V.

And he was at last in the city of the unending murmuring streets, a

part of the stirring shadow, of the amber-lighted gloom.

It seemed a long time since he had knelt before his sweetheart in the

lane, the moon-fire streaming upon them from the dark circle of the

fort, the air and the light and his soul full of haunting, the touch of

the unimaginable thrilling his heart; and now he sat in a terrible

“bed-sitting-room” in a western suburb, confronted by a heap and litter

of papers on the desk of a battered old bureau.

He had put his breakfast-tray out on the landing, and was thinking of

the morning’s work, and of some very dubious pages that he had

blackened the night before. But when he had lit his disreputable briar,

he remembered there was an unopened letter waiting for him on the

table; he had recognized the vague, staggering script of Miss Deacon,

his cousin. There was not much news; his father was “just the same as

usual,” there had been a good deal of rain, the farmers expected to

make a lot of cider, and so forth. But at the close of the letter Miss

Deacon became useful for reproof and admonition.

“I was at Caermaen on Tuesday,” she said, “and called on the Gervases

and the Dixons. Mr. Gervase smiled when I told him you were a literary

man, living in London, and said he was afraid you wouldn’t find it a

very practical career. Mrs. Gervase was very proud of Henry’s success;

he passed fifth for some examination, and will begin with nearly four

hundred a year. I don’t wonder the Gervases are delighted. Then I went

to the Dixons, and had tea. Mrs. Dixon wanted to know if you had

published anything yet, and I said I thought not. She showed me a book

everybody is talking about, called the _Dog and the Doctor_. She says

it’s selling by thousands, and that one can’t take up a paper without

seeing the author’s name. She told me to tell you that you ought to try

to write something like it. Then Mr. Dixon came in from the study, and

your name was mentioned again. He said he was afraid you had made

rather a mistake in trying to take up literature as if it were a

profession, and seemed to think that a place in a house of business

would be more _suitable_ and more practical. He pointed out that you

had not had the advantages of a university training, and said that you

would find men who had made good friends, and had the _tone_ of the

university, would be before you at every step. He said Edward was doing

very well at Oxford. He writes to them that he knows several noblemen,

and that young Philip Bullingham (son of Sir John Bullingham) is his

most intimate friend; of course this is _very_ satisfactory for the

Dixons. I am afraid, my dear Lucian, you have rather overrated your

powers. Wouldn’t it be better, even now, to look out for some _real

work_ to do, instead of wasting your time over those silly old books? I

know quite well how the Gervases and the Dixons feel; they think

idleness so injurious for a young man, and likely to lead to _bad

habits_. You know, my dear Lucian, I am only writing like this because

of my affection for you, so I am sure, my dear boy, you won’t be

offended.”

Lucian pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the receptacle lettered

“Barbarians.” He felt that he ought to ask himself some serious

questions: “Why haven’t I passed fifth? why isn’t Philip (son of Sir

John) my most intimate friend? why am I an idler, liable to fall into

bad habits?” but he was eager to get to his work, a curious and

intricate piece of analysis. So the battered bureau, the litter of

papers, and the thick fume of his pipe, engulfed him and absorbed him

for the rest of the morning. Outside were the dim October mists, the

dreary and languid life of a side street, and beyond, on the main road,

the hum and jangle of the gliding trains. But he heard none of the

uneasy noises of the quarter, not even the shriek of the garden gates

nor the yelp of the butcher on his round, for delight in his great task

made him unconscious of the world outside.

He had come by curious paths to this calm hermitage between Shepherd’s

Bush and Acton Vale. The golden weeks of the summer passed on in their

enchanted procession, and Annie had not returned, neither had she

written. Lucian, on his side, sat apart, wondering why his longing for

her were not sharper. As he though of his raptures he would smile

faintly to himself, and wonder whether he had not lost the world and

Annie with it. In the garden of Avallaunius his sense of external

things had grown dim and indistinct; the actual, material life seemed

every day to become a show, a fleeting of shadows across a great white

light. At last the news came that Annie Morgan had been married from

her sister’s house to a young farmer, to whom, it appeared, she had

been long engaged, and Lucian was ashamed to find himself only

conscious of amusement, mingled with gratitude. She had been the key

that opened the shut palace, and he was now secure on the throne of

ivory and gold. A few days after he had heard the news he repeated the

adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he scaled the steep

hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expected violent

disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at the activity of

boyish imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now in the green

bulwarks, and the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any way

extraordinary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory of his sensations, he

was not angry at the cheat. Certainly it had been all illusion, all the

heats and chills of boyhood, its thoughts of terror were without

significance. But he recognized that the illusions of the child only

differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque;

belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of

happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as

well as inept. It was better, he knew, and wiser, to wish for a fairy

coach than to cherish longings for a well-appointed brougham and

liveried servants.

