VII

Adrian, pink with the livelier pink of Adrian freshly tubbed and

razored, and shedding a cheerful aroma of bay-rum, regarded Anthony,

across the bowlful of roses that occupied the centre of the breakfast

table, with a show of perplexity.

In the end, thrusting forward his chin, and dropping his eyelids,

whereby his expression became remote and superior, "The state of mind

of a person like you," he announced, "is a thing I am totally unable to

conceive."

And he plunged his spoon into his first egg.

"It is inexplicable, it is downright uncanny," Anthony was thinking, as

he munched his toast, "the effect she produces upon a man; the way she

pursues one, persists with one. I see her, I hear her voice, her

laughter, as clearly as if she were still present. I can't get rid of

her, I can't shut her out."

Adrian, his announcement provoking no response, spoke up.

"I am utterly unable," he repeated, "to conceive the state of mind of a

person like you."

"Of course you are," said Anthony, with affability.

"I suppose," he thought, "it's because she is what they call a

pronounced personality,--though that does n't seem a very flattering

description. I suppose it's her odylic force."

Adrian selected a second egg, and placed it in his egg-cup.

"You live, you move, you have a sort of being," he said, as he operated

upon the egg-shell; "and, apparently, you live contented. Yet, be

apprised by me, you live in the manner of the beasts that perish. For

the whole excuse, warrant, purpose, and business of life, you treat as

alien to your equation."

"The business of life I entrust to my eminently competent man of

business," said Anthony, with a bow.

"She 's so magnificently vivid," he thought. "That white skin of hers,

and the red lips, and the white teeth; that cloud of black hair, and

the sweep of it as it leaves her brow; and then those luminous, lucid,

glowing, glowing eyes--that last smile of them, before she went away!

She gives one such a sense of intense vitality, of withheld power, of

unknown possibilities."

Adrian, with some expenditure of pains, extracted the spine from a

grilled sardine.

"These children of the inconstant wave," he mused, "these captives from

the inscrutable depths of ocean--the cook ought to bone them before she

sends them to table, ought n't she? _Labor et amor_. The warrant for

life is labour, and the business of life is love."

"You should address your complaints to the cook in person," said

Anthony.

"That's it--unknown possibilities," he thought. "She 's vivid, but she

is n't obvious. It's a vividness that is all reserves--that hints, but

does n't tell. It's the vividness of the South, of the Italy that

produced her,--'Italy, whose work still serves the world for miracle.'

She's vivid, but not in primary colours. I defy you, for example, to

find the word for her--the word that would make her visible to one who

had never seen her."

"They 're immensely improved by a drop or two of Worcester sauce," said

Adrian, with his mouth full. "Observe how, in the labyrinth of

destiny, journeys end in the most romantic and improbable conjunctions.

These fishlets from a southern sea--this sauce from a northern

manufacturing town."

"And then her figure," thought Anthony; "that superb, tall, pliant

figure,--the flow of it, the spring of it,--the lines it takes when she

moves, when she walks,--its extraordinary union of strength with

fineness."

"The longest night," said Adrian, "is followed by a dawn." He dropped

three lumps of sugar into his tea-cup. "There 's a paragraph in this

week's _Beaux and Belles_ which says that sugar in tea is quite the

correct thing again. Thank mercy. Tongue can never tell the

hankerings my sweet-tooth has suffered during the years that sugar has

been unfashionable.

"Nearest neighbours though they dwell,

Neighbour Tongue can never tell

What Neighbour Tooth has had to dree,

Nearest neighbours though they be,"

he softly hummed. "But that's really from a poem about toothache, and

does n't perhaps apply. Do _you_ labour? Do _you_ love?" he enquired.

"Love is such an ambiguous term," said Anthony, with languor.

"Yes--strength and fineness: those are her insistent notes," he was

thinking. "She is strong, strong. She is strong as a perfect young

animal is strong. Yet she is fine. She is fine as only, of all

created beings, a fine woman can be fine--a woman delicate, sensitive,

high-bred, fine in herself, and with all her belongings fine."

