In the dreary drawing-room, amid the tattered copies of the _Graphic_
and _Illustrated London News_, he encountered the inevitable idle
woman. They engaged in conversation; and he repeated the phrases that
belong inevitably to such occasions.
"How horrible all this is," he said to himself; "this is worse than
peeping and botanizing on a mother's grave."
He desired supreme grief, and grief fled from his lure; and rhymes
and images thronged his brain; and the poem that oftenest rose in his
mind, seemingly complete in cadence and idea, was so cruel, that
Lily, looking out of heaven, seemed to beg him to refrain. But though
he erased the lines on the paper, he could not erase them on his
brain, and baffled, he pondered over the phenomena of the antagonism
of desired aspirations and intellectual instincts. He desired a poem
full of the divine grace of grief; a poem beautiful, tender and pure,
fresh and wild as a dove crossing in the dawn from wood to wood. He
desired the picturesqueness of a young man's grief for a dead girl,
an Adonais going forth into the glittering morning, and weeping for
his love that has passed out of the sun into the shadow. This is what
he wrote:
A UNE POETRENAIRE.
We are alone! listen, a little while,
And hear the reason why your weary smile
And lute-toned speaking is so very sweet
To me, and how my love is more complete
Than any love of any lover. They
Have only been attracted by the gray
Delicious softness of your eyes, your slim
And delicate form, or some such whimpering whim,
The simple pretexts of all lovers;--I
For other reasons. Listen whilst I try
And say. I joy to see the sunset slope
Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope,
Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm,
Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm,
In mildly modulated phrases; thus
Your life shall fade like a voluptuous
Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die
Like some soft evening's sad serenity ...
I would possess your dying hours; indeed
My love is worthy of the gift, I plead
For them.
Although I never loved as yet,
Methinks that I might love you; I would get
From out the knowledge that the time was brief,
That tenderness whose pity grows to grief,
My dream of love, and yea, it would have charms
Beyond all other passions, for the arms
Of death are stretchéd you-ward, and he claims
You as his bride. Maybe my soul misnames
Its passion; love perhaps it is not, yet
To see you fading like a violet,
Or some sweet thought away, would be a strange
And costly pleasure, far beyond the range
Of common man's emotion. Listen, I
Will choose a country spot where fields of rye
And wheat extend in waving yellow plains,
Broken with wooded hills and leafy lanes,
To pass our honeymoon; a cottage where
The porch and windows are festooned with fair
Green wreaths of eglantine, and look upon
A shady garden where we'll walk alone
In the autumn sunny evenings; each will see
Our walks grow shorter, till at length to thee
The garden's length is far, and thou wilt rest
From time to time, leaning upon my breast
Thy languid lily face. Then later still,
Unto the sofa by the window-sill
Thy wasted body I shall carry, so
That thou mays't drink the last left lingering glow
Of even, when the air is filled with scent
Of blossoms; and my spirits shall be rent
The while with many griefs. Like some blue day
That grows more lovely as it fades away,
Gaining that calm serenity and height
Of colour wanted, as the solemn night
Steals forward thou shalt sweetly fall asleep
For ever and for ever; I shall weep
A day and night large tears upon thy face,
Laying thee then beneath a rose-red place
Where I may muse and dedicate and dream
Volumes of poesy of thee; and deem
It happiness to know that thou art far
From any base desires as that fair star
Set in the evening magnitude of heaven.
Death takes but little, yea, thy death has given
Me that deep peace and immaculate possession
Which man may never find in earthly passion.
The composition of the poem induced a period of literary passion,
during which he composed much various matter, even part of his great
poem, which he would have completed had he not been struck by an idea
for a novel, and so imperiously, that he wrote the book straight from
end to end. It was sent to a London publisher, and it raised some
tumult of criticism, none of which reached the author. When it
appeared he was far away, living in Arab tents, seeking pleasure at
other sources. For suddenly, when the strain of the composition of
his book was relaxed, civilization had grown hateful to him; a
picture by Fromantin, and that painter's book, _Un été dans le
Sahara_, quickened the desire of primitive life; he sped away, and
for nearly two years lived on the last verge of civilization,
sometimes passing beyond it with the Bedouins into the interior, on
slave-trading or rapacious expeditions. The frequentation of these
simple people calmed the fever of ennui, which had been consuming
him. Nature leads us to the remedy that the development of reason
inflicts on the animal--man. And for more than a year Mike thought he
had solved the problem of life; now he lived in peace--passion had
ebbed almost out of hearing, and in the plain satisfaction of his
instincts he found happiness.
