"Because bribery's too harsh a term to apply to an editor, _mon

semblable, mon frère_; but in a woman, or a parliamentary candidate,

it might possibly be called corruption."

"Thanks. Well, you've made me a very generous offer, Maddox, so

generous that I'm glad you've explained yourself before I took it. For

after that, you know, it would have been rather awkward for me to have

to tell you you're a liar!"

"You consider me a liar, do you?" said Maddox in a mild dispassionate

voice.

"Certainly I do, when you say these thing about Jewdwine."

"How about Rankin? He says them."

"Then Rankin's a liar, too!"

"And Stables?"

"_And_ Stables--if he says them."

"My dear Rickman, everybody says them; only they don't say them to

you. We can't all be liars."

"There's a difference, I admit. Anybody who says them is a liar; and

anybody who says them to _me_ is a d----d liar! That's the

difference."

Whereupon Maddox intimated (as honour indeed compelled him) that

Rickman was the sort of young fool for which there is no salvation.

And by the time Rickman had replied with suitable hyperbole; and

Maddox, because of the great love he bore to Rickman, had observed

that if Rickman chose to cut his confused throat he might do so

without its being a matter of permanent regret to Maddox; and Rickman,

because of the great love he bore to Maddox, had suggested his

immediate departure for perdition, it was pretty clearly understood

that Rickman himself preferred to perish, everlastingly perish, rather

than be connected even remotely with Maddox and his paper. And on that

understanding they separated.

And when the door was closed between them, Rickman realised that his

folly was even as Maddox had described it. In one night, and at a

crisis of his finances, he had severed himself from a fairly permanent

source of income; flung up the most desirable chance that had

presented itself hitherto in his career; and quarrelled disgracefully

and disagreeably with his best friend. He supposed the split was bound

to come; but if he could only have staved it off for another year,

till he had collected that seven hundred and fifty! There could be no

doubt that that was what he ought to have done. He ought to have been

prudent for Lucia's sake. And on the top of it all came the terrible

reflection--Was it really worth it? Did he really believe in Jewdwine?

Or had he sacrificed himself for an idea?

CHAPTER LXVII

Rickman could never be made to speak of the quarrel with Maddox. He

merely mentioned to Jewdwine in the most casual manner that he had

left _The Planet_. As for his grounds for that abrupt departure

Jewdwine was entirely in the dark. It was Lucia that enlightened him.

For all things, even the deep things of journalism, sooner or later

come to light. Rickman, before the quarrel, had given Miss Roots an

introduction to the young men of _The Planet_, and its editor had

taken kindly to Miss Roots. Maddox, it is true, did his best to keep

the matter quiet, until in a moment of expansion he allowed that

shrewd lady to lure him into confidences. Maddox tried to take it and

present it philosophically. "It was bound to happen," he said. "Our

Ricky-ticky is a bad hand at serving two masters," but as to which was

God and which Mammon in this connection he modestly reserved his

opinion. Jewdwine's name was carefully avoided, but Miss Roots was

left in no doubt as to the subject of dispute.

She and Maddox were one in their inextinguishable enthusiasm for their

Rickman, for Rickman had the gift, the rarest of all gifts, of uniting

the hearts that loved him. If Jewdwine had showed anything like a

proper appreciation of the poet, Maddox would have spared him now. So

the two looked at each other, with eyes that plumbed all the depths of

the unspoken and unspeakable, eyes that sent out a twinkling flash of

admiration as they agreed that it was "just like Rickman." That phrase

was for ever on the lips of his admirers, a testimony to the fact that

Rickman was invariably true to himself.

He was being true to himself now in being true to Jewdwine, and it was

in that form that the tale went round. "I can't tell you all the ins

and outs of it," wrote Miss Roots to Lucia, "but he is paying for his

loyalty to Mr. Jewdwine;" and Lucia, with equal pride in her cousin

and her friend, repeated it to Kitty Palliser, who repeated it to

somebody else with the comment, "I'm not surprised to hear it"; and

somebody else repeated it in a good many quarters without any comment

at all. For everybody but Lucia understood that it spoke for itself.

And nobody understood it better than Jewdwine when his cousin said,

"You _will_ be nice to him, Horace, won't you? He is suffering for his

loyalty to you." Lucia herself had adopted a theory which she now set

forth (reluctantly, by reason of the horrible light it threw on human

nature). Mr. Maddox (whoever he might be) was of course jealous of

Horace. It was a shocking theory, but it was the only one which made

these complications clear to her.

But Jewdwine had no need of theories or explanations. He understood.

He knew that a certain prejudice, not to say suspicion, attached to

him. Ideas, not very favourable to his character as a journalist, were

in the air. And as his mind (in this respect constitutionally

susceptible) had seldom been able to resist ideas in the air there

were moments when his own judgment wavered. He was beginning to

suspect himself.

He was not sure, and if he had been he would not have acted on that

certainty; for he had never possessed the courage of his opinions. But

it had come to this, that Jewdwine, the pure, the incorruptible, was

actually uncertain whether he had or had not taken a bribe. As he lay

awake in bed at four o'clock in the morning his conscience would

suggest to him that he had done this thing; but at noon, in the office

of _Metropolis_, his robust common sense, then like the sun, in the

ascendant, boldly protested that he had done nothing of the sort. He

had merely made certain not very unusual concessions to the interests

of his journal. In doing so he had of course set aside his artistic

conscience, an artistic conscience being a private luxury incompatible

with the workings of a large corporate concern. He was bound to

disregard it in loyalty to his employers and his public. They expected

certain things of him and not others. It was different in the

unexciting days of the old _Museion_; it would be different now if he

could afford to run a paper of his own dedicated to the service of

the Absolute. But Jewdwine was no longer the servant of the Absolute.

He was the servant and the mouthpiece of a policy that in his heart he

abhorred; irretrievably committed to a programme that was concerned

with no absolute beyond the absolute necessity of increasing the

circulation of _Metropolis_. Such a journal only existed on the

assumption that its working expenses were covered by the

advertisements of certain publishing houses. But if this necessity

committed him to a more courteous attitude than he might otherwise

have adopted towards the works issued by those houses, that was not

saying that he was in their pay. He was, of course, in the pay of his

own publishers, but so was every man who drew a salary under the same

conditions; and if those gentlemen, finding their editor an even more

competent person than they had at first perceived, were in the habit

of increasing his salary in proportion to his competence, that was

only the very correct and natural expression of their good opinion.

Whatever he had thought of himself at four o'clock in the morning, by

four o'clock in the afternoon Jewdwine took an extremely lenient, not

to say favourable view. Unfortunately he had not the courage of that

opinion either. Therefore he was profoundly touched by this final

instance of Rickman's devotion, and all that it argued of reckless and

inspired belief. In the six months that followed he saw more of

Rickman than he had seen in as many years. Whenever he had a slack

evening he would ask him to dinner, and let him sit talking on far

into the night. He was afraid of being left alone with that

uncomfortable doubt, that torturing suspicion. Rickman brought with

him an atmosphere charged with stimulating conviction, and in his

presence Jewdwine breathed freely and unafraid. He felt himself no

longer the ambiguous Jewdwine that he was, but the noble incorruptible

Jewdwine that he had been. Up there in the privacy of his study

Jewdwine let himself go; to that listener he was free to speak as a

critic noble and incorruptible. But there were moments, painful for

both men, when he would pause, gripped by his doubt, in the full swing

of some high deliverance; when he looked at Rickman with a pathetic

anxious gaze, as if uncertain whether he were not presuming too far

on a character that he held only at the mercy of his friend's belief.

Though as yet he was not fully aware of the extent to which he relied

on that belief, there could hardly have been a stronger tie than that

which now bound him to his subordinate. He would have shrunk from

loosing it lest he should cut himself off from some pure source of

immortality, lest he should break the last link between his soul and

the sustaining and divine reality. It was as if through Rickman he

remained attached to the beauty which he still loved and to the truth

which he still darkly discerned.

In any case he could not have suffered him to go unrewarded. He owed

that to himself, to the queer personal decency which he still managed

to preserve after all his flounderings in the slough of journalism. It

was intolerable to his pride that Rickman should be in any pecuniary

embarrassment through his uncompromising devotion. He hardly knew

whether he was the more pleased because Rickman had stuck to him or

because he had thrown his other friends over. He had never quite

forgiven him that divided fealty. He cared nothing for an allegiance

that he had had to share with Maddox and his gang. But now that

Rickman was once more exclusively, indisputably his, he was in honour

bound to cherish and protect him. (Jewdwine was frequently visited by

these wakenings of the feudal instinct that slept secretly in his

blood.) If he could not make up to Rickman for the loss of the

proposed editorship, he saw to it that he was kept well supplied with

lucrative work on his own paper. As an even stronger proof of his

esteem he allowed him for the first time a certain authority, and an

unfettered hand.

For six months Rickman luxuriated in power and increase of leisure and

of pay. If the pay was insufficient to cover all his losses the

leisure was invaluable; it enabled him to get on with his tragedy.

Now if Rickman had been prudent he would have finished his tragedy

then and there and got it published in all haste. For there is no

doubt that if any work of his had been given to the world any time

within those six months, Jewdwine would have declared the faith that

was in him. Whatever the merits of the work he would have celebrated

its appearance by a sounding Feast of Trumpets in _Metropolis_. He

would have done anything to strengthen the tie that attached him to

the sources of his spiritual content. But Rickman was not prudent. He

let the golden hours slip by while he sat polishing up his blank verse

as if he had all eternity before him.

Meanwhile he did all he could for Jewdwine. Jewdwine indeed could not

have done a better thing for himself than in giving Rickman that free

hand. In six months there was a marked improvement in the tone of

_Metropolis_ and the reputation of its editor, and, but for the

unexpected which is always happening, Jewdwine might in the long run

have emerged without a stain.

Nothing in fact could have been more utterly unforeseen, and yet, in

reviewing all the steps which led to the ultimate catastrophe, Rickman

said to himself that nothing would have been more consistent and

inevitable. It came about first of all through a freak, a wanton freak

of Fate in the form of a beardless poet, a discovery, not of

Jewdwine's nor of Rickman's but of Miss Roots'. That Miss Roots could

make a discovery clearly indicated the finger of fate. Miss Roots

promptly asked Rickman to dinner and presented to him the discovery,

beardless, breathless also and hectic, wearing an unclean shirt and a

suit of frayed shoddy.

He came away from that dinner, that embarrassing, palpitating

encounter, with a slender sheaf of verses in his pocket. It did not

take him long to read them, nor to see (the unforeseen again!) that

the verses would live longer than their maker. They were beardless,

breathless, and hectic like the boy, but nobody could have been keener

than Rickman to recognize the immortal adolescence, the swift panting

of the pursuing god, the burning of the inextinguishable flame. He

wrote a letter to him, several letters, out of the fulness of his

heart. Then Maddox, to whom he had not spoken since the day of their

falling out, came up to him at the Junior Journalists, shook his hand

as if nothing had happened, and thanked him for his appreciation of

young Paterson. He said that it had put new life into the boy. They

made it up over young Paterson. And that was another step towards the

inevitable conclusion.

The next step was that somebody who was paying for the boy's doctor's

bills paid also for the publication of his poems. They arrived (this

of course was only to be expected) at the office of _Metropolis_ (the

slender sheaf grown slenderer by some omissions which Rickman had

advised). But it was Fate that contrived that they should arrive in

the same week with a volume (by no means slender), a volume of Poems

issued by the publishers of _Metropolis_ and written by a friend (and

an influential friend) of the editor. Therein were the last sweet

pipings of the pastoral Fulcher. No other hand but Jewdwine's, as

Jewdwine sorrowfully owned, could have done anything for this work,

and he meant to have devoted a flattering article to it in the next

number. But in the arrangements of the unforeseen it was further

provided that Jewdwine should be disabled, at what he playfully called

the "critical moment," by an attack of influenza. The two volumes, the

slender and the stout, were forwarded to Rickman in the same parcel,

and Jewdwine in a note discreetly worded threw himself and the poems

of his influential friend on Rickman's mercy. Would Rickman deal with

the big book? He would see for himself that it _was_ a big book. He

gave him as usual a perfectly free hand as to space, but he thought it

might be well to mention that the book _was_ to have had a two-page

article all to itself. He drew Rickman's attention to the fact that it

was published by So and So, and hoped that he might for once at least

rely on his discretion. Perhaps as he was reviewing the work of a

"brother bard" it would be better to keep the article anonymous.

There was nothing coarse about Jewdwine's methods. Through all his

career he remained refined and fastidious, and his natural instincts

forbade him to give a stronger hint. Unfortunately, in this instance,

refinement had led him into a certain ambiguity of phrase!

On this ambiguity Rickman leapt, with a grin of diabolical delight. He

may have had some dim idea that it would be his shelter in the day of

rebuke; but all he could clearly think of as he held the boy's frail

palpitating volume in his hand, was that he had but that moment in

which to praise him. This was his unique and perfect opportunity, the

only sort of opportunity that he was not likely to let slip.

_Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat_; and it really looked as if

madness had come upon Rickman in the loneliness and intoxication of

his power. With those two volumes of poetry before him, a small one by

a rank outsider, unknown, unkempt and unprotected; a boy from whom no

more was to be expected, seeing that he was about to depart out of the

world where editors are powerful; and one, a large, considerable

volume by a person eminent already in that world and with many years

of poetry and influence before him, he gave (reckless of all

proportion) the two-page article to the slender volume and the

paragraph to the stout. That was what he did--he, the sub-editor.

Of the paragraph the less said the better. As for the article it was

such a song of jubilation as one poet sings over the genius of

another; and nothing that he had ever done for _Metropolis_ delighted

him so much as the making of it. He sent the proofs to Jewdwine as

usual with a note. "Here they are. I _think_ I've been discreet. I've

done what I could for Mr. Fulcher, but, as you'll see, I've dealt

nobly with young Paterson, as he deserves." As he heard nothing from

Jewdwine, he could only suppose that the chief was satisfied, and he

could not help reflecting with some complacency that no doubt old

Maddox would be satisfied too.

The next thing that happened was that he was cut by Maddox at the

Junior Journalists. (It was on a Saturday, and _Metropolis_, _the_

number, had appeared the night before). Cut unmistakably, with a

thrust from the blue eyes and an expressive turning of the enormous

shoulders. A number once issued from his hands Rickman never looked at

it again if he could help it, and he never troubled to look at it now.

He simply regarded Maddox's behaviour as unaccountable. In the hope of

lighting on some explanation he called at Tavistock Place one Sunday

afternoon, at a time when he was pretty sure of finding Miss Roots

alone. He wanted to know, he said, what was the matter with Maddy.

Apparently Miss Roots had something the matter with her too, for her

only answer was to hand him stiffly a copy of _Metropolis_ with the

pages scored in blue pencil at his own article. He took it with a

radiant and confiding smile, a smile that assumed such a thoroughly

delightful understanding between him and Miss Roots that the little

lady, who had evidently counted on a very different effect, was put to

some intellectual confusion. She noticed that as he read the smile

vanished and gave place, first to an expression of absolute

bewilderment, and then to a furious flush, whether of shame or

indignation she could not tell, but it looked (again to her confusion)

uncommonly like both.

"I see," he said quietly, and laid the paper aside.

What he had seen was that, save for a few ingenious transpositions,

the two reviews stood very much as he had written them. The only

striking alteration was that Mr. Fulcher had got the article and young

Paterson the paragraph.

"Oh, you see, do you?" said Miss Roots bitterly. "That's more than I

do."

"I see there's been some astonishing mistake." For one moment he

exonerated Jewdwine and embraced the wild hypothesis of a printer's

error. He took back the accursed journal; as he held it his hand

trembled uncontrollably. He glanced over the notices again. No. It was

not after this fashion that the printers of the _Metropolis_ were wont

to err. He recognized the familiar hand of the censor, though it had

never before accomplished such an incredible piece of editing as this.

And yet it was in strict accordance with the old tradition. The staff

of _Metropolis_ knew that before a line of theirs was printed it had

to pass under their editor's reforming hand; that was the understood

condition on which they wrote for him at all; it was the method by

which Jewdwine maintained the unity of his empire. But in the case of

Rickman he either forbore to exercise his privilege, or exercised it

in such a manner as preserved the individuality of the poet's style.

Like some imperial conqueror Jewdwine had absorbed the literary spirit

of the man he conquered, and _Metropolis_ bore the stamp of Rickman

for all time. So now the style of the articles remained intact; they

might have passed equally for the work of Rickman or of Jewdwine.

"I suppose," he said helplessly, "it is a little short."

"Short? You weren't bound to make it long; but there was no occasion

to be so contemptuous."

"Contemptuous? Good God!"

"That's what it amounts to when you're so insufferably polite."

Oh yes he recognized it, the diabolical urbanity that had seemed the

very choicest method of dealing with Mr. Fulcher.

"Politeness was not exactly all you led us to expect from you."

He passed his hand wearily over his forehead and his eyes. Miss Roots

had a moment of compunction. She thought of all that he had done for

her. He had delivered her from her labours in the Museum; he had

introduced her to the young men of _The Planet_, and had made Maddox

send her many books to review; he had lifted her from the obscurity

that threatened to engulf her. And he had done more for her than this.

He had given her back her youth and intellect; he had made her life a

joy instead of a terror to her. But Miss Roots was just. The agony on

his face would have melted her heart, but for another agony that she

saw.

"If the poor boy knew that _you_ had written that paragraph--"

"He needn't know unless some kind friend goes and tells him. It isn't

signed."

"No. I don't wonder that you were ashamed to put your name to it."

He rose to go. She looked up at him with a queer little look, half

penetrating and half pleading, and held out her hand.

"Well," she said, "what am I to say if he asks me if you wrote it? Can

you deny it?"

"No," he said curtly, "I can't deny it."

"And you can't explain it?"

"No, and I can't explain it. Surely," he said with a horrible attempt

at laughter, "it speaks for itself."

"It does indeed, Keith."

And Maddox, to whom Miss Roots related the substance of that

interview, echoed her sentiment.

"It does indeed."

Of all that brilliant band of young men lured by journalism to ruin

they looked on their Rickman as the most splendid, the most tragic.

CHAPTER LXVIII

Up till now it had never occurred to Rickman that his connection with

_Metropolis_ could directly damage him, still less that Jewdwine could

personally inflict a blow. But the injury now done to him was

monstrous and intolerable; Jewdwine had hurt him in a peculiarly

delicate and shrinking place. Because his nature was not originally

magnificent in virtue of another sort, it was before all things

necessary that he should perserve his intellectual chastity. That

quality went deeper than the intellect; it was one with a sense of

honour so fine that a touch, impalpable to ordinary men, was felt by

it as a laceration and a stain. He walked up to Hampstead that Sunday

evening, taking the hill at a round swinging pace. Not all the ardour

and enthusiasm of his youth had ever carried him there with such an

impetus as did his burning indignation against Jewdwine. And as he

went the spirit of youth, the spirit of young Paterson, went beside

him and breathed upon the flame.

And yet he was the same man who only an hour ago had been defending

Jewdwine's honour at the expense of his own; without a thought that in

so defending it he was doing anything in the least quixotic or

remarkable. He had done nothing. He had simply refrained at a critical

moment from giving him away. Maddox was Jewdwine's enemy; and to have

given Jewdwine away at that moment would have meant delivering him

over to Maddox to destroy.

No; when he thought of it he could hardly say he had defended his

friend's honour at the expense of his own; for Jewdwine's honour was

Lucia's, and Lucia's was not Jewdwine's but his, indistinguishably,

inseparably his.

But though he was not going to give Jewdwine up to Maddox, he was

going to give him up. It might come to the same thing. He could

imagine that, to anybody who chose to put two and two together, an

open rupture would give him away as completely as if he had accused

him in so many words. That, of course he could not help. There was a

point beyond which his honour refused to identify itself with

Jewdwine's. He had never felt a moment's hesitation upon that point.

For in his heart he condemned his friend far more severely than Maddox

could have condemned anybody. He had a greater capacity for disgust

than Maddox. He would draw up, writhing at trifles over which Maddox

would merely shrug his shoulders and pass on. In this instance Maddox,

whose Celtic soul grew wanton at the prospect of a fight, would have

fallen upon Jewdwine with an infernal joy, but he would have been the

first to deprecate Rickman's decision as absurd. As for Rankin of

Stables, instead of flying into a passion they would, in similar

circumstances, have sat still and smiled.

If it had not been for young Paterson, Rickman would have smiled too,

even if he had been unable to sit still; for his vision of Fulcher

pocketing the carefully selected praise intended for Paterson was

purely and supremely comic; so delightful in fact, that he could have

embraced Jewdwine for providing it. But Paterson, who had looked to

him as to the giver of life or death, Paterson on his death-bed taking

Fulcher's paragraph to himself and wondering whether it were indeed

Rickman who had done this thing, the thought of Paterson was too

painful to be borne. Honour or no honour, it would be impossible for

him to work for Jewdwine after that.

He had got to make that clear to Jewdwine; and anything more

unpleasant than the coming interview he could not well conceive.

Unpleasantness you would have said, was far from Jewdwine's mind that

Sunday evening. He himself suggested nothing of the sort. He was in

his study, sitting in an armchair with a shawl over his knees, smoking

a cigarette and looking more pathetically refined than ever after his

influenza, when Rickman burst in upon his peace. He was so frankly

glad to see him that his greeting alone was enough to disarm

prejudice. It seemed likely that he would carry off the honours of the

discussion by remaining severely polite while Rickman grew more and

more perturbed and heated. Rickman, however, gained at the outset by

making straight for his point. As Jewdwine gave him no opening he had

to make one and make it as early as possible, before the great man's

amenities had time to lure him from the track.

"I wish," said he abruptly, "you'd tell me what was wrong with those

reviews of mine, that you found it necessary to alter them?"

"The reviews? Oh, the reviews were all right--excellent material--they

only wanted a little editing."

"Do you mind telling me what you mean by editing?"

"_That_ is the last point an editor is competent to explain."

"All the same I'd like to hear what you've got to say. I think you'll

admit that you owe me some explanation."

"My dear fellow--sit down, won't you?--I admit nothing of the sort."

Jewdwine no longer stood on his dignity, he lay back on it, lounged on

it, stretched all his graceful length upon it, infinitely at ease.

Time had mellowed his manners and made them incomparably gentle and

humane.

"You seem to think I took a liberty with your articles. I didn't. I

merely exercised an ancient editorial right. I couldn't possibly have

let them be printed as they stood. Conceive my feelings if I'd had to

sit next to Mr. Fulcher at dinner that evening. It might easily have

happened. It's all very well for you, Rickman; you're young and

irresponsible, and you haven't got to sit next to Mr. Fulcher at

dinner; but you'll own that it would have been rather an awkward

situation for me?"

"I can forgive you Fulcher, but I can't forgive you Paterson."

"And I could have forgiven you Paterson, but I couldn't forgive you

Fulcher. Do you see?"

He allowed a few moments for reflection, and continued.

"Of course, I understand your feelings. In fact I sympathize

profoundly. As a rule I never dream of touching anything with your

signature; I've far too great a reverence for style."

"Style be d----d. For all I care you may cut up my style till you

can't tell it from Fulcher's. I object to your transposing my meaning

to suit your own. Honestly, Jewdwine, I'd rather write like Fulcher

than write as you've made me appear to have written."

"My dear Rickman, that's where you make the mistake. You don't appear

at all." He smiled with urbane tolerance of the error. "The editor, as

you know, is solely responsible for unsigned reviews."

So far Jewdwine had come off well. He had always a tremendous

advantage in his hereditary manners; however right you had been to

start with, his imperturbable refinement put you grossly in the wrong.

And at this point Rickman gave himself away.

"What's the good of that?" said he, "if young Paterson believes I

wrote them?"

"Young Paterson isn't entitled to any belief in the matter."

"But--he knew."

There was a shade of genuine annoyance on Jewdwine's face.

"Oh of course, if you've told him that you were the author. That's

rather awkward for you, but it's hardly my fault. I'm sorry, Rickman,

but you really _are_ a little indiscreet."

"I wish I could explain your behaviour in the same way."

"Come, since you're so keen on explanations, how do you propose to

explain your own? I gave you certain instructions, and what right had

you to go beyond them, not to say against them?"

"What earthly right had you to make me say the exact opposite of what

I did say? But I didn't go against your instructions. Here they are."

He produced them. "You'll see that you gave me a perfectly free hand

as to space."

Jewdwine looked keenly at him. "You knew perfectly well what I meant.

And you took advantage of--of a trifling ambiguity in my phrasing, to

do--as you would say--the exact opposite. That was hardly what I

expected of you."

As he spoke Jewdwine drew his shawl up about his waist, thus

delicately drawing attention to his enfeebled state. The gesture

seemed to convict Rickman of taking advantage not only of his phrase

but of his influenza, behaviour superlatively base.

"I can give you a perfectly clear statement of the case. You carefully

suppressed _my_ friend and you boomed your own for all you were worth.

Naturally, I reversed your judgment. Of course, if you had told me you

wanted to do a little log-rolling on your own account, I should have

been only too delighted--but I always understood that you disapproved

of the practice."

"So I do. Paterson isn't a friend of mine."

"He's your friend's friend then. I think Mr. Maddox might have been

left to look after his own man."

Rickman rose hastily, as if he were no longer able to sit still and

bear it.

"Jewdwine," he said, and his voice had the vibration which the master

had once found so irresistible. "Have you read young Paterson's

poems?"

"Yes. I've read them."

"And what is your honest--your private opinion of them?"

"I'm not a fool, Rickman. My private opinion of them is the same as

yours."

"What an admission!"

"But," said Jewdwine suavely, "that's not the sort of opinion my

public--the public that pays for _Metropolis_--pays to have."

"You mean it's the sort of opinion I'm paid to give."

