At Lady Day, when the negotiations for the sale of his unprofitable
riverside domain were finally concluded, Rainham scarcely regretted
to find that an ample margin had been left before the new company
took possession; and he had still several months, during which he
might remain in occupation of his old habitation, and arrange
leisurely for the subsequent disposition of his books and more
intimate personal chattels. The dilapidated old house was to be
pulled down by the new owners (the plans for an extensive warehouse,
to be erected on the site of it, were already in the hands of the
builders), and this also was a fact from which Rainham derived a
certain satisfaction.
Insensibly, the spot had discovered a charm for him: the few rooms,
which had been his for so long, although, actually, so small a
proportion of his days had been spent in them, had gradually taken
the impress of his personality--the faded carpets, the familiar
grouping of pictures and books, the very shape of the apartment, and
the discoloured paper on the walls, expressed him in a way that
certainly no other abiding place, which might conceivably await him,
could ever do. And he took a dreary pleasure in the consideration
that, after he had gone, the rooms would know no other occupant;
that from the glazed and barred windows of the dreary building,
which was to take the place of the quaint old house, when it was
levelled to the ground, no person would ever gaze out, exactly as he
had done, at the white and melancholy river; in which, as he said to
himself fantastically, he had cast, one by one, as the days
lengthened, his interests, his passions, his desires.
Years before, by an accident of inheritance, he had come into the
property with an immense antipathy:--a white elephant that would
bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence
that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse. It had
altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his
ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely than
anything else, the element of failure which had run through his
life.
And, after all, now that deliverance was at hand, he was by no means
jubilant. In escaping from this thraldom of so many years, he felt
something of the chagrin with which a man witnesses the removal of
some long-cherished and inveterate grievance; the more so, in that
he could now remind himself impartially how small it had been, how
little, after all, he had allowed it to weigh upon him. In effect,
had he not always done very much as he liked, lived half his time
abroad in his preferred places, chosen his own friends, and followed
his own tastes without greatly considering his inherited occupation?
He must look deeper than that, he reflected, within himself, or into
the nature of things themselves, actually to seize and define that
curious flaw which had made life seem to him at last (from what
wearied psychologist, read long ago and half forgotten, did he cull
the phrase?) "a long disease of the spirit."
For appreciations of this kind, he had, nowadays, ample leisure; and
unprofitable as it appeared (he did not even pretend to himself that
it would lead anywhere, since what faint illumination he might
strike from it could only refer to the past), he was seldom tired of
searching for them.
A hard March, cited generally as the coldest within the memory of a
generation, following a winter of fog and rain, had made him an
inveterate prisoner within the four walls of his apartment. He had,
indeed, the run of others at this time, for the Bullens had left him
(at the last there had been no question of little Margot's
appropriation; Rainham had taken it so serenely for granted that she
would remain with him), but this was a privilege of which he did not
avail himself. And the place, stripped of all its commercial
attributes, had fallen into an immense desuetude, to which the charm
of silence, and of a deeper solitude than it had ever possessed
before, was attached.
The dock gates were finally closed; a hard frost of many days'
duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames
water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic
stalactites of clear ice. Rainham found it difficult to believe, at
times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London,
still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply
of silence round him. It was as though he had fallen suddenly from
the midst of men into some wholly abandoned region, a land of
perpetual snows. It symbolized well for him the fantastic separation
which he had suffered from the rest of the world; so that, but for
the painter Oswyn, who was a constant visitor, and had, indeed,
since the departure of the Bullens, a room set apart for him in the
house, he might have been already dead and buried, and his old life
would not have seemed more remote. And if he found the atmosphere of
Blackpool, more often than not, to be of soothing quality, or at
least a harmonious setting to the long and aimless course of
introspection on which he had embarked, there were also times when
it had a certain terror for him.
It came upon him in the evening, as a rule, when Margot had been
carried away to bed by the hard-featured old woman who had succeeded
Mrs. Bullen in the superintendence of his household; for the child,
with her sweet, shrill voice and her infantile chatter, had come to
seem to him far more even than Oswyn, about whom there would always
lurk something shadowy and unreal, a last link with the living; when
the tide was nearly out, so that the stillness was not even broken
by the long, lugubrious syren of a passing steamer, his isolation
was borne in upon him with something of the sting of sharp, physical
pain.
