It was in this winter after his coming to the grey street that Lucian
first experienced the pains of desolation. He had all his life known
the delights of solitude, and had acquired that habit of mind which
makes a man find rich company on the bare hillside and leads him into
the heart of the wood to meditate by the dark waterpools. But now in
the blank interval when he was forced to shut up his desk, the sense of
loneliness overwhelmed him and filled him with unutterable melancholy.
On such days he carried about with him an unceasing gnawing torment in
his breast; the anguish of the empty page awaiting him in his bureau,
and the knowledge that it was worse than useless to attempt the work.
He had fallen into the habit of always using this phrase “the work” to
denote the adventure of literature; it had grown in his mind to all the
austere and grave significance of “the great work” on the lips of the
alchemists; it included every trifling and labourious page and the
vague magnificent fancies that sometimes hovered below him. All else
had become mere by-play, unimportant, trivial; the work was the end,
and the means and the food of his life—it raised him up in the morning
to renew the struggle, it was the symbol which charmed him as he lay
down at night. All through the hours of toil at the bureau he was
enchanted, and when he went out and explored the unknown coasts, the
one thought allured him, and was the coloured glass between his eyes
and the world. Then as he drew nearer home his steps would quicken, and
the more weary and grey the walk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of
his hermitage and of the curious difficulties that awaited him there.
But when, suddenly and without warning, the faculty disappeared, when
his mind seemed a hopeless waste from which nothing could arise, then
he became subject to a misery so piteous that the barbarians themselves
would have been sorry for him. He had known some foretaste of these
bitter and inexpressible griefs in the old country days, but then he
had immediately taken refuge in the hills, he had rushed to the dark
woods as to an anodyne, letting his heart drink in all the wonder and
magic of the wild land. Now in these days of January, in the suburban
street, there was no such refuge.
He had been working steadily for some weeks, well enough satisfied on
the whole with the daily progress, glad to awake in the morning, and to
read over what he had written on the night before. The new year opened
with faint and heavy weather and a breathless silence in the air, but
in a few days the great frost set in. Soon the streets began to suggest
the appearance of a beleaguered city, the silence that had preceded
the frost deepened, and the mist hung over the earth like a dense
white smoke. Night after night the cold increased, and people seemed
unwilling to go abroad, till even the main thoroughfares were empty and
deserted, as if the inhabitants were lying close in hiding. It was at
this dismal time that Lucian found himself reduced to impotence. There
was a sudden break in his thought, and when he wrote on valiantly,
hoping against hope, he only grew more aghast on the discovery of the
imbecilities he had committed to paper. He ground his teeth together
and persevered, sick at heart, feeling as if all the world were fallen
from under his feet, driving his pen on mechanically, till he was
overwhelmed. He saw the stuff he had done without veil or possible
concealment, a lamentable and wretched sheaf of verbiage, worse, it
seemed, than the efforts of his boyhood. He was no longer tautological,
he avoided tautology with the infernal art of a leader-writer, filling
his wind bags and mincing his words as if he had been a trained
journalist on the staff of the _Daily Post_. There seemed all the
matter of an insufferable tragedy in these thoughts; that his patient
and enduring toil was in vain, that practice went for nothing, and
that he had wasted the labour of Milton to accomplish the tenth-rate.
Unhappily he could not “give in”; the longing, the fury for the work
burnt within him like a burning fire; he lifted up his eyes in despair.
It was then, while he knew that no one could help him, that he
languished for help, and then, though he was aware that no comfort was
possible, he fervently wished to be comforted. The only friend he had
was his father, and he knew that his father would not even understand
his distress. For him, always, the printed book was the beginning and
end of literature; the agony of the maker, his despair and sickness,
were as accursed as the pains of labour. He was ready to read and
admire the work of the great Smith, but he did not wish to hear of the
period when the great Smith had writhed and twisted like a scotched
worm, only hoping to be put out of his misery, to go mad or die, to
escape somehow from the bitter pains. And Lucian knew no one else. Now
and then he read in the paper the fame of the great _littérateurs_; the
Gypsies were entertaining the Prince of Wales, the Jolly Beggars were
dining with the Lord Mayor, the Old Mumpers were mingling amicably and
gorgeously with the leading members of the Stock Exchange. He was so
unfortunate as to know none of these gentlemen, but it hardly seemed
likely that they could have done much for him in any case. Indeed, in
his heart, he was certain that help and comfort from without were in
the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin and grief were
within, and only his own assistance could avail. He tried to reassure
himself, to believe that his torments were a proof of his vocation,
that the facility of the novelist who stood six years deep in contracts
to produce romances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all the while
he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible fluency which he
professed to despise.
