Metaphysics had preyed on Jewdwine like a flame. He was consumed with
a passion for unity. The unity which Nature only strives after,
blindly, furiously, ineffectually; the unity barely reached by the
serene and luminous processes of Thought--the artist achieves it with
one stroke. In him, by the twin acts of vision and creation, the
worlds of Nature and the Idea are made one. He leaps at a bound into
the very heart of the Absolute. He alone can be said to have attained,
and (this was the point which Jewdwine insisted on) attained only by
the sacrifice of his individuality.

Thus Jewdwine in his _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_.

As that work could be regarded only as a brutal and terrific challenge
to the intellect, the safer course was to praise it, and it was
unanimously praised. Nobody was able to understand a word of it except
the last chapter on "Individualism in Modern Art." But as criticism
wisely concentrated itself on this the only comprehensible portion of
the book, Jewdwine (who otherwise would have perished in his own
profundity) actually achieved some journalistic notoriety as a dealer
in piquant paradox and vigorous personalities.

Jewdwine was ambitious. On the strength of his _Prolegomena_ he had
come up from Oxford with a remarkable reputation, which he had every
inducement to cherish and to guard. He was therefore the best possible
editor for such a review as _The Museion_, and such a review as _The
Museion_ was the best possible instrument of his ambition.

His aim was to preserve the tradition of the paper as pure as on the
day when it was given into his hands.

He was a little doubtful as to how far young Rickman would lend
himself to that.

However, as the fruit of Jewdwine's meditations, Rickman received a
note inviting him to dine with the editor alone, at Hampstead.
Jewdwine, whose health required pure air, had settled very comfortably
in that high suburb. And, as his marriage seemed likely to remain long
a matter for dubious reflection, he had arranged that his sister Edith
should keep house for him. In inviting Rickman to dine at Hampstead
his intention was distinctly friendly; at the same time he was careful
to fix an evening when Miss Jewdwine would not be there. He was
willing to help Rickman in every possible way short of introducing him
to the ladies of his family.

But before dinner was ended he had to admit that this precaution was
excessive. Rickman (barring certain dreadful possibilities of speech)
was really by no means unpresentable. He was attired with perfect
sanity. His methods at the dinner table, if at all unusual, erred on
the side of restraint rather than of extravagance; he gave indications
of a certain curious personal refinement; and in the matter of wine he
was almost incredibly abstemious. It was the first time that Jewdwine
had come to close quarters with his disciple, and with some surprise
he saw himself going through the experience without a shock. Either he
had been mistaken in Rickman, or Rickman had improved. Shy he still
was, but he had lost much of his old ungovernable nervousness, and
gave Jewdwine the impression of an immense reserve. He seemed to have
entered into some ennobling possession which raised him above the
region of small confusions and excitements. His eye, when Jewdwine
caught it, no longer struggled to escape; but it seemed to be held
less by him than by its own controlling inner vision.

Jewdwine watched him narrowly. It never entered into his head that
what he was watching was the effect of three weeks' intercourse with
Lucia Harden. He attributed it to Rickman's deliverance from the shop.
To be sure Rickman did not strike him as particularly happy, but this
again he accounted for by the depressing state of his finances.

Neither of them made the most distant allusion to Lucia. Jewdwine was
not aware of the extent of Rickman's acquaintance with his cousin,
neither could he well have conceived it. And for Rickman it was not
yet possible either to speak or to hear of Lucia without pain.

It was not until dinner was over, and Rickman was no longer eating
Jewdwine's food, that they ventured on the unpleasant topic that lay
before them, conspicuous, though untouched. Jewdwine felt that, as it
was impossible to ignore what had passed between them since they had
last met, the only thing was to refer to it as casually as might be.

"By the way, Rickman," he said when they were alone in his study, "you
were quite right about that library. I only wish you could have let me
know a little sooner."

"I wish I had," said Rickman, and his tone implied that he appreciated
the painfulness of the subject.

There was a pause which Rickman broke by congratulating Jewdwine on
his appointment. This he did with a very pretty diffidence and
modesty, which smoothed over the awkwardness of the transition, if
indeed it did not convey an adroit suggestion of the insignificance of
all other affairs. The editor, still observing his unconscious
candidate, was very favourably impressed. He laid before him the views
and aims of _The Museion_.

Yes; he thought it had a future before it. He was going to make it the
organ of philosophic criticism, as opposed to the mere personal view.
It would, therefore, be unique. Yes; certainly it would also be
unpopular. Heaven forbid that anything he was concerned in should be
popular. It was sufficient that it should be impartial and
incorruptible. Its tone was to be sober and scholarly, but militant.
Rickman gathered that its staff were to be so many knights-errant
defending the virtue of the English Language. No loose slip-shod
journalistic phrase would be permitted in its columns. Its articles,
besides being well reasoned, would be examples of the purity it
preached. It was to set its face sternly against Democracy,
Commercialism and Decadence.

The disciple caught fire from the master's enthusiasm; he approved,
aspired, exulted. His heart was big with belief in Jewdwine and his
work. Being innocent himself of any sordid taint, he admired above all
things what he called his friend's intellectual chastity. Jewdwine
felt the truth of what Lucia had told him. He could count absolutely
on Rickman's devotion. He arrived by well-constructed stages at the
offer of the sub-editorship.

Rickman looked up with a curious uncomprehending stare. When he
clearly understood the proposal that was being made to him, he flushed
deeply and showed unmistakable signs of agitation.

"Do you think," said Jewdwine discreetly, "you'd care to try it for a
time?"

"I don't know, I'm sure," said Rickman thoughtfully.

"Well, it's only an experiment. I'm not offering you anything
permanent."

"Of course, that makes all the difference."

"It does; if it isn't good enough--"

"You don't understand me. That's what would make it all right."

"Make what all right?"

"My accepting--if you really only want a stop-gap."

"I see," said Jewdwine to himself, "the youth has tasted liberty, and
he objects to being caught and caged."

"The question is," said Rickman, sinking into thought again, "whether
you really want _me_."

"My dear fellow, why on earth should I say so if I didn't?"

"N--no. Only I thought, after the mess I've made of things, that none
of your family would ever care to have anything to do with me again."
It was the nearest he had come to mentioning Lucia Harden, and the
pain it cost him was visible on his face.

"My family," said Jewdwine with a stiff smile, "will _not_ have
anything to do with you. It has nothing to do with _The Museion_.

"In that case, I don't see why I shouldn't try it, if I can be of any
use to you." From the calmness of his manner you would have supposed
that salaried appointments hung on every lamp-post, ready to drop into
the mouths of impecunious young men of letters.

"Thanks. Then we'll consider that settled for the present."

Impossible to suppose that Rickman was not properly grateful. Still,
instead of thanking Jewdwine, he had made Jewdwine thank him. And he
had done it quite unconsciously, without any lapse from his habitual
sincerity, or the least change in his becoming attitude of modesty.
Jewdwine considered that what Maddox had qualified as Rickman's
colossal cheek was simply his colossal ignorance; not to say his
insanely perverted view of the value of salaried appointments.