"Life," said Adrian, "is a thing a man should come by honestly; a thing

the possession of which a man should justify; a thing a man should

earn."

"Some favoured individuals, I have heard, inherit it from their

forebears," said Anthony, as one loth to dogmatise, on the tone of a

mere suggestion.

"Pish," answered Adrian, with absoluteness. "Our forebears affect my

thesis only in so far as they did not forbear. At most, they touched

the button. The rest--the adventurous, uncertain, interesting rest--we

must do ourselves. We must _earn_ our life; and then we should _spend_

it--lavishly, like noble, freehanded gentlemen. Well, we earn our life

by labour; and then, if we spend as the gods design, we spend our life

in love. I could quote Browning, I could quote Byron, I could even

quote What's-his-name, the celebrated German."

"You could--but you won't," interposed Anthony, with haste. "It is

excellent to have a giant's strength, but tyrannous to use it like a

giant."

"The puzzling thing, however," he reflected, "is that I can't in the

least realise her as what she is. She is a widow, she has been

married. I can't in the least think of her as a woman who has been

married. Not that she strikes one exactly as a young girl,

either,--she exhibits too plentiful a lack of young-girlish rawness and

insipidity,--she 's a woman, she 's a _femme faite_. But I can't think

of her as a woman who has passed through marriage. One feels a

freshness, a bloom, a something untouched, intact. One feels the

presence of certain inexperiences. And yet--well, by the card, one's

feeling is mistaken."

Adrian sprinkled sugar and poured cream over a plateful of big red

strawberries.

"All this--and Heaven too," he piously murmured.

Then, rosy face and blue eyes bright with anticipation, he tasted one.

Slowly the brightness faded.

"Deceivers!" he cried, falling back in his seat, and shaking his fist

at the tall glass dish from which he had helped himself. "Fair as

Hyperion, false as dicers' oaths. Acid and watery--a mere sour bath.

You may have them all." He pushed the dish towards Anthony. "I

suppose it's too early in the season to hope for good ones. But

this"--he charged a plate with bread, butter, and marmalade--"this

honest, homely Scottish marmalade, this can always be depended upon to

fill the crannies." And therewith he broke into song.

"To fill the crannies,

The mannie's crannies,

Then hey for the sweeties of bonny Dundee!" he carolled lustily. "Let

me see--I was saying?" he resumed. "Ah, yes, I was saying that the

state of mind of a man like you is a thing I am utterly unable to

conceive. And that 's funny, because it is generally true that the

larger comprehends the less. But I look at you, and I think to myself,

thinks I, 'There is a man--or at least the semblance of a man,--a

breathing thing at least, with anthropoid features and dimensions,--who

is never, never, never tormented by the feeling--'Now, tell me, what

feeling do you conjecture I mean?"

"Don't know, I 'm sure," said Anthony, without much animation.

"'By the feeling that he ought to be bending over a sheet of paper,

ruled in pretty parallels of fives, trying to embellish the same with

semi-breves and crotchets.' That is what I think to myself, thinks I;

and the thought leaves me gasping. I am utterly unable to conceive

your state of mind."

"I shan't--barring happy accidents--see her again till Sunday; and

to-day is only Friday," Anthony was brooding.

"Apropos," he said to Adrian, "I remember your telling me that Friday

was unlucky."

"Tut," said Adrian. "That is n't apropos in the slightest degree. The

difference that baffles me, I expect, is that I 've the positive, you

've the negative, temperament; I 've the active, you 've the passive; I

've the fertile, you 've the sterile. It's the difference between Yea

and Nay, between Willy and Nilly. Serenely, serenely, you will drift

to your grave, and never once know what it is to be consumed, harried,

driven by a deep, inextinguishable, unassuageable craving to write a

song. You 'll never know the heartburn, the unrest, the

conscience-sickness, the self-abasement that I know when I 'm not

writing one, nor the glorious anguish of exhilaration when I am. I can

get no conception of your state of mind--any more than a nightingale

could conceive the state of mind of a sparrow. In a sparrowish way, it

must be rather blissful--no? We artists are the salt of the earth, of

course; but every art knows its own bitterness, and--_il faut souffrir

pour être sel_."