He drove himself out from that dreary contemplation of the white paper
and the idle pen. He went into the frozen and deserted streets, hoping
that he might pluck the burning coal from his heart, but the fire was
not quenched. As he walked furiously along the grim iron roads he
fancied that those persons who passed him cheerfully on their way to
friends and friendly hearths shrank from him into the mists as they
went by. Lucian imagined that the fire of his torment and anguish must
in some way glow visibly about him; he moved, perhaps, in a nimbus that
proclaimed the blackness and the flames within. He knew, of course,
that in misery he had grown delirious, that the well-coated,
smooth-hatted personages who loomed out of the fog upon him were in
reality shuddering only with cold, but in spite of common sense he
still conceived that he saw on their faces an evident horror and
disgust, and something of the repugnance that one feels at the sight of
a venomous snake, half-killed, trailing its bleeding vileness out of
sight. By design Lucian tried to make for remote and desolate places,
and yet when he had succeeded in touching on the open country, and knew
that the icy shadow hovering through the mist was a field, he longed
for some sound and murmur of life, and turned again to roads where pale
lamps were glimmering, and the dancing flame of firelight shone across
the frozen shrubs. And the sight of these homely fires, the thought of
affection and consolation waiting by them, stung him the more sharply
perhaps because of the contrast with his own chills and weariness and
helpless sickness, and chiefly because he knew that he had long closed
an everlasting door between his heart and such felicities. If those
within had come out and had called him by his name to enter and be
comforted, it would have been quite unavailing, since between them and
him there was a great gulf fixed. Perhaps for the first time he
realized that he had lost the art of humanity for ever. He had thought
when he closed his ears to the wood whisper and changed the fauns’
singing for the murmur of the streets, the black pools for the shadows
and amber light of London, that he had put off the old life, and had
turned his soul to healthy activities, but the truth was that he had
merely exchanged one drug for another. He could not be human, and he
wondered whether there were some drop of the fairy blood in his body
that made him foreign and a stranger in the world.
He did not surrender to desolation without repeated struggles. He
strove to allure himself to his desk by the promise of some easy task;
he would not attempt invention, but he had memoranda and rough jottings
of ideas in his note-books, and he would merely amplify the suggestions
ready to his hand. But it was hopeless, again and again it was
hopeless. As he read over his notes, trusting that he would find some
hint that might light up the dead fires, and kindle again that pure
flame of enthusiasm, he found how desperately his fortune had fallen.
He could see no light, no colour in the lines he had scribbled with
eager trembling fingers; he remembered how splendid all these things
had been when he wrote them down, but now they were meaningless, faded
into grey. The few words he had dashed on to the paper, enraptured at
the thought of the happy hours they promised, had become mere jargon,
and when he understood the idea it seemed foolish, dull, unoriginal. He
discovered something at last that appeared to have a grain of promise,
and determined to do his best to put it into shape, but the first
paragraph appalled him; it might have been written by an unintelligent
schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and shut and locked his desk,
heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart. For the rest of that
day he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after pipe in the hope
of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes. The air in the room became
blue and thick with smoke; it was bitterly cold, and he wrapped himself
up in his great-coat and drew the counterpane over him. The night came
on and the window darkened, and at last he fell asleep.
He renewed the effort at intervals, only to plunge deeper into misery.
He felt the approaches of madness, and knew that his only hope was to
walk till he was physically exhausted, so that he might come home
almost fainting with fatigue, but ready to fall asleep the moment he
got into bed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring
to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper,
with the advertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness
of the light that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the
muffled voices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to
make out the design that had once coloured the faded carpet on the
floor, and wondered about the dead artist in Japan, the adorner of his
bureau. He speculated as to what his thoughts had been as he inserted
the rainbow mother-of-pearl and made that great flight of shining
birds, dipping their wings as they rose from the reeds, or how he had
conceived the lacquer dragons in red gold, and the fantastic houses in
the garden of peach-trees. But sooner or later the oppression of his
grief returned, the loud shriek and clang of the garden-gate, the
warning bell of some passing bicyclist steering through the fog, the
noise of his pipe falling to the floor, would suddenly awaken him to
the sense of misery. He knew that it was time to go out; he could not
bear to sit still and suffer. Sometimes he cut a slice of bread and put
it in his pocket, sometimes he trusted to the chance of finding a
public-house, where he could have a sandwich and a glass of beer. He
turned always from the main streets and lost himself in the intricate
suburban byways, willing to be engulfed in the infinite whiteness of
the mist.
The roads had stiffened into iron ridges, the fences and trees were
glittering with frost crystals, everything was of strange and altered
aspect. Lucian walked on and on through the maze, now in a circle of
shadowy villas, awful as the buried streets of Herculaneum, now in
lanes dipping onto open country, that led him past great elm-trees
whose white boughs were all still, and past the bitter lonely fields
where the mist seemed to fade away into grey darkness. As he wandered
along these unfamiliar and ghastly paths he became the more convinced
of his utter remoteness from all humanity, he allowed that grotesque
suggestion of there being something visibly amiss in his outward
appearance to grow upon him, and often he looked with a horrible
expectation into the faces of those who passed by, afraid lest his own
senses gave him false intelligence, and that he had really assumed some
frightful and revolting shape. It was curious that, partly by his own
fault, and largely, no doubt, through the operation of mere
coincidence, he was once or twice strongly confirmed in this fantastic
delusion. He came one day into a lonely and unfrequented byway, a
country lane falling into ruin, but still fringed with elms that had
formed an avenue leading to the old manor-house. It was now the road of
communication between two far outlying suburbs, and on these winter
nights lay as black, dreary, and desolate as a mountain track. Soon
after the frost began, a gentleman had been set upon in this lane as he
picked his way between the corner where the bus had set him down, and
his home where the fire was blazing, and his wife watched the clock. He
was stumbling uncertainly through the gloom, growing a little nervous
because the walk seemed so long, and peering anxiously for the lamp at
the end of his street, when the two footpads rushed at him out of the
fog. One caught him from behind, the other struck him with a heavy
bludgeon, and as he lay senseless they robbed him of his watch and
money, and vanished across the fields. The next morning all the suburb
rang with the story; the unfortunate merchant had been grievously hurt,
and wives watched their husbands go out in the morning with sickening
apprehension, not knowing what might happen at night. Lucian of course
was ignorant of all these rumors, and struck into the gloomy by-road
without caring where he was or whither the way would lead him.