He turned his back on the green walls and the dark oaks without any

feeling of regret or resentment. After a little while he began to think

of his adventures with pleasure; the ladder by which he had mounted had

disappeared, but he was safe on the height. By the chance fancy of a

beautiful girl he had been redeemed from a world of misery and torture,

the world of external things into which he had come a stranger, by

which he had been tormented. He looked back at a kind of vision of

himself seen as he was a year before, a pitiable creature burning and

twisting on the hot coals of the pit, crying lamentably to the laughing

bystanders for but one drop of cold water wherewith to cool his tongue.

He confessed to himself, with some contempt, that he had been a social

being, depending for his happiness on the goodwill of others; he had

tried hard to write, chiefly, it was true, from love of the art, but a

little from a social motive. He had imagined that a written book and

the praise of responsible journals would ensure him the respect of the

county people. It was a quaint idea, and he saw the lamentable

fallacies naked; in the first place, a painstaking artist in words was

not respected by the respectable; secondly, books should not be written

with the object of gaining the goodwill of the landed and commercial

interests; thirdly and chiefly, no man should in any way depend on

another.

From this utter darkness, from danger of madness, the ever dear and

sweet Annie had rescued him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian

thought, she had done her work without any desire to benefit him, she

had simply willed to gratify her own passion, and in doing this had

handed to him the priceless secret. And he, on his side, had reversed

the process; merely to make himself a splendid offering for the

acceptance of his sweetheart, he had cast aside the vain world, and had

found the truth, which now remained with him, precious and enduring.

And since the news of the marriage he found that his worship of her had

by no means vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a

happy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of gold

without alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no

defect in the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not

conceived an affection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but

for the very woman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is

to be judged by literature, and not literature by humanity, he detected

the analogy between _Lycidas_ and Annie. Only the dullard would object

to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of the other.

A sober critic might say that the man who could generalize Herbert and

Laud, Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and Lancelot

Andrewes into “our corrupted Clergy” must be either an imbecile or a

scoundrel, or probably both. The judgment would be perfectly true, but

as a criticism of _Lycidas_ it would be a piece of folly. In the case

of the woman one could imagine the attitude of the conventional lover;

of the chevalier who, with his tongue in his cheek, “reverences and

respects” all women, and coming home early in the morning writes a

leading article on St English Girl. Lucian, on the other hand, felt

profoundly grateful to the delicious Annie, because she had at

precisely the right moment voluntarily removed her image from his way.

He confessed to himself that, latterly, he had a little dreaded her

return as an interruption; he had shivered at the thought that their

relations would become what was so terribly called an “intrigue” or

“affair.” There would be all the threadbare and common stratagems, the

vulgarity of secret assignations, and an atmosphere suggesting the

period of Mr. Thomas Moore and Lord Byron and “segars.” Lucian had been

afraid of all this; he had feared lest love itself should destroy love.

He considered that now, freed from the torment of the body, leaving

untasted the green water that makes thirst more burning, he was

perfectly initiated in the true knowledge of the splendid and glorious

love. There seemed to him a monstrous paradox in the assertion that

there could be no true love without a corporal presence of the beloved;

even the popular sayings of “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” and

“familiarity breeds contempt,” witnessed to the contrary. He thought,

sighing, and with compassion, of the manner in which men are

continually led astray by the cheat of the senses. In order that the

unborn might still be added to the born, nature had inspired men with

the wild delusion that the bodily companionship of the lover and the

beloved was desirable above all things, and so, by the false show of

pleasure, the human race was chained to vanity, and doomed to an

eternal thirst for the non-existent.

