One knows not whether there can be human compassion for anemia of the
soul. When the pitch of Life is dropped, and the spirit is so put over
and reversed that that only is horrible which before was sweet and
worldly and of the day, the human relation disappears. The sane soul
turns appalled away, lest not merely itself, but sanity should suffer.
We are not gods. We cannot drive out devils. We must see selfishly
to it that devils do not enter into ourselves.
And this we must do even though Love so transfuse us that we may well
deem our nature to be half divine. We shall but speak of honour and duty
in vain. The letter dropped within the dark door will lie unregarded, or,
if regarded for a brief instant between two unspeakable lapses, left and
forgotten again. The telegram will be undelivered, nor will the whistling
messenger (wiselier guided than he knows to whistle) be conscious as he
walks away of the drawn blind that is pushed aside an inch by a finger
and then fearfully replaced again. No: let the miserable wrestle with his
own shadows; let him, if indeed he be so mad, clip and strain and enfold
and couch the succubus; but let him do so in a house into which not an
air of Heaven penetrates, nor a bright finger of the sun pierces the
filthy twilight. The lost must remain lost. Humanity has other business
to attend to.
For the handwriting of the two letters that Oleron, stealing noiselessly
one June day into his kitchen to rid his sitting-room of an armful of
fetid and decaying flowers, had seen on the floor within his door, had
had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and
faraway dream. And at the beating of the telegraph-boy upon the door,
within a few feet of the bed where he lay, he had gnashed his teeth and
stopped his ears. He had pictured the lad standing there, just beyond his
partition, among packets of provisions and bundles of dead and dying
flowers. For his outer landing was littered with these. Oleron had feared
to open his door to take them in. After a week, the errand lads had
reported that there must be some mistake about the order, and had left no
more. Inside, in the red twilight, the old flowers turned brown and fell
and decayed where they lay.
Gradually his power was draining away. The Abomination fastened on
Oleron's power. The steady sapping sometimes left him for many hours
of prostration gazing vacantly up at his red-tinged ceiling, idly
suffering such fancies as came of themselves to have their way with him.
Even the strongest of his memories had no more than a precarious hold
upon his attention. Sometimes a flitting half-memory, of a novel to be
written, a novel it was important that he should write, tantalised him
for a space before vanishing again; and sometimes whole novels, perfect,
splendid, established to endure, rose magically before him. And sometimes
the memories were absurdly remote and trivial, of garrets he had
inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him, and so forth. Oleron had
known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now
past. He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until
they fetched him out--a place that some might have thought a little on
the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too
redolent of long-dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up
in, but ah, so irresistible, with such an authority of its own, with such
an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had
ceased to struggle against its inexorable will! A novel? Somebody ought
to write a novel about a place like that! There must be lots to write
about in a place like that if one could but get to the bottom of it! It
had probably already been painted, by a man called Madley who had lived
there ... but Oleron had not known this Madley--had a strong feeling
that he wouldn't have liked him--would rather he had lived somewhere
else--really couldn't stand the fellow--hated him, Madley, in fact. (Aha!
That was a joke!). He seriously doubted whether the man had led the life
he ought; Oleron was in two minds sometimes whether he wouldn't tell that
long-nosed guardian of the public morals across the way about him; but
probably he knew, and had made his praying hullabaloos for him also.
That was his line. Why, Oleron himself had had a dust-up with him about
something or other ... some girl or other ... Elsie Bengough her name
was, he remembered....
Oleron had moments of deep uneasiness about this Elsie Bengough. Or
rather, he was not so much uneasy about her as restless about the things
she did. Chief of these was the way in which she persisted in thrusting
herself into his thoughts; and, whenever he was quick enough, he sent her
packing the moment she made her appearance there. The truth was that she
was not merely a bore; she had always been that; it had now come to the
pitch when her very presence in his fancy was inimical to the full
enjoyment of certain experiences.... She had no tact; really ought to
have known that people are not at home to the thoughts of everybody all
the time; ought in mere politeness to have allowed him certain seasons
quite to himself; and was monstrously ignorant of things if she did not
know, as she appeared not to know, that there were certain special hours
when a man's veins ran with fire and daring and power, in which ... well,
in which he had a reasonable right to treat folk as he had treated that
prying Barrett--to shut them out completely.... But no: up she popped,
the thought of her, and ruined all. Bright towering fabrics, by the side
of which even those perfect, magical novels of which he dreamed were dun
and grey, vanished utterly at her intrusion. It was as if a fog should
suddenly quench some fair-beaming star, as if at the threshold of some
golden portal prepared for Oleron a pit should suddenly gape, as if a
bat-like shadow should turn the growing dawn to mirk and darkness
again.... Therefore, Oleron strove to stifle even the nascent thought
of her.