"Oh," said he, "I shall want you as a contributor, too. I don't know
how you'll work in with the rest, but we shall see. I won't have any
but picked men. The review has always stood high; but I want it to
stand higher. It isn't a commercial speculation. There's no question
of making it pay. It must keep up its independence whether it can
afford it or not. We've been almost living on Vaughan's
advertisements. All the same, I mean to slaughter those new men he's
got hold of."

Rickman admired this reckless policy. It did not occur to him at the
moment that Jewdwine was reader to a rival publisher.

"What," he said, "all of them at once?"

"No--We shall work them off weekly, one at a time."

Rickman laughed. "One at a time? Then you allow them the merit of
individuality?"

"It isn't a merit; it's a vice, _the_ vice of the age. It shrieks; it
ramps. Individuality means slow disease in ethics and politics, but
it's sudden death to art. When will you young men learn that art is
self-restraint, not self-expansion?"

"Self expansion--it seems an innocent impulse."

"If it were an impulse--but it isn't. It's a pose. A cold, conscious,
systematic pose. So deadly artificial; and so futile, if they did but
know. After all, the individual is born, not made."

"I believe you!"

"Yes; but he isn't born nowadays. He belongs to the ages of inspired
innocence and inspired energy. We are not inspired; we are not
energetic; we are not innocent. We're deliberate and languid and
corrupt. And we can't reproduce by our vile mechanical process what
only exists by the grace of nature and of God. Look at the modern
individual--for all their cant and rant, is there a more contemptible
object on the face of this earth? Don't talk to me of individuality."

"It's given us one or two artists--"

"Artists? Yes, artists by the million; and no Art. To produce Art, the
artist's individuality must conform to the Absolute."

Jewdwine in ninety-two was a man of enormous utterances and noble
truths. With him all artistic achievements stood or fell according to
the canons of the _Prolegomena to Æsthetics_. Therefore in ninety-two
his conversation was not what you would call diverting. Yet it made
you giddy; his ideas kept on circulating round and round the same icy,
invisible pole. Rickman, in describing the interview afterwards, said
he thought he had caught a cold in the head talking to Jewdwine; his
intellect seemed to be sitting in a thorough draught.

"And if the artist has a non-conforming devil in him? If he's the sort
of genius who can't and won't conform? Strikes me the poor old
Absolute's got to climb down."

"If he's a genius--he generally isn't--he'll know that he'll express
himself best by conforming. He isn't lost by it, but enlarged. Look at
Greek art. There," said Jewdwine, a rapt and visionary air passing
over his usually apathetic face, "the individual, the artist, is
always subdued to the universal, the absolute beauty."

"And in modern art, I take it, the universal absolute beauty is
subdued to the individual. That seems only fair. What you've got to
reckon with is the man himself."

"Who wants the man himself? We want the thing itself--the reality, the
pure object of art. Do any of your new men understand that?"

"We _want_ it--some of us."

"Do you _understand_ it?"

"Not I. Do you understand it yourself? Would you know it if you met it
in the street?"

"It never is in the street."

"How do you know? You can't say where it is or what it is. You can't
say anything about it at all. But while you're all trying to find out,
the most unlikely person suddenly gets up and produces it. And _he_
can't tell you where he got it. Though, if you ask him, ten to one
he'll tell you he's been sitting on it all the time."

"Well," said Jewdwine, "tell me when you've 'sat on' anything
yourself."

"I will." He rose to go, being anxious to avoid the suspicion of
having pushed that question to a personal issue. It was only in reply
to more searching inquiries that he mentioned (on the doorstep) that a
book of his was coming out in the autumn.

"What, _Helen_?"

"No. _Saturnalia_ and--a lot of things you haven't seen yet." It was a
rapid nervous communication, made in the moment of withdrawing his
hand from Jewdwine's.

"Who's your publisher?" called out Jewdwine.

Rickman laughed as the night received him. "Vaughan!" he shouted from
the garden gate.

"Now, what on earth," said Jewdwine, "could have been his motive for
not consulting me?" He had not got the clue to the hesitation and
secrecy of the young man's behaviour. He did not know that there were
three things which Rickman desired at any cost to keep pure--his
genius, his friendship for Horace Jewdwine, and his love for Lucia
Harden.




CHAPTER XL


The end of May found Rickman still at Mrs. Downey's, established on
the second floor in a glory that exceeded the glory of Mr. Blenkinsop.
He had now not only a bedroom, but a study, furnished with a
simplicity that had the effect of luxury, and lined from floor to
ceiling with his books. Mrs. Downey had agreed that Mr. Rickman
should, whenever the mysterious fancy took him, have his meals served
to him in his own apartment after the high manner of Mr. Blenkinsop;
and it was under protest that she accepted any compensation for the
break thus made in the triumphal order of the Dinner.

Here then at last, he was absolutely alone and free. Feeling perhaps
how nearly it had lost him, or impressed by the sudden change in his
position, the boarding-house revered this privacy of Rickman's as a
sacred thing. Not even Mr. Soper would have dared to violate his
virgin leisure. The charm of it was unbroken, it was even heightened
by the inaudible presence of Miss Roots in her den on the same floor.
Miss Roots indeed was the tie that bound him to Mrs. Downey's;
otherwise the dream of his affluence would have been chambers in
Westminster or the Temple. For his income, in its leap from zero to a
fluctuating two hundred a year, appeared to him as boundless
affluence. To be sure, Jewdwine had expressly stated that it would not
be permanent, but this he had understood to be merely a delicate way
of referring to his former imperfect record of sobriety. And he had
become rich not only in money but in time. Rickman's had demanded an
eight or even a ten hours' day; the office of _The Museion_ claimed
him but five hours of four days in the week. From five o'clock on
Thursday evening till eleven on Monday morning, whatever work remained
for him to do could be done in his own time and his own temper.

Much of the leisure time at his disposal he spent in endeavouring to
follow the Harden library in its dispersion. He attended the great
auctions in the hope of intercepting some treasure in its passage from
Rickman's to the home of the collector. Once, in his father's absence,
he bought a dozen volumes straight over the counter from his successor
there. It was also about this time that Spinks and Soper appeared in
the new character of book fanciers, buying according to Rickman's
instructions and selling to him on commission, a transaction which
filled these gentlemen with superb importance. Thus Rickman became
possessed of about twenty or thirty volumes which he ranged behind a
curtain, on a shelf apart. The collection, formed gradually, included
nothing of any intrinsic value; such as it was he treasured it with a
view to restoring it ultimately to Lucia Harden. He was considering
whether with the means at his disposal he could procure a certain
Aldine Dante of his memory, when the Harden library disappeared from
the market as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. No volume
belonging to it could be bought for love or money; and none were
displayed in the windows of Rickman's. Keith learnt nothing by his
inquiries beyond the extent of his estrangement from his father. When
he called at the shop his successor regretted that he was unable to
give him any information. When he visited the suburban villa Isaac
refused to see him. When he wrote Isaac never answered the letters.
His stepmother in an unpleasant interview gave him to understand that
the separation was final and complete.