"Well, broadly speaking--of course there are exceptions, and Paterson

in other circumstances might have been one of them--that's very much

what I do mean."

"Then--I'm awfully sorry, Jewdwine--but if that's so I can't go on

working for _Metropolis_. I must give it up. In fact, that's really

what I came to say."

Jewdwine too had risen with an air of relief, being anxious to end an

interview which was becoming more uncomfortable than he cared for. He

had stood, gazing under drooping eyelids at his disciple's feet.

Nobody would have been more surprised than Jewdwine if you had

suggested to him that he could have any feeling about looking anybody

in the face. But at that last incredible, impossible speech of his he

raised his eyes and fixed them on Rickman's for a moment.

In that moment many things were revealed to him.

He turned and stood with his back to Rickman, staring through the open

window. All that he saw there, the quiet walled garden, the rows of

elms on the terrace beside it, the dim green of the Heath, and the

steep unscaleable grey blue barrier of the sky, had taken on an

unfamiliar aspect, as it were a tragic simplicity and vastness. For

these things, once so restfully indifferent, had in a moment become

the background of his spiritual agony, a scene where his soul appeared

to him, standing out suddenly shelterless, naked and alone. No--if it

_had_ only been alone; but that was the peculiar horror of it. He

could have borne it but for the presence of the other man who had

called forth the appalling vision, and remained a spectator of it.

There was at least this much comfort for him in his pangs--he knew

that a man of coarser fibre would neither have felt nor understood

them. But it was impossible for Jewdwine to do an ignoble thing and

not to suffer; it was the innermost delicacy of his soul that made it

writhe under the destiny he had thrust upon it.

And in the same instant he recognized and acknowledged the greatness

of the man with whom he had to do; acknowledged, not grudgingly, not

in spite of himself, but because of himself, because of that finer

soul within his soul which spoke the truth in secret, being born to

recognize great things and admire them. He wondered now how he could

ever have mistaken Rickman. He perceived the origin and significance

of his attitude of disparagement, of doubt. It dated from a certain

hot July afternoon eight years ago when he lay under a beech-tree in

the garden of Court House and Lucia had insisted on talking about the

poet, displaying an enthusiasm too ardent to be borne. He had meant

well by Rickman, but Lucia's ardour had somehow put him off. Maddox's

had had the same effect, though for a totally different reason, and so

it had gone on. He had said to himself that if other people were going

to take Rickman that way he could no longer feel the same peculiar

interest.

He turned back again.

"Do you really mean it?" said he.

"I'm afraid I do."

"You mean that you intend to give up reviewing for _Metropolis_?"

"I mean that after this I can't have anything more to do with it."

He means, thought Jewdwine, that he won't have anything more to do

with me.

And Rickman saw that he was understood. He wondered how Jewdwine would

take it.

He took it nobly. "Well," he said, "I'm sorry. But if you must go, you

must. To tell the truth, my dear fellow, at this rate, you know, I

couldn't afford to keep you. I wish I could. You are not the only

thing I can't afford." He said it with a certain emotion not very

successfully concealed beneath his smile. Rickman was about to go; but

he detained him.

"Wait one minute. Do you mind telling me whether you've any regular

sources of income besides _Metropolis_?"

"Well, not at the moment."

"And supposing--none arise?"

"I must risk it."

"You seem to have a positive mania for taking risks." Yes, that was

Rickman all over, he found a brilliant joy in the excitement; he was

in love with danger.

"Oh well, sometimes, you know, you've _got_ to take them."

Happy Rickman! The things that were so difficult and complicated to

Jewdwine were so simple, so incontestable to him. "Some people,

Rickman, would say you were a fool." He sighed, and the sigh was a

tribute his envy paid to Rickman's foolishness. "I won't offer an

opinion; the event will prove."

"It won't prove anything. Events never do. They merely happen."

"Well, if they happen wrong, and I can help you, you've only got to

come to me."

Never in all his life had Jewdwine so nearly achieved the grace of

humility as in this offer of his help. He would have given anything if

Rickman could have accepted it, but refusal was a foregone conclusion.

And yet he offered it.

"Thanks--thanks awfully." It was Rickman who appeared nervous and

ashamed. His mouth twitched; he held out his hand abruptly; he was

desperately anxious to say good-night and get it over. It seemed to

him that he had been six years taking leave of Jewdwine; each year had

seen the departure of some quality he had known him by. He wanted to

have done with it now for ever.

But Jewdwine would not see his hand. He turned away; paced the floor;

swung back on a hesitating heel and approached him, smiling.

"You're not going to disappear altogether, are you? You'll turn up

again, and let me know how you're getting on?"

To Rickman there was something tragic and retrospective in Jewdwine's

smile. It had no joy in it, but an appeal, rather, to the memory of

what he had been. He found it irresistible.

"Thanks. I shall get on all right; but I'll turn up again sometime."

Jewdwine's smile parted with its pathos, its appeal. It conveyed a

promise, an assurance that whatever else had perished in him his

friendship was not dead.

For there were ways, apart from the ways of journalism, in which

Jewdwine could be noble still. And still, as he watched Rickman's

departing back, the back that he seemed doomed to know so well, he

said to himself--

"He's magnificent, but I can't afford him."

CHAPTER LXIX

In all this his history had only repeated itself. When six years ago

he had turned his back on Rickman's he had made it inevitable that he

should turn his back on Jewdwine now. On each occasion his behaviour

had provoked the same melancholy admission, from Jewdwine--"He is

magnificent, but I can't afford him"; from Isaac Rickman--"I can't

afford to pay your price, my boy." The incredible thing was that

Jewdwine should have been brought to say it. Jewdwine was changed; but

Rickman was the same Rickman who had swung the shop door behind him,

unmoved by the separation from his salary.

But after all he could only keep half of that rash vow he had made to

himself on the way to Hampstead. He must give up the Editor of

_Metropolis_; but he could not give up Horace Jewdwine. It was not the

first time he had been compelled to admit the distinction which Maddox

for decency's sake had insisted on. When it came to the point, as now,

he found himself insisting on it with even greater emphasis than

Maddox. He knew that in his soul Jewdwine still loved and worshipped

what was admirable, that in his soul he would have given anything to

recall his injustice to young Paterson. But young Paterson was too

great to have need either of Jewdwine or of him. Young Paterson had

his genius to console him. His profounder pity was for the man who had

inflicted such awful injuries on himself; the great man who had made

himself mean; the spiritual person who had yielded to a material

tyranny; the incorruptible person who had sold his soul, who only

realized the value of his soul now that he had sold it.

And yet he knew that there could be nothing more sundering than such

meanness, such corruptibility as Jewdwine's. Their friendship could

never be the same. There was a certain relief in that. There could

never be any hypocrisy, any illusion in their relations now. And

nobody knew that better than Jewdwine. Well, the very fact that

Jewdwine had still desired and chosen that sad-hearted, clear-eyed

communion argued a certain greatness in him.

Therefore he resolved to spare him. It would cost him the friendship

of better men than he; but that could not be helped. They must

continue to think that he had sold or at any rate lent himself at

interest to Jewdwine. Honour debarred him from all explanation and

defence, an honour so private and personal that it must remain

unsuspected by the world. In the beginning he had made himself almost

unpleasantly conspicuous by the purity of his literary morals; his

innocence had been a hair-lifting spectacle even to honest

journalists. And now the fame he would have among them was the fame of

a literary prostitute, without a prostitute's wages.

On the contrary he would have to pay heavily for the spiritual luxury

of that break with the editor of _Metropolis_. When he reached his

comfortable room on the third floor in Torrington Square, he sat down

by his writing-table, not to write but to think. It was war-time,

fatal to letters. Such terrors arose before him as must arise before a

young man severed by his own rash act from the sources of his income.

What a moment he had chosen for the deed, too! When money was of all

things the thing he most passionately desired; when to his fancy the

sum of a hundred and seventy-five pounds was the form that most

nearly, most divinely presented the adored perfection; when, too, that

enchanting figure was almost in his grasp. A few brief spasms of

economy, and ten months of _Metropolis_ would have seen him through.

And yet there was no bitterness in the dismay with which he

contemplated his present forlorn and impecunious state. It was

inevitable that he should sever himself from the sources of his income

when they were found to be impure. Much more inevitable than that he

should have cut off that untainted supply which six months ago would

have flowed to him through Maddox. Common prudence had not restrained

him from quarrelling with Maddox over a point of honour that was

shadowy compared with this. It was hardly likely that it should have

restrained him now. There were few things that he would not do for

Lucia Harden, but not even for her sake could he have done otherwise

than he had done. It was the least that honour could require of him,

the very least.

His attitude to honour had in a manner changed. Eight years ago it had

seemed to him the fantastic child of a preference for common honesty,

coupled with a preposterous passion for Lucia Harden. He had indulged

it as a man indulges the creature of fantasy and caprice, and had felt

that he was thrusting a personal infatuation into a moral region where

such extravagances are unknown. It belonged rather to the realm of

imagination, being essentially a poet's honour, a winged and lyric

creature, a creature altogether too radiant and delicate to do battle

with the gross material world, a thing as mysterious and indomitable

as his genius; a very embarrassing companion for a young journalist in

his first start in life. And now he had grown so used to it that it

seemed to him no longer mysterious and fantastic; obedience to it was

as simple as the following of a natural impulse, a thing in no way

conspicuous and superb. It was the men who knew nothing of such

leadership who seemed to him separated from the order of the world.

But to the friends who watched him Rickman's honour had been always an

amazing spectacle. Like another genius it had taken possession of him

and led him through what Jewdwine had called the slough of journalism,

so that he went with fine fastidious feet, choosing the clean places

in that difficult way. Like another genius it had lured him, laughing

and reckless, along paths perilous and impossible to other men. How

glad he had been to follow that bright-eyed impetuous leader.

And this was where it had led him to, the radiant and delicate comrade

of his youth. As he sat propping his chin up with his hands the face

that confronted destiny had grown haggard in an hour.

He pulled himself together, and deliberately reviewed the situation.

He had at that moment three and eightpence in his pocket, and lying

about somewhere in the table-drawer there was part of last week's

salary and a cheque for nine pounds, the price of a recent article.

He could count on five pounds at Michaelmas, the quarterly rent of the

furniture in the little house at Ealing. Added to these certain sums

there was that unknown incalculable amount that he might yet receive

for unsolicited contributions. He had made seventy-five pounds in this

way last year. The casual earnings of ninety-nine were no security for

nineteen hundred; still, invincible hopefulness fixed the

probabilities at that figure.

But it was now January, and Dicky Pilkington's bill would be due in

November. By successive triumphs of ingenious economy he had reduced

that once appalling seven hundred and fifty to a hundred and

seventy-five. He couldn't actually count on more than twenty-six

pounds three and eightpence with which to meet the liability. And he

had also to live for ten months before he met it. Even invincible Hope

was nervous facing those formidable figures. It did indeed suggest the

presence of a shadowy army in the rear, whole columns of figures

marching invincibly to his aid. They were the sums that might, that

ought to be obtained by a dramatic poet in the hour of his success.

But Rickman had not been born over a bookseller's shop for nothing;

and an austere hereditary voice reminded him that he couldn't really

count on a penny from his tragedy. He couldn't even afford to write

it. The thing was, economically speaking, a crime. It would of course

be finished, as it had been begun, in defiance of economy, as of all

other human pieties and laws, but it would be unreasonable to expect

that any financial blessing could rest on it.

He had only got ten months to raise the money in. It would probably

take him that time to find regular work, if he found it. There was not

an editor in London to whom the initials S.K.R. conveyed the unique

significance they did to Jewdwine, to Maddox and to Rankin. He now

thought with regret of the introductions he had refused in the

insolence of his youth. To Hanson for instance. Hanson was a good

sort, and he might have come in very handy now. A few other names

passed before him, men whom it would be useless for him to approach.

There was old Mackinnon, though, who was a good sort, too. He had

long ago forgotten that ancient jest which compared his head with the

dome of the Museum. He had been the most frequent entertainer of

adventitious prose. Mackinnon might be good for something. He had half

a mind to look him up. The thought of Mackinnon made him feel almost

cheerful again.

Before he went to bed he put ten pounds into a tobacco-jar on an

inaccessible shelf, keeping one pound three and eightpence for the

expenses of the coming week. The next morning he looked Mackinnon up.

Now Mackinnon's head was so far unlike the dome of the Museum that it

was by no means impervious to light; and where Mackinnon's interests

were concerned it was positively limpid in its transparency. So that

Mackinnon was not slow to perceive the advantages of an alliance with

impecunious brilliance. The brilliance he was already familiar with,

the impecuniosity he inferred from the more than usual offhandedness

of Rickman's manner. The war had hit Mackinnon also; the affairs of

the _Literary Observer_ were not so flourishing as Mackinnon could

have wished, and he was meditating some reductions in his staff. He

reflected that young men in Rickman's mood and Rickman's circumstances

were sometimes willing to do the work of two journalists for a lower

salary than he had been paying to one. And when he further learnt that

Rickman had left _Metropolis_, he felt that besides these solid

advantages a subtler satisfaction would be his. Jewdwine, corruptible

or incorruptible, had not endeared himself to other editors, and even

the sober Mackinnon was unable to resist the temptation of annexing

the great man's great man. But the dome-like head, impenetrable in

this, betrayed none of the thoughts that were going on inside it, and

in the bargaining that followed it was concealed from Rickman that his

connection with _Metropolis_ had in any way increased his market

value. He made the best terms he could; and the end of the interview

found him retained on Mackinnon's staff as leader, writer and dramatic

critic at a salary of two pounds ten a week. Mackinnon had offered two

pounds, Rickman had held out for three, and they split the difference.

