And underneath these Mr. Rickmans, though inextricably, damnably one
with them, was a certain apparently commonplace but amiable young man,
who lived in a Bloomsbury boarding-house and dropped his aitches. This
young man was tender and chivalrous, full of little innocent
civilities to the ladies of his boarding-house; he admired, above all
things, modesty in a woman, and somewhere, in the dark and unexplored
corners of his nature, he concealed a prejudice in favour of marriage
and the sanctities of home.

That made six, and no doubt they would have pulled together well
enough; but the bother was that any one of them was liable at any
moment to the visitation of the seventh--Mr. Rickman the genius. There
was no telling whether he would come in the form of a high god or a
demon, a consolation or a torment. Sometimes he would descend upon Mr.
Rickman in the second-hand department, and attempt to seduce him from
his allegiance to the Quarterly Catalogue. Or he would take up the
poor journalist's copy as it lay on a table, and change it so that its
own editor wouldn't know it again. And sometimes he would swoop down
on the little bookseller as he sat at breakfast on a Sunday morning,
in his nice frock coat and clean collar, and wrap his big flapping
wings round him, and carry him off to the place where the divine ideas
come from leaving a silent and to all appearances idiotic young
gentleman in his place. Or he would sit down by that young gentleman's
side and shake him out of his little innocences and complacencies, and
turn all his little jokes into his own incomprehensible humour. And
then the boarding-house would look uncomfortable and say to itself
that Mr. Rickman had been drinking.

In short, it was a very confusing state of affairs, and one that made
it almost impossible for Mr. Rickman to establish his identity. Seven
Rickmans--only think of it! And some reckon an eighth, Mr. Rickman
drunk. But this is not altogether fair; for intoxication acted rather
on all seven at once, producing in them a gentle fusion with each
other and the universe. They had ceased to struggle. But Mr. Rickman
was not often drunk, or at least not nearly so often as his friends
supposed.

So it was all very well for Jewdwine, who was not so bewilderingly
constructed, to talk about finding your formula and pulling yourself
together. How, Mr. Rickman argued, could you hope to find the formula
of a fellow who could only be expressed in fractions, and vulgar
fractions, too? How on earth could you pull yourself together when
Nature had deliberately cut you into little pieces? Never since poor
Orpheus was torn to tatters by the Mænads was there a poet so horribly
subdivided. Talk of being dissolute, dissipated! Those adjectives were
a poor description of S.K.R. It was more than sowing a mere handful of
wild oats, it was a disintegration, a scattering of Rickmans to all
the winds of the world.

Find himself, indeed!

Still, he was perfectly willing to try; and to that end (after dining
with people who were anything but cultivated, or intellectual, or
refined) he turned himself loose into the streets.

The streets--he was never tired of them. After nine or ten hours of
sitting in a dusty second-hand bookshop, his soul was dry with thirst
for the living world, and the young joy of the world, "the fugitive
actuality." And her ways were in the streets.

Being a young poet about town, he turned to the streets as naturally
as a young poet in the country turns to the woods and fields. For in
the streets, if you know how to listen, you can hear the lyric soul of
things as plainly, more plainly perhaps, than in the woods or fields.
Only it sings another sort of song. And going into the streets was
Rickman's way (the only way open to him as yet) of going into society.
The doors were thrown hospitably wide to him; one day was as good as
another; the world was always at home.

It was a world where he could pick and choose his acquaintance;
where, indeed, out of that multitudinous, never-ending procession of
persons, his power of selection was unlimited. He never had any
difficulty with them; their methods were so charmingly simple and
direct. In the streets the soul is surprised through the lifting of an
eyelid, and the secret of the heart sits lightly on the curl of the
lip. These passers by never wearied him; they flung him the flower of
the mystery and--passed by. The perfection of social intercourse he
conceived as a similar succession of radiant intimacies.

To-night he went southwards down Gower Street, drawn by the
never-ending fugitive perspective of the lamps. He went westwards down
Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly. The Circus was a gleaming basin
filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with
lights. Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness
into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in
their flight. Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings
leading into the night. The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed
piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden
white façade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with
clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of
the dark above them. Over all was an illusion of immensity.

Nine o'clock of an April night--the time when a great city has most
power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and
subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems;
when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her
grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate
temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and
darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging
out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the
senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to
distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his
imagination and his soul.

He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night.
He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that
went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers'
eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of
the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing. A very ordinary
spectacle. But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic,
processional resonance and grandeur. It was an unrhymed song out of
_Saturnalia_, it was the luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets.

Half-past nine; a young girl met him and stopped. She laughed into his
face.

"Pretty well pleased with yourself, aren't you?" said the young girl.

