Seven hours had elapsed since he had parted from Lily Young, and
these seven hours he had spent in restaurants and music-halls,
seeking in dissipation surcease of sorrow and disappointment. He had
dined at Lubi's, and had gone on with Lord Muchross and Lord Snowdown
to the Royal, and they had returned in many hansoms and with many
courtesans to drink at Lubi's. But his heart was not in gaiety, and
feeling he could neither break a hat joyously nor allow his own to be
broken good-humouredly, nor even sympathize with Dicky, the driver,
who had not been sober since Monday, he turned and left the place.
"This is why fellows marry," he said, when he returned home, and sat
smoking in the shadows--he had lighted only one lamp--depressed by
the loneliness of the apartment. And more than an hour passed before
he heard Frank's steps. Frank was in evening dress; he opened his
cigarette-case, lighted a cigarette, and sat down willing to be
amused. Mike told him the entire story with gestures and descriptive
touches; on the right was the bed with its curtains hanging superbly,
on the left the great hay-boats filling the window; and by insisting
on the cruelest aspects, he succeeded in rendering it almost
unbearable. But Frank had dined well, and as Lizzie had promised
to come to breakfast he was in excellent humour, and on the whole
relished the tale. He was duly impressed and interested by the
subtlety of the fancy which made Lily tell how she used to identify
her ideal lover while praying to Him, Him with the human ideal which
had led her from the cloister, and which she had come to seek in the
world. He was especially struck with, and he admired the conclusion
of, the story, for Mike had invented a dramatic and effective ending.
"Well-nigh mad, drunk with her beauty and the sensuous charm of her
imagination, I threw my arms about her. I felt her limbs against
mine, and I said, 'I am mad for you; give yourself to me, and make
this afternoon memorable.' There was a faint smile of reply in her
eyes. They laughed gently, and she said, 'Well, perhaps I do love you
a little.'"
Frank was deeply impressed by Mike's tact and judgement, and they
talked of women, discussing each shade of feminine morality through
the smoke of innumerable cigarettes; and after each epigram they
looked in each other's eyes astonished at their genius and
originality. Then Mike spoke of the paper and the articles that would
have to be written on the morrow. He promised to get to work early,
and they said good-night.
When Frank left Southwick two years ago and pursued Lizzie Baker to
London, he had found her in straitened circumstances and unable to
obtain employment. The first night he took her out to dinner and
bought her a hat, on the second he bought her a gown, and soon after
she became his mistress. Henceforth his days were devoted to her;
they were seen together in all popular restaurants, and in the
theatres. One day she went to see some relations, and Frank had to
dine alone. He turned into Lubini's, but to his annoyance the only
table available was one which stood next where Mike Fletcher was
dining. "That fellow dining here," thought Frank, "when he ought to
be digging potatoes in Ireland." But the accident of the waiter
seeking for a newspaper forced him to say a few words, and Mike
talked so agreeably that at the end of dinner they went out together
and walked up and down, talking on journalism and women.
Suddenly the last strand of Frank's repugnance to make a friend of
Mike broke, and he asked him to come up to his rooms and have a
drink. They remained talking till daybreak, and separated as friends
in the light of the empty town. Next day they dined together, and a
few days after Frank and Lizzie breakfasted with Mike at his
lodgings. But during the next month they saw very little of him, and
this pause in the course of dining and journalistic discussion,
indicating, as Frank thought it did, a coolness on Mike's part,
determined the relation of these two men. When they ran against each
other in the corridor of a theatre, Frank eagerly button-holed Mike,
and asked him why he had not been to dine at Lubini's, and not
suspecting that he dined there only when he was in funds, was
surprised at his evasive answers. Mistress and lover were equally
anxious to know why they had not been able to find him in any of the
usual haunts; he urged a press of work, but it transpired he was
harassed by creditors, and was looking out for rooms. Frank told
him he was thinking of moving into the Temple.
"Lucky fellow! I wish I could afford to live there."
"I wish you could.... The apartment I have in mind is too large for
me, you might take the half of it."
Mike knew where his comforts lay, and he accepted his friend's offer.
