Scene I--The period is 1863

THE YELLOW BOOK

An Illustrated Quarterly

Volume I April 1894

[Illustration: Magazine Cover]

London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane

Contents

Letterpress

I. The Death of the Lion By Henry James _Page_ 7

II. Tree-Worship Richard Le Gallienne 57

III. A Defence of Cosmetics Max Beerbohm 65

IV. Daimonizomenos Arthur Christopher Benson 83

V. Irremediable Ella D'Arcy 87

VI. The Frontier }

} William Watson 113

VII. Night on Curbar Edge }

VIII. A Sentimental Cellar George Saintsbury 119

IX. Stella Maris Arthur Symons 129

X. Mercedes }

} Henry Harland 135

XI. A Broken Looking-Glass }

XII. Alere Flammam }

} Edmund Gosse 153

XIII. A Dream of November }

XIV. The Dedication Fred M. Simpson 159

XV. A Lost Masterpiece George Egerton 189

XVI. Reticence in Literature Arthur Waugh 201

XVII. Modern Melodrama Hubert Crackanthorpe 223

XVIII. London }

} John Davidson 233

XIX. Down-a-down }

XX. The Love-Story of Luigi } Richard Garnett, LL.D. 235

Tansillo }

XXI. The Fool's Hour { John Oliver Hobbes } 253

{ and George Moore }

Pictures

I. A Study { By Sir Frederic Leighton,

{ P.R.A. _Frontispiece_

II. L'Education Sentimentale Aubrey Beardsley _Page_ 55

III. Le Puy en Velay Joseph Pennell 63

IV. The Old Oxford Music Hall Walter Sickert 85

V. Portrait of a Gentleman Will Rothenstein 111

VI. The Reflected Faun Laurence Housman 117

VII. Night Piece Aubrey Beardsley 127

VIII. A Study Sir Frederic Leighton, P.R.A. 133

IX. Portrait of a Lady Will Rothenstein 151

X. Portrait of Mrs. Patrick } Aubrey Beardsley 157

Campbell }

XI. The Head of Minos J. T. Nettleship 187

XII. Portrait of a Lady Charles W. Furse 199

XIII. A Lady Reading Walter Sickert 221

XIV. A Book Plate Aubrey Beardsley 251

XV. A Book Plate R. Anning Bell 251

[Illustration:

The Yellow Book

An Illustrated Quarterly

Volume I April 1894

London: Elkin Mathews

& John Lane

Boston: Copeland &

Day]

Ballantyne Press

London & Edinburgh

A Study

By Sir Frederic Leighton, P.R.A.

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: A Study]

The Death of the Lion

By Henry James

I

I had simply, I suppose, a change of heart, and it must have begun when

I received my manuscript back from Mr. Pinhorn. Mr. Pinhorn was my

"chief," as he was called in the office: he had accepted the high

mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had

been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It

was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully--he was never mentioned

in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanour. Young as I

was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner

as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and

office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and

depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my

continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather

resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector,

who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to make I found

matter enough for complacency in being on a "staff." At the same time I

was aware that I was exposed to suspicion as a product of the old

lowering system. This made me feel that I was doubly bound to have

ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr.

Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember that

he looked at me first as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who

indeed at that moment was by no means in the middle of the heavens; and

even when I had knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence

in the demand for any such matter. When I had reminded him that the

great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the

demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: "I see;

you want to write him up."

"Call it that if you like."

"And what's your inducement?"

"Bless my soul--my admiration!"

Mr. Pinhorn pursed up his mouth. "Is there much to be done with him?"

"Whatever there is, we should have it all to ourselves, for he hasn't

been touched."

This argument was effective, and Mr. Pinhorn responded: "Very well,

touch him." Then he added: "But where can you do it?"

"Under the fifth rib!" I laughed.

Mr. Pinhorn stared. "Where's that?"

"You want me to go down and see him?" I inquired, when I had enjoyed his

visible search for this obscure suburb.

"I don't 'want' anything--the proposal's your own. But you must remember

that that's the way we do things _now_," said Mr. Pinhorn, with another

dig at Mr. Deedy.

Unregenerate as I was, I could read the queer implications of this

speech. The present owners superior virtue as well as his deeper craft

spoke in his reference to the late editor as one of that baser sort who

deal in false representations. Mr. Deedy would as soon have sent me to

call on Neil Paraday as he would have published a "holiday-number;" but

such scruples presented themselves as mere ignoble thrift to his

successor, whose own sincerity took the form of ringing door-bells and

whose definition of genius was the art of finding people at home. It was

as if Mr. Deedy had published reports without his young men's having, as

Mr. Pinhorn would have said, really been there. I was unregenerate, as I

have hinted, and I was not concerned to straighten out the journalistic

morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of

which it was better not to peer. Really to be there this time moreover

was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil

Paraday only the more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr.

Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr.

Pinhorn could conceive. My allusion to the sequestered manner in which

Mr. Paraday lived (which had formed part of my explanation, though I

knew of it only by hearsay) was, I could divine, very much what had made

Mr. Pinhorn bite. It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his

paper that any one should be so sequestered as that. Moreover, was not

an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted? Mr.

Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness

with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool, on her return from her

fiasco in the States. Hadn't we published, while its freshness and

flavour were unimpaired, Miss Braby's own version of that great

international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this coupling of the

actress and the author, and I confess that after having enlisted Mr.

Pinhorn's sympathies I procrastinated a little. I had succeeded better

than I wished, and I had, as it happened, work nearer at hand. A few

days later I called on Lord Crouchley and carried off in triumph the

most unintelligible statement that had yet appeared of his lordship's

reasons for his change of front. I thus set in motion in the daily

papers columns of virtuous verbiage. The following week I ran down to

Brighton for a chat, as Mr. Pinhorn called it, with Mrs. Bounder, who

gave me, on the subject of her divorce, many curious particulars that

had not been articulated in court. If ever an article flowed from the

primal fount it was that article on Mrs. Bounder. By this time, however,

I became aware that Neil Paraday's new book was on the point of

appearing, and that its approach had been the ground of my original

appeal to Mr. Pinhorn, who was now annoyed with me for having lost so

many days. He bundled me off--we would at least not lose another. I have

always thought his sudden alertness a remarkable example of the

journalistic instinct. Nothing had occurred, since I first spoke to him,

to create a visible urgency, and no enlightenment could possibly have

reached him. It was a pure case of professional _flair_--he had smelt

the coming glory as an animal smells its distant prey.

II

I may as well say at once that this little record pretends in no degree

to be a picture either of my introduction to Mr. Paraday or of certain

proximate steps and stages. The scheme of my narrative allows no space

for these things and in any case a prohibitory sentiment would be

attached to my recollection of so rare an hour. These meagre notes are

essentially private, and if they see the light the insidious forces

that, as my story itself shows, make at present for publicity will

simply have overmastered my precautions. The curtain fell lately enough

on the lamentable drama. My memory of the day I alighted at Mr.

Paraday's door is a fresh memory of kindness, hospitality, compassion,

and of the wonderful illuminating talk in which the welcome was

conveyed. Some voice of the air had taught me the right moment, the

moment of his life at which an act of unexpected young allegiance might

most come home. He had recently recovered from a long, grave illness. I

had gone to the neighbouring inn for the night, but I spent the evening

in his company, and he insisted the next day on my sleeping under his

roof. I had not an indefinite leave: Mr. Pinhorn supposed us to put our

victims through on the gallop. It was later, in the office, that the

step was elaborated and regulated. I fortified myself however, as my

training had taught me to do, by the conviction that nothing could be

more advantageous for my article than to be written in the very

atmosphere. I said nothing to Mr. Paraday about it, but in the morning,

after my removal from the inn, while he was occupied in his study, as he

had notified me that he should need to be, I committed to paper the

quintessence of my impressions. Then thinking to commend myself to Mr.

Pinhorn by my celerity, I walked out and posted my little packet before

luncheon. Once my paper was written I was free to stay on, and if it was

designed to divert attention from my frivolity in so doing I could

reflect with satisfaction that I had never been so clever. I don't mean

to deny of course that I was aware it was much too good for Mr. Pinhorn;

but I was equally conscious that Mr. Pinhorn had the supreme shrewdness

of recognising from time to time the cases in which an article was not

too bad only because it was too good. There was nothing he loved so much

as to print on the right occasion a thing he hated. I had begun my visit

to Mr. Paraday on a Monday, and on the Wednesday his book came out. A

copy of it arrived by the first post, and he let me go out into the

garden with it immediately after breakfast. I read it from beginning to

end that day, and in the evening he asked me to remain with him the rest

of the week and over the Sunday.

That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a

letter, of which the gist was the desire to know what I meant by sending

him such stuff. That was the meaning of the question, if not exactly its

form, and it made my mistake immense to me. Such as this mistake was I

could now only look it in the face and accept it. I knew where I had

failed, but it was exactly where I couldn't have succeeded. I had been

sent down there to be personal, and in point of fact I hadn't been

personal at all; what I had sent up to London was merely a little

finicking, feverish study of my author's talent. Anything less relevant

to Mr. Pinhorn's purpose couldn't well be imagined, and he was visibly

angry at my having (at his expense, with a second-class ticket)

approached the object of our arrangement only to be so deucedly distant.

For myself, I knew but too well what had happened, and how a miracle--as

pretty as some old miracle of legend--had been wrought on the spot to

save me. There had been a big brush of wings, the flash of an opaline

robe, and then, with a great cool stir of the air, the sense of an

angel's having swooped down and caught me to his bosom. He held me only

till the danger was over, and it all took place in a minute. With my

manuscript back on my hands I understood the phenomenon better, and the

reflections I made on it are what I meant, at the beginning of this

anecdote, by my change of heart. Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a

rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him (it

was the case to say so) the genuine article, the revealing and

reverberating sketch to the promise of which--and of which alone--I owed

my squandered privilege. A week or two later I recast my peccant paper,

and giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday's new book,

obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit,

Mr. Pinhorn was so far justified that it attracted not the least

attention.

III

I was frankly, at the end of three days, a very prejudiced critic, so

that one morning when, in the garden, Neil Paraday had offered to read

me something I quite held my breath as I listened. It was the written

scheme of another book--something he had put aside long ago, before his

illness, and lately taken out again to reconsider. He had been turning

it round when I came down upon him, and it had grown magnificently under

this second hand. Loose, liberal, confident, it might have passed for a

great gossiping, eloquent letter--the overflow into talk of an artist's

amorous plan. The subject I thought singularly rich, quite the strongest

he had yet treated; and this familiar statement of it, full too of fine

maturities, was really, in summarised splendour, a mine of gold, a

precious, independent work. I remember rather profanely wondering

whether the ultimate production could possibly be so happy. His reading

of the epistle, at any rate, made me feel as if I were, for the

advantage of posterity, in close correspondence with him--were the

distinguished person to whom it had been affectionately addressed. It

was high distinction simply to be told such things. The idea he now

communicated had all the freshness, the flushed fairness of the

conception untouched and untried: it was Venus rising from the sea,

before the airs had blown upon her. I had never been so throbbingly

present at such an unveiling. But when he had tossed the last bright

word after the others, as I had seen cashiers in banks, weighing mounds

of coin, drop a final sovereign into the tray, I became conscious of a

sudden prudent alarm.

"My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it?" I asked. "It's

infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and

independence, what assured, what perfect conditions it will demand! Oh

for a lone isle in a tepid sea!"

"Isn't this practically a lone isle, and aren't you, as an encircling

medium, tepid enough?" he replied; alluding with a laugh to the wonder

of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial

home. "Time isn't what I've lacked hitherto: the question hasn't been to

find it, but to use it. Of course my illness made a great hole, but I

daresay there would have been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has

more pockets than a billiard-table. The great thing is now to keep on my

feet."

"That's exactly what I mean."

Neil Paraday looked at me with eyes--such pleasant eyes as he had--in

which, as I now recall their expression, I seem to have seen a dim

imagination of his fate. He was fifty years old, and his illness had

been cruel, his convalescence slow. "It isn't as if I weren't all

right."

"Oh, if you weren't all right I wouldn't look at you!" I tenderly said.

We had both got up, quickened by the full sound of it all, and he had

lighted a cigarette. I had taken a fresh one, and, with an intenser

smile, by way of answer to my exclamation, he touched it with the flame

of his match. "If I weren't better I shouldn't have thought of _that_!"

He flourished his epistle in his hand.

"I don't want to be discouraging, but that's not true," I returned. "I'm

sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations

sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of more and more

all the while. That's what makes you, if you will pardon my familiarity,

so respectable. At a time when so many people are spent you come into

your second wind. But, thank God, all the same, you're better! Thank

God, too, you're not, as you were telling me yesterday, 'successful.' If

_you_ weren't a failure, what would be the use of trying? That's my one

reserve on the subject of your recovery--that it makes you 'score,' as

the newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything

that does that is horrible. 'We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday,

the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.'

Somehow I shouldn't like to see it."

"You won't see it; I'm not in the least celebrated--my obscurity

protects me. But couldn't you bear even to see I was dying or dead?" my

companion asked.

"Dead--_passe encore_; there's nothing so safe. One never knows what a

living artist may do--one has mourned so many. However, one must make

the worst of it; you must be as dead as you can."

"Don't I meet that condition in having just published a book?"

"Adequately, let us hope; for the book is verily a masterpiece."

At this moment the parlour-maid appeared in the door that opened into

the garden: Paraday lived at no great cost, and the frisk of petticoats,

with a timorous "Sherry, sir?" was about his modest mahogany. He allowed

half his income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating

without redundancy of legend. I had a general faith in his having

behaved well, and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to

dinner. He now turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a tray,

some card or note, while agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of

the garden. The idea of his security became supremely dear to me, and I

asked myself if I were the same young man who had come down a few days

before to scatter him to the four winds. When I retraced my steps he had

gone into the house and the woman (the second London post had come in)

had placed my letters and a newspaper on a bench. I sat down there to

the letters, which were a brief business, and then, without heeding the

address, took the paper from its envelope. It was the journal of highest

renown, _The Empire_ of that morning. It regularly came to Paraday, but

I remembered that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already

delivered. This one had a great mark on the "editorial" page, and,

uncrumpling the wrapper, I saw it to be directed to my host and stamped

with the name of his publishers. I instantly divined that _The Empire_

had spoken of him, and I have not forgotten the odd little shock of the

circumstance. It checked all eagerness and made me drop the paper a

moment. As I sat there, conscious of a palpitation, I think I had a

vision of what was to be. I had also a vision of the letter I would

presently address to Mr. Pinhorn, breaking as it were with Mr. Pinhorn.

Of course, however, the next minute the voice of _The Empire_ was in my

ears.

The article was not, I thanked Heaven, a review; it was a "leader," the

last of three, presenting Neil Paraday to the human race. His new book,

the fifth from his hand, had been but a day or two out, and _The

Empire_, already aware of it, fired, as if on the birth of a prince, a

salute of a whole column. The guns had been booming these three hours in

the house without our suspecting them. The big blundering newspaper had

discovered him, and now he was proclaimed and anointed and crowned. His

place was assigned him as publicly as if a fat usher with a wand had

pointed to the topmost chair; he was to pass up and still up, higher

and higher, between the watching faces and the envious sounds--away up

to the daïs and the throne. The article was a date; he had taken rank at

a bound--waked up a national glory. A national glory was needed, and it

was an immense convenience he was there. What all this meant rolled over

me, and I fear I grew a little faint--it meant so much more than I could

say "yea" to on the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was different; the

tremendous wave I speak of had swept something away. It had knocked

down, I suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my

flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast and

bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would come out a

contemporary. That was what had happened--the poor man was to be

squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on

the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A little more and he

would have dipped down to posterity and escaped.

IV

When he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside

him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore

spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance

I recognised the highest contemporary enterprise.

"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white;

"he wants to publish heaven knows what about me."

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted.

"Already?" I exclaimed, with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to

me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses: they suggested the

electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if

Paraday and I were tossing terrified under his bows. I saw that his

momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the first

in the field," he declared. "A great interest is naturally felt in Mr.

Paraday's surroundings."

"I hadn't the least idea of it," said Paraday, as if he had been told he

had been snoring.

"I find he has not read the article in _The Empire_," Mr. Morrow

remarked to me. "That's so very interesting--it's something to start

with," he smiled. He had begun to pull off his gloves, which were

violently new, and to look encouragingly round the little garden. As a

"surrounding" I felt that I myself had already been taken in; I was a

little fish in the stomach of a bigger one. "I represent," our visitor

continued, "a syndicate of influential journals, no less than

thirty-seven, whose public--whose publics, I may say--are in peculiar

sympathy with Mr. Paraday's line of thought. They would greatly

appreciate any expression of his views on the subject of the art he so

brilliantly practises. Besides my connection with the syndicate just

mentioned, I hold a particular commission from _The Tatler_, whose most

prominent department, 'Smatter and Chatter'--I daresay you've often

enjoyed it--attracts such attention. I was honoured only last week, as a

representative of _The Tatler_, with the confidence of Guy Walsingham,

the author of 'Obsessions.' She expressed herself thoroughly pleased

with my sketch of her method; she went so far as to say that I had made

her genius more comprehensible even to herself."

Neil Paraday had dropped upon the garden-bench and sat there, at once

detached and confused; he looked hard at a bare spot in the lawn, as if

with an anxiety that had suddenly made him grave. His movement had been

interpreted by his visitor as an invitation to sink sympathetically into

a wicker chair that stood hard by, and as Mr. Morrow so settled himself

I felt that he had taken official possession and that there was no

undoing it. One had heard of unfortunate people's having "a man in the

house," and this was just what we had. There was a silence of a moment,

during which we seemed to acknowledge in the only way that was possible

the presence of universal fate; the sunny stillness took no pity, and my

thought, as I was sure Paraday's was doing, performed within the minute

a great distant revolution. I saw just how emphatic I should make my

rejoinder to Mr. Pinhorn, and that having come, like Mr. Morrow, to

betray, I must remain as long as possible to save. Not because I had

brought my mind back, but because our visitor's last words were in my

ear, I presently inquired with gloomy irrelevance if Guy Walsingham were

a woman.

"Oh yes, a mere pseudonym; but convenient, you know, for a lady who goes

in for the larger latitude. 'Obsessions, by Miss So-and-So,' would look

a little odd, but men are more naturally indelicate. Have you peeped

into 'Obsessions'?" Mr. Morrow continued sociably to our companion.

Paraday, still absent, remote, made no answer, as if he had not heard

the question: a manifestation that appeared to suit the cheerful Mr.

Morrow as well as any other. Imperturbably bland, he was a man of

resources--he only needed to be on the spot. He had pocketed the whole

poor place while Paraday and I were woolgathering, and I could imagine

that he had already got his "heads." His system, at any rate, was

justified by the inevitability with which I replied, to save my friend

the trouble: "Dear, no; he hasn't read it. He doesn't read such things!"

I unwarily added.

"Things that are _too_ far over the fence, eh?" I was indeed a godsend

to Mr. Morrow. It was the psychological moment; it determined the

appearance of his notebook, which, however, he at first kept slightly

behind him, as the dentist, approaching his victim, keeps his horrible

forceps. "Mr. Paraday holds with the good old proprieties--I see!" And,

thinking of the thirty-seven influential journals, I found myself, as I

found poor Paraday, helplessly gazing at the promulgation of this

ineptitude. "There's no point on which distinguished views are so

acceptable as on this question--raised perhaps more strikingly than ever

by Guy Walsingham--of the permissibility of the larger latitude. I have

an appointment, precisely in connection with it, next week, with Dora

Forbes, the author of 'The Other Way Round,' which everybody is talking

about. Has Mr. Paraday glanced at 'The Other Way Round'?" Mr. Morrow now

frankly appealed to me. I took upon myself to repudiate the supposition,

while our companion, still silent, got up nervously and walked away. His

visitor paid no heed to his withdrawal; he only opened out the notebook

with a more motherly pat. "Dora Forbes, I gather, takes the ground, the

same as Guy Walsingham's, that the larger latitude has simply got to

come. He holds that it has got to be squarely faced. Of course his sex

makes him a less prejudiced witness. But an authoritative word from Mr.

Paraday--from the point of view of _his_ sex, you know--would go right

round the globe. He takes the line that we _haven't_ got to face it?"

I was bewildered; it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes. My

interlocutor's pencil was poised, my private responsibility great. I

simply sat staring, however, and only found presence of mind to say: "Is

this Miss Forbes a gentleman?"

Mr. Morrow hesitated an instant, smiling: "It wouldn't be

'Miss'--there's a wife!"

"I mean is she a man?"

"The wife?"--Mr. Morrow, for a moment, was as confused as myself. But

when I explained that I alluded to Dora Forbes in person he informed me,

with visible amusement at my being so out of it, that this was the

"pen-name" of an indubitable male--he had a big red moustache. "He only

assumes a feminine personality because the ladies are such popular

favourites. A great deal of interest is felt in this assumption, and

there's every prospect of its being widely imitated." Our host at this

moment joined us again, and Mr. Morrow remarked invitingly that he

should be happy to make a note of any observation the movement in

question, the bid for success under a lady's name, might suggest to Mr.