He had been driven out that day as with whips, another hopeless attempt
to return to the work had agonised him, and existence seemed an
intolerable pain. As he entered the deeper gloom, where the fog hung
heavily, he began, half consciously, to gesticulate; he felt convulsed
with torment and shame, and it was a sorry relief to clench his nails
into his palm and strike the air as he stumbled heavily along, bruising
his feet against the frozen ruts and ridges. His impotence was hideous,
he said to himself, and he cursed himself and his life, breaking out
into a loud oath, and stamping on the ground. Suddenly he was shocked
at a scream of terror, it seemed in his very ear, and looking up he saw
for a moment a woman gazing at him out of the mist, her features
distorted and stiff with fear. A momentary convulsion twitched her arms
into the ugly mimicry of a beckoning gesture, and she turned and ran
for dear life, howling like a beast.
Lucian stood still in the road while the woman’s cries grew faint and
died away. His heart was chilled within him as the significance of this
strange incident became clear. He remembered nothing of his violent
gestures; he had not known at the time that he had sworn out loud, or
that he was grinding his teeth with impotent rage. He only thought of
that ringing scream, of the horrible fear on the white face that had
looked upon him, of the woman’s headlong flight from his presence. He
stood trembling and shuddering, and in a little while he was feeling
his face, searching for some loathsome mark, for the stigmata of evil
branding his forehead. He staggered homewards like a drunken man, and
when he came into the Uxbridge Road some children saw him and called
after him as he swayed and caught at the lamp-post. When he got to his
room he sat down at first in the dark. He did not dare to light the
gas. Everything in the room was indistinct, but he shut his eyes as he
passed the dressing-table, and sat in a corner, his face turned to the
wall. And when at last he gathered courage and the flame leapt hissing
from the jet, he crept piteously towards the glass, and ducked his
head, crouching miserably, and struggling with his terrors before he
could look at his own image.
To the best of his power he tried to deliver himself from these more
grotesque fantasies; he assured himself that there was nothing terrific
in his countenance but sadness, that his face was like the face of
other men. Yet he could not forget that reflection he had seen in the
woman’s eyes, how the surest mirrors had shown him a horrible dread,
her soul itself quailing and shuddering at an awful sight. Her scream
rang and rang in his ears; she had fled away from him as if he offered
some fate darker than death.
He looked again and again into the glass, tortured by a hideous
uncertainty. His senses told him there was nothing amiss, yet he had
had a proof, and yet, as he peered most earnestly, there was, it
seemed, something strange and not altogether usual in the expression of
the eyes. Perhaps it might be the unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps
a flaw in the cheap looking-glass, that gave some slight distortion to
the image. He walked briskly up and down the room and tried to gaze
steadily, indifferently, into his own face. He would not allow himself
to be misguided by a word. When he had pronounced himself incapable of
humanity, he had only meant that he could not enjoy the simple things
of common life. A man was not necessarily monstrous, merely because he
did not appreciate high tea, a quiet chat about the neighbors, and a
happy noisy evening with the children. But with what message, then, did
he appear charged that the woman’s mouth grew so stark? Her hands had
jerked up as if they had been pulled with frantic wires; she seemed for
the instant like a horrible puppet. Her scream was a thing from the
nocturnal Sabbath.
He lit a candle and held it close up to the glass so that his own face
glared white at him, and the reflection of the room became an
indistinct darkness. He saw nothing but the candle flame and his own
shining eyes, and surely they were not as the eyes of common men. As he
put down the light, a sudden suggestion entered his mind, and he drew a
quick breath, amazed at the thought. He hardly knew whether to rejoice
or to shudder. For the thought he conceived was this: that he had
mistaken all the circumstances of the adventure, and had perhaps
repulsed a sister who would have welcomed him to the Sabbath.
He lay awake all night, turning from one dreary and frightful thought
to the other, scarcely dozing for a few hours when the dawn came. He
tried for a moment to argue with himself when he got up; knowing that
his true life was locked up in the bureau, he made a desperate attempt
to drive the phantoms and hideous shapes from his mind. He was assured
that his salvation was in the work, and he drew the key from his
pocket, and made as if he would have opened the desk. But the nausea,
the remembrances of repeated and utter failure, were too powerful. For
many days he hung about the Manor Lane, half dreading, half desiring
another meeting, and he swore he would not again mistake the cry of
rapture, nor repulse the arms extended in a frenzy of delight. In those
days he dreamed of some dark place where they might celebrate and make
the marriage of the Sabbath, with such rites as he had dared to
imagine.