There they founded, and there they edited, the _Pilgrim_, a weekly
sixpenny paper devoted to young men, their doings, their amusements,
their literature, and their art. Under their dual editorship this
journal had prospered; it now circulated five thousand a week, and
published twelve pages of advertisements. Frank, whose bent was
hospitality, was therefore able to entertain his friends as it
pleased him, and his rooms were daily and nightly filled with
revelling lords, comic vocalists, and chorus girls. Mike often craved
for other amusements and other society. Temple Gardens was but one
page in the book of life, and every page in that book was equally
interesting to him. He desired all amusements, to know all things, to
be loved by every one; and longing for new sensations of life, he
often escaped to the Cock tavern for a quiet dinner with some young
barristers, and a quiet smoke afterwards with them in their rooms. It
was there he had met John Norton.
The _Pilgrim_ was composed of sixteen columns of paragraphs in which
society, art, and letters were dealt with--the form of expression
preferred being the most exaggerated. Indeed, the formula of
criticism that Mike and Frank, guided by Harding, had developed, was
to consider as worthless all that the world held in estimation, and
to laud as best all that world had agreed to discard. John Norton's
views regarding Latin literature had been adopted, and Virgil was
declared to be the great old bore of antiquity, and some three or
four quite unknown names, gathered amid the Fathers, were upon
occasion trailed in triumph with adjectives of praise.
What painter of Madonnas does the world agree to consider as the
greatest? Raphael--Raphael was therefore decried as being scarcely
superior to Sir Frederick Leighton; and one of the early Italian
painters, Francesco Bianchi, whom Vasari exhumes in some three or
four lines, was praised as possessing a subtle and mysterious talent
very different indeed from the hesitating smile of La Jaconde. There
is a picture of the Holy Family by him in the Louvre, and of it
Harding wrote--"This canvas exhales for us the most delicious
emanations, sorrowful bewitchments, insidious sacrileges, and
troubled prayers."
All institutions, especially the Royal Academy, St. Paul's Cathedral,
Drury Lane Theatre, and Eton College, were held to be the symbols of
man's earthiness, the bar-room and music-hall as certain proof of his
divine origin; actors were scorned and prize-fighters revered; the
genius of courtesans, the folly of education, and the poetry of
pantomime formed the themes on which the articles which made the
centre of the paper were written. Insolent letters were addressed to
eminent people, and a novel by Harding, the hero of which was a
butler and the heroine a cook, was in course of publication.
Mike was about to begin a series of articles in this genial journal,
entitled _Lions of the Season_. His first lion was a young man who
had invented a pantomime, _Pierrot murders his Wife_, which he was
acting with success in fashionable drawing-rooms. A mute brings
Pierrot back more dead than alive from the cemetery, and throws him
in a chair. When Pierrot recovers he re-acts the murder before a
portrait of his wife--how he tied her down and tickled her to death.
Then he begins drinking, and finally sets fire to the curtains of the
bed and is burnt.
It was the day before publishing day, and since breakfast the young
men had been drinking, smoking, telling tales, and writing
paragraphs; from time to time the page-boy brought in proofs, and
the narrators made pause till he had left the room. Frank continued
reading Mike's manuscript, now and then stopping to praise a
felicitous epithet.
At last he said--"Harding, what do you think of this?--'The Sphynx is
representative of the grave and monumental genius of Egypt, the Faun
of the gracious genius of Rome, the Pierrot of the fantastic genius
of the Renaissance. And, in this one creation, I am not sure that
the seventeenth does not take the palm from the earlier centuries.
Pierrot!--there is music, there is poetry in the name. The soul of an
epoch lives in that name, evocative as it is of shadowy trees, lawny
spaces, brocade, pointed bodices, high heels and guitars. And in
expression how much more perfect is he than his ancestor, the Faun!
His animality is indicated without coarse or awkward symbolism;
without cloven hoof or hirsute ears--only a white face, a long white
dress with large white buttons, and a black skull-cap; and yet,
somehow, the effect is achieved. The great white creature is not
quite human--hereditary sin has not descended upon him; he is not
quite responsible for his acts.'"
"I like the paragraph," said Harding; "you finish up, of course, with
the apotheosis of pantomimists, and announce him as one of the lions
of the season. Who are your other lions and lionesses?"
"The others will be far better," said Mike. He took a cigarette from
a silver box on the table, and, speaking as he puffed at it, entered
into the explanation of his ideas.
Mademoiselle D'Or, the _première danseuse_ who had just arrived from
Vienna, was to be the lioness of next week. Mike told how he would
translate into words the insidious poetry of the blossom-like skirt
that the pink body pierces like a stem, the beautiful springing,
the lifted arms, then the flight from the wings; the posturing, the
artificial smiles; this art a survival of Oriental tradition; this
art at once so carnal and so enthusiastically ideal. "A prize-fighter
will follow the _danseuse_. And I shall gloat in Gautier-like
cadence--if I can catch it--over each superb muscle and each splendid
development. But my best article will be on Kitty Carew. Since Laura
Bell and Mabel Grey our courtesans have been but a mediocre lot."