Paraday. But the poor man, without catching the allusion, excused

himself, pleading that, though he was greatly honoured by his visitor's

interest, he suddenly felt unwell and should have to take leave of

him--have to go and lie down and keep quiet. His young friend might be

trusted to answer for him, but he hoped Mr. Morrow didn't expect great

things even of his young friend. His young friend, at this moment,

looked at Neil Paraday with an anxious eye, greatly wondering if he were

doomed to be ill again; but Paraday's own kind face met his question

reassuringly, seemed to say in a glance intelligible enough: "Oh, I'm

not ill, but I'm scared: get him out of the house as quietly as

possible." Getting newspaper-men out of the house was odd business for

an emissary of Mr. Pinhorn, and I was so exhilarated by the idea of it

that I called after him as he left us:

"Read the article in _The Empire_, and you'll soon be all right!"

V

"Delicious my having come down to tell him of it!" Mr. Morrow

ejaculated. "My cab was at the door twenty minutes after _The Empire_

had been laid upon my breakfast-table. Now what have you got for me?" he

continued, dropping again into his chair, from which, however, the next

moment he quickly rose. "I was shown into the drawing-room, but there

must be more to see--his study, his literary sanctum, the little things

he has about, or other domestic objects or features. He wouldn't be

lying down on his study-table? There's a great interest always felt in

the scene of an author's labours. Sometimes we're favoured with very

delightful peeps. Dora Forbes showed me all his table-drawers, and

almost jammed my hand into one into which I made a dash! I don't ask

that of you, but if we could talk things over right there where he sits

I feel as if I should get the keynote."

I had no wish whatever to be rude to Mr. Morrow, I was much too

initiated not to prefer the safety of other ways; but I had a quick

inspiration and I entertained an insurmountable, an almost superstitious

objection to his crossing the threshold of my friend's little lonely,

shabby, consecrated workshop. "No, no--we sha'n't get at his life that

way," I said. "The way to get at his life is to--But wait a moment!" I

broke off and went quickly into the house; then, in three minutes, I

reappeared before Mr. Morrow with the two volumes of Paraday's new book.

"His life's here," I went on, "and I'm so full of this admirable thing

that I can't talk of anything else. The artist's life's his work, and

this is the place to observe him. What he has to tell us he tells us

with _this_ perfection. My dear sir, the best interviewer's the best

reader."

Mr. Morrow good-humouredly protested. "Do you mean to say that no other

source of information should be opened to us?"

"None other till this particular one--by far the most copious--has been

quite exhausted. Have you exhausted it, my dear sir? Had you exhausted

it when you came down here? It seems to me in our time almost wholly

neglected, and something should surely be done to restore its ruined

credit. It's the course to which the artist himself at every step, and

with such pathetic confidence, refers us. This last book of Mr.

Paraday's is full of revelations."

"Revelations?" panted Mr. Morrow, whom I had forced again into his

chair.

"The only kind that count. It tells you with a perfection that seems to

me quite final all the author thinks, for instance, about the advent of

the 'larger latitude.'"

"Where does it do that?" asked Mr. Morrow, who had picked up the second

volume and was insincerely thumbing it.

"Everywhere--in the whole treatment of his case. Extract the opinion,

disengage the answer--those are the real acts of homage."

Mr. Morrow, after a minute, tossed the book away. "Ah, but you mustn't

take me for a reviewer."

"Heaven forbid I should take you for anything so dreadful! You came down

to perform a little act of sympathy, and so, I may confide to you, did

I. Let us perform our little act together. These pages overflow with the

testimony we want: let us read them and taste them and interpret them.

You will of course have perceived for yourself that one scarcely does

read Neil Paraday till one reads him aloud; he gives out to the ear an

extraordinary quality, and it's only when you expose it confidently to

that test that you really get near his style. Take up your book again

and let me listen, while you pay it out, to that wonderful fifteenth

chapter. If you feel that you can't do it justice, compose yourself to

attention while I produce for you--I think I can!--this scarcely less

admirable ninth."

Mr. Morrow gave me a straight glance which was as hard as a blow between

the eyes; he had turned rather red and a question had formed itself in

his mind which reached my sense as distinctly as if he had uttered it:

"What sort of a damned fool are _you_?" Then he got up, gathering

together his hat and gloves, buttoning his coat, projecting hungrily all

over the place the big transparency of his mask. It seemed to flare over

Fleet Street and somehow made the actual spot distressingly humble:

there was so little for it to feed on unless he counted the blisters of

our stucco or saw his way to do something with the roses. Even the poor

roses were common kinds. Presently his eyes fell upon the manuscript

from which Paraday had been reading to me and which still lay on the

bench. As my own followed them I saw that it looked promising, looked

pregnant, as if it gently throbbed with the life the reader had given

it. Mr. Morrow indulged in a nod toward it and a vague thrust of his

umbrella. "What's that?"

"Oh, it's a plan--a secret."

"A secret!" There was an instant's silence, and then Mr. Morrow made

another movement. I may have been mistaken, but it affected me as the

translated impulse of the desire to lay hands on the manuscript, and

this led me to indulge in a quick anticipatory grab which may very well

have seemed ungraceful, or even impertinent, and which at any rate left

Mr. Paraday's two admirers very erect, glaring at each other while one

of them held a bundle of papers well behind him. An instant later Mr.

Morrow quitted me abruptly, as if he had really carried something away.

To reassure myself, watching his broad back recede, I only grasped my

manuscript the tighter. He went to the back-door of the house, the one

he had come out from, but on trying the handle he appeared to find it

fastened. So he passed round into the front garden, and, by listening

intently enough, I could presently hear the outer gate close behind him

with a bang. I thought again of the thirty-seven influential journals

and wondered what would be his revenge. I hasten to add that he was

magnanimous: which was just the most dreadful thing he could have been.

_The Tatler_ published a charming, chatty, familiar account of Mr.

Paraday's "Home-life," and on the wings of the thirty-seven influential

journals it went, to use Mr. Morrow's own expression, right round the

globe.

VI

A week later, early in May, my glorified friend came up to town, where,

it may be veraciously recorded, he was the king of the beasts of the

year. No advancement was ever more rapid, no exaltation more complete,

no bewilderment more teachable. His book sold but moderately, though the

article in _The Empire_ had done unwonted wonders for it; but he

circulated in person in a manner that the libraries might well have

envied. His formula had been found--he was a "revelation." His momentary

terror had been real, just as mine had been--the overclouding of his

passionate desire to be left to finish his work. He was far from

unsociable, but he had the finest conception of being let alone that I

have ever met. For the time, however, he took his profit where it seemed

most to crowd upon him, having in his pocket the portable sophistries

about the nature of the artist's task. Observation too was a kind of

work and experience a kind of success; London dinners were all material

and London ladies were fruitful toil. "No one has the faintest

conception of what I'm trying for," he said to me, "and not many have

read three pages that I've written; but they're all enthusiastic,

enchanted, devoted." He found himself in truth equally amused and

fatigued; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, and the

phantasmagoric town was perhaps after all less of a battlefield than the

haunted study. He once told me that he had had no personal life to speak

of since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him

before. London closed the parenthesis and exhibited him in relations;

one of the most inevitable of these being that in which he found himself

to Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless brewer and proprietress of

the universal menagerie. In this establishment, as everybody knows, on

occasions when the crush is great, the animals rub shoulders freely with

the spectators and the lions sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.

It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil Paraday

this lady, who, as all the world agreed, was tremendous fun, considered

that she had secured a prime attraction, a creature of almost heraldic

oddity. Nothing could exceed her enthusiasm over her capture, and

nothing could exceed the confused apprehensions it excited in me. I had

an instinctive fear of her which I tried without effect to conceal from

her victim, but which I let her perceive with perfect impunity. Paraday

heeded it, but she never did, for her conscience was that of a romping

child. She was a blind, violent force, to which I could attach no more

idea of responsibility than to the hum of a spinning-top. It was

difficult to say what she conduced to but to circulation. She was

constructed of steel and leather, and all I asked of her for our

tractable friend was not to do him to death. He had consented for a

time to be of indiarubber, but my thoughts were fixed on the day he

should resume his shape or at least get back into his box. It was

evidently all right, but I should be glad when it was well over. I was

simply nervous--the impression was ineffaceable of the hour when, after

Mr. Morrow's departure, I had found him on the sofa in his study. That

pretext of indisposition had not in the least been meant as a snub to

the envoy of _The Tatler_--he had gone to lie down in very truth. He had

felt a pang of his old pain, the result of the agitation wrought in him

by this forcing open of a new period. His old programme, his old ideal

even had to be changed. Say what one would, success was a complication

and recognition had to be reciprocal. The monastic life, the pious

illumination of the missal in the convent cell were things of the

gathered past. It didn't engender despair, but it at least required

adjustment. Before I left him on that occasion we had passed a bargain,

my part of which was that I should make it my business to take care of

him. Let whoever would represent the interest in his presence (I had a

mystical prevision of Mrs. Weeks Wimbush), I should represent the

interest in his work--in other words, in his absence. These two

interests were in their essence opposed; and I doubt, as youth is

fleeting, if I shall ever again know the intensity of joy with which I

felt that in so good a cause I was willing to make myself odious.

One day, in Sloane Street, I found myself questioning Paraday's

landlord, who had come to the door in answer to my knock. Two vehicles,

a barouche and a smart hansom, were drawn up before the house.

"In the drawing-room, sir? Mrs. Weeks Wimbush."

"And in the dining-room?"

"A young lady, sir--waiting: I think a foreigner."

It was three o'clock, and on days when Paraday didn't lunch out he

attached a value to these subjugated hours. On which days, however,

didn't the dear man lunch out? Mrs. Wimbush, at such a crisis, would

have rushed round immediately after her own repast. I went into the

dining-room first, postponing the pleasure of seeing how, upstairs, the

lady of the barouche would, on my arrival, point the moral of my sweet

solicitude. No one took such an interest as herself in his doing only

what was good for him, and she was always on the spot to see that he did

it. She made appointments with him to discuss the best means of

economising his time and protecting his privacy. She further made his

health her special business, and had so much sympathy with my own zeal

for it that she was the author of pleasing fictions on the subject of

what my devotion had led me to give up. I gave up nothing (I don't count

Mr. Pinhorn) because I had nothing, and all I had as yet achieved was to

find myself also in the menagerie. I had dashed in to save my friend,

but I had only got domesticated and wedged; so that I could do nothing

for him but exchange with him over people's heads looks of intense but

futile intelligence.

VII

The young lady in the dining-room had a brave face, black hair, blue

eyes, and in her lap a big volume. "I've come for his autograph," she

said, when I had explained to her that I was under bonds to see people

for him when he was occupied. "I've been waiting half an hour, but I'm

prepared to wait all day." I don't know whether it was this that told me

she was American, for the propensity to wait all day is not in general

characteristic of her race. I was enlightened probably not so much by

the spirit of the utterance as by some quality of its sound. At any rate

I saw she had an individual patience and a lovely frock, together with

an expression that played among her pretty features as a breeze among

flowers. Putting her book upon the table, she showed me a massive album,

showily bound and full of autographs of price. The collection of faded

notes, of still more faded "thoughts," of quotations, platitudes,

signatures, represented a formidable purpose.

"Most people apply to Mr. Paraday by letter, you know," I said.

"Yes, but he doesn't answer. I've written three times."

"Very true," I reflected; "the sort of letter you mean goes straight

into the fire."

"How do you know the sort I mean?" my interlocutress asked. She had

blushed and smiled and in a moment she added: "I don't believe he gets

many like them!"

"I'm sure they're beautiful, but he burns without reading." I didn't add

that I had told him he ought to.

"Isn't he then in danger of burning things of importance?"

"He would be, if distinguished men hadn't an infallible nose for a

petition."

She looked at me a moment--her face was sweet and gay. "Do _you_ burn

without reading, too?" she asked; in answer to which I assured her that

if she would trust me with her repository I would see that Mr. Paraday

should write his name in it.

She considered a little. "That's very well, but it wouldn't make me see

him."

"Do you want very much to see him?" It seemed ungracious to catechise so

charming a creature, but somehow I had never yet taken my duty to the

great author so seriously.

"Enough to have come from America for the purpose."

I stared. "All alone?"

"I don't see that that's exactly your business; but if it will make me

more appealing I will confess that I am quite by myself. I had to come

alone or not at all."

She was interesting; I could imagine that she had lost parents, natural

protectors--could conceive even that she had inherited money. I was in a

phase of my own fortunes when keeping hansoms at doors seemed to me pure

swagger. As a trick of this frank and delicate girl, however, it became

romantic--a part of the general romance of her freedom, her errand, her

innocence. The confidence of young Americans was notorious, and I

speedily arrived at a conviction that no impulse could have been more

generous than the impulse that had operated here. I foresaw at that

moment that it would make her my peculiar charge, just as circumstances

had made Neil Paraday. She would be another person to look after, and

one's honour would be concerned in guiding her straight. These things

became clearer to me later; at the instant I had scepticism enough to

observe to her, as I turned the pages of her volume, that her net had,

all the same, caught many a big fish. She appeared to have had fruitful

access to the great ones of the earth; there were people moreover whose

signatures she had presumably secured without a personal interview. She

couldn't have waylaid George Washington and Friedrich Schiller and

Hannah More. She met this argument, to my surprise, by throwing up the

album without a pang. It wasn't even her own; she was responsible for

none of its treasures. It belonged to a girl-friend in America, a young

lady in a western city. This young lady had insisted on her bringing it,

to pick up more autographs: she thought they might like to see, in

Europe, in what company they would be. The "girl-friend," the western

city, the immortal names, the curious errand, the idyllic faith, all

made a story as strange to me, and as beguiling, as some tale in the

Arabian Nights. Thus it was that my informant had encumbered herself

with the ponderous tome; but she hastened to assure me that this was the

first time she had brought it out. For her visit to Mr. Paraday it had

simply been a pretext. She didn't really care a straw that he should

write his name; what she did want was to look straight into his face.

I demurred a little. "And why do you require to do that?"

"Because I just love him!" Before I could recover from the agitating

effect of this crystal ring my companion had continued: "Hasn't there

ever been any face that you've wanted to look into?"

How could I tell her so soon how much I appreciated the opportunity of

looking into hers? I could only assent in general to the proposition

that there were certainly for everyone such faces; and I felt that the

crisis demanded all my lucidity, all my wisdom. "Oh, yes, I'm a student

of physiognomy. Do you mean," I pursued, "that you've a passion for Mr.

Paraday's books?"

"They've been everything to me--I know them by heart. They've completely

taken hold of me. There's no author about whom I feel as I do about Neil

Paraday."

"Permit me to remark then," I presently rejoined, "that you're one of

the right sort."

"One of the enthusiasts? Of course I am!"

"Oh, there are enthusiasts who are quite of the wrong. I mean you're one

of those to whom an appeal can be made."

"An appeal?" Her face lighted as if with the chance of some great

sacrifice.

If she was ready for one it was only waiting for her, and in a moment I

mentioned it. "Give up this rigid purpose of seeing him. Go away without

it. That will be far better."

She looked mystified; then she turned visibly pale. "Why, hasn't he any

personal charm?" The girl was terrible and laughable in her bright

directness.

"Ah, that dreadful word 'personal'!" I exclaimed; "we're dying of it,

and you women bring it out with murderous effect. When you encounter a

genius as fine as this idol of ours, let him off the dreary duty of

being a personality as well. Know him only by what's best in him, and

spare him for the same sweet sake."

My young lady continued to look at me in confusion and mistrust, and the

result of her reflection on what I had just said was to make her

suddenly break out: "Look here, sir--what's the matter with him?"

"The matter with him is that, if he doesn't look out, people will eat a

great hole in his life."

She considered a moment. "He hasn't any disfigurement?"

"Nothing to speak of!"

"Do you mean that social engagements interfere with his occupations?"

"That but feebly expresses it."

"So that he can't give himself up to his beautiful imagination?"

"He's badgered, bothered, overwhelmed, on the pretext of being

applauded. People expect him to give them his time, his golden time, who

wouldn't themselves give five shillings for one of his books."

"Five? I'd give five thousand!"

"Give your sympathy--give your forbearance. Two-thirds of those who

approach him only do it to advertise themselves."

"Why, it's too bad!" the girl exclaimed, with the face of an angel.

I followed up my advantage. "There's a lady with him now who's a

terrible complication, and who yet hasn't read, I am sure, ten pages

that he ever wrote."

My visitor's wide eyes grew tenderer. "Then how does she talk----?"

"Without ceasing. I only mention her as a single case. Do you want to

know how to show a superlative consideration? Simply avoid him."

"Avoid him?" she softly wailed.

"Don't force him to have to take account of you; admire him in silence,

cultivate him at a distance and secretly appropriate his message. Do you

want to know," I continued, warming to my idea, "how to perform an act

of homage really sublime?" Then as she hung on my words: "Succeed in

never seeing him!"

"Never?" she pathetically gasped.

"The more you get into his writings the less you'll want to; and you'll

be immensely sustained by the thought of the good you're doing him."

She looked at me without resentment or spite, and at the truth I had put

before her with candour, credulity and pity. I was afterwards happy to

remember that she must have recognised in my face the liveliness of my

interest in herself. "I think I see what you mean."

"Oh, I express it badly; but I should be delighted if you would let me

come to see you--to explain it better."

She made no response to this, and her thoughtful eyes fell on the big

album, on which she presently laid her hands as if to take it away. "I

did use to say out West that they might write a little less for

autographs (to all the great poets, you know) and study the thoughts and

style a little more."

"What do they care for the thoughts and style? They didn't even

understand you. I'm not sure," I added, "that I do myself, and I daresay

that you by no means make me out." She had got up to go, and though I

wanted her to succeed in not seeing Neil Paraday I wanted her also,

inconsequently, to remain in the house. I was at any rate far from

desiring to hustle her off. As Mrs. Weeks Wimbush, upstairs, was still

saving our friend in her own way, I asked my young lady to let me

briefly relate, in illustration of my point, the little incident of my

having gone down into the country for a profane purpose and been

converted on the spot to holiness. Sinking again into her chair to

listen, she showed a deep interest in the anecdote. Then, thinking it

over gravely, she exclaimed with her odd intonation:

"Yes, but you do see him!" I had to admit that this was the case; and I

was not so prepared with an effective attenuation as I could have

wished. She eased the situation off, however, by the charming quaintness

with which she finally said: "Well, I wouldn't want him to be lonely!"

This time she rose in earnest, but I persuaded her to let me keep the

album to show to Mr. Paraday. I assured her I would bring it back to her

myself. "Well, you'll find my address somewhere in it, on a paper!" she

sighed resignedly, as she took leave.

VIII

I blush to confess it, but I invited Mr. Paraday that very day to

transcribe into the album one of his most characteristic passages. I

told him how I had got rid of the strange girl who had brought it--her

ominous name was Miss Hurter and she lived at an hotel; quite agreeing

with him moreover as to the wisdom of getting rid with equal promptitude

of the book itself. This was why I carried it to Albemarle Street no

later than on the morrow. I failed to find her at home, but she wrote to

me and I went again: she wanted so much to hear more about Neil Paraday.

I returned repeatedly, I may briefly declare, to supply her with this

information. She had been immensely taken, the more she thought of it,

with that idea of mine about the act of homage: it had ended by filling

her with a generous rapture. She positively desired to do something

sublime for him, though indeed I could see that, as this particular

flight was difficult, she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her

up. I had it on my conscience to keep her up; I neglected nothing that

would contribute to it, and her conception of our cherished author's

independence became at last as fine as his own conception. "Read him,

read him," I constantly repeated; while, seeking him in his works, she

represented herself as convinced that, according to my assurance, this

was the system that had, as she expressed it, weaned her. We read him

together when I could find time, and the generous creature's sacrifice

was fed by our conversation. There were twenty selfish women, about whom

I told her, who stirred her with a beautiful rage. Immediately after my

first visit her sister, Mrs. Milsom, came over from Paris, and the two

ladies began to present, as they called it, their letters. I thanked our

stars that none had been presented to Mr. Paraday. They received

invitations and dined out, and some of these occasions enabled Fanny

Hurter to perform, for consistency's sake, touching feats of submission.

Nothing indeed would now have induced her even to look at the object of

her admiration. Once, hearing his name announced at a party, she

instantly left the room by another door and then straightway quitted

the house. At another time, when I was at the opera with them (Mrs.

Milsom had invited me to their box) I attempted to point Mr. Paraday out

to her in the stalls. On this she asked her sister to change places with

her, and, while that lady devoured the great man through a powerful

glass, presented, all the rest of the evening, her inspired back to the

house. To torment her tenderly I pressed the glass upon her, telling her

how wonderfully near it brought our friend's handsome head. By way of

answer she simply looked at me in grave silence; on which I saw that

tears had gathered in her eyes. These tears, I may remark, produced an

effect on me of which the end is not yet. There was a moment when I felt

it my duty to mention them to Neil Paraday; but I was deterred by the

reflection that there were questions more relevant to his happiness.