As the poet left the room Mackinnon turned to his desk with a smile of

satisfaction that seemed to illuminate the dome. He had effected a

considerable saving by that little transaction.

And for the poet it did not prove so bad a bargain after all. He had

now a more ample leisure; and for the first time in his journalistic

career he knew what it was to be left mercifully, beneficently alone.

He had cut himself off from all his friends; and though at times his

heart suffered, his genius profited by the isolation. It was not until

he had escaped from Jewdwine that he realized what that special

deliverance meant for him. He could not well have encountered a more

subtle and dangerous influence than that of the author of the

_Prolegomena to Æsthetics_. Jewdwine had been hostile to his genius

from the beginning, though he had cared for it, too, in his imperious

way. He would have tamed the young, ungovernably ardent thing and

wedded it to his own beautiful and passionless idea; an achievement

which would have reflected some glory on Jewdwine as the matchmaker.

But he had left off caring when he found that he had less to gain from

Rickman's genius than from his talent, and had turned his attention to

the protection and encouragement of the more profitable power. As that

talent ran riot in the columns of _Metropolis_ Rickman himself was

unaware how relentlessly it drew on the vitality that sustained his

genius. It was Jewdwine's excuse that the vitality seemed

inexhaustible.

Jewdwine, as he had once said, dreaded the divine fire. He would

ultimately have subdued the flame by a persistent demand for

brilliance of another kind. Even Maddox (who adored his Rickman) had

not seen that his Rickman, his young divinity, must change and grow.

He admired his immortal adolescence; he would have him young and

lyrical for ever. He had discovered everything in him but the dramatic

poet he was yet to be. Thus, through the very fervour of his

superstition, Maddox had proved hostile, too. But in Mackinnon Rickman

found no malign disturbing influence, no influence of any kind at all.

No thought of capturing his genius or exploiting his talent had ever

entered into the dome-like head. Mackinnon, his mortal nature appeased

by his victory over Jewdwine and further gratified by the

consciousness of having secured a good man cheap, made no exorbitant

claims on his contributor. Let Rickman write what he would, Mackinnon

knew he had got his money's worth.

Rickman squared himself nobly for the next round with fortune. And

Dicky, in his attitude of enthusiastic but not uninterested spectator,

cheered him on, secretly exultant. Dicky was now serenely sure of his

odds. It was war-time; and Rickman could not hold out long after such

an injury to his income.

But Rickman, unconquered, made matters even by reducing his

expenditure. It was winter, and the severity of the weather would have

ruined him in coal alone had he not abandoned the superstition of a

fire. With an oil-stove there was always some slight danger of

asphyxia, but Rickman loved the piquancy of danger. By many such

ingenious substitutions he effected so prodigious a saving that

three-fifths or more of his salary went into the tobacco-jar and

thence into Dicky Pilkington's pocket. He rejoiced to see it go, so

completely had he subdued the lust of spending, so ardently embraced

the life of poverty; if it were poverty to live on a pound a week. Was

it not rather wanton, iniquitous extravagance to have allowed himself

three times that amount? But for that his position at this moment

would have been such that three months on the _Literary Observer_

would have cleared him. As he stood, the remainder of his debt loomed

monstrous under the shadow of next November.

And it was this moment (when he should have been turning his talent

into ready-money by unremitting journalism), that he chose for

finishing his tragedy. If he could be said to have chosen it; for it

was rather the Tragic Muse that had claimed him for her own. She knew

her hour, the first young hour of his deliverance, when he had ceased

from hungering and thirsting after life, and from the violence and

stress of living, and was no more tormented by scruple and by passion;

when the flaming orgy of his individuality no longer confused the

pageant of the world. He had been judging by himself when he

propounded the startling theory that lyric poets must grow into

dramatic poets if they grow at all. It was now, when his youth no

longer sang aloud in him, that he heard the living voices of the men

and women whom he made. Their flesh and blood no longer struggled

violently for birth, no longer tortured the delicate tissue of the

dream. His dreams themselves were brought forth incarnate, he being no

longer at variance with himself as in the days of neo-classic drama.

And so now, when he contemplated his poverty, he saw in it the

dream-crowned head and austere countenance of an archangel destiny. In

the absence of all visible and material comfort the invisible powers

assumed their magnificent dominion. He gave his evenings to Mackinnon

and his mornings, his fresh divine mornings, to the Tragic Muse, thus

setting a blessed purifying interval of sleep between his talent and

his genius. But through it all, while he slept and while he worked,

and while he scribbled with a tenth part of his brain, mechanically

filling in his columns of the _Literary Observer_, he felt that his

genius, conscious of its hour, possessed him utterly. Not even for

Lucia's sake could he resist the god who was so tyrannous and strong.

In his heart he called on her to forgive him for writing unsaleable

tragedies when he ought to have been making money for her. His heart

kept on accusing him. "You would write tragedies if she were

starving," it said. And the god, indignant at the interruption,

answered it, "You wouldn't, you fool, you know you wouldn't. And she

isn't starving. It's you who'll starve, if anybody does; so fire

away." And he fired away; for hope, still invincible, told him that he

could afford to do it, that he had in a drawer fifty pounds' worth of

unpublished articles, works of the baser power, and that, war or no

war, he could surely sell them. He could sell his furniture also; and

if the worst came to the worst, he could sell his books (his own

books, not Lucia's). Meanwhile he must get on with his tragedy. He

could easily finish it in six weeks, and expiate the crime by months

of journalism.

He did finish it in six weeks; and when the Spring came he began

another; for the hand of the god was heavy upon him. This he knew was

madness, though a madness divine and irresistible. In view of its

continuance he called upon Mackinnon and inquired whether at any time,

if the occasion should arise, he could count upon an advance of

salary. Mackinnon, solid, impenetrable, but benignant, replied that

very possibly it might be so. This Rickman interpreted as a distinct

encouragement to dally with the Tragic Muse. It was followed by a

request from Mackinnon that Rickman on his part should oblige him with

a few columns in advance. This he did. He was now, though he was

blissfully unaware of it, the last man on the paper. In six months

from the time of his joining its staff the _Literary Observer_ ceased

from observing, and Mackinnon retired suddenly into private life.

Dicky, who had watched with joy the decline of the _Literary

Observer_, chuckled openly at its fall. He was sorry for old Razors,

though. It was hard luck on him. Old Razors, in Dicky's opinion, was

about done for now.

It might have seemed so to Rickman but that the experience had sobered

him. He rose from the embraces of the Tragic Muse. Yet dizzy with the

august rapture, he resisted and defied the god. He thrust his tragedy

from him into the hindmost obscurity of his table-drawer. Then he

betook himself, in a mood more imperative than solicitous, to Hanson.

Hanson who had labelled him Decadent, and lumped him with Letheby. It

was no matter now. Whatever Hanson thought of his genius, there could

be but one opinion of his talent.

Hanson was genial and complimentary. He, like Mackinnon, knew his

business too well to let Savage Keith Rickman slip through his

fingers. Like Mackinnon he was pleased with the idea of securing a

deserter from the insufferable Jewdwine. But the _Courier_ was full up

with war news and entirely contented with its staff. Hanson was only

good for occasional contributions.

Rickman again overhauled his complicated accounts. By what seemed to

him a series of miracles he had saved seventy-five pounds somehow

during those six months with Mackinnon; but how he was going to raise

a hundred in four months he did not know. That was what he meant to

try for, though. It was July; and he loved more than ever the green

peace of Torrington Square, and the room associated with the first

austere delights of poverty and the presence of the Tragic Muse. But

he could forego even peace for four months. After much search in the

secret places of Bloomsbury, he found an empty attic in Howland

Street. The house was clean, decent, and quiet for a wonder. Thither

he removed himself and his belongings. He had parted with all but the

absolutely essential, among which he reckoned all Lucia's books and a

few of his own. He had stripped himself for this last round with

Fortune. He would come out of it all right if he wrote nothing but

articles, lived on ten shillings a week and sold the articles; which,

meant that in the weeks when no articles were sold he must live on

less. It meant, too, that he must make his own bed, sweep his own

room, and cook his own meals when they were cooked at all; that to

have clean linen he must pay the price of many meals, as he counted

meals.

The attic was not a nice place in July and August. Though the house

was quiet, there flowed through it, in an incessant, suffocating,

sickly stream, the untamed smells and noises of the street. For the

sake of peace he took to working through the night and going to bed in

the day-time; an eccentricity which caused him to be regarded with

some suspicion by his neighbours. In spite of their apparent decency

he had judged it expedient to keep his door locked, a lack of

confidence that wounded them. The lodger in the garret next to his

went so far as to signify by laughter her opinion of his unfriendly

secrecy. Her own door was never shut except when he shut it. This

interference with her liberty she once violently resented, delivering

herself of a jet of oratory that bore with far-fetched fancy on his

parentage and profession. For her threshold was her vantage ground.

Upon it she stood and waited, listening for the footsteps of her luck.

It was a marvel to him how under these conditions he could turn out

the amount of work he did. For some nights were as noisy as the day.

There was no sort of repose about his next-door neighbour. At times

she coughed all night, at times she sang. Or again, by sounds of

sobbing he gathered that the poor wretch was not prospering in her

trade. Still, there were long and blessed intervals of peace when she

roamed farther afield; intervals which might or might not be prolonged

by alcoholic stupor after her return. It may have been owing to these

influences that he began to notice a decided deterioration in his

prose. Hanson had returned his last article. He had worked poor

Hanson's geniality for all it was worth, and he felt that in common

prudence he must withdraw from the _Courier_ for a season. Meanwhile

his best prose, the articles he had by him, remained unpublished. In

war-time there was no market for such wares.

It was now October, and he had paid off but fifteen pounds of the

hundred he still owed. The lease of the little house at Ealing was out

at Michaelmas; he had the five pounds provided every quarter by the

furniture. He sold his furniture and the last of his books, but when

Dicky's bill fell due in November he was still fifty pounds to the

bad. The fact that he had already paid three thousand and thirty-five

would not prevent the sale and dispersal of part, and perhaps the most

valuable part, of the Harden Library. In that event he would get the

money, not the books, and it was the books, all the books, he wanted.

He had persuaded himself that the actual redemption of the whole was

the only legitimate means by which he could now approach Lucia Harden.

The mere repayment of the money was a coarser and more difficult

method. And now at the last moment the end, all but achieved, was as

far from him as ever, supposing Dicky should refuse to renew his bill.

But Dicky did not refuse. He gave him another two months. No longer

term could be conceded; but, yes, he would give him another two

months. "Just for the almighty fun of the thing. If there's one thing

I like to see," said Dicky, "it's pluck." Dicky was more than ever

sure of his game. He argued rightly that Rickman would never have sold

his books if he could have sold his articles or borrowed from a

friend; that, as he had nothing else to sell or offer as security, his

end was certain. But it was so glorious to see the little fellow

fighting his luck. Dicky was willing to prolong the excitement for

another two months.

For two months he fought it furiously.

He spent many hours of many days in trying to find work; a difficult

thing when a man has cut himself loose from all his friends. Strangers

were not likely to consider his superior claims when the kind of work

for which he was now applying could be done by anybody as well or

better. He counted himself uncommonly happy if he got a stray book to

review or a job at the Museum, or if Vaughan held out the promise of

giving him some translation by-and-by.

The conditions under which he worked were now appalling. It was hard

to say whether the attic was more terrible in summer, or in the winter

that forced him to the intimate and abominable companionship of his

oil-stove. Nor was that all. A new horror was added to his existence.

He was aware that he had become an object of peculiar interest to the

woman in the next room, that she waited for him and stealthily watched

his going out and his coming in. As he passed on the landing two eyes,

dull or feverish, marked him through the chink of the door that never

closed. By some hideous instinct of her kind she divined the days when

he was in luck. By another instinct she divined also his nature. His

mystic apathy held her brute soul in awe; and she no longer revenged

herself by furious and vindictive song. So he stayed on, for he owed

rent, and removals were expensive.