He laughed back again. He was pleased with the world, so of course he
was pleased with himself. They were one. The same spirit was in Mr.
Rickman that was in the young girl and in the young April night.

They walked together as far as the Strand, conversing innocently.




CHAPTER VIII


At ten o'clock he found himself in a corridor of the Jubilee Variety
Theatre. The young girl had vanished.

For a moment he stood debating whether he would go home and work out
some ideas he had. Or whether he would pursue the young Joy, the
fugitive actuality, to the very threshold of the dawn. Whether, in
short, he would make a night of it.

He was aroused by the sound of a box-door opening and shutting; and a
shining shirt-front and a shining face darted suddenly into the light.
At the same moment a voice hailed him.

"Hello, Razors! That you?"

Voice, face, and shining shirt-front belonged to Mr. Richard
Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue.

"Razors" was the name by which Rickman was known to his intimates in
subtle allusion to his youth. He responded sulkily to the hail. Dicky
Pilkington was the last person he desired to meet. For he owed Dicky a
certain sum, not large, but larger than he could conveniently pay, and
Dicky was objectionable for other reasons. He had mysterious relations
with the Management of the Jubilee Theatre, and consequently unlimited
facilities of access to Miss Poppy Grace. Besides, there was something
about him that was deadly to ideas.

Ideas or no ideas, Mr. Pilkington was not to be evaded. He bore down
on Rickman, shining genially, and addressed him with an air of banter.

"Couldn't have arranged it better. You're the very fellow I want."

There was a suggestion of a chuckle in his voice which sent Rickman's
thoughts flying fearfully to his last I.O.U. The alert mind of
Pilkington followed their flight. He was intensely amused. He always
was amused when anybody showed a marked distaste for his society.

"Your business, not mine, this time, Rick. I happen to know of a
ripping old library for sale down in Devonshire. Shouldn't have
thought of it if I hadn't seen you."

"Well?" Rickman's face expressed an utter inability to perceive the
connection. Once the iron shutters had closed on Rickman's he felt
that he was no more a part of it. Words could not express his
abhorrence of the indecent people who insisted on talking shop out of
shop hours. And Dicky never had any decency.

"Well--it's practically on our hands, d'ye see? And if your people
care to take over the whole lot, I can let you have it pretty
reasonably."

Rickman's face emptied itself of all expression whatever.

"I say, you are a cool young cuss. Is this the way you generally do
business?"

"I'll think it over."

"Wouldn't think too long if I were you. It ought to go by auction, and
it might; only private contract's preferred."

"Why preferred?"

"Out of respect for the feelin's of the family."

Rickman's eyes were wandering dreamily from the matter in hand. They
had alighted on an enormous photograph of Miss Poppy Grace. For an
instant thought, like a cloud, obscured the brilliance of Mr.
Pilkington's face.

"Anyhow I've given you the straight tip," said Pilkington.

"Thanks. We'll send a fellow down to overhaul the thing."

"He'd better hurry up then. It _may_ have to go by auction after all.
But if you'd like the refusal of it, now's your chance."

But Rickman betrayed no enthusiasm.

"You'd better see the guv'nor about it."

Mr. Pilkington looked Rickman up and down, and encountered an
immovable determination in his gaze.

"Right you are. I'll send him word to-night. Ta-ta!" He turned again
in the moment of departing. "I say, he must send a good man down, you
know. It'll take an expert. There's a lot of old things--Greek and
Latin--that's something in _your_ line, isn't it?"

But Rickman's line at present was the line of least resistance. It was
ten past ten, and Poppy Grace was "on" from ten fifteen to ten forty.




CHAPTER IX


She was only an ordinary little variety actress, and he knew her
little programme pretty well by heart. But her fascinations were
independent of the glamour of the foot-lights. It was off the stage
that he had first come to know her, really know her, a thing that at
the first blush of it seems impossible; for the great goddess Diana is
not more divinely secret and secluded than (to a young bookseller) a
popular Dance and Song Artiste in private life. Poppy's rooms were
next door to the boarding-house balcony, and it was the balcony that
did it.

