The next morning, just as I had dropped into an uneasy doze, there came
a knocking and a hammering, and a muttering outside my door.
"M'sieur! M'sieur!" Tap-tap-tap. "Que diable donc! Qu'il dort! M'sieur!
Profondement! Est ce qu'il est mort? Ah! c'est une bete Anglaise!"
Tap-tap-tap.
All this came through the wall in a hazy sort of confusion, mingling
with my sleep, before it roused me to go and open the door. Finally,
however, I stumbled off the bed and unlocked the door, and threw it
open.
"What now" I thought. "Have I broken any more of your confounded Gallic
regulations."
It was not a Commissary of Police this time, but a uniformed
commissionaire, with a note in his hand. Possibly serenely unconscious
that I had heard his polite remarks outside, he bowed urbanely.
"Bonjour, M'sieur! A thousand apologies for disturbing M'sieur! But
Madame said I was to deliver this note personally."
I looked at him with elevated eyebrows. I knew no Madame in Paris.
"I think there is some mistake," I said.
"But why? Monsieur Eeltone? Numero quinze, is it not?"
"Hilton. Yes, that is my name."
He gave me a triumphant glance, and handed me the note with a flourish.
The envelope was that of the Grand Hotel; but the writing on it was
Lucia's writing. Lucia here in Paris! Close to me! How? Why? The blood
poured over my face. With a sense of delight I tore the envelope open:--
"I am at the above hotel. I shall remain at home all to-day in the hope
that you may be able to come and see me." "LUCIA."
I looked up the man in the doorway bowed with a deprecating air.
"Madame said I was to wait for an answer."
He had a subdued smile upon his face, which seemed to say--"We know all
about these little notes! We are accustomed to them here in Paris!"
I told him to enter, and he followed me into the room and took an
interested glance round. Probably, to his view, my pallid face and
blood-shot eyes, my last night's clothes, my boots on my feet, and the
bed unslept-in, conveyed the idea of a drunken fit only just over in
time to make room for the morning's intrigue. A young, beautiful
English madame--for the title Miss is barely recognised, never
understood in Paris--staying at the hotel and sending notes to a young
English M'sieur in another. Yes, this was plainly an intrigue of the
genuine order, and the mari would doubtless arrive from England later.
All was plain, and he stood with a patronising smile by the table,
while I scribbled a note to Lucia.
"My Dearest Life,--I am rushing, flying to you now. I will be with you
as soon as fiacre can bring me." "VICTOR."
I closed it, and made him wait while I sealed it, lest he should
interfere with it. Then I handed it to him with a two-franc piece, and
with bon jours and remerciments and grins he withdrew.
I dressed hurriedly and yet carefully, and shaved with a dangerously
trembling hand. The first fiacre that was passing as I left the hotel I
took, and was driven, through the bright sunshine that filled the Paris
boulevards, to the Grand. I sat back in it, with my arms folded,
feeling my heart like a stone within me. Lucia's coming, that,
thirty-six hours back, would have infused the extreme of delight
through me, was now useless, worthless.
I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner again, fettered,
bound, as if I had an iron collar on my neck, and manacles on my
wrists. I looked through the shining, quivering sunlight that fell on
every side with blank, unseeing eyes, and the bitterest curses against
Howard rose to my lips, checked only by the knowledge that I had
forgiven him.
When I reached the hotel, and mentioned her name, I was shown up to a
private sitting-room on the first floor, facing the gay Paris
boulevard, and with the bright light streaming in through its
half-closed persiennes. A figure rose at the opening of the door, and
came towards me with outstretched hands.
"Lucia!"
My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and
poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within the
first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I recognised
that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but nevertheless
distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman since I had seen
her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She had awakened. It was
a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to me now; a woman awake to
her own powers, conscious of the sceptre, and the gifts, and the
kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a woman for a few years, I
felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in her advance towards me,
heard it in the soft tones of her voice as she said,--
"Well, Victor, are you glad I have come?"
And it was with my heart suddenly beating hard, and my face pale, and a
mist before my eyes, that I came forward to her. What had been the
first slight shock to her sleeping woman's passions I had no idea.
Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she passed him
in a crowd had suddenly struck through the ice of her abstraction.
Perhaps some pressure of an arm meaning she did not even comprehend.
Perhaps some word, overheard between two men, whose meaning she did not
even comprehend. Perhaps it was only Nature unaided that had whispered
to her,--"Life is passing, and its greatest pleasure is as yet untried.
