Anne could never recall just when it was she discovered, or rather
divined, that her husband was once more a dual being. A vague sense of
change cohered into fact when she realised that for some time he had
been reading aloud and pursuing an undercurrent of independent
thought. His devotion increased, were that possible, but the time came
when he no longer could conceal that he was often absent in mind and
depressed in spirit. He took to long rambles in which she could not
accompany him at that season while so far from robust, smilingly
excusing himself by reminding her that being so much more vigorous
than of old he needed a corresponding amount of exercise. There
finally came an entire week when he was forced to remain indoors, so
persistent were the torrential rains, and after the first two days he
ceased even to pretend to read, but sat staring out of the window with
blank eyes and set lips, at the gray deluge beating down the palm
trees. He came to the table and consumed his meals mechanically. Nor
was he irritable. The gentleness of his nature seemed unaffected, but
that his mental part seethed was autoptical. If he was less the lover
he clung to Anne as to a rock in mid-ocean, and if he would not talk
he was uneasy if she left the room.
There was but one explanation, and he was becoming less the man and
more the poet every day. He slept little, and lost the spring from his
gait. Anne was as convinced as Lord Hunsdon or Lady Constance that all
geniuses were unsound of mind no matter how normal they might be while
the creative faculty slept. Sleep it must, and no doubt this familiar
of Warner's had been almost moribund owing to the extraordinary and
unexpected change that had taken place in his life, and the new
interest that had held every faculty. This interest was no less alive,
but it was no longer novel, and a ghost had risen in his brain
clamouring for form and substance.
Anne wished that he would write the poem and have done with it. She
had never for a moment demanded that he should sacrifice his career
to her, and during the past months, having admired as much as she
loved him, she had dismissed as a mere legend the belief held by his
friends that he could not write without stimulant. And she loved the
poet as much as she loved the man. Indeed it was the poet she had
loved first, to whom she had owed a happiness during many lonely years
almost as perfect as the man had given her. That he had no weakness
for spirits was indubious. There were always cognac and Madeira on the
table in the living room where they received the convivial planters,
and she drank Canary herself at table. It was patent to her that he
refrained from writing because he had voluntarily given her his word
he would write no more, and that he had but to take pen in hand for
the flood to burst. She did not broach the subject for some days,
waiting for him to make an appeal of some sort, no matter how subtle,
but toward the end of this stormy week when he was looking more
forlorn and haunted every moment, she suddenly determined to wait no
longer.
They were standing at the window watching the moon fight its way
amidst torn black clouds and flinging glittering doles upon the black
and swollen waters. She put her hand on his shoulder as a man might
have done and said in a matter-of-fact tone:
"You want to write. You are quick with a new poem. That must be patent
even to the servants. I wish you would write it."
He jerked up his shoulders as if to dislodge her hand, then
recollected himself and put his arm about her.
"I never intend to write another poem," he said.
"That is nonsense. A poem must be much like a baby. If it is conceived
it must be born. Do you deny it is there?" tapping his forehead.
"When the devil takes possession it is better to stifle him before he
grows to his full strength."
"You are unjust to speak in that fashion of the most divine of all
gifts. You are not intimating that your poem is too wicked to
publish?"
"No!" He flung out his hands, striking the window. His eyes expanded
and flashed. "I believe it to be the most beautiful poem ever
conceived!" he cried. "I never before knew much about any of my poems
until I had pen in hand, but although I could not recite a line of
this I can see it all. I can feel it. I can hear it. It calls me in
my dreams and whispers when I am closest to you. And you--you--are
its inspiration. You have liberated all that was locked from my
imagination before. I lived in an unreal world until I knew, lived
with you. Knowing that so well, I believed that my deserted muse would
either take herself off in disdain, or be smothered dead. Art has
always been jealous of mortal happiness. But the emotions I have
experienced in the past six months--despair, hope, despair, hope,
superlative happiness, mere content, the very madness of terror, and
its equally violent reaction when I experienced the profoundest
religious emotion--all this has enriched my nature, my mind, that
abnormal patch in my brain that creates. Ever since I took pen
in hand I have dreamed of a poetic meridian that I have never
approached--until now!"
"What must it be?" cried Anne, quivering with excitement and delight.
"You have done more than other men already."
"I have never written a great poetical drama. My faculty has been
mainly narrative, lyric, epic, with dramatic action in short bursts
only. The power to build a great, sustained, and varied drama, the
richness and ripeness of dramatic imagination, of character portrayal,
representation as distinct from analysis, of vigorous scenes that
sweep through the excited brain of the reader with the rush of the
hurricane, and owe nothing to metrical sweetness, to lyrical
melody--that has never come before--and now--now----"
"You will write it! Do you--can you imagine that I am jealous--that I
am not as ambitious for you as you could be for yourself?"