"You must not say that in the _Pilgrim_--we should offend all our
friends," Harding said, and he poured himself out a brandy-and-soda.
Mike laughed, and walking up and down the room, he continued--
"That it should be so is inexplicable, that it is so is certain; we
have not had since Mabel Grey died a courtesan whom a foreign prince,
passing London, would visit as a matter of course as he would visit
St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; and yet London has advanced
enormously in all that constitutes wealth and civilization. In Paris,
as in ancient Greece, courtesans are rich, brilliant, and depraved;
here in London the women are poor, stupid, and almost virtuous. Kitty
is revolution. I know for a fact that she has had as much as £1000
from a foreign potentate, and she spends in one day upon her
tiger-cat what would keep a poor family in affluence for a week. Nor
can she say half a dozen words without being witty. What do you think
of this? We were discussing the old question, if it were well for a
woman to have a sweetheart. Kitty said, 'London has given me
everything but that. I can always find a man who will give me five
and twenty guineas, but a sweetheart I can't find.'"
Every pen stopped, and expectation was on every face. After a pause
Mike continued--
"Kitty said, 'In the first place he must please me, and I am very
difficult to please; then I must please him, and sufficiently for him
to give up his whole time to me. And he must not be poor, for
although he would not give me money, it would cost him several
hundreds a year to invite me to dinner and send me flowers. And where
am I to find this combination of qualities?' Can't you hear her
saying it, her sweet face like a tea-rose, those innocent blue eyes
all laughing with happiness? The great stockbroker, who has been with
her for the last ten years, settled fifty thousand pounds when he
first took her up. She was speaking to me about him the other day,
and when I said, 'Why didn't you leave him when the money was
settled?' she said, 'Oh no, I wouldn't do a dirty trick like that;
I contented myself simply by being unfaithful to him.'"
"This is no doubt very clever, but if you put all you have told us
into your article, you'll certainly have the paper turned off the
book-stalls."
The conversation paused. Every one finished his brandy-and-soda, and
the correction of proofs was continued in silence, interrupted only
by an occasional oath or a word of remonstrance from Frank, who
begged Drake, a huge-shouldered man, whose hand was never out of the
cigarette-box, not to drop the lighted ends on the carpet. Mike was
reading Harding's article.
"I think we shall have a good number this week," said Mike. "But we
want a piece of verse. I wonder if you could get something from John
Norton. What do you think of Norton, Harding?"
"He is one of the most interesting men I know. His pessimism, his
Catholicism, his yearning for ritual, his very genuine hatred of
women, it all fascinates me."
"What do you think of that poem he told us of the other night?"
"Intensely interesting; but he will never be able to complete it. A
man may be full of talent and yet be nothing of an artist; a man may
be far less clever than Norton, and with a subtler artistic sense. If
a seal had really something to say, I believe it would find a way of
saying it; but has John Norton really got any idea so overwhelmingly
new and personal that it would force a way of utterance where none
existed? The Christian creed with its tale of Mary must be of all
creeds most antipathetic to his natural instincts, he nevertheless
accepts it.... If you agitate a pool from different sides you must
stir up mud, and this is what occurs in Norton's brain; it is
agitated equally from different sides, and the result is mud."
Mike looked at Harding inquiringly, for a moment wondered if the
novelist understood him as he seemed to understand Norton.
A knock was heard, and Norton entered. His popularity was visible in
the pleasant smiles and words which greeted him.
"You are just the man we want," cried Frank. "We want to publish one
of your poems in the paper this week."
"I have burnt my poems," he answered, with something more of
sacerdotal tone and gesture than usual.
All the scribblers looked up. "You don't mean to say seriously that
you have burnt your poems?"
"Yes; but I do not care to discuss my reasons. You do not feel as I
do."
"You mean to say that you have burnt _The Last Struggle_--the poem
you told us about the other night?"
"Yes, I felt I could not reconcile its teaching, or I should say the
tendency of its teaching, to my religion. I do not regret--besides, I
had to do it; I felt I was going off my head. I should have gone mad.
I have been through agonies. I could not think. Thought and pain and
trouble were as one in my brain. I heard voices.... I had to do it.