"It's the difference between egotism rampant and modesty regardant,"

Anthony, with some grimness, returned. "I am content to sit in my

place, and watch the pantomime. You long to get upon the stage. Your

unassuageable craving to write a song is, in its essence, just an

unassuageable craving to make yourself an object of attention. And

that's the whole truth about you artists. I recollect your telling me

that Friday was unlucky."

"Oh, how superficial you are," Adrian plaintively protested. "A man

like me, you should understand, is meant for the world--for the world's

delight, for mankind's wonder. And here unfortunate circumstances--my

poverty and not my will--constrain me to stint the world of its due: to

languish in this lost corner of Nowhere, like Wamba the son of Witless,

the mere professed buffoon of a merer franklin. Well, my unassuageable

craving to write a song is, in its essence, just a great, splendid,

generous desire to indemnify the world. The world needs me--the world

has me not--but the world _shall_ have me. For the world's behoof, I

will translate myself into semi-breves and crotchets. So _there_!

Besides, to be entirely frank, I can't help it. Nothing human is

perfect that does not exhibit somewhere a fine inconsequence. Thus I

exhibit mine. I make music from a high sense of duty, to enrich the

world; but at the same time I make it because I can't help making it.

I make it as the bee makes honey, as the Jew makes money,

spontaneously, inevitably. It is my nature to,--just as it 's the

nature of fire to burn, and of dairy-maids to churn. It is the

inherent, ineradicable impulse of my bounteous soul."

"You told me in so many words that Friday was unlucky," said Anthony.

"Well, and so it is," said Adrian.

"I don't agree with you. Friday, in my experience, is the luckiest day

of the seven. All sorts of pleasant things have happened to me on

Friday."

"That's merely because your sponsors in baptism happened to name you

Tony," Adrian explained. "Friday, and the still more dread thirteen,

are both lucky for people who happen to be named Tony. Because why?

Because the blessed St. Anthony of Padua was born on a Friday, and went

to his reward on a thirteenth--the thirteenth of June, this very month,

no less." He allowed Anthony's muttered "_A qui le dites-vous_?" to

pass unnoticed, and, making his voice grave, continued, "But for those

of us who don't happen to be named Tony--_unberufen_! Take a man like

me, for instance, an intellectual young fellow, with work to do, but

delicate, and dependent for his strength upon the regular

administration of sustaining nourishment. Well, Friday comes, and

there he is, for twenty-four hours by the clock, obliged to keep up, as

best he may, on fish and vegetables and suchlike kickshaws, when every

fibre of his frame is crying out for meat, red meat. And now"--he

pushed back his chair--"and now, dear heart, be brave. Steel yourself

to meet adversity. A sorrow stoically borne is already half a sorrow

vanquished. I must absent thee from thy felicity a while---I must be

stepping." He rose, and moved, with that dancing gait of his, to the

door. From the threshold he remarked, "If you will come to my

business-room about half an hour before luncheon, I shall hope to have

the last bars polished off, and I 'll sing you something sweeter than

ever plummet sounded. _Lebe wohl_."

"Yes," thought Anthony, left to himself, "barring happy accidents, I

must wait till Sunday."

And he went into the park.

"The nuisance," he said to Patapouf, as he released him, "the nuisance

of things happening early is that they 're just so much the less likely

to happen late. The grudge I bear the Past is based upon the

circumstance that it has taken just so much from the Future.

Meanwhile, suggest the unthinking, let's enjoy the present. But

virtually, as I need n't remind _you_, there is no such thing as the

present. The present is an infinitesimal between two infinites. 'T is

a line (a thing without breadth or thickness) moving across the surface

of Eternity. The present is no more, by the time you have said, This

is present. So, then, it were inordinate to hope to fall in with her

again to-day, and you and I must face an anti-climax. Be thankful we

have the memories of the morning to feed upon. And, if you desire a

subject for meditation, observe how appetites are created. If we had

not met her at all, we should not hunger and thirst in this way for

another meeting."

He left the red collar round Patapouf's neck. The rest of the torn

ribbon he carefully gathered up and put in his pocket-book.