Get up and seek it."
Perhaps any of these, or all or none. I could not say. The change was
there. Lucia was conscious, awake. Pure, delicate, as from her integral
nature she would always, but still awake. As she stood, the sun fell
upon her light hair and seemed to get tangled there, a hot, rose glow
was in her face, and the smooth scarlet lips parted in a faint seducing
smile.
"Now, tell me everything," she said, softly, "I am sure the manuscript
is finished by now."
She pointed to a wicker chair for me, and drew one just opposite it in
which she threw herself, full in the morning light, but just avoiding
the stabbing sun-rays. I saw in a sort of mechanical manner the way in
which she was dressed. It was as a woman only dresses once or twice,
perhaps, in her lifetime; and that is when she is determined to win,
through the sheer strength and force of her beauty, in the face of
every obstacle, the man she desires.
Every detail had been thought of, every beauty of her form studied and
enhanced, from the light curls on her forehead, and the curves of her
bosom rising and falling under its lace bodice, to the tiny shoes that
came from beneath the folds of her delicate-coloured skirt.
It was presumably of cotton, for Lucia herself had informed me that she
never wore anything in the mornings except cotton or serge; if so, it
was a glorified cotton of a clear rose tint. Film upon film of lace
hung over it in transparent folds, through which the glowing colour
deepened and blushed at her slightest movement, as the hot colour in
the heart of a rose flushes through all its leaves.
Above her supple hips, clasping her waist, shone an open-work band of
Maltese silver, and above this rose delicate vase-like lines, swelling
and expanding at last into the rounded curves of her bosom; here the
colour seemed to glow deeper and warmer where her heart was beating
tumultuously, and then towards her neck it paled again, beneath ruffle
and ruffle of lace that lay like foam against the soft, snow-white
throat. It was a symphony of colour. A perfect harmony of perfect tones
in union with the brilliant fairness of her skin. The sleeves, half
open to the elbow, revealed a white, rounded, downy arm, and the
thousand subtle pink-and-white tints of her flesh seemed to melt and
merge themselves into a bewildering, distracting glow within that
rose-hued sleeve. She made one exquisite, intoxicating vision to the
senses. In those moments I can hardly say I saw her. She rather seemed
to sway before the dizzy sight of my excited eyes.
Dimly yet keenly, vaguely yet convincingly, I felt she had come as an
adorable antagonist to my resolutions. Traditionally speaking, such a
knowledge should have made me instantly on my guard.
I ought certainly to have summoned my control, my judgment, and so on,
to say nothing of an icy reserve. But I did not. My whole heart seemed
to rush out to her, my whole being to strain towards her. I longed to
take her entirely in my arms, to kiss her on the lips and throat, and
say,--
"Ask whatever you will and it shall be granted."
"The manuscript is finished, isn't it?" she repeated.
Oh, bitter, bitter, and cruel fate that had dragged the fruits of my
labour, and with them everything, out of my hand!
"It was finished, Lucia, a few days ago," I said, speaking calmly with
a great effort; "but an accident happened and it was destroyed."
I felt myself growing paler and paler as I spoke, meeting her lovely,
eager eyes fixed on mine.
"Destroyed?" she echoed, growing white to the lips. "Oh, Victor! How?"
"I would rather not say, Lucia, exactly how it occurred, but it had
been accepted by a publisher here, and I was going to make one or two
trifling alterations in it to please him, and so I had it back. Well,
then, as I say, something happened, and the thing was destroyed."
There was a dead silence.
I saw her heart beating painfully beneath the laces on her bosom, and
pain stamped on all her face. Then she said abruptly,--
"Have you Howard with you still?"
"No. He left Paris last night," I answered.
Her eyes met mine full across the sunlight. We looked at each other in
silence.
She asked nothing farther.
I believe she comprehended the whole case as it stood, because she
would know that had I lost or injured the MSS. myself I should have no
reason for concealing it. As a matter of honourable feeling I wanted to
keep the fact from her, but I could not help her guessing it. Curiously
enough her next question, after a long pause--though I did not see that
in her mind there could have been connection between the subjects--was:
"Where is Nous?"
"Nous is dead."
"How did he die?"
"That, also, I would rather not say."
At that, in addition to a sharper look of distress, a puzzled surprise
came into her face. She raised her delicate eyebrows and looked at me
with a perplexed, half-frightened expression.