And now a great calm has come. I feel much better."
"You are a curious chap."
Then at the end of a long silence John said, as if he wished to
change the conversation--
"Even though I did burn my pessimistic poem, the world will not go
without one. You are writing a poem on Schopenhauer's philosophy.
It is hard to associate pessimism with you."
"Only because you take the ordinary view of the tendency of
pessimistic teaching," said Mike. "If you want a young and laughing
world, preach Schopenhauer at every street corner; if you want a
sober utilitarian world, preach Comte."
"Doesn't much matter what the world is as long as it is not sober,"
chuckled Platt, the paragraph-writing youth at the bottom of the
table.
"Hold your tongue!" cried Drake, and he lighted another cigarette
preparatory to fixing his whole attention on the paradox that Mike
was about to enounce.
"The optimist believes in the regeneration of the race, in its
ultimate perfectibility, the synthesis of humanity, the providential
idea, and the path of the future; he therefore puts on a shovel hat,
cries out against lust, and depreciates prostitution."
"Oh, the brute!" chuckled the wizen youth, "without prostitutes and
public-houses! what a world to live in!"
"The optimist counsels manual labour for all. The pessimist believes
that forgetfulness and nothingness is the whole of man. He says, 'I
defy the wisest of you to tell me why I am here, and being here, what
good is gained by my assisting to bring others here.' The pessimist
is therefore the gay Johnny, and the optimist is the melancholy
Johnny. The former drinks champagne and takes his 'tart' out to
dinner, the latter says that life is not intended to be happy
in--that there is plenty of time to rest when you are dead."
John laughed loudly; but a moment after, reassuming his look of
admonition, he asked Mike to tell him about his poem.
"The subject is astonishingly beautiful," said Mike; "I only speak of
the subject; no one, not even Victor Hugo or Shelley, ever conceived
a finer theme. But they had execution, I have only the idea. I
suppose the world to have ended; but ended, how? Man has at last
recognized that life is, in equal parts, misery and abomination, and
has resolved that it shall cease. The tide of passion has again
risen, and lashed by repression to tenfold fury, the shores of life
have again been strewn with new victims; but knowledge--calm,
will-less knowledge--has gradually invaded all hearts; and the
restless, shifting sea (which is passion) shrinks to its furthest
limits.
"There have been Messiahs, there have been persecutions, but the Word
has been preached unintermittently. Crowds have gathered to listen
to the wild-eyed prophets. You see them on the desert promontories,
preaching that human life must cease; they call it a disgraceful
episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets--you see
them hunted and tortured as were their ancestors, the Christians of
the reign of Diocletian. You see them entering cottage doors and
making converts in humble homes. The world, grown tired of vain
misery, accepts oblivion.
"The rage and the seething of the sea is the image I select to
represent the struggle for life. The dawn is my image for the
diffusion and triumph of sufficient reason. In a couple of hundred
lines I have set my scene, and I begin. It is in the plains of
Normandy; of countless millions only two friends remain. One of them
is dying. As the stars recede he stretches his hand to his companion,
breathes once more, looking him in the face, joyous in the attainment
of final rest. A hole is scraped, and the last burial is achieved.
Then the man, a young beautiful man with the pallor of long vigils
and spiritual combat upon his face, arises.
"The scene echoes strangely the asceticism that produced it.
Rose-garden and vineyard are gone; there are no fields, nor
hedgerows, nor gables seen picturesquely on a sky, human with smoke
mildly ascending. A broken wall that a great elm tears and rends,
startles the silence; apple-orchards spread no flowery snow, and the
familiar thrushes have deserted the moss-grown trees, in other times
their trees; and the virgin forest ceases only to make bleak place
for marish plains with lonely pools and stagnating streams, where
perchance a heron rises on blue and heavy wings.
"All the beautiful colours the world had worn when she was man's
mistress are gone, and now, as if mourning for her lover and lord,
she is clad only in sombre raiment. Since her lord departed she bears
but scanty fruit, and since her lover left her, she that was glad has
grown morose; her joy seems to have died with his; and the feeling of
gloom is heightened, when at the sound of the man's footsteps a pack
of wild dogs escape from a ruin, where they have been sleeping, and
wake the forest with lugubrious yelps and barks. About the dismantled
porches no single rose--the survival of roses planted by some fair
woman's hand--remains to tell that man was once there--worked there
for his daily bread, seeking a goodness and truth in life which was
not his lot to attain.