Again and again he gave thanks for his own escape; he had been set free

from a life of vice and sin and folly, from all the dangers and

illusions that are most dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he

remembered what would be the common view of the situation. An ordinary

lover would suffer all the sting of sorrow and contempt; there would be

grief for a lost mistress, and rage at her faithlessness, and hate in

the heart; one foolish passion driving on another, and driving the man

to ruin. For what would be commonly called the real woman he now cared

nothing; if he had heard that she had died in her farm in Utter Gwent,

he would have experienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might feel

at the death of any one he had once known. But he did not think of the

young farmer’s wife as the real Annie; he did not think of the

frost-bitten leaves in winter as the real rose. Indeed, the life of

many reminded him of the flowers; perhaps more especially of those

flowers which to all appearance are for many years but dull and dusty

clumps of green, and suddenly, in one night, burst into the flame of

blossom, and fill all the misty lawns with odour; till the morning. It

was in that night that the flower lived, not through the long

unprofitable years; and, in like manner, many human lives, he thought,

were born in the evening and dead before the coming of day. But he had

preserved the precious flower in all its glory, not suffering it to

wither in the hard light, but keeping it in a secret place, where it

could never be destroyed. Truly now, and for the first time, he

possessed Annie, as a man possesses the gold which he has dug from the

rock and purged of its baseness.

He was musing over these things when a piece of news, very strange and

unexpected, arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical

relative, known from childhood as “Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight,”

had died, and by some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand

pounds. It was a pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, and

the rector on his side forgot for a couple of days to lean his head on

his hand. From the rest of the capital, which was well invested, Lucian

found he would derive something between sixty and seventy pounds a

year, and his old desires for literature and a refuge in the murmuring

streets returned to him. He longed to be free from the incantations

that surrounded him in the country, to work and live in a new

atmosphere; and so, with many good wishes from his father, he came to

the retreat in the waste places of London.

He was in high spirits when he found the square, clean room, horribly

furnished, in the by-street that branched from the main road, and

advanced in an unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation that

was neither town nor country. On every side monotonous grey streets,

each house the replica of its neighbor, to the east an unexplored

wilderness, north and west and south the brickfields and

market-gardens, everywhere the ruins of the country, the tracks where

sweet lanes had been, gangrened stumps of trees, the relics of hedges,

here and there an oak stripped of its bark, white and haggard and

leprous, like a corpse. And the air seemed always grey, and the smoke

from the brickfields was grey.

At first he scarcely realized the quarter into which chance had led

him. His only thought was of the great adventure of letters in which he

proposed to engage, and his first glance round his “bed-sitting-room”

showed him that there was no piece of furniture suitable for his

purpose. The table, like the rest of the suite, was of bird’s-eye

maple; but the maker seemed to have penetrated the druidic secret of

the rocking-stone, the thing was in a state of unstable equilibrium

perpetually. For some days he wandered through the streets, inspecting

the second-hand furniture shops, and at last, in a forlorn byway, found

an old Japanese bureau, dishonored and forlorn, standing amongst rusty

bedsteads, sorry china, and all the refuse of homes dead and desolate.

The bureau pleased him in spite of its grime and grease and dirt.

Inlaid mother-of-pearl, the gleam of lacquer dragons in red gold, and

hints of curious design shone through the film of neglect and

ill-usage, and when the woman of the shop showed him the drawers and

well and pigeon-holes, he saw that it would be an apt instrument for

his studies.

The bureau was carried to his room and replaced the “bird’s-eye” table

under the gas-jet. As Lucian arranged what papers he had accumulated:

the sketches of hopeless experiments, shreds and tatters of stories

begun but never completed, outlines of plots, two or three notebooks

scribbled through and through with impressions of the abandoned hills,

he felt a thrill of exaltation at the prospect of work to be

accomplished, of a new world all open before him.

He set out on the adventure with a fury of enthusiasm; his last thought

at night when all the maze of streets was empty and silent was of the

problem, and his dreams ran on phrases, and when he awoke in the

morning he was eager to get back to his desk. He immersed himself in a

minute, almost a microscopic analysis of fine literature. It was no

longer enough, as in the old days, to feel the charm and incantation of

a line or a word; he wished to penetrate the secret, to understand

something of the wonderful suggestion, all apart from the sense, that

seemed to him the _differentia_ of literature, as distinguished from

the long follies of “character-drawing,” “psychological analysis,” and

all the stuff that went to make the three-volume novel of commerce.