These questions indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to a

single one--the question of reconstituting, so far as might be possible,

the conditions under which he had produced his best work. Such

conditions could never all come back, for there was a new one that took

up too much place; but some perhaps were not beyond recall. I wanted

above all things to see him sit down to the subject of which, on my

making his acquaintance, he had read me that admirable sketch. Something

told me there was no security but in his doing so before the new factor,

as we used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, should render the problem

incalculable. It only half reassured me that the sketch itself was so

copious and so eloquent that even at the worst there would be the making

of a small but complete book, a tiny volume which, for the faithful,

might well become an object of adoration. There would even not be

wanting critics to declare, I foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be

more thankful for than the structure to have been reared on it. My

impatience for the structure, none the less, grew and grew with the

interruptions. He had, on coming up to town, begun to sit for his

portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we used

to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on the shoulders

of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which the man of the

hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the hoops of his showy

frames almost as electrically as they burst into telegrams and

"specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their back; he was the

reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and there was one roaring

year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby, Guy Walsingham and Dora

Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same pictured walls that no one had

yet got ahead of him.

Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with

characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in his

show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality. From Mrs.

Wimbush to the last "representative" who called to ascertain his twelve

favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous assumption that he would

rejoice in the repercussion. There were moments when I fancied I might

have had more patience with them if they had not been so fatally

benevolent. I hated, at all events, Mr. Rumble's picture, and had my

bottled resentment ready when, later on, I found my distracted friend

had been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush into the mouth of another cannon. A

young artist in whom she was intensely interested, and who had no

connection with Mr. Rumble, was to show how far he could shoot him. Poor

Paraday, in return, was naturally to write something somewhere about the

young artist. She played her victims against each other with admirable

ingenuity, and her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest

and the biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene

with her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was

to exercise his genius--not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial

posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors of

magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so aware

were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him grind

their axes by contributing his views on vital topics and taking part in

the periodical prattle about the future of fiction. I made sure that

before I should have done with him there would scarcely be a current

form of words left me to be sick of; but meanwhile I could make surer

still of my animosity to bustling ladies for whom he drew the water that

irrigated their social flower-beds.

I had a battle with Mrs. Wimbush over the artist she protected, and

another over the question of a certain week, at the end of July, that

Mr. Paraday appeared to have contracted to spend with her in the

country. I protested against this visit; I intimated that he was too

unwell for hospitality without a _nuance_, for caresses without

imagination; I begged he might rather take the time in some restorative

way. A sultry air of promises, of reminders hung over his August, and he

would greatly profit by the interval of rest. He had not told me he was

ill again--that he had had a warning; but I had not heeded this, and I

found his reticence his worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was

that he believed a comfortable attack of something or other would set

him up: it would put out of the question everything but the exemptions

he prized. I am afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a very

small cause if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself much more

liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs, for the most

part, with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy was in the

spectacles through which I chose to look. He was conscious of

inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement; but how could he

have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his accession? The sagacity and

the jealousy were mine, and his the impressions and the anecdotes. Of

course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I was worsted in my encounters, for was

not the state of his health the very reason for his coming to her at

Prestidge? Wasn't it precisely at Prestidge that he was to be coddled,

and wasn't the dear Princess coming to help her to coddle him? The dear

Princess, now on a visit to England, was of a famous foreign house, and,

in her gilded cage, with her retinue of keepers and feeders, was the

most expensive specimen in the good lady's collection. I don't think her

august presence had had to do with Paraday's consenting to go, but it is

not impossible that he had operated as a bait to the illustrious

stranger. The party had been made up for him, Mrs. Wimbush averred, and

everyone was counting on it, the dear Princess most of all. If he was

well enough he was to read them something absolutely fresh, and it was

on that particular prospect the Princess had set her heart. She was so

fond of genius, in _any_ walk of life, and she was so used to it, and

understood it so well; she was the greatest of Mr. Paraday's admirers,

she devoured everything he wrote. And then he read like an angel. Mrs.

Wimbush reminded me that he had again and again given her, Mrs. Wimbush,

the privilege of listening to him.

I looked at her a moment. "What has he read to you?" I crudely inquired.

For a moment too she met my eyes, and for the fraction of a moment she

hesitated and coloured. "Oh, all sorts of things!"

I wondered whether this were a perfect fib or only an imperfect

recollection, and she quite understood my unuttered comment on her

perception of such things. But if she could forget Neil Paraday's

beauties she could of course forget my rudeness, and three days later

she invited me, by telegraph, to join the party at Prestidge. This time

she might indeed have had a story about what I had given up to be near

the master. I addressed from that fine residence several communications

to a young lady in London, a young lady whom, I confess, I quitted with

reluctance and whom the reminder of what she herself could give up was

required to make me quit at all. It adds to the gratitude I owe her on

other grounds that she kindly allows me to transcribe from my letters a

few of the passages in which that hateful sojourn is candidly

commemorated.

IX

"I suppose I ought to enjoy the joke," I wrote, "of what's going on

here, but somehow it doesn't amuse me. Pessimism on the contrary

possesses me and cynicism solicits. I positively feel my own flesh sore

from the brass nails in Neil Paraday's social harness. The house is full

of people who like him, as they mention, awfully, and with whom his

talent for talking nonsense has prodigious success. I delight in his

nonsense myself; why is it therefore that I grudge these happy folk

their artless satisfaction? Mystery of the human heart--abyss of the

critical spirit! Mrs. Wimbush thinks she can answer that question, and

as my want of gaiety has at last worn out her patience she has given me

a glimpse of her shrewd guess. I am made restless by the selfishness of

the insincere friend--I want to monopolise Paraday in order that he may

push me on. To be intimate with him is a feather in my cap; it gives me

an importance that I couldn't naturally pretend to, and I seek to

deprive him of social refreshment because I fear that meeting more

disinterested people may enlighten him as to my real spirit. All the

disinterested people here are his particular admirers and have been

carefully selected as such. There is supposed to be a copy of his last

book in the house, and in the hall I come upon ladies, in attitudes,

bending gracefully over the first volume. I discreetly avert my eyes,

and when I next look round the precarious joy has been superseded by the

book of life. There is a sociable circle or a confidential couple, and

the relinquished volume lies open on its face, as if it had been dropped

under extreme coercion. Somebody else presently finds it and transfers

it, with its air of momentary desolation, to another piece of furniture.

Every one is asking every one about it all day, and everyone is telling

everyone where they put it last. I'm sure it's rather smudgy about the

twentieth page. I have a strong impression too that the second volume is

lost--has been packed in the bag of some departing guest; and yet

everybody has the impression that somebody else has read to the end. You

see therefore that the beautiful book plays a great part in our

conversation. Why should I take the occasion of such distinguished

honours to say that I begin to see deeper into Gustave Flaubert's

doleful refrain about the hatred of literature? I refer you again to the

perverse constitution of man.

"The Princess is a massive lady with the organisation of an athlete and

the confusion of tongues of a _valet de place_. She contrives to commit

herself extraordinarily little in a great many languages, and is

entertained and conversed with in detachments and relays, like an

institution which goes on from generation to generation or a big

building contracted for under a forfeit. She can't have a personal

taste, any more than, when her husband succeeds, she can have a personal

crown, and her opinion on any matter is rusty and heavy and plain--made,

in the night of ages, to last and be transmitted. I feel as if I ought

to pay some one a fee for my glimpse of it. She has been told

everything in the world and has never perceived anything, and the echoes

of her education respond awfully to the rash footfall--I mean the casual

remark--in the cold Valhalla of her memory. Mrs. Wimbush delights in her

wit and says there is nothing so charming as to hear Mr. Paraday draw it

out. He is perpetually detailed for this job, and he tells me it has a

peculiarly exhausting effect. Every one is beginning--at the end of two

days--to sidle obsequiously away from her, and Mrs. Wimbush pushes him

again and again into the breach. None of the uses I have yet seen him

put to irritate me quite so much. He looks very fagged, and has at last

confessed to me that his condition makes him uneasy--has even promised

me that he will go straight home instead of returning to his final

engagements in town. Last night I had some talk with him about going

to-day, cutting his visit short; so sure am I that he will be better as

soon as he is shut up in his lighthouse. He told me that this is what he

would like to do; reminding me, however, that the first lesson of his

greatness has been precisely that he can't do what he likes. Mrs.

Wimbush would never forgive him if he should leave her before the

Princess has received the last hand. When I say that a violent rupture

with our hostess would be the best thing in the world for him he gives

me to understand that if his reason assents to the proposition his

courage hangs wofully back. He makes no secret of being mortally afraid

of her, and when I ask what harm she can do him that she hasn't already

done he simply repeats: 'I'm afraid, I'm afraid! Don't inquire too

closely,' he said last night; 'only believe that I feel a sort of

terror. It's strange, when she's so kind! At any rate, I would as soon

overturn that piece of priceless Sèvres as tell her that I must go

before my date.' It sounds dreadfully weak, but he has some reason, and

he pays for his imagination, which puts him (I should hate it) in the

place of others and makes him feel, even against himself, their

feelings, their appetites, their motives. He's so beastly intelligent.

Besides, the famous reading is still to come off, and it has been

postponed a day, to allow Guy Walsingham to arrive. It appears that this

eminent lady is staying at a house a few miles off, which means of

course that Mrs. Wimbush has forcibly annexed her. She's to come over in

a day or two--Mrs. Wimbush wants her to hear Mr. Paraday.

"To-day's wet and cold, and several of the company, at the invitation of

the Duke, have driven over to luncheon at Bigwood. I saw poor Paraday

wedge himself, by command, into the little supplementary seat of a

brougham in which the Princess and our hostess were already ensconced.

If the front glass isn't open on his dear old back perhaps he'll

survive. Bigwood, I believe, is very grand and frigid, all marble and

precedence, and I wish him well out of the adventure. I can't tell you

how much more and more _your_ attitude to him, in the midst of all this,

shines out by contrast. I never willingly talk to these people about

him, but see what a comfort I find it to scribble to you! I appreciate

it; it keeps me warm; there are no fires in the house. Mrs. Wimbush goes

by the calendar, the temperature goes by the weather, the weather goes

by God knows what, and the Princess is easily heated. I have nothing but

my acrimony to warm me, and have been out under an umbrella to restore

my circulation. Coming in an hour ago, I found Lady Augusta Minch

rummaging about the hall. When I asked her what she was looking for she

said she had mislaid something that Mr. Paraday had lent her. I

ascertained in a moment that the article in question is a manuscript,

and I have a foreboding that it's the noble morsel he read me six weeks

ago. When I expressed my surprise that he should have passed about

anything so precious (I happen to know it's his only copy--in the most

beautiful hand in all the world) Lady Augusta confessed to me that she

had not had it from himself, but from Mrs. Wimbush, who had wished to

give her a glimpse of it as a salve for her not being able to stay and

hear it read.

"'Is that the piece he's to read,' I asked, 'when Guy Walsingham

arrives?'

"'It's not for Guy Walsingham they're waiting now, it's for Dora

Forbes,' Lady Augusta said. 'She's coming, I believe, early to-morrow.

Meanwhile Mrs. Wimbush has found out about _him_ and is actively wiring

to him. She says he also must hear him.'

"'You bewilder me a little,' I replied; 'in the age we live in one gets

lost among the genders and the pronouns. The clear thing is that Mrs.

Wimbush doesn't guard such a treasure as jealously as she might.'

"'Poor dear, she has the Princess to guard! Mr. Paraday lent her the

manuscript to look over.'

"'Did she speak as if it were the morning paper?'

"Lady Augusta stared--my irony was lost upon her. 'She didn't have time,

so she gave me a chance first; because unfortunately I go to-morrow to

Bigwood.'

"'And your chance has only proved a chance to lose it?'

"'I haven't lost it. I remember now--it was very stupid of me to have

forgotten. I told my maid to give it to Lord Dorimont--or at least to

his man.'

"'And Lord Dorimont went away directly after luncheon.'

"'Of course he gave it back to my maid--or else his man did,' said Lady

Augusta. 'I daresay it's all right.'

"The conscience of these people is like a summer sea. They haven't time

to 'look over' a priceless composition; they've only time to kick it

about the house. I suggested that the 'man,' fired with a noble

emulation, had perhaps kept the work for his own perusal; and her

ladyship wanted to know whether, if the thing didn't turn up again in

time for the session appointed by our hostess, the author wouldn't have

something else to read that would do just as well. Their questions are

too delightful! I declared to Lady Augusta briefly that nothing in the

world can ever do as well as the thing that does best; and at this she

looked a little confused and scared. But I added that if the manuscript

had gone astray our little circle would have the less of an effort of

attention to make. The piece in question was very long--it would keep

them three hours.

"'Three hours! Oh, the Princess will get up!' said Lady Augusta.

"'I thought she was Mr. Paraday's greatest admirer.'

"'I daresay she is--she's so awfully clever. But what's the use of being

a Princess----'

"'If you can't dissemble your love?' I asked, as Lady Augusta was vague.

She said, at any rate, that she would question her maid; and I am hoping

that when I go down to dinner I shall find the manuscript has been

recovered."

X

"It has not been recovered," I wrote early the next day, "and I am

moreover much troubled about our friend. He came back from Bigwood with

a chill and, being allowed to have a fire in his room, lay down a while

before dinner. I tried to send him to bed and indeed thought I had put

him in the way of it; but after I had gone to dress Mrs. Wimbush came up

to see him, with the inevitable result that when I returned I found him

under arms and flushed and feverish, though decorated with the rare

flower she had brought him for his button-hole. He came down to dinner,

but Lady Augusta Minch was very shy of him. To-day he's in great pain,

and the advent of those ladies--I mean of Guy Walsingham and Dora

Forbes--doesn't at all console me. It does Mrs. Wimbush, however, for

she has consented to his remaining in bed, so that he may be all right

to-morrow for the _séance_. Guy Walsingham is already on the scene, and

the doctor, for Paraday, also arrived early. I haven't yet seen the

author of 'Obsessions,' but of course I've had a moment by myself with

the doctor. I tried to get him to say that our invalid must go straight

home--I mean to-morrow or next day; but he quite refuses to talk about

the future. Absolute quiet and warmth and the regular administration of

an important remedy are the points he mainly insists on. He returns this

afternoon, and I'm to go back to see the patient at one o'clock, when he

next takes his medicine. It consoles me a little that he certainly won't

be able to read--an exertion he was already more than unfit for. Lady

Augusta went off after breakfast, assuring me that her first care would

be to follow up the lost manuscript. I can see she thinks me a shocking

busybody and doesn't understand my alarm, but she will do what she can,

for she's a good-natured woman. 'So are they all honourable men.' That

was precisely what made her give the thing to Lord Dorimont and made

Lord Dorimont bag it. What use _he_ has for it God only knows. I have

the worst forebodings, but somehow I'm strangely without

passion--desperately calm. As I consider the unconscious, the

well-meaning ravages of our appreciative circle I bow my head in

submission to some great natural, some universal accident; I'm rendered

almost indifferent, in fact quite gay (ha-ha!) by the sense of

immitigable fate. Lady Augusta promises me to trace the precious object

and let me have it, through the post, by the time Paraday is well

enough to play his part with it. The last evidence is that her maid did

give it to his lordship's valet. One would think it was some thrilling

number of _The Family Budget_. Mrs. Wimbush, who is aware of the

accident, is much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were

she not for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."

Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I kept a

sort of diary of the situation, that I had made the acquaintance of this

celebrity and that she was a pretty little girl who wore her hair in

what used to be called a crop. She looked so juvenile and so innocent

that if, as Mr. Morrow had announced, she was resigned to the larger

latitude, her fortitude must have come to her early. I spent most of the

day hovering about Neil Paraday's room, but it was communicated to me

from below that Guy Walsingham, at Prestidge, was a success. Towards

evening I became conscious somehow that her resignation was contagious

and by the time the company separated for the night I was sure that the

larger latitude had been generally accepted. I thought of Dora Forbes

and felt that he had no time to lose. Before dinner I received a

telegram from Lady Augusta Minch. "Lord Dorimont thinks he must have

left bundle in train--inquire." How could I inquire--if I was to take

the word as a command? I was too worried and now too alarmed about Neil

Paraday. The doctor came back, and it was an immense satisfaction to me

to feel that he was wise and interested. He was proud of being called to

so distinguished a patient, but he admitted to me that night that my

friend was gravely ill. It was really a relapse, a recrudescence of his

old malady. There could be no question of moving him: we must at any

rate see first, on the spot, what turn his condition would take.

Meanwhile, on the morrow, he was to have a nurse. On the morrow the

dear man was easier and my spirits rose to such cheerfulness that I

could almost laugh over Lady Augusta's second telegram: "Lord Dorimont's

servant been to station--nothing found. Push inquiries." I did laugh, I

am sure, as I remembered this was the mystic scroll I had scarcely

allowed poor Mr. Morrow to point his umbrella at. Fool that I had been:

the thirty-seven influential journals wouldn't have destroyed it, they

would only have printed it. Of course I said nothing to Paraday.

When the nurse arrived she turned me out of the room, on which I went

downstairs. I should premise that at breakfast the news that our

brilliant friend was doing well excited universal complacency, and the

Princess graciously remarked that he was only to be commiserated for

missing the society of Miss Collop. Mrs. Wimbush, whose social gift

never shone brighter than in the dry decorum with which she accepted

this blemish on her perfection, mentioned to me that Guy Walsingham had

made a very favourable impression on her Imperial Highness. Indeed I

think everyone did so and that, like the money-market or the national

honour, her Imperial Highness was constitutionally sensitive. There was

a certain gladness, a perceptible bustle in the air, however, which I

thought slightly anomalous in a house where a great author lay

critically ill. "_Le roy est mort--vive le roy_": I was reminded that

another great author had already stepped into his shoes. When I came

down again after the nurse had taken possession I found a strange

gentleman hanging about the hall and pacing to and fro by the closed

door of the drawing-room. This personage was florid and bald, he had a

big red moustache and wore showy knickerbockers--characteristics all

that fitted into my conception of the identity of Dora Forbes. In a

moment I saw what had happened: the author of "The Other Way Round" had

just alighted at the portals of Prestidge, but had suffered a scruple to

restrain him from penetrating further. I recognised his scruple when,

pausing to listen at his gesture of caution, I heard a shrill voice

lifted in a prolonged monotonous quaver. The famous reading had begun,

only it was the author of "Obsessions" who now furnished the sacrifice.

The new visitor whispered to me that he judged something was going on

that he oughtn't to interrupt.

"Miss Collop arrived last night," I smiled, "and the Princess has a

thirst for the _inédit_."

Dora Forbes lifted his bushy brows. "Miss Collop?"

"Guy Walsingham, your distinguished _confrère_--or shall I say your

formidable rival?"

"Oh!" growled Dora Forbes. Then he added: "Shall I spoil it if I go in?"

"I should think nothing could spoil it!" I ambiguously laughed.

Dora Forbes evidently felt the dilemma; he gave an irritated crook to

his moustache. "_Shall_ I go in?" he presently asked.

We looked at each other hard a moment; then I expressed something bitter

that was in me, expressed it in an infernal "Yes!" After this I got out

into the air, but not so quickly as not to hear, as the door of the

drawing-room opened, the disconcerted drop of Miss Collop's public

manner: she must have been in the midst of the larger latitude.

Producing with extreme rapidity, Guy Walsingham has just published a

work in which amiable people who are not initiated have been pained to

see the genius of a sister-novelist held up to unmistakable ridicule; so

fresh an exhibition does it seem to them of the dreadful way men have

always treated women. Dora Forbes, it is true, at the present hour, is

immensely pushed by Mrs. Wimbush, and has sat for his portrait to the

young artists she protects, sat for it not only in oils but in

monumental alabaster.

What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course contemporary

history. If the interruption I had whimsically sanctioned was almost a

scandal, what is to be said of that general dispersal of the company

which, under the doctor's rule, began to take place in the evening? His

rule was soothing to behold, small comfort as I was to have at the end.

He decreed in the interest of his patient an absolutely soundless house

and a consequent break-up of the party. Little country practitioner as

he was, he literally packed off the Princess. She departed as promptly

as if a revolution had broken out, and Guy Walsingham emigrated with

her. I was kindly permitted to remain, and this was not denied even to

Mrs. Wimbush. The privilege was withheld indeed from Dora Forbes; so

Mrs. Wimbush kept her latest capture temporarily concealed. This was so

little, however, her usual way of dealing with her eminent friends that

a couple of days of it exhausted her patience, and she went up to town

with him in great publicity. The sudden turn for the worse her afflicted

guest had, after a brief improvement, taken on the third night raised an

obstacle to her seeing him before her retreat; a fortunate circumstance

doubtless, for she was fundamentally disappointed in him. This was not

the kind of performance for which she had invited him to Prestidge, or

invited the Princess. Let me hasten to add that none of the generous

acts which have characterised her patronage of intellectual and other

merit have done so much for her reputation as her lending Neil Paraday

the most beautiful of her numerous homes to die in. He took advantage to

the utmost of the singular favour. Day by day I saw him sink, and I

roamed alone about the empty terraces and gardens. His wife never came

near him, but I scarcely noticed it: as I paced there with rage in my

heart I was too full of another wrong. In the event of his death it

would fall to me perhaps to bring out in some charming form, with notes,

with the tenderest editorial care, that precious heritage of his written

project. But where _was_ that precious heritage, and were both the

author and the book to have been snatched from us? Lady Augusta wrote me

that she had done all she could and that poor Lord Dorimont, who had

really been worried to death, was extremely sorry. I couldn't have the

matter out with Mrs. Wimbush, for I didn't want to be taunted by her

with desiring to aggrandise myself by a public connection with Mr.

Paraday's sweepings. She had signified her willingness to meet the

expense of all advertising, as indeed she was always ready to do. The

last night of the horrible series, the night before he died, I put my

ear closer to his pillow.