Now, in the matter of balconies, if you choose to regard the receding
wooden partition as a partition, and sit very far back behind it, you
will have your balcony all to yourself, that is to say, you will see
nothing, neither will you be seen. If, however, you prefer, as Mr.
Rickman preferred, to lean forward over the railings and observe
things passing in the street below, you can hardly help establishing
some sort of communication with the next-door neighbour who happens to
be doing the same thing. At first this communication was purely in the
region of the mind, without so much as the movement of an eyelid on
either side, and that made it all the more intimate and intense. But
to sit there Sunday evening after Sunday evening, when the other
boarders were at church, both looking at the same plane-tree opposite,
or the same tail-end of a sunset flung across the chimney pots,
without uttering a syllable or a sound, was at last seen by both in
its true light, as a thing not only painful but absurd. So one evening
the deep, full-hearted silence burst and flowered into speech. In
common courtesy Mr. Rickman had to open his lips to ask her whether
she objected to his smoking (she did not). Then it came to
acknowledging each other in the streets; after that, to Poppy's coming
out and looking over the balcony about the time when Mr. Rickman would
be coming home from the shop, and to Mr. Rickman's looking to see if
Poppy was looking; and so on, to that wonderful night when he saw her
home from the Jubilee Theatre. The stars were out; not that Poppy
cared a rap about the stars.

Her first appearance to-night was in the character of a coster-girl, a
part well suited to her audacity and impertinent prettiness. Poppy was
the tiniest dancer that ever whirled across a stage, a circumstance
that somewhat diminished the vulgarity of her impersonation, while it
gave it a very engaging character of its own. Her small Cockney face,
with its impudent laughing nose, its curling mouth (none too small),
its big, twinkling blue eyes, was framed in a golden fringe and side
curls. She wore a purple velveteen skirt, a purple velveteen jacket
with a large lace collar, and a still larger purple velveteen hat with
white ostrich feathers that swayed madly from the perpendicular.

The secret of Poppy's popularity lay in this, that you could always
depend on her; she always played the same part in the same manner; but
her manner was her own. To come on the stage quietly; to look, in
spite of her coster costume, the picture of suburban innocence, and
pink and white propriety; to stand facing her audience for a second of
time, motionless and in perfect gravity--it was a trick that, though
Poppy never varied it, had a more killing effect than the most
ingenious impromptu.

"Sh--sh--sh--sh!" A flutter of programmes in the pit was indignantly
suppressed by the gallery. There was a movement of Poppy's right
eyelid which in a larger woman would have been called a wink; in Poppy
it appeared as an exaggerated twinkle. It was greeted with a roar of
rapturous applause. Then Poppy, with her hands on her hips, and her
head on one side, raised her Cockney voice in a high-pitched song,
executing between each verse a slow, swinging chassée to the stage
Humorist with the concertina.

      "Oh, she's my fancy girl,
        With 'er 'air all outer curl,
      'Ooks orf, eyes orf, petticoats all awry.
        For then she isn't shy;
        She gives 'er bangs a twirl,
    And it's--'Kiss me quick!'--and--'That's the Trick!'
    --and--(_dim_)--'_Wouldn't_ yer like to try?'"

When the stage Humorist with the concertina stopped chasséeing, and
put his finger to his nose, and observed, "That's wot you might call a
dim innuender," Rickman could have kicked him.

    (_cresc._),
         'But got up fit ter kill,
            In 'er velverteen an' frill,
          It's--'Ands orf!'--'Heyes orf!'--'Fetch yer one in the heye!'--
            A strollin' down the 'Igh,
            With 'Enery, Alf an' Bill,
    It's--'None er that!'--and 'Mind my 'at!'--and
    (_fortissimo_)--'WOULDN'T yer like to try!'"

"To try! To try!" Her chassée quickened ever so little, doubled on
itself, and became a tortuous thing. Poppy's feet beat out the measure
that is danced on East End pavements to the music of the concertina.
In the very abandonment of burlesque Poppy remained an artist, and her
dance preserved the gravity of the original ballet, designed for
performance on a flagstone. Now it unfolded; it burst its bounds; it
was a rhythmic stampede. Louder and louder, her clicking heels beat
the furious time; higher and higher her dexterous toes flew to her
feathers that bowed to meet them, and when her last superhuman kick
sent her hat flying, and the Humorist caught it on his head, they had
brought the house down.

Rickman went out to the bar, where he found Dicky Pilkington, and at
Dicky's suggestion he endeavoured to quench with brandy and soda his
inextinguishable thirst.

He returned to the storm and glare of the ballet, the last appearance
of that small, incarnate genius of Folly. There were other dancers,
but he saw none but her. He knew every pose and movement of her body,
from her first tentative, preluding pirouette, to her last moon-struck
dance, when she tossed her tall grenadier's cap to the back of the
stage, and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself
backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her
dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and
black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant
morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury of the
foot-lights.

There was a noise of many boots beating the floor of the house; it
grew into a thick, solid body of sound, torn at intervals by a
screaming whistle from the galleries. Someone up there shouted her
name--"Poppy--Poppy Grace!" and Rickman shivered.