It was perhaps only the shock of a letter from his father that rescued
him from these evident approaches to madness. Mr. Taylor wrote how they
had missed him at Christmas, how the farmers had inquired after him, of
the homely familiar things that recalled his boyhood, his mother’s
voice, the friendly fireside, and the good old fashions that had
nurtured him. He remembered that he had once been a boy, loving the
cake and puddings and the radiant holly, and all the
seventeenth-century mirth that lingered on in the ancient farmhouses.
And there came to him the more holy memory of Mass on Christmas
morning. How sweet the dark and frosty earth had smelt as he walked
beside his mother down the winding lane, and from the stile near the
church they had seen the world glimmering to the dawn, and the
wandering lanthorns advancing across the fields. Then he had come into
the church and seen it shining with candles and holly, and his father
in pure vestments of white linen sang the longing music of the liturgy
at the altar, and the people answered him, till the sun rose with the
grave notes of the Paternoster, and a red beam stole through the
chancel window.
The worst horror left him as he recalled the memory of these dear and
holy things. He cast away the frightful fancy that the scream he had
heard was a shriek of joy, that the arms, rigidly jerked out, invited
him to an embrace. Indeed, the thought that he had longed for such an
obscene illusion, that he had gloated over the recollection of that
stark mouth, filled him with disgust. He resolved that his senses were
deceived, that he had neither seen nor heard, but had for a moment
externalized his own slumbering and morbid dreams. It was perhaps
necessary that he should be wretched, that his efforts should be
discouraged, but he would not yield utterly to madness.
Yet when he went abroad with such good resolutions, it was hard to
resist an influence that seemed to come from without and within. He did
not know it, but people were everywhere talking of the great frost, of
the fog that lay heavy on London, making the streets dark and terrible,
of strange birds that came fluttering about the windows in the silent
squares. The Thames rolled out duskily, bearing down the jarring
ice-blocks, and as one looked on the black water from the bridges it
was like a river in a northern tale. To Lucian it all seemed mythical,
of the same substance as his own fantastic thoughts. He rarely saw a
newspaper, and did not follow from day to day the systematic readings
of the thermometer, the reports of ice-fairs, of coaches driven across
the river at Hampton, of the skating on the fens; and hence the iron
roads, the beleaguered silence and the heavy folds of mist appeared as
amazing as a picture, significant, appalling. He could not look out and
see a common suburban street foggy and dull, nor think of the
inhabitants as at work or sitting cheerfully eating nuts about their
fires; he saw a vision of a grey road vanishing, of dim houses all
empty and deserted, and the silence seemed eternal. And when he went
out and passed through street after street, all void, by the vague
shapes of houses that appeared for a moment and were then instantly
swallowed up, it seemed to him as if he had strayed into a city that
had suffered some inconceivable doom, that he alone wandered where
myriads had once dwelt. It was a town as great as Babylon, terrible as
Rome, marvelous as Lost Atlantis, set in the midst of a white
wilderness surrounded by waste places. It was impossible to escape from
it; if he skulked between hedges, and crept away beyond the frozen
pools, presently the serried stony lines confronted him like an army,
and far and far they swept away into the night, as some fabled wall
that guards an empire in the vast dim east. Or in that distorting
medium of the mist, changing all things, he imagined that he trod an
infinite desolate plain, abandoned from ages, but circled and encircled
with dolmen and menhir that loomed out at him, gigantic, terrible. All
London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard
stones circled about some central place, every circle was an
initiation, every initiation eternal loss. Or perhaps he was astray for
ever in a land of grey rocks. He had seen the light of home, the
flicker of the fire on the walls; close at hand, it seemed, was the
open door, and he had heard dear voices calling to him across the
gloom, but he had just missed the path. The lamps vanished, the voices
sounded thin and died away, and yet he knew that those within were
waiting, that they could not bear to close the door, but waited,
calling his name, while he had missed the way, and wandered in the
pathless desert of the grey rocks. Fantastic, hideous, they beset him
wherever he turned, piled up into strange shapes, pricked with sharp
peaks, assuming the appearance of goblin towers, swelling into a vague
dome like a fairy rath, huge and terrible. And as one dream faded into
another, so these last fancies were perhaps the most tormenting and
persistent; the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice of some
half-human, malignant race who swarmed in hiding, ready to bear him
away into the heart of their horrible hills. It was awful to think that
all his goings were surrounded, that in the darkness he was watched and
surveyed, that every step but led him deeper and deeper into the
labyrinth.
When, of an evening, he was secure in his room, the blind drawn down
and the gas flaring, he made vigorous efforts toward sanity. It was
not of his free will that he allowed terror to overmaster him, and
he desired nothing better than a placid and harmless life, full
of work and clear thinking. He knew that he deluded himself with
imagination, that he had been walking through London suburbs and not
through Pandemonium, and that if he could but unlock his bureau all
those ugly forms would be resolved into the mist. But it was hard to
say if he consoled himself effectually with such reflections, for the
return to common sense meant also the return to the sharp pangs of
defeat. It recalled him to the bitter theme of his own inefficiency,
to the thought that he only desired one thing of life, and that this
was denied him. He was willing to endure the austerities of a monk
in a severe cloister, to suffer cold, to be hungry, to be lonely and
friendless, to forbear all the consolation of friendly speech; and to
be glad of all these things, if only he might be allowed to illuminate
the manuscript in quietness. It seemed a hideous insufferable cruelty,
that he should so fervently desire that which he could never gain.