Nevertheless, there came an occasion on which this woman Bengough
absolutely refused to be suppressed. Oleron could not have told exactly
when this happened; he only knew by the glimmer of the street lamp on his
blind that it was some time during the night, and that for some time she
had not presented herself.
He had no warning, none, of her coming; she just came--was there. Strive
as he would, he could not shake off the thought of her nor the image of
her face. She haunted him.
But for her to come at that moment of all moments!... Really, it was past
belief! How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive! Actually, to
look on, as it were, at the triumph of a Rival.... Good God! It was
monstrous! tact--reticence--he had never credited her with an
overwhelming amount of either: but he had never attributed mere--oh,
there was no word for it! Monstrous--monstrous! Did she intend
thenceforward.... Good God! To look on!...
Oleron felt the blood rush up to the roots of his hair with anger against
her.
"Damnation take her!" he choked....
But the next moment his heat and resentment had changed to a cold sweat
of cowering fear. Panic-stricken, he strove to comprehend what he had
done. For though he knew not what, he knew he had done something,
something fatal, irreparable, blasting. Anger he had felt, but not _this_
blaze of ire that suddenly flooded the twilight of his consciousness with
a white infernal light. _That_ appalling flash was not his--not his
_that_ open rift of bright and searing Hell--not his, not his! His had
been the hand of a child, preparing a puny blow; but what was _this
other_ horrific hand that was drawn back to strike in the same place? Had
_he_ set that in motion? Had _he_ provided the spark that had touched off
the whole accumulated power of that formidable and relentless place? He
did not know. He only knew that that poor igniting particle in himself
was blown out, that--Oh, impossible!--a clinging kiss (how else to
express it?) had changed on his very lips to a gnashing and a removal,
and that for very pity of the awful odds he must cry out to her against
whom he had lately raged to guard herself ... guard herself....
"_Look out!_" he shrieked aloud....
* * * * *
The revulsion was instant. As if a cold slow billow had broken over him,
he came to to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror
that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron,
and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and
alone. His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon
them; and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had
left him sweating and shaking thus.
Yes, he was himself, Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the
summit of his best work, and slipping downhill again empty-handed from it
all. He had struck short in his life's aim. He had tried too much, had
over-estimated his strength, and was a failure, a failure....
It all came to him in the single word, enwrapped and complete; it needed
no sequential thought; he was a failure. He had missed....
And he had missed not one happiness, but two. He had missed the ease of
this world, which men love, and he had missed also that other shining
prize for which men forgo ease, the snatching and holding and triumphant
bearing up aloft of which is the only justification of the mad adventurer
who hazards the enterprise. And there was no second attempt. Fate has no
morrow. Oleron's morrow must be to sit down to profitless, ill-done,
unrequired work again, and so on the morrow after that, and the morrow
after that, and as many morrows as there might be....
He lay there, weakly yet sanely considering it....
And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worth while to
consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck. No
good would ever come of that half-finished novel. He had intended that it
should appear in the autumn; was under contract that it should appear; no
matter; it was better to pay forfeit to his publishers than to waste what
days were left. He was spent; age was not far off; and paths of wisdom
and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey....
If only he had chosen the wife, the child the faithful friend at the
fireside, and let them follow an _ignis fatuus_ that list!...
In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly what he should be so
weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable
matter, and that his hand, chancing to stray to his face in the darkness,
should encounter a beard.
"Most extraordinary!" he began to mutter to himself. "Have I been ill? Am
I ill now? And if so, why have they left me alone?... Extraordinary!..."
He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom. He rose a
little on his pillow, and listened.... Ah! He was not alone, then! It
certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and
alone--Alone? Oh no. He would be looked after. He wouldn't be left, ill,
to shift for himself. If everybody else had forsaken him, he could trust
Elsie Bengough, the dearest chum he had, for that ... bless her faithful
heart!
But suddenly a short, stifled, spluttering cry rang sharply out:
"_Paul!_"
It came from the kitchen.
And in the same moment it flashed upon Oleron, he knew not how, that two,
three, five, he knew not how many minutes before, another sound, unmarked
at the time but suddenly transfixing his attention now, had striven to
reach his intelligence. This sound had been the slight touch of metal on
metal--just such a sound as Oleron made when he put his key into the
lock.
"Hallo!... Who's that?" he called sharply from his bed.
He had no answer.