"That thing I read you that morning, you know."

"In your garden--that dreadful day? Yes!"

"Won't it do as it is?"

"It would have been a glorious book."

"It _is_ a glorious book," Neil Paraday murmured. "Print it as it

stands--beautifully."

"Beautifully!" I passionately promised.

It may be imagined whether, now that he has gone, the promise seems to

me less sacred. I am convinced that if such pages had appeared in his

lifetime the Abbey would hold him to-day. I have kept the advertising in

my own hands, but the manuscript has not been recovered. It's

impossible, and at any rate intolerable, to suppose it can have been

wantonly destroyed. Perhaps some chance blundering hand, some brutal

ignorance has lighted kitchen-fires with it. Every stupid and hideous

accident haunts my meditations. My undiscourageable search for the lost

treasure would make a long chapter. Fortunately I have a devoted

associate in the person of a young lady who has every day a fresh

indignation and a fresh idea and who maintains with intensity that the

prize will still turn up. Sometimes I believe her, but I have quite

ceased to believe myself. The only thing for us, at all events, is to go

on seeking and hoping together; and we should be closely united by this

firm tie even were we not at present by another.

L'Education Sentimentale

By Aubrey Beardsley

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: L'Education Sentimentale]

Tree-Worship

By Richard Le Gallienne

Vast and mysterious brother, ere was yet of me

So much as men may poise upon a needle's end,

Still shook with laughter all this monstrous might of thee,

And still with haughty crest it called the morning friend.

Thy latticed column jetted up the bright blue air,

Tall as a mast it was, and stronger than a tower;

Three hundred winters had beheld thee mighty there,

Before my little life had lived one little hour.

With rocky foot stern-set like iron in the land,

With leafy rustling crest the morning sows with pearls,

Huge as a minster, half in heaven men saw thee stand,

Thy rugged girth the waists of fifty Eastern girls.

Knotted and warted, slabbed and armoured like the hide

Of tropic elephant; unstormable and steep

As some grim fortress with a princess-pearl inside,

Where savage guardian faces beard the bastioned keep:

So hard a rind, old tree, shielding so soft a heart,

A woman's heart of tender little nestling leaves;

Nor rind so hard but that a touch so soft can part,

And spring's first baby-bud an easy passage cleaves.

I picture thee within with dainty satin sides,

Where all the long day through the sleeping dryad dreams,

But when the moon bends low and taps thee thrice she glides,

Knowing the fairy knock, to bask within her beams.

And all the long night through, for him with eyes and ears,

She sways within thine arms and sings a fairy tune,

Till, startled with the dawn, she softly disappears,

And sleeps and dreams again until the rising moon.

But with the peep of day great bands of heavenly birds

Fill all thy branchy chambers with a thousand flutes,

And with the torrid noon stroll up the weary herds,

To seek thy friendly shade and doze about thy roots;

Till with the setting sun they turn them once more home:

And, ere the moon dawns, for a brief enchanted space,

Weary with million miles, the sore-spent star-beams come,

And moths and bats hold witches' sabbath in the place.

And then I picture thee some bloodstained Holyrood,

Dread haunted palace of the bat and owl, whence steal,

Shrouded all day, lost murdered spirits of the wood,

And fright young happy nests with homeless hoot and squeal.

Some Rizzio nightingale that plained adulterous love

Beneath the boudoir-bough of some fast-married bird,

Some dove that cooed to some one else's lawful dove,

And felt the dagger-beak pierce while his lady heard.

Then, maybe, dangling from thy gloomy gallows boughs,

A human corpse swings, mournful, rattling bones and chains--

His eighteenth century flesh hath fattened nineteenth century cows--

Ghastly Æolian harp fingered of winds and rains.

Poor Rizpah comes to reap each newly-fallen bone

That once thrilled soft, a little limb, within her womb;

And mark yon alchemist, with zodiac-spangled zone,

Wrenching the mandrake root that fattens in the gloom.

So rounds thy day, from maiden morn to haunted night,

From larks and sunlit dreams to owl and gibbering ghost;

A catacomb of dark, a sponge of living light,

To the wide sea of air a green and welcome coast.

I seek a god, old tree: accept my worship, thou!

All other gods have failed me always in my need.

I hang my votive song beneath thy temple bough,

Unto thy strength I cry--Old monster, be my creed!

Give me to clasp this earth with feeding roots like thine,

To mount yon heaven with such star-aspiring head,

Fill full with sap and buds this shrunken life of mine,

And from my boughs O might such stalwart sons be shed!

With loving cheek pressed close against thy horny breast,

I hear the roar of sap mounting within thy veins;

Tingling with buds, thy great hands open towards the west,

To catch the sweetheart wind that brings the sister rains.

O winds that blow from out the fruitful mouth of God,

O rains that softly fall from his all-loving eyes,

You that bring buds to trees and daisies to the sod,

O God's best Angel of the Spring, in me arise.

Le Puy en Velay

By Joseph Pennell

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: Le Puy en Velay]

A Defence of Cosmetics

By Max Beerbohm

Nay, but it is useless to protest. Artifice must queen it once more in

the town, and so, if there be any whose hearts chafe at her return, let

them not say, "We have come into evil times," and be all for resistance,

reformation or angry cavilling. For did the king's sceptre send the sea

retrograde, or the wand of the sorcerer avail to turn the sun from its

old course? And what man or what number of men ever stayed that

reiterated process by which the cities of this world grow, are very

strong, fail and grow again? Indeed, indeed, there is charm in every

period, and only fools and flutterpates do not seek reverently for what

is charming in their own day. No martyrdom, however fine, nor satire,

however splendidly bitter, has changed by a little tittle the known

tendency of things. It is the times that can perfect us, not we the

times, and so let all of us wisely acquiesce. Like the little wired

marionettes, let us acquiesce in the dance.

For behold! The Victorian era comes to its end and the day of sancta

simplicitas is quite ended. The old signs are here and the portents to

warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are

not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the

rouge-pots? At Rome, in the keenest time of her degringolade, when there

was gambling even in the holy temples, great ladies (does not Lucian

tell us?) did not scruple to squander all they had upon unguents from

Arabia. Nero's mistress and unhappy wife, Poppæa, of shameful memory,

had in her travelling retinue fifteen--or, as some say,

fifty--she-asses, for the sake of their milk, that was thought an

incomparable guard against cosmetics with poison in them. Last century,

too, when life was lived by candle-light, and ethics was but etiquette,

and even art a question of punctilio, women, we know, gave the best

hours of the day to the crafty farding of their faces and the towering

of their coiffures. And men, throwing passion into the wine-bowl to sink

or swim, turned out thought to browse upon the green cloth. Cannot we

even now in our fancy see them, those silent exquisites round the long

table at Brooks', masked, all of them, "lest the countenance should

betray feeling," in quinze masks, through whose eyelets they sat

peeping, peeping, while macao brought them riches or ruin? We can see

them, those silent rascals, sitting there with their cards and their

rouleaux and their wooden money-bowls, long after the dawn had crept up

St. James' and pressed its haggard face against the window of the little

club. Yes, we can raise their ghosts--and, more, we can see manywhere a

devotion to hazard fully as meek as theirs. In England there has been a

wonderful revival of cards. Roulette may rival dead faro in the tale of

her devotees. Her wheel is spinning busily in every house and ere long

it may be that tender parents will be writing to complain of the

compulsory baccarat in our public schools.

In fact, we are all gamblers once more, but our gambling is on a finer

scale than ever it was. We fly from the card-room to the heath, and from

the heath to the City, and from the City to the coast of the

Mediterranean. And just as no one seriously encourages the clergy in its

frantic efforts to lay the spirit of chance, that has thus resurged

among us, so no longer are many faces set against that other great sign

of a more complicated life, the love for cosmetics. No longer is a lady

of fashion blamed if, to escape the outrageous persecution of time, she

fly for sanctuary to the toilet-table; and if a damosel, prying in her

mirror, be sure that with brush and pigment she can trick herself into

more charm, we are not angry. Indeed, why should we ever have been?

Surely it is laudable, this wish to make fair the ugly and overtop

fairness, and no wonder that within the last five years the trade of the

makers of cosmetics has increased immoderately--twentyfold, so one of

these makers has said to me. We need but walk down any modish street and

peer into the little broughams that flit past, or (in Thackeray's

phrase) under the bonnet of any woman we meet, to see over how wide a

kingdom rouge reigns. We men, who, from Juvenal down to that

discourteous painter of whom Lord Chesterfield tells us, have especially

shown a dislike of cosmetics, are quite yielding; and there are, I

fancy, many such husbands as he who, suddenly realising that his wife

was painted, bad her sternly, "Go up and take it all off," and, on her

reappearance, bad her with increasing sternness, "Go up and put it all

on again."

But now that the use of pigments is becoming general, and most women are

not so young as they are painted, it may be asked curiously how the

prejudice ever came into being. Indeed, it is hard to trace folly, for

that it is inconsequent, to its start; and perhaps it savours too much

of reason to suggest that the prejudice was due to the tristful

confusion man has made of soul and surface. Through trusting so keenly

to the detection of the one by keeping watch upon the other, and by

force of the thousand errors following, he has come to think of surface

even as the reverse of soul. He supposes that every clown beneath his

paint and lip-salve is moribund and knows it, (though in verity, I am

told, clowns are as cheerful a class of men as any other), that the

fairer the fruit's rind and the more delectable its bloom, the closer

are packed the ashes within it. The very jargon of the hunting-field

connects cunning with a mask. And so perhaps came man's anger at the

embellishment of women--that lovely mask of enamel with its shadows of

pink and tiny pencilled veins, what must lurk behind it? Of what

treacherous mysteries may it not be the screen? Does not the heathen

lacquer her dark face, and the harlot paint her cheeks, because sorrow

has made them pale?

After all, the old prejudice is a-dying. We need not pry into the secret

of its birth. Rather is this a time of jolliness and glad indulgence.

For the era of rouge is upon us, and as only in an elaborate era can man

by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions reach that

refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself, so to

say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an elaborate

era is woman perfect. Artifice is the strength of the world, and in that

same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct and most

trimly pencilled, is woman's strength.

For see! We need not look so far back to see woman under the direct

influence of Nature. Early in this century, our grandmothers, sickening

of the odour of faded exotics and spilt wine, came out into the daylight

once more and let the breezes blow around their faces and enter, sharp

and welcome, into their lungs. Artifice they drove forth, and they set

Martin Tupper upon a throne of mahogany to rule over them. A very reign

of terror set in. All things were sacrificed to the fetish Nature. Old

ladies may still be heard to tell how, when they were girls, affectation

was not; and, if we verify their assertion in the light of such literary

authorities as Dickens, we find that it is absolutely true. Women appear

to have been in those days utterly natural in their conduct--flighty,

gushing, blushing, fainting, giggling and shaking their curls. They knew

no reserve in the first days of the Victorian era. No thought was held

too trivial, no emotion too silly, to express. To Nature everything was

sacrificed. Great heavens! And in those barren days what influence was

exerted by women? By men they seem not to have been feared nor loved,

but regarded rather as "dear little creatures" or "wonderful little

beings," and in their relation to life as foolish and ineffectual as the

landscapes they did in water-colour. Yet, if the women of those years

were of no great account, they had a certain charm and they at least had

not begun to trespass upon men's ground; if they touched not thought,

which is theirs by right, at any rate they refrained from action, which

is ours. Far more serious was it when, in the natural trend of time,

they became enamoured of rinking and archery and galloping along the

Brighton Parade. Swiftly they have sped on since then from horror to

horror. The invasion of the tennis-courts and of the golf-links, the

seizure of the tricycle and of the type-writer, were but steps

preliminary in that campaign which is to end with the final victorious

occupation of St. Stephen's. But stay! The horrific pioneers of

womanhood who gad hither and thither and, confounding wisdom with the

device on her shield, shriek for the unbecoming, are doomed. Though they

spin their tricycle-treadles so amazingly fast, they are too late.

Though they scream victory, none follow them. Artifice, that fair exile,

has returned.

Yes, though the pioneers know it not, they are doomed already. For of

the curiosities of history not the least strange is the manner in which

two social movements may be seen to overlap, long after the second has,

in truth, given its deathblow to the first. And, in like manner as one

has seen the limbs of a murdered thing in lively movement, so we need

not doubt that, though the voices of those who cry out for reform be

very terribly shrill, they will soon be hushed. Dear Artifice is with

us. It needed but that we should wait.

Surely, without any of my pleading, women will welcome their great and

amiable protectrix, as by instinct. For (have I not said?) it is upon

her that all their strength, their life almost, depends. Artifice's

first command to them is that they should repose. With bodily activity

their powder will fly, their enamel crack. They are butterflies who must

not flit, if they love their bloom. Now, setting aside the point of view

of passion, from which very many obvious things might be said, (and

probably have been by the minor poets), it is, from the intellectual

point of view, quite necessary that a woman should repose. Hers is the

resupinate sex. On her couch she is a goddess, but so soon as ever she

put her foot to the ground--lo, she is the veriest little sillypop and

quite done for. She cannot rival us in action, but she is our mistress

in the things of the mind. Let her not by second-rate athletics, nor

indeed by any exercise soever of the limbs, spoil the pretty procedure

of her reason. Let her be content to remain the guide, the subtle

suggester of what _we_ must do, the strategist whose soldiers we are,

the little architect whose workmen.

"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by

themselves, so to speak," and the sharper the line between their worldly

functions and ours, the better. This greater swiftness and less erring

subtlety of mind, their forte and privilege, justifies the painted mask

that Artifice bids them wear. Behind it their minds can play without

let. They gain the strength of reserve. They become important, as in the

days of the Roman Empire were the Emperor's mistresses, as was the

Pompadour at Versailles, as was our Elizabeth. Yet do not their faces

become lined with thought; beautiful and without meaning are their

faces.

And, truly, of all the good things that will happen with the full

renascence of cosmetics, one of the best is that surface will finally be

severed from soul. That damnable confusion will be solved by the

extinguishing of a prejudice which, as I suggest, itself created. Too

long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a

mere vulgar index of character or emotion. We had come to troubling

ourselves, not with its charm of colour and line, but with such

questions as whether the lips were sensuous, the eyes full of sadness,

the nose indicative of determination. I have no quarrel with

physiognomy. For my own part, I believe in it. But it has tended to

degrade the face æsthetically, in such wise as the study of cheirosophy

has tended to degrade the hand. And the use of cosmetics, the masking of

the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely because she

is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a

barometer.

How fatal it has been, in how many ways, this confusion of soul and

surface! Wise were the Greeks in making plain masks for their mummers to

play in, and dunces we not to have done the same! Only the other day, an

actress was saying that what she was most proud of in her art--next, of

course, to having appeared in some provincial pantomime at the age of

three--was the deftness with which she contrived, in parts demanding a

rapid succession of emotions, to dab her cheeks quite quickly with rouge

from the palm of her right hand, or powder from the palm of her left.

Gracious goodness! why do not we have masks upon the stage? Drama is the

presentment of the soul in action. The mirror of the soul is the voice.

Let the young critics, who seek a cheap reputation for austerity, by

cavilling at "incidental music," set their faces rather against the

attempt to justify inferior dramatic art by the subvention of a quite

alien art like painting, of any art, indeed, whose sphere is only

surface. Let those, again, who sneer, so rightly, at the "painted

anecdotes of the Academy," censure equally the writers who trespass on

painter's ground. It is a proclaimed sin that a painter should concern

himself with a good little girl's affection for a Scotch greyhound, or

the keen enjoyment of their port by elderly gentlemen of the early

'forties. Yet, for a painter to prod the soul with his paint-brush is no

worse than for a novelist to refuse to dip under the surface, and the

fashion of avoiding a psychological study of grief by stating that the

owner's hair turned white in a single night, or of shame by mentioning a

sudden rush of scarlet to the cheeks, is as lamentable as may be. But!

But with the universal use of cosmetics and the consequent secernment of

soul and surface, which, at the risk of irritating a reader, I must

again insist upon, all those old properties that went to bolster up the

ordinary novel--the trembling lips, the flashing eyes, the determined

curve of the chin, the nervous trick of biting the moustache--aye and

the hectic spot of red on either cheek--will be made spiflicate, as the

puppets were spiflicated by Don Quixote. Yes, even now Demos begins to

discern. The same spirit that has revived rouge, smote his mouth as it

grinned at the wondrous painter of mist and river, and now sends him

sprawling for the pearls that Meredith dived for in the deep waters of

romance.

Indeed the revival of cosmetics must needs be so splendid an influence,

conjuring boons innumerable, that one inclines almost to mutter against

that inexorable law by which Artifice must perish from time to time.

That such branches of painting as the staining of glass or the

illuminating of manuscripts should fall into disuse seems in comparison,

so likely; these were esoteric arts; they died with the monastic

spirit. But personal appearance is art's very basis. The painting of the

face is the first kind of painting man can have known. To make beautiful

things--is it not an impulse laid upon few? But to make oneself

beautiful is an universal instinct. Strange that the resultant art could

ever perish! So fascinating an art too! So various in its materials from

stimmis, psimythium and fuligo to bismuth and arsenic, so simple in that

its ground and its subject-matter are one, so marvellous in that its

very subject-matter becomes lovely when an artist has selected it! For

surely this is no idle nor fantastic saying. To deny that "making-up" is

an art, on the pretext that the finished work of its exponents depends

for beauty and excellence upon the ground chosen for the work, is

absurd. At the touch of a true artist, the plainest face turns comely.

As subject-matter the face is no more than suggestive, as ground, merely

a loom round which the beatus artifex may spin the threads of any golden

fabric:

"Quae nunc nomen habent operosi signa Maronis

Pondus iners quondam duraque massa fuit.

Multa viros nescire decet; pars maxima rerum

Offendat, si non interiora tegas,"

and, as Ovid would seem to suggest, by pigments any tone may be set

aglow on a woman's cheek, from enamel the features take any form.

Insomuch that surely the advocates of soup-kitchens and free-libraries

and other devices for giving people what providence did not mean them to

receive, should send out pamphlets in the praise of self-embellishment.

For it will place Beauty within easy reach of many who could not

otherwise hope to attain it.

But of course Artifice is rather exacting. In return for the repose she

forces--so wisely!--upon her followers when the sun is high or the moon

is blown across heaven, she demands that they should pay her long homage

at the sun's rising. The initiate may not enter lightly upon her

mysteries. For, if a bad complexion be inexcusable, to be ill-painted is

unforgivable; and when the toilet is laden once more with the fulness of

its elaboration, we shall hear no more of the proper occupation for

women. And think, how sweet an energy, to sit at the mirror of coquetry!

See the dear merits of the toilet as shown upon old vases, or upon the

walls of Roman dwellings, or, rather still, read Böttiger's alluring,

scholarly description of "Morgenscenen im Puttzimmer Einer Reichen

Römerin." Read of Sabina's face as she comes through the curtain of her

bed-chamber to the chamber of her toilet. The slave-girls have long been

chafing their white feet upon the marble floor. They stand, those timid

Greek girls, marshalled in little battalions. Each has her appointed

task, and all kneel in welcome as Sabina stalks, ugly and frowning, to

the toilet chair. Scaphion steps forth from among them, and, dipping a

tiny sponge in a bowl of hot milk, passes it lightly, ever so lightly,

over her mistress' face. The Poppæan pastes melt beneath it like snow. A

cooling lotion is poured over her brow and is fanned with feathers.

Phiale comes after, a clever girl, captured in some sea-skirmish in the

Aegean. In her left hand she holds the ivory box wherein are the phucus

and that white powder, psimythium; in her right a sheaf of slim brushes.

With how sure a touch does she mingle the colours, and in what sweet

proportion blushes and blanches her lady's upturned face. Phiale is the

cleverest of all the slaves. Now Calamis dips her quill in a certain

powder that floats, liquid and sable, in the hollow of her palm.

Standing upon tip-toe and with lips parted, she traces the arch of the

eyebrows. The slaves whisper loudly of their lady's beauty, and two of

them hold up a mirror to her. Yes, the eyebrows are rightly arched. But

why does Psecas abase herself? She is craving leave to powder Sabina's

hair with a fine new powder. It is made of the grated rind of the

cedar-tree, and a Gallic perfumer, whose stall is near the Circus, gave

it to her for a kiss. No lady in Rome knows of it. And so, when four

special slaves have piled up the head-dress, out of a perforated box

this glistening powder is showered. Into every little brown ringlet it

enters, till Sabina's hair seems like a pile of gold coins. Lest the

breezes send it flying, the girls lay the powder with sprinkled attar.

Soon Sabina will start for the Temple of Cybele.

Ah! Such are the lures of the toilet that none will for long hold aloof

from them. Cosmetics are not going to be a mere prosaic remedy for age

or plainness, but all ladies and all young girls will come to love them.

Does not a certain blithe Marquise, whose _lettres intimes_ from the

Court of Louis Seize are less read than their wit would merit, tell us

how she was scandalised to see "_même les toutes jeunes demoiselles

émaillées comme ma tabatière_?" So it shall be with us. Surely the

common prejudice against painting the lily can but be based on mere

ground of economy. That which is already fair is complete, it may be

urged--urged implausibly, for there are not so many lovely things in

this world that we can afford not to know each one of them by heart.