He was led back to the old conclusion; he had lost the sense of
humanity, he was wretched because he was an alien and a stranger
amongst citizens. It seemed probable that the enthusiasm of literature,
as he understood it, the fervent desire for the fine art, had in it
something of the inhuman, and dissevered the enthusiast from his
fellow-creatures. It was possible that the barbarian suspected as much,
that by some slow process of rumination he had arrived at his fixed and
inveterate impression, by no means a clear reasoned conviction; the
average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would
either become inarticulate, ejaculating “faugh” and “pah” like an
old-fashioned Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and
absurd reason, alleging that all “littery men” were poor, that
composers never cut their hair, that painters were rarely public-school
men, that sculptors couldn’t ride straight to hounds to save their
lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the
average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that
was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his
harsh, semi-bestial “faugh,” and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from
much the same motives as usually impelled the black savages to dismiss
the white man on an even longer journey.
Lucian was not especially interested in this hatred of the barbarian
for the maker, except from this point, that it confirmed him in his
belief that the love of art dissociated the man from the race. One
touch of art made the whole world alien, but surely miseries of the
civilized man cast amongst savages were not so much caused by dread of
their ferocity as by the terror of his own thoughts; he would perhaps
in his last despair leave his retreat and go forth to perish at their
hands, so that he might at least die in company, and hear the sound of
speech before death. And Lucian felt most keenly that in his case there
was a double curse; he was as isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as
his reviewers. The consolation of the work had failed him, and he was
suspended in the void between two worlds.
It was no doubt the composite effect of his failures, his loneliness of
soul, and solitude of life, that had made him invest those common
streets with such grim and persistent terrors. He had perhaps yielded
to a temptation without knowing that he had been tempted, and, in the
manner of De Quincey, had chosen the subtle in exchange for the more
tangible pains. Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred
the splendor and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal
pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to
dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city
doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to
awake to a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of
business would have been more suitable and more practical, that he had
promised what he could never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back
the phantasmagoria of the mist, and resolved that he would no longer
make all the streets a stage of apparitions, he hardly realized what he
had done, or that the ghosts he had called might depart and return
again.
He continued his long walks, always with the object of producing a
physical weariness and exhaustion that would enable him to sleep of
nights. But even when he saw the foggy and deserted avenues in their
proper shape, and allowed his eyes to catch the pale glimmer of the
lamps, and the dancing flame of the firelight, he could not rid himself
of the impression that he stood afar off, that between those hearths
and himself there was a great gulf fixed. As he paced down the footpath
he could often see plainly across the frozen shrubs into the homely and
cheerful rooms. Sometimes, late in the evening, he caught a passing
glimpse of the family at tea, father, mother, and children laughing and
talking together, well pleased with each other’s company. Sometimes a
wife or a child was standing by the garden gate peering anxiously
through the fog, and the sight of it all, all the little details, the
hideous but comfortable armchairs turned ready to the fire, maroon-red
curtains being drawn close to shut out the ugly night, the sudden blaze
and illumination as the fire was poked up so that it might be cheerful
for father; these trivial and common things were acutely significant.
They brought back to him the image of a dead boy—himself. They recalled
the shabby old “parlor” in the country, with its shabby old furniture
and fading carpet, and renewed a whole atmosphere of affection and
homely comfort. His mother would walk to the end of the drive and look
out for him when he was late (wandering then about the dark woodlands);
on winter evenings she would make the fire blaze, and have his slippers
warming by the hearth, and there was probably buttered toast “as a
treat.” He dwelt on all these insignificant petty circumstances, on the
genial glow and light after the muddy winter lanes, on the relish of
the buttered toast and the smell of the hot tea, on the two old cats
curled fast asleep before the fender, and made them instruments of
exquisite pain and regret. Each of these strange houses that he passed
was identified in his mind with his own vanished home; all was prepared
and ready as in the old days, but he was shut out, judged and condemned
to wander in the frozen mist, with weary feet, anguished and forlorn,
and they that would pass from within to help him could not, neither
could he pass to them. Again, for the hundredth time, he came back to
the sentence: he could not gain the art of letters and he had lost the
art of humanity. He saw the vanity of all his thoughts; he was an
ascetic caring nothing for warmth and cheerfulness and the small
comforts of life, and yet he allowed his mind to dwell on such things.
If one of those passers-by, who walked briskly, eager for home, should
have pitied him by some miracle and asked him to come in, it would have
been worse than useless, yet he longed for pleasures that he could not
have enjoyed. It was as if he were come to a place of torment, where
they who could not drink longed for water, where they who could feel no
warmth shuddered in the eternal cold. He was oppressed by the grim
conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket,
imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort. He had never come
out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the
earth.