"Victor," she said, leaning forward a little in her chair, "was it he
that tore up the manuscript? and did you kill him in a fit of rage?"
I looked back at her, also with surprise, that she could suggest such a
thing of me as possible.
"Oh, no!" I said hastily; "nothing at all of the sort. No! If either
the loss of the book or the dog's death had occurred in any way through
my fault I would tell you. I have no secrets of my own from you, but
both of these concern another man, and therefore I would rather let
them pass."
There was silence.
Then I asked, looking at her,--
"Are you alone here, Lucia?"
"Except, of course, for my maid--Yes."
My heart beat harder. Why? I hardly know, except that the word "alone"
has such a charm in it connected with a woman we love.
"Of course," she said, leaning back, "it is a little unconventional my
coming here alone; but Mama was not well enough, and I--Victor," she
said, with a sudden indrawn breath, "I felt I must come and see you. I
told her I felt I should die there if they would not let me come!"
I saw her breast heave as she spoke, her cheek flushed and paled
alternately, the azure of her eyes deepened slowly as the pupils
widened in them, till there seemed midnight behind the lashes.
I felt a dangerous current stirring in all my blood at her words, a dry
spasm seemed in my throat, blocking all speech.
"I thought you must have finished by now, and I came to say--I came to
say"--she murmured.
The blood rushed scarlet, staining all the fair skin, across the face
before me, and the bright lips fluttered in uncertain hesitation.
I guessed the situation.
She had come to say to me phrases that seemed quite easy, quite simple
to her, murmuring them to herself in the silence of an empty studio,
and now face to face with me, listening and expectant, they had become
difficult, impossible. I leant forward, the blood hot in my own cheek,
a dull flame waking in every vein.
"Darling," I said, taking her soft left hand within both my own, "I
cannot tell exactly what you wish to tell me; but listen--I had
finished all, and had things not turned out as they have I should have
been starting now to come to you and say, 'Lucia I am free now to be
your slave.' All this year we have been separated I have thought only
of you, waking and sleeping, longed for you, dreamed of you, lived in
the hour of our re-union, desired with an intensity beyond all words
that day that gives you to me; and, forty hours back, that day, Lucia,
seemed so near, but now--dearest"--
I stopped, choked, suffocated with the weight of hopeless, despairing
passion that fell back upon itself within me.
Lucia leant forward, the beating, palpitating bosom was close to me,
her white, nerveless hand lay close in mine.
"And now, Victor?"
"Now all is vanished. I am exactly in the position where I was when I
left you in England a year ago."
"And what do you mean--what are we--what?"--
"My sweet, what can we do? I must recommence. I must work on another
year."
I felt the burning, tremulous fingers grow cold in mine. Her face paled
till it was like white stone. Then suddenly she withdrew her hand from
my clasp, and started to her feet.
"Victor, I cannot! no, I cannot! I cannot wait another year! It will
kill me!" she said, passionately, looking away from me, and pacing a
short length of the floor backwards and forwards before me, as I rose,
too, and stood watching dizzily the incomparable figure pass and
repass, hardly master of myself.
"Dearest," she continued; "this is what I came to say--let us marry
now. I thought you would have successfully finished your work, and we
might do so; but now, now, even as it is, let it be as it is, let it be
unfinished, and still, still let us marry. There is no real bar as
there might be. There is no question of wrong to any one. We are to be
married--it cannot matter to any one when we are. Continue to work
afterwards. I am willing to be second always, in every thing, to your
work. But don't drive me from you altogether. Let me stay with you now
I have come. Let us marry now--here. Let us go before some
official--the Maire, or some one, or English consul, no matter
whom--this afternoon! Victor, if not now, that day you desire will
never come. I shall never be your own. Think how it has receded and
receded into time! We have been engaged now more than three years!"
She paused in front of me, and lifted her face--brilliant, glowing,
appealing--with an intensity of passionate, eager longing in it that
defied her words to express. Her whole form quivered with excitement,
till I saw the laces of her dress tremble. On the bodice beneath my
eyes, the lace fell from the shoulders, and its folds on each side
divided slightly in the centre, leaving a depression there in which the
rose-colour glowed crimson. It riveted my eyes this line--this channel
of colour burnt fiercely beneath my lids.