He would have been more hurt by this rupture but for that other and
abiding pain. The thought of Lucia Harden checked his enjoyment in the
prospect of a now unimpeded career. Rickman was like some young
athlete who walks on to the field stripped and strong for the race,
but invisibly handicapped, having had the heart knocked out of him by
some shameful incident outside the course. Apart from his own disgrace
he was miserably anxious about Lucia herself, about her health, her
happiness, her prospects; his misery being by no means lightened by
his perception that these things were not exactly his concern.

He tried to picture her living as poor ladies live; he had seen them
sometimes at Mrs. Downey's. He could not see her there, or rather,
seeing her he could see nothing else; he perceived that surroundings
and material accessories contributed nothing to his idea of her.
Still, he knew nothing; and he had to accept his ignorance as part,
and the worst part, of the separation that was his punishment. Many
mixed feelings, shame and passion, delicacy and pride restrained him
from asking Jewdwine any question. Even if Jewdwine had not told him
as much, he would have known that his acquaintance with Jewdwine's
affairs would not involve acquaintance with Jewdwine's family. He had
absolutely nothing to hope for from that connection.

And yet he hoped. The probabilities were that if Lucia did not make
her home with her cousins, she would at any rate stay with them the
greater part of the year. He was always walking up to Hampstead Heath
on the chance of some day seeing her there. Sometimes he would pass by
the front of Jewdwine's beautiful old brown house, and glance quickly
through the delicate iron gate and up at the windows. But she was
never there. Sometimes he would sit for hours on one of the seats
under the elm tree at the back. There was a high walk there
overlooking the West Heath and shaded by the elms and by Jewdwine's
garden wall. The wall had a door in it that might some day open and
let out the thing he longed for. Only it never did. There was nothing
to hope for from Jewdwine's house.

At last his longing became intolerable, and one day, in the office, he
made up his mind to approach Jewdwine himself. He had been telling him
about the apparent check in the career of the Harden library, when he
saw his opportunity and took it.

"By the way, can you tell me where your cousin is now?"

"Miss Harden," said Jewdwine coldly, "is in Germany with Miss
Palliser." He added, as if he evidently felt that some explanation was
necessary (not on Rickman's account, but on his own), "She was to have
come to us, but we were obliged to give her up to Miss Palliser, who
is living alone."

"Alone?"

"Yes. Mrs. Palliser is dead."

Rickman turned abruptly away to the window and stared into the street
below. Jewdwine from his seat by the table looked after him
thoughtfully. He would have given a good deal to know what was implied
in the sudden turning of Rickman's back. What on earth did it matter
to Rickman if old Mrs. Palliser was dead or alive? What could he be
thinking of?

He was thinking of Kitty who had shown him kindness, of Kitty and the
pleasant jests with which she used to cover his embarrassment; of
Kitty who had understood him at the last. It was impossible not to
feel some grief for the grief of Lucia's friend; but he had no
business to show it. Therefore he had turned away.

And then he thought of Lucia; and in his heart he cursed that other
business which was his and yet not his; he cursed the making of the
catalogue; he cursed the great Harden Library which had brought them
together and divided them. But for that, his genius, a thing apart,
might have claimed her friendship for itself. As it was, his genius,
being after all bound up with his person which suffered and was
ashamed, had (as far as Lucia was concerned) to accept its humiliation
and dismissal.

And all the time his genius, already vigorous enough in all
conscience, throve on his suffering as it had thriven on his joy. In
that summer of ninety-two, Rickman's _Saturnalia_ were followed by _On
Harcombe Hill_ and _The Four Winds_, and that greatest poem of his
lyric period, _The Song of Confession_. Upon the young poet about town
there had descended, as it were out of heaven, a power hitherto
undreamed of and undivined. No rapture of the body was ever so winged
and flamed, or lost itself in such heights and depths of music, as
that cry of the passion of his soul.




CHAPTER XLI


Meanwhile, of a Sunday evening, Miss Poppy Grace wondered why
Ricky-ticky never by any chance appeared upon his balcony. At last,
coming home about ten o'clock from one of his walks to Hampstead, he
found Poppy leaning out over _her_ balcony most unmistakably on the
look-out.

"Come in and have some supper," said she.

"No thanks, I fancy it's a little late."

"Better late than never, when it's supper with _me_. Catch!" And
Poppy, in defiance of all propriety, tossed her latch-key over the
balcony. And somehow that latch-key had to be returned. He did not use
it, but rang, with the intention of handing it to the servant; an
intention divined and frustrated by Poppy, who opened the door to him
herself.

"Don't go away," she said, "I've got something to tell you."

"Not now, I think--"

Her eyes were hideous to him in their great rings of paint and bistre.

"Why ever not? It'll only tyke a minute. Come in; there's nobody up
there that matters."

And because he had no desire to be brutal or uncivil, he went up into
the room he knew so well. It being summer, the folding doors were
thrown wide open, and in the room beyond they came upon a large lady
in a dirty tea-gown, eating lobster. For Poppy, now that she saw
respectability departing from her, held out to it a pathetic little
hand, and the tea-gown, pending an engagement as heavy matron on the
provincial stage, was glad enough to play Propriety in Miss Grace's
drawing-room. To-night Poppy made short work of Propriety. She waited
with admirable patience while the large lady (whom she addressed
affectionately as Tiny) followed up the last thin trail of mayonnaise;
but when Tiny showed a disposition to toy with the intricacies of an
empty claw, Poppy protested.

"Hurry up and clear out, there's a dear. I want to give Rickets his
supper, and we haven't got a minute to spare."

And Tiny, who seemed to know her business, hurried up and cleared out.

But Rickets didn't want any supper, and Poppy was visibly abstracted
and depressed. She mingled whipped cream with minute fragments of
lobster, and finally fell to torturing a sandwich with a spoon; and
all with an immense affectation of not having a minute to spare.

"Well, Ryzors," she said at last (and her accent jarred him horribly),
"this is very strynge behyviour."

"Which?"

"Which? Do you know you haven't been near me for two months?"

He laughed uneasily. "I couldn't be near you when I was away."

"Never said you could. But what did you go away for?"

"Business."

"Too busy to write, I suppose?"

"Much too busy."

She rose, and with one hand on his shoulder steered him into the front
room.

"Sit down," she said. "And don't look so sulky. I want to talk to you
sensibly."

He sat down where he had sat that night two months ago, on the Polar
bear skin. She sat down too, with a sweeping side-long movement of her
hips that drew her thin skirts close about her. She contemplated the
effect a little dubiously, then with shy nervous fingers loosened and
shook out the folds. He leaned back, withdrawn as far as possible into
the corner of the divan. The associations of the place were
unspeakably loathsome to him.