To Rickman's mind the name was an outrage; it reeked of popularity; it
suggested--absurdly and abominably--a certain cheap drink of sudden
and ephemeral effervescence. He never let his mind dwell on those
dreadful syllables any longer than he could help; he never thought of
her as Poppy Grace at all. He thought of her in undefined,
extraordinary ways; now as some nameless aerial spirit, unaccountably
wandering about in a world too gross for it; and now as the Young Joy,
the fugitive actuality. To-night, after brandy and soda, his
imagination possessed itself of Poppy, and wove round her the glory
and gloom of the world. It saw in her, not the incarnation of the rosy
moment, but the eternal sacrifice of woman, the tragedy of her
abasement, her obedience to the world. Which, when he came to think of
it, was really very clever of his imagination.

Meanwhile Poppy was behaving, as she had behaved for the last fifty
nights, like a lunatic humming top. Now it had steadied itself in the
intensity of its speed; the little humming-top was sleeping. Poppy, as
she span, seemed to be standing, her feet rooted, her body swaying
delicately from the hips, like a flower rocked by the wind, the light
of her flickering flamewise. There was a stir, a wave, as if the heart
of the house had heaved. Pit and gallery breathed hard. Rickman leaned
forward with clouded eyes and troubled forehead, while the young
shop-men--the other young shop-men--thrilled with familiar and
delicious emotion. Now she curtsied, as she had curtsied for the last
fifty nights, bowing lower and lower till her hair fell over her face
and swept the stage; and now she shook her head till the great golden
whorl of hair seemed the only part of her left spinning; then Poppy
folded her arms and sank, sank till she sat on her heels, herself
invisible, curtained in modest and mystic fashion by her hair.

"Bravo! Bravo!" "That's the trick!"--"Encore!"--"Oh, _she's_ my fancy
girl!"--"Encore-ore-ore-ore-ore!"

It was all over.




CHAPTER X


He hurried back to Bloomsbury, in the wake of her hansom, to the house
of the balcony opposite the plane-trees. The plane-tree was
half-withdrawn into the night, but the balcony hung out black in the
yellow light from its three long windows. Poppy was not in the
balcony.

He went up into the room where the light was, a room that had been
once an ordinary Bloomsbury drawing-room, the drawing-room of
Propriety. Now it was Poppy's drawing-room.

You came straight out of a desert of dreary and obscure
respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your
eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and
inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung
with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself.
Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a
litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could
have belonged to nobody but Poppy, they were so diminutive. In the
waste paper basket a bouquet that must have been Poppy's too, it was
so enormous. And on the table in the window a Japanese flower-bowl
that served as a handy receptacle for cigarette ash and spent vestas.
Two immense mirrors facing each other reflected these objects and
Poppy, when she was there, for ever and ever, in diminishing
perspective. But Poppy was not there.

Passing through this brilliant scene into the back room beyond, he
found her finishing her supper.

Poppy was not at all surprised to see him. She addressed him as
"Rickets," and invited him under that name to sit down and have some
supper, too.

But Rickets did not want any supper. He sat down at the clear end of
the table, and looked on as in a dream. And when Poppy had finished
she came and sat by him on the clear end of the table, and made
cigarettes, and drank champagne out of a little tumbler.

"Thought you might feel a little lonely over there, Ricky-ticky," said
she.

Poppy was in spirits. If she had yielded to the glad impulse of her
heart, she would have stood on one foot and twirled the other over
Ricky-ticky's head. But she restrained herself. Somehow, before
Ricky-ticky, Poppy never played any of those tricks that delighted Mr.
Pilkington and other gentlemen of her acquaintance. She merely sat on
the table. She was in her ballet-dress, and before sitting on the
table she arranged her red skirts over her black legs with a
prodigious air of propriety. Poppy herself did not know whether this
meant that she wanted Ricky-ticky to think her nice, or whether she
wanted to think Ricky-ticky nice. After all, it came to the same
thing; for to Poppy the peculiar charm of Ricky-ticky was his
innocence.

The clock on St. Pancras church struck half-past eleven; in his
hanging cage in the front room, behind his yellow gauze curtain,
Poppy's canary woke out of his first sleep. He untucked his head from
under his wing and chirrupped drowsily.

"Oh, dicky," said Poppy, "it's time you were in your little bed!"

He did not take the hint. He was intent on certain movements of
Poppy's fingers and the tip of her tongue concerned in the making of
cigarettes.

He was gazing into her face as if it held for him the secret of the
world. And that look embarrassed her. It had all the assurance of age
and all the wonder of youth in it. Poppy's eyes were trained to look
out for danger signals in the eyes of boys, for Poppy, according to
those lights of hers, was honest. If she knew the secret of the world,
she would not have told it to Ricky-ticky; he was much too young. Men,
in Poppy's code of morality, were different. But this amazing,
dreamy, interrogative look was not the sort of thing that Poppy was
accustomed to, and for once in her life Poppy felt shy.