With the wild chieftains, their lances at rest, watching from behind
a sandhill, he sometimes thought that the joy he experienced was akin
to that which he had known in Sussex, when his days were spent in
hunting and shooting; now, as then, he found relief by surrendering
himself to the hygienics of the air and earth. But his second return
to animal nature had been more violent and radical; and it pleased
him to think that he could desire nothing but the Arabs with whom he
lived, and whose friendship he had won. But _qui a bu boira_, and
below consciousness dead appetites were awakening, and would soon be
astir.
The tribe had wandered to an encampment in the vicinity of Morocco;
and one day a missionary and his wife came with a harmonium and
tracts. The scene was so evocative of the civilization from which
Mike had fled, that he at once was drawn by a power he could not
explain towards them. He told the woman that he had adopted Arab
life; explaining that the barbaric soul of some ancestor lived in
him, and that he was happy with these primitive people. He too was a
missionary, and had come to warn and to save them from Christianity
and all its corollaries--silk hats, piano playing, newspapers, and
patent medicines. The English woman argued with him plaintively; the
husband pressed a bundle of tracts upon him; and this very English
couple hoped he would come and see them when he returned to town.
Mike thanked them, insisting, however, that he would never leave his
beloved desert, or desert his friends. Next day, however, he forgot
to fall on his knees at noon, and outside the encampment stood
looking in the direction whither the missionaries had gone. A strange
sadness seemed to have fallen upon him; he cared no more for plans
for slave-trading in the interior, or plunder in the desert. The
scent of the white woman's skin and hair was in his nostrils; the
nostalgia of the pavement had found him, and he knew he must leave
the desert. One morning he was missed in the Sahara, and a fortnight
after he was seen in the Strand, rushing towards Lubini's.
"My dear fellow," he said, catching hold of a friend's arm, "I've
been living with the Arabs for the last two years. Fancy, not to have
seen a 'tart' or drunk a bottle of champagne for two years! Come and
dine with me. We'll go on afterwards to the Troc'."
Mike looked round as if to assure himself that he was back again
dining at Lubi's. It was the same little white-painted gallery,
filled with courtesans, music-hall singers, drunken lords, and
sarcastic journalists. He noticed, however, that he hardly knew a
single face, and was unacquainted with the amours of any of the
women. He inquired for his friends. Muchross was not expected to
live, Laura was underground, and her sister was in America. Joining
in the general hilarity, he learnt that as the singer declined the
prize-fighter was going up in popular estimation. A young and drunken
lord offered to introduce him "to a very warm member."
He felt sure, however, that the Royal would stir in him the old
enthusiasms, and his heart beat when he saw in a box Kitty Carew,
looking exactly the same as the day he had left her; but she insisted
on taking credit for recognizing him--so changed was he. He felt
somewhat provincial, and no woman noticed him, and it was clear that
Kitty was no longer interested in him. The conversation languished,
he did not understand the allusions, and he was surprised and a
little alarmed, indeed, to find that he did not even desire their
attention.
A few weeks afterwards he received an invitation to a ball. It was
from a woman of title, the address was good, and he resolved to go.
It was to one of the Queen Anne houses with which Chelsea abounds,
and as he drove towards it he noted the little windows aflame with
light and colour in the blue summer night. On the carved cramped
staircases women struck him as being more than usually interesting,
and the distinguished air of the company moved him with pleasurable
sensations. A thick creamy odour of white flowers gratified the
nostrils; the slender backs of the girls, the shoulder-blades
squeezed together by the stays, were full of delicate lines and
tints. Mike saw a tall blonde girl, slight as a reed, so blonde that
she was almost an albino, her figure in green gauze swaying. He saw a
girl so brown that he thought of palms and cocoa-nuts; she passed him
smiling, all her girlish soul awake in the enchantment of the dance.
He said--
"No, I don't want to be introduced; she'd only bore me; I know
exactly all she would say."