Beset by such ingenious terrors, it was not wonderful that outward
events and common incidents should abet his fancies. He had succeeded
one day in escaping from the mesh of the streets, and fell on a rough
and narrow lane that stole into a little valley. For the moment he was
in a somewhat happier mood; the afternoon sun glowed through the
rolling mist, and the air grew clearer. He saw quiet and peaceful
fields, and a wood descending in a gentle slope from an old farmstead
of warm red brick. The farmer was driving the slow cattle home from the
hill, and his loud halloo to his dog came across the land a cheerful
mellow note. From another side a cart was approaching the clustered
barns, hesitating, pausing while the great horses rested, and then
starting again into lazy motion. In the well of the valley a wandering
line of bushes showed where a brook crept in and out amongst the
meadows, and, as Lucian stood, lingering, on the bridge, a soft and
idle breath ruffled through the boughs of a great elm. He felt soothed,
as by calm music, and wondered whether it would not be better for him
to live in some such quiet place, within reach of the streets and yet
remote from them. It seemed a refuge for still thoughts; he could
imagine himself sitting at rest beneath the black yew tree in the farm
garden, at the close of a summer day. He had almost determined that he
would knock at the door and ask if they would take him as a lodger,
when he saw a child running towards him down the lane. It was a little
girl, with bright curls tossing about her head, and, as she came on,
the sunlight glowed upon her, illuminating her brick-red frock and the
yellow king-cups in her hat. She had run with her eyes on the ground,
chirping and laughing to herself, and did not see Lucian till she was
quite near him. She started and glanced into his eyes for a moment, and
began to cry; he stretched out his hand, and she ran from him
screaming, frightened no doubt by what was to her a sudden and strange
apparition. He turned back towards London, and the mist folded him in
its thick darkness, for on that evening it was tinged with black.
It was only by the intensest strain of resolution that he did not yield
utterly to the poisonous anodyne which was always at hand. It had been
a difficult struggle to escape from the mesh of the hills, from the
music of the fauns, and even now he was drawn by the memory of these
old allurements. But he felt that here, in his loneliness, he was in
greater danger, and beset by a blacker magic. Horrible fancies rushed
wantonly into his mind; he was not only ready to believe that something
in his soul sent a shudder through all that was simple and innocent,
but he came trembling home one Saturday night, believing, or
half-believing, that he was in communion with evil. He had passed
through the clamorous and blatant crowd of the “high street,” where, as
one climbed the hill, the shops seemed all aflame, and the black night
air glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and
wavering before the February wind. Voices, raucous, clamant,
abominable, were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors
swung to and fro, and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very
slowly swinging in a violent blast of air, so that they might have been
infernal thuribles, censing the people. Some man was calling his wares
in one long continuous shriek that never stopped or paused, and, as a
respond, a deeper, louder voice roared to him from across the road. An
Italian whirled the handle of his piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of
imps danced mad figures around him, danced and flung up their legs till
the rags dropped from some of them, and they still danced on. A flare
of naphtha, burning with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of
the circle, and Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen as she came round
and round to the flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her
petticoats away, and the crowd howled laughter and applause at her. Her
black hair poured down and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and
leapt round the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy, and led the orgy to
triumph. People were crossing to and fro, jostling against each other,
swarming about certain shops and stalls in a dense dark mass that
quivered and sent out feelers as if it were one writhing organism. A
little farther a group of young men, arm in arm, were marching down the
roadway chanting some music-hall verse in full chorus, so that it
sounded like plainsong. An impossible hubbub, a hum of voices angry as
swarming bees, the squeals of five or six girls who ran in and out, and
dived up dark passages and darted back into the crowd; all these
mingled together till his ears quivered. A young fellow was playing the
concertina, and he touched the keys with such slow fingers that the
tune wailed solemn into a dirge; but there was nothing so strange as
the burst of sound that swelled out when the public-house doors were
opened.
He walked amongst these people, looked at their faces, and looked at
the children amongst them. He had come out thinking that he would see
the English working class, “the best-behaved and the best-tempered
crowd in the world,” enjoying the simple pleasure of the Saturday
night’s shopping. Mother bought the joint for Sunday’s dinner, and
perhaps a pair of boots for father; father had an honest glass of beer,
and the children were given bags of sweets, and then all these worthy
people went decently home to their well-earned rest. De Quincey had
enjoyed the sight in his day, and had studied the rise and fall of
onions and potatoes. Lucian, indeed, had desired to take these simple
emotions as an opiate, to forget the fine fret and fantastic trouble of
his own existence in plain things and the palpable joy of rest after
labour. He was only afraid lest he should be too sharply reproached by
the sight of these men who fought bravely year after year against
starvation, who knew nothing of intricate and imagined grief, but only
the weariness of relentless labour, of the long battle for their wives
and children. It would be pathetic, he thought, to see them content
with so little, brightened by the expectation of a day’s rest and a
good dinner, forced, even then, to reckon every penny, and to make
their children laugh with halfpence. Either he would be ashamed before
so much content, or else he would be again touched by the sense of his
inhumanity which could take no interest in the common things of life.
But still he went to be at least taken out of himself, to be forced to
look at another side of the world, so that he might perhaps forget a
little while his own sorrows.