He found himself curiously strengthened by the change from the hills to

the streets. There could be no doubt, he thought, that living a lonely

life, interested only in himself and his own thoughts, he had become in

a measure inhuman. The form of external things, black depths in woods,

pools in lonely places, those still valleys curtained by hills on every

side, sounding always with the ripple of their brooks, had become to

him an influence like that of a drug, giving a certain peculiar colour

and outline to his thoughts. And from early boyhood there had been

another strange flavor in his life, the dream of the old Roman world,

those curious impressions that he had gathered from the white walls of

Caermaen, and from the looming bastions of the fort. It was in reality

the subconscious fancies of many years that had rebuilt the golden

city, and had shown him the vine-trellis and the marbles and the

sunlight in the garden of Avallaunius. And the rapture of love had made

it all so vivid and warm with life, that even now, when he let his pen

drop, the rich noise of the tavern and the chant of the theatre sounded

above the murmur of the streets. Looking back, it was as much a part of

his life as his schooldays, and the tessellated pavements were as real

as the square of faded carpet beneath his feet.

But he felt that he had escaped. He could now survey those splendid and

lovely visions from without, as if he read of opium dreams, and he no

longer dreaded a weird suggestion that had once beset him, that his

very soul was being moulded into the hills, and passing into the black

mirror of still waterpools. He had taken refuge in the streets, in the

harbor of a modern suburb, from the vague, dreaded magic that had

charmed his life. Whenever he felt inclined to listen to the old

wood-whisper or to the singing of the fauns he bent more earnestly to

his work, turning a deaf ear to the incantations.

In the curious labour of the bureau he found refreshment that was

continually renewed. He experienced again, and with a far more violent

impulse, the enthusiasm that had attended the writing of his book a

year or two before, and so, perhaps, passed from one drug to another.

It was, indeed, with something of rapture that he imagined the great

procession of years all to be devoted to the intimate analysis of

words, to the construction of the sentence, as if it were a piece of

jewelry or mosaic.

Sometimes, in the pauses of the work, he would pace up and down his

cell, looking out of the window now and again and gazing for an instant

into the melancholy street. As the year advanced the days grew more and

more misty, and he found himself the inhabitant of a little island

wreathed about with the waves of a white and solemn sea. In the

afternoon the fog would grow denser, shutting out not only sight but

sound; the shriek of the garden gates, the jangling of the tram-bell

echoed as if from a far way. Then there were days of heavy incessant

rain; he could see a grey drifting sky and the drops plashing in the

street, and the houses all dripping and saddened with wet.

He cured himself of one great aversion. He was no longer nauseated at

the sight of a story begun and left unfinished. Formerly, even when an

idea rose in his mind bright and wonderful, he had always approached

the paper with a feeling of sickness and dislike, remembering all the

hopeless beginnings he had made. But now he understood that to begin a

romance was almost a separate and special art, a thing apart from the

story, to be practiced with sedulous care. Whenever an opening scene

occurred to him he noted it roughly in a book, and he devoted many long

winter evenings to the elabouration of these beginnings. Sometimes the

first impression would yield only a paragraph or a sentence, and once

or twice but a splendid and sonorous word, which seemed to Lucian all

dim and rich with unsurmised adventure. But often he was able to write

three or four vivid pages, studying above all things the hint and

significance of the words and actions, striving to work into the lines

the atmosphere of expectation and promise, and the murmur of wonderful

events to come.

In this one department of his task the labour seemed almost endless. He

would finish a few pages and then rewrite them, using the same incident

and nearly the same words, but altering that indefinite something which

is scarcely so much style as manner, or atmosphere. He was astonished

at the enormous change that was thus effected, and often, though he

himself had done the work, he could scarcely describe in words how it

was done. But it was clear that in this art of manner, or suggestion,

lay all the chief secrets of literature, that by it all the great

miracles were performed. Clearly it was not style, for style in itself

was untranslatable, but it was that high theurgic magic that made the

English _Don Quixote_, roughly traduced by some Jervas, perhaps the

best of all English books. And it was the same element that made the

journey of Roderick Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of

coarse jokes and common experiences and burlesque manners, told in no

very choice diction, essentially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth

century, carrying to one’s very nostrils the aroma of the Great North

Road, iron-bound under black frost, darkened beneath shuddering woods,

haunted by highwaymen, with an adventure waiting beyond every turn, and

great old echoing inns in the midst of lonely winter lands.

