When Jewdwine changed the subject, it was to intimate that his friend
might now expect a salary rising steadily with the fortunes of
_Metropolis_.
That promise to marry Flossie in the autumn had made Rickman very
uneasy on this head. The sources of his income had been hitherto
uncertain; for _The Planet_ might at any moment cease to be, and only
indomitable hope could say that _The Museion_ would be long for this
world.
The amount of his income, too, depended on conditions which were, to
some extent, beyond his own control. It had never sunk below a hundred
and fifty, and had never risen above three hundred, even in the years
when he wrote more articles than poems. Whereas, if he wrote more
poems than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet
attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in
these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long
been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the
transformation of _The Museion_. It certainly promised him a larger
and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage
in the autumn. It had been expressly understood that his promise to
Flossie was to be fulfilled only if possible. But meanwhile he had got
to make it possible, for Flossie (in spite of _her_ promise) kept the
terror of her wine-merchant perpetually dangling above his head. He
had visited Messrs. Vassell & Hawkins' detestable establishment; and
it made him shudder to think of his pretty Beaver shut up in a little
mahogany cage, with her bright eyes peeping sad and shy through the
brass netting, and her dear little nostrils sniffing the villainous
alcoholic air.
But as the time approached and their marriage grew every day more
certain and more near, the joy and excitement of the bridegroom were
mingled with an inexplicable terror and misgiving. He had been
disagreeably impressed by the manner of Flossie's insistence on his
poverty. He had not missed the fine contempt conveyed by all her
references to his profession, which she not unjustly regarded as the
cause of the poverty. He was well aware that his genius was a heavy
burden for so small a thing to bear; and his chivalry had determined
that it should lie lightly on her lest it should crush or injure her.
It was part of her engaging innocence that she knew nothing of the
world in which his supremacy began and hers ended, that she had not
even suspected its existence. If he had any illusions about her it was
his own mind that created and controlled them. He delighted in them
deliberately, as in a thing of his creating; seeing through them with
that extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the
more. Flossie's weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him.
As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way
affecting him as a poet and a man of letters. While the little
suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would
still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire. For
those two flames could never mingle. In that dream he saw himself
travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never
touched and never diverged; a feat only possible given two Rickmans,
not one Rickman. There used to be many more of him; it was something
that he had reduced the quantity to two. And in dreams nothing is
absurd, nothing impossible.
Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited. At
first it had been only a simple question of time and space. Not that
Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him
plenty of time for the everyday work that paid. But where was that
divine solitude? Where were those long days of nebulous conception?
Where the days when he removed himself, as it were, and watched his
full-orbed creations careering in the intellectual void? The days when
Keith Rickman was as a god? He was hardly aware how fast they were
vanishing already; and where would they be in two months' time? It
was on his tragedy that he based his hopes for his future; the future,
in which Flossie had no part. He knew that the plea of art sounded
weak before the inexorable claims of nature; he felt that something
ought to be sacrificed to the supreme passion; but he couldn't give up
his tragedy. He was consumed by two indomitable passions; and who was
to say which of them was supreme? Still, tragedies in blank verse were
a luxury; and Flossie had more than once pointed out to him he
couldn't afford luxuries. He would sit up working on the tragedy till
long past midnight; and when he woke in the morning his sense of guilt
could not have been greater if he had been indulging in the most
hateful orgies. But you can't burn even genius at both ends; and his
paying work began to suffer. Jewdwine complained that it was not up to
his usual level. Maddox had returned several articles. So at last he
stuffed his tragedy into a drawer to wait there for a diviner hour.
"That would have been a big expensive job," he said to himself. "I
suppose it's possible to put as good work into the little things that
pay; but I shall have to cut myself in pieces." That was what he was
doing now; changing his gold into copper as fast as he could, so many
pennies for one sovereign. Nobody was cheated. He knew that in his
talent (his mere journalistic talent) there was a genius that no
amount of journalism had as yet subdued. But he had an awful vision of
the future, when he saw himself swallowed up body and soul in
journalism. The gods were dead; but there were still men and columns.
That would be the inevitable surrender to reality. To have no part in
the triumph of the poetic legions; but to march with the rank and
file, to a detestable music not his own; a mere mercenary ingloriously
fighting in a foreign cause.
To Jewdwine, Jewdwine once incorruptible, it seemed that Rickman was
preparing himself very suitably for the new campaign. But Maddox
mourned as he returned those articles; and when he heard of the
approaching marriage which explained them he was frantic. He rushed up
on Sunday afternoon, and marched Rickman out into the suburbs and on
to a lonely place on Hampstead Heath. And there, for the space of one
hour, with his arm linked in Rickman's, he wrestled with Rickman for
his body and his soul. Jewdwine's cry had been, "Beware of the
friendship of little men"; the burden of Maddox was, "Beware of the
love of little women."
"That's all you know about it, Maddy. The love of great women absorbs
you, dominates you. The little women leave you free."
Maddox groaned.
"A fat lot of freedom you'll get, Ricky, when you're married." Rickman
looked straight before him to the deep blue hills of the west, as if
freedom lay on the other side of them. "Good God," he said, "what am I
to do? I must marry. I can't go back to Poppy Grace, and her sort."
"If that's all," said Maddox, "I don't see much difference. Except
that marriage is worse. It lasts longer." Whereupon Rickman blushed,
and said that wasn't all, and that Maddox was a brute. He would change
his opinion when he knew Miss Walker.
Before very long he had an opportunity of changing it.