He was fascinated by what he saw and heard. He wondered whether De
Quincey also had seen the same spectacle, and had concealed his
impressions out of reverence for the average reader. Here there were no
simple joys of honest toilers, but wonderful orgies, that drew out his
heart to horrible music. At first the violence of sound and sight had
overwhelmed him; the lights flaring in the night wind, the array of
naphtha lamps, the black shadows, the roar of voices. The dance about
the piano-organ had been the first sign of an inner meaning, and the
face of the dark girl as she came round and round to the flame had been
amazing in its utter furious abandon. And what songs they were singing
all around him, and what terrible words rang out, only to excite peals
of laughter. In the public-houses the workmen’s wives, the wives of
small tradesmen, decently dressed in black, were drinking their faces
to a flaming red, and urging their husbands to drink more. Beautiful
young women, flushed and laughing, put their arms round the men’s necks
and kissed them, and then held up the glass to their lips. In the dark
corners, at the openings of side streets, the children were talking
together, instructing each other, whispering what they had seen; a boy
of fifteen was plying a girl of twelve with whisky, and presently they
crept away. Lucian passed them as they turned to go, and both looked at
him. The boy laughed, and the girl smiled quietly. It was above all in
the faces around him that he saw the most astounding things, the
Bacchic fury unveiled and unashamed. To his eyes it seemed as if these
revelers recognized him as a fellow, and smiled up in his face, aware
that he was in the secret. Every instinct of religion, of civilization
even, was swept away; they gazed at one another and at him, absolved of
all scruples, children of the earth and nothing more. Now and then a
couple detached themselves from the swarm, and went away into the
darkness, answering the jeers and laughter of their friends as they
vanished.
On the edge of the pavement, not far from where he was standing, Lucian
noticed a tall and lovely young woman who seemed to be alone. She was
in the full light of a naphtha flame, and her bronze hair and flushed
cheeks shone illuminate as she viewed the orgy. She had dark brown
eyes, and a strange look as of an old picture in her face; and her eyes
brightened with an urgent gleam. He saw the revelers nudging each other
and glancing at her, and two or three young men went up and asked her
to come for a walk. She shook her head and said “No thank you” again
and again, and seemed as if she were looking for somebody in the crowd.
“I’m expecting a friend,” she said at last to a man who proposed a
drink and a walk afterwards; and Lucian wondered what kind of friend
would ultimately appear. Suddenly she turned to him as he was about to
pass on, and said in a low voice:
“I’ll go for a walk with you if you like; you just go on, and I’ll
follow in a minute.”
For a moment he looked steadily at her. He saw that the first glance
had misled him; her face was not flushed with drink as he had supposed,
but it was radiant with the most exquisite colour, a red flame glowed
and died on her cheek, and seemed to palpitate as she spoke. The head
was set on the neck nobly, as in a statue, and about the ears the
bronze hair strayed into little curls. She was smiling and waiting for
his answer.
He muttered something about being very sorry, and fled down the hill
out of the orgy, from the noise of roaring voices and the glitter of
the great lamps very slowly swinging in the blast of wind. He knew that
he had touched the brink of utter desolation; there was death in the
woman’s face, and she had indeed summoned him to the Sabbath. Somehow
he had been able to refuse on the instant, but if he had delayed he
knew he would have abandoned himself to her, body and soul. He locked
himself in his room and lay trembling on the bed, wondering if some
subtle sympathy had shown the woman her perfect companion. He looked in
the glass, not expecting now to see certain visible and outward signs,
but searching for the meaning of that strange glance that lit up his
eyes. He had grown even thinner than before in the last few months, and
his cheeks were wasted with hunger and sorrow, but there were still
about his features the suggestion of a curious classic grace, and the
look as of a faun who has strayed from the vineyards and olive gardens.
He had broken away, but now he felt the mesh of her net about him, a
desire for her that was a madness, as if she held every nerve in his
body and drew him to her, to her mystic world, to the rosebush where
every flower was a flame.
He dreamed all night of the perilous things he had refused, and it was
loss to awake in the morning, pain to return to the world. The frost
had broken and the fog had rolled away, and the grey street was filled
with a clear grey light. Again he looked out on the long dull sweep of
the monotonous houses, hidden for the past weeks by a curtain of mist.
Heavy rain had fallen in the night, and the garden rails were still
dripping, the roofs still dark with wet, all down the line the dingy
white blinds were drawn in the upper windows. Not a soul walked the
street; every one was asleep after the exertions of the night before;
even on the main road it was only at intervals that some straggler
paddled by. Presently a woman in a brown ulster shuffled off on some
errand, then a man in shirt-sleeves poked out his head, holding the
door half-open, and stared up at a window opposite. After a few
minutes he slunk in again, and three loafers came slouching down the
street, eager for mischief or beastliness of some sort. They chose a
house that seemed rather smarter than the rest, and, irritated by the
neat curtains, the little grass plot with its dwarf shrub, one of the
ruffians drew out a piece of chalk and wrote some words on the front
door. His friends kept watch for him, and the adventure achieved,
all three bolted, bellowing yahoo laughter. Then a bell began, tang,
tang, tang, and here and there children appeared on their way to
Sunday-school, and the chapel “teachers” went by with verjuice eyes
and lips, scowling at the little boy who cried “Piper, piper!” On the
main road many respectable people, the men shining and ill-fitted, the
women hideously bedizened, passed in the direction of the Independent
nightmare, the stuccoed thing with Doric columns, but on the whole life
was stagnant. Presently Lucian smelt the horrid fumes of roast beef and
cabbage; the early risers were preparing the one-o’clock meal, but many
lay in bed and put off dinner till three, with the effect of prolonging
the cabbage atmosphere into the late afternoon. A drizzly rain began as
the people were coming out of church, and the mothers of little boys
in velvet and little girls in foolishness of every kind were impelled
to slap their offspring, and to threaten them with father. Then the
torpor of beef and beer and cabbage settled down on the street; in
some houses they snorted and read the Parish Magazine, in some they
snored and read the murders and collected filth of the week; but the
only movement of the afternoon was a second procession of children,
now bloated and distended with food, again answering the summons of
tang, tang, tang. On the main road the trams, laden with impossible
people, went humming to and fro, and young men who wore bright blue
ties cheerfully haw-hawed and smoked penny cigars. They annoyed the
shiny and respectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful stench
of the cigars, but because they were cheerful on Sunday. By and by the
children, having heard about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in the
Lion’s Den, came straggling home in an evil humor. And all the day it
was as if on a grey sheet grey shadows flickered, passing by.