"There are few open spaces, and the man has to follow the tracks of
animals. Sometimes he comes upon a herd of horses feeding in a glade;
they turn and look upon him in a round-eyed surprise, and he sees
them galloping on the hill-sides, their manes and tails floating in
the wind.
"Paris is covered with brushwood, and trees and wood from the shore
have torn away the bridges, of which only a few fragments remain. Dim
and desolate are those marshes now in the twilight shedding.
"The river swirls through multitudinous ruins, lighted by a crescent
moon; clouds hurry and gather and bear away the day. The man stands
like a saint of old, who, on the last verge of the desert, turns and
smiles upon the world he conquered.
"The great night collects and advances in shadow; and wandering
vapour, taking fire in the darkness, rolls, tumbling over and over
like fiery serpents, through loneliness and reeds.
"But in the eternal sunshine of the South flowers have not become
extinct; winds have carried seeds hither and thither, and the earth
has waxed lovely, and the calm of the spiritual evenings of the
Adriatic descend upon eternal perfume and the songs of birds. Symbol
of pain or joy there is none, and the august silence is undisturbed
by tears. From rotting hangings in Venice rats run, and that idle
wave of palace-stairs laps in listless leisure the fallen glories of
Veronese. As it is with painters so it is with poets, and wolf cubs
tear the pages of the last _Divine Comedy_ in the world. Rome is his
great agony, her shameful history falls before his eyes like a
painted curtain. All the inner nature of life is revealed to him, and
he sees into the heart of things as did Christ in the Garden of
Gethsemane--Christ, that most perfect symbol of the denial of the
will to live; and, like Christ, he cries that the world may pass from
him.
"But in resignation, hatred and horror vanish, and he muses again on
the more than human redemption, the great atonement that man has made
for his shameful life's history; and standing amid the orange and
almond trees, amid a profusion of bloom that the world seems to have
brought for thank-offering, amid an apparent and glorious victory of
inanimate nature, he falls down in worship of his race that had
freely surrendered all, knowing it to be nothing, and in surrender
had gained all.
"In that moment of intense consciousness a cry breaks the stillness,
and searching among the marbles he finds a dying woman. Gathering
some fruit, he gives her to eat, and they walk together, she
considering him as saviour and lord, he wrapped in the contemplation
of the end. They are the end, and all paling fascination, which is
the world, is passing from them, and they are passing from it. And
the splendour of gold and red ascends and spreads--crown and raiment
of a world that has regained its primal beauty.
"'We are alone,' the woman says. 'The world is ours; we are as king
and queen, and greater than any king or queen.'
"Her dark olive skin changes about the neck like a fruit near to
ripen, and the large arms, curving deeply, fall from the shoulder in
superb indolences of movement, and the hair, varying from burnt-up
black to blue, curls like a fleece adown the shoulders. She is large
and strong, a fitting mother of man, supple in the joints as the
young panther that has just bounded into the thickets; and her rich
almond eyes, dark, and moon-like in their depth of mystery, are fixed
on him. Then he awakes to the danger of the enchantment; but she
pleads that they, the last of mankind, may remain watching over each
other till the end; and seeing his eyes flash, her heart rejoices.
And out of the glare of the moon they passed beneath the sycamores.
And listening to the fierce tune of the nightingales in the dusky
daylight there, temptation hisses like a serpent; and the woman
listens, and drawing herself about the man, she says--
"'The world is ours; let us make it ours for ever; let us give birth
to a new race more great and beautiful than that which is dead. Love
me, for I am love; all the dead beauties of the race are incarnate in
me. I am the type and epitome of all. Was the Venus we saw yesterday
among the myrtles more lovely than I?'
"But he casts her from him, asking in despair (for he loves her) if
they are to renew the misery and abomination which it required all
the courage and all the wisdom of all the ages to subdue? He calls
names from love's most fearful chronicle--Cleopatra, Faustina,
Borgia. A little while and man's shameful life will no longer disturb
the silence of the heavens. But no perception of life's shame touches
the heart of the woman. 'I am love,' she cries again. 'Take me, and
make me the mother of men. In me are incarnate all the love songs of
the world. I am Beatrice; I am Juliet. I shall be all love to
you--Fair Rosamond and Queen Eleanor. I am the rose! I am the
nightingale!'