The dark old room, with its mildewing wainscot, became full of
ghosts; and he could fancy that the spirits of his ancestors were
returned from the other side of Styx to finger the pages of bygone
ledgers, and to mock from between the shadows of his incongruous
bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give
place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls,
to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the
faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with
extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers
of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the
round accusation of futility brought by the rest. They were part of
his introspection, all those--he was not sick enough to hold them
real--but nevertheless they gave him food for much vigilant thought,
which came back always to the great interest of his life. Futility!
Did she too, the beloved woman, point an accusing finger, casting
back at him a sacrifice which, certainly, in his then disability
seemed to him vain enough? For all his goodwill, had he gained any
more for her than a short respite, the temporal reconstruction of a
fading illusion?--and at what a price! The irony of things was just
then so present to him that he could readily believe he had done no
more than that--enough merely to embitter her knowledge when it
should finally come. And an old saying of Lady Garnett's returned to
him, which, at the time, he had disputed; but which struck him now
with the sharp stab of an intimate truth. "You could have prevented
it, had you wished." Yes, he might have prevented it, if only he had
foreseen; the wise old woman had not made a mistake. And yet he had
wished to prevent it, in a manner, only his colder second
thoughts--he made no allowance now for their generous intention--had
found propriety in the match, and his long habit of spectatorship
had made the personal effort, which interference would have
involved, impossible.
Harking back scrupulously to the remote days of Eve's girlhood, his
morbid recollection collected a variety of scattered threads, of
dispersed signs and tokens, which led him to ask at last, with a
gathering dread, whether he had not made a mistake, must not plead
guilty to a charge of malingering, or, at least, of intellectual
cowardice in acquiescing so supinely in defeat?
Was it true, then, that a man found in life very much what he
brought to the search?
Certainly, the world was full of persons who had been broken on the
wheel for their proper audacity, because they had sought so much
more than was to be found; but might it not be equally true that one
could err on the other side, expect, desire too little, less even
than was there, and so reap finally, as he had done, in an immense
lassitude and disgust of all things, born neither of satiety nor of
disappointment, the full measure of one's reward? Perhaps success in
the difficult art of life depended, almost as much as in the plastic
arts, upon conviction, upon the personal enthusiasm which one
brought to bear upon its conduct, and was never really compatible
with that attitude of half-disdainful toleration which he had so
early acquired.
Yet that was a confession of failure he was loath to make, or admit
that he had been too much afraid of high passions and great affairs,
had been fastidious and reserved only to dissipate his life on whims
and small interests--those seemed to him now too great refusals to
be contemplated without regret. His depression had reached its
lowest pitch when he had asked himself whether in love, as in life,
his error might not have been the same; and his passion, like the
rest, a thing without conviction, and thereby foredoomed to fail.
And it was a sensible alleviation of his mood when he could answer
this question finally with a firm negative.
Certainly, his vain desire for her personal presence, for the
consolation of her voice and eyes, was with him always, like the
ache of physical hunger or thirst--the one thing real in a world of
shadows.
Reaching this point one night, and relapsing, as was his wont, into
a vaguer mood of reminiscence, not wholly unpleasant, which the
darkness of the quiet room, lit only by the fire of logs, turned at
last into drowsiness, he looked up presently, with a sudden start,
to find Oswyn standing over him.
"I am sorry," said the painter; "I am afraid I have awaked you. The
room was so dark that I imagined you had gone to bed. I came to warm
myself before turning in."
Rainham shifted his chair a little, and watched the other as he
extended his thin, nervous hands to the glow.
"Don't apologize," he said; "I haven't so many visitors that I can
afford to miss the best of them. Besides, I was only half asleep, or
half awake, as you like to look at it."
"Oh, look at it!" cried Oswyn. "My dear fellow, I don't, and won't."
He pointed his words, which Rainham found meaningless enough, with
an impatient dig of his rusty boot against the fragrant wood, and
his friend considered him curiously in the light of the blaze which
his gesture had provoked.
"Is there anything wrong?" he asked. "More wrong than usual, I
mean."
"As you like to look at it," echoed the other; "a mare's nest--a
discovery of the blessed public--oh, but a discovery! Two or three
clever young newspaper men, with a tip from Paris to help them, have
made a discovery; they have unearthed a disreputable painting
genius, one Oswyn, and found the inevitable Jew of culture--you know
the type, all nose and shekels--to finance their boom. Oh, it's
genuine! I have Mosenthal's letter in my pocket--it was handed me by
McAllister--offering his gallery, the pick of Bond Street. Oswyn's
Exhibition, with expurgations and reservations, of course, but an
exhibition! Don't you congratulate me?"