"Look here, dear"--(In Poppy's world the term of endearment went for
nothing; it was simply the stamp upon the current coin of comradeship.
If only that had been the beginning and the end between them!)

"I haven't a minute--but, I'm going to ask you something" (though
Poppy hadn't a minute she was applying herself very leisurely to the
making of cigarettes). "Don't go and get huffy at what I'm going to
say. Do you happen to owe Dicky anything?"

"Why?"

"Tell you why afterwards. _Do_ you owe him anything?"

"Oh, well--a certain amount--Why?"

"Why? Because I think he owes _you_ something. And that's a grudge. It
isn't my business, but if I were you, Rickets, I'd pay him orf and
have done with him."

"Oh, that's all right. I'm safe enough."

"You? It's just you who isn't. Dicky's not a bad sort, in his way. All
the same, he'd sell you up as soon as look at you. Unless--" (for a
moment her bright eyes clouded, charged with the melancholy meanings
of the world) "Unless you happened to be an orf'ly pretty woman." She
laid her right leg across her left knee and struck a vesta on the heel
of her shoe.

"Then, of course, he'd sooner look at me."

Poppy puffed at her cigarette and threw the vesta into the grate with
a dexterous jerk of her white forearm. "Look at you first. Sell you
up--after." Then Poppy burst into song--

    "Oh, he is such a nice little boy,
    When there's nothing you do to annoy;
        But he's apt to stand aloof
        If you arsk him for the oof,
      And it's then that he looks coy.
        Oh, he'll show the cloven hoof,
        If you put him to the proof.
    When you want him to hand you the boodle
    He's _not_ such a nice little boy.

"Yes, dickee, _I_ see you!"

The canary, persuaded by Poppy's song that it was broad daylight, was
awake and splashing in his bath. Again in Poppy's mind (how
unnecessarily) he stood for the respectabilities and proprieties; he
was an understudy for Tiny of the dirty tea-gown.

"Going?"

"Yes. I must go."

"Wait." She rose and held him by the collar of his coat, a lapel in
each small hand. He grasped her wrists by an instinctive movement of
self-preservation, and gently slackened her hold. She gave his coat a
little shake. "What's the matter with you, Rickets? You're such a
howling swell."

Her eyes twinkled in the old way, and he smiled in spite of himself.

"Say, I'm a little nuisance, Rickets, _say_ I'm a little nuisance."

"You are a little nuisance.

"A d----d little nuisance."

"A d----d little nuisance."

"Ah, now you feel better, don't you? Poor Ricky-ticky, don't you be
afraid. It's only a _little_ nuisance. It'll never be a big one. It's
done growing. That is, I won't rag you any more, if you'll tell me one
thing--oh, what a whopper of a sigh!--Promise me you'll pay Dicky
off."

"All right. I'll pay him."

"To-morrow?"

"To-morrow, then. Don't, Poppy. I--I've got a sore throat." For Poppy,
standing on tip-toe, had made an effort to embrace him.

"I sy, if you blush like that, Rickets, you'll have a fit. Poor dear!
_Did_ I crumple his nice little stylish collar!"

He endured while she smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle, her head very
much on one side. "You see, Razors, we've been such chums. Whatever
happens, I want to be all right and straight with you."

"What should happen?"

"Oh, anything." Again there was that troubling of the bright shallows
of her eyes. "You remember larst time you were here?" (his shudder
told her that he remembered well). "I _did_ try to send you away,
didn't I?"

"As far as I can remember, you did."

"What did you think I did it for?"

"I suppose, because you wanted me to go."

"Stupid! I did it because I wanted you to _stay_." She looked into his
eyes and the light went out of her own; among its paint and powder her
audacity lay dead. It was as if she saw on his face the shadow of
Lucia Harden, and knew that her hour had come.

She met it laughing. "Good-night, Ricky-ticky."

As he took her hand he muttered something about being "fearfully
sorry."

"Sorry?" Poppy conjured up a poor flickering ghost of her inimitable
wink. "The champagne was bad, dear. Don't you worry."

When he had left her, she flung herself face downwards on the divan.
"Oh, dicky, will you hold your horrid little tongue?" But as she
sobbed aloud, the canary, symbol of invincible Propriety, rocked on
his perch and shook over her his piercing and exultant song.

Rickman was sorry for her, but the sight and touch of her were hateful
to him. He took her advice however. He had had good luck with some
articles, and he called on Pilkington the next afternoon and paid him
his thirty pounds with the interest. Dicky was in a good humour and
inclined to be communicative. He congratulated him on his present
berth, and informed him that Rickman's was "going it." The old man had
just raised four thousand on the Harden library, the only security
that he, Dicky, would accept.

"I suppose," said Rickman simply, "you'd no idea of its value when you
let him buy it?"

Dicky stared through his eye-glass with his blue eyes immense and
clear.

"My dear fellow, do you take me for a d----d fool?"

So that had been Dicky's little game? Trust Dicky.

And yet for the time being, held in the opposing grip of two firm
cupidities, it was safe, the great Harden library, once the joy of
scholars, loved with such high intellectual passion, and now the
centre of so many hot schemes and rivalries and lusts. Now that the
work of sacrilege was complete, housed at last in the Gin Palace of
Art, it stood, useless in its desecrated beauty, cumbering the shelves
whence no sale would remove it until either Rickman's or Pilkington
let go. So far the Hardens were avenged.




CHAPTER XLII


More than once, after that night when Rickman dined with him, Jewdwine
became the prey of many misgivings. He felt that in taking Rickman up
he was assuming an immense responsibility. It might have been better,
happier for Rickman, poor fellow, if after all he had left him in his
decent obscurity; but having dragged him out of it, he was in a manner
answerable to the world for Rickman and to Rickman for the world.
Supposing Rickman disappointed the world? Supposing the world
disappointed Rickman?

Jewdwine lived in the hope, natural to a distinguished critic, of some
day lighting upon a genius. The glory of that find would go far to
compensate him for his daily traffic with mediocrity. Genius was
rarely to be seen, but Jewdwine felt that he would be the first to
recognize it if he did see it; the first to penetrate its many curious
disguises; the first to give it an introduction (if it wanted one) to
his own superior world. And here was Rickman--manifestly in need of
that introduction--a man who unquestionably had about him some of the
marks by which a genius is identified; and yet he left you terribly
uncertain. He was the very incarnation of uncertainty. Jewdwine was
perfectly willing to help the man if only he were sure of the genius.
But was he sure? Had it really pleased the inscrutable divine thing to
take up its abode in this otherwise rather impossible person?

Meanwhile Rickman seemed to be settling down fairly comfortably to the
work of _The Museion_; and Jewdwine, having other things to think of,
began to forget his existence. He was in fact rapidly realizing his
dream. He had won for himself and his paper a position lonely and
unique. The reputation of _The Museion_ was out of all proportion to
its circulation, but Jewdwine was making himself heard. As an editor
and critic he was respected for his incorruptibility and for the
purity of his passion for literature. His utterances were considered
to carry authority and weight.

