It seemed, indeed, as if work was to Ernest what the sting of pleasure
is to the average human animal. The inter-play of his mental forces gave
him the sensuous satisfaction of a woman's embrace. His eyes sparkled.
His muscle tightened. The joy of creation was upon him.
Often very material reasons, like stone weights tied to the wings of a
bird, stayed the flight of his imagination. Magazines were waiting for
his copy, and he was not in the position to let them wait. They supplied
his bread and butter.
Between the bread and butter, however, the play was growing scene by
scene. In the lone hours of the night he spun upon the loom of his fancy
a brilliant weft of swift desire--heavy, perfumed, Oriental--interwoven
with bits of gruesome tenderness. The thread of his own life intertwined
with the thread of the story. All genuine art is autobiography. It is
not, however, necessarily a revelation of the artist's actual self, but
of a myriad of potential selves. Ah, our own potential selves! They are
sometimes beautiful, often horrible, and always fascinating. They loom
to heavens none too high for our reach; they stray to yawning hells
beneath our very feet.
The man who encompasses heaven and hell is a perfect man. But there are
many heavens and more hells. The artist snatches fire from both. Surely
the assassin feels no more intensely the lust of murder than the poet
who depicts it in glowing words. The things he writes are as real to him
as the things that he lives. But in his realm the poet is supreme. His
hands may be red with blood or white with leprosy: he still remains
king. Woe to him, however, if he transcends the limits of his kingdom
and translates into action the secret of his dreams. The throng that
before applauded him will stone his quivering body or nail to the cross
his delicate hands and feet.
Sometimes days passed before Ernest could concentrate his mind upon his
play. Then the fever seized him again, and he strung pearl on pearl,
line on line, without entrusting a word to paper. Even to discuss his
work before it had received the final brush-strokes would have seemed
indecent to him.
Reginald, too, seemed to be in a turmoil of work. Ernest had little
chance to speak to him. And to drop even a hint of his plans between the
courses at breakfast would have been desecration.
Sunset followed sunset, night followed night. The stripling April had
made room for the lady May. The play was almost completed in Ernest's
mind, and he thought, with a little shudder, of the physical travail of
the actual writing. He felt that the transcript from brain to paper
would demand all his powers. For, of late, his thoughts seemed strangely
evanescent; they seemed to run away from him whenever he attempted to
seize them.
The day was glad with sunshine, and he decided to take a long walk in
the solitude of the Palisades, to steady hand and nerve for the final
task.
He told Reginald of his intention, but met with little response.
Reginald's face was wan and bore the peculiar pallor of one who had
worked late at night.
"You must be frightfully busy?" Ernest asked, with genuine concern.
"So I am," Reginald replied. "I always work in a white heat. I am
restless, nervous, feverish, and can find no peace until I have given
utterance to all that clamours after birth."
"What is it that is so engaging your mind, the epic of the French
Revolution?"
"Oh, no. I should never have undertaken that. I haven't done a stroke of
work on it for several weeks. In fact, ever since Walkham called, I
simply couldn't. It seemed as if a rough hand had in some way destroyed
the web of my thought. Poetry in the writing is like red hot glass
before the master-blower has fashioned it into birds and trees and
strange fantastic shapes. A draught, caused by the opening of a door may
distort it. But at present I am engaged upon more important work. I am
modelling a vessel not of fine-spun glass, but of molten gold."
"You make me exceedingly anxious to know what you have in store for us.
It seems to me you have reached a point where even you can no longer
surpass yourself."
Reginald smiled. "Your praise is too generous, yet it warms like
sunshine. I will confess that my conception is unique. It combines with
the ripeness of my technique the freshness of a second spring."
Ernest was bubbling with anticipated delights. His soul responded to
Reginald's touch as a harp to the winds. "When," he cried, "shall we be
privileged to see it?"
Reginald's eyes were already straying back to his writing table. "If the
gods are propitious," he remarked, "I shall complete it to-night.
To-morrow is my reception, and I have half promised to read it then."
"Perhaps I shall be in the position soon to let you see my play."
"Let us hope so," Reginald replied absent-mindedly. The egotism of the
artist had once more chained him to his work.
X
That night a brilliant crowd had gathered in Reginald Clarke's house.