"I say, Rickets, there goes a quarter to twelve. _Did_ I wake him out
of his little sleep?"

Poppy talked as much to the canary as to Rickets, which made it all
quite proper. As for Rickman, he talked hardly at all.

"You'll have to go in ten minutes, Rick." And by way of softening this
announcement she gave him some champagne.

He had paid no attention to that hint either, being occupied with a
curious phenomenon. Though Poppy was, for her, most unusually
stationary, he found that it was making him slightly giddy to look at
her.

He was arriving at that moment of intoxication when things lose their
baldness and immobility, and the world begins to float like an
enchanted island in a beautiful blood-warm haze. Nothing could be more
agreeable than the first approaches of this blessed state; he
encouraged it, anticipating with ecstasy each stage in the mounting of
the illusion. For when he was sober he saw Poppy very much as she was;
but when he was drunk she became for him a being immaculate, divine.
He moved in a region of gross but glorious exaggeration, where his
wretched little Cockney passion assumed the proportions of a superb
romance. His soul that minute was the home of the purest, most exalted
emotions. Yes, he could certainly feel it coming on. Poppy's face was
growing bigger and bigger, opening out and blossoming like an enormous
flower.

"Nine minutes up. In another minute you go."

It seemed to him that Poppy was measuring time by pouring champagne
into little tumblers, and that she gave him champagne to drink. He
knew it was no use drinking it, for that thirst of his was
unquenchable; but he drank, for the sake of the illusion; and as he
drank it seemed to him that not only was Poppy worthy of all
adoration, but that his passion for her was no mere vulgar and earthly
passion; it was a glorious and immortal thing.

Poppy looked at him curiously. She was the soul of hospitality, but
it struck her that she was being a little too liberal with the
champagne.

"No, Razors. No more fizz. If I were to drink a drop more it would
spoil my little dance that always fetches the boys."

She turned her tumbler upside down in token of renunciation and led
the way into the front room. He followed her with enchanted feet. He
was now moving as in an Arabian Night's dream.

In the front room was a sofa--No, a divan, and on the divan the skin
of a Polar bear sprawling. Rickman and Poppy sat on the top of the
bear. Such a disreputable, out-of-elbow, cosmopolitan bear! His little
eye-holes were screwed up in a wicked wink, a wink that repudiated any
connection with his native waters of the Pole.

The house was very still. Behind his yellow gauze curtain the canary
stirred in his sleep. "Swe-eet," he murmured plaintively in his dream.

"Swe-eet, dicky!" echoed Poppy. Then because she had nothing to say
she began to sing. She sang the song of Simpson the tenor, Simpson the
master of tears.

    "'Twas on the night our little byby died,
    And Bill, 'e comes, and, 'Sal,' 'e sez,'look ere,
    I've signed a pledge,'ser 'e, 'agains the beer.
          'D'ye see?'
          Sez 'e.
        'And wot I 'ope ter syve
    Will tittervyte 'is bloomin' little gryve.'
    Then--Well--yo' should 'ave 'eard us 'ow we cried--
    Like bloomin' kids--the--night--the byby--died.

"That song," said Poppy, "doesn't exactly suit my style of beauty. You
should have heard Simpey sing it. _That_ 'd 'ave given you something to
'owl for."

For Rickman looked depressed.

The sound of Poppy's song waked the canary; he fluttered down from his
perch and stretched his wings, trailing them on the floor of his cage
to brush the sleep out of them.

"Did you ever see such affectation," said Poppy, "look at him,
striking attitudes up there, all by 'is little self!"

Poppy seemed to cling to the idea of the canary as a symbol of
propriety.

"Do you know, Rickets, it's past twelve o'clock?"

No, he didn't know. He had taken no count of time. But he knew that he
had drunk a great many little tumblers of champagne, and that his love
for Poppy seemed more than ever a supersensuous and immortal thing. He
pulled himself together in order to tell her so; but at that moment he
was confronted by an insuperable difficulty. In the tender and
passionate speech that he was about to make to her, it would be
necessary to address her by name. But how--in Heaven's name--could he
address a divinity as Poppy? He settled the difficulty by deciding
that he would not address her at all. There should be no invocation.
He would simply explain.

He got up and walked about the room and explained in such words as
pleased him the distinction between the corruptible and the
incorruptible Eros. From time to time he chanted his own poems in the
intervals of explaining; for they bore upon the matter in hand.