Just at first the weight was perhaps the more conspicuous quality of
the two. Jewdwine could not be parted from his "Absolute." He had
lived with it for years in Oxford, and he brought it up to town with
him; it walked beside him on the London pavements and beckoned him
incessantly into the vast inane. It cut a very majestic figure in his
columns, till some irritable compositor docked it of its capital and
compelled it to march with the rank and file of vulgar adjectives.
Even thus degraded it ruled his paragraphs as it ruled his thoughts.

But lately the review seemed to be making efforts to redeem itself
from the charge of heaviness. In certain of its columns there was a
curious radiance and agitation, as of some winged and luminous
creature struggling against obscurity; and it was felt that Jewdwine
was binding in a pious tradition of dulness a spirit that would
otherwise have danced and flown. Whether it was his own spirit or
somebody else's did not definitely appear; but now and again it broke
loose altogether, and then, when people complimented him on the
brilliance of his appearance that week, he smiled inscrutably.

It was impossible to say how far Jewdwine's conscience approved of
these outbursts of individuality. Certainly he did his best to
restrain them, his desire being to give to his columns a distinguished
unity of form. He saw himself the founder of a new and higher school
of journalism, thus satisfying his undying tutorial instincts. He had
chosen his staff from the most promising among the young band of
disciples who thronged his lecture-room at Oxford; men moulded on his
methods, inspired by his ideals, drenched in his metaphysics; crude
young men of uncontrollable enthusiasm, whose style awaited at his
hands the final polishing.

He knew that he had done a risky thing in associating young Rickman
with them in this high enterprise. But under all his doubts there lay
a faith in the genius of his sub-editor, a faith the more fascinating
because it was so far removed from any certainty. In giving Rickman
his present post he conceived himself not only to be paying a debt of
honour, but doing the best possible thing for _The Museion_. It was
also, he considered, the best possible thing for Rickman. His work on
the review would give him the discipline he most needed, the
discipline he had never had. To be brought into line with an august
tradition; to be caught up out of the slough of modern journalism into
a rarer atmosphere; to breathe the eternal spirit of great literature
(a spirit which according to Jewdwine did not blow altogether where it
listed); to have his too exuberant individuality chastened and
controlled, would be for Rickman an unspeakable benefit at this
critical stage of his career.

The chastening and controlling were difficult. Rickman's phrases were
frequently more powerful than polite. Like many young writers of
violent imagination he was apt to be somewhat vividly erotic in his
metaphors. And he had little ways that were very irritating to
Jewdwine. He was wasteful with the office paper and with string; he
would use penny stamps where halfpenny ones would have served his
purpose; he had once permitted himself to differ with Jewdwine on a
point of scholarship in the presence of the junior clerk. There were
times when Jewdwine longed to turn him out and have done with him; and
yet Rickman stayed on. When all was said and done there was a charm
about him. Jewdwine in fact had proved the truth of Lucia's saying; he
could rely absolutely on his devotion. He could not afford to let him
go. Though Rickman tampered shamelessly with the traditions of the
review, it could not be said that as yet he had injured its
circulation. His contributions were noticed with approval in rival
columns; and they had even been quoted by Continental critics with
whom _The Museion_ passed as being the only British review that had
the true interests of literature at heart.

But though Rickman helped to bring fame to _The Museion_, _The
Museion_ brought none to him. The identity of its contributors was
merged in that of its editor, and those brilliant articles were never
signed.

The spring of ninety-three, which found Jewdwine comfortably seated
on the summit of his ambition, saw Rickman almost as obscure as in the
spring of ninety-two. His poems had not yet appeared. Vaughan
evidently regarded them as so many sensitive plants, and, fearing for
them the boisterous seasons of autumn and spring, had kept them back
till the coming May, when, as he expressed it, the market would be
less crowded. This delay gave time to that erratic artist, Mordaunt
Crawley, to complete the remarkable illustrations on which Vaughan
relied chiefly for success. Vaughan had spared no expense, but
naturally it was the artist and the printer, not the poet, whom he
paid.

Rickman, however, had not thought of his _Saturnalia_ as a source of
revenue. It had been such a pleasure to write them that the wonder was
he had not been called upon to pay for that. Happily for him he was by
this time independent. As sub-editor and contributor to _The Museion_,
he was drawing two small but regular incomes. He could also count on a
third (smaller and more uncertain) from _The Planet_, where from the
moment of his capture by Jewdwine he had been reinstated.

He found it easy enough to work for both. _The Planet_ was poor, and
it was out of sheer perversity that it indulged a disinterested
passion for literature. In fact, Maddox and his men were trying to do
with gaiety of heart what Jewdwine was doing with superb solemnity.
But whenever Rickman mentioned Maddox to Jewdwine, Jewdwine would
shrug his shoulders and say, "Maddox is not important"; and when he
mentioned _The Museion_ to Maddox, Maddox would correct him with a
laugh, "The Museum, you mean," and refer to his fellow-contributors as
"a respectable collection of meiocene fossils." Maddox had conceived a
jealous and violent admiration for Savage Keith Rickman. "Rickman," he
said, "you shall not go over body and soul to _The Museion_." He
regarded himself as the keeper and lover of Rickman's soul, and would
not have been sorry to bring about a divorce between it and Jewdwine.
His irregular attentions were to save it from a suicidal devotion to a
joyless consort. So that Rickman was torn between Maddox's enthusiasm
for him and his own enthusiasm for Jewdwine.

That affection endured, being one with his impetuous and generous
youth; while his genius, that thing alone and apart, escaped from
Jewdwine. He knew that Jewdwine's incorruptibility left him nothing to
expect in the way of approval and protection, and the knowledge did
not greatly affect him. He preferred that his friend should remain
incorruptible. That Jewdwine should greatly delight in his
_Saturnalia_ was more than he at any time expected. For there his
muse, Modernity, had begun to turn her back resolutely on the masters
and the models, to fling off the golden fetters of rhyme, gird up her
draperies to her naked thighs, and step out with her great swinging
stride on perilous paths of her own. To be sure there were other
things which Jewdwine had not seen, on which he himself felt that he
might rest a pretty secure claim to immortality.

Of his progress thither his friends had to accept Vaughan's
announcements as the only intimation. Rickman had not called upon any
of the Junior Journalists to smooth the way for him. He had not, in
fact, called on any of them at all, but as April advanced he retreated
more and more into a foolish privacy; and with the approaches of May
he vanished. One night, however, some Junior Journalists caught him at
the club, belated, eating supper. They afterwards recalled that he had
then seemed to them possessed by a perfect demon of indiscretion; and
when his book finally appeared on the first of May, it was felt that
it could hardly have been produced under more unfavourable auspices.
This reckless attitude was evidently unaffected (nobody had ever
accused Rickman of affectation); and even Maddox pronounced it
imprudent in the extreme. As for Jewdwine, it could not be accounted
for by any motives known to him. His experience compelled him to take
a somewhat cynical view of the literary character. Jewdwine among his
authors was like a man insusceptible of passion, but aware of the
fascinations that caused him to be pursued by the solicitations of the
fair. He was flattered by the pursuit, but the pursuer inspired him
with the liveliest contempt. It had not yet occurred to him that
Rickman could have any delicacy in approaching him. Still less could
he believe that Rickman could be indifferent to the fate of his book.
His carelessness therefore did not strike him as entirely genuine.
There could be no doubt however as to the genuineness of Rickman's
surprise when he came upon Jewdwine in the office reading
_Saturnalia_.