Rickman had been in error when he told Flossie that if she would
consent to marry him he would never again be ill. For he was ill the
first week in September, not two years after he had made that
ill-considered statement. The Fielding episode, when the first fine
stimulus was over, had left him miserable and restless. It was as if
he had heard the sound of Lucia Harden's voice passing through the
immeasurable darkness that divided them. And now he seemed to be
suffering from something not unlike the nervous fever that had
attacked him once before at Harmouth; complicated, this time, by a
severe cold on the chest, caught by walking about through pouring rain
in great agony of mind.
For Flossie (who may have felt latterly that she had chanced upon
another season of depression in her woman's trade) that illness was a
piece of amazing good luck, coming as it did at the moment of Keith's
misgivings. It not only drew them together, just as they were drifting
insensibly apart, but it revealed them to each other in a tenderer and
serener light. There was a little hard spot in Flossie which was
impervious to the subtler charm of Rickman when he was well. But
Rickman ill and at her mercy, confined to the bed where (so long as
Flossie waited on him) he lay very quietly, with the sheet drawn tight
up to his chin, in a state of touching dependence and humiliation, was
a wholly different person from the stormy and incomprehensible Rickman
who for more than two years had struggled so madly in her toils. And
if, to the eye of Mrs. Downey, Flossie appeared untouched by the
really heartrending pathos of his attitude in sleep; beholding unmoved
his huddled boyish form under the blankets, one half-naked arm laid
slack along the bed, the other thrust out straight into the cold
outside it; if she left Mrs. Downey to cover the poor fellow up,
wondering why on earth the girl could sit there and never do it; if,
when he woke, she missed the extreme poignancy of appeal in the
murmurs that followed her as she went Beaver-like about her business
in the room, it may be that in that unaccustomed service the hidden
prescient motherhood in her was awakened and appeased (Flossie being
still under the dominion of her dream). As yet it struggled blindly
with her invincible propriety; a struggle poor Rickman was made aware
of by the half-averted manner of her approaches, the secrecy and
hesitation of her touch. But the little clerk undoubtedly found that
patting pillows, straightening coverlets, and making mustard plasters,
was an employment more satisfying to her nature than the perpetual
handling of bank notes. And to Rickman lying there with his hungry
heart filled for the time quite full with its own humility and
gratitude, lying in a helplessness that had in it something soothing
and agreeable, feeling the soft shy woman's hands about his bed,
following with affectionate, remorseful eyes her coming and going, or
watching as she sat patiently mending his socks, it came with the
freshness of a new discovery that she was, after all, a very engaging
little Beaver. He had never for one instant glorified his love for
her; he understood it too thoroughly. It was love as Nature loves to
have it; honest enough, too, but of its kind singularly devoid of any
inspiring quality. Flossie had never moved him to the making of
sonnets or of songs. Moreover, he had discovered in her a certain
lack of tenderness, or of the outward signs of tenderness. Not but
what Flossie commanded all the foolish endearing language of young
love; only she was apt to lavish it on little details of attire, on
furniture, on things seen in shop-windows and passionately desired.
But there was something very transfiguring in the firelight of his
bedroom hearth. As he lay in it, enjoying the pure sweet foretaste of
domestic felicity, it was as if he saw more clearly into himself and
her and the life that would so soon make them one. If it was not the
best life, he told himself that of its kind it would be very good. He
had no doubt now that Flossie loved him. He was led to this certainty
by the maternal quality in her present dealings with him, when perhaps
it should have warned him rather that these cares were not for him.
Flossie had somewhat elaborated her dream. Bearing the fascinating
name of Muriel Maud, it had grown softer and rosier than ever. She
could not any longer deny its mysterious association with Keith
Rickman, though she would have died rather than that Keith should have
suspected it. And now as she sat mending Keith's socks her fancy all
the time was busy fashioning delicious garments for her dream. Flossie
never pursued her vision of Muriel Maud beyond the period of
enchanting infancy; when it outgrew the tender folly of those
garments, it was dismissed from Flossie's fancy with unmaternal
harshness. Therefore it appeared eternally innocent and young, mortal
in a delicate immortality. In fact, viewing her life too in the light
of the bedroom firelight, Flossie was herself deceived.
They were both blissfully unaware that Nature cares nothing about
love, but was bent upon using them for the only end she does care
about, the end that gives to love the illusion of its own eternity.
But Maddox saw through it in a minute. It was in the earlier stages of
the poet's illness, and Maddox had happened to put his head into
Rickman's room at the moment when Flossie, compelled by Mrs. Downey,
was helping to put a stinging mustard plaster on his chest. They
shrieked, and Maddox instantly withdrew.
He painted the scene afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic
colours of his Celtic fancy. "Talk of Samson among the Philistines,
it's nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d----d boarding-house. There was a
woman on each side of his bed. They'd got him down on it; they were
pinning the poor little chap in his blankets. I could just see
Ricky-ticky's face between their shoulders; it was very red; and I
shall never forget the expression on it, never. The agony, Rankin, the
hopeless, unutterable agony."
"What were they doing to him?"
"I couldn't see properly. But I think they were cutting his hair off."
He declared later that he had distinctly heard the squeaking of that
young Delilah's scissors. "We're not told whether Delilah was Samson's
wife," said he. "But the Scriptures were never wrong on a point of
human nature."
At which Rankin looked depressed; for he too was thinking of getting
married; though, as Maddox reminded him for his comfort, not to Miss
Flossie Walker.
"Is our Ricky-ticky," urged Rankin, "the man to show wisdom in
choosing a wife?"
"He isn't the man to marry at all."
"Did you expect him to live like an anchorite, then?"
"I didn't expect anything. He might have lived as he liked, provided
he didn't ruin himself as he's doing now."
And though Maddox now saw that young Delilah frequently, and always at
her prettiest and her best, he did not change his opinion.