He found also that there were limits to the advantages of too

eccentric an asceticism in diet. No doubt the strange meals he

prepared for himself on his oil-stove had proved stimulating by their

very strangeness; but when the first shock and surprise of them had

worn off he no longer obtained that agreeable result. Perhaps there

was something cloying in so much milk and cocoa; he fancied he gained

by diluting these rich foods with water. It certainly seemed to him

that his veins were lighter and carried a swifter and more delicate

current to his brain, that his thoughts now flowed with a remarkable

fineness and lucidity. And then all of a sudden the charm stopped

working. What food he ate ceased to nourish him. He grew drowsy by

day, and had bad dreams at night. He had not yet reached the

reconciling stage of nausea, but was forever tormented by a strong and

healthy craving for a square meal. There was a poor devil on the floor

below him whose state in comparison with his own was affluence. That

man had a square meal every Sunday. Even she, the lady of the

ever-open door, was better off than he; there was always, or nearly

always, a market for her wares.

His sufferings would have been unendurable if any will but his own had

imposed them on him in the beginning. Not that he could continue to

regard his poverty as a destiny in any way angelic. It was because

hitherto he had not known the real thing, because he had seen it from

very far away, that it had worn for him that divine benignant aspect.

Now it was very near him; a sordid insufferable companion that dogged

his elbow in the street, that sat with him by his fireless hearth,

that lay beside him all night, a loathsome bedfellow, telling him a

shameful, hopeless tale, and driving the blessed sleep away from him.

There were times when he envied his neighbour her nirvana of gin and

water; times when the gross steam of the stew prepared for the man

below awoke in him acute, intolerable emotion; times when the

spiritual will that dominated him, so far from being purified by

abstinence, seemed merged in the will of the body made conspicuous and

clamorous by hunger.

There were ways in which he might have satisfied it. He could have

obtained a square meal any day from Mrs. Downey or the Spinkses; but

now that the value of a square meal had increased so monstrously in

imagination, his delicacy shrank from approaching his friends with

conscious designs upon their hospitality. Spinks was always asking him

to dine at his house in Camden Town; but he had refused because he

would have had abominable suspicions of his own motives in accepting.

Trust Flossie to find him out too. And latterly he had hidden himself

from the eye of Spinks. There were moments now when he might have been

tempted to borrow fifty pounds from Spinks and end it; but he could

not bring himself to borrow from Flossie's husband. The last time he

had dined with them he thought she had looked at him as if she were

afraid he was going to borrow money. He knew it so well, that gleam of

the black eyes, half subtle and half savage. For Flossie had realized

her dream, and her little hand clung passionately to the purse that

provided for Muriel Maud. He couldn't borrow from Spinky. From

Jewdwine? Never. From Hanson? Hardly. From Vaughan? Possibly. Vaughan

was considering the expediency of publishing his tragedy, and might be

induced to advance him a little on account. Such possibilities visited

him in the watches of the night, but dawn revealed their obvious

futility. And yet he knew all the time he had only to go to Maddox

for the money, and he would get it. To Maddox or to Rankin, Rankin

whose books stood open on every bookstall, whose face in its beautiful

photogravure portrait smiled so impenetrably, guarding the secret of

success. But he could not go to them without giving them the

explanation he was determined not to give. He knew what they thought

of him; therefore he would not go to them. If they had known him

better they would have come to him.

He was reminded of them now by seeing in _The Planet_ an obituary

notice of young Paterson. Paterson had been dying slowly all the year,

and December finished him. Though Rickman had been expecting the news

for months, the death accomplished affected him profoundly. And at the

thought of the young poet whom he had seemed to have so greatly

wronged, at the touch of grief and pity and divine regret, his own

genius, defied and resisted, descended on him again out of heaven. It

was as if the spirit of young Paterson, appeased and reconciled, had

bequeathed to him its own immortal adolescence. He finished the poem

in four nights, sitting in his great coat, with his legs wrapped in

his blankets, and for the last two nights drinking gin and water to

keep the blood beating in his head. In the morning he felt as if it

were filled with some light and crackling and infinitely brittle

substance, the ashes of a brain that had kindled, flamed, and burned

itself away. It was the last onslaught of the god, the last mad

flaring of the divine fire.

For now he could write no longer. His whole being revolted against the

labour of capturing ideas, of setting words in their right order. The

least effort produced some horrible sensation. Now it was of a

plunging heart that suddenly reversed engines while his brain shivered

with the shock; now of a little white wave that swamped his brain with

one pulse of oblivion; now it was a sudden giving way of the floor of

consciousness, through which his thoughts dropped downwards headlong

into the abyss. He had great agony and distress in following their

flight. At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic

procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was

not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they

clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the

gabble of idiocy or aphasia. At such moments he trembled for his

reason.

At first these horrors would vanish in the brief brilliance that

followed the act of eating; but before long, in the next stage of

exhaustion, food induced nothing but a drunken drowsiness. He had once

said as an excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on

anything else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal

porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But

of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained

the immortal Elegy was his last excess.

He sent the poem to Hanson. Hanson made no sign. But about the middle

of January Rankin of all people broke the silence that had bound them

for a year and a half. Rankin did not know his address, even Hanson

had forgotten it. The letter had been forwarded by one of Hanson's

clerks.

"My dear Rickman," it said, "where are you? And what are you

doing? I dined with Hanson the other night, and he showed me your

Elegy. It's too long for _The Courier_, and he's sending it back

to you with a string of compliments. If you have no other

designs, can you let us have it for _The Planet_? For Paterson's

sake it ought to appear at once. My dear fellow, I should like to

tell you what I think of it, but I will only state my profound

conviction that you have given poor Paterson the fame he should

have had and couldn't get, anymore than we could get it for him;

and I, as his friend, thank you for this magnificent tribute to

his genius. Will you do me the honour of dining with me on Sunday

if you have nothing better to do? There are many things I should

like to talk over with you, and my wife is anxious to make your

acquaintance.

"Sincerely yours,

"Herbert Rankin.

"PS.--Maddox is out of town at present, but you'll meet him if

you come on Sunday. By the way, I saw your friend Jewdwine the

other day. He explained at my request a certain matter which I

own with great regret should never have required explanation."

So Jewdwine had explained. And why had not Rankin asked for the

explanation sooner? Why had he had to ask for it at all? Still, it was

decent of him to admit that he ought not to have required it.

He supposed that he must accept Rankin's invitation to dine. Except

for his hunger, which made the prospect of dining so unique and great

a thing, he had no reason for refusing. Rankin had reckoned on a

scruple, and removed the ground of it. He knew that there was no

approaching Rickman as long as there remained the shadow of an

assumption that the explanation should have come from him.

The invitation had arrived just in time, before Rickman had sent the

last saleable remnants of his wardrobe to the place where his

dress-suit had gone before. He would have to apologize to Mrs. Rankin

for its absence, but his serge suit was still presentable, for he had

preserved it with much care, and there was one clean unfrayed shirt in

his drawer.

But when Sunday came, the first febrile excitement of anticipation was

succeeded by the apathy of an immense fatigue, and at the back of it

all a loathsome sense of the positive indecency of his going. It was

hunger that was driving him, the importunate hunger of many months,

apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure. And after all could any

dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it? When at the last moment

he discovered a loose button on his trousers, he felt that there was

no motive, no power on earth that could urge him to the task of

securing it. And when it broke from its thread and fell, and hid

itself under the skirting board in a sort of malignant frenzy, he took

its behaviour as a sign that he would do well to forego that dinner at

Rankin's. He had hardly acquiesced in this decision when reason

reasserted itself and told him that everything depended on that dinner

and that the dinner depended on the button; therefore that in all

God's universe there was nothing so important, so essential to him as

that button. He went down on his knees and dislodged the button with a

penknife, after an agonizing search. He sat feebly on the edge of his

bed, and with many sad, weak blasphemies bowed himself to a miserable,

ignominious struggle. All malign and adverse fortunes seemed to be

concentrated in the rolling, slippery, ungovernable thing.

The final victory was his, such a victory as amounted to a resurgence

of the spiritual will.

CHAPTER LXX

All things seemed to work together to create an evening of

misunderstanding rather than of reconciliation. To begin with he

arrived at the Rankins' half an hour after the time appointed. Rankin

lived in Sussex Square, which seemed to him an interminably long way

off. The adventure with the trouser button, and a certain dizziness

which precluded all swift and decided movement, would have been enough

to make him late, even if he had not miscalculated the distance

between Hyde Park and Bloomsbury.

He had also miscalculated the distance between Rankin the junior

journalist and Rankin the celebrity. Rankin had achieved celebrity in

a way he had not meant. There was a time when even Jewdwine was

outdone by the young men of _The Planet_ in honest contempt for the

taste and judgement of the many; when it had been Rankin's task to

pursue with indefatigable pleasantry the figures of popular renown.

And now he was popular himself. The British public had given to him

its fatal love.

At first he looked on himself as a man irretrievably disgraced.

However proudly he might bear himself in the company of strangers, he

approached his colleagues with the air of a man made absurd by

unsolicited attentions, persecuted and compromised to the last degree.

The bosses of his ruddy face displayed all the quiverings and tortures

and suffusions of a smiling shame. He was, however, compensated for

the loss of personal dignity by a very substantial income. Not that at

first he would admit the compensation. "Ricky," he would say in the

voice of a man bowed and broken on the wheel of life, "you needn't

envy me my thousands. They are the measure of my abasement." Yet he

continued to abase himself. Nothing was more amazing than his

versatility. The public could hardly keep up with the flight of

Rankin's incarnations. Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral,

fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one

to Rankin. An infallible instinct told him which _genre_ should be

chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour

of his success. And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and

underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist. But

latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant's daughter) an

insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate,

then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence. The old

ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself

doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability

which was now the atmosphere of his home.

Rankin's drawing-room (where he was now waiting for Rickman) was

furnished with the utmost correctness in the purest Chippendale,

upholstered in silver and grey and lemon and rose brocade; it had grey

curtains, rose-lined, with a design of true lovers' knots in silver;

straight draperies of delicate immaculate white muslin veiled the

window-panes; for the feet an interminable stretch of grey velvet

carpet whose pattern lay on it like a soft shadow. Globes of electric

light drooped clustering under voluminously fluted shades. Rankin

himself looked grossly out of keeping with the scene. It was (and they

both knew it) simply the correct setting for his wife, who dominated

it, a young splendour of rose-pink and rose-white and jewelled laces

and gold.

Rickman, after many weeks' imprisonment between four dirty yellow

ochre walls, was bewildered with the space, the colours, the perfumes,

the illumination. He was suffering from a curious and, it seemed to

him, insane illusion, the illusion of distance, the magnifying of the

spaces he had got to traverse, and as he entered Mrs. Rankin's

drawing-room the way from the threshold to the hearthrug stretched

before him as interminably as the way from Howland Street to Sussex

Square. But of any other distance he was blissfully unaware. Beside

his vision of Lucia Harden Mrs. Herbert Rankin was an entirely

insignificant person.

Now Rankin was a little afraid of the elegant lady his wife. He had

had to apologise to her many times for the curious people he brought

to the house, and he was anxious that Rickman should make a good

impression. He was also hungry, as hungry as a man can be who has

three square meals every day of his life. Therefore he was annoyed

with Rickman for being late.

But his annoyance vanished at the first sight of him. His handshake

was significant of atonement and immutable affection. He introduced

him almost fearlessly to his wife. He had been at some pains to

impress upon her that she was about to entertain a much greater man

than her husband, and that it would be very charming of her if she

behaved accordingly. At this she pouted prettily, as became a bride,

and he pointed out that as Keith Rickman was a poet his greatness was

incommensurable with that of her husband, it left him undisturbed upon

his eminence as the supreme master of prose. So that Mrs. Rankin

smiled dimly and deferentially as an elegant hostess must smile upon a

poet who has kept her waiting. There were two other ladies there

(Rankin's mother and sister from the provinces); their greeting

conveyed a rustling and excited consciousness of the guest's

distinction.

As Rankin's family retreated, Maddox heaved himself forward and

grasped Rickman's hand without a word.

Rickman had no very clear idea of what happened in the brief pause

before dinner. His first sensation was one of confused beatitude and

warmth, of being received into an enfolding atmosphere of

friendliness. He was sure it was friendliness that made Maddox pluck

him by the arm and draw him down beside him on the sofa; and he was

too tired to wonder why Maddy should think it necessary to whisper

into his collar, "Steady, you'll be all right if you sit still, old

man." The strange voices of the women confused him further, and

standing made him giddy: he was glad to sit still in his corner

obliterated by Maddy's colossal shoulders. It was friendliness, he

knew, that made Rankin dispense with ceremony and pilot him through

those never-ending spaces to the dining-room. And it must have been an

exaggeration of the same feeling that made him (regardless of his

wife's uplifted eyebrows) insist on placing the guest of the evening

between Maddox and himself. It was later on, about the time when the

wine went round, that Rickman became aware of a change, of a subtle

undefined hostility in the air. He wondered whether the Rankins were

annoyed with him because of his inability to take a brilliant part in

the conversation or to finish any one thing that he took upon his

plate. But for the life of him he couldn't help it. He was too tired

to talk, and he had reached that stage of hunger when the desire to

eat no longer brought with it the power of eating, when the

masterpieces of Rankin's _chef_ excited only terror and repugnance. He

ate sparingly as starving men must eat, and he drank more sparingly

than he ate; for he feared the probable effect of unwonted stimulants.