He smiled upon him, innocent and unconscious. "Ah!" he said, "so
you're reading it? You won't like it."

Jewdwine crossed one leg over the other, and it was wonderful the
amount of annoyance he managed to convey by the gesture. His face,
too, wore a worried and uncertain look; so worried and so uncertain
that Rickman was sorry for him. He felt he must make it easy for him.

"At any rate, you won't admire its personal appearance."

"I don't. What possessed you to give it to Vaughan?"

"Some devil, I think."

"You certainly might have done better."

"Perhaps. If I'd taken the trouble. But I didn't."

Jewdwine raised his eyebrows (whenever he did that Rickman thought of
someone who used to raise her eyebrows too, but with a difference).

"You see, it was last year. I let things slide."

Jewdwine looked as if he didn't see. "If you had come to me, I think I
could have helped you."

"I didn't want to bother you. I knew you wouldn't care for the
things."

"Well, frankly, I don't care very much for some of them. But I should
have stretched a point to keep you clear of Crawley. I'm sorry he put
temptation in your way."

"He didn't. They say I put temptation in his way. Horrid, isn't it, to
think there's something in me that appeals to his diseased
imagination?"

"It's a pity. And I don't know what I can do for you. You see you've
identified yourself with a school I particularly abominate. It isn't a
school. A school implies a master and some attempt at discipline. It
should have a formula. Crawley has none."

"Oh, I don't know about that." He stood beside Jewdwine, who was
gazing at the frontispiece. "Talk about absolute beauty, any fool can
show you the beauty of a beautiful thing, or the ugliness of an ugly
one; but it takes a clever beast like Crawley to show you beauty in
anything so absolutely repulsive as that woman's face. Look at it!
He's got hold of something. He's caught the lurking fascination,
the--the leer of life."

Jewdwine made a gesture of disgust.

"Of course, it's no good as an illustration. I don't see life with a
leer on its face. But he can draw. Look at the fellow's line. Did you
ever see anything like the purity of it? It's a high and holy
abstraction. By Jove! He's got _his_ formula. Pure line remains pure,
however bestial the object it describes. I wish he'd drawn it at
illustrating _me_. But I suppose if he saw it that way he had to draw
it that way."

Jewdwine turned over the pages gingerly, as if he feared to be
polluted. He was at the moment profoundly sorry for Rickman in this
marriage of his art with Mordaunt Crawley's. Whatever might be said of
Rickman's radiant and impetuous genius it neither lurked nor leered;
it was in no way represented by that strange and shameless figure,
half Mænad, half modern courtesan, the face foreshortened, tilted back
in the act of emptying a wine-cup.

"At any rate," said Rickman, "he hasn't lied. He's had the courage to
be his filthy self."

"Still, the result isn't exactly a flattering portrait of your Muse."

"She _is_ a caution. It's quite enough to make you and Hanson lump me
with Letheby and that lot."

This touched Jewdwine in two sensitive places at once. He objected to
being "lumped" with Hanson. He also felt that his generosity had been
called in question. For a moment the truth that was in him looked out
of his grave and earnest eyes.

"I do _not_ lump you with Letheby or anybody. On the contrary, I think
you stand by yourself. Quite one half of this book is great poetry."

"You really think that?"

"Yes," said Jewdwine solemnly; "I do think it. That's why I deplore
the appearance of the other half. But if you _had_ to publish, why
couldn't you bring out your _Helen in Leuce_? It was far finer than
anything you have here."

"Yes. Helen's all right _now_." His tone implied only too plainly that
she was not all right when Jewdwine had approved of her.

"_Now?_ What on earth have you been doing to her?"

"Only putting a little life into her limbs. But Vaughan wouldn't have
her at any price."

"My dear Rickman, you should have come to _me_. I hope to goodness
Vaughan won't tempt you into any more _Saturnalia_."

"After all--what's wrong with them?"

Jewdwine leaned back, keenly alive to these stirrings of dissent; he
withdrew, as it were, his protecting presence a foot or two farther.
He spoke slowly and with emphasis.

"Excess," said he; "too much of everything. Too much force, too much
fire, and too much smoke with your fire. In other words, too much
temperament, too much Rickman."

"Too much Rickman?"

"Yes; far too much. It's nothing but a flaming orgy of individuality."

"And that's why it's all wrong?" He really wondered whether there
might not be something in that view after all.

"It seems so to me. Look here, my dear fellow. Because a poet happens
to have been drunk once or twice in his life it's no reason why he
should write a poem called _Intoxication_. That sort of exhibition,
you know, is scandalous."

Rickman hung his head. That one poem he would have given anything at
the moment to recall. It _was_ scandalous if you came to think of it.
Only in the joy of writing it he had not thought of it; that was all.

"It's simply astounding in a splendid scholar like you, Rickman. It's
such an awful waste." He looked at him as he spoke, and his soul was
in his eyes. It gave him a curious likeness to his cousin, and in that
moment Rickman worshipped him. "Go back. Go back to your Virgil and
your Homer and your Sophocles, and learn a little more restraint.
There's nothing like them. They'll take you out of this ugly, weary,
modern world where you and I, Rickman, had no business to be born."

"And yet," said Rickman, "there _are_ modern poets."

"There are very few, and those not the greatest. By modern, I mean
inspired by the modern spirit; and the modern spirit does not inspire
great poetry. The greatest have been obliged to go back--back to
primeval nature, back to the Middle Ages, back to Greece and Rome--but
always back."

"I can't go back," said Rickman. "I mayn't know what I'm working for
yet, but I believe I'm on the right road. How can I go back?"

"Why not? Milton went back to the Creation, and _he_ was only born in
the seventeenth century. You have had the unspeakable misfortune to be
born in the nineteenth. You must live on your imagination--the world
has nothing for you."

"I believe it _has_ something for me, if I could only find it."

"Well, don't lose too much time in looking for it. Art's long and
life's short, especially modern life; and that's the trouble."

Rickman shook his head. "No; that's not the trouble. It's the other
way about. Life's infinite and art's one. And at first, you know, it's
the infinity that staggers you." He flung himself into a chair
opposite Jewdwine, planted his elbows on the table, and propped his
chin on his hands. He looked as if he saw the infinity he spoke of. "I
can't describe to you," he said, "what it is merely to be alive out
there in the streets, on a sunny day, when the air's all fine watery
gold, and goes dancing and singing into your head like dry champagne.
I've given up alcohol. It isn't really necessary. I got as drunk as a
lord the other day going over Hampstead Heath in a west wind" (he
_looked_ drunk at the mere thought of it). "Does it ever affect _you_
in that way?"