Studying these, he thought vaguely of dancing a quadrille, and was
glad when the lady said she never danced. With a view to astonish
her, he said--
"Since I became a student of Schopenhauer I have given up waltzing.
Now I never indulge in anything but a square."
For a few moments his joke amused him, and he regretted that John
Norton, who would understand its humour, was not there to laugh at
it. Having eaten supper he chose the deepest chair among the
clustered furniture of the drawing-room, and watched in spleenic
interest a woman of thirty flirting with a young man.
The panelled skirt stretched stiffly over the knees, the legs were
crossed, one drawn slightly back. The young man sat awkwardly on the
edge of the sofa nursing his silk foot. She looked at him over her
fan, inclining her blonde head in assent from time to time. The young
man was delicate--a red blonde. The wall, laden with heavy shelves,
was covered with an embossed paper of a deep gold hue. A piece of
silk, worked with rich flowers, concealed the volumes in a light
bookcase. A lamp, set on a tall brass rod, stood behind the lady,
flooding her hair with yellow light, and its silk shade was nearly
the same tint as the lady's hair. The costly furniture, the lady and
her lover, the one in black and white, the other in creamy lace, the
panelled skirt extended over her knees, filled the room like a
picture--an enticing but somewhat vulgar picture of modern refinement
and taste. Mike watched them curiously.
"Five years ago," he thought, "I was young like he is; my soul
thrilled as his is thrilling now."
Then, seeing a woman whom he knew pass the door on her way to the
ball-room, he asked her to come and sit with him. He did so
remembering the tentative steps they had taken in flirtation three
years ago. So by way of transition, he said--
"The last time we met we spoke of the higher education of women, and
you said that nothing sharpened the wits like promiscuous flirtation.
Enchanting that was, and it made poor Mrs.--Mrs.--I really can't
remember--a lady with earnest eyes--look so embarrassed."
"I don't believe I ever said such a thing; anyhow, if I did, I've
entirely changed my views."
"What a pity! but--perhaps you have finished your education?"
"Yes, that's it; and now I must go up-stairs. I am engaged for this
dance."
"Clearly I'm out of it," thought Mike. "Not only do people see me
with new eyes, but I see them with eyes that I cannot realize as
mine."
The drawing-room was empty; all had gone up-stairs to dance, so,
finding himself alone, he went to a mirror to note the changes. At
first he seemed the same Mike Fletcher; but by degrees he recognized,
or thought he recognized, certain remote and subtle differences. He
thought that the tenderness which used to reside in his eyes was
evanescent or gone. This tenderness had always been to him a subject
of surprise, and he had never been able to satisfactorily explain its
existence, knowing as he knew how all tenderness was in contradiction
to his true character; at least, as he understood himself. This
tenderness was now replaced by a lurking evil look, and he remembered
that he had noted such evil look in certain old libertines. Certain
lines about the face had grown harder, the hollow freckled cheeks
seemed to have sunk a little, and the pump-handle chin seemed to be
defining itself, even to caricature. There was still a certain air of
_bravoure_, of truculence, which attracted, and might still charm. He
turned from the mirror, went up-stairs, and danced three or four
times. He remained until the last, and followed by an increasing
despair he muttered, as he got into a hansom--
"If this is civilization I'd better go back to the Arabs."
The solitude of his rooms chilled him in the roots of his mind; he
looked around like a hunted animal. He threw himself into an
arm-chair. Like a pure fire ennui burned in his heart.
"Oh, for rest! I'm weary of life. Oh, to slip back into the
unconscious, whence we came, and pass for ever from the fitful
buzzing of the midges. To feel that sharp, cruel, implacable
externality of things melt, vanish, and dissolve!
"The utter stupidity of life! There never was anything so stupid; I
mean the whole thing--our ideas of right and wrong, love and duty,
etc. Great Scott! what folly. The strange part of it all is man's
inability to understand the folly of living. When I said to that
woman to-night that I believed that the only evil is to bring
children into the world, she said, 'But then the world would come to
an end.' I said, 'Do you not think it would be a good thing if it
did?' Her look of astonishment proved how unsuspicious she is of the
truth. The ordinary run of mortals do not see into the heart of
things, nor do we, except in terribly lucid moments; then, seeing
life truly, seeing it in its monstrous deformity, we cry out like
children in the night.