"She follows him in all depths of the forests wherever he may go. In
the white morning he finds her kneeling by him, and in blue and rose
evening he sees her whiteness crouching in the brake. He has fled to
a last retreat in the hills where he thought she could not follow,
and after a long day of travel lies down. But she comes upon him in
his first sleep, and with amorous arms uplifted, and hair shed to the
knee, throws herself upon him. It is in the soft and sensual scent of
the honeysuckle. The bright lips strive, and for an instant his soul
turns sick with famine for the face; but only for an instant, and in
a supreme revulsion of feeling he beseeches her, crying that the
world may not end as it began, in blood. But she heeds him not, and
to save the generations he dashes her on the rocks.
"Man began in bloodshed, in bloodshed he has ended.
"Standing against the last tinge of purple, he gazes for a last time
upon the magnificence of a virgin world, seeing the tawny forms of
lions in the shadows, watching them drinking at the stream."
"Adam and Eve at the end of the world," said Drake. "A very pretty
subject; but I distinctly object to an Eve with black hair. Eve and
golden hair have ever been considered inseparable things."
"That's true," said Platt; "the moment my missis went wrong her hair
turned yellow."
Mike joined in the jocularity, but at the first pause he asked Escott
what he thought of his poem.
"I have only one fault to find. Does not the _dénouement_ seem too
violent? Would it not be better if the man were to succeed in
escaping from her, and then vexed with scruples to return and find
her dead? What splendid lamentations over the body of the last
woman!--and as the man wanders beneath the waxing and waning moon he
hears nature lamenting the last woman. Mountains, rocks, forests,
speak to him only of her."
"Yes, that would do.... But no--what am I saying? Such a conclusion
would be in exact contradiction to the philosophy of my poem. For it
is man's natural and inveterate stupidity (Schopenhauer calls it
Will) that forces man to live and continue his species. Reason is the
opposing force. As time goes on reason becomes more and more
complete, until at last it turns upon the will and denies it, like
the scorpion, which, if surrounded by a ring of fire, will turn and
sting itself to death. Were the man to escape, and returning find the
woman dead, it would not be reason but accident which put an end to
this ridiculous world."
Seeing that attention was withdrawn from him Drake filled his pockets
with cigarettes, split a soda with Platt, and seized upon the
entrance of half a dozen young men as an excuse for ceasing to write
paragraphs. Although it had only struck six they were all in evening
dress. They were under thirty, and in them elegance and dissipation
were equally evident. Lord Muchross, a clean-shaven Johnnie, walked
at the head of the gang, assuming by virtue of his greater volubility
a sort of headship. Dicky, the driver, a stout commoner, spoke of
drink; and a languid blonde, Lord Snowdown, leaned against the
chimney-piece displaying a thin figure. The others took seats and
laughed whenever Lord Muchross spoke.
"Here we are, old chappie, just in time to drink to the health of the
number. Ha, ha, ha! What damned libel have you in this week? Ha, ha!"
"Awful bad head, a heavy day yesterday," said Dicky--"drunk blind."
"Had to put him in a wheelbarrow, wheeled him into a greengrocer's
shop, put a carrot in his mouth, and rang the bell," shouted
Muchross.
"Ha, ha, ha!" shouted the others.
"Had a rippin' day all the same, didn't we, old Dicky? Went up the
river in Snowdown's launch. Had lunch by Tag's Island, went as far as
Datchet. There we met Dicky; he tooted us round by Staines. There we
got in a fresh team, galloped all the way to Houndslow. Laura brought
her sister. Kitty was with us. Made us die with a story she told us
of a fellow she was spoony on. Had to put him under the bed....
Ghastly joke, dear boy!"
Amid roars of laughter Dicky's voice was heard--
"She calls him Love's martyr; he nearly died of bronchitis, and
became a priest. Kitty swears she'll go to confession to him one of
these days."
"By Jove, if she does I'll publish it in the _Pilgrim_."
"Too late this week," Mike said to Frank.
"We got to town by half past six, went round to the Cri. to have a
sherry-and-bitters, dined at the Royal, went on to the Pav., and on
with all the girls in hansoms, four in each, to Snowdown's."
"See me dance the polka, dear boy," cried the languid lord, awaking
suddenly from his indolence, and as he pranced across the room most
of his drink went over Drake's neck; and amid oaths and laughter
Escott besought of the revellers to retire.
"We are still four columns short, we must get on." And for an hour
and a half the scratching of the pens was only interrupted by the
striking of a match and an occasional damn. At six they adjourned to
the office. They walked along the Strand swinging their sticks, full
of consciousness of a day's work done. Drake and Platt, who had
avenged some private wrongs in their paragraphs, were disturbed by
the fear of libel; Harding gnawed the end of his moustache, and
reconsidered his attack on a contemporary writer, pointing his gibes
afresh.
