THE BARE BODKIN.
Presently Lenox found himself on the boulevard. There was a café near
at hand, and he sat down at one of the tables that lined the sidewalk.
He was dazed as were he in the semi-consciousness of somnambulism. He
gave an order absently, and when some drink was placed before him, he
took it at a gulp.
Under its influence his stupor fell from him. The necessity, the
obligation of proving his innocence presented itself, but, with it,
hand in hand, came the knowledge that such proof was impossible. Even
his luck at play would be taken as corroboratory of the charge. Were he
to say that the marked cards had been placed on the talion by Incoul,
who was there outside the aisles of the insane that would listen to
such a defense? To compel attention, he would be obliged to explain
the act, and state its reason. And that explanation he could never
give. He could not exculpate himself at the cost of a woman’s fame.
Which ever way he turned, dishonor stood before him. The toils into
which he had fallen had been woven with a cunning so devilish in its
clairvoyance that every avenue of escape was closed. He was blockaded
in his own disgrace.
He rested his head in his hand, and moaned aloud. Presently, with the
instinct of a hunted beast, he felt that people were looking at him. He
feared that some of his former acquaintances, on leaving the club, had
passed and seen him sitting there, and among them, perhaps Incoul.
He threw some money in the saucer and hurried away. There were still
many people about. To avoid them he turned into a side street and
walked on with rapid step. Soon he was in the Rue de la Paix. It was
practically deserted. On a corner, a young ruffian in a slouch hat was
humming, “_Ugène, tu m’fais languir_,” and beating time to the measure
with his foot. Just above the Colonne Vendôme the moon rested like a
vagrant, weary of its amble across the sky. But otherwise the street
was solitary. Through its entire length but one shop was open, and as
Lenox approached it a man came out to arrange the shutters. From the
doorway a thin stream of light still filtered on the pavement. In the
window were globes filled with colored liquids, and beyond at a counter
a clerk was tying a parcel.
Lenox entered. “Give me a Privas,” he said, and when the clerk had done
so, he asked him to make up a certain prescription. But to this the man
objected; he could not, he explained, without a physician’s order.
“Here are several,” said Lenox, and he took from his card-case a roll
of azure notes.
The clerk eyed them nervously. They represented over a year’s salary.
He hesitated a moment, “I don’t know,”--and he shook his head, as were
he arguing with himself--“I don’t know whether I am doing right.” And
at once prepared the mixture.
Ten minutes later Lenox was mounting the stair of the hotel at which he
lodged. On reaching his room he put his purchases on a table, poured
out a glass of absinthe, lit a cigarette, and threw himself down on
a lounge. For a while his thoughts roamed among the episodes of the
day, but gradually they drifted into less personal currents. He began
to think of the early legends: of Chiron, the god, renouncing his
immortality; of the Hyperboreans, that fabled people, famous for their
felicity, who voluntarily threw themselves into the sea; of Juno
bringing death to Biton and Cleobis as the highest recompense of their
piety; of Agamedes and Trophonius, praying Apollo for whatever gift he
deemed most advantageous, and in answer to the prayer receiving eternal
sleep.
He reflected on the meaning of these legends, and, as he reflected,
he remembered that the Thracians greeted birth with lamentations and
death with welcoming festivals. He thought of that sage who pitied the
gods because their lives were unending, and of Menander singing the
early demise of the favored. He remembered how Plato had preached to
the happiest people in the world the blessedness of ceaseless sleep;
how the Buddha, teaching that life was but a right to suffer, had
found for the recalcitrant no greater menace than that of an existence
renewed through kalpas of time. Then he bethought him of the promise of
that peace which passeth all understanding, and which the grave alone
fulfills, and he repeated to himself Christ’s significant threat, “In
this life ye shall have tribulation.”
And, as these things came to him, so, too, did the problem of pain.
He reviewed the ravages of that ulcer which has battened on humanity
since the world began. History uncoiled itself before him in a shudder.
In its spasms he saw the myriads that have fought and died for dogmas
that they did not understand, for invented principles of patriotism and
religion, for leaders that they had never seen, for gods more helpless
than themselves.
He saw, too, Nature’s cruelty and her snares. The gift to man of
appetites, which, in the guise of pleasure, veil immedicable pain.
Poison in the richest flowers, the agony that lurks in the grape. He
knew that whoso ate to his hunger, or drank to his thirst, summoned
to him one or more of countless maladies--maladies which parents gave
with their vices to their children, who, in turn, bring forth new
generations that are smitten with all the ills to which flesh is heir.
