It was the third week in August; summer was dying, as a London summer
dies, in days of feverish sunlight and breathless languor. Everywhere
there was the same torpor, the same wornout, desiccated life in death.
It was in the streets with their sultry pallor, in the parks and squares
where the dust lay like a grey blight on every green thing. Everywhere
the glare accentuated this toneless melancholy. It was the symbol of the
decadence following the brilliant efflorescence of the season, the
exhaustion after that supreme effort of Society to amuse itself. This
lassitude is felt most by those who have shared least in the amusement,
the workers who must stay behind in the great workshop because they are
too busy or too poor to leave it.
There was one worker, however, who felt nothing of this depression.
Langley Wyndham had reasons for congratulating himself that everybody
was out of town, and that he was left to himself in his rooms in Dover
Street. For one thing, it gave him opportunity for cultivating Miss
Craven's acquaintance. For another, he had now a luxurious leisure in
which to polish up the proofs of his last novel, and to arrange his
ideas for its successor. Compared with this great work, all former
efforts would seem to the taste they had created as so much literary
trifling. Hitherto he had been merely trying his instrument, running his
fingers over the keys in his easy professional way; but these
preliminary flourishes gave no idea of the constructive harmonies to
follow. And now, on a dull evening, some three weeks after Audrey's
dinner-party, he was alone in his study, smoking, as he leaned back in
his easy-chair, in one of those dreamy moods which with him meant
fiction in the making, the tobacco-smoke curling round his head the
Pythian fumes of his inspiration. The study was curiously suggestive of
its owner's inconsistencies. With its silk cushions, Oriental rugs, and
velvet draperies, its lining of books, and writing-table heaped with
manuscripts and proofs, it witnessed to his impartial love of luxury and
hard work. It told other secrets too. The cigar-case on the table beside
him was embroidered by a woman's hand, the initials L. W. worked with
gold thread in a raised monogram. Two or three photographs of pretty
women were stuck by their corners behind the big looking-glass over the
fireplace, together with invitation cards, frivolous little notes, and
ball programmes. On one end of the mantel-board there was a photograph
of Knowles; on the other, the one nearest Wyndham's chair, an empty
frame of solid silver. The photograph and the frame represented the
friendship and the love of his life.
To-night he had left his proofs untouched on the writing-table, and had
settled himself comfortably to his pipe, with the voluptuous
satisfaction of a man who has put off a disagreeable duty. He felt that
delicious turmoil of ideas which with him accompanied the building up of
a story round its central character. Not that he yet understood that
character. Wyndham had his intuitions, but he was not the man to trust
them as such; it was his habit to verify them by a subsequent logic. His
literary conscience allowed nothing to take the place of the
experimental method, the careful observation, and arranging of minute
facts, intimate analytical study from the life. No action was too small,
no emotion too insignificant, for his uncompromising realism. He had
applied the same method to his own experience. Whatever came in his way,
the tragedy or comedy of his daily life, his moods of passion and
apathy, the aspirations of his better moments, all underwent the same
disintegrating process. He had the power of standing aloof from himself,
of arresting the flight of his own sensations, and criticising his own
actions as a disinterested spectator. Thus he made no experiment on
others that he had not first tried on his own person. If any man ever
understood himself, that man was Langley Wyndham. He was by no means
vain of this distinction; on the contrary, he would have said that as a
man's inner consciousness is the only thing he has any direct knowledge
of, he must be a fool if he can live with himself--the closest of all
human relations--for thirty-five years without understanding his own
character.
What he really prided himself on was his knowledge of other people,
especially of women. Unfortunately, for the first few years of his
literary life he knew no women intimately: he had many acquaintances
among them, a few enemies, but no friends; and the little he knew of
individuals had not tended to raise his opinion of women in general.