"Then why do we go to Death with terror-stricken faces and reluctant
feet? We should go to Death in perfect confidence, like a bride to
her husband, and with eager and smiling eyes. But he who seeks Death
goes with wild eyes--upbraiding Life for having deceived him; as if
Life ever did anything else! He goes to Death as a last refuge. None
go to Death in deep calm and resignation, as a child goes to the kind
and thoughtful nurse in whose arms he will find beautiful rest.
"It was in this very room I spoke to Lady Helen for the last time.
She understood very well indeed the utter worthlessness of life. How
beautiful was her death! That white still face, with darkness
stealing from the closed lids, a film of light shadow, symbol of
deeper shadow. The unseen but easily imagined hand grasping the
pistol, the unseen but imagined red stain upon the soft texture of
the chemise! I might have loved her. She saw into the heart of
things, and like a reasonable being, which she was, resolved to rid
herself of the burden. We discussed the whole question in the next
room; and I remember I was surprised to find that she was in no wise
deceived by the casual fallacy of the fools who say that the good
times compensate for the bad. Ah! how little they understand!
Pleasure! what is it but the correlative of pain? Nothing short of
man's incomparable stupidity could enable him to distinguish between
success and failure.
"But now I remember she did not die for any profound belief in the
worthlessness of life, but merely on account of a vulgar love affair.
That letter was quite conclusive. It was written from the Alexandra
Hotel. It was a letter breaking it off (strange that any one should
care to break off with Lady Helen!); she stopped to see him, in the
hope of bringing about a reconciliation. Quite a Bank Holiday sort of
incident! She did not deny life; but only that particular form in
which life had come to her. Under such circumstances suicide is
unjustifiable.
"There! I'm breaking into what John Norton would call my
irrepressible levity. But there is little gladness in me. Ennui hunts
me like a hound, loosing me for a time, but finding the scent again
it follows--I struggle--escape--but the hour will come when I shall
escape no more. If Lily had not died, if I had married her, I might
have lived. In truth, I'm not alive, I'm really dead, for I live
without hope, without belief, without desire. Ridiculous as a wife
and children are when you look at them from the philosophical side,
they are necessary if man is to live; if man dispenses with the
family, he must embrace the cloister; John has done that; but now I
know that man may not live without wife, without child, without God!"
* * * * * *
Next day, after breakfast, he lay in his arm-chair, thinking of the
few hours that lay between him and the fall of night. He sought to
tempt his jaded appetite with many assorted dissipations, but he
turned from all in disgust, and gambling became his sole distraction.
Every evening about eleven he was seen in Piccadilly, going towards
Arlington Street, and every morning about four the street-sweepers
saw him returning home along the Strand. Then, afraid to go to bed,
he sometimes took pen and paper and attempted to write some lines of
his long-projected poem. But he found that all he had to say he had
said in the sketch which he found among his papers. The idea did not
seem to him to want any further amplification, and he sat wondering
if he could ever have written three or four thousand lines on the
subject.
The casual eye and ear still recognized no difference in him. There
were days when he was as good-looking as ever, and much of the old
fascination remained: but to one who knew him well, as Harding did,
there was no doubt that his life had passed its meridian. The day was
no longer at poise, but was quietly sinking; and though the skies
were full of light, the buoyancy and blitheness that the hours bear
in their ascension were missing; lassitude and moodiness were aboard.
More than ever did he seek women, urged by a nervous erethism which
he could not explain or control. Married women and young girls came
to him from drawing-rooms, actresses from theatres, shop-girls from
the streets, and though seemingly all were as unimportant and
accidental as the cigarettes he smoked, each was a drop in the ocean
of the immense ennui accumulating in his soul. The months passed,
disappearing in a sheer and measureless void, leaving no faintest
reflection or even memory, and his life flowed in unbroken weariness
and despair. There was no taste in him for anything; he had eaten of
the fruit of knowledge, and with the evil rind in his teeth, wandered
an exile beyond the garden. Dark and desolate beyond speech was his
world; dark and empty of all save the eyes of the hound Ennui; and by
day and night it watched him, fixing him with dull and unrelenting
eyes. Sometimes these acute strainings of his consciousness lasted
only between entering his chambers late at night and going to bed;
and fearful of the sleepless hours, every sensation exaggerated by
the effect of the insomnia, he sat in dreadful commune with the
spectre of his life, waiting for the apparition to leave him.