I could see nothing but it; it seemed everywhere, to fill the room, to
scorch into my brain, this palpitating, throbbing, crimson line. That
terrible impulse of blind excitement was rapidly drawing me into
itself--the impulse that counts nothing, knows nothing, reckons nothing
but itself; that will buy the present hour at any sacrifice--that
accepts everything, ignores everything but that one moment it feels
approaching. This impulse urged me, pressed me, strained violently upon
me.
It left me barely conscious of anything except the absorbing longing to
take her, draw her close, hard into my arms, and say, "Yes, let all go;
from this day henceforward you are mine." But almost unconsciously to
myself my reason rebelled against being thus thrust down and trampled
upon by this sudden, brute instinct rushing furiously through my frame,
and my reason clutched me and clung to me and maintained its hold, and,
feeling myself wrenched asunder by these two opposite forces, I stood
immovable and silent.
"Victor," she said, after a minute, and the warm, white uncertain hand
sought mine again and held it, "I have been working hard since you
left, and the canvas is nearly finished, but I am willing to relinquish
it for the present, to let it go. In all this time you have been away
from me I have been slowly learning that one's own life and one's own
life's happiness is of more worth than these abstract ideas, than one's
work or talent or anything else. I have been feeling that you and I are
letting day after day go by and are working for a to-morrow that for us
may never come. Is this your philosophy?"
I looked down on her as she clasped my hand and drew it up to her
breast, her eyes were on mine, and all my mental perceptions were
blinded and forced down under the pressure of the physical senses.
"Take me into your life, Victor. I swear I won't interfere with your
work. Let me sit somewhere beside you all day long while you write, and
let me lie all night long watching you while you write, if you like!
Oh, do let me! do speak to me?"
She pressed my hand in, convulsively, upon her breast, until it seemed
to be in the midst of tremulous warmth, close upon the throbbing heart
itself. I could not think. Thought seemed slipping from me. I felt
sinking deeper each minute into the quicksand of desire. Nothing seemed
clear any longer. All within my brain was merged into one hot, clinging
haze, in which still loomed the idea that I must not yield. It would be
dishonourable to my father, disappointing to myself, destructive to my
work. I could not realise it then, could not see it, but I knew and
remembered in a dim way that it was so, that it had been so decided,
and I must adhere to it.
"It is impossible, Lucia."
"Why?"
"Because I promised my father we should not marry until I had got out
some book."
"But rescind the promise! Say that you cannot carry it out! Give up all
help from him, and let us live our lives apart!"
"I have no means to do it with."
"You can make them! Surely with all your knowledge you can get some
ordinary work to do till you can get your works out!"
"Even if I had the means I could not, after the understanding between
us, after all he has done for me, throw him over at a moment's notice."
"He has no right to ask such a sacrifice!"
"It has all been thought out," I said dully, "and settled before. I
can't re-argue it all now. I decided it finally before I left England,
and I am in the same position now as I was then."
A scarlet colour stole into the rose glow on Lucia's face.
"You don't care for me, Victor!" she said passionately. "You can't! No
man could and speak so!" and she threw my hand from her and herself
into the long chair in a sudden, wild storm of excited tears.
I hardly knew what I was doing. I felt as if I had been struck sharply
on the eyes as I heard her words. I fell on my knees beside her chair,
and put both my arms up and clasped them round the soft waist, and let
them lean hard on the hips, in a spasm of angry passion.
"What are you thinking of? You know there is nothing I covet like
yourself," I said savagely, the blood flowing over my face as hotly as
it burnt in her own. "But we can't do this. We should both despise
ourselves afterwards. You should be the last person to urge it on me.
What do I ask you? To wait another nine months! That's all. You should
help me."
"Help you?" she said, her eyes blazing upon me with anger, shame and
passion. "Help you in making a fatal mistake? No, I will not! You can
refuse me if you like, but all the responsibility is with you. I warn
you against it. I have come to warn you. When it is too late you will
wish this day back again. You are not tied now after a whole year's
work, and after a misfortune you could not help. If you always wait in
life until you have settled and arranged everything just to your
satisfaction you will find that you lose your desires. They will slip
like sand through your hands while you are arranging your
circumstances. Life is never, never quite as we would have it. We must
take our pleasures one by one as they are offered to us; it is hopeless
to think we can gain them all together. Oh, Victor dearest!" she added,
stretching out two rounded, glowing arms in a sort of half-timid
desperation and clasping them round my neck, while mine still held her
heaving waist, "love now, and win your name by-and-by."