So that his glass appeared ever to be full.

The hostility was more Mrs. Herbert Rankin's attitude than that of her

husband, but he noticed a melancholy change in Rankin. His geniality

had vanished, or lingered only in the curl of his moustache. He was

less amusing than of old. His conversation was no longer that of the

light-hearted junior journalist flinging himself recklessly into the

tide of talk; but whatever topic was started he turned it to himself.

He was exceedingly indignant on the subject of the war, which he

regarded more as a personal grievance than as a national calamity. No

doubt it was his eminence that constituted him the centre of so vast a

range.

"The worst of it is," said he, "whichever side beats it's destruction

to royalties. I lost a clean thousand on Spion Kop and I can tell you

I didn't recover much on Mafeking, though I worked Tommy Atkins for

all he was worth. This year my sales have dropped from fifty to thirty

thousand. I can't stand many more of these reverses."

He paused, dubious, between two _entrées_.

"If it's had that effect on _me_," said the great man, "Heaven only

knows what it's done to other people. How about you, Rickman?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thanks." The war had ruined him, but his ruin was

not the point of view from which he had yet seriously regarded it. He

was frankly disgusted with his old friend's tone.

"If it goes on much longer, I shall be obliged," said Rankin

solemnly, "to go out to the seat of war."

Rickman felt a momentary glow. He was exhilarated by the idea of

Rankin at the seat of war. He said he could see Rankin sitting on it.

Rankin laughed, for he was not wholly dead to the humour of his own

celebrity; but there was a faint silken rustle at the head of the

table, subtle and hostile, like the stirring of a snake. Mrs. Herbert

Rankin bent her fine flat brows towards the poet, with a look ominous

and intent. The look was lost upon Rickman and he wondered why Maddox

pressed his foot.

"Have you written anything on the war, Mr. Rickman?" she asked.

"No; I haven't written anything on the war."

She looked at him almost contemptuously as at a fool who had neglected

an opportunity.

"What do you generally write on, then?"

Rickman looked up with a piteous smile. He was beginning to feel very

miserable and weary, and he longed to get up and go. It seemed to him

that there was no end to that dinner; no end to the pitiless ingenuity

of Rankin's _chef_. And he always had hated being stared at.

"I don't--generally--write--on anything," he said.

"Your last poem is an exception to your rule, then?"

"It is. I wrote most of _that_ on gin and water," said Rickman

desperately.

Rankin had tugged all the geniality out of his moustache, and his face

was full of anxiety and gloom. Maddox tried hard not to snigger. He

was not fond of Mrs. Herbert Rankin.

And Rankin's _chef_ continued to send forth his swift and fair

creations.

Rickman felt his forehead grow cold and damp. He leaned back and wiped

it with his handkerchief. A glance passed between Maddox and Rankin.

But old Mrs. Rankin looked at him and the motherhood stirred in her

heart.

"Won't you change places with me? I expect you're feeling that fire

too much at your back."

Maddox plucked his sleeve. "Better stay where you are," he whispered.

Rickman rose instantly to his feet. The horrible conviction was

growing on him that he was going to faint, to faint or to be

ignominiously ill. That came sometimes of starving, by some irony of

Nature.

"Don't Maddy--I think perhaps--"

Surely he was going to faint.

Maddox jumped up and held him as he staggered from the room.

Rankin looked at his wife and his wife looked at Rankin. "He may be a

very great poet," said she, "but I hope you'll never ask him to dine

here again."

"Never. I can promise you," said Rankin.

The mother had a kinder voice. "I think the poor fellow was feeling

ill from that fire."

"Well he might, too," said Rankin with all the bitterness that became

the husband of elegant respectability.

"Go and make him lie down and be sure and keep his head lower than his

feet," said Rankin's mother.

"I shouldn't be surprised if Ricky's head were considerably lower than

his feet already," said Rankin. And when he said it the bosses of his

face grew genial again as the old coarse junior journalistic humour

possessed itself of the situation. And he went out sniggering and

cursing by turns under his moustache.

Rankin's mother was right. Rickman was feeling very ill indeed.

Without knowing how he got there he found himself lying on a bed in

Rankin's dressing-room. Maddox and Rankin were with him. Maddox had

taken off his boots and loosened his collar for him, and was now

standing over him contemplating the effect.

"That's all very well," said Maddox, "but how the dickens am I to get

him home? Especially as we don't know his address."

"Ask him."

"I'm afraid our Ricky-ticky's hardly in a state to give very reliable

information."

"Sixty-five Howland Street," said Rickman faintly, and the two smiled.

"It was Torrington Square, but I forget the number."

"Sixty-five Howland Street," repeated Rickman with an effort to be

distinct.

Maddox shook his head. Rickman had sunk low enough, but it was

incredible to them that he should have sunk as low as Howland Street.

His insistence on that address they regarded as a pleasantry peculiar

to his state. "It's perfectly hopeless," said Maddox. "I don't see

anything for it, Rankin, but to let him stay where he is."

At that Rickman roused himself from his stupor. "If you'd only stop

jawing and give me some brandy, I could go."

"Oh my Aunt!" said Rankin, dallying with his despair.

"It isn't half a bad idea. Try it."

They tried it. Maddox raised the poet's head and Rankin poured the

brandy into him. Rankin's hand was gentle, but there was a sternness

about Maddox and his ministrations. And as the brandy brought the

blood back to his brain, Rickman sat up on Rankin's bed, murmuring

apologies that would have drawn pity from the nether mill-stone. But

there was no sign of the tenderness that had warmed him when he came.

He could see that they were anxious to get him out of the house. Since

they had been so keen on reconciliation whence this change to

hostility and disapproval? Oh, of course, he remembered; he had been

ill (outrageously ill) in Rankin's dressing-room. Perhaps it wasn't

very nice of him; still he didn't do it for his own amusement, and

Rankin might have been as ill as he liked in _his_ dressing-room, if

he had had one. Even admitting that the nature of his calamity was

such as to place him beyond the pale of human sympathy, he thought

that Rankin might have borne himself with a somewhat better grace. And

why Maddox should have taken that preposterous tone--

Maddox explained himself as they left Sussex Square.

Rickman did not at first take in the explanation. He was thinking how

he could best circumvent Maddox's obvious intention of hailing a

hansom and putting him into it. He didn't want to confess that he

hadn't a shilling in his pocket. Coppers anybody may be short of, and

presently he meant to borrow twopence for a bus. Later on he would

have to ask for a loan of fifty pounds; for you can borrow pounds and

you can borrow pennies, but not shillings. Not at any rate if you are

starving.

"If I were you, Ricky," Maddox was saying. "I should go straight to

bed when you get home. You'll be all right in the morning."

"I'm all right now. I can't think what bowled me over."

"Ricky, the prevarication is unworthy of you. Without humbug, I think

you might keep off it a bit before you dine with people. It doesn't

matter about us, you know, but it's hardly the sort of thing Mrs.

Rankin's been accustomed to."

"Mrs. Rankin?"

"Well yes, I said Mrs. Rankin; but it's not about her I care--it's

about you. Of course you'll tell me to mind my own business, but I

wish--I wish to goodness you'd give it up--altogether. You did once,

why not again? Believe me the game isn't worth the candle." And he

said to himself, noting the sharp lines of his friend's haggard

figure, "It's killing him."

"I see," said Rickman slowly. In an instant he saw it all; the

monstrous and abominable suspicion that had rested upon him all the

evening. It explained everything. He saw, too, how every movement of

his own had lent itself to the intolerable inference. It was so

complete, so satisfactory, so comprehensive, that he could not wonder

that they had found no escape from it. He could find none himself.

There was no way by which he could establish the fact of his sobriety;

for it is the very nature of such accusations to feed upon defence.

Denial, whether humorous or indignant, would but condemn him more. The

very plausibility of the imputation acted on him as a despotic

suggestion. He began to feel that he must have been drunk at Rankin's;

that he was drunk now while he was talking to Maddox. And to have told

the truth, to have said, "Maddy, I'm starving. I haven't had a square

meal for four months," would have sounded too like a beggar's whine.

Whatever he let out later on, it would be mean to spring all that on

Maddox now, covering him with confusion and remorse.

He laughed softly, aware that his very laugh would be used as

evidence against him. "I see. So you all thought I'd been drinking?"

"Well--if you'll forgive my saying so--"

"Oh, I forgive you. It was a very natural supposition."

"I think you'll have to apologise to the Rankins."

"I think the Rankins'll have to apologise to me."

With every foolish word he was more hopelessly immersed.

He insisted on parting with Maddox at the Marble Arch. After all, he

had not borrowed that fifty pounds nor yet that twopence. Luckily

Rankin's brandy enabled him to walk back with less difficulty than he

came. It had also warmed him, so that he did not find out all at once

that he had left his overcoat at Rankin's. He could not go back for

it. He could never present himself at that house again.

It was a frosty night with a bitter wind rising in the east and

blowing up Oxford Street. His attic under the icicled tiles was dark

and narrow as the grave. And on the other side of the thin wall a

Hunger, more infernal and malignant than his own, waited stealthily

for its prey.

CHAPTER LXXI

It was five o'clock, and Dicky Pilkington was at his ease stretched

before the fire in a low chair in the drawing-room of the flat he now

habitually shared with Poppy Grace. It was beatitude to lie there with

his legs nicely toasting, to have his tea (which he did not drink)

poured out for him by the most popular little variety actress in

London, and to know that she had found in him her master. This

evening, his intellect in play under many genial influences, Dicky was

once more raising the pæan of Finance. Under some piquant provocation,

too; for Poppy had just informed him, that she "didn't fancy his

business."

"Now, look here," said Dicky, "you call yourself an artist. Well--this

business of mine isn't a business, it's an art. Think of the delicacy

we 'ave to use. To know to a hairsbreadth how far you can go with a

man, to know when to give him his head with the snaffle and when to

draw him in with the curb. It's a feelin' your way all along. Why, I

knew a fellow, a broker--an uncommonly clever chap he was, too--ruined

just for want of a little tact. He was too precipitate, began hauling

his man up just when he ought to have let him go. He'd no imagination,

that fellow. (Don't you go eating too much cake, Popsie, or you'll

make your little nose red.) I don't know any other profession gives

you such a grip of life and such a feelin' of power. You've got some

young devil plungin' about, kickin' up his heels all over the shop,

say. He thinks he's got the whole place to break his neck in; and you

know the exact minute by your watch that you can bring him in

grovellin' on your office floor. It's the iron 'and in the velvet

glove," said Dicky.

"I know what you're driving at, and I call it a beastly shame."

"No, it isn't. I shouldn't wonder if old Rickets paid up all right,

after all."

"And if he doesn't?"

"If he doesn't--Well--"

"I say, though, think wot a lot he's paid you. Can't you let him go?"

Dicky shook his head and smiled softly as at some interior vision.

"You'll ruin him for a dirty fifty pounds?"

"I won't ruin him. And it isn't for the money, it's for the game. I

like," said Dicky, "to see a man play in first-class style. But I

don't blame him if he hasn't got style so long as he's got pluck. In

fact, I don't know that of the two I wouldn't rather have pluck. I've

seen a good many men play this game, but I've never seen any one who

came up to old Razors for pluck _and_ style. It's a treat to see him.

Do you suppose I'm going to cut in now and spoil it all by giving him

points? That would take all the gilt off the gingerbread. And do you

suppose he'd let me? Not he; he's spreading the gilt on thick, and

he'd see me d----d first."

Dicky smoked, with half-closed eyes fixed on the fire, in speechless

admiration. He felt that he was encouraging the display of high

heroism by watching it. He singled out a beautiful writhing flame,

spat at it, and continued: "No, I'll take good care that Rickets

doesn't starve. But I'm going to stand by and see him finish fair. If

you like, Popsie, you can back him to win. I don't care if he _doe'_

win. It would be worth it for what I've got out of him."

By what he had got out of him Dicky meant, not three thousand seven

hundred and odd pounds, but a spectacle beyond all comparison exciting

and sublime. For that he was prepared to abandon any further advantage

that might be wrung from the Harden library by a successful

manipulation of the sales.

Poppy did not back Rickman to win; but she determined to call on him

at his rooms, and leave a little note with a cheque and a request that

he would pay Dicky and have done with him. "You'd better owe it to me

than to him, old chappy"; thus she wrote in the kindness and

impropriety of her heart. But Rickman never got that little note.

CHAPTER LXXII

Of all the consequences of that terrible dinner at Rankin's there was

none that Rickman resented more than the loss of his overcoat. As he

lay between his blankets he still felt all the lashings of the east

wind around his shivering body. He was awake all that night, and the

morning found him feverish with terror of the illness that might

overtake him before he attained his end. He stayed in bed all day to

prevent it, and because of his weakness, and for warmth.

But the next day there came a mild and merciful thaw, a tenderness of

Heaven that was felt even under the tiles in Howland Street. And the

morning of that day brought a thing that in all his dreams he had not

yet dreamed of, a letter from Lucia.