And in the rose-garden every flower was a flame! He thought in symbols,
using the Persian imagery of a dusky court, surrounded by white
cloisters, gilded by gates of bronze. The stars came out, the sky
glowed a darker violet, but the cloistered wall, the fantastic
trellises in stone, shone whiter. It was like a hedge of may-blossom,
like a lily within a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam tossed on the
heaving sea at dawn. Always those white cloisters trembled with the
lute music, always the garden sang with the clear fountain, rising and
falling in the mysterious dusk. And there was a singing voice stealing
through the white lattices and the bronze gates, a soft voice chanting
of the Lover and the Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and the Way.
Oh! the language was unknown; but the music of the refrain returned
again and again, swelling and trembling through the white nets of the
latticed cloisters. And every rose in the dusky air was a flame.
He had seen the life which he expressed by these symbols offered to
him, and he had refused it; and he was alone in the grey street, with
its lamps just twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast of a
ribald chorus sounding from the main road, a doggerel hymn whining from
some parlor, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered why he
had turned away from that woman who knew all secrets, in whose eyes
were all the mysteries. He opened the desk of his bureau, and was
confronted by the heap and litter of papers, lying in confusion as he
had left them. He knew that there was the motive of his refusal; he had
been unwilling to abandon all hope of the work. The glory and the
torment of his ambition glowed upon him as he looked at the manuscript;
it seemed so pitiful that such a single desire should be thwarted. He
was aware that if he chose to sit down now before the desk he could, in
a manner, write easily enough—he could produce a tale which would be
formally well constructed and certain of favorable reception. And it
would not be the utterly commonplace, entirely hopeless favorite of the
circulating library; it would stand in those ranks where the real thing
is skillfully counterfeited, amongst the books which give the reader
his orgy of emotions, and yet contrive to be superior, and “art,” in
his opinion. Lucian had often observed this species of triumph, and had
noted the acclamation that never failed the clever sham. _Romola_, for
example, had made the great host of the serious, the portentous, shout
for joy, while the real book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was a
comparative failure.
He knew that he could write a _Romola_; but he thought the art of
counterfeiting half-crowns less detestable than this shabby trick of
imitating literature. He had refused definitely to enter the atelier of
the gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the
grain of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out
contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of
hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer.
He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers,
and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could
never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and
genuine pages.
He was stirred again to this fury for the work by the event of the
evening before, by all that had passed through his mind since the
melancholy dawn. The lurid picture of that fiery street, the flaming
shops and flaming glances, all its wonders and horrors, lit by the
naphtha flares and by the burning souls, had possessed him; and the
noises, the shriek and the whisper, the jangling rattle of the
piano-organ, the long-continued scream of the butcher as he dabbled in
the blood, the lewd litany of the singers, these seemed to be resolved
into an infernal overture, loud with the expectation of lust and death.
And how the spectacle was set in the cloud of dark night, a phantom
play acted on that fiery stage, beneath those hideous brassy lamps,
very slowly swinging in a violent blast. As all the medley of
outrageous sights and sounds now fused themselves within his brain into
one clear impression, it seemed that he had indeed witnessed and acted
in a drama, that all the scene had been prepared and vested for him,
and that the choric songs he had heard were but preludes to a greater
act. For in that woman was the consummation and catastrophe of it all,
and the whole stage waited for their meeting. He fancied that after
this the voices and the lights died away, that the crowd sank swiftly
into the darkness, and that the street was at once denuded of the great
lamps and of all its awful scenic apparatus.
Again, he thought, the same mystery would be represented before him;
suddenly on some dark and gloomy night, as he wandered lonely on a
deserted road, the wind hurrying before him, suddenly a turn would
bring him again upon the fiery stage, and the antique drama would be
re-enacted. He would be drawn to the same place, to find that woman
still standing there; again he would watch the rose radiant and
palpitating upon her cheek, the argent gleam in her brown eyes, the
bronze curls gilding the white splendor of her neck. And for the second
time she would freely offer herself. He could hear the wail of the
singers swelling to a shriek, and see the dusky dancers whirling round
in a faster frenzy, and the naphtha flares tinged with red, as the
woman and he went away into the dark, into the cloistered court where
every flower was a flame, whence he would never come out.
His only escape was in the desk; he might find salvation if he could
again hide his heart in the heap and litter of papers, and again be
rapt by the cadence of a phrase. He threw open his window and looked
out on the dim world and the glimmering amber lights. He resolved that
he would rise early in the morning, and seek once more for his true
life in the work.
But there was a strange thing. There was a little bottle on the
mantelpiece, a bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered
before it, as if it were a fetish.