There was delirium in my brain. The whole woman's form swam before my
sight. My arms locked themselves violently round the yielding,
pulsating waist.
"I would if I could," I muttered, and that was as much as I could say.
"You can," she urged in a soft, desperate voice. "Why not? I can't
believe you love me if you let me go back now."
"I can't believe you love me if you urge me to do what I think is
dishonourable."
Her arms dropped from my neck.
"Oh, it is a mistake," she said.
"Perhaps so."
We had both risen. The floor seemed to bend beneath my feet. I felt her
pulses still beating against my arms. I looked at her. Our eyes met,
and the gaze seemed locked, fixed, and we neither of us could transfer
it. My throat seemed rigid, dry as a desert; her voice was choked,
suffocated in tears. But "Kiss me, at least; oh, kiss me!" was written
on the whole imploring face, on the wildly quivering lips, in the
burning, distracted eyes. But what use? Rather such a kiss, here, now,
might bring an irremediable loss. In any case, the pain of parting
after would be ten times intensified for us both. Could I then go?
Would any force then be left in me? Would my will stand beyond a
certain point? I did not know. It seemed the only safety for us both,
the one rock still left in the wild ocean of our passion--an absolute
denial to the rushing feelings to find expression in the least of acts
or words.
I did not believe nor think she could misunderstand me. I felt sure the
struggle and the suffering and the desire must be printed in my face. I
knew she must see in it that I was not cold before the despairing,
passionate longing I saw stirring all her pained, excited frame. To me
it seemed as if she must see me ageing and my face lining before her
eyes. I held her hand in mine hard for a moment. Then I dropped it
gently, and she looked at me--stunned. And so, unkissed, untouched by
my lips that ached so desperately for hers, I left her and went out
through the passages and down the steps and out of the hotel into the
brilliant streets with my nerves strung tense to sheer agony.
I had acted, of course, in a correct and orthodox manner. No one could
reproach me for the interview just past, but in my heart there was a
self-condemning voice. Pleasure seldom unveils her face and offers
herself to us twice, and Venus is a dangerous goddess to offend. I
said, "Wait, wait," and "to-morrow," but those ominous lines beat dully
through my brain--
"to daurion tis oiden;
os oun et eudi estin."
When I reached my hotel, thought, intelligent thought, seemed
collapsing, and my brain spinning round and round within my skull.
"The end of me," I muttered, "at this rate will certainly be a cell in
a lunatic asylum."
For the first time, I released my rule against drugs. I sent the hotel
porter for a draught of chloral. When it came I drank it, and, in the
middle of the brilliant afternoon sunshine, threw myself on the bed,
conscious of nothing but a longing for oblivion. Unaccustomed to it,
the drug seized well upon me. For long, merciful, quiet hours I knew
nothing.
After this there came a blank of many days: idle, barren days, in which
I did nothing, knew nothing except that I suffered. My brain seemed
blank, empty, like a quarry of black slate. The power that seemed to
dwell there at times was gone now; crushed all that impersonal emotion
of the writer's mind by the blighting personal emotion of the man.
A fortnight passed, and at the end of it I had done nothing; another
week, and then another, and I had still not written a line.
At last one night, sitting idle in the cafe after dinner, I felt the
old impulse stir in me, a rush of eager inclination to write went
through me. A sudden sense of power filled me. The brain, empty and
idle a few minutes before, became charged with energy and desire to
expend it. A corresponding current of activity poured along each vein.
The old familiar impetus swayed me.
I welcomed it gladly and went upstairs, got out paper and a pen, and
the remembrance of my own life slipped away from me. All that night I
wrote, and the next day, and the fresh manuscript was fairly started.
For a whole fortnight I wrote almost incessantly. I snatched a little
food in the cafe, hardly knowing what I ate.
The nights passed feverishly without sleep, while the brain revolved,
excitedly, scenes written or to be written. Towards the end of the
fortnight the impulses to work steadily declined. I forced myself to
write at intervals; but, as usual, the forced work was worthless, and I
destroyed it when it was done. No, it was no use. I could merely shrug
my shoulders and smoke and wait.
The hot, blank days of August drifted by, and as I saw the boulevards
empty themselves day by day, and Paris grow hotter and duller each
afternoon, I felt the solitary existence weigh heavier and heavier upon
me. The loss of the dog seemed to have made a larger gap in my
existence than I should have believed; his unused collars still lay
upon my mantelpiece, his plate and saucer still stood in the corner by
the hearth, and sometimes when I was climbing the dark stairs at night
to my empty room I felt as if I would have given years of my life to
have had the dog leap up into my arms in welcome.