"And to think," he cried, turning his face to the wall, "that it is
this _ego_ that gives existence to it all!"
One of the most terrible of these assaults of consciousness came upon
him on the winter immediately on his return from London. He had gone
to London to see Miss Dudley, whom he had not seen since his return
from Africa--therefore for more than two years. Only to her had he
written from the desert; his last letters, however, had remained
unanswered, and for some time misgivings had been astir in his heart.
And it was with the view of ridding himself of these that he had been
to London. The familiar air of the house seemed to him altered, the
servant was a new one; she did not know the name, and after some
inquiries, she informed him that the lady had died some six months
past. All that was human in him had expressed itself in this
affection; among women Lily Young and Miss Dudley had alone touched
his heart; there were friends scattered through his life whom he had
worshipped; but his friendships had nearly all been, though intense,
ephemeral and circumstantial; nor had he thought constantly and
deeply of any but these two women. So long as either lived, there was
a haven of quiet happiness and natural peace in which his shattered
spirit might rock at rest; but now he was alone.
Others he saw with homes and family ties; all seemed to have hopes
and love to look to but he--"I alone am alone! The whole world is in
love with me, and I'm utterly alone." Alone as a wreck upon a desert
ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm
and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some
ship-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock?
must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he
foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness he had so elaborately
prepared?
Wisdom! dost thou turn in the end, and devour thyself? dost thou
vomit folly? or is folly born of thee?
Overhead was cloud of storm, the ocean heaved, quick lightnings
flashed; but no waves gathered, and in heavy sulk a sense of doom lay
upon him. Wealth and health and talent were his; he had all, and in
all he found he had nothing;--yes, one thing was his for
evermore,--Ennui.
Thoughts and visions rose into consciousness like monsters coming
through a gulf of dim sea-water; all delusion had fallen, and he saw
the truth in all its fearsome deformity. On awakening, the implacable
externality of things pressed upon his sight until he felt he knew
what the mad feel, and then it seemed impossible to begin another
day. With long rides, with physical fatigue, he strove to keep at bay
the despair-fiend which now had not left him hardly for weeks. For
long weeks the disease continued, almost without an intermission; he
felt sure that death was the only solution, and he considered the
means for encompassing the end with a calm that startled him.
Nor was it until the spring months that he found any subjects that
might take him out of his melancholy, and darken the too acute
consciousness of the truth of things which was forcing him on to
madness or suicide. One day it was suggested that he should stand for
Parliament. He eagerly seized the idea, and his brain thronged
immediately with visions of political successes, of the parliamentary
triumphs he would achieve. Bah! he was an actor at heart, and
required the contagion of the multitude, and again he looked out upon
life with visionary eyes. Harsh hours fell behind him, gay hours
awaited him, held hands to him.
Men wander far from the parent plot of earth; but a strange fatality
leads them back, they know not how. None had desired to separate from
all associations of early life more than Mike, and he was at once
glad and sorry to find that the door through which he was to enter
Parliament was Cashel. He would have liked better to represent an
English town or county, but he could taste in Cashel a triumph which
he could nowhere else in the world. To return triumphant to his
native village is the secret of every wanderer's desire, for there he
can claim not only their applause but their gratitude.
The politics he would have to adopt made him wince, for he knew the
platitudes they entailed; and in preference he thought of the
paradoxes with which he would stupefy the House, the daring and
originality he would show in introducing subjects that, till then, no
one had dared to touch upon. With the politics of his party he had
little intention of concerning himself, for his projects were to make
for himself a reputation as an orator, and having confirmed it to
seek another constituency at the close of the present Parliament.
Such intention lay dormant in the background of his mind, but he had
not seen many Irish Nationalists before he was effervescing with
rhetoric suitable for the need of the election, and he was sometimes
puzzled to determine whether he was false or true.
Driving through Dublin from the steamer, he met Frank Escott. They
shouted simultaneously to their carmen to stop.
