"I am so happy you came," Reginald Clarke said, as he conducted Ernest
into his studio. It was a large, luxuriously furnished room overlooking
the Hudson and Riverside Drive.
Dazzled and bewildered, the boy's eyes wandered from object to object,
from picture to statue. Despite seemingly incongruous details, the whole
arrangement possessed style and distinction.
A satyr on the mantelpiece whispered obscene secrets into the ears of
Saint Cecilia. The argent limbs of Antinous brushed against the garments
of Mona Lisa. And from a corner a little rococo lady peered coquettishly
at the gray image of an Egyptian sphinx. There was a picture of Napoleon
facing the image of the Crucified. Above all, in the semi-darkness,
artificially produced by heavy draperies, towered two busts.
"Shakespeare and Balzac!" Ernest exclaimed with some surprise.
"Yes," explained Reginald, "they are my gods."
His gods! Surely there was a key to Clarke's character. Our gods are
ourselves raised to the highest power.
Clarke and Shakespeare!
Even to Ernest's admiring mind it seemed almost blasphemous to name a
contemporary, however esteemed, in one breath with the mighty master of
song, whose great gaunt shadow, thrown against the background of the
years has assumed immense, unproportionate, monstrous dimensions.
Yet something might be said for the comparison. Clarke undoubtedly was
universally broad, and undoubtedly concealed, with no less exquisite
taste than the Elizabethan, his own personality under the splendid
raiment of his art. They certainly were affinities. It would not have
been surprising to him to see the clear calm head of Shakespeare rise
from behind his host.
Perhaps--who knows?--the very presence of the bust in his room had, to
some extent, subtly and secretly moulded Reginald Clarke's life. A man's
soul, like the chameleon, takes colour from its environment. Even
comparative trifles, the number of the house in which we live, or the
colour of the wallpaper of a room, may determine a destiny.
The boy's eyes were again surveying the fantastic surroundings in which
he found himself; while, from a corner, Clarke's eyes were watching his
every movement, as if to follow his thoughts into the innermost
labyrinth of the mind. It seemed to Ernest, under the spell of this
passing fancy, as though each vase, each picture, each curio in the
room, was reflected in Clarke's work. In a long-queued, porcelain
Chinese mandarin he distinctly recognised a quaint quatrain in one of
Clarke's most marvellous poems. And he could have sworn that the grin of
the Hindu monkey-god on the writing-table reappeared in the weird rhythm
of two stanzas whose grotesque cadence had haunted him for years.
At last Clarke broke the silence. "You like my studio?" he asked.
The simple question brought Ernest back to reality.
"Like it? Why, it's stunning. It set up in me the queerest train of
thought."
"I, too, have been in a whimsical mood to-night. Fancy, unlike genius,
is an infectious disease."
"What is the peculiar form it assumed in your case?"
"I have been wondering whether all the things that environ us day by day
are, in a measure, fashioning our thought-life. I sometimes think that
even my little mandarin and this monkey-idol which, by the way, I
brought from India, are exerting a mysterious but none the less real
influence upon my work."
"Great God!" Ernest replied, "I have had the identical thought!"
"How very strange!" Clarke exclaimed, with seeming surprise.
"It is said tritely but truly, that great minds travel the same roads,"
Ernest observed, inwardly pleased.
"No," the older man subtly remarked, "but they reach the same
conclusion by a different route."
"And you attach serious importance to our fancy?"
"Why not?"
Clarke was gazing abstractedly at the bust of Balzac.
"A man's genius is commensurate with his ability of absorbing from life
the elements essential to his artistic completion. Balzac possessed this
power in a remarkable degree. But, strange to say, it was evil that
attracted him most. He absorbed it as a sponge absorbs water; perhaps
because there was so little of it in his own make-up. He must have
purified the atmosphere around him for miles, by bringing all the evil
that was floating in the air or slumbering in men's souls to the point
of his pen.
"And he"--his eyes were resting on Shakespeare's features as a man might
look upon the face of a brother--"he, too, was such a nature. In fact,
he was the most perfect type of the artist. Nothing escaped his mind.
From life and from books he drew his material, each time reshaping it
with a master-hand. Creation is a divine prerogative. Re-creation,
infinitely more wonderful than mere calling into existence, is the
prerogative of the poet. Shakespeare took his colours from many
palettes. That is why he is so great, and why his work is incredibly
greater than he. It alone explains his unique achievement. Who was he?
What education did he have, what opportunities? None. And yet we find in
his work the wisdom of Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh's fancies and
discoveries, Marlowe's verbal thunders and the mysterious loveliness of
Mr. W.H."