Jewdwine smiled. The wind on Hampstead Heath had never affected him in
that way.

"No. It isn't what you think. I used to go mad about women, just as I
used to drink. I don't seem to care a rap about them now." But his
eyes had a peculiar large and brilliant look, as if he saw the woman
of his desire approaching him. His voice softened. "Don't you know
when the world--all the divine maddening beauty of it--lies naked
before your eyes, and you want to get hold of it--now--this minute,
and instead it gets hold of you, and pulls you every way at
once--don't you know? The thing's got a thousand faces, and two
thousand arms, and ten thousand devils in it."

Jewdwine didn't know. How should he? He had a horror of this forcing
of the sensuous and passionate note. The author of the _Prolegomena to
Æsthetics_ recoiled from "too much temperament." He felt, moreover,
the jealous pang of the master who realizes that he has lost his hold.
This was not that Rickman who used to hang all flushed and fervid on
Jewdwine's words. He remembered how once on an April day, a year ago,
the disciple had turned at the call of woman and of the world, the
call of the Spring in his heart and in his urgent blood.

And yet this was not that Rickman either.

"My dear Rickman, I don't understand. Are you talking about the world?
Or the flesh? Or the devils?"

"All of them, if you like. And you can throw in the sun and the moon
and the stars, too. There are moments, Jewdwine, when I understand
God. At any rate I know how he felt the very day before creation. His
world's all raw chaos to me, and I've got to make my world out of it."

"I'm afraid I cannot help you _there_."

As they parted he felt that perhaps he had failed to be sufficiently
sympathetic. "I'll do my best," said he, "to set you right with the
public."

Left alone, he stood staring earnestly at the chair where Rickman had
sat propping his chin in his hands. He seemed to be contemplating his
phantom; the phantom that had begun to haunt him.

What had he let himself in for?




CHAPTER XLIII


There was one man who was sure, perfectly sure; and that man was
Maddox. He had read Rickman's book before Jewdwine had seen it, and
while Jewdwine was still shaking his head over it in the office of the
_The Museion_, its chances were being eagerly discussed in the office
of _The Planet_. Maddox was disgusted with the publishers, Stables
with the price, Rankin with the illustrations.

"It's all very well," said Rankin; "but those borrowed plumes will
have to be paid for."

"Borrowed plumes with a vengeance," said Maddox. "Vaughan might just
as well have turned him out tarred and feathered as illustrated by
Mordaunt Crawley. Mind you, some of that tar will stick. It'll take
him all his time to get it off."

"Did you see," said Stables, "that Hanson bracketed him with Letheby
in this morning's _Courier_?"

"No, did he?" said Maddox; "I'm sorry for that. It's rough on little
Rickman."

"It's what you must expect," said Rankin, "if you're illustrated by
Crawley."

"It's what you must expect," said Stables, "if you go out of your way
to offend people who can help you. You know he refused an introduction
to Hanson the other day?"

"No!"

"Fact. And it was in his sublimest manner. He said he hadn't any use
for Hanson. Hanson couldn't help him till he'd helped himself. I don't
know whether any one was kind enough to tell that tale to Hanson."

"Hanson," said Maddox, "is too big a man to mind it if they did."

"Anyhow, he _hasn't_ helped him."

"No," said Rankin; "but that's another story. Hanson was dining with
Jewdwine, and Jewdwine was cracking up Rickman most extravagantly (for
him). That was quite enough to make Hanson jump on him. He was bound
to do it by way of asserting his independence."

"I wonder if Jewdwine calculated that that would be the natural
effect."

"Oh, come, he's a subtle beast; but I don't suppose he's as subtle as
all that."

"You'll find that all the reviews will follow Hanson like a flock of
sheep."

"How about the _Literary Observer_? Mackinnon was friendly."

Maddox smiled. "He was. But our Ricky-ticky alienated Mackinnon on the
very eve of publication."

"How?"

"By some awful jest. Something about Mackinnon's head and the dome of
the British Museum."

"Well, if it was a joke, Mackinnon wouldn't see it."

"No, but he'd feel it, which would be a great deal worse. Our
Ricky-ticky is devoid of common prudence."

"Our Ricky-ticky is a d----d fool," said Stables.

"Well," said Rankin, "I suppose he knows what he's about. He's got
Jewdwine at his back."

Maddox shrugged his enormous shoulders. "Jewdwine? Jewdwine won't
slate his own man, but he can't very well turn round and boom the set
he always goes for. This," said Maddox, "is my deal. I shall sail in
and discover Ricky-ticky."

"He's taking precious good care to hide himself. It's a thousand
pities he ever got in with those wretched decadents."

"He isn't in with them."

"Well, he mayn't be exactly immersed, but the tide's caught him."

"The tide? You might be talking of the Atlantic."

"The stream then--' the stream of tendency that makes for '--muck."

"It isn't a stream, it's a filthy duck-pond in somebody's back yard.
There's just enough water for the rest to drown in, but it isn't deep
enough to float a man of Rickman's size. He's only got his feet wet,
and that won't hurt him."

"There are things," said Rankin, "in Saturnalia that lend themselves
to Crawley's treatment."

"And there are things in it that Crawley can't touch. And look at the
later poems--The Four Winds, On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of
Confession. Good God! It makes my blood boil to compare the man who
wrote that with Letheby. Letheby! I could wring Vaughan's neck and
Hanson's too. I should like to take their heads and knock them
together. As for Letheby I'll do for him. I'll smash him in one
column, and I'll give Rickman his send-off in four."

(The Planet in those early days was liberal with its space.)

"After all," he added in a calmer tone, "he was right. We can't help
him, except by taking a back seat and letting him speak for himself. I
shall quote freely. The Song of Confession is the best answer to
Hanson."

"It seems to me," said Stables, "you'll want a whole number at this
rate."

"I shall want six columns, if I'm to do him any justice," said Maddox,
rising. "Poor beggar, I expect he's a bit off colour. I shall go and
look him up."

At eight that evening he went and looked him up. He found him in his
room tranquilly reading. Thinking of him as a man of genius who had
courted failure and madly fooled away his chances, and seeing him
sitting there, so detached, and so unconscious, Maddox was profoundly
moved. He had come with cursing and with consolation, with sympathy,
with prophecy, with voluble belief. But all he could say was, "It's
all right, Rickman. It's great, my son, it's great."

All the same he did not conceal his doubts as to the sort of reception
Rickman had to expect. That part of the business, he said, had been
grossly mismanaged, and it was Rickman's own fault.

"Look here," he said, "what on earth possessed you to go and refuse
that introduction to Hanson? Was it just your cheek, or the devil's
own pride, or what?"