From the studio and the adjoining salon arose a continual murmur of
well-tuned voices. On bare white throats jewels shone as if in each a
soul were imprisoned, and voluptuously rustled the silk that clung to
the fair slim forms of its bearers in an undulating caress. Subtle
perfumes emanated from the hair and the hands of syren women,
commingling with the soft plump scent of their flesh. Fragrant tapers,
burning in precious crystal globules stained with exquisite colours,
sprinkled their shimmering light over the fashionable assemblage and
lent a false radiance to the faces of the men, while in the hair and the
jewels of the women each ray seemed to dance like an imp with its mate.
A seat like a throne, covered with furs of tropic beasts of prey, stood
in one corner of the room in the full glare of the light, waiting for
the monarch to come. Above were arranged with artistic _raffinement_
weird oriental draperies, resembling a crimson canopy in the total
effect. Chattering visitors were standing in groups, or had seated
themselves on the divans and curiously-fashioned chairs that were
scattered in seeming disorder throughout the salon. There were critics
and writers and men of the world. Everybody who was anybody and a little
bigger than somebody else was holding court in his own small circle of
enthusiastic admirers. The Bohemian element was subdued, but not
entirely lacking. The magic of Reginald Clarke's name made stately dames
blind to the presence of some individuals whom they would have passed on
the street without recognition.
Ernest surveyed this gorgeous assembly with the absent look of a
sleep-walker. Not that his sensuous soul was unsusceptible to the
atmosphere of culture and corruption that permeated the whole, nor to
the dazzling colour effects that tantalised while they delighted the
eye. But to-night they shrivelled into insignificance before the
splendour of his inner vision. A radiant dreamland palace, his play, had
risen from the night of inchoate thought. It was wonderful, it was real,
and needed for its completion only the detail of actual construction.
And now the characters were hovering in the recesses of his brain, were
yearning to leave that many-winded labyrinth to become real beings of
paper and ink. He would probably have tarried overlong in this fanciful
mansion, had not the reappearance of an unexpected guest broken his
reverie.
"Jack!" he exclaimed in surprise, "I thought you a hundred miles away
from here."
"That shows that you no longer care for me," Jack playfully answered.
"When our friendship was young, you always had a presentiment of my
presence."
"Ah, perhaps I had. But tell me, where do you hail from?"
"Clarke called me up on the telephone--long-distance, you know. I
suppose it was meant as a surprise for you. And you certainly looked
surprised--not even pleasantly. I am really head-over-heels at work.
But you know how it is. Sometimes a little imp whispers into my ears
daring me to do a thing which I know is foolish. But what of it? My legs
are strong enough not to permit my follies to overtake me."
"It was certainly good of you to come. In fact, you make me very glad. I
feel that I need you to-night--I don't know why. The feeling came
suddenly--suddenly as you. I only know I need you. How long can you
stay?"
"I must leave you to-morrow morning. I have to hustle somewhat. You know
my examinations are taking place in a day or two and I've got to cram up
a lot of things."
"Still," remarked Ernest, "your visit will repay you for the loss of
time. Clarke will read to us to-night his masterpiece."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. I only know it's the real thing. It's worth all the
wisdom bald-headed professors may administer to you in concentrated
doses at five thousand a year."
"Come now," Jack could not help saying, "is your memory giving way?
Don't you remember your own days in college--especially the mathematical
examinations? You know that your marks came always pretty near the
absolute zero."
"Jack," cried Ernest in honest indignation, "not the last time. The last
time I didn't flunk."
"No, because your sonnet on Cartesian geometry roused even the
math-fiend to compassion. And don't you remember Professor Squeeler,
whose heart seemed to leap with delight whenever he could tell you that,
in spite of incessant toil on your part, he had again flunked you in
physics with fifty-nine and a half per cent.?"
"And he wouldn't raise the mark to sixty! God forgive him,--I cannot."
Here their exchange of reminiscences was interrupted. There was a stir.
The little potentates of conversation hastened to their seats, before
their minions had wholly deserted them.
The king was moving to his throne!
Assuredly Reginald Clarke had the bearing of a king. Leisurely he took
his seat under the canopy.
A hush fell on the audience; not a fan stirred as he slowly unfolded his
manuscript.