And he knew that even those who lived most temperately were defenceless
from disorders that come unawares and frighten away one’s nearest
friends. While for those who escaped miasmas and microbes; for those
who asked pleasure, not of the flesh, but of the mind; for those whose
days are passed in study, who seek to learn some rhyme for the reason
of things, who try to gratify the curiosity which Nature has given
them; for such as they, he remembered, there is blindness, paralysis,
and the asylums of the insane.
He thought of the illusions, of love, hope and ambition, illusions
which make life seem a pleasant thing worth living, and which, in
cheating man into a continuance of his right to suffer, make him think
pain an accident and not the rule.
“Surely,” he mused, “the idiot alone is content. He at least has no
illusions; he expects nothing in this world and cares less for another.
Nor is the stupidity of the ordinary run of men without its charm. It
must be a singularly blessed thing not to be sensitive, not to know
what life might be, and not to find its insufficiency a curse. But
there’s the rub. When the reforms of the utopists are one and all
accomplished, what shall man do in his Icaria? A million years hence,
perhaps, physical pain will have been vanquished. Diseases of the body
will no longer exist. Laws will not oppress. Justice will be inherent.
Love will be too far from Nature to know of shame. The earth will be a
garden of pleasure. Industry will have enriched every home. Through an
equitable division of treasures acquired without toil, each one will be
on the same footing as his neighbor. Even envy will have disappeared.
In place of the trials, terrors and superstitions of to-day, man will
enjoy perfect peace. He will no longer labor. When he journeys it will
be through the air. He will be in daily communication with Mars, he
will have measured the Infinite and know the bounds of Space. And in
this Eden in which there will be no forbidden fruit, no ignorance, no
tempter, but where there will be larger flowers, new perfumes, and
a race whose idea of beauty stands to mine as mine does to that of
prehistoric man, a race whose imagination has crossed the frontiers of
the impossible, who have developed new senses, who see colors to which
I am blind, who hear music to which I am deaf, who speak in words of
tormented polish, who have turned art into a plaything and learning
into a birthright, a race that has no curiosity and who accept their
wonderful existence as the rich to-day accept their wealth, in this
Eden, Boredom will be King. The Hyperboreans will have their imitators.
The one surcease will be in death. Yet even that may not be robbed of
its grotesqueness.”
A candle flickered a moment and expired in a splutter of grease. The
agony of the candle aroused him from his revery. “Bah,” he muttered, “I
am becoming a casuist, I argue with myself.”
He mixed himself another absinthe, holding the _carafe_ high in the
air, watching the thin stream of water coalesce with the green drug and
turn with it into an opalescent milk. He toyed for a moment with the
purchases that he had made in the Rue de la Paix, and presently, in
answer to some query which they evoked, the soliloquy began anew.
“After what has happened there is nothing left. I might change my name.
I might go to Brazil or Australia, but with what object? I could not
get away from myself.
Da me stesso
Sempre fuggendo, avrò me sempre appresso.
Beside I don’t care for transplantation. If I had an ambition it would
be a different matter. If I could be a pretty woman up to thirty, a
cardinal up to fifty, and after that the Anti-Christ, it might be worth
while. Failing that I might occupy myself with literature. If I have
not written heretofore, it is because it seems more original not to
do so. But it is not too late. The manufacture of trash is easy, and
it must be a pleasure to the manufacturer to know that it is trash
and that it sells. It must give him a high opinion of the intellect
of his contemporaries. Or when, as happens now and then, a work of
enduring value is produced, and it is condemned, as such works usually
are, the author must take immense delight in the reflection that the
disapproval of imbeciles is the surest acknowledgement of talent, as
it is also its sweetest mead of praise. For me, of course, such praise
is impossible. Were I to write successful failures, it must needs
be under a pseudonym. In which case I would have the consciousness
of being scorned as Lenox Leigh, and admired as John Smith. Beside,
what is there to write about? There is nothing to prove, there is
no certainty, there is not even a criterion of truth. To-morrow
contradicts yesterday, next week will contradict this. On no given
subject are there two people who think and see exactly alike. The book
which pleases me bores my neighbor, and _vice versâ_. One man holds to
the Episcopal Church, another to the Baptist; one man is an atheist,
another a Jew; one man thinks a soprano voice a delicious gift, another
says it is a disease of the larynx, and whatever the divergence of
opinion may be, each one is convinced that he alone is correct.
Supposing, however, that through some chance I were to descend to
posterity in the garb and aspect of a great man. What is a great man?
The shadow of nothing. The obscurest _privat docent_ in Germany could
to-day give points to Newton. And even though Newton’s glory may still
subsist, yet such are the limitations of fame that the great majority
have never heard of it or of him. The foremost conqueror of modern
times, he who fell not through his defeats, but through his victories,
is entombed just across the Seine. And the other day as I passed the
Invalides I heard an intelligent-looking woman ask her companion who
the Napoleon was that lay buried there. Her companion did not know.