He read it kneeling on the floor of his garret, supporting himself by

the edge of the table. It was only a few lines in praise of the Elegy

(which had appeared in _The Planet_ the week before) and a postscript

that told him she would be staying at Court House with Miss Palliser

till the summer.

He knelt there a long time with his head bowed upon his arms. His

brains failed him when he tried to write an answer, and he put the

letter into his breast-pocket, where it lay like a loving hand against

his heart. And yet there was not a word of love in it.

The old indomitable hope rose in his heart again and he forced himself

to eat and drink, that he might have strength for the things he had to

do. That night he did not sleep, but lay wrapt in his beatific

passion. His longing was so intense that it created a vision of the

thing it longed for. It seemed to him that he heard Lucia's soft

footfall about his bed, that she came and sat beside his pillow, that

she bowed her head upon his breast, and that her long hair drifted

over him. For the beating of his own heart gave him the sense of a

presence beside him all night long, as he lay with his right arm flung

across his own starved body, guarding her letter, the letter that had

not a word of love in it.

In the morning he discovered that another letter had lain on his table

under Lucia's. It was from Dicky Pilkington, reminding him that it

wanted but seven days to the thirtieth. Dicky said nothing about any

willingness to renew the bill. What did it matter? Dicky would renew

it, Dicky must renew it; he felt that there was force in him to compel

Dicky to renew it. He went out and bought a paper with the price of a

meal of milk (he couldn't pawn his good clothes; their assistance was

too valuable in interviews with possible employers). He found the

advertisement of an Exeter bookseller in want of a foreman and expert

cataloguer at a salary of ninety pounds. He answered it by return. In

the list of his credentials he mentioned that he had catalogued the

Harden library (a feat, as he knew, sufficient to constitute him a

celebrity in the eyes of the Exeter man). He added that if the

bookseller felt inclined to consider his application he would be

obliged by a wire, as he had several other situations in view.

The bookseller wired engaging him for six months. The same day came a

cheque for ten pounds from _The Planet_, the honorarium for the Elegy.

He sent the ten pounds to Dicky at once (by way of showing what he

could do) with a curt note informing him of his appointment and

requesting a renewal for three months, by which time his salary would

cover the remainder still owing.

Feeling that no further intellectual efforts were now required of him

he went out to feed on the fresh air. As he crossed the landing an

odour of hot pottage came to meet him. Through the ever-open door he

caught a glimpse of a woman's form throned, as it were, above clouds

of curling steam. A voice went out, hoarse with a supreme emotion.

"Come in, you there, and 'ave a snack, wontcher?" it said.

"No, thank you," he answered.

"Garn then. I'll snack yer for a ----y fool!"

And from the peaceableness of the reply he gathered that this time the

lady was not soliciting patronage but conferring it.

He was no longer hungry, no longer weighed upon by his exhausted body.

A great restlessness had seized it, a desire to walk, to walk on and

on without stopping. The young day had lured him into the Regent's

Park. So gentle was the weather that, but for bare branches and

blanched sky, it might have been a day in Spring. As he walked he

experienced sensations of indescribable delicacy and lightness, he saw

ahead of him pellucid golden vistas of metaphysical splendour, he

skimmed over fields of elastic air with the ease and ecstasy of a

blessed spirit.

When he came in he found that the experience prolonged itself through

the early night, even when he lay motionless on his bed staring at the

wall. And as he stared it seemed to him that there passed upon the

wall clouds upon clouds of exquisite and evanescent colour, and that

strange forms appeared and moved upon the clouds. He saw a shoal of

fishes (they _were_ fishes, radiant, iridescent, gorgeous fishes, with

the tails of peacocks); they swam round and round the room just under

the cornice, an ever-revolving, ever-floating frieze. He was immensely

interested in these decorative hallucinations. His brain seemed to be

lifted up, to be iridescent also, to swim round and round with the

swimming fishes.

He woke late in the morning with a violent sore throat and pain in all

his body. He was too giddy to sit up and help himself, but he knocked

weakly on the thin wall. His neighbour roused herself at the faint

summons and appeared. She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands

on her hips and contemplated him for a moment. He tried to speak, but

his tongue seemed to be stuck burning to the roof of his mouth. He

pointed to his throat.

"Yes, I dessay," said she. "I said you'd get somefing and you've got

it." So saying she disappeared into her own apartment.

As he saw her go despair shook him. He thought that he was abandoned.

But presently she returned, bringing a cup of hot tea with a dash of

gin in it from her own breakfast.

"I'd a seen to you afore ef you'd let me," she said. "You tyke it from

me, young man, wot you wants is a good hot lining to your belly. I'd

'ave given it to you ef you'd a let me. I'm a lydy as tykes her dinner

reg'ler, I am. No, you don't--" This, as he turned away his head in

protest. She however secured it firmly with one filthy hand, while

with the other she held the reeking cup to his lips. She had put it to

her own first to test the heat and quality of the brew. Yet he was

grateful. He had some difficulty in swallowing; and from time to time

she wiped his mouth with her villainous apron; and he was grateful

still, having passed beyond disgust.

She perceived the gratitude. "Garn," said she, "wot's a cup er tea?

I'd a seen to yer afore ef you'd a let me."

She continued her ministrations; she brought coal in her own scuttle

and after immense pains she lighted a fire in the wretched grate. Then

she smoothed his bed-clothes till they were covered with her smutty

trail. She would have gone for a doctor then and there, but difficulty

arose. For doctors meant hospitals, and the man below threatened to

sell his lodger's "sticks" if rent were not forthcoming. She cast her

eyes about in search of pawnable articles. They fell upon his clothes.

She took up his shirt and examined it carefully, appraising the sleeve

links and the studs. But when she touched the coat, the coat that had

Lucia's letter in the breast-pocket, Rickman turned in his bed and

made agonizing signs, struggling with the voice that perished in his

burning throat.

"Wot's the good," said she, "of a suit when yer can't wear it? As I

telled you wot you wa--No, the's no sorter use your making fyces at

me. And you keep your ----y legs in, or I'll--" The propositions that

followed were murmured in a hoarse but crooning tone such as a mother

might have used to soothe a fractious child. She went away, carrying

the clothes with her, and turned out the pockets in her den.

On her return she sent the man below to fetch the doctor. But the man

below fell in with boon companions on the way, and no doctor came. All

that night the woman watched by Rickman's bedside, heedless of her

luck. She kept life in him by feeding him with warm milk and gin, a

teaspoonful at a time. Rickman, aware of footsteps in the room,

fancied himself back again in Rankin's dressing-room. The whole scene

of that evening floated before him all night long. He had a sense of

presences hostile and offended, of being irretrievably disgraced. In

the recurring nightmare he saw Lucia Harden instead of Mrs. Rankin. So

persistently did he see her that when he woke he could not shake off

the impression that she had been actually, if unaccountably, present,

a spectator of his uttermost disgrace. He could never look her in the

face again. No, for he was disgraced; absolutely, irredeemably,

atrociously disgraced. Beyond all possibility of explanation and

defence; though he sometimes caught himself explaining and pleading

against those offended phantoms of his brain. Why should he suffer so?

Just because of his inability to deal with Rankin's never-ending

dinner, or to pay a debt of millions, many millions of figures that

climbed up the wall. He was not sure which of these two obligations

was laid upon him.

He became by turns delirious and drowsy, and the woman fetched a

doctor early the next day. He found enteric and blood-poisoning also,

of which Rickman's illness at the Rankins' must have been the first

warning symptoms.

"He'll have to go to the hospital; but you'd better send word to his

friends."

"'E ain't got no friends. And _I_ dunno 'oo 'e is."

The doctor said to himself, "Gone under," and looked round him for a

clue. He examined a postcard from Spinks and a parcel (containing an

overcoat) from Rankin, with the novelist's name and address inside the

wrapper. The poet's name was familiar to the doctor, who read

_Metropolis_. He first of all made arrangements for removing his

patient to the hospital. Then in his uncertainty he telegraphed to

Jewdwine, to Rankin and to Spinks.

The news of Rickman's illness was thus spread rapidly among his

friends. It brought Spinks that afternoon, and Flossie, the poor

Beaver, dragged to Howland Street by her husband to see what her

woman's hands could do. They entered upon a scene of indescribable

confusion and clangour. Poppy Grace, arrived on her errand (for which

she had attired herself in a red dress and ermine tippet), had mounted

guard over the unconscious poet.

"Ricky," cried Poppy, bending over him, "won't you speak to me? It's

Poppy, dear. Don't you know me?"

"No, 'e don't know yer, so you needn't arsk 'im."

Poppy placed her minute figure defiantly between Rickman and her rival

of the open door. She had exhausted her emotions in those wild cries,

and was prepared to enjoy the moment which produced in her the

hallucination of self-conscious virtue.

The woman, voluble and fierce, began to describe Miss Grace's

character in powerful but somewhat exaggerated language, appealing to

the new-comers to vindicate her accuracy. Poppy seated herself on the

bed and held a pocket-handkerchief to her virtuous nose. It was the

dumb and dignified rebuke of Propriety in an ermine tippet, to Vice

made manifest in the infamy of rags. The Beaver retreated in terror on

to the landing, where she stood clutching the little basket of jellies

and things which she had brought, as if she feared that it might be

torn from her in the violence of the scene. Spinks, convulsed with

anguish by the sight of his friend lying there unconscious, could only

offer an inarticulate expostulation. It was the signal for the woman

to burst into passionate self-defence.

"I ain't took nothing 'cept wot the boss 'e myde me. 'Go fer a

doctor?' ses 'e. 'No you don't. I don't 'ave no ----y doctor messing

round 'ere an' cartin' 'im orf to the 'orspital afore 'e's paid 'is

rent.' Ses 'e 'I'm--"

The entrance of Maddox and Rankin checked the hideous flow. They were

followed by the porters of the hospital and the nurse in charge. Her

presence commanded instantaneous calm.

"There are far too many people in this room," said she. Her expelling

glance fell first on Poppy, throned on the bed, then on the convulsive

Spinks. She turned more gently to Rankin, in whose mouth she saw

remonstrance, and to Maddox, in whose eyes she read despair. "It will

really be better for him to take him to the hospital."

"No," cried Spinks, darting in again from the landing, "take him to

my house, 45, Dalmeny Av--" but the Beaver plucked him by the sleeve;

for she thought of Muriel Maud.

"No, no, take him to mine, 87, Sussex Square," said Rankin, and he

insisted. But in the end he suffered himself to be overruled; for he

thought darkly of his wife.

"I'd give half my popularity if I could save him," he said to Maddox.

"Half your popularity won't save him, nor yet the whole of it," said

Maddox savagely. In that moment they hated themselves and each other

for the wrong they had done him. Their hearts smote them as they

thought of the brutalities of Sunday night.

The woman still held her ground in the centre of the room where she

stood scowling at the nurse as she busied herself about the bed.

"I'd a seen to 'im ef 'e'd a let me," she reiterated.

Maddox dealt with her. He flicked a sovereign on to the table. "Look

here," said he, "suppose you take that and go out quietly."

There was a momentary glitter in her eyes, but her fingers hesitated.

"I didn' fink 'e 'ad no frien's wen I come in." It was her way of

intimating that what she had done she had not done for money.

"All right, take it."

She drew out a filthy grey flannel bag from the bosom of her gown and

slipped the gold into it. And still she hesitated. She could not

understand why so large a sum was offered for such slight services as

she had rendered. It must have been for--Another thought stirred in

her brute brain.

They were raising Rickman in his bed before taking him away. His

shoulders were supported on the nurse's arm, his head dropped on her

breast. The posture revealed all the weakness of his slender body. The

woman turned. And as she looked at the helpless figure she was visited

by a dim sense of something strange and beautiful and pure, something

(his helplessness perhaps) that was outraged by her presence, and

called for vindication.

"'E never 'ad no truck with me," she said. It struck Maddox that the

denial had a sublimity and pathos of its own. She dropped the bag into

her lean bosom and went out.

And the porters wrapped him in his blankets, and laid him on a

stretcher, and carried him out; past Maddox and Rankin who turned

their heads away; past Flossie who shrank a little from the blankets,

but cried softly to see him go; and past the woman standing on her

threshold. And in that manner he passed Horace Jewdwine coming up the

stair too late. And all that Jewdwine could do was to stand back and

let him pass.

It was Jewdwine's fear that made him uncover, as in the presence of

the dead.

CHAPTER LXXIII

When Rankin, Maddox and Jewdwine stood alone in the garret whence they

had seen Rickman carried away from them, remorse drove all hope of his

recovery from their hearts. They learnt some of the truth about him

from the woman in the next room, a keen observer of human nature.

Jewdwine and Rankin, when they too had paid her for her services, were

glad to escape from the intolerable scene. Maddox stayed behind,

collecting what he could only think of as Rickman's literary remains.

He found in the table drawer three unpublished articles, a few poems,

and the First Act of the second and unfinished tragedy, saved by its

obscure position at the back of the drawer. The woman owned to having

lit the fire with the rest. Maddox cursed and groaned as he thought of

that destruction. He knew that many poems which followed _Saturnalia_

had remained unpublished. Had they too been taken to light the fire?