"Home to London. I've just come from Cashel. I went to try to effect
some sort of reconciliation with Mount Rorke; but--and you, where are
you going?"
"I'm going to Cashel. I'm going to contest the town in the Parnellite
interest."
Each pair of eyes was riveted on the other. For both men thought of
the evening when Mike had received the letter notifying that Lady
Seeley had left him five thousand a year, and Frank had read in
the evening paper that Lady Mount Rorke had given birth to a son.
Frank was, as usual, voluble and communicative. He dilated on the
painfulness of the salutations of the people he had met on the
way going from the station to Mount Rorke; and, instead of walking
straight in, as in old times, he had to ask the servant to take
his name.
"Burton, the old servant who had known me since I was a boy, seemed
terribly cut up, and he was evidently very reluctant to speak the
message. 'I'm very sorry, Mr. Frank,' he said, 'but his lordship says
he is too unwell to see any one to-day, sir; he is very sorry, but if
you would write' ... If I would write! think of it, I who was once
his heir, and used the place as if it were mine! Poor old Burton
was quite overcome. He tried to ask me to come into the dining-room
and have some lunch. If I go there again I shall be asked into the
servants' hall. And at that moment the nurse came, wheeling the baby
in the perambulator through the hall, going out for an airing. I
tried not to look, but couldn't restrain my eyes, and the nurse
stopped and said, 'Now then, dear, give your hand to the gentleman,
and tell him your name.' The little thing looked up, its blue eyes
staring out of its sallow face, and it held out the little putty-like
hand. Poor old Burton turned aside, he couldn't stand it any longer,
and walked into the dining-room."
"And how did you get away?" asked Mike, who saw his friend's
misfortune in the light of an exquisite chapter in a novel. "How sad
the old place must have seemed to you!"
"You are thinking how you could put it in a book--how brutal you
are!"
"I assure you you are wrong. I can't help trying to realize your
sensations, but that doesn't prevent me from being very sorry for
you, and I'm sure I shall be very pleased to help you. Do you want
any money? Don't be shy about saying yes. I haven't forgotten how you
helped me."
"I really don't like to ask you, you've been very good as it is.
However, if you could spare me a tenner?"
"Of course I can. Let's send these jarvies away, and come into my
hotel, and I'll write you a cheque."
The sum Frank asked for revealed to Mike exactly the depth to which
he had sunk since they had last met. Small as it was, however, it
seemed to have had considerable effect in reviving Frank's spirits,
and he proceeded quite cheerfully into the tale of his misfortune.
Now it seemed to strike him too in quite a literary light, and he
made philosophic comments on its various aspects, as he might on the
hero of a book which he was engaged on or contemplated writing.
"No," he said, "you were quite wrong in supposing that I waited to
look back on the old places. I got out of the park through a wood so
as to avoid the gate-keeper. In moments of great despair we don't
lapse into pensive contemplation." ... He stopped to pull at the
cigar Mike had given him, and when he had got it well alight, he
said, "It was really most dramatic, it would make a splendid scene in
a play; you might make him murder the baby."
Half an hour after Mike bade his friend good-bye, glad to be rid of
him.
"He's going back to that beastly wife who lives in some dirty
lodging. How lucky I was, after all, not to marry."
Then, remembering the newspaper, and the use it might be to him when
in Parliament, he rushed after Frank. When the _Pilgrim_ was
mentioned Frank's face changed expression, and he seemed stirred with
deeper grief than when he related the story of his disinheritance. He
had no further connection with the paper. Thigh had worked him out of
it.
"I never really despaired," he said, "until I lost my paper. Thigh
has asked me to send him paragraphs, but of course I'm not going to
do that."
"Why not?"
"Well, hang it, after being the editor of a paper, you aren't going
to send in paragraphs on approval. It isn't good enough. When I go
back to London I shall try to get a sub-editorship."
Mike pressed another tenner upon him, and returning to the
smoking-room, and throwing himself into an arm-chair, he lapsed into
dreams of the bands and the banners that awaited him. When animal
spirits were ebullient in him, he regarded his election in the light
of a vulgar practical joke; when the philosophic mood was upon him he
turned from all thought of it as from the smell of a dirty kitchen
coming through a grating.