There is only one white lily, and who that has ever seen--as I have--a

lily really well painted could grudge the artist so fair a ground for

his skill? Scarcely do you believe through how many nice metamorphoses a

lily may be passed by him. In like manner, we all know the young girl,

with her simpleness, her goodness, her wayward ignorance. And a very

charming ideal for England must she have been, and a very natural one,

when a young girl sat even on the throne. But no nation can keep its

ideal for ever and it needed none of Mr. Gilbert's delicate satire in

"Utopia" to remind us that she had passed out of our ken with the rest

of the early Victorian era. What writer of plays, as lately asked some

pressman, who had been told off to attend many first nights and knew

what he was talking about, ever dreams of making the young girl the

centre of his theme? Rather he seeks inspiration from the tried and

tired woman of the world, in all her intricate maturity, whilst, by way

of comic relief, he sends the young girl flitting in and out with a

tennis-racket, the poor eidôlon amauron of her former self. The

season of the unsophisticated is gone by, and the young girl's final

extinction beneath the rising tides of cosmetics will leave no gap in

life and will rob art of nothing.

"Tush," I can hear some damned flutterpate exclaim, "girlishness and

innocence are as strong and as permanent as womanhood itself! Why, a few

months past, the whole town went mad over Miss Cissie Loftus! Was not

hers a success of girlish innocence and the absence of rouge? If such

things as these be outmoded, why was she so wildly popular?" Indeed, the

triumph of that clever girl, whose début made London nice even in

August, is but another witness to the truth of my contention. In a very

sophisticated time, simplicity has a new dulcedo. Hers was a success of

contrast. Accustomed to clever malaperts like Miss Lloyd or Miss Reeve,

whose experienced pouts and smiles under the sun-bonnet are a standing

burlesque of innocence and girlishness, Demos was really delighted, for

once and away, to see the real presentment of these things upon his

stage. Coming after all those sly serios, coming so young and mere with

her pink frock and straightly combed hair, Miss Cissie Loftus had the

charm which things of another period often do possess. Besides, just as

we adored her for the abrupt nod with which she was wont at first to

acknowledge the applause, so we were glad for her to come upon the

stage with nothing to tinge the ivory of her cheeks. It seemed so

strange, that neglect of convention. To be behind footlights and not

rouged! Yes, hers was a success of contrast. She was like a daisy in the

window at Solomons'. She was delightful. And yet, such is the force of

convention, that when last I saw her, playing in some burlesque at the

Gaiety, her fringe was curled and her pretty face rouged with the best

of them. And, if further need be to show the absurdity of having called

her performance "a triumph of naturalness over the jaded spirit of

modernity," let us reflect that the little mimic was not a real

old-fashioned girl after all. She had none of that restless naturalness

that would seem to have characterised the girl of the early Victorian

days. She had no pretty ways--no smiles nor blushes nor tremors.

Possibly Demos could not have stood a presentment of girlishness

unrestrained.

But with her grave insouciance, Miss Cissie Loftus had much of the

reserve that is one of the factors of feminine perfection, and to most

comes only, as I have said, with artifice. Her features played very,

very slightly. And in truth, this may have been one of the reasons of

her great success. For expression is but too often the ruin of a face;

and, since we cannot as yet so order the circumstances of life that

women shall never be betrayed into "an unbecoming emotion," when the

brunette shall never have cause to blush, and the lady who looks well

with parted lips be kept in a permanent state of surprise, the safest

way by far is to create, by brush and pigments, artificial expressions

for every face.

And this--say you?--will make monotony? You are mistaken, _toto coelo_

mistaken. When your mistress has wearied you with one expression, then

it will need but a few touches of that pencil, a backward sweep of that

brush, and lo, you will be revelling in another. For though, of course,

the painting of the face is, in manner, most like the painting of

canvas, in outcome it is rather akin to the art of music--lasting, like

music's echo, not for very long. So that, no doubt, of the many little

appurtenances of the Reformed Toilet Table, not the least vital will be

a list of the emotions that become its owner, with recipes for

simulating them. According to the colour she wills her hair to be for

the time--black or yellow or, peradventure, burnished red--she will

blush for you, sneer for you, laugh or languish for you. The good

combinations of line and colour are nearly numberless, and by their

means poor restless woman will be able to realise her moods in all their

shades and lights and dappledoms, to live many lives and masquerade

through many moments of joy. No monotony will be. And for us men

matrimony will have lost its sting.

But be it remembered! Though we men will garner these oblique boons, it

is into the hands of women that Artifice gives her pigments. I know, I

know that many men in a certain sect of society have shown a marked

tendency to the use of cosmetics. I speak not of the countless gentlemen

who walk about town in the time of its desertion from August to October,

artificially bronzed, as though they were fresh from the moors or from

the Solent. This, I conceive, is done for purely social reasons and need

not concern me here. Rather do I speak of those who make themselves up,

seemingly with an æsthetic purpose. Doubtless--I wish to be quite

just--there are many who look the better for such embellishment; but, at

the hazard of being thought old-fashioned and prejudiced, I cannot speak

of the custom with anything but strong disapproval. If men are to lie

among the rouge-pots, inevitably it will tend to promote that

amalgamation of the sexes which is one of the chief planks in the

decadent platform and to obtund that piquant contrast between him and

her, which is one of the redeeming features of creation. Besides,

really, men have not the excuse of facial monotony, that holds in the

case of women. Have we not hair upon our chins and upper lips? And can

we not, by diverting the trend of our moustache or by growing our beard

in this way or that, avoid the boredom of looking the same for long? Let

us beware. For if, in violation of unwritten sexual law, men take to

trifling with the paints and brushes that are feminine heritage, it may

be that our great ladies will don false imperials, and the little doner

deck her pretty chin with a Newgate fringe! After all, I think we need

not fear that many men will thus trespass. Most of them are in the City

nowadays, and the great wear and tear of that place would put their use

of rouge--that demands bodily repose from its dependents--quite outside

the range of practical æsthetics.

But that in the world of women they will not neglect this art, so

ripping in itself, in its result so wonderfully beneficent, I am sure

indeed. Much, I have said, is already done for its full renascence. The

spirit of the age has made straight the path of its professors. Fashion

has made Jezebel surrender her monopoly of the rouge-pot. As yet, the

great art of self-embellishment is for us but in its infancy. But if

Englishwomen can bring it to the flower of an excellence so supreme as

never yet has it known, then, though Old England may lose her martial

and commercial supremacy, we patriots will have the satisfaction of

knowing that she has been advanced at one bound to a place in the

councils of æsthetic Europe. And, in sooth, is this hoping too high of

my countrywomen? True that, as the art seems always to have appealed to

the ladies of Athens, and it was not until the waning time of the

Republic that Roman ladies learned to love the practice of it, so Paris,

Athenian in this as in all other things, has been noted hitherto as a

far more vivid centre of the art than London. But it was in Rome, under

the Emperors, that unguentaria reached its zenith, and shall it not be

in London, soon, that unguentaria shall outstrip its Roman perfection?

Surely there must be among us artists as cunning in the use of brush and

puff as any who lived at Versailles. Surely the splendid, impalpable

advance of good taste, as shown in dress and in the decoration of

houses, may justify my hope of the preëminence of Englishwomen in the

cosmetic art. By their innate delicacy of touch they will accomplish

much, and much, of course, by their swift feminine perception. Yet it

were well that they should know something also of the theoretical side

of the craft. Modern authorities upon the mysteries of the toilet are,

it is true, rather few; but among the ancients many a writer would seem

to have been fascinated by them. Archigenes, a man of science at the

Court of Cleopatra, and Criton at the Court of the Emperor Trajan, both

wrote treatises upon cosmetics--doubtless most scholarly treatises that

would have given many a precious hint. It is a pity they are not extant.

From Lucian or from Juvenal, with his bitter picture of a Roman _levée_,

much may be learnt; from the staid pages of Xenophon and Aristophanes'

dear farces. But best of all is that fine book of the Ars Amatoria that

Ovid has set aside for the consideration of dyes, perfumes and pomades.

Written by an artist who knew the allurements of the toilet and

understood its philosophy, it remains without rival as a treatise upon

Artifice. It is more than a poem, it is a manual; and if there be left

in England any lady who cannot read Latin in the original, she will do

well to procure a discreet translation. In the Bodleian Library there is

treasured the only known copy of a very poignant and delightful

rendering of this one book of Ovid's masterpiece. It was made by a

certain Wye Waltonstall, who lived in the days of Elizabeth, and, seeing

that he dedicated it to "the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen of Great

Britain," I am sure that the gallant writer, could he know of our great

renascence of cosmetics, would wish his little work to be placed once

more within their reach. "Inasmuch as to you, ladyes and gentlewomen,"

so he writes in his queer little dedication, "my booke of pigments doth

first addresse itself, that it may kisse your hands and afterward have

the lines thereof in reading sweetened by the odour of your breath,

while the dead letters formed into words by your divided lips may

receive new life by your passionate expression, and the words marryed in

that Ruby coloured temple may thus happily united, multiply your

contentment." It is rather sad to think that, at this crisis in the

history of pigments, the Vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen cannot read the

libellus of Wye Waltonstall, who did so dearly love pigments.

But since the days when these great critics wrote their treatises, with

what gifts innumerable has Artifice been loaded by Science! Many little

partitions must be added to the narthecium before it can comprehend all

the new cosmetics that have been quietly devised since classical days,

and will make the modern toilet chalks away more splendid in its

possibilities. A pity that no one has devoted himself to the compiling

of a new list; but doubtless all the newest devices are known to the

admirable unguentarians of Bond Street, who will impart them to their

clients. Our thanks, too, should be given to Science for ridding us of

the old danger that was latent in the use of cosmetics. Nowadays they

cannot, being purged of any poisonous element, do harm to the skin that

they make beautiful. There need be no more sowing the seeds of

destruction in the furrows of time, no martyrs to the cause like

Georgina Gunning, that fair dame but infelix, who died, so they relate,

from the effect of a poisonous rouge upon her lips. No, we need have no

fears now. Artifice will claim not another victim from among her

worshippers.

Loveliness shall sit at the toilet, watching her oval face in the oval

mirror. Her smooth fingers shall flit among the paints and powder, to

tip and mingle them, catch up a pencil, clasp a phial, and what not and

what _not_, until the mask of vermeil tinct has been laid aptly, the

enamel quite hardened. And, heavens, how she will charm us and ensorcel

our eyes! Positively rouge will rob us for a time of all our reason; we

shall go mad over masks. Was it not at Capua that they had a whole

street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a

street, and, to fill our new Seplasia, our Arcade of the Unguents, herbs

and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The white

cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for loveliness, and perfumed

by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks, that are

swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the powder-puff

may be moonlike as it passes over loveliness's lovely face. Even the

camels shall become ministers of delight, giving their hair in many

tufts to be stained by the paints in her colour-box, and across her

cheek the swift hare's foot shall fly as of old. The sea shall offer her

the phucus, its scarlet weed. We shall spill the blood of mulberries at

her bidding. And, as in another period of great ecstasy, a dancing

wanton, la belle Aubrey, was crowned upon a church's lighted altar, so

Arsenic, that "green-tress'd goddess," ashamed at length of skulking

between the soup of the unpopular and the test-tubes of the Queen's

analyst, shall be exalted to a place of highest honour upon loveliness's

toilet-table.

All these things shall come to pass. Times of jolliness and glad

indulgence! For Artifice, whom we drove forth, has returned among us,

and, though her eyes are red with crying, she is smiling forgiveness.

She is kind. Let us dance and be glad, and trip the cockawhoop!

Artifice, sweetest exile, is come into her kingdom. Let us dance her a

welcome!

Daimonizomenos

By Arthur Christopher Benson

You were clear as a sandy spring

After a drought, when its waters run

Evenly, sparingly, filtering

Into the eye of the sun.

Love you took with a placid smile,

Pain you bore with a hopeful sigh,

Never a thought of gain or guile

Slept in your wide blue eye.

Suddenly, once, at a trivial word,--

Side by side together we stept,--

Rose a tempest that swayed and stirred;

Over your soul it swept.

Dismal visitants, suddenly,

Pulled the doors in your house of clay;

Out of the windows there stared at me

Something horrible, grey.

The Old Oxford Music Hall

By Walter Sickert

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: The Old Oxford Music Hall]

Irremediable

By Ella D'Arcy

A young man strolled along a country road one August evening after a

long delicious day--a day of that blessed idleness the man of leisure

never knows: one must be a bank clerk forty-nine weeks out of the

fifty-two before one can really appreciate the exquisite enjoyment of

doing nothing for twelve hours at a stretch. Willoughby had spent the

morning lounging about a sunny rickyard; then, when the heat grew

unbearable, he had retreated to an orchard, where, lying on his back in

the long cool grass, he had traced the pattern of the apple-leaves

diapered above him upon the summer sky; now that the heat of the day was

over he had come to roam whither sweet fancy led him, to lean over

gates, view the prospect and meditate upon the pleasures of a well-spent

day. Five such days had already passed over his head, fifteen more

remained to him. Then farewell to freedom and clean country air! Back

again to London and another year's toil.

He came to a gate on the right of the road. Behind it a foot-path

meandered up over a glassy slope. The sheep nibbling on its summit cast

long shadows down the hill almost to his feet. Road and field-path were

equally new to him, but the latter offered greener attractions; he

vaulted lightly over the gate and had so little idea he was taking thus

the first step towards ruin that he began to whistle "White Wings" from

pure joy of life.

The sheep stopped feeding and raised their heads to stare at him from

pale-lashed eyes; first one and then another broke into a startled run,

until there was a sudden woolly stampede of the entire flock. When

Willoughby gained the ridge from which they had just scattered he came

in sight of a woman sitting on a stile at the further end of the field.

As he advanced towards her he saw that she was young and that she was

not what is called "a lady"--of which he was glad: an earlier episode in

his career having indissolubly associated in his mind ideas of feminine

refinement with those of feminine treachery.

He thought it probable this girl would be willing to dispense with the

formalities of an introduction and that he might venture with her on

some pleasant foolish chat.

As she made no movement to let him pass he stood still, and, looking at

her, began to smile.

She returned his gaze from unabashed dark eyes and then laughed, showing

teeth white, sound, and smooth as split hazel-nuts.

"Do you wanter get over?" she remarked familiarly.

"I'm afraid I can't without disturbing you."

"Dontcher think you're much better where you are?" said the girl, on

which Willoughby hazarded:

"You mean to say looking at you? Well, perhaps I am!"

The girl at this laughed again, but nevertheless dropped herself down

into the further field; then, leaning her arms upon the cross-bar, she

informed the young man: "No, I don't wanter spoil your walk. You were

goin' p'raps ter Beacon Point? It's very pretty that wye."

"I was going nowhere in particular," he replied: "just exploring, so to

speak. I'm a stranger in these parts."

"How funny! Imer stranger here too. I only come down larse Friday to

stye with a Naunter mine in Horton. Are you stying in Horton?"

Willoughby told her he was not in Orton, but at Povey Cross Farm out in

the other direction.

"Oh, Mrs. Payne's, ain't it? I've heard aunt speak ovver. She takes

summer boarders, don't chee? I egspec you come from London, heh?"

"And I expect you come from London too?" said Willoughby, recognising

the familiar accent.

"You're as sharp as a needle," cried the girl with her unrestrained

laugh; "so I do. I'm here for a hollerday 'cos I was so done up with the

work and the hot weather. I don't look as though I'd bin ill, do I? But

I was, though: for it was just stifflin' hot up in our workrooms all

larse month, an' tailorin's awful hard work at the bester times."

Willoughby felt a sudden accession of interest in her. Like many

intelligent young men, he had dabbled a little in Socialism and at one

time had wandered among the dispossessed; but since then, had caught up

and held loosely the new doctrine--It is a good and fitting thing that

woman also should earn her bread by the sweat of her brow. Always in

reference to the woman who, fifteen months before, had treated him ill,

he had said to himself that even the breaking of stones in the road

should be considered a more feminine employment than the breaking of

hearts.

He gave way therefore to a movement of friendliness for this working

daughter of the people, and joined her on the other side of the stile in

token of his approval. She, twisting round to face him, leaned now with

her back against the bar, and the sunset fires lent a fleeting glory to

her face. Perhaps she guessed how becoming the light was, for she took

off her hat and let it touch to gold the ends and fringes of her rough

abundant hair. Thus and at this moment she made an agreeable picture, to

which stood as background all the beautiful wooded Southshire view.

"You don't really mean to say you are a tailoress?" said Willoughby with

a sort of eager compassion.

"I do, though! An' I've bin one ever since I was fourteen. Look at my

fingers if you don't b'lieve me."

She put out her right hand, and he took hold of it, as he was expected

to do. The finger-ends were frayed and blackened by needle-pricks, but

the hand itself was plump, moist, and not unshapely. She meanwhile

examined Willoughby's fingers enclosing hers.

"It's easy ter see you've never done no work!" she said, half admiring,

half envious. "I s'pose you're a tip-top swell, ain't you?"

"Oh, yes! I'm a tremendous swell indeed!" said Willoughby ironically. He

thought of his hundred and thirty pounds' salary; and he mentioned his

position in the British and Colonial Banking house, without shedding

much illumination on her mind; for she insisted:

"Well, anyhow, you're a gentleman. I've often wished I was a lady. It

must be so nice ter wear fine clo'es an' never have ter do any work all

day long."

Willoughby thought it innocent of the girl to say this; it reminded him

of his own notion as a child--that kings and queens put on their crowns

the first thing on rising in the morning. His cordiality rose another

degree.

"If being a gentleman means having nothing to do," said he, smiling, "I

can certainly lay no claim to the title. Life isn't all beer and

skittles with me, any more than it is with you. Which is the better

reason for enjoying the present moment, don't you think? Suppose, now,

like a kind little girl, you were to show me the way to Beacon Point,

which you say is so pretty?"

She required no further persuasion. As he walked beside her through the

upland fields where the dusk was beginning to fall, and the white

evening moths to emerge from their daytime hiding-places, she asked him

many personal questions, most of which he thought fit to parry. Taking

no offence thereat, she told him, instead, much concerning herself and

her family. Thus he learned her name was Esther Stables, that she and

her people lived Whitechapel way; that her father was seldom sober, and

her mother always ill; and that the aunt with whom she was staying kept

the post-office and general shop in Orton village. He learned, too, that

Esther was discontented with life in general; that, though she hated

being at home, she found the country dreadfully dull; and that,

consequently, she was extremely glad to have made his acquaintance. But

what he chiefly realised when they parted was that he had spent a couple

of pleasant hours talking nonsense with a girl who was natural,

simple-minded, and entirely free from that repellently protective

atmosphere with which a woman of the "classes" so carefully surrounds

herself. He and Esther had "made friends" with the ease and rapidity of

children before they have learned the dread meaning of "etiquette," and

they said good-night, not without some talk of meeting each other again.

Obliged to breakfast at a quarter to eight in town, Willoughby was

always luxuriously late when in the country, where he took his meals

also in leisurely fashion, often reading from a book propped up on the

table before him. But the morning after his meeting with Esther Stables

found him less disposed to read than usual. Her image obtruded itself

upon the printed page, and at length grew so importunate he came to the

conclusion the only way to lay it was to confront it with the girl

herself.

Wanting some tobacco, he saw a good reason for going into Orton. Esther

had told him he could get tobacco and everything else at her aunt's. He

found the post-office to be one of the first houses in the widely spaced

village-street. In front of the cottage was a small garden ablaze with

old-fashioned flowers; and in a larger garden at one side were

apple-trees, raspberry and currant bushes, and six thatched beehives on

a bench. The bowed windows of the little shop were partly screened by

sunblinds; nevertheless the lower panes still displayed a heterogeneous

collection of goods--lemons, hanks of yarn, white linen buttons upon

blue cards, sugar cones, churchwarden pipes, and tobacco jars. A

letter-box opened its narrow mouth low down in one wall, and over the

door swung the sign, "Stamps and money-order office," in black letters

on white enamelled iron.

The interior of the shop was cool and dark. A second glass-door at the

back permitted Willoughby to see into a small sitting-room, and out

again through a low and square-paned window to the sunny landscape

beyond. Silhouetted against the light were the heads of two women: the

rough young head of yesterday's Esther, the lean outline and bugled cap

of Esther's aunt.

It was the latter who at the jingling of the door-bell rose from her

work and came forward to serve the customer; but the girl, with much

mute meaning in her eyes and a finger laid upon her smiling mouth,

followed behind. Her aunt heard her footfall. "What do you want here,

Esther?" she said with thin disapproval; "get back to your sewing."

Esther gave the young man a signal seen only by him and slipped out into

the side-garden, where he found her when his purchases were made. She

leaned over the privet-hedge to intercept him as he passed.

"Aunt's an awful ole maid," she remarked apologetically; "I b'lieve

she'd never let me say a word to enny one if she could help it."

"So you got home all right last night?" Willoughby inquired; "what did

your aunt say to you?"

"Oh, she arst me where I'd been, and I tolder a lotter lies!" Then, with

woman's intuition, perceiving that this speech jarred, Esther made haste

to add, "She's so dreadful hard on me! I dursn't tell her I'd been with

a gentleman or she'd never have let me out alone again."

"And at present I suppose you'll be found somewhere about that same

stile every evening?" said Willoughby foolishly, for he really did not

much care whether he met her again or not. Now he was actually in her

company he was surprised at himself for having given her a whole

morning's thought; yet the eagerness of her answer flattered him, too.