One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a
letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I supposed
it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too occupied, or
indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other correspondents.
In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to my
father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without explaining
farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and begging him to
release me from the arrangement made before I left England, I had
received a derisive note from him, full of ironical sympathy with my
misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to another year's work,
with a good grace and a contented spirit.
My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.
I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony, and since
then my letters to him had been short notes, out of which I studiously
kept my own feelings. There was no one now to whom I could either speak
or write a word of personal matters.
An anchorite in a cave of the desert could not have been more shut off
from that dear communication with his fellows that a man hardly values
till he loses it.
When I had lighted the lamp I sat staring at the loose sheets of the
manuscript lying on the side table, noting painfully how far it was
from completion, and it was only when I lifted it to the middle table
for work that I glanced at the letter again.
As my eyes fell on the superscription the blood leapt into my face--it
was Howard's. There was a strong disinclination in me to take up the
letter, to read it, to let my thoughts flow in his direction at all.
Resolutely I had tried to banish the memory of him from my mind, to
utterly throw out his image from my recollection. The thought of him
was disagreeable, and therefore never welcomed.
The idea of one person cherishing, as the phrase is, hatred, envy, or
anger against another, always seems to me incomprehensible. All these
are unpleasant sensations, and I sweep them out of my mind as quickly
as I possibly can, not from any exalted motives, but simply as useless,
cumbering lumber, for which I decline to use my brain at a storehouse.
Howard had injured me enough.
Was I to waste my time and my energies in hating him? And yet the time
had not come when I could think of him with calm indifference.
Therefore, to scout the idea of him whenever it presented itself, to
refuse to dwell upon him and what he had inflicted on me, was the only
way to escape additional pain and discomfort for myself. And now, at
sight of his handwriting, the beast, the monster of declining hate rose
in me again, and I remembered him.
It came back upon me that evening, his image, and I knew that I hated
him still. I took up the letter with a feeling of revolt and disgust,
as if it had been a filthy object, broke it open, and read:--
"DEAR VICTOR,--I expect you will say to yourself it is the greatest
cheek my writing to you, and I know it is, but I am reduced to that
state of desperation when a man ceases to feel degradation."
"I am writing to ask you for help--you will wonder how I can. So do I.
I wonder at myself. But I know you are the best of fellows, and I feel
you will help me now in spite of all that has happened. Victor send me
what you can, as near 15 Pounds Sterling as possible, to save me from
irrevocable disgrace. I have no one but yourself to apply to. If you
refuse I am done for. You will know what a desperate position I am in,
I must be in, to ask you at all.--Yours in despair and everlasting
regret, HOWARD."
I read it through, and then dropped the letter and its envelope into
the fire, glad to get rid of the sight of the familiar hand. And I
watched it burn, and I thought of the manuscript which must have curled
and writhed in the same way, leaf by leaf, as he lighted it, and I
asked myself again--What is forgiveness?
I knew that I hated him. I had now the opportunity of consigning him to
"irrevocable disgrace," as he put it. But I knew that I should send him
the help he asked for on the same principle as I had refrained from
injuring him, forgiven him, shaken hands with him. And why? I wondered.
What was my motive? Simply, I think, a mere instinct to preserve my own
self-respect.
I enclosed a cheque for 20 Pounds Sterling in a blank sheet of paper,
put it in an envelope, and went out that same night and posted it. When
I had his letter of thanks I glanced through it hastily and then burnt
it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain.
Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some
of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity,
but slowly a manuscript grew and grew again into being.
The slow winter wore away, and the ice froze or the fog pressed on the
long French windows of my room. My father invited me to run over and
spend Christmas with him, but I dreaded the interruption and the delay
in the work. I stayed and pressed forward with it, and in the last days
of March the whole book stood complete.
It was one of the first nights of May. The first warm, spring-like
night of the season, and the seats at the Concert des Ambassadeurs were
crowded by the Parisians consuming their brandied cherries under the
canopy of fluttering light green leaves of the opening limes. I sat,
one of the audience, and heard the band clashing, and watched the
dancers flit on and off the glittering diminutive stage, with
indifferent eyes and ears.