They trooped up-stairs, the door was thrown open. It was a small
office, and at the end of the partitioned space a clerk sat in front
of a ledger on a high stool, his face against the window. Lounging on
the counter, turning over the leaves of back numbers, they discussed
the advertisements. They stood up when Lady Helen entered. [Footnote:
See _A Modern Lover_.] She had come to speak to Frank about a poem,
and she only paused in her rapid visit to shake hands with Harding,
and she asked Mike if his poems would be published that season.
The contributors to the _Pilgrim_ dined together on Wednesday, and
spent four shillings a head in an old English tavern, where unlimited
joint and vegetables could be obtained for half-a-crown. The
old-fashioned boxes into which the guests edged themselves had not
been removed, and about the mahogany bar, placed in the passage in
front of the proprietress's parlour, two dingy barmaids served actors
from the adjoining theatre with whisky-and-water. The contributors to
the _Pilgrim_ had selected a box, and were clamouring for food.
Smacking his lips, the head-waiter, an antiquity who cashed cheques
and told stories about Mr. Dickens and Mr. Thackeray, stopped in
front of this table.
"Roast beef, very nice--a nice cut, sir; saddle of mutton just up."
All decided for saddle of mutton.
"Saddle of mutton, number three."
Greasy and white the carver came, and as if the meat were a delight
the carver sliced it out. Some one remarked this.
"That is nothing," said Thompson; "you should hear Hopkins grunting
as he cuts the venison on Tuesdays and Fridays, and how he sucks his
lips as he ladles out the gravy. We only enjoy a slice or two,
whereas his pleasure ends only with the haunch."
The evening newspapers were caught up, glanced at, and abused as
worthless rags, and the editors covered with lively ridicule.
The conversation turned on Boulogne, where Mike had loved many
solicitors' wives, and then on the impurity of the society girl and
the prurient purity of her creation--the "English" novel.
"I believe that it is so," said Harding; "and in her immorality we
find the reason for all this bewildering outcry against the slightest
license in literature. Strange that in a manifestly impure age there
should be a national tendency towards chaste literature. I am not
sure that a moral literature does not of necessity imply much laxity
in practical morality. We seek in art what we do not find in
ourselves, and it would be true to nature to represent an unfortunate
woman delighting in reading of such purity as her own life daily
insulted and contradicted; and the novel is the rag in which this
leper age coquets before the mirror of its hypocrisy, rehearsing the
deception it would practise on future time."
"You must consider the influence of impure literature upon young
people," said John.
"No, no; the influence of a book is nothing; it is life that
influences and corrupts. I sent my story of a drunken woman to
Randall, and the next time I heard from him he wrote to say he had
married his mistress, and he knew she was a drunkard."
"It is easy to prove that bad books don't do any harm; if they did,
by the same rule good books would do good, and the world would have
been converted long ago," said Frank.
Harding thought how he might best appropriate the epigram, and when
the influence of the liberty lately acquired by girls had been
discussed--the right to go out shopping in the morning, to sit out
dances on dark stairs; in a word, the decadence and overthrow of the
chaperon--the conversation again turned on art.
"It is very difficult," said Harding, "to be great as the old masters
were great. A man is great when every one is great. In the great ages
if you were not great you did not exist at all, but in these days
everything conspires to support the weak."
Out of deference to John, who had worn for some time a very solid
look of disapproval, Mike ceased to discourse on half-hours passed on
staircases, and in summer-houses when the gardener had gone to
dinner, and he spoke about naturalistic novels and an exhibition of
pastels.
"As time goes on, poetry, history, philosophy, will so multiply that
the day will come when the learned will not even know the names of
their predecessors. There is nothing that will not increase out of
all reckoning except the naturalistic novel. A man may write twenty
volumes of poetry, history, and philosophy, but a man will never be
born who will write more than two, at the most three, naturalistic
novels. The naturalistic novel is the essence of a phase of life
that the writer has lived in and assimilated. If you take into
consideration the difficulty of observing twice, of the time an
experience takes to ripen in you, you will easily understand
_à priori_ that the man will never be born who will write three
realistic novels."
Coffee and cigars were ordered, and Harding extolled the charm and
grace of pastels.
