Jewdwine made up for the coldness of his published utterances by the
fervour of his secret counsel. His advice to Rickman was, "Beware of
the friendship of little men."
This Rickman understood to be a reflection on Maddox's position in the
world of letters. He did not care a rap about Maddox's position; but
there were moments when it was borne in upon him that Maddox was a
bigger man even than Horace Jewdwine, that his reckless manner poorly
disguised a deeper insight and a sounder judgement. His work on _The
Planet_ proved it every day. And though for himself he could have
desired a somewhat discreeter champion, he had the highest opinion of
his friend's courage in standing up for him when there was absolutely
nothing to be gained by it. He had every reason therefore to be
attached to Maddox.
But it was true enough that he knew too many little men; men who were
at home in that house of bondage from which he was for ever longing to
escape; men whom he had met as he had described, sitting contentedly
on the dirty back-stairs of Fleet Street; men who in rubbing shoulders
with each other in that crowded thoroughfare had had to allow for a
great deal of what Maddox called wear and tear. Those little men had
remained invincibly, imperturbably friendly. They knew perfectly well
that he thought them little men, and they delighted in their great man
all the same, more than ever, in fact, since his new suit of morals
provided them with a subject of eternal jest. For Maddox was but
human, and he had found Rickman's phrase too pregnant with humour to
be lost. They were sometimes very funny, those Junior Journalists,
especially on a Saturday night. But Rickman was not interested in the
unseemly obstacle race they dignified by the name of a career, and he
did not care to mix too freely with young men so little concerned
about removing the dirt and sweat of it. He clung to Maddox and Rankin
as the strongest and the cleanest of them all. But even they had
inspirations that left him cold, and they thought many things large
and important that were too small for him to see. He would have died
rather than let either of them know what he was doing now. He saw with
dismay that they suspected him of doing something, that their
suspicions excited them most horribly, that they were watching him;
and he had told Maddox that what he desired most was peace and
quietness.
He found it in the Secret Chamber of the Muse, where he shut himself
up when his work with them was done. In there, his days and nights
were as the days and nights of God. There he forecast the schemes of
dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic. And as his genius
foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself
of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist's vision of the
world. This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden
chain that bound Lucia's name to his whether she would or no. They
recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the
day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification.
For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia's
image was no longer one and indivisible. He had come to think of her
as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh. One
carried that garment a little more conspicuously than the other; it
was by her beauty that she pierced him with the pain of longing; and
not by her beauty only, but by the marks of suffering that in his
memory still obscured it. She came before him, and her tragic eyes
reproached him with the intolerable pathos of her fate, making him
suffer too, through his exceeding pity. And yet his longing had not
been consumed by pity, but had mingled with it as flame in flame. Long
after he had parted from her, his senses ached as they recalled the
exquisite movements of her body. He had only to shut his eyes, and he
was aware of the little ripple of her shoulders and the delicate
swaying of her hips. To lie awake in the dark was to see her kneeling
at his side, to feel the fragrance of her thick braid of hair
flattened and warmed by her sleep, and the light touch of her hands as
they covered him. And before that memory his shame still burnt deeper
than his desire.
But this Lucia had no desire for him and no pity. Her countenance,
seen even in dreams, expressed a calm but immutable repugnance. No
wonder, for _she_ was only acquainted with the pitiably inadequate
sample of him introduced to her as Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He was
aware that she belonged exclusively not only to Jewdwine's class, but
to Jewdwine himself in some way (a way unspeakably disagreeable to
contemplate). If he was not to think of her as enduring the
abominations of poverty, he must think of her as married to Jewdwine.
Married to Jewdwine, she would make an end of his friendship as she
had made an end of his peace of mind. There had been moments, at the
first, when he had felt a fierce and unforgiving rage against her for
the annoyance that she caused him.
But now, dividing the host of turbulent and tormenting memories, there
appeared a different Lucia, an invincible but intimate presence that
brought with it a sense of deliverance and consolation. It was Lucia
herself that saved him from Lucia. Her eyes were full of discernment
and of an infinite tenderness and compassion. They kindled in him the
desire that fulfils itself in its own utterance.
That this Lucia was not wholly the creature of his imagination he was
assured by his memory of certain passages in his life at Harmouth, a
memory that had all the vividness and insistence of the other. It was
the Lucia he had known before the other Lucia, the Lucia who had
divined and would divine him still. In a way she was more real than
the other, more real than flesh and blood, even as that part of him by
which he apprehended her was more real than the rest. From her he was
not and could not be divided; they belonged to each other, and by no
possibility could he think of this Lucia as married to Jewdwine, or of
his friendship for Jewdwine as in anyway affected by her. He was hers
by right of her perfect comprehension of him; for such comprehension
was of the nature of possession. It was also an assurance of her
forgiveness, if indeed she had anything to forgive. He had not wronged
her; it was the other Lucia he had wronged. In all this he never once
thought of her as his inspiration. She would not have desired him to
think of her so, being both too humble and too proud to claim any part
in the genius she divined. But she could not repudiate all connection
with it, because it was in the moments when his genius was most
dominant that he had this untroubled assurance of her presence.
And there in the Secret Chamber he bound her to him by an
indestructible chain, the chain of the Nine and Twenty Sonnets.
The question was what should he do with it now that it was made? To
dedicate twenty-nine sonnets to Lucia was one thing, to print them was
another. If it was inevitable that he should thus reveal himself after
the manner of poets, it was also inevitable that she should regard a
public declaration as an insult rather than an honour. And he himself
shrank from exposing so sacred a thing to the pollution and violence
of publicity. Therefore he took each sonnet as it was written, and hid
it in a drawer. But he was not without prescience of their ultimate
value, and after all this method of disposal seemed to him somehow
unsatisfactory. So he determined that he would leave the manuscript to
Lucia in his will, to be afterwards dealt with as she judged best,
whether she chose to publish or to burn. In the former case the
proceeds might be regarded as partial payment of a debt.
And so two years passed and it was Spring again.