Consequently he drew them all, as he saw them, from the outside; the
best sort with a certain delicacy and clearness of outline, the result
of unerring eyesight and the gift of style; the worst sort with an
incisive, almost brutal touch that suggested the black lines bitten out
by some powerful acid. His work "took" because of its coarser qualities,
the accentuated bitterness, the startling irony, the vigorous,
characteristic phrase. Those black strokes were not introduced to throw
up the grey wash or pencilled shading; Wyndham's cynicism was no mere
literary affectation, it was engrained in his very nature. He had gone
through many phases of disillusionment (including disgust at his own
success) before that brief crisis of feeling which ended in his
engagement to Miss Fraser. Then, for the first time in his life, a
woman's nature had been given to him to know. It was a glorious
opportunity for the born analyst; and for the first time in his life he
let an opportunity go. He loved Alison Fraser, and he found that love
made understanding impossible. He never wanted to understand her; the
relentless passion for analysis was absorbed in a comprehensive
enthusiasm which embraced the whole of Alison and took no count of the
parts. To have pulled her to pieces, even with a view to reconstruction,
would have been a profanation of her and of his love. For a whole year
the student of the earthly and the visible lived on the substance of
things unseen--on faith in the goodness of Alison Fraser. By a peculiar
irony it was her very goodness--for she was a good woman--which made her
give up Wyndham. As Miss Gladys Armstrong had guessed (or as she would
have put it, diagnosed), a detail of Wyndham's past life had come to
Miss Fraser's knowledge, as these details always come, through a
well-meaning friend. It was one which made it difficult for her to
reconcile her marriage with Wyndham to her conscience. And because she
loved him, because the thought of him, so hard to other women, so tender
to herself, fascinated her reason and paralysed her will--flattering the
egoism inherent even in the very good--because she was weak and he was
irresistibly strong, she cut herself from him deliberately, open-eyed,
and with one stroke. She had just sufficient strength for the sudden
breaking off of their engagement, none for explanation, and none, alas!
to save her from regretting her act of supererogatory virtue.
Wyndham gave no sign of suffering. He simply sank back into himself, and
became the man he had been before, plus his experience of feeling, and
minus the ingenuousness of his self-knowledge. He took instead to
self-mystification, trying to persuade himself that because he could not
have Alison, Alison was not worth having. After that, it was but a step
to palming off on his reason the monstrous syllogism that because Alison
was unworthy, and Alison was a woman, therefore all women were unworthy.
Except for purely literary purposes, he had done with the sex. He became
if anything more intently, more remorselessly analytical, more
absolutely the student of human nature. He lived now in and for his
work.
He struck out into new paths; he was tired of his neutral washes, and
striking effects in black and white. He had begun to dream of glorious
subtilties of design and colour. Novels were lying in his head ten deep.
He had whole note-books full of germs and embryos, all neatly arranged
in their separate pigeon-holes. In some he had jotted down a name and a
date, or a word which stood for a whole train of ideas. In others he had
recorded some illustration as it occurred to him; or a single sentence
stood flanked by a dozen variants--Wyndham being a careful worker and
sensitive to niceties of language. To-night he was supremely happy. He
saw his way to a lovely little bit of psychological realism. All that
had been hitherto wanting to this particular development of his art had
been the woman. In Audrey Craven he had found the indispensable
thing--intimacy without love, or even, as he understood the word,
friendship. She was the type he had long desired, the feminine creature
artless in perpetual artifice, for ever revealing herself in a
succession of disguises.
He was beginning to adjust his latest impressions to his earlier idea of
her. He recalled the evening when he had first seen her--the hot,
crowded drawing-room, the heavy atmosphere, the dull faces coming and
going, and the figure of Audrey flashing through it all. She had
irritated him then, for he had not yet classified her. He had tried not
to think of her. She dogged his thoughts with most unmaidenly
insistence; her image lay in wait for him at every cross-road of
association; it was something vivid yet elusive, protean yet persistent.
He recalled that other evening of her dinner-party--their first
recognised meeting. Her whole person, which at first sight had impressed
him with its emphatic individuality, now struck him as characterless and
conventional. And yet--what was she like? She was like a chameleon. No,
she wasn't; he recollected that the change of colour was a vital process
in that animal. She was like an opal--all sparkle when you move it, and
at rest dull, most undeniably dull. No, _that_ wasn't it exactly. She
was a looking-glass for other people's personalities (he hated the
horrid word, and apologised to himself for using it), formless and
colourless, reflecting form and colour. After a moment's satisfaction
with this last fancy, he became aware that he was being made the fool of
metaphor. That was not his way. To find out what lay at the bottom of
this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any,
the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of
circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was
capable of--in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living
nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of work for the year 1896.
Making a mental note of several of the above phrases for future use,
Wyndham knocked the ashes out of his pipe and went to bed, where he
dreamed that the Devil, in evening dress, was presenting him with
Audrey's soul--done up in a brown wrapper marked "MS. only"--for
dissection.