"Rickets," said Poppy, severely, "you've had too much fizz. I can see
it in your eyes--most unmistakably. I know it isn't very nice of me to
say so, when it's my fizz you've been drinking; but it isn't really
mine, it's Dicky Pilkington's--at least he paid for it."

But Rickets did not hear her. His soul, soaring on wings of champagne,
was borne far away from Dicky Pilkington.

    "Know" (chanted Rickets) "that the Love which is my Lord most high,
      He changeth not with seasons and with days,
      His feet are shod with light in all his ways.
    And when he followeth none have power to fly.

    "He chooseth whom he will, and draweth nigh.
      To them alone whom he himself doth raise
      Unto his perfect service and his praise;
    Of such Love's lowliest minister am I."

"If you'd asked me," said Poppy, "I should have said he had a pretty
good opinion of himself. What do you say, Dicky?"

"Sweet!" sang the canary in one pure, penetrating note, the voice of
Innocence itself.

"Isn't he rakish?" But Poppy got no answer from the sonneteer. He had
wheeled round from her, carried away in the triumph and rapture of the
sestette. His steps marked the beat of the iambics, he turned on his
heel at the end of every line. For the moment he was sober, as men
count sobriety.

    "For he I serve hath paced Heaven's golden floor,
         And chanted with the Seraphims' glad choir;
         Lo! All his wings are plumed with fervent fire;
    He hath twain that bear him upward evermore,
    With twain he veils his holy eyes before
         The mystery of his own divine desire.

"Does it remind you of anything?" he asked. It struck her as odd that
he seemed to realize her presence with difficulty.

"No, I can't say that I ever heard anything like it in my life."

"Well, the idea's bagged from Dante--I mean Dante-gabrier-rossetti.
But he doesn't want it as badly as I do. In fac', I don' think he
wants it at all where he is now. If he does, he can take any of mine
in exchange. You bear me out, Poppy--I invite the gentleman to step
down and make 's own s'lection: Nobody can say I plagiarize
anyborry--anyborry but myself."

"All right, don't you worry, old chappy," said Poppy soothingly. "You
come here and sit quiet."

He came and sat down beside her, as if the evening had only just
begun. He sat down carefully, tenderly, lest he should crush so much
as the hem of her fan-like, diaphanous skirts. And then he began to
talk to her.

He said there was no woman--no lady--in the world for whom he felt
such reverence and admiration; "Pop-oppy," he said, "you're fit to
dance before God on the floor of Heaven when they've swept it."

"Oh come," said Poppy, "can't you go one better?"

He could. He did. He intimated that though he worshipped every hair of
Poppy's little head and every inch of Poppy's little body, what held
him, at the moment, were the fascinations of her mind, and the
positively gorgeous beauty of her soul. Yes; there could be no doubt
that the object of his devotion was Poppy's imperishable soul.

"Well," said Poppy, "that tykes the very tip-top macaroon!"

Then she laughed; she laughed as if she would never have done. She
laughed, first with her eyes, then with her throat, then with her
whole body, shaking her head and rocking herself backwards and
forwards. She laughed till her hair came down, and he took it and
smoothed it into two sleek straight bands, and tied them in a loose
knot under her chin.

Then she stopped laughing. Her face between the two tight sheaths of
hair seemed to close and shrink to a thin sharp bud. It closed and
opened again, it grew nearer and bigger, it bent forward and put out
its mouth (for it had a mouth, this extraordinary flower) and kissed
him.

"I sy, it's nearly one o'clock," said she. "You've got to clear out of
this. Come!"

She rose; she stood before him holding out her hands to help him to
get up and go. She laughed again. She laughed wide-mouthed, her head
flung back, her face foreshortened, her white throat swelled and
quivering--the abandoned figure of Low Comedy incarnate. But that was
not what he saw.

To him it was as if the dark, impenetrable world had suddenly
unfolded, had blossomed and flowered in the rose of her mouth; as if
all the roses of all the world went to make up the petals of that
rose. Her body was nothing but a shining, transparent vessel for the
fire of life. It ran over; it leapt from her; the hands she stretched
out to him were two shallow lamps that could hardly hold the tall,
upward shooting, wind-tortured splendour of the flame.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. The movement, being somewhat
complicated, brought him within a yard of his own figure as presented
in one of the long mirrors. He stood there, arrested, fascinated,
shocked by that person in the mirror. The face he was accustomed to
see in mirrors was grave, and not high coloured, and it always kept
its mouth shut. This person's face was very red, and his mouth was
slightly open, a detail he noticed with a peculiar disgust. He could
not get away from it, either. It was held there, illuminated, insisted
on, repeated for ever and ever, smaller and smaller, an endless
procession of faces, all animated by one frenzy and one flame. He was
appalled by this mysterious multiplication of his person, and by the
flushed and brilliant infamy of his face. The face was the worst; he
thought he had never seen anything so detestable as the face. He sat
down and hid it in his hands.