Rainham glanced up at him, smiling; at last he said whimsically:
"If you don't want me to, of course I won't. But _après_, where's the
harm?"
"Ah, they don't understand," cried the other quickly, acridly. "They
don't understand."
He had drawn his chair beside Rainham, and sat with his large,
uncouth head propped on one hand, and the latter could perceive that
his mouth was twisted with vague irony and some subtile emotion
which eluded him.
"You are the great paradox!" he sighed at last. "For Heaven's sake,
be reasonable! It is a chance, whoever makes it, and you mustn't
miss it, for the sake of a few--the just, the pure, the discreet,
who do know good work--as well as for your own. After all, we are
not all gross, and fatuous, and vulgar; there are some of us who
know, who care, who make fine distinctions. Consider us!"
"Consider you?" cried the other quickly. "Ah, _mon gros_, don't
I--more than anything?"
Then he continued in a lighter key:
"However, I don't refuse; you take me too literally. It was the last
bitter cry of my spleen. I have put myself in Mosenthal's hands;
I've sold him two pictures."
"In that case, then, why am I not to be glad?"
"Oh, it's success!" said Oswyn. He glanced contemptuously at his
frayed shirt-cuff, with the broad stains of paint upon it. "Be glad,
if you like; I am glad in a way. God knows, I have arrears to make
up with the flesh-pots of Egypt. And I have paid my price for it.
Oh, I have damnably paid my price!"
Rainham shrugged his shoulders absently.
"Yes, one pays," he agreed--"one pays, some time or other, to the
last penny."
His friend rose, pushed his chair back impatiently: he had the air
of suppressing some fierce emotion, of anxiously seeking
self-control. At last he moved over to the black square of window,
and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at nothing, at
the frosty fantasies which had collected on the glass.
"If it had come ten years ago," he said in a low, constrained voice,
"ten years ago, in Paris.... Oh, man, man!" he went on bitterly, "if
you could know, if you could dimly imagine the horrors, the mad,
furious horrors, the things I have seen and suffered, since then."
He pulled himself up sharply, and concluded with a little mirthless
laugh, as though he were ashamed of his outburst.
"You would consume a great deal of raw spirit, to take the taste out
of your mouth. And my 'Medusa' is to hang for the future in Mr.
Mosenthal's dining-room! Will he understand her, do you think?"
Rainham was silent, wondering at his friend's departure from his
wonted reticence, which, however, scarcely surprised him. He had
never sought to penetrate the dark background, against which the
painter's solitary figure stood. He was content to accept him as he
was, asking no questions, and hardly forming, even in his own mind,
conjectures as to what his previous history and relations might have
been. He was not ignorant, indeed, that he was a man who had been in
dark places; it had always seemed possible to account for him on the
theory that he lived on the memory of an inextinguishable sorrow.
And now this possibility had received corroboration from his own
words, shedding a new light, in which both his character and his
genius became more intelligible. He had only stood out of the
shadows which obscured him for one instant; but that instant had
been enough.
And Rainham did not find the occasion less valuable, nor the
impression which he had received less pitiful, because he believed
it to be ultimate and unique; his friend would make no vain,
elaborate confidences; he would simply step back into his old
obscurity, leaving Rainham with the memory of that instructive cry
which had been wrung from him by the irony of tardy recognition,
when he had seen him luridly standing over the wreck of his honour
and of his life. And with his pity there came to him a fresh sense
of the greatness of the painter's work. His genius, so full of
suffering, and of the sense of an almost fiendish cruelty in things,
was, simply, his life, his experience, his remorse.
With the hand of a master, with the finest technique, which made his
work admirable even to persons who misinterpreted or were revolted
by its conception, he rendered the things he had known, so that his
art was nothing so much as an expression of his personal pain in
life.
In the light of this vision into the bottom of Oswyn's soul,
Rainham's own pain seemed suddenly shallow and remote; he had gazed
for a moment upon a blacker desolation than any which he could know.
He felt a new, a tolerant sympathy towards his friend, and it struck
him, not for the first time, but with an increased force, as he
reminded himself how his days were bounded, that they had many
things which they had still to say, things which must certainly be
said.