_Wherein Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre struts airily towards
the Goal of Freedom_
Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre climbed the stairs to his
rooms at midnight; and all that night he wrote.
When the grey of the dawn put out his lamp’s light, that wondrous
misspending energy of his had finished the essay that brought him such
an uproar of notoriety and made him for awhile again the pet of London
drawing-rooms.
It was a master-stroke.
It accounted æsthetically, the Nietzschian note, for his past infamies;
it gave the philosophic standpoint to the latest and shabbiest infamy
he was about to commit--for the first bound copy of his new book lay
upon the table, fresh from the publisher. He smiled as he thought of
the green eyes of Gabrielle Solignac reading this book, reclining in
her catlike grace amongst her little smiling Eastern gods.
It was scarce a couple of months since he had read a volume of
Nietzsche. It had set his brain on fire. It was a revelation--of his
own possibilities. Here suddenly was revelation that his instincts
had been masterly--that he had no need for shame. With his accustomed
industry, he had forthwith mastered the whole of Nietzsche’s published
work--our Quogge was a gluttonous reader.
Here was a philosophy that overthrew the whole of the accepted ethics
and morals of society--overturned the whole conception of conduct. It
made of Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre a splendid hero--whom
himself in his inner man even he had more than suspected to be a rather
scurvy fellow. His conceit and his egoism jumped with this gospel. He
foresaw that the vogue of this aristocratic anarchism must soon spread
into England--the decaying hereditary aristocracy would leap at any
straw, and here for place of straw was a glittering argosy laden with
thrones of gold and purple, and carrying a gaudy diadem for them all.
It had begun to thrill the youth of Germany and France. He decided to
forestall it in England.
His great chance had come.
There must be no moment’s delay.
That night he had heard a French workman spout it. A workman!
There was indeed no time to be lost.
His book would be in the hands of the reviewers to-day--it would be
publicly sold in a fortnight’s time. This new philosophy robbed its
publication of all baseness. It would read as if he had had the courage
of his outlook upon life.
He rubbed his cold hands together....
He brushed his untidy colourless hair off his forehead and read the
clean copy of his essay carefully through--altered a line or two--and
folded it with a covering letter to his friend Harry Pollis, the
egregious editor of a great London Review, begging urgent publication.
There was just time to catch the post. He arose, went out into the
early morning, and posted it. Myre’s feet never lagged in his duty to
his only god.
When he returned to his room he looked at himself in the great mirror
over the low mantel, rubbed his hands, and smiled.
These two things would make a sensation!
He stood and gazed at himself. He took a hand-mirror and looked at
himself from every point of view.
He wondered if a head like his could not be the front of one as great
as Shakespeare--he wondered whether he looked like a man who could top
the world.
It worried him.
He posed so as to see the back of his head and the side-face, to see
which of the great men of the past he might be most like.... He could
find no sign to guide his destiny. But his gloom was suddenly relieved.
His conceit saved him.
He smiled a large smile.
It came to him with a rush that he was wholly original.
He lit a cigarette, posed himself in his gorgeous dressing-gown before
the mirror again, and smirked upon a pleasant prospect.
He dreamed of exquisite sensations.
He saw himself sitting in the smartest drawing-rooms, holding himself
with delightful insolence, giving voice to anarchistic destruction
of all the moralities. Art for art’s sake would be nothing to this.
He had once thought of going over to Rome--but every mediocrity went
over to Rome nowadays; it had become positively banal--the extremity
of commonplace. The very suburbs did it! People were not even barred
for it. You went as to a dentist.... God! how he would frighten the
editors--and the women!
It was time, too, that he was done with France. Indeed, Mr. Quogge
Myre, who had so sworn by the French intellect and French art, who
had so flouted the vulgarity of the English nation of shopkeepers,
found that there were now so many crossing the Channel to Paris that
he realized they were discovering and exploiting the sources of his
originality.
He looked in the mirror. There was no slightest doubt about it, he was
becoming puffy, middle-aged, just a _leetle_ bourgeois! He wondered
if he had always looked rather a common fellow. Tush! he had been
surrendering to the bourgeois ideals--he had married!
Well, the last Clatter about him had run down. He must start another.
Yes, he must strike quickly in England--or they would be discovering
this Nietzsche for themselves.
Some days after Mr. Myre’s notorious book appeared, he walked into a
café frequented by literary men; and he saw that his coming produced a
sensation.
He went up to a table where Aubrey sat with Noll and Rupert Greppel
and Lord Montagu Askew and others; and putting his hand on Aubrey’s
shoulder he said airily:
“This book will give my lady her freedom.”
He flung the volume upon the table, and called for a bock of beer with
carefully rehearsed calm.
Noll took up the book, _She Whom I Once Loved_, and skimmed through the
recital, shamelessly and brutally detailed, of this conceited fellow’s
relations with women. They were of every class....
“Rather vivid!” said Noll, after Myre had yawed away an hour of time.
And he added drily: “Yes; you’ll get your divorce.”
“It’s rather daring, I flatter myself,” said Mr. Myre. “We lack an
English Casanova.”
Noll rose from his seat; flung down the volume:
“Faugh!” said he; and kicked it into the street, took up his cigarette
from the table, flicked the ash from it, and left the place.
Myre’s face was livid with anger.
The Honourable Rupert Greppel said:
“There’ll be blood spilt over this.”
Gaston Latour, who sat at a table near by, laughed immoderately.
The proceedings for divorce were begun in the French Courts that day.
The silent woman with the green eyes was swift when she decided.
She took her freedom.
The book had a considerable vogue.