Ernest listened, entranced by the sound of Clarke's mellifluous voice.
He was, indeed, a master of the spoken word, and possessed a miraculous
power of giving to the wildest fancies an air of vraisemblance.
V
"Yes," said Walkham, the sculptor, "it's a most curious thing."
"What is?" asked Ernest, who had been dreaming over the Sphinx that was
looking at him from its corner with the sarcastic smile of five thousand
years.
"How our dreams of yesterday stare at us like strangers to-day."
"On the contrary," remarked Reginald, "it would be strange if they were
still to know us. In fact, it would be unnatural. The skies above us and
the earth underfoot are in perpetual motion. Each atom of our physical
nature is vibrating with unimaginable rapidity. Change is identical with
life."
"It sometimes seems," said the sculptor, "as if thoughts evaporated like
water."
"Why not, under favorable conditions?"
"But where do they go? Surely they cannot perish utterly?"
"Yes, that is the question. Or, rather, it is not a question. Nothing
is ever lost in the spiritual universe."
"But what," inquired Ernest, "is the particular reason for your
reflection?"
"It is this," the sculptor replied; "I had a striking motive and lost
it."
"Do you remember," he continued, speaking to Reginald, "the Narcissus I
was working on the last time when you called at my studio?"
"Yes; it was a striking thing and impressed me very much, though I
cannot recall it at the moment."
"Well, it was a commission. An eccentric young millionaire had offered
me eight thousand dollars for it. I had an absolutely original
conception. But I cannot execute it. It's as if a breeze had carried it
away."
"That is very regrettable."
"Well, I should say so," replied the sculptor.
Ernest smiled. For everybody knew of Walkham's domestic troubles. Having
twice figured in the divorce court, he was at present defraying the
expenses of three households.
The sculptor had meanwhile seated himself at Reginald's writing-table,
unintentionally scanning a typewritten page that was lying before him.
Like all artists, something of a madman and something of a child, he at
first glanced over its contents distractedly, then with an interest so
intense that he was no longer aware of the impropriety of his action.
"By Jove!" he cried. "What is this?"
"It's an epic of the French Revolution," Reginald replied, not without
surprise.
"But, man, do you know that I have discovered my motive in it?"
"What do you mean?" asked Ernest, looking first at Reginald and then at
Walkham, whose sanity he began to doubt.
"Listen!"
And the sculptor read, trembling with emotion, a long passage whose
measured cadence delighted Ernest's ear, without, however, enlightening
his mind as to the purport of Walkham's cryptic remark.
Reginald said nothing, but the gleam in his eye showed that this time,
at least, his interest was alert.
Walkham saw the hopelessness of making clear his meaning without an
explanation.
"I forget you haven't a sculptor's mind. I am so constituted that, with
me, all impressions are immediately translated into the sense of form. I
do not hear music; I see it rise with domes and spires, with painted
windows and Arabesques. The scent of the rose is to me tangible. I can
almost feel it with my hand. So your prose suggested to me, by its
rhythmic flow, something which, at first indefinite, crystallised
finally into my lost conception of Narcissus."
"It is extraordinary," murmured Reginald. "I had not dreamed of it."
"So you do not think it rather fantastic?" remarked Ernest,
circumscribing his true meaning.
"No, it is quite possible. Perhaps his Narcissus was engaging the
sub-conscious strata of my mind while I was writing this passage. And
surely it would be strange if the undercurrents of our mind were not
reflected in our style."
"Do you mean, then, that a subtle psychologist ought to be able to read
beneath and between our lines, not only what we express, but also what
we leave unexpressed?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Even if, while we are writing, we are unconscious of our state of mind?
That would open a new field to psychology."
"Only to those that have the key, that can read the hidden symbols. It
is to me a matter-of-course that every mind-movement below or above the
threshold of consciousness must, of a necessity, leave its imprint
faintly or clearly, as the case may be, upon our activities."
"This may explain why books that seem intolerably dull to the majority,
delight the hearts of the few," Ernest interjected.
"Yes, to the few that possess the key. I distinctly remember how an
uncle of mine once laid down a discussion on higher mathematics and
blushed fearfully when his innocent wife looked over his shoulder. The
man who had written it was a roué."
"Then the seemingly most harmless books may secretly possess the power
of scattering in young minds the seed of corruption," Walkham remarked.
"If they happen to understand," Clarke observed thoughtfully. "I can
very well conceive of a lecherous text-book of the calculus, or of a
reporter's story of a picnic in which burnt, under the surface,
undiscoverable, save to the initiate, the tragic passion of Tristram and
Iseult."