It was this magic that Lucian sought for his opening chapters; he tried

to find that quality that gives to words something beyond their sound

and beyond their meaning, that in the first lines of a book should

whisper things unintelligible but all significant. Often he worked for

many hours without success, and the grim wet dawn once found him still

searching for hieroglyphic sentences, for words mystical, symbolic. On

the shelves, in the upper part of his bureau, he had placed the books

which, however various as to matter, seemed to have a part in this

curious quality of suggestion, and in that sphere which might almost be

called supernatural. To these books he often had recourse, when further

effort appeared altogether hopeless, and certain pages in Coleridge and

Edgar Allan Poe had the power of holding him in a trance of delight,

subject to emotions and impressions which he knew to transcend

altogether the realm of the formal understanding. Such lines as:

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,

And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,

With forms that no man can discover

For the dews that drip all over;

had for Lucian more than the potency of a drug, lulling him into a

splendid waking-sleep, every word being a supreme incantation. And it

was not only his mind that was charmed by such passages, for he felt at

the same time a strange and delicious bodily languor that held him

motionless, without the desire or power to stir from his seat. And

there were certain phrases in _Kubla Khan_ that had such a magic that

he would sometimes wake up, as it were, to the consciousness that he

had been lying on the bed or sitting in the chair by the bureau,

repeating a single line over and over again for two or three hours. Yet

he knew perfectly well that he had not been really asleep; a little

effort recalled a constant impression of the wall-paper, with its pink

flowers on a buff ground, and of the muslin-curtained window, letting

in the grey winter light. He had been some seven months in London when

this odd experience first occurred to him. The day opened dreary and

cold and clear, with a gusty and restless wind whirling round the

corner of the street, and lifting the dead leaves and scraps of paper

that littered the roadway into eddying mounting circles, as if a storm

of black rain were to come. Lucian had sat late the night before, and

rose in the morning feeling weary and listless and heavy-headed. While

he dressed, his legs dragged him as with weights, and he staggered and

nearly fell in bending down to the mat outside for his tea-tray. He lit

the spirit lamp on the hearth with shaking, unsteady hands, and could

scarcely pour out the tea when it was ready. A delicate cup of tea was

one of his few luxuries; he was fond of the strange flavor of the green

leaf, and this morning he drank the straw-coloured liquid eagerly,

hoping it would disperse the cloud of languor. He tried his best to

coerce himself into the sense of vigor and enjoyment with which he

usually began the day, walking briskly up and down and arranging his

papers in order. But he could not free himself from depression; even as

he opened the dear bureau a wave of melancholy came upon him, and he

began to ask himself whether he were not pursuing a vain dream,

searching for treasures that had no existence. He drew out his cousin’s

letter and read it again, sadly enough. After all there was a good deal

of truth in what she said; he had “overrated” his powers, he had no

friends, no real education. He began to count up the months since he

had come to London; he had received his two thousand pounds in March,

and in May he had said good-bye to the woods and to the dear and

friendly paths. May, June, July, August, September, October, November,

and half of December had gone by; and what had he to show? Nothing but

the experiment, the attempt, futile scribblings which had no end nor

shining purpose. There was nothing in his desk that he could produce as

evidence of his capacity, no fragment even of accomplishment. It was a

thought of intense bitterness, but it seemed as if the barbarians were

in the right—a place in a house of business would have been more

suitable. He leaned his head on his desk overwhelmed with the severity

of his own judgment. He tried to comfort himself again by the thought

of all the hours of happy enthusiasm he had spent amongst his papers,

working for a great idea with infinite patience. He recalled to mind

something that he had always tried to keep in the background of his

hopes, the foundation-stone of his life, which he had hidden out of

sight. Deep in his heart was the hope that he might one day write a

valiant book; he scarcely dared to entertain the aspiration, he felt

his incapacity too deeply, but yet this longing was the foundation of

all his painful and patient effort. This he had proposed in secret to

himself, that if he laboured without ceasing, without tiring, he might

produce something which would at all events be art, which would stand

wholly apart from the objects shaped like books, printed with printers’

ink, and called by the name of books that he had read. Giotto, he knew,

was a painter, and the man who imitated walnut-wood on the deal doors

opposite was a painter, and he had wished to be a very humble pupil in

the class of the former. It was better, he thought, to fail in

attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the

utterly contemptible; he had vowed he would be the dunce of Cervantes’s

school rather than top-boy in the academy of _A Bad Un to Beat_ and

_Millicent’s Marriage_. And with this purpose he had devoted himself to

labourious and joyous years, so that however mean his capacity, the

pains should not be wanting. He tried now to rouse himself from a

growing misery by the recollection of this high aim, but it all seemed

hopeless vanity. He looked out into the grey street, and it stood a

symbol of his life, chill and dreary and grey and vexed with a horrible

wind. There were the dull inhabitants of the quarter going about their

common business; a man was crying “mackerel” in a doleful voice, slowly

passing up the street, and staring into the white-curtained “parlors,”

searching for the face of a purchaser behind the India-rubber plants,

stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books that adorned the windows.