“But, even were glory more substantial, what is the applause of
posterity to the ears of the dead? To them honor and ignominy must
be alike unmeaning. No, decidedly, ambition does not tempt me. And
what is there else that tempts? Love seems to me now like hunger, an
unnecessary affliction, productive far more of pain than of pleasure;
the most natural, the most alluring thing of all, see in what plight
it has brought me. Yet it is, I have heard, the ultimate hope of those
who have none. If I relinquish it, what have I left? The satisfaction
of my curiosity as to what the years may hold? But I am indifferent. To
revenge myself on Incoul. Certainly, I would like to cut his heart out
and force it down his throat! But how would it better me? If I could
be transported to the multicolored nights of other worlds, and there
taste of inexperienced pleasures, move in new refinements, lose my own
identity, or pursue a chimera and catch it, it might be worth while,
but, as it is--”
The clock on the mantel rang out four times. Again Lenox started from
his revery. He smiled cynically at himself. “If I continue in that
strain,” he muttered, “it must be that I am drunk.”
But soon his eyes closed again in mental retrospect. “And yet,” he
mused, “life is pleasant; ill spent as mine has been, many times I have
found it grateful. In books, I have often lost the consciousness of my
own identity; now and then music has indeed had the power to take me to
other worlds, to show me fresh horizons and larger life. Maida herself
came to me like a revelation. She gave me a new conception of beauty.
Yes, I have known very many pleasant hours. I was younger then, I
fancy. After all, it is not life that is short, it is youth. When that
goes, as mine seems to have done, outside of solitude there is little
charm in anything. And what is death but isolation? The most perfect
and impenetrable that Nature has devised. And whether that isolation
come to me to-night or decades hence, what matters it? It is odd,
though, how the thought of it unnerves one, and yet, to be logical, I
suppose one should be as uneasy of the chaos which precedes existence
as of the unknowable that follows it. The proper course, I take it, is
to imitate the infant, who faces death without a tremor, and enters it
without regret.”
He stood up, and drawing the curtains aside, looked out into the night.
From below came the rumble of a cart on its way to the Halles, but
otherwise the street was silent. The houses opposite were livid. There
was a faint flicker from the street lamps, and above were the trembling
stars. The moon had gone, but there was yet no sign of coming dawn.
He left the window. The candles had burned down; he found fresh ones
and lighted them. As he did so, he caught sight of himself in the
glass. His eyes were haggard and rimmed with circles. It was owing to
the position of the candles, he thought, and he raised them above his
head and looked again. There was something on his forehead just above
the temple, and he put the candles down to brush that something away.
He looked again, it was still there. He peered into the glass and
touched it with his hand. It was nothing, he found, merely a lock of
hair that had turned from black to white.
He poured out more absinthe, and put the bottle down empty. Before
drinking it he undid the package which he had bought from the chemist.
First he took from it a box about three inches long. In it was a toy
syringe, and with it two little instruments. One of these he adjusted
in the projecting tube, and with his finger felt carefully of the
point. It was sharp as a needle, and beneath the point was an orifice
like a shark’s mouth, in miniature.
Then he took from the package a phial that held a brown liquid, in
which he detected a shade like to that of gold. The odor was dull and
heavy. He put the phial down and stood for a moment irresolute. He had
looked into the past and now he looked into the future. But in its
Arcadias he saw nothing, save his own image suspended from a gibbet. He
looked again almost wistfully; no, there was nothing. He threw off his
coat and rolled up his sleeve. From the phial he filled the syringe,
and with the point pricked the bare arm and sent the liquid spurting
into the flesh. Three times he did this. He reached for the absinthe
and left it untasted.
Into his veins had come an unknown, a delicious languor. He sank into
a chair. The walls of the room dissolved into cataracts of light and
dazzling steel. The flooring changed to running crimson, and from
that to black, and back to red again. From the ceiling came flood
after flood of fused, intermingled and oscillating colors. His eyes
closed. The light became more intense, and burned luminous through the
lids. In his ears filtered a harmony, faint as did it come from afar,
and singular as were it won from some new consonance of citherns and
clavichords, and suddenly it rose into tumultuous vibrations, striated
with series of ascending scales. Then as suddenly ceased, drowned in
claps of thunder.
The lights turned purple and glowed less vividly, as though veils were
being lowered between him and them. But still the languor continued,
sweeter ever and more enveloping, till from very sweetness it was
almost pain.
The room grew darker, the colors waned, the lights behind the falling
veils sank dim, and dimmer, fading, one by one; a single spark
lingered, it wavered a moment, and vanished into night.