"Poor Rickets," said Poppy softly. She drew his hands from his face by
a finger at a time.

"Oh, Ricky-ticky, you are such a rum little fellow. I suppose that's
why I like you. But for the life of me I can't think why I kissed you;
unless it was to say Good-night."

A kiss more or less was nothing to Poppy. And that one, she felt, had
been valedictory. She had kissed, not Ricky-ticky, but his dying
Innocence, the boy in him. And she had really wanted him to go.

The house was stiller than ever. The canary had tucked his head under
his wing and gone to sleep again. Out of the silence the clock of St.
Pancras Church struck one.

And yet he had not gone.




CHAPTER XI


A step was heard on the pavement outside; then the click of a
latch-key; a step on the stairs, at the threshold, and Mr. Pilkington
walked in with the air of being the master of the house and everything
in it.

The little laughing mask slipped from Poppy's face, her eyes were two
sapphire crescents darting fright under down-dropped lids. There was a
look in Dicky's face she did not care for. But Rickman--as Maddox had
testified--was a perfect little gentleman when he was drunk, and at
the sight of Pilkington, chivalry, immortal chivalry, leapt in his
heart.

He became suddenly grave, steady and coherent.

"I was just going, Miss Grace. But--if you want me to stay a little
longer, I'll stay."

"You'd better _go_," said Miss Grace.

Her eyes followed him sullenly as he went; so did Pilkington's.

"Well," she said, "I suppose that's what you wanted?"

"Yes, but there's no good overdoing the thing, you know. This," said
Pilkington, "is a damned sight too expensive game for him to play."

"He's all right. It wasn't his fault. I let him drink too much
champagne."

"What did you do that for? Couldn't you see he'd had enough already?"

"How was I to know? He's nicer when he's drunk than other people are
when they're sober."

He looked at her critically. "I know all about him. What I'd like to
know is what you see in him."

Poppy returned his look with interest. Coarseness in Dicky
Pilkington's eyes sat brilliant and unashamed.

"Would you? So would I. P'raps it's wot I don't see in him."

Now subtlety was the last thing Dicky expected from Poppy, and it
aroused suspicion.

Whatever Poppy's instructions were she had evidently exceeded them.
Poppy read his thoughts with accuracy.

"I only did what you told me. If you don't like it, you can finish the
job yourself. I'm tired," said Poppy, wearily coiling up her hair.

She was no longer in spirits.




CHAPTER XII


A tiny jet of gas made a glimmer in the fan-light of Mrs. Downey's
boarding-house next door. Mrs. Downey kept it burning there for Mr.
Rickman.

Guided by this beacon, he reached his door, escaping many dangers. For
the curbstone was a rocking precipice, and the street below it a grey
and shimmering stream, that rolled, and flowed, and rolled, and never
rested. The houses, too, were so drunk as to be dangerous. They bowed
over him, swaying hideously from their foundations. They seemed to be
attracted, just as he was, by that abominable slimy flow and glister
of the asphalt. Another wriggle of the latch-key, and they would be
over on the top of him.

He approached his bedroom candle with infinite precaution. He had
tried to effect a noiseless entry, but every match, as it spurted and
went out, was a little fiendish spit-fire tongue betraying him. From
behind a bedroom door, ajar at the dark end of the passage, the voice
of Mrs. Downey gently reminded him not to forget to turn the gas out.

There was a bright clear space in his brain which Pilkington's
champagne had not penetrated, so intolerably clear and bright that it
hurt him to look at it. In that space three figures reeled and
whirled; three, yet one and the same; Poppy of the coster-dance, Poppy
of the lunatic ballet, and Poppy of the Arabian night. Beyond the
bright space and the figures there was a dark place that was somehow
curtained off. Something had happened there, he could not see what.
And in trying to see he forgot to turn the gas out. He turned it up
instead.

He left it blazing away at the rate of a penny an hour, a witness
against him in the face of morning. But he did not forget to sit down
at the bottom of the stairs and take his boots off, lest he should
wake Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who worked so hard, and had to
be up so early. He left them on the stairs, where Flossie tripped over
them in the morning.

On the first landing a young man in a frowsy sleeping suit stood
waiting for him. A fresh, sober, and thoroughly wide-awake young man.

"Gurra bed, Spinks," said Mr. Rickman severely to the young man.

"All right, old man." Mr. Spinks lowered his voice to a discreet
whisper. "I say--do you want me to help you find your legs?"