One of the blistered doors over the way banged, and a woman came

scurrying out on some errand, and the garden gate shrieked two

melancholy notes as she opened it and let it swing back after her. The

little patches called gardens were mostly untilled, uncared for,

squares of slimy moss, dotted with clumps of coarse ugly grass, but

here and there were the blackened and rotting remains of sunflowers and

marigolds. And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth of streets more

or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the mud pits

and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north was a

great wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind. It was

all like his own life, he said again to himself, a maze of unprofitable

dreariness and desolation, and his mind grew as black and hopeless as

the winter sky. The morning went thus dismally till twelve o’clock, and

he put on his hat and great-coat. He always went out for an hour every

day between twelve and one; the exercise was a necessity, and the

landlady made his bed in the interval. The wind blew the smoke from the

chimneys into his face as he shut the door, and with the acrid smoke

came the prevailing odour of the street, a blend of cabbage-water and

burnt bones and the faint sickly vapor from the brickfields. Lucian

walked mechanically for the hour, going eastward, along the main road.

The wind pierced him, and the dust was blinding, and the dreariness of

the street increased his misery. The row of common shops, full of

common things, the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a

horrible stucco parody of a Greek temple with a façade of hideous

columns that was a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again,

a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the

builder, these were the pictures of the way. When he got home again he

flung himself on the bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer hunger

roused him. He ate a hunch of bread and drank some water, and began to

pace up and down the room, wondering whether there were no escape from

despair. Writing seemed quite impossible, and hardly knowing what he

did he opened his bureau and took out a book from the shelves. As his

eyes fell on the page the air grew dark and heavy as night, and the

wind wailed suddenly, loudly, terribly.

“By woman wailing for her Demon lover.” The words were on his lips when

he raised his eyes again. A broad band of pale clear light was shining

into the room, and when he looked out of the window he saw the road all

brightened by glittering pools of water, and as the last drops of the

rain-storm starred these mirrors the sun sank into the wrack. Lucian

gazed about him, perplexed, till his eyes fell on the clock above his

empty hearth. He had been sitting, motionless, for nearly two hours

without any sense of the passage of time, and without ceasing he had

murmured those words as he dreamed an endless wonderful story. He

experienced somewhat the sensations of Coleridge himself; strange,

amazing, ineffable things seemed to have been presented to him, not in

the form of the idea, but actually and materially, but he was less

fortunate than Coleridge in that he could not, even vaguely, image to

himself what he had seen. Yet when he searched his mind he knew that

the consciousness of the room in which he sat had never left him; he

had seen the thick darkness gather, and had heard the whirl of rain

hissing through the air. Windows had been shut down with a crash, he

had noted the pattering footsteps of people running to shelter, the

landlady’s voice crying to some one to look at the rain coming in under

the door. It was like peering into some old bituminous picture, one

could see at last that the mere blackness resolved itself into the

likeness of trees and rocks and travelers. And against this background

of his room, and the storm, and the noises of the street, his vision

stood out illuminated, he felt he had descended to the very depths,

into the caverns that are hollowed beneath the soul. He tried vainly to

record the history of his impressions; the symbols remained in his

memory, but the meaning was all conjecture.

The next morning, when he awoke, he could scarcely understand or

realize the bitter depression of the preceding day. He found it had all

vanished away and had been succeeded by an intense exaltation.

