It was thus that soon after Eva’s departure with the mystical de Jones,
Frank found himself one afternoon strolling vacantly down Oxford-street.
A crowd of people. Bustling, frolicking folk. Women, gay, charming, so
beautiful, so tender, whose arms, if they could guess, might open for
the kiss--and who passed him without a look! Flitting by on what was the
latest in footwear, thin ankles, swelling into glossy silken calves--oh,
rapture! oh, seduction! How lonely one could be in a crowd. For it
wasn’t--he reflected--that there was any one cohesive and receptive
sensibility in that crowd, which frolicked and enjoyed life while he
suffered, into which he could have merged with any profit. Groups of
laughing young voices.... Why could he not talk to them without causing
them to feel they had been slighted, or landing himself at
Marlborough-street Police Station? Why could he not join them without
very soon being bored? There they were, groups on the face of it, but
really solitary, yearning, suffering souls like himself. There was no
sort of one central well in all this diffused accidentally accumulated
hilarity from which one could draw. All came out to look at the
feast--and all looked without being filled.
He saw rich men in furs and motor-cars, and wished them joy of it; he
read the New Year’s Honours list, and sensed no pang; he watched old
colleagues overtake him on the road to fame, and felt no jealousy; he
had seen his father’s fortune blown to smithereens, without a blink: but
that every woman whom he looked at twice did not immediately yield
herself to him was something he found hard to bear, harder to forgive.
To possess all the comely women in the world, the female portion of the
universe, in a sort of cumulative, consummative kiss--it was his dream.
For--indisputably--one woman was not like another; and how? how enjoy
them all? While lying, as he thought appeased, in one woman’s arms, the
thought that there must be another in some particular different from his
own would at once renew his restlessness and send him searching,
searching round the globe. Content at last, content and happy at Port
Said, the thought of what he must be missing in Calcutta was sufficient
to uproot him and send him on his onward quest over plain and mountain,
dune and sea, continent and ocean, till, with ever greater frequency, he
would rebound in London, in Piccadilly Circus, the reputed centre of the
world, with his heart still burning, with hot tears in his parched
throat. “I can’t bear it,” he said, looking with a kind of stupor at the
fountain he had seen before. “I will kill myself....”
A practical man inessentially, Frank was impractical in essentials. He
had a kind of vague idea that the whole universe and all that it held
could, under favourable conditions, be embraced in a woman’s kiss, the
consummation, _das Welt-Alles_! The all-in-all. There was a critic just
then who wrote copiously in the _Adelphi_ about the One and the Many.
Yes, perhaps the One was to be realised most clearly in one of the many.
“Very likely,” he said, “very likely.” Was he already beginning to
regret his Eva’s absence? No, he had weighed her kisses in the balance
and had found them wanting. Except for that first virgin kiss upon the
mountain-top when she came up close, close to him, took a long breath
and closed her eyes....
He turned into Piccadilly, steadied his thoughts, and continued in a
Tolstoyan mood of honest self-analysis: “Then what am I to do? Renounce
the flesh and turn saint? Difficult. Difficult and uncongenial.
Essentially the world is good and one ought to know how to be happy. But
happiness is a strange thing: it is in two parts and is conditioned by
an inner equilibrium. On the surface I oscillate in a kind of twilight,
through black night into the dawn and back: but within, my soul sings
like a lark and it is morning. And all is well and beyond implication. I
knew it long ago. Yet I cannot sit down in the cool quiet of a pillared
cathedral as I would by choice, with all my passions and lusts raging in
me, raging in me! Essentially all is well. Certainly. Certainly. But
that does not do away with the surface things being all wrong. Mere
pinpricks. Perhaps. But the skin is a sensitive tissue.”
Tired out, he sat down on a bench in the Green Park and pulled out his
_Times_. How it assumed that all was well and orderly in the world. With
what propriety it examined and relegated to the requisite sections and
columns the haphazard irrelevance of life. But how sane, how quiet and
dignified and, withal, informed. Under a rubric headed “Science,” he
read:
“ ...In the course of the year Jeans has explored the problem further,
and has reached conclusions of immense significance in our conceptions
of the universe. These are, in short, that the chemical elements of
which we have knowledge are only one end of an indefinite series and
that end a degeneration from an indefinitely more complex set of atoms
in the distant stars and nebulæ. The conditions in which life is
possible are an extreme case, possibly unique, and came about by a
destruction of matter through countless aeons of time. The primary
physical process of the universe is the conversion of matter into
radiation, a process not even suspected until 1904. The primary matter
of the universe consists of highly complex atoms, dissociated and
incapable of association inasmuch as they change their make-up millions
of times in a second.”