"To-night I can't come, worse luck! It's Thursday, and the shops here

close of a Thursday at five. I'll havter keep aunt company. But

to-morrer?--I can be there to-morrer. You'll come, say?"

"Esther!" cried a vexed voice, and the precise, right-minded aunt

emerged through the row of raspberry-bushes; "whatever are you thinking

about, delayin' the gentleman in this fashion?" She was full of rustic

and official civility for "the gentleman," but indignant with her niece.

"I don't want none of your London manners down here," Willoughby heard

her say as she marched the girl off.

He himself was not sorry to be released from Esther's too friendly eyes,

and he spent an agreeable evening over a book, and this time managed to

forget her completely.

Though he remembered her first thing next morning, it was to smile

wisely and determine he would not meet her again. Yet by dinner-time the

day seemed long; why, after all, should he not meet her? By tea-time

prudence triumphed anew--no, he would not go. Then he drank his tea

hastily and set off for the stile.

Esther was waiting for him. Expectation had given an additional colour

to her cheeks, and her red-brown hair showed here and there a beautiful

glint of gold. He could not help admiring the vigorous way in which it

waved and twisted, or the little curls which grew at the nape of her

neck, tight and close as those of a young lamb's fleece. Her neck here

was admirable, too, in its smooth creaminess; and when her eyes lighted

up with such evident pleasure at his coming, how avoid the conviction

she was a good and nice girl after all?

He proposed they should go down into the little copse on the right,

where they would be less disturbed by the occasional passerby. Here,

seated on a felled tree-trunk, Willoughby began that bantering silly

meaningless form of conversation known among the "classes" as flirting.

He had but the wish to make himself agreeable, and to while away the

time. Esther, however, misunderstood him.

Willoughby's hand lay palm downwards on his knee, and she noticing a

ring which he wore on his little finger, took hold of it.

"What a funny ring!" she said; "let's look?"

To disembarrass himself of her touch he pulled the ring off and gave it

her to examine.

"What's that ugly dark green stone?" she asked.

"It's called a sardonyx."

"What's it for?" she said, turning it about.

"It's a signet ring, to seal letters with."

"An' there's a sorter king's head scratched on it, an' some writin' too,

only I carn't make it out?"

"It isn't the head of a king, although it wears a crown," Willoughby

explained, "but the head and bust of a Saracen against whom my ancestor

of many hundred years ago went to fight in the Holy Land. And the words

cut round it are the motto of our house, 'Vertue vaunceth,' which means

virtue prevails."

Willoughby may have displayed some slight accession of dignity in giving

this bit of family history, for Esther fell into uncontrolled laughter,

at which he was much displeased. And when the girl made as though she

would put the ring on her own finger, asking, "Shall I keep it?" he

coloured up with sudden annoyance.

"It was only my fun!" said Esther hastily, and gave him the ring back,

but his cordiality was gone. He felt no inclination to renew the

idle-word pastime, said it was time to go back, and, swinging his cane

vexedly, struck off the heads of the flowers and the weeds as he went.

Esther walked by his side in complete silence, a phenomenon of which he

presently became conscious. He felt rather ashamed of having shown

temper.

"Well, here's your way home," said he with an effort at friendliness.

"Good-bye, we've had a nice evening anyhow. It was pleasant down there

in the woods, eh?"

He was astonished to see her eyes soften with tears, and to hear the

real emotion in her voice as she answered, "It was just heaven down

there with you until you turned so funny-like. What had I done to make

you cross? Say you forgive me, do!"

"Silly child!" said Willoughby, completely mollified, "I'm not the least

angry. There! good-bye!" and like a fool he kissed her.

He anathematised his folly in the white light of next morning, and,

remembering the kiss he had given her, repented it very sincerely. He

had an uncomfortable suspicion she had not received it in the same

spirit in which it had been bestowed, but, attaching more serious

meaning to it, would build expectations thereon which must be left

unfulfilled. It were best indeed not to meet her again; for he

acknowledged to himself that, though he only half liked, and even

slightly feared, her, there was a certain attraction about her--was it

in her dark unflinching eyes or in her very red lips?--which might lead

him into greater follies still.

Thus it came about that for two successive evenings Esther waited for

him in vain, and on the third evening he said to himself with a grudging

relief that by this time she had probably transferred her affections to

some one else.

It was Saturday, the second Saturday since he left town. He spent the

day about the farm, contemplated the pigs, inspected the feeding of the

stock, and assisted at the afternoon milking. Then at evening, with a

refilled pipe, he went for a long lean over the west gate, while he

traced fantastic pictures and wove romances in the glories of the sunset

clouds.

He watched the colours glow from gold to scarlet, change to crimson,

sink at last to sad purple reefs and isles, when the sudden

consciousness of some one being near him made him turn round. There

stood Esther, and her eyes were full of eagerness and anger.

"Why have you never been to the stile again?" she asked him. "You

promised to come faithful, and you never came. Why have you not kep your

promise? Why?--why?" she persisted, stamping her foot because Willoughby

remained silent.

What could he say! Tell her she had no business to follow him like this;

or own, what was, unfortunately, the truth, he was just a little glad to

see her?

"P'raps you don't care to see me?" she said. "Well, why did you kiss me,

then?"

Why, indeed! thought Willoughby, marvelling at his own idiotcy, and

yet--such is the inconsistency of man--not wholly without the desire to

kiss her again. And while he looked at her she suddenly flung herself

down on the hedge-bank at his feet and burst into tears. She did not

cover up her face, but simply pressed one cheek down upon the grass

while the water poured from her eyes with astonishing abundance.

Willoughby saw the dry earth turn dark and moist as it drank the tears

in. This, his first experience of Esther's powers of weeping, distressed

him horribly; never in his life before had he seen anyone weep like

that; he should not have believed such a thing possible, and he was

alarmed, too, lest she should be noticed from the house. He opened the

gate; "Esther!" he begged, "don't cry. Come out here, like a dear girl,

and let us talk sensibly."

Because she stumbled, unable to see her way through wet eyes, he gave

her his hand, and they found themselves in a field of corn, walking

along the narrow grass-path that skirted it, in the shadow of the

hedgerow.

"What is there to cry about because you have not seen me for two days?"

he began; "why, Esther, we are only strangers, after all. When we have

been at home a week or two we shall scarcely remember each other's

names."

Esther sobbed at intervals, but her tears had ceased. "It's fine for you

to talk of home," she said to this. "You've got something that is a

home, I s'pose? But me! my home's like hell, with nothing but

quarrellin' and cursin', and father who beats us whether sober or drunk.

Yes!" she repeated shrewdly, seeing the lively disgust on Willoughby's

face, "he beat me, all ill as I was, jus' before I come away. I could

show you the bruises on my arms still. And now to go back there after

knowin' you! It'll be worse than ever. I can't endure it and I won't!

I'll put an end to it or myself somehow, I swear!"

"But, my poor Esther, how can I help it, what can I do?" said

Willoughby. He was greatly moved, full of wrath with her father, with

all the world which makes women suffer. He had suffered himself at the

hands of a woman, and severely, but this, instead of hardening his

heart, had only rendered it the more supple. And yet he had a vivid

perception of the peril in which he stood. An interior voice urged him

to break away, to seek safety in flight even at the cost of appearing

cruel or ridiculous; so, coming to a point in the field where an

elm-bole jutted out across the path, he saw with relief he could now

withdraw his hand from the girl's, since they must walk singly to skirt

round it.

Esther took a step in advance, stopped and suddenly turned to face him;

she held out her two hands and her face was very near his own.

"Don't you care for me one little bit?" she said wistfully, and surely

sudden madness fell upon him. For he kissed her again, he kissed her

many times, and pushed all thoughts of the consequences far from him.

But some of these consequences already called loudly to him as he and

Esther reached the last gate on the road to Orton.

"You know I have only £130 a year?" he told her: "it's no very brilliant

prospect for you to marry me on that."

For he had actually offered her marriage, although such conduct to the

mediocre man must appear incredible or at least uncalled for. But to

Willoughby it seemed the only course possible. How else justify his

kisses, rescue her from her father's brutality, or bring back the smiles

to her face?

As for Esther, sudden exultation had leaped in her heart; then ere

fifty seconds were gone by, she was certain she would never have

consented to anything less.

"O! I'me used to managin'," she told him confidently, and mentally

resolved to buy herself, so soon as she was married, a black feather

boa, such as she had coveted last winter.

Willoughby spent the remaining days of his holiday in thinking out and

planning with Esther the details of his return to London and her own,

the secrecy to be observed, the necessary legal steps to be taken, and

the quiet suburb in which they would set up housekeeping. And, so

successfully did he carry out his arrangements, that within five weeks

from the day on which he had first met Esther Stables he and she came

out one morning from a church in Highbury husband and wife. It was a

mellow September day, the streets were filled with sunshine, and

Willoughby, in reckless high spirits, imagined he saw a reflection of

his own gaiety on the indifferent faces of the passers-by. There being

no one else to perform the office he congratulated himself very warmly,

and Esther's frequent laughter filled in the pauses of the day.

Three months later Willoughby was dining with a friend, and the

hour-hand of the clock nearing ten the host no longer resisted the

guest's growing anxiety to be gone. He arose and exchanged with him good

wishes and good-byes.

"Marriage is evidently a most successful institution," said he, half

jesting, half sincere; "you almost make me inclined to go and get

married myself. Confess now your thoughts have been at home the whole

evening?"

Willoughby thus addressed turned red to the roots of his hair, but did

not deny the soft impeachment.

The other laughed. "And very commendable they should be," he continued,

"since you are scarcely, so to speak, out of your honeymoon."

With a social smile on his lips Willoughby calculated a moment before

replying, "I have been married exactly three months and three days;"

then, after a few words respecting their next meeting, the two shook

hands and parted, the young host to finish the evening with books and

pipe, the young husband to set out on a twenty minutes' walk to his

home.

It was a cold clear December night following a day of rain. A touch of

frost in the air had dried the pavements, and Willoughby's footfall

ringing upon the stones re-echoed down the empty suburban street. Above

his head was a dark remote sky thickly powdered with stars, and as he

turned westward Alpherat hung for a moment "comme le point sur un _i_,"

over the slender spire of St. John's. But he was insensible to the

worlds about him; he was absorbed in his own thoughts, and these, as his

friend had surmised, were entirely with his wife. For Esther's face was

always before his eyes, her voice was always in his ears, she filled the

universe for him; yet only four months ago he had never seen her, had

never heard her name. This was the curious part of it--here in December

he found himself the husband of a girl who was completely dependent upon

him not only for food, clothes, and lodging, but for her present

happiness, her whole future life; and last July he had been scarcely

more than a boy himself, with no greater care on his mind than the

pleasant difficulty of deciding where he should spend his annual three

weeks' holiday.

But it is events, not months or years, which age. Willoughby, who was

only twenty-six, remembered his youth as a sometime companion

irrevocably lost to him; its vague, delightful hopes were now

crystallised into definite ties, and its happy irresponsibility

displaced by a sense of care inseparable perhaps from the most fortunate

of marriages.

As he reached the street in which he lodged his pace involuntarily

slackened. While still some distance off his eye sought out and

distinguished the windows of the room in which Esther awaited him.

Through the broken slats of the Venetian blinds he could see the yellow

gaslight within. The parlour beneath was in darkness; his landlady had

evidently gone to bed, there being no light over the hall door either.

In some apprehension he consulted his watch under the last street-lamp

he passed, to find comfort in assuring himself it was only ten minutes

after ten. He let himself in with his latch-key, hung up his hat and

overcoat by the sense of touch, and, groping his way upstairs, opened

the door of the first floor sitting-room.

At the table in the centre of the room sat his wife, leaning upon her

elbows, her two hands thrust up into her ruffled hair; spread out before

her was a crumpled yesterday's newspaper, and so interested was she to

all appearance in its contents that she neither spoke nor looked up as

Willoughby entered. Around her were the still uncleared tokens of her

last meal: tea-slops, bread-crumbs, and an eggshell crushed to fragments

upon a plate, which was one of those trifles that set Willoughby's teeth

on edge--whenever his wife ate an egg she persisted in turning the

egg-cup upside down upon the tablecloth, and pounding the shell to

pieces in her plate with her spoon.

The room was repulsive in its disorder. The one lighted burner of the

gaselier, turned too high, hissed up into a long tongue of flame. The

fire smoked feebly under a newly administered shovelful of "slack," and

a heap of ashes and cinders littered the grate. A pair of walking boots,

caked in dry mud, lay on the hearthrug just where they had been thrown

off. On the mantelpiece, amidst a dozen other articles which had no

business there, was a bedroom-candlestick; and every single article of

furniture stood crookedly out of its place.

Willoughby took in the whole intolerable picture, and yet spoke with

kindliness. "Well, Esther! I'm not so late, after all. I hope you did

not feel the time dull by yourself?" Then he explained the reason of his

absence. He had met a friend he had not seen for a couple of years, who

had insisted on taking him home to dine.

His wife gave no sign of having heard him; she kept her eyes rivetted on

the paper before her.

"You received my wire, of course," Willoughby went on, "and did not

wait?"

Now she crushed the newspaper up with a passionate movement, and threw

it from her. She raised her head, showing cheeks blazing with anger, and

dark, sullen, unflinching eyes.

"I did wyte then!" she cried. "I wyted till near eight before I got your

old telegraph! I s'pose that's what you call the manners of a

'gentleman,' to keep your wife mewed up here, while you go gallivantin'

off with your fine friends?"

Whenever Esther was angry, which was often, she taunted Willoughby with

being a "gentleman," although this was the precise point about him which

at other times found most favour in her eyes. But to-night she was

envenomed by the idea he had been enjoying himself without her, stung by

fear lest he should have been in company with some other woman.

Willoughby, hearing the taunt, resigned himself to the inevitable.

Nothing that he could do might now avert the breaking storm, all his

words would only be twisted into fresh griefs. But sad experience had

taught him that to take refuge in silence was more fatal still. When

Esther was in such a mood as this it was best to supply the fire with

fuel, that, through the very violence of the conflagration, it might the

sooner burn itself out.

So he said what soothing things he could, and Esther caught them up,

disfigured them, and flung them back at him with scorn. She reproached

him with no longer caring for her; she vituperated the conduct of his

family in never taking the smallest notice of her marriage; and she

detailed the insolence of the landlady, who had told her that morning

she pitied "poor Mr. Willoughby," and had refused to go out and buy

herrings for Esther's early dinner.

Every affront or grievance, real or imaginary, since the day she and

Willoughby had first met, she poured forth with a fluency due to

frequent repetition, for, with the exception of to-day's added injuries,

Willoughby had heard the whole litany many times before.

While she raged and he looked at her, he remembered he had once thought

her pretty. He had seen beauty in her rough brown hair, her strong

colouring, her full red mouth. He fell into musing ... a woman may lack

beauty, he told himself, and yet be loved....

Meantime Esther reached white heats of passion, and the strain could no

longer be sustained. She broke into sobs and began to shed tears with

the facility peculiar to her. In a moment her face was all wet with the

big drops which rolled down her cheeks faster and faster and fell with

audible splashes on to the table, on to her lap, on to the floor. To

this tearful abundance, formerly a surprising spectacle, Willoughby was

now acclimatised; but the remnant of chivalrous feeling not yet

extinguished in his bosom forbade him to sit stolidly by while a woman

wept, without seeking to console her. As on previous occasions, his

peace-overtures were eventually accepted. Esther's tears gradually

ceased to flow, she began to exhibit a sort of compunction, she wished

to be forgiven, and, with the kiss of reconciliation, passed into a

phase of demonstrative affection perhaps more trying to Willoughby's

patience than all that had preceded it. "You don't love me?" she

questioned, "I'm sure you don't love me?" she reiterated; and he

asseverated that he loved her until he loathed himself. Then at last,

only half satisfied, but wearied out with vexation--possibly, too, with

a movement of pity at the sight of his haggard face--she consented to

leave him; only what was he going to do? she asked suspiciously: write

those rubbishing stories of his? Well, he must promise not to stay up

more than half an hour at the latest--only until he had smoked one pipe!

Willoughby promised, as he would have promised anything on earth to

secure to himself a half-hour's peace and solitude. Esther groped for

her slippers, which were kicked off under the table; scratched four or

five matches along the box and threw them away before she succeeded in

lighting her candle; set it down again to contemplate her tear-swollen

reflection in the chimney-glass, and burst out laughing.

"What a fright I do look, to be sure!" she remarked complacently, and

again thrust her two hands up through her disordered curls. Then,

holding the candle at such an angle that the grease ran over on to the

carpet, she gave Willoughby another vehement kiss and trailed out of the

room with an ineffectual attempt to close the door behind her.

Willoughby got up to shut it himself, and wondered why it was that

Esther never did any one mortal thing efficiently or well. Good God! how

irritable he felt! It was impossible to write. He must find an outlet

for his impatience, rend or mend something. He began to straighten the

room, but a wave of disgust came over him before the task was fairly

commenced. What was the use? To-morrow all would be bad as ever. What

was the use of doing anything? He sat down by the table and leaned his

head upon his hands.

* * * * *

The past came back to him in pictures: his boyhood's past first of all.

He saw again the old home, every inch of which was familiar to him as

his own name; he reconstructed in his thought all the old well-known

furniture, and replaced it precisely as it had stood long ago. He passed

again a childish linger over the rough surface of the faded Utrecht

velvet chairs, and smelled again the strong fragrance of the white

lilac-tree, blowing in through the open parlour-window. He savoured anew

the pleasant mental atmosphere produced by the dainty neatness of

cultured women, the companionship of a few good pictures, of a few good

books. Yet this home had been broken up years ago, the dear familiar

things had been scattered far and wide, never to find themselves under

the same roof again; and from those near relatives who still remained to

him he lived now hopelessly estranged.

Then came the past of his first love-dream, when he worshipped at the

feet of Nora Beresford, and, with the wholeheartedness of the true

fanatic, clothed his idol with every imaginable attribute of virtue and

tenderness. To this day there remained a secret shrine in his heart

wherein the Lady of his young ideal was still enthroned, although it was

long since he had come to perceive she had nothing whatever in common

with the Nora of reality. For the real Nora he had no longer any

sentiment: she had passed altogether out of his life and thoughts; and

yet, so permanent is all influence, whether good or evil, that the

effect she wrought upon his character remained. He recognised to-night

that her treatment of him in the past did not count for nothing among

the various factors which had determined his fate.

Now the past of only last year returned, and, strangely enough, this

seemed farther removed from him than all the rest. He had been

particularly strong, well and happy this time last year. Nora was

dismissed from his mind, and he had thrown all his energies into his

work. His tastes were sane and simple, and his dingy, furnished rooms

had become through habit very pleasant to him. In being his own they

were invested with a greater charm than another man's castle. Here he

had smoked and studied, here he had made many a glorious voyage into the

land of books. Many a home-coming, too, rose up before him out of the

dark ungenial streets to a clean blazing fire, a neatly laid cloth, an

evening of ideal enjoyment; many a summer twilight when he mused at the

open window, plunging his gaze deep into the recesses of his neighbour's

lime-tree, where the unseen sparrows chattered with such unflagging

gaiety.

He had always been given to much day-dreaming, and it was in the silence

of his rooms of an evening that he turned his phantasmal adventures into

stories for the magazines; here had come to him many an editorial

refusal, but, here, too, he had received the news of his first

unexpected success. All his happiest memories were embalmed in those

shabby, badly furnished rooms.

Now all was changed. Now might there be no longer any soft indulgence of

the hour's mood. His rooms and everything he owned belonged now to

Esther, too. She had objected to most of his photographs, and had

removed them. She hated books, and were he ever so ill-advised as to

open one in her presence, she immediately began to talk, no matter how

silent or how sullen her previous mood had been. If he read aloud to her

she either yawned despairingly, or was tickled into laughter where there

was no reasonable cause. At first, Willoughby had tried to educate her

and had gone hopefully to the task. It is so natural to think you may

make what you will of the woman who loves you. But Esther had no wish to

improve. She evinced all the self-satisfaction of an illiterate mind. To

her husband's gentle admonitions she replied with brevity that she

thought her way quite as good as his; or, if he didn't approve of her

pronunciation, he might do the other thing, she was too old to go to

school again. He gave up the attempt, and, with humiliation at his

previous fatuity, perceived that it was folly to expect a few weeks of

his companionship could alter or pull up the impressions of years, or

rather of generations.

Yet here he paused to admit a curious thing: it was not only Esther's

bad habits which vexed him, but habits quite unblameworthy in

themselves, and which he never would have noticed in another, irritated

him in her. He disliked her manner of standing, of walking, of sitting

in a chair, of folding her hands. Like a lover he was conscious of her

proximity without seeing her. Like a lover, too, his eyes followed her

every movement, his ear noted every change in her voice. But, then,

instead of being charmed by everything as the lover is, everything

jarred upon him.

What was the meaning of this? To-night the anomaly pressed upon him: he

reviewed his position. Here was he quite a young man, just twenty-six

years of age, married to Esther, and bound to live with her so long as

life should last--twenty, forty, perhaps fifty years more. Every day of

those years to be spent in her society; he and she face to face, soul to

soul; they two alone amid all the whirling, busy, indifferent world. So

near together in semblance, in truth so far apart as regards all that

makes life dear.