Afterwards, when at rare intervals he experienced the same strange

possession of the consciousness, he found this to be the invariable

result, the hour of vision was always succeeded by a feeling of

delight, by sensations of brightened and intensified powers. On that

bright December day after the storm he rose joyously, and set about the

labour of the bureau with the assurance of success, almost with the

hope of formidable difficulties to be overcome. He had long busied

himself with those curious researches which Poe had indicated in the

_Philosophy of Composition_, and many hours had been spent in analyzing

the singular effects which may be produced by the sound and resonance

of words. But he had been struck by the thought that in the finest

literature there were more subtle tones than the loud and insistent

music of “never more,” and he endeavored to find the secret of those

pages and sentences which spoke, less directly, and less obviously, to

the soul rather than to the ear, being filled with a certain grave

melody and the sensation of singing voices. It was admirable, no doubt,

to write phrases that showed at a glance their designed rhythm, and

rang with sonorous words, but he dreamed of a prose in which the music

should be less explicit, of names rather than notes. He was astonished

that morning at his own fortune and facility; he succeeded in covering

a page of ruled paper wholly to his satisfaction, and the sentences,

when he read them out, appeared to suggest a weird elusive chanting,

exquisite but almost imperceptible, like the echo of the plainsong

reverberated from the vault of a monastic church.

He thought that such happy mornings well repaid him for the anguish of

depression which he sometimes had to suffer, and for the strange

experience of “possession” recurring at rare intervals, and usually

after many weeks of severe diet. His income, he found, amounted to

sixty-five pounds a year, and he lived for weeks at a time on fifteen

shillings a week. During these austere periods his only food was bread,

at the rate of a loaf a day; but he drank huge draughts of green tea,

and smoked a black tobacco, which seemed to him a more potent mother of

thought than any drug from the scented East. “I hope you go to some

nice place for dinner,” wrote his cousin; “there used to be some

excellent eating-houses in London where one could get a good cut from

the joint, _with plenty of gravy_, and a boiled potato, for a shilling.

Aunt Mary writes that you should try Mr. Jones’s in Water Street,

Islington, whose father came from near Caermaen, and was always most

comfortable in her day. I daresay the walk there would do you good. It

is such a pity you smoke that horrid tobacco. I had a letter from Mrs.

Dolly (Jane Diggs, who married your cousin John Dolly) the other day,

and she said they would have been delighted to take you for only

twenty-five shillings a week for the sake of the family if you had not

been a smoker. She told me to ask you if you had ever seen a horse or a

dog smoking tobacco. They are such nice, comfortable people, and the

children would have been company for you. Johnnie, who used to be such

a dear little fellow, has just gone into an office in the City, and

seems to have excellent prospects. How I wish, my dear Lucian, that you

could do something in the same way. Don’t forget Mr. Jones’s in Water

Street, and you might mention your name to him.”

Lucian never troubled Mr. Jones; but these letters of his cousin’s

always refreshed him by the force of contrast. He tried to imagine

himself a part of the Dolly family, going dutifully every morning to

the City on the bus, and returning in the evening for high tea. He

could conceive the fine odour of hot roast beef hanging about the

decorous house on Sunday afternoons, papa asleep in the dining-room,

mamma lying down, and the children quite good and happy with their

“Sunday books.” In the evening, after supper, one read the _Quiver_

till bedtime. Such pictures as these were to Lucian a comfort and a

help, a remedy against despair. Often when he felt overwhelmed by the

difficulty of the work he had undertaken, he thought of the alternative

career, and was strengthened.

He returned again and again to that desire of a prose which should

sound faintly, not so much with an audible music, but with the memory

and echo of it. In the night, when the last tram had gone jangling by,

and he had looked out and seen the street all wrapped about in heavy

folds of the mist, he conducted some of his most delicate experiments.

In that white and solitary midnight of the suburban street he

experienced the curious sense of being on a tower, remote and apart and

high above all the troubles of the earth. The gas lamp, which was

nearly opposite, shone in a pale halo of light, and the houses

themselves were merely indistinct marks and shadows amidst that

palpable whiteness, shutting out the world and its noises. The

knowledge of the swarming life that was so still, though it surrounded

him, made the silence seem deeper than that of the mountains before the

dawn; it was as if he alone stirred and looked out amidst a host

sleeping at his feet. The fog came in by the open window in freezing

puffs, and as Lucian watched he noticed that it shook and wavered like

the sea, tossing up wreaths and drifts across the pale halo of the

lamp, and, these vanishing, others succeeded. It was as if the mist

passed by from the river to the north, as if it still passed by in the

silence.