"I have never been ambitious before. I have never cared enough about
the world. I wrote first because the songs sang off the point of
my quill, and then to keep a roof over my head. I have never placed
any inordinate value on my work after it was done, although the making
of it gave me the keenest happiness, the polishing delighted all the
artist in me. It is only now, now, for the first time, that I have
been fancying myself going down to posterity in the company of the
immortals. Oh God, what irony! When it did not matter the inspiration
lagged, and now it can do me no good!"
"But it shall! And as much for me as for your fame. Your work has been
little less to me than yourself. I must have this!"
He turned to her for the first time and looked at her curiously. "Is
it possible that you do not know the reason why I cannot write?" he
asked. "We have avoided the subject, but I understood that you knew.
Hunsdon told me----"
"Oh, yes, but that was when you were physically and morally a----" she
stopped short, blushing painfully.
"A wreck," he supplemented grimly.
"Well! You had let yourself go. Now it is different. You are well. You
are happy. Even your brain is stronger--your will, as a matter of
course."
"I never wrote a line in my earliest youth without stimulant."
"But you might have done so. It is only a freak of imagination that
prompts you to believe that you cannot write alone, that you must take
alcohol into partnership, as it were. Even little people are ruled by
imagination; how much more so a great faculty in which imagination
must follow many morbid and eccentric tracks? And habit, no doubt, is
the greatest of all forces, while it is undisturbed. But that old
habit of yours has been shattered these last months. You made no
attempt to resist before. You could resist now. If I have been the
inspiration of this poem, why cannot I take the place of brandy? It is
no great compliment to me if I cannot. Try."
He put his hands on her shoulders and looked more the man than the
poet for the moment. "Anne," he said solemnly. "Let well enough alone.
I made up my mind to write no more the day you promised to marry me. I
told you that the lover had buried the poet, and I believed it. But I
find that the poet must come to life now and again--for a while at
least. But although the process will be neither pleasant nor painless,
I shall strangle him in time."
"Can you?"
"Yes--I think so."
"And be quite as happy as before?"
"Oh, I am not prophet enough for that. I can never be unhappy while I
have you."
"And I could never be happy if I let you kill a gift that is as living
a part of yourself as your sense of vision or touch. Do you suppose I
ever deluded myself with the dream that you would settle down into the
domestic routine of years--write political pamphlets for Hunsdon? I
knew this would come and I never have had a misgiving. I know you can
write without stimulant. Nothing can be more fanciful than that the
highest of all mental gifts must have artificial aid. That may be the
need of the little man driving a pen for his daily bread, of the small
talent trying to create, but never for you!"
"There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I
gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks--a
beast--oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living
for in the wretched present is that you never may."
"I do not believe in permanent congenital weaknesses with a free rich
faculty like yours. I know how that fatal idea has wedged itself in
your brain--but if you try--if you persist--you will overcome it.
Promise me that you will try."
"You are so strong," he said sadly. "You cannot conceive, with
all your own imagination, the miserable weaknesses of the still
half-developed human brain. The greatest scientific minds that have
spent their lives in the study of the brain know next to nothing about
it. How should you, dear child? I know the curse that is the other
half of my gift to write, but of its cause, its meaning, I know
nothing. You are strong by instinct, but you have not the least idea
why or how you are strong. It is all a mysterious arrangement of
particles."
"But that is no reason one should not strive to overcome weakness."
"Certainly not. But I have so much at stake that I think it wisest to
kill the temptation outright, and not tempt providence by dallying
with it. And this regarding the arbitrary exercise of the imagination:
It is the small people of whom you spoke just now who are the slaves
of what little imagination they have, who can make themselves ill
or sometimes well under its influence. But when a man uses his
imagination professionally as long as I have done it takes a place in
his life apart. It has no influence whatever on his daily life, on his
physical or even his mental being. He knows it too well. It would
seem as if the imagination itself were cognisant of this fact and was
too wise to court defeat."
"I can understand that, but I also know that genius is too abnormal to
accept any such reasoning, no matter what the highly developed brain
may be capable of. Unknown to yourself you have become the victim
first of an idea, then of a habit. You will struggle and exhaust
yourself and end by hating yourself and me. You have no doubt that
this would be a greater work than your greatest?"
"Oh, no! no!"
"Then do me the justice to make one attempt at least to write it. Come
to the library!"
His face had been turned from her for some moments, but at the last
words, so full of concrete suggestion, he moved irresistibly and she
saw that his eyes were blazing with eagerness, with a desire she had
never seen.
"Come," she said.
He stared at her, through her, miles beyond her, then turned
mechanically toward his library. "Perhaps," he muttered. "Who
knows? Why not?"