He turned the garret upside down in search of the missing manuscripts.

At last in a cupboard, he came upon a leather bag. It was locked and

he could find no key, but he wrenched it open with the poker. It

contained many manuscripts; among them the Nine and Twenty Sonnets,

and the testament concerning them. He read the Sonnets, but not the

other document which was in a sealed envelope. He found also a bundle

of Dicky Pilkington's receipts and his last letter threatening

foreclosure. And when he had packed up the books (Lucia's books) and

redeemed Rickman's clothes from the pawn-shop, he took all these

things away with him for safety.

There was little he could do for Rickman, but he promised himself the

pleasure of settling Dicky's claim. But even that satisfaction was

denied him. For Dicky had just renewed his bill for a nominal three

months. Nominal only. Dicky had in view a magnificent renunciation,

and he flatly refused to treat with Maddox or anybody else. He was

completely satisfied with this conclusion; it meant that Rickman, for

all his style and pluck, had lost the game and that he, Pilkington,

had done the handsome thing, as he could do it when the fancy took

him. For Dicky's heart had been touched by the tale that Poppy told

him, and it melted altogether when he went and saw for himself poor

Ricky lying in his cot in the North-Western Hospital. He had a great

deal of nice feeling about him after all, had Dicky.

Terrible days followed Rickman's removal to the hospital; days when

his friends seemed justified in their sad conviction; days when the

doctors gave up hope; days when he would relapse after some brief

recovery; days when he kept them all in agonizing suspense.

But Rickman did not die. As they said, it was not in him to take that

exquisitely mean revenge. It was not in him to truckle to the

tradition that ordains that unfortunate young poets shall starve in

garrets and die in hospitals. He had always been an upsetter of

conventions, and a law unto himself. So there came a day, about the

middle of March, when he astonished them all by appearing among them

suddenly in Maddox's rooms, less haggard than he had been that night

when he sat starving at Rankin's dinner-table.

And as he came back to them, to Jewdwine, to Maddox and to Rankin,

they each could say no more to him than they had said five years ago.

"What a fool you were, Rickman. Why didn't you come to _me_?" But when

the others had left, Maddox put his hands on Rickman's shoulders and

they looked each other in the face.

"I say, Ricky, what did you do it for?"

But that was more than Rickman could explain, even to Maddox.

They had all contended which should receive him when he came out of

hospital; but it was settled that for the present he should remain

with Maddox in his rooms. There Dicky, absolutely prepared to do the

handsome thing, called upon him at an early date. Dicky had promised

himself some exquisite sensations in the moment of magnanimity; but

the moment never came. Rickman remained firm in his determination that

every shilling of the debt should be paid and paid by him; it was more

than covered by the money Maddox advanced for his literary remains.

Dicky had to own that the plucky little fellow had won his game, but

he added, "You couldn't have done it, Razors, if I hadn't given you

points."

The great thing was that he had done it, and that the Harden library

was his, was Lucia's. It only remained to tell her, and to hand it

over to her. He had long ago provided for this difficult affair. He

wrote, as he had planned to write, with a judicious hardness, brevity

and restraint. He told her that he desired to see her on some business

connected with the Harden library, in which he was endeavouring to

carry out as far as possible his father's last wishes. He asked to be

allowed to call on her some afternoon in the following week. He

thanked her for her letter without further reference, and he

remained--"sincerely"? No, "faithfully" hers.

He told Maddox that he thought of going down to Devonshire to recruit.

CHAPTER LXXIV

Lucia was suffering from the disagreeable strain of a divided mind. To

begin with she was not altogether pleased with Mr. Rickman. He had

taken no notice of the friendly little letter she had written about

the Elegy, her evident intention being to give him pleasure. She had

written it on impulse, carried away by her ardent admiration. That was

another of those passionate indiscreet things, which were followed by

torments of her pride. And the torments had followed. His two months'

silence had reproved her ardour, had intimated to her that he was in

no mood to enter in at the door which she had closed to him three

years ago. She took it that he had regarded her poor little olive

branch as an audacity. And now that he _had_ written there was not a

word about the subject of her letter. He had only written because

business compelled him, and his tone was not only cold, but positively

austere.

But, she reflected, business after all did not compel him to come down

and see her. Having reached this point she became aware that her heart

was beating most uncomfortably at the bare idea of seeing him. For the

first time this anticipation inspired her with anxiety and fear. Until

their last meeting in Tavistock Place there had been in all their

intercourse something intangible and rare, something that, though on

her part it had lacked the warmth of love, she had acknowledged to be

finer than any friendship. That beautiful intangible quality had

perished in the stress of their final meeting. And even if it came to

life again it could never be the same, or so she thought. She had

perceived how much its permanence had depended on external barriers,

on the social gulf, and on the dividing presence of another woman. She

could not separate him from his genius; and his genius had long ago

overleapt the social gulf. And now, without poor Flossie, without the

safeguard of his engagement, she felt herself insecure and

shelterless. More than ever since he had overleapt that barrier too.

But though Lucia had found out all these things, she had not yet found

out why it was that she had been so glad to hear that Keith Rickman

was going to be married, nor why she had been so passionately eager to

keep him to his engagement. In any case she could not have borne to be

the cause of unhappiness to another woman; and that motive was so

natural that it served for all.

As things had turned out, if he had married, that, she had understood,

would have been such a closing of the door as would have shut him out

for ever. And now that he was knocking at the door again, now that

there was no reason why, once opened, it should not remain open, she

began to be afraid of what might enter in with him. She made up her

mind that she would not let him in. So she sat down and wrote a cold

little note to say that she was afraid she would not be able to see

him next week. Could he not explain the business in writing? She took

that letter to the post herself. And as each step brought her nearer

to the inevitable act, the conviction grew on her that this conduct of

hers was cowardly, and unworthy both of him and of herself. A refusal

to see him was a confession of fear, and fear assumed the existence of

the very thing his letter had ignored. It was absurd too, if he had

come to see that his feeling for her was (as she persisted in

believing it to be) a piece of poetic folly, an illusion of the

literary imagination. She turned back and tore up that cold little

note, and wrote another that said she would be very glad to see him

any day next week, except Friday. There was no reason why she should

have excepted Friday; but it sounded more business-like somehow.

She did not take Kitty into her confidence, and in this she failed to

perceive the significance of her own secrecy. She told herself that

there was no need to ask Kitty's advice, because she knew perfectly

well already what Kitty's advice would be.

He came on Tuesday. Monday was too early for his self-respect,

Wednesday too late for his impatience. He had looked to find

everything altered in and about Court House; and he saw, almost with

surprise, the same April flowers growing in the green garden, and the

same beech-tree dreaming on the lawn. He recognized the black rifts in

its trunk and the shining sweep of its branches overhead. The door was

opened by Robert, and Robert remembered him. There was a shade more

gravity in the affectionate welcome, but then Robert was nine years

older. He was shown into the drawing-room, and it, too, was much as he

had left it nine years ago.

Kitty Palliser was there; she rose to meet him with her irrepressible

friendliness, undiminished by nine years. There was nothing cold and

business-like about Kitty.

"Will you tell Miss Harden?" said she to the detached, retreating

Robert. Then she held out her hand. "I am very glad to see you." But a

wave of compassion rather than of gladness swept over her face as she

looked at him. She made him sit down, and gave him tea. There was a

marked gentleness in all her movements, unlike the hilarious lady she

used to be.

The minutes went by and Lucia did not appear. He could not attend to

what Kitty was saying. His eyes were fixed on the door that looked as

if it were never going to open. Kitty seemed to bear tenderly with his

abstraction. Once he glanced round the room, recognizing familiar

objects. He had expected, after Dicky's descent on Court House, to

find nothing recognizable in it. Kitty was telling him how an uncle of

hers had lent them the house for a year, how he had bought it

furnished, and how, but for the dismantled library and portrait

gallery, it was pretty much as it had been in Miss Harden's time. So

unchanged was it and its atmosphere that Rickman felt himself in the

presence of a destiny no less unchanging and familiar. He had come on

business as he had done nine years ago; and he felt that the events of

that time must in some way repeat themselves, that when he was alone

with Lucia he would say to her such things as he had said before, that

there would be differences, misunderstandings, as before, and that his

second coming would end in misery and separation like the first. It

seemed to him that Kitty, kind Kitty, had the same perception and

foreboding. Thus he interpreted her very evident compassion. She meant

to console him.

"Robert remembers you," said she.

"That's very clever of Robert," said he.

"No, it's only his faithfulness. What a funny thing faithfulness is.

Robert won't allow any one but Miss Harden to be mistress here. My

people are interlopers, abominations of desolation. He can barely be

civil to their friends. But to hers--he is as you see him. It's a good

thing for me I'm her friend, or he wouldn't let me sit here and pour

out tea for you."

He thought over the speech. It admitted an encouraging interpretation.

But Miss Palliser may have been more consoling than she had meant.

She rattled on in the kindness of her heart. He was grateful for her

presence; it calmed his agitation and prepared him to meet Lucia with

composure when she came. But Lucia did not come; and he began to have

a horrible fear that at the last moment she would fail him. He refused

the second cup that Kitty pressed on him, and she looked at him

compassionately again. He was so used to his appearance that he had

forgotten how it might strike other people. He was conscious only of

Kitty's efforts to fill up agreeably these moments of suspense.

At last it ended. Lucia was in the doorway. At the sight of her his

body shook and the strength in his limbs seemed to dissolve and flow

downwards to the floor. His eyes never left her as she came to him

with her rhythmic unembarrassed motion. She greeted him as if they had

met the other day; but as she took his hand she looked down at it,

startled by its slenderness. He was glad that she seated herself on

his right, for he felt that the violence of his heart must be audible

through his emaciated ribs.

Kitty made some trivial remark, and Lucia turned to her as if her

whole soul hung upon Kitty's words. Her absorption gave him time to

recover himself. (It did not occur to him that that was what she had

turned away for.) Her turning enabled him to look at her. He noticed

that she seemed in better health than when he had seen her last, and

that in sign of it her beauty was stronger, more vivid and more

defined.

They said little to each other. But when Kitty had left them they drew

in their chairs to the hearth with something of the glad consent of

those for whom the long-desired moment has arrived. He felt that old

sense of annihilated time, of return to a state that had never really

lapsed; and it struck him that she, too, had that feeling. It was she

who spoke first.

"Before you begin your business, tell me about yourself."

"There isn't anything to tell."

She looked as if she rather doubted the truth of that statement.

"If you don't mind, I'd rather begin about the business and get it

over."

"Why, is it--is it at all unpleasant?"

He smiled. "Not in the least, not in the very least. It's about the

library."

"I thought we'd agreed that that was all over and done with long ago?"

"Well, you see, it hasn't anything to do with _us_. My father--"

"Don't let us go back to that."

"I'm sorry, but we must--a little. You know my father and I had a

difference of opinion?"

"I know--I know."

"Well, in the end he owned that I was right. That was when he was

dying."

He wished she would not look at him; for he could not look at her. He

was endeavouring to make his tale appear in the last degree natural

and convincing. Up till now he had told nothing but the truth, but as

he was about to enter on the path of perjury he became embarrassed by

the intentness of her gaze.

"You were with him?" she asked.

"Yes." He paused a moment to command a superior kind of calm. That

pause wrecked him, for it gave her also time for thought. "He wanted

either to pay you the money that you should have had, or to hand over

the library; and I thought--"

"But the library was sold?"

He explained the matter of the mortgage, carefully, but with an amount

of technical detail meant to impose and mystify.

"Then how," she asked, "was the library redeemed?"

He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional

significance. He desired to lead her gently away from a line of

thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue. "You

can't call it redeemed. Nobody redeemed it. The debt, of course, had

to be paid out of my father's estate."

"In which case the library became yours?"

He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.

"It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go

against my father's wishes by holding on to it."

"Can't you see that it's equally impossible for me to take it?"

"Why? Try and think of it as a simple matter of business."

He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her

feminine persistence and refining fantasy. "It hasn't anything to do

with you or me."

Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed

him in another such dispute nine years ago.

"I am more business-like than you are. I remember perfectly well that

your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the

beginning."

"That needn't trouble you. It has been virtually deducted. I'm sorry

to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and

could not be recovered."

He had given himself away by that word "recovered." Her eyes searched

him through and through to find his falsehood, as they had searched

him once before to find his truth. "It is very, very good of you," she

said.

"Of _me_? Am _I_ bothering you? Don't think of me except as my

father's executor."

"Did you know that he wanted you to do this, or did you only think it?

Was it really his express wish?"

He looked her in the face and lied boldly and freely. "It was.

Absolutely."

And as she met that look, so luminously, so superlatively sincere, she

knew that he had lied. "All the same," said she, "I can't take it.

Don't think it unfriendly of me. It isn't. In fact, don't you see it's

just because we have been--we are--friends that I must refuse it? I

can't take advantage of that"--she was going to say "feeling," but

thought better of it.