I was thinking of my success. The band might thunder its hardest, but
it could not drown the publisher's voice in my ears, which repeated
over and over the words I had heard that morning. "Yes, M'sieur, your
book has been accepted. We shall hope to bring it out in September."
I sat there at peace with all the world. Howard was entirely forgiven
now; my father's treatment forgotten. Let the past go. What did
anything matter? And I tapped my stick on the flooring at the end of
the songs I had barely heard, out of sheer good humour, and swallowed
the second-rate brandy and smoked an infamous cigar with imperturbable
complacence; and as I got up with the mass at the finale I heard my
nearest neighbour's remark to his companion, which might be freely
translated thus:
"How jolly these pigs of English always look!"
As I was leaving, a woman ran down the gravel walk after me, and
slipped her arm through mine. I turned and paused. She was very small,
pretty, and Parisian from her black eyebrows, cocked like one of her
own circumflex accents, to her patent shoes under her silk skirt.
"What do you want" I said, in her own tongue, of course. "Money?"
"We don't put it like that!" she said, thrusting out her red lips.
"Well, it comes to that in the end generally," I said, whirling my cane
round in my hand and smiling." It will save you trouble if you take it
now," and I offered her two five-franc pieces and withdrew my arm. "Go
to the bar and drink my health with it!" She took the money, but still
looked at me.
"Give me a kiss!" she said in a low tone, so low that I did not catch
the last word.
"Give you what" I asked.
She stamped her foot.
"Un baiser!" she said, with a little French scream. "Embrasse moi!
Stupide!"
I laughed slightly as I looked down upon her. It seemed so ludicrous,
the proposition, just then to me. I had hardly lived the life I had in
Paris for the last thirty months, to now, in the moment of success and
freedom, mar its remembrance by even so much as a chance kiss to a cafe
chantant girl.
For a second we looked at each other. I noted the tint and the curl of
the offered lips, damp with cosmetic, and suggestive of past kisses,
and the untouched lips of Lucia seemed almost against my own as I
looked. Then I loosened her hand, which clung to my sleeve, and turned
from her, and went on down the path. She shrieked some vile French
words after me, and sent the five-franc piece rolling after me down the
gravel slope.
I laughed and shrugged my shoulders without looking back, and went on
out of the gardens down into the now silent streets. What a flood of
good spirits poured through my frame as I passed on! I hardly seemed to
walk. The buoyant, almost intolerable, unbearable sense of elation
within me seemed pressing me forward without volition.
The incident just passed, the woman's hand on mine, the woman's words,
though from her they were nothing to me, had yet touched and unlocked
those impulses which, until now, had been so sternly repressed, barred
down, sepulchred and sealed. They rose upwards, and with an exultant
triumph I remembered I was free now to live and to love. My work was
done, honourably and faithfully accomplished.
Thirty months lay behind me, an unblemished scroll in time, recording
one unbroken stretch of labour, suffering, and repression. And now it
was over, and I was at liberty. An unspeakable animation swelled in me;
and through all the excited, burning frame seemed to run living fire
that formed one thought in my brain, one loved word on my lips--Lucia!
Like two planets, at the end of each dark street I turned, I seemed to
see her eyes. To her, to her my feet seemed carrying me. I was only
returning to my empty room, but no matter! A few days more and then
England and Lucia!
I was glad now of everything I had suffered, every emotion repressed,
every weakness vanquished. Strange, wonderful power that lies in that
slight, grey tissue which we call brain! It seemed hardly credible that
this buoyant sense of exultation, this overflowing, stupendous joy of
gratified pride and ambition, this triumphant pleasure in my own powers
and their recognition at last, these brilliant vistas that opened in my
thoughts, could come from the movements of a little matter with a
little blood flowing through it. And yet, so soon, a few years and I,
who seemed now like some eternal being carried through worlds of space
and endless cycles of years, should be--nothing. Well, no matter; I
lived now and Lucia lived!
The street was quite empty, and, half unconsciously, I began to sing
the song Bella Napoli, always a favourite of mine, for the sake of the
refrain, Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia! The notes echoed down the silent
street as the words flowed from my tongue in the intoxication of
pleasure--pure, simple, single, undiluted pleasure of the relief after
those weary months of strain. The ground beneath my feet seemed buoyant
air, each pulse within me beat with keen life, and the name of the
woman I loved formed itself again and again on my lips, fluttered and
lingered there, almost like the touch of a pure and invisible kiss.