Willoughby groaned. From the woman he did not love, whom he had never

loved, he might not again go free; so much he recognised. The feeling he

had once entertained for Esther, strange compound of mistaken chivalry

and flattered vanity, was long since extinct; but what, then, was the

sentiment with which she inspired him? For he was not indifferent to

her--no, never for one instant could he persuade himself he was

indifferent, never for one instant could he banish her from his

thoughts. His mind's eye followed her during his hours of absence as

pertinaciously as his bodily eye dwelt upon her actual presence. She was

the principal object of the universe to him, the centre around which his

wheel of life revolved with an appalling fidelity.

What did it mean? What could it mean? he asked himself with anguish.

And the sweat broke out upon his forehead and his hands grew cold, for

on a sudden the truth lay there like a written word upon the tablecloth

before him. This woman, whom he had taken to himself for better for

worse, inspired him with a passion--intense indeed, all-masterful,

soul-subduing as Love itself--.... But when he understood the terror of

his Hatred, he laid his head upon his arms and wept, not facile tears

like Esther's, but tears wrung out from his agonising, unavailing

regret.

Portrait of a Gentleman

By Will Rothenstein

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: Portrait of a Gentleman]

Two Sonnets

By William Watson

I--The Frontier

At the hushed brink of twilight,--when, as though

Some solemn journeying phantom paused to lay

An ominous finger on the awestruck day,

Earth holds her breath till that great presence go,--

A moment comes of visionary glow,

Pendulous 'twixt the gold hour and the grey,

Lovelier than these, more eloquent than they

Of memory, foresight, and life's ebb and flow.

So have I known, in some fair woman's face,

While viewless yet was Time's more gross imprint,

The first, faint, hesitant, elusive hint

Of that invasion of the vandal years

Seem deeper beauty than youth's cloudless grace,

Wake subtler dreams, and touch me nigh to tears.

II--Night on Curbar Edge, Derbyshire

No echo of man's life pursues my ears;

Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign;

Change comes not, this dread temple to profane,

Where time by æons reckons, not by years.

Its patient form one crag, sole-stranded, rears,

Type of whate'er is destined to remain

While yon still host encamped on Night's waste plain

Keeps armèd watch, a million quivering spears.

Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor;

The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall,

Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled:

Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door;

And there is built and 'stablisht over all

Tremendous Silence, older than the world.

The Reflected Faun

By Laurence Housman

_Reproduced by Messrs. Carl Hentschel & Co._

[Illustration: The Reflected Faun]

A Sentimental Cellar

By George Saintsbury

[It would appear from the reference to a "Queen" that the following

piece was written in or with a view to the reign of Queen Anne,

though an anachronism or two (such as a reference to the '45 and a

quotation from Adam Smith) may be noted. On the other hand, an

occasional mixture of "you" and "thou" seems to argue a date before

Johnson. It must at any rate have been composed for, or in

imitation of the style of, one or other of the eighteenth-century

collections of Essays.]

It chanced the other day that I had a mind to visit my old friend

Falernianus. The maid who opened the door to me showed me into his

study, and apologised for her master's absence by saying that he was in

the cellar. He soon appeared, and I rallied him a little on the gravity

of his occupation. Falernianus, I must tell you, is neither a drunkard

nor a man of fortune. But he has a pretty taste in wine, indulges it

rather in collection than in consumption, and arranges his cellar (or,

as he sometimes calls it, "cellaret") himself, having no butler or other

man-servant. He took my pleasantry very good-humouredly; and when I

asked him further if I might behold this temple of his devotions he

complied at once. "'Tis rather a chantry than a temple, Eugenius," said

he, "but you are very welcome to see it if you please; and if you are

minded to hear a sermon, perhaps I can preach one different from what

you may expect at an Oracle of the Bottle."

We soon reached the cavern, which, indeed, was much less magnificent

than that over which Bacbuc presided; and I perused, not without

interest (for I had often tasted the contents), the various bins in

which bottles of different shapes and sizes were stowed away with a

modest neatness. Falernianus amused himself, and did not go so far as to

weary me, with some tales of luck or disappointment in his purchases, of

the singular improvement of this vintage, and the mortifying conduct of

that. For these wine-lovers are curious in their phrase; and it is not

disgusting to hear them say regretfully that the claret of such and such

a year "has not spoken yet"; or that another was long "under the curse

of the seventies." This last phrase, indeed, had a grandiloquent and

romantic turn which half surprised me from my friend, a humourist with a

special horror of fine speech or writing, and turning sharply I saw a

smile on his lips.

"But," said I, "my Falernianus, your sermon? For I scarce think that

this wine-chat would be dignified by you with such a name."

"You are right, Eugenius," answered he, "but I do not quite know whether

I am wise to disclose even to you the ruling fancy under which I have

formed this little liquid museum, or Baccheum if you prefer it."

"I think you may," said I, "for in the first place we are old enough

friends for such confidences, and in the second I know you to be too

much given to laugh at your own foibles to be greatly afraid of

another's ridicule."

"You say well," he said, "so mark! For if my sermon inflicts what our

toasts call ennui upon you, remember that in the words of their

favourite Molière, 'You have willed it.'

"I do not, Eugenius, pretend to be indifferent to good wine in itself.

But when I called this little cellar of mine just now a museum I did no

dishonour to the daughters of Mnemosyne. For you will observe that wine,

by the fact of its keeping powers and by the other fact of its date

being known, is a sort of calendar made to the hand of whoso would

commemorate, with a festive solemnity, the things that are, as Mr.

Dryden says,

'Hid in the sacred treasure of the past.'

If not the mere juice of the grape (for the merit of the strongest wine

after fifty or sixty years is mostly but itself a memory), strong waters

brewed on the day of a man's birth will keep their fire and gain ever

fresh mellowness though he were to outlive the longest lifetime; and in

these little flasks here, my Eugenius, you will find a cup of Nantz that

was born with me, and that will keep its virtues long after thou and I

have gone to solve the great enigma. Again, thou seest those pints of

red port which nestle together? Within a few days, Eugenius, of the time

when that must was foaming round the Douro peasants, I made mine

entrance at the University. You can imagine with what a mixture of

tender and humorous feelings I quaff them now and then. When their juice

was tunned, what amiable visions, what boyish hopes floated before my

eyes! I was to carry off all that Cam or Isis had of honours or profit,

all that either could give of learning. I was to have my choice of

learned retirement on the one hand, or of ardent struggle at the hoarse

bar on the other, with the prizes of the senate beyond. They were scarce

throwing down their crust when that dream faded; they had scarce become

drinkable by a hasty toper before I saw clearly that metaphysical aid

was wanting, and that a very different fate must be mine. I make no moan

over it, Eugenius, and I puff away like a worse than prostitute as she

is, the demon Envy when she whispers in my ear the names of Titius or

Seius, and adds, 'Had they better parts, or only better stars than you?'

But as they fable that the wine itself throbs with the early movement of

the sap in the vines, so, Eugenius, when I sip that cordial (and truth

'tis a noble vintage) the old hopes, the old follies, the old dreams

waken in me, and I am once more eighteen.

"Look yonder again at those cobwebbed vessels of various shapes that lie

side by side, although of different vineyards, in the peaceful bins.

They all date from a year in which the wheel of fortune brought honest

men to the top in England; and if only for a brief space, as, I am told,

they sing in North Britain, 'the de'il went hame wi' a' the Whigs before

him' (I must tell you, Mr. ----, that Falernianus, though a loyal

subject to our good Queen, is a most malignant Tory, and indeed I have

heard him impeached of Jacobitism by ill-willers). But no more of

politics." He paused a moment and then went on: "I think I see you smile

again, Eugenius, and say to yourself, 'These are but dry-lipped subjects

for so flowing a calendar.' And to tell the truth, my friend, the main

part of my ephemerides of this kind has been filled by the aid of the

goddess who was ever nearest and kindest to Bacchus. In yonder bin lie

phials of the mightiest port that Lusitanian summers ever blackened, and

flasks of sack from the more southern parts of that peninsula, which our

Ben or his son Herrick would have loved. In the same year which saw the

pressing of these generous juices the earth was made more fair by the

birth of Bellamira and Candiope. The blackest purple of the Lusitanian

grape is not so black as the tresses of Candiope's hair, nor doth the

golden glow of the sherris approach in flame the locks of Bellamira; but

if I let the sunlight play through both, Love, with fantastic triumph,

shows me, as the bright motes flicker and flee through the sack, the

tawny eyes of Candiope, and the stain, no longer black or purple, but

rosy red, that floats from the Oportian juice on the white napery,

recalls the velvet blush of Bellamira's cheek."

"And this?" I said, pointing to a bin of Bordeaux near me. "Thou shalt

try it this very day," said Falernianus with a laugh, which I thought

carried off some feelings a little overstrained; "'tis a right pleasant

wine, and they made it in the year when I first saw the lips of Damaris.

The flavour is not unlike theirs, and if it should fluster thine head a

little, and cause thee what men call heartburn, I will not say that the

effects are wholly dissimilar." It is not like Falernianus even to jest

at women, and I turned to another. His face cleared. "Many a year has

passed," he said, "since the grape that bore that juice was gathered,

and even as it was ripening it chanced that I met Lalage and won her.

The wine was always good and the love likewise; but in neither in their

early years was there half the pleasure that there is now. But I weary

you, Eugenius, and perhaps the philosopher speaks truly in saying that

these things are not matters of sympathy, or, as the Scripture saith, a

stranger is not partaker of them. Suffice it to say that these

imprisoned rubies and topazes, amethysts and jacinths, never flash in

the glass, nor collect their deeper body of colour in the flagon,

without bringing a memory with them, that my lips seldom kiss them

without recalling other kisses, my eye never beholds them without seeing

other colours and other forms in 'the sessions of sweet silent thought.'

At the refining of this elixir I assumed the virile gown; when that

nectar was fit for drinking I made my first appearance in the field of

letters; and this again recalls the death of dear friends and the

waning of idle hopes. When I am dead, or if any reverse of fortune makes

me part with this cabinet of quintessence, it will pass to heirs or

purchasers as so much good wine and nothing more. To me it is that and

much more--a casket of magic liquors, a museum, as I have called it, of

glasses like that of Dr. Dee, in which I see again the smile of beauty

and the hope of youth, in which once more I win, lose, possess, conquer,

am defeated; in which I live over again in the recesses of fantasy the

vanished life of the past.

"But it is not often that I preach in this fashion. Let us take a turn

in the garden while they get dinner ready, that you may taste," and he

smiled, "that you may taste--if you dare--the wine that I have likened

to the lips of Damaris."

Night Piece

By Aubrey Beardsley

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: Night Piece]

Stella Maris

by Arthur Symons

Why is it I remember yet

You, of all women one has met

In random wayfare, as one meets

The chance romances of the streets,

The Juliet of a night? I know

Your heart holds many a Romeo.

And I, who call to mind your face

In so serene a pausing-place,

Where the bright pure expanse of sea,

The shadowy shore's austerity,

Seems a reproach to you and me,

I too have sought on many a breast

The ecstasy of love's unrest,

I too have had my dreams, and met

(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.

Why is it, then, that I recall

You, neither first nor last of all?

For, surely as I see to-night

The glancing of the lighthouse light,

Against the sky, across the bay,

As turn by turn it falls my way,

So surely do I see your eyes

Out of the empty night arise,

Child, you arise and smile to me

Out of the night, out of the sea,

The Nereid of a moment there,

And is it seaweed in your hair?

O lost and wrecked, how long ago,

Out of the drownèd past, I know,

You come to call me, come to claim

My share of your delicious shame.

Child, I remember, and can tell

One night we loved each other well;

And one night's love, at least or most,

Is not so small a thing to boast.

You were adorable, and I

Adored you to infinity,

That nuptial night too briefly borne

To the oblivion of morn.

Oh, no oblivion! for I feel

Your lips deliriously steal

Along my neck, and fasten there;

I feel the perfume of your hair,

And your soft breast that heaves and dips,

Desiring my desirous lips,

And that ineffable delight

When souls turn bodies, and unite

In the intolerable, the whole

Rapture of the embodied soul.

That joy was ours, we passed it by;

You have forgotten me, and I

Remember you thus strangely, won

An instant from oblivion.

And I, remembering, would declare

That joy, not shame, is ours to share,

Joy that we had the will and power,

In spite of fate, to snatch one hour,

Out of vague nights, and days at strife,

So infinitely full of life.

And 'tis for this I see you rise,

A wraith, with starlight in your eyes,

Here, where the drowsy-minded mood

Is one with Nature's solitude;

For this, for this, you come to me

Out of the night, out of the sea.

A Study

By Sir Frederic Leighton, P.R.A.

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: A Study]

Two Sketches

By Henry Harland

I--Mercedes

When I was a child some one gave me a family of white mice. I don't

remember how old I was, I think about ten or eleven; but I remember very

clearly the day I received them. It must have been a Thursday, a

half-holiday, for I had come home from school rather early in the

afternoon. Alexandre, dear old ruddy round-faced Alexandre, who opened

the door for me, smiled in a way that seemed to announce, "There's a

surprise in store for you, sir." Then my mother smiled too, a smile, I

thought, of peculiar promise and interest. After I had kissed her she

said, "Come into the dining-room. There's something you will like."

Perhaps I concluded it would be something to eat. Anyhow, all agog with

curiosity, I followed her into the dining-room--and Alexandre followed

_me_, anxious to take part in the rejoicing. In the window stood a big

cage, enclosing the family of white mice.

I remember it as a very big cage indeed; no doubt I should find it

shrunken to quite moderate dimensions if I could see it again. There

were three generations of mice in it: a fat old couple, the founders of

the race, dozing phlegmatically on their laurels in a corner; then a

dozen medium-sized, slender mice, trim and youthful-looking, rushing

irrelevantly hither and thither, with funny inquisitive little faces;

and then a squirming mass of pink things, like caterpillars, that were

really infant mice, newborn. They didn't remain infants long, though. In

a few days they had put on virile togas of white fur, and were

scrambling about the cage and nibbling their food as independently as

their elders. The rapidity with which my mice multiplied and grew to

maturity was a constant source of astonishment to me. It seemed as if

every morning I found a new litter of young mice in the cage--though how

they had effected an entrance through the wire gauze that lined it was a

hopeless puzzle--and these would have become responsible,

self-supporting mice in no time.

My mother told me that somebody had sent me this soul-stirring present

from the country, and I dare say I was made to sit down and write a

letter of thanks. But I'm ashamed to own I can't remember who the giver

was. I have a vague notion that it was a lady, an elderly

maiden-lady--Mademoiselle ... something that began with P--who lived

near Tours, and who used to come to Paris once or twice a year, and

always brought me a box of prunes.

Alexandre carried the cage into my play-room, and set it up against the

wall. I stationed myself in front of it, and remained there all the rest

of the afternoon, gazing in, entranced. To watch their antics, their

comings and goings, their labours and amusements, to study their shrewd,

alert physiognomies, to wonder about their feelings, thoughts,

intentions, to try to divine the meaning of their busy twittering

language--it was such keen, deep delight. Of course I was an

anthropomorphist, and read a great deal of human nature into them;

otherwise it wouldn't have been such fun. I dragged myself reluctantly

away when I was called to dinner. It was hard that evening to apply

myself to my school-books. Before I went to bed I paid them a parting

visit; they were huddled together in their nest of cotton-wool, sleeping

soundly. And I was up at an unheard-of hour next morning, to have a bout

with them before going to school. I found Alexandre, in his nightcap and

long white apron, occupied with the _soins de propreté_, as he said. He

cleaned out the cage, put in fresh food and water, and then, pointing to

the fat old couple, the grandparents, who stopped lazily abed, sitting

up and rubbing their noses together, whilst their juniors scampered

merrily about their affairs, "Tiens! On dirait Monsieur et Madame

Denis," he cried. I felt the appositeness of his allusion; and the old

couple were forthwith officially denominated Monsieur and Madame Denis,

for their resemblance to the hero and heroine of the song--though which

was Monsieur, and which Madame, I'm not sure that I ever clearly knew.

It was a little after this that I was taken for the first time in my

life to the play. I fancy the theatre must have been the Porte St.

Martin; at any rate, it was a theatre in the Boulevard, and towards the

East, for I remember the long drive we had to reach it. And the piece

was _The Count of Monte Cristo_. In my memory the adventure shines, of

course, as a vague blur of light and joy; a child's first visit to the

play, and that play _The Count of Monte Cristo_! It was all the

breath-taking pleasantness of romance made visible, audible, actual. A

vague blur of light and joy, from which only two details separate

themselves. First, the prison scene, and an aged man, with a long white

beard, moving a great stone from the wall; then--the figure of Mercedes.

I went home terribly in love with Mercedes. Surely there are no such

_grandes passions_ in maturer life as those helpless, inarticulate ones

we burn in secret with before our teens; surely we never love again so

violently, desperately, consumedly. Anyhow, I went home terribly in love

with Mercedes. And--do all children lack humour?--I picked out the

prettiest young ladyish-looking mouse in my collection, cut off her

moustaches, adopted her as my especial pet, and called her by the name

of my _dea certè_.

All of my mice by this time had become quite tame. They had plenty to

eat and drink, and a comfortable home, and not a care in the world; and

familiarity with their master had bred assurance; and so they had become

quite tame and shamefully, abominably lazy. Luxury, we are taught, was

ever the mother of sloth. I could put my hand in amongst them, and not

one would bestir himself the littlest bit to escape me. Mercedes and I

were inseparable. I used to take her to school with me every day; she

could be more conveniently and privately transported than a lamb. Each

_lycéen_ had a desk in front of his form, and she would spend the

school-hours in mine, I leaving the lid raised a little, that she might

have light and air. One day, the usher having left the room for a

moment, I put her down on the floor, thereby creating a great excitement

amongst my fellow-pupils, who got up from their places and formed an

eager circle round her. Then suddenly the usher came back, and we all

hurried to our seats, while he, catching sight of Mercedes, cried out,

"A mouse! A white mouse! Who dares to bring a white mouse to the class?"

And he made a dash for her. But she was too quick, too 'cute, for "the

likes of" Monsieur le Pion. She gave a jump, and in the twinkling of an

eye had disappeared up my leg, under my trousers. The usher searched

high and low for her, but she prudently remained in her hiding-place;

and thus her life was saved, for when he had abandoned his ineffectual

chase, he announced, "I should have wrung her neck." I turned pale to

imagine the doom she had escaped as by a hair's breadth. "It is useless

to ask which of you brought her here," he continued. "But mark my

words: if ever I find a mouse again in the class _I will wring her

neck_!" And yet, in private life, this bloodthirsty _pion_ was a quite

gentle, kindly, underfed, underpaid, shabby, struggling fellow, with

literary aspirations, who would not have hurt a fly.

The secrets of a schoolboy's pocket! I once saw a boy surreptitiously

angling in Kensington Gardens, with a string and a bent pin. Presently

he landed a fish, a fish no bigger than your thumb, perhaps, but still a

fish. Alive and wet and flopping as it was, he slipped it into his

pocket. I used to carry Mercedes about in mine. One evening, when I put

in my hand to take her out, I discovered to my bewilderment that she was

not alone. There were four little pink mites of infant mice clinging to

her.

I had enjoyed my visit to the theatre so much that at the _jour de l'an_

my father included a toy-theatre among my presents. It had a real

curtain of green baize, that would roll up and down, and beautiful

coloured scenery that you could shift, and footlights, and a trap-door

in the middle of the stage; and indeed it would have been altogether

perfect, except for the Company. I have since learned that this is not

infrequently the case with theatres. My company consisted of pasteboard

men and women who, as artists, struck me as eminently unsatisfactory.

They couldn't move their arms or legs, and they had such stolid,

uninteresting faces. I don't know how it first occurred to me to turn

them all off, and fill their places with my mice. Mercedes, of course,

was leading lady; Monsieur and Madame Denis were the heavy parents; and

a gentlemanlike young mouse named Leander was _jeune premier_. Then, in

my leisure, they used to act the most tremendous plays. I was

stage-manager, prompter, playwright, chorus, and audience, placing the

theatre before a looking-glass, so that, though my duties kept me

behind, I could peer round the edge, and watch the spectacle as from

the front. I would invent the lines and deliver them, but, that my

illusion might be the more complete, I would change my voice for each

personage. The lines tried hard to be verses; no doubt they were _vers

libres_. At any rate, they were mouth-filling and sonorous. The first

play we attempted, I need hardly say, was _Le Comte de Monte Cristo_,

such version of it as I could reconstruct from memory. That had rather a

long run. Then I dramatised _Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp_, _Paul et

Virginie_, _Quentin Durward_, and _La Dame de Monsoreau_. Mercedes made

a charming Diane, Leander a brilliant and dashing Bussy; Monsieur Denis

was cast for the rôle of Frère Gorenflot; and a long, thin,

cadaverous-looking mouse, Don Quichotte by name, somewhat inadequately

represented Chicot. We began, as you see, with melodrama; presently we

descended to light comedy, playing _Les Mémoires d'un Ane_, _Jean qui

rit_, and other works of the immortal Madame de Ségur. And then at last

we turned a new leaf, and became naturalistic. We had never heard of the

naturalist school, though Monsieur Zola had already published some

volumes of the _Rougon-Macquart_; but ideas are in the air; and we, for

ourselves, discovered the possibilities of naturalism simultaneously, as

it were, with the acknowledged apostle of that form of art. We would

impersonate the characters of our own world--our schoolfellows and

masters, our parents, servants, friends--and carry them through

experiences and situations derived from our impressions of real life.

Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I dare say those we didn't like

came in for a good deal of retributive justice. It was a little

universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the final law.

I don't know whether all children lack humour; but I'm sure no grown-up

author-manager can take his business more seriously than I took mine.

Oh, I enjoyed it hugely; the hours I spent at it were enraptured hours;

but it was grim, grim earnest. After a while I began to long for a less

subjective public, a more various audience. I would summon the servants,

range them in chairs at one end of the room, conceal myself behind the

theatre, and spout the play with fervid solemnity. And they would

giggle, and make flippant commentaries, and at my most impassioned

climaxes burst into guffaws. My mice, as has been said, were overfed and

lazy, and I used to have to poke them through their parts with sticks

from the wings; but this was a detail which a superior imagination

should have accepted as one of the conventions of the art. It made the

servants laugh, however; and when I would step to the front in person,

and, with tears in my eyes, beseech them to be sober, they would but

laugh the louder. "Bless you, sir, they're only mice--_ce ne sont que

des souris_," the cook called out on one such occasion. She meant it as

an apology and a consolation, but it was the unkindest cut of all. Only

mice, indeed! To me they had been a young gentleman and lady lost in the

Desert of Sahara, near to die for the want of water, and about to be

attacked, captured, and sold into slavery, by a band of Bedouin Arabs.

Ah, well, the artist must steel himself to meet with indifference or

derision from the public, to be ignored, misunderstood, or jeered at;

and to rely for his real, his legitimate, reward on the pleasure he

finds in his work.

And now there befell a great change in my life. Our home in Paris was

broken up, and we moved to St. Petersburg. It was impossible to take my

mice with us; their cage would have hopelessly complicated our

impedimenta. So we gave them to the children of our concierge. Mercedes,

however, I was resolved I would not part with, and I carried her all the

way to the Russian capital by hand. In my heart I was looking to her to

found another family--she had so frequently become a mother in the

past. But month succeeded month, and she forever disappointed me, and at

last I abandoned hope. In solitude and exile Mercedes degenerated sadly;

got monstrously fat; too indolent to gnaw, let her teeth grow to a

preposterous length; and in the end died of a surfeit of _smetana_.

When I returned to Paris, at the age of twenty, to _faire mon droit_ in

the Latin Quarter, I paid a visit to our old house, and discovered the

same old concierge in the _loge_. I asked her about the mice, and she

told me her children had found the care of them such a bother that at

first they had neglected them, and at last allowed them to escape. "They

took to the walls, and for a long time afterwards, Monsieur, the mice of

this neighbourhood were pied. To this day they are of a paler hue than

elsewhere."

II--A Broken Looking-Glass

He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the

lock; but before he turned it, he stopped--to rest, to take breath. On

the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane. It

is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was

dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even within

the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a deeper hush.

When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop

into an arm-chair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was

exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he

always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had

driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired.

But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his spirit,

like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.

"I suppose I am getting old," he thought.

To a second person the matter would have appeared one not of supposition

but of certainty, not of progression but of accomplishment. Getting old

indeed? But he _was_ old. It was an old man, grey and wrinkled and

wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon himself, in his easy-chair. In

years, to be sure, he was under sixty; but he looked like a man of

seventy-five.

"I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old."

And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him like

a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What had it

come to? What had it brought him? What had he done or won? Nothing,

nothing. It had brought him nothing but old age, solitude,

disappointment, and, to-night especially, a sense of fatigue and apathy

that weighed upon him like a suffocating blanket. On a table, a yard or

two away, stood a decanter of whisky, with some soda-water bottles and

tumblers; he looked at it with heavy eyes, and he knew that there was

what he needed. A little whisky would strengthen him, revive him, and

make it possible for him to bestir himself and undress and go to bed.

But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he

shrunk from that effort as from an Herculean labour; no--he was too

tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had left in Chelsea

half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and

years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly remembered from a

remote past.

Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come

to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful

life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy

life, he could have forgotten its uselessness; but it had been both

useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won nothing

for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had left Oxford

people expected great things of him; he had expected great things of

himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he was ambitious,

he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to justify his

existence by fruitful work. And he had worked hard. He had put all his

knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work; he had not

spared himself; he had passed laborious days and studious nights. And

what remained to show for it? Three or four volumes upon Political

Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed a little,

and then quite forgotten--superseded by the books of newer men. "Pulped,

pulped," he reflected bitterly. Except for a stray dozen of copies

scattered here and there--in the British Museum, in his College library,

on his own bookshelves--his published writings had by this time (he

could not doubt) met with the common fate of unsuccessful literature,

and been "pulped."

"Pulped--pulped; pulped--pulped." The hateful word beat rhythmically

again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was all

he was conscious of.

So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The

living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure. It had sufficed that

he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his

heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his

possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had been so

always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift

listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory. Everywhere they

encountered wreckage, derelicts: defeated aspirations, broken hopes.

Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to resent, to rebel. He

even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what

unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in resigning himself to the

unmerited.

He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather

arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot

everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how

thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the

veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a

dry lustre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes

closed and his head fell forward. But he was not sleepy, he was only

tired and weak.

He raised his head with a start, and changed his position. He felt cold;

but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put something on,

or go to bed.

How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of

solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He was quite cut off from the

rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should

need help of any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would hear?

At nine in the morning the porter's wife would come with his tea. But if

anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be nothing

for it but to wait till nine o'clock.

Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his

own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!

If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrow's crown of sorrow that he

had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he

had wished to marry wouldn't have him. Failure? Success? He could have

accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at

what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife. But

that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn't have him.

He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a

girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her slender

girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair

curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For twelve years

he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But she had always

said, "No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I love you as a

friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father, my sisters. But

I can't marry you." However, she married no one else, she loved no one

else; and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome guest in her father's

house; and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could

hope. Then she died. He called one day, and they said she was ill. After

that there came a blank in his memory--a gulf, full of blackness and

redness, anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm,

when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father,

her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale daylight that

filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all looked. And

there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her

dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her writing-desk,

her bookcase. He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the

mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if

they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at them,

because they had failed to do their work.

"You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard," her mother

said. "What would you like?"

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-glass in an ivory

frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him. She

had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in

it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He could almost

persuade himself that something of her must remain in it. To own it was

like owning something of herself. He carried it home with him, hugging

it to his side with a kind of passion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the

looking-glass in which her face had been reflected a thousand times; the

glass that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself,

he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was

like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him an emotion that

was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.

The glass lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in

front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his

chimney-shelf; so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his

room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time his

eyes remained fixed upon it. "If she had married me, she wouldn't have

died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have died."

Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over and over

again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory case into

which her looking-glass was folded. It was an effect of his fatigue, no

doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were slow to leave

it for another; that a phrase once pronounced in his thought had this

tendency to repeat itself over and over again.

But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his

hand out and up, to take the glass from the shelf. He wished to hold it,

to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell open,

the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was glued to

the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp had been

insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped from his

fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.

The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back into his

chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty

physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he

could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet. But

his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to neutralise,

emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being hurried along with

terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous

roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy bewilderment in his

head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of things, to stop his

progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness; that he was trying to

call out for help, but he could make no sound. On--on--on, he was being

whirled through some immeasurable abyss of space.

* * * * *

"Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead," the doctor said. "He has been dead

some hours. He must have passed away peacefully sitting here in his

chair."

"Poor gentleman," said the porter's wife. "And a broken looking-glass

beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-glass."

Portrait of a Lady

By Will Rothenstein

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: Portrait of a Lady]

Two Poems

By Edmund Gosse

I--Alere Flammam

To A. C. B.

In ancient Rome, the secret fire,--

An intimate and holy thing,--

Was guarded by a tender choir

Of kindred maidens in a ring;

Deep, deep within the house it lay,

No stranger ever gazed thereon,

But, flickering still by night and day,

The beacon of the house, it shone;

Thro' birth and death, from age to age,

It passed, a quenchless heritage;

And there were hymns of mystic tone

Sung round about the family flame,

Beyond the threshold all unknown,

Fast-welded to an ancient name;

There sacrificed the sire as priest,

Before that altar, none but he,

Alone he spread the solemn feast

For a most secret deity;

He knew the god had once been sire,

And served the same memorial fire.

Ah! so, untouched by windy roar

Of public issues loud and long,

The Poet holds the sacred door,

And guards the glowing coal of song;

Not his to grasp at praise or blame,

Red gold, or crowns beneath the sun,

His only pride to tend the flame

That Homer and that Virgil won,

Retain the rite, preserve the act,

And pass the worship on intact.

Before the shrine at last he falls;

The crowd rush in, a chattering band

But, ere he fades in death, he calls

Another priest to ward the brand;

He, with a gesture of disdain,

Flings back the ringing brazen gate,

Reproves, repressing, the profane,

And feeds the flame in primal state;

Content to toil and fade in turn,

If still the sacred embers burn.

II--A Dream of November

Far, far away, I know not where, I know not how,

The skies are grey, the boughs are bare, bare boughs in flower:

Long lilac silk is softly drawn from bough to bough,

With flowers of milk and buds of fawn, a broidered shower.

Beneath that tent an Empress sits, with slanted eyes,

And wafts of scent from censers flit, a lilac flood;

Around her throne bloom peach and plum in lacquered dyes,

And many a blown chrysanthemum, and many a bud.

She sits and dreams, while bonzes twain strike some rich bell,

Whose music seems a metal rain of radiant dye;

In this strange birth of various blooms, I cannot tell

Which spring from earth, which slipped from looms, which sank from sky.

Beneath her wings of lilac dim, in robes of blue,

The Empress sings a wordless hymn that thrills her bower;

My trance unweaves, and winds, and shreds, and forms anew

Dark bronze, bright leaves, pure silken threads, in triple flower.

Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

By Aubrey Beardsley

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Illustration: Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell]

The Dedication

By Fred M. Simpson

PERSONS REPRESENTED

Lucy Rimmerton. Harold Sekbourne

Scene I--The period is 1863

_The sitting-room in_ Lucy Rimmerton's _lodgings. She is seated in front

of the fire making some toast._

_Lucy._ There! I think that will do, although it isn't anything very

great. [_Rises._] What a colour I must have! Harold says I always manage

to toast myself very much better than I do the bread. [_Lights the gas,

and begins arranging some flowers on the table._] His favourite flowers;

I know he will be pleased when he sees them. How strange it is that he

should really care for me!--I, who am so commonplace and ordinary,

hardly pretty either, although he says I am. I always tell him he might

have done so much better than propose to a poor governess without a

penny.--Oh, if only his book proves a success!--a really great

success!--how glorious it will be! Why doesn't the wretched publisher

make haste and bring it out? I believe he is keeping it back on purpose.

What dreadful creatures they are! At first--squabble, squabble,

squabble; squabble about terms, squabble about this, another squabble

about that, and then, when everything is finally arranged, delay, delay,

delay. "You must wait for the publishing season." As though a book were

a young lady whose future might be seriously jeopardised if it made its

_début_ at an unfashionable time.

[_The door opens, and_ Harold _bursts into the room_.]

_Harold._ It's out, it's out; out at last.

_Lucy._ What, the book! Really! Where is it? Do show it to me.

_Harold._ Do you think you deserve it!

_Lucy._ Oh! don't tantalise me. Have you seen it? What is it like!

_Harold._ It is printed, and very much like other books.

_Lucy._ You are horrid. I believe you have it with you. Have you?

_Harold._ And what if I say yes?

_Lucy._ You have. Do let me see it.

_Harold._ And will you be very good if I do!

_Lucy._ I'll be angelic.

_Harold._ Then on that condition only--There! take it gently. [Lucy

_snatches it, and cuts the string_.] I thought you never cut string?

_Lucy._ There is never a never that hasn't an exception.

_Harold._ Not a woman's, certainly.

_Lucy._ Oh! how nice it looks! And to think that it is yours, really and

truly yours. "Grace: a Sketch. By Harold Sekbourne." It's delicious!

[_Holding the book, dances round the room._]

_Harold._ I shall begin to be jealous. You will soon be more in love

with my book than you are with me.

_Lucy._ And why shouldn't I be? Haven't you always said that a man's

work is the best part of him?

_Harold._ If my silly sayings are to be brought up in evidence against

me like this, I shall----

_Lucy._ You shall what?

_Harold._ Take the book back.

_Lucy._ Oh, will you? I should like to see you do it. [_Holds it behind

her._] You have got to get it first.

_Harold._ And what are you going to give me for it?

_Lucy._ Isn't it a presentation copy?

_Harold._ It is the very first to leave the printer's.

_Lucy._ Then you ought not to want any payment.

_Harold._ I do though, all the same. Come--no payment, no book.

_Lucy._ There, there, there!

_Harold._ And there.

_Lucy._ Oh! don't! You'll stifle me. And is this for me; may I really

keep it?

_Harold._ Of course you may; I brought it expressly for you.

_Lucy._ How nice of you! And you'll write my name in it?

_Harold._ I'll write the dedication.

_Lucy._ What do you mean?

_Harold._ You shall see. Pen and ink for the author! A new pen and

virgin ink!

_Lucy._ Your Authorship has but to command to be obeyed.

_Harold._ [_Sitting down, writes._] It is printed in all the other

copies, but this one I have had bound specially for you, with a blank

sheet where the dedication comes, so that in your copy, and yours alone,

I can write it myself. There.

_Lucy._ [_Looks over his shoulder and reads._] "To my Lady Luce." Oh,

Harold, you have dedicated it to me!

_Harold._ Who else could I dedicate it to? although 'tis--

"Not so much honouring thee,

As giving it a hope that now

It may immortal be."

_Lucy._ It is good of you.

_Harold._ [_Writes again._] "Harold Sekbourne"--what's to-day?--oh, yes,

"3rd November, 1863."

_Lucy._ And will people know who the "Lady Luce" is?

_Harold._ They will some day. The dedication in my next book shall be

"To my Lady Wife."

_Lucy._ I wonder if I shall ever be that. It seems so long coming.

_Harold._ I don't mind when it is--to-morrow, if you like.

_Lucy._ Don't talk nonsense, although it is my fault for beginning it.

And now sit down--no, here in the arm-chair--and you shall have some

nice tea.

[_She makes and pours out the tea as Harold talks._]

_Harold._ You won't have to wait long if this proves a success: and it

will be one. I know it; I feel it. It isn't only that everybody who has

read it, likes it; it's something else that I can't describe, not even

to you; a feeling inside, that--call it conceit if you like, but it

isn't conceit; it isn't conceit to feel confidence in oneself. Why, look

at the trash, the arrant trash, that succeeds every day; you will say,

perhaps, that it succeeds because it is trash, that trash is what people

want--they certainly get it. But no book that ever had real stuff in it

has failed yet, and I feel that--Ha! ha! the same old feeling mentioned

above. Don't think me an awful prig, Luce. I don't talk to anybody else

as I do to you; and if you only knew what a relief it is to me to let

myself go a bit occasionally, you would excuse everything.

_Lucy._ You have a right to be conceited.

_Harold._ Not yet. I have done nothing yet; but I mean to. [_Takes up

the book._] I wonder what will become of you and your fellows; what will

be your future? Will you one day adorn the shelves of libraries, figure

in catalogues of "Rare books and first editions," and be contended for

by snuffy, long-clothed bibliomaniacs, who will bid one against the

other for the honour of possessing you? Or will you descend to the

tables of secondhand book-stalls marked at a great reduction; or lie in

a heap, with other lumber, outside the shop-front, all this lot sixpence

each, awaiting there, uncared for, unnoticed, and unknown, your ultimate

destination, the dust-hole?

_Lucy._ You are horrid. What an idea!

_Harold._ No, I don't think that will be your end. [_Puts down the

book._] You are not going to the dustbin, you are going to be a success.

No more hack work for me after this. Why, supposing only the first

edition is sold, I more than clear expenses, and if it runs to

two--ten--twenty editions, I shall receive--the amount fairly takes my

breath away. Twentieth thousand; doesn't it sound fine? We shall have

our mansion in Grosvenor Square yet, Luce; and that charming, little old

house we saw the other day up the river--we'll have that, too; so that

we can run down here from Saturday to Monday, to get away from London

fog and nastiness. Yes, I am going to be rich some day--rich--in ten

years' time, if this book gets a fair start and I have anything like

decent luck, I shall be the best known author in England. [_Rises._] The

son of the old bookseller who failed will be able then to repay those

who helped him when he wanted help, and, more delightful thought still,

pay back those with interest who did their best to keep him down, when

they could just as easily have helped him to rise. I am going to have a

success, I feel it. In a few weeks' time I'll bring you a batch of

criticisms that will astonish you. But what is the matter? why so silent

all of a sudden? has my long and conceited tirade disgusted you?

_Lucy._ No, not at all.

_Harold._ Then what is it?

_Lucy._ I was only thinking that--[_hesitates_].

_Harold._ Thinking what? About me:

_Lucy._ Yes, about you and--and also about myself.

_Harold._ That is just as it should be, about us two together.

_Lucy._ Yes, but I was afraid----

_Harold._ [_Smiling._] Afraid! what of?

_Lucy._ Nothing, nothing really. I am ashamed that--let me give you some

more tea.

_Harold._ No, thanks. Come, let me hear, make a clean breast of it.

_Lucy._ I can't, really; you would only laugh at me.

_Harold._ Then why deny me a pleasure, for you know I love to laugh?

_Lucy._ Well, then--if you become famous--and rich----

_Harold._ If I do; well?

_Lucy._ You won't--you won't forget me, will you?

_Harold._ Forget you, what an idea! Why do I want to become famous? why

do I want to become rich? For my own sake? for the sake of the money?

Neither. I want it for your sake, so that you can be rich; so that you

can have everything you can possibly want. I don't mind roughing it a

bit myself, but----

_Lucy._ No more do I: I am sure we might be very happy living even here.

_Harold._ No, thank you; no second pair fronts for me, or, rather, none

for my wife. I want you to forget all about this place, as though it had

never existed; I want you to only remember your giving lessons as a

nightmare which has passed and gone. I want you to take a position in

the world, to go into society----

_Lucy._ But, Harold----

_Harold._ To entertain, receive, lead----

_Lucy._ But I could never lead. I detest receiving. I hate

entertaining----

_Harold._ Except me.

_Lucy._ I often wonder if I do. You are so clever and I----

_Harold._ Such a goose. Whatever put such ideas into your head? Why, you

are actually crying.

_Lucy._ I am not.

_Harold._ Then what is that? [_Puts his finger against her cheek._] What

is that little sparkling drop?

_Lucy._ It must be a tear of joy, then.

_Harold._ Which shall be used to christen the book!

_Lucy._ Oh, don't--there, you have left a mark.

_Harold._ It is your fault. My finger wouldn't have done it by itself.

Are you going to be silly any more?

_Lucy._ No, I am not.

_Harold._ And you are going to love me, believe in me, and trust me?

_Lucy._ I do all three--implicitly.

_Harold._ [_He kisses her._] The seal of the trinity. [_Looks at his

watch._] By jove, I must be going.

_Lucy._ So soon?

_Harold._ Rather; I have to dine in Berkeley Square at eight o'clock, at

Sir Humphrey Mockton's. You would like their house, it's a beauty, a

seventeenth or eighteenth century one, with such a gorgeous old

staircase. He's awfully rich, and just a little bit vulgar--"wool" I

think it was, or "cottons," or some other commodity; but his daughter is

charming--I should say daughters, as there are two of them, so you

needn't be jealous.

_Lucy._ Jealous? of course I am not. Have you known them long?

_Harold._ Oh! some little time. They are awfully keen to see my book. I

am going to take--send them a copy. You see I must be civil to these

people, they know such an awful lot of the right sort; and their

recommendation of a book will have more weight than fifty

advertisements. So good-bye. [_Takes his overcoat._]

_Lucy._ Let me help you. But you are going without noticing my flowers.

_Harold._ I have been admiring them all along, except when I was looking

at you.

_Lucy._ Don't be silly.

_Harold._ They are charming. Sir Humphrey has some orchids just the same

colours; you ought to see them; he has basketsful sent up every week

from his place in Surrey.

_Lucy._ No wonder my poor little chrysanthemums didn't impress you.

_Harold._ What nonsense! I would give more for one little flower from

you, than for the contents of all his conservatories.

_Lucy._ Then you shall have that for nothing.

_Harold._ Don't, it will destroy the bunch.

_Lucy._ What does that matter? they are all yours.

_Harold._ You do your best to spoil me.

_Lucy._ [_Pins the flower into his button-hole._] Don't talk nonsense.

There!

_Harold._ What a swell you have made me look!

_Lucy._ Good-bye; when shall I see you again?

_Harold._ Not until Sunday, I am afraid; I am so busy just now. But I'll

come round early, and, if fine, we'll go and lunch at Richmond, and have

a good walk across the Park afterwards. Would you like it?

_Lucy._ Above all things, but--but don't spend all your money on me.

_Harold._ Bother the money! I am going to be rich. Good-bye till Sunday.

_Lucy._ _Au revoir_; and while you are dining in your grand house, with

lots of grand people, I am going to enjoy a delightful evening here, not

alone, as I shall have your book for company. Good-bye.

Six Months elapse between Scene I. and Scene II.