"Neither," said Rickman, in a tone that pathetically intimated that
he was worn out. "I think it was chiefly my desire for peace and
quiet. I'm writing some more poems, you see. I wouldn't have refused
it at any other time."

"At any other time it wouldn't have mattered so much. You should be
civil to the people who can help you."

"I rather distrust that sort of civility myself. I've seen too much of
the dirty back stairs of Fleet Street. I've tumbled over the miserable
people who sit on them all day long, and I don't mean anybody to
tumble over me. When I've got my best trousers on I want to keep them
clean."

"It's a mistake," said Maddox, "to wear your best trousers every day."

"Perhaps. But I mean to wear them."

"Wear them by all means. But you must make up your mind for a certain
amount of wear and tear. In your case it will probably be tear."

"That's my look-out."

"Quite so. I wouldn't say anything if it was only Hanson you'd
offended, but you shouldn't alienate your friends."

"My friends?"

"Yes. Why, oh why, did you make that joke about Mackinnon's head?"

"We were all making jokes about Mackinnon's head."

"Yes; but we weren't all of us bringing out poems the next day. Your
position, Ricky-ticky, was one of peculiar delicacy--and danger."

"What does it matter?" said Rickman wearily. "I can trust my friends
to speak the truth about me."

"Heaven bless you, Rickman, and may your spring suitings last for
ever." He added, as Jewdwine had added, "Anyhow, this friend will do
his level best for you."

At which Rickman's demon returned again. "Don't crack me up too much,
Maddy. You might do me harm."

But before midnight Maddox burst into the office and flung himself on
to his desk.

"Give me room!" he cried; "I mean to spread myself, to roll, to
wallow, to wanton, to volupt!"

Before morning he had poured out his soul, in four columns of _The
Planet_, the exuberant, irrepressible soul of the Celt. He did it in
an hour and twenty minutes. As he said himself afterwards (relating
his marvellous achievement) he was sustained by one continuous
inspiration; his passionate pen paused neither for punctuation nor for
thought. The thoughts, he said, were there. As the critical notices
only appeared weekly, to pause would have entailed a delay of seven
days, and he meant that his panegyric should appear the very next day
after the article in the _Literary Observer_, as an answer to Hanson's
damnable paragraph.

If Maddox was urged to these excesses by his contempt for Jewdwine's
critical cowardice, Jewdwine was cooled by the spectacle of Maddox's
intemperance. He had begun by feeling a little bitter towards Rickman
on his own account. He was disappointed in him. Rickman had shown that
he was indifferent to his opinion. That being so, Jewdwine might have
been forgiven if he had had no very keen desire to help him. Still, he
_had_ desired to help him; but his desire had ceased after reading
Maddox's review. There was no pleasure in helping him now, since he
had allowed himself to be taken up and caressed so violently by other
people. The clumsy hand of Maddox had brushed the first bloom from his
Rickman, that once delightful youth. He was no longer Jewdwine's
Rickman, his disciple, his discovery.

But though Jewdwine felt bitter, he was careful that no tinge of this
personal feeling should appear in his review of Rickman's poems. It
was exceedingly difficult for him to review them at all. He had to
take an independent attitude, and most possible attitudes had been
taken already. He could not ignore Rickman's deplorable connection
with the Decadents; and yet he could not insist on it, for that was
what Hanson and the rest had done. Rickman had got to stay there; he
could not step in and pluck him out like a brand from the burning; for
Maddox had just accomplished that heroic feat. He would say nothing
that would lend countenance to the extravagance of Maddox. There was
really no room for fresh appreciation anywhere. He could not give
blame where Hanson had given it; and Maddox had plastered every line
with praise. He would have been the first to praise Rickman, provided
that he _was_ the first. Not that Jewdwine ever committed himself. As
a critic his surest resource had always lain in understatement. If the
swan was a goose, Jewdwine had as good as said so. If the goose proved
a swan, Jewdwine had implied as much by his magnificent reserve. But
this time the middle course was imposed on him less by conviction than
necessity. He had to hold the balance true between Hanson and Maddox.

In his efforts to hold it true, he became more than ever academic and
judicial. So judicial, so impartial was he in his opinion, that he
really seemed to have no opinion at all; to be merely summing up the
evidence and leaving the verdict to the incorruptible jury. Every
sentence sounded as though it had been passed through a refrigerator.
Not a hint or a sign that he had ever recognized in Rickman the
possibility of greatness.

Now, if Rickman had not been connected with _The Museion_, the review
would have done him neither harm nor good. As it was, it did him harm.
It was naturally supposed that Jewdwine, so far from understating his
admiration, had suppressed his bad opinion in the interests of
friendship. Rickman's _Saturnalia_ remained where Hanson had placed
it, rather low in the ranks of young Decadence.

And then, just because he had suppressed the truth about him, because
he felt that he had given Rickman some grounds for bitterness,
Jewdwine began to feel more and more bitter himself.

If Rickman felt any bitterness he never showed it. He had only two
thoughts on reading Jewdwine's articles. "It wouldn't have mattered
except that _she_ will see it"; and "I wouldn't have minded if it was
what he really thought."

Maddox, rightly judging that Rickman would be suffering more in his
affection than his vanity, called on him that afternoon and dragged
him out for his usual Saturday walk. As if the thought of Jewdwine
dominated their movements, they found themselves on the way to
Hampstead. Maddox attempted consolation.

"It really doesn't matter much what Jewdwine says. These fellows come
up from Oxford with wet towels round their heads to keep the
metaphysics in. Jewdwine's muddled himself with the Absolute Beauty
till he doesn't know a beautiful thing if you stick it under his
nose."

"Possibly not; if you keep it farther off he might have a better
chance. Trust him to know."

"Well, if he knows, he doesn't care."

"Oh, doesn't he. That's where Jewdwine's great. He cares for nothing
else. He cares more than any man alive--in his heart."

"D--n his heart! I don't believe he has one."

"Would you oblige me by not talking about him any more?"

Maddox obliged him.

They tramped far into the country, returning at nightfall by the great
road that crosses the high ground of the Heath. Rickman loved that
road; for by night, or on a misty evening, it was possible to imagine
some remote resemblance between it and the long straight ridge of
Harcombe Hill.

They paused by common consent where the Heath drops suddenly from the
edge of the road; opening out the view towards London. The hollow
beneath them, filled by a thin fog, had become mysterious and immense.

"By the way," said Maddox, following an apparently irrelevant train of
thought, "what has become of your friendship for Miss Poppy Grace?"

"It has gone," said Rickman, "where the old trousers go. Look there--"

Above them heaven seemed to hang low, bringing its stars nearer. A few
clouds drifted across it, drenched in the blue of the night behind
them, a grey-blue, watery and opaque. Below, sunk in a night greyer
and deeper, were the lights of London. The ridge they stood on was
like the rampart of another world hung between the stars which are the
lights of poets, and the lights which are the stars of men. Under the
stars Maddox chanted softly the last verses of the _Song of
Confession_ that Rickman had made.