He stopped reading and pondered. “Dissociated and incapable of
association.” Significant.... Significant and suggestive. “The primary
matter of the universe ... consists of atoms incapable of association
... inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a
second.... Like me,” he thought. And came to the conclusion that he was,
his salvation lay, in the primary matter of the universe.
Calmed down, appeased by a distant hope of merging into the primary
matter of the universe and finding peace in changing his make-up with it
millions of times in a second with more inward profit than heretofore
and more pleasure than he found in his already frequent reboundings in
London, he strolled on across the Park and called in to see Lord
Ottercove.
Lord Ottercove, as he saw him, looked as though he had no wish to change
his make-up millions of times in a second, but was indeed perfectly
content with his make-up such as it was and, moreover, dissociated
himself from the primary matter of the universe, being content to dwell
and act within that end of the indefinite series of chemical elements
come about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time
and described by the paragraph in _The Times_ as an extreme, possibly
unique, case in which life (and journalistic activity) was possible.
“Forgive me for not rising,” he said. “But all these things will fall
off my lap if I do.”
“What need for me to forgive you,” thought Frank, “since you have
already forgiven yourself?”
There was an air about Lord Ottercove as though he knew what a rich and
splendid type he was for the imaginative novelist--and he was always
ready to help the young and striving artist--but could scarcely
comprehend the established novelists’ blindness to the riches lying at
their feet. Now that he knew Frank had conceived him as the hero of his
new novel he not only proved a willing sitter, but lent his own
imagination towards bettering Frank’s plot. And this he did in a way
that tended to enhance the prestige and lovableness of the hero by
placing him in more favourable situations than those envisaged by the
author. Frank, in relating the plot of his new novel, might say: “And
here the scientist gets the better of the hero by an ingenious use of
the latter’s newspapers to an end the hero cannot at this stage
envisage.”
“Quite,” Lord Ottercove would say. “But by pretending not to see the
scientist’s game the newspaper proprietor outwits him in the following
chapter.”
Frank was grateful to Lord Ottercove for the privilege of seeing him in
all his multifarious attitudes from every angle and aspect: in his
beautifully fitting tailcoats (there were several of them in the office
and in every one of his several town and country houses); in his silk
pyjamas; in the heroic act of jumping out of bed; sitting on the edge of
it in pensive mood with his bare feet dangling meditatively; in
dishabille; in dressing-gown and _en pantoufles_; or shaving in his vest
and pants: in all attitudes and from all aspects Lord Ottercove, Frank
could but remark, was unequivocally, indubitably great. It seemed as if
Lord Ottercove in his unfailing thoughtfulness provided him with these
opportunities to study him at all hours and in all attitudes. If Frank
had not, as yet, had the opportunity of studying his lordship _au
naturel_, it was because such study, both for descriptive purposes in a
work of fiction and as a practical opportunity, was, he willingly
recognised, in advance of current customs and usages.
“Well, how are you?” said Lord Ottercove. “How are your sales?”
In the first week of January, and having run through some twenty issues
of one of Ottercove’s newspapers, _Pale Primroses_ by Frank Septimus
Dickin appeared, in a pale jacket liberally sprinkled with flowers of
the title, on the bookstalls; yet enjoyed but a melancholy sale which,
with rumours of a new European imbroglio, dropped like the jaw of a man
astonished. “Completely and utterly stopped,” said Frank.
“Look here,” said Lord Ottercove, “you should get married.”
“Gladly. But who will marry me with my sales stopped? My publisher’s
wife’s great aunt died the other day, and he said to me over the
telephone: ‘I think it only right to close down the office for a week to
commemorate our respect for the dead woman.’”
Lord Ottercove thought deeply, and said:
“You should get married.”
“To whom?”
“I’ll introduce you. A peach of a girl. Beautiful. A wonderful face. I
can look at it for hours at a stretch without getting bored. The trouble
with her is that she’s got ... too much money.”
“But will she marry me?”
“She would if I gave you ... gave you _The Evening Ensign_.”
There was a pause. “It’s a pity,” said Frank, “that I don’t know her.”
“I will introduce you.”
“When?”
“Come and dine with me to-morrow night at my house.”