Thompson said--"I keep pastels for my hours of idleness--cowardly
hours, when I have no heart to struggle with nature, and may but
smile and kiss my hand to her at a distance. For dreaming I know
nothing like pastel; it is the painter's opium pipe.... Latour was
the greatest pastellist of the eighteenth century, and he never
attempted more than a drawing heightened with colour. But how
suggestive, how elegant, how well-bred!"
Then in reply to some flattery on the personality of his art,
Thompson said, "It is strange, for I assure you no art was ever less
spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and
study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity,
temperament--temperament is the word--I know nothing. When I hear
people talk about temperament, it always seem to me like the strong
man in the fair, who straddles his legs, and asks some one to step
upon the palm of his hand."
Drake joined in the discussion, and the chatter that came from this
enormous man was as small as his head, which sat like a pin's-head
above his shoulders. Platt drifted from the obscene into the
incomprehensible. The room was fast emptying, and the waiter
loitered, waiting to be paid.
"We must be getting off," said Mike; "it is nearly eleven o'clock,
and we have still the best part of the paper to read through."
"Don't be in such a damned hurry," said Frank, authoritatively.
Harding bade them good-night at the door, and the editors walked down
Fleet Street. To pass up a rickety court to the printer's, or to go
through the stage-door to the stage, produced similar sensations
in Mike. The white-washed wall, the glare of the raw gas, the low
monotonous voice of the reading-boy, like one studying a part, or
perhaps like the murmur of the distant audience; the boy coming in
asking for "copy" or proof, like the call-boy, with his "Curtain's
going up, gentlemen." Is there not analogy between the preparation
of the paper that will be before the public in the morning, and the
preparation of the play that will be before its eyes in the evening?
From the glass closet where they waited for the "pages," they could
see the compositors bending over the forms. The light lay upon a red
beard, a freckled neck, the crimson of the volutes of an ear.
In the glass closet there were three wooden chairs, a table, and an
inkstand; on the shelf by the door a few books--the _London
Directory_, an _English Dictionary_, a _French Dictionary_--the
titles of the remaining books did not catch the eye. As they waited,
for no "pages" would be ready for them for some time, Mike glanced at
stray numbers of two trade journals. It seemed to him strange that
the same compositors who set up these papers should set up the
_Pilgrim_.
Presently the "pages" began to come in, but long delays intervened,
and it transpired that some of the "copy" was not yet in type. Frank
grew weary, and he complained of headache, and asked Mike to see the
paper through for him. Mike thought Frank selfish, but there was no
help for it. He could not refuse, but must wait in the paraffin-like
smell of the ink, listening to the droning voice of the reading-boy.
If he could only get the proof of his poem he could kill time by
correcting it; but it could not be obtained. Two hours passed, and
he still sat watching the red beard of a compositor, and the crimson
volutes of an ear. At last the printer's devil, his short sleeves
rolled up, brought in a couple of pages. Mike read, following the
lines with his pen, correcting the literals, and he cursed when the
"devil" told him that ten more lines of copy were wanting to complete
page nine. What should he write?
About two o'clock, holding her ball-skirts out of the dirt, a lady
entered.
"How do you do, Emily?" said Mike. "Just fancy seeing you here, and
at this hour!" He was glad of the interruption; but his pleasure was
dashed by the fear that she would ask him to come home with her.
"Oh, I have had such a pleasant party; So-and-so sang at Lady
Southey's. Oh, I have enjoyed myself! I knew I should find you here;
but I am interrupting. I will go." She put her arm round his neck.
He looked at her diamonds, and congratulated himself that she was
a lady.
"I am afraid I am interrupting you," she said again.
"Oh no, you aren't, I shall be done in half an hour; I have only got
a few more pages to read through. Escott went away, selfish brute
that he is, and has left me to do all the work."
She sat by his side contentedly reading what he had written. At
half-past two all the pages were passed for press, and they descended
the spiral iron staircase, through the grease and vinegar smell of
the ink, in view of heads and arms of a hundred compositors, in
hearing of the drowsy murmur of the reading-boy. Her brougham was at
the door. As she stepped in Mike screwed up his courage and said
good-bye.
"Won't you come?" she said, with disappointment in her eyes.
"No, not to-night. I have been slaving at that paper for the last
four hours. Thanks; not to-night. Good-bye; I'll see you next week."
The brougham rolled away, and Mike walked home. The hands of the
clocks were stretching towards three, and only a few drink-disfigured
creatures of thirty-five or forty lingered; so horrible were they
that he did not answer their salutations.