He would shut his window gently, and sit down in his lighted room with

all the consciousness of the white advancing shroud upon him. It was

then that he found himself in the mood for curious labours, and able to

handle with some touch of confidence the more exquisite instruments of

the craft. He sought for that magic by which all the glory and glamour

of mystic chivalry were made to shine through the burlesque and gross

adventures of Don Quixote, by which Hawthorne had lit his infernal

Sabbath fires, and fashioned a burning aureole about the village

tragedy of the _Scarlet Letter_. In Hawthorne the story and the

suggestion, though quite distinct and of different worlds, were rather

parallel than opposed to one another; but Cervantes had done a stranger

thing. One read of Don Quixote, beaten, dirty, and ridiculous,

mistaking windmills for giants, sheep for an army; but the impression

was of the enchanted forest, of Avalon, of the San Graal, “far in the

spiritual city.” And Rabelais showed him, beneath the letter, the

Tourainian sun shining on the hot rock above Chinon, on the maze of

narrow, climbing streets, on the high-pitched, gabled roofs, on the

grey-blue _tourelles_, pricking upward from the fantastic labyrinth of

walls. He heard the sound of sonorous plain-song from the monastic

choir, of gross exuberant gaiety from the rich vineyards; he listened

to the eternal mystic mirth of those that halted in the purple shadow

of the _sorbier_ by the white, steep road. The gracious and ornate

_châteaux_ on the Loire and the Vienne rose fair and shining to

confront the incredible secrets of vast, dim, far-lifted Gothic naves,

that seemed ready to take the great deep, and float away from the mist

and dust of earthly streets to anchor in the haven of the clear city

that hath foundations. The rank tale of the _garderobe_, of the

farm-kitchen, mingled with the reasoned, endless legend of the schools,

with luminous Platonic argument; the old pomp of the Middle Ages put on

the robe of a fresh life. There was a smell of wine and of incense, of

June meadows and of ancient books, and through it all he hearkened,

intent, to the exultation of chiming bells ringing for a new feast in a

new land. He would cover pages with the analysis of these marvels,

tracking the suggestion concealed beneath the words, and yet glowing

like the golden threads in a robe of samite, or like that device of the

old binders by which a vivid picture appeared on the shut edges of a

book. He tried to imitate this art, to summon even the faint shadow of

the great effect, rewriting a page of Hawthorne, experimenting and

changing an epithet here and there, noting how sometimes the alteration

of a trifling word would plunge a whole scene into darkness, as if one

of those blood-red fires had instantly been extinguished. Sometimes,

for severe practice, he attempted to construct short tales in the

manner of this or that master. He sighed over these desperate attempts,

over the clattering pieces of mechanism which would not even simulate

life; but he urged himself to an infinite perseverance. Through the

white hours he worked on amidst the heap and litter of papers; books

and manuscripts overflowed from the bureau to the floor; and if he

looked out he saw the mist still pass by, still passing from the river

to the north.

It was not till the winter was well advanced that he began at all to

explore the region in which he lived. Soon after his arrival in the

grey street he had taken one or two vague walks, hardly noticing where

he went or what he saw; but for all the summer he had shut himself in

his room, beholding nothing but the form and colour of words. For his

morning walk he almost invariably chose the one direction, going along

the Uxbridge Road towards Notting Hill, and returning by the same

monotonous thoroughfare. Now, however, when the new year was beginning

its dull days, he began to diverge occasionally to right and left,

sometimes eating his luncheon in odd corners, in the bulging parlors of

eighteenth-century taverns, that still fronted the surging sea of

modern streets, or perhaps in brand new “publics” on the broken borders

of the brickfields, smelling of the clay from which they had swollen.

He found waste by-places behind railway embankments where he could

smoke his pipe sheltered from the wind; sometimes there was a wooden

fence by an old pear-orchard where he sat and gazed at the wet

desolation of the market-gardens, munching a few currant biscuits by

way of dinner. As he went farther afield a sense of immensity slowly

grew upon him; it was as if, from the little island of his room, that

one friendly place, he pushed out into the grey unknown, into a city

that for him was uninhabited as the desert.

He came back to his cell after these purposeless wanderings always with

a sense of relief, with the thought of taking refuge from grey. As he

lit the gas and opened the desk of his bureau and saw the pile of

papers awaiting him, it was as if he had passed from the black skies

and the stinging wind and the dull maze of the suburb into all the

warmth and sunlight and violent colour of the south.