"Wish you'd fin' any par' of me that is n' legs," said Mr. Rickman.
And he went on to explain and to demonstrate to Mr. Spinks the
resemblance (amounting to identity) between himself and the Manx arms.
"Three legs, rampant, on the bend, proper. Amazin', isn't it?"

"It _is_ amazin'."

Feigning surprise and interest, Mr. Spinks relieved him of his candle;
and under that escort Mr. Rickman managed to attain to the second
floor.

Mr. Rickman's room was bared to the glimmer of a lamp in the street
below. He plunged and stumbled through a litter of books. The glimmer
fell on the books, on many books; books that covered three walls from
floor to ceiling; books ranged above and beside the little camp-bed in
the corner; books piled on the table and under it. The glimmer fell,
too, on the mantel-piece, reflected from the glass above it, right on
to the white statuette of the Venus of Milo that supported a
photograph of a dancing Poppy--Poppy, who laughed in the face of the
goddess with insatiable impudence, and flung to the immortal forehead
the flick of her shameless foot. White and austere gleamed the Venus
(if Venus she be, for some say she is a Wingless Victory, and Rickman,
when sober, inclined to that opinion). White and austere gleamed the
little camp-bed in the corner. He ignored Mr. Spinks' discreet
suggestion. He wasn't going to undress to please Spinks or anybody.
He'd see Spinks in another world first. He wasn't going to bed like a
potman; he was going to sit up like a poet and write. That's what he
was going to do. This was his study.

With shaking hands he lit the lamp on his study table; the wick
sputtered, and the light in his head jigged horribly with the jigging
of the flame. It was as if he was being stabbed with little knives of
light.

He plunged his head into a basin of cold water, threw open his window
and leaned out into the pure regenerating night. Spinks sat down on a
chair and watched him, his fresh, handsome face clouded with anxiety.
He adored Rickman sober; but for Rickman drunk he had a curious
yearning affection. If anything, he preferred him in that state. It
seemed to bring him nearer to him. Spinks had never been drunk in his
life, but that was his feeling.

Rickman laid his arms upon the window sill and his head upon his arms.

"'The blessed damozel leaned out,'" he said (the idea in his mind
being that _he_ was a blessed damozel).

"'From the gold bar of heaven.'"

("Never knew they had 'em up there," murmured Spinks.)

"'Her eyes were deeper than the depth of waters stilled at
even'--Oh--my--God!"

A great sigh shook him, and went shuddering into the night like the
passing of a lost soul. He got up and staggered to the table, and
grasped it by the edge, nearly upsetting the lamp. The flare in his
brain had died down as the lamp burnt steadily. Under its shade a
round of light fell on his Euripides, open at the page he had been
reading the night before.

[Greek: ELENÊ]

He saw it very black, with the edges a little wavering, a little
blurred, as if it had been burnt by fire into the whiteness of the
page. Below, the smaller type of a chorus reeled and shook through all
its lines. Set up by an intoxicated compositor.

Under the Euripides was the piled up manuscript of Rickman's great
neo-classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_. He implored Spinks to read it.
(Spinks was a draper's assistant and uncultured.) He thrust the
manuscript into his hands.

"There," he said, "rea' that. Tha's the sor' o' thing I write when I'm
drunk. Couldn' do it now t' save my life. Temp'rance been _my_ ruin."

He threw himself on his bed.

"It's all righ'. At nine o'clock to-morrow morning, no--at a quar'er
pas' nine, I mean three quar'ers pas' nine, I shall be drunk. Not
disgustingly and ridicklelously, as you are, Spinky, at this minute,
but soo-p-p-perbubbly, loominously, divinely drunk! You don' know what
I could do if I was only drunk."

"Oh, come, I shouldn't complain, if I was you. You'll do pretty well
as you are, I think."

With an almost maternal tenderness and tact Mr. Spinks contrived to
separate the poet from his poem. He then undressed him. That is to
say, by alternate feats of strength, dexterity and cunning, he
succeeded in disengaging him from the looser portion of his clothing.
From his shirt and trousers Rickman refused to part, refused with a
shake of the head, slow, gentle, and implacable, and with a smile of
great sweetness and gravity and wisdom. He seemed to regard those
garments with a peculiar emotion as the symbols of his dignity, and
more especially, as the insignia of sobriety.

Spinks sat down and stared at the object of his devotion. "Poor old
chappie," he murmured tenderly. He was helpless before that slow
melancholy shaking of the head, that mysterious and steadfast smile.
He approached tip-toe on deprecating feet. But Rickman would none of
him; his whole attitude was eloquent of rebuke. He waved Spinks away
with one pathetic hand; with the other he clutched and gathered round
him the last remnants of his personal majesty. And thus, in his own
time and in his own fashion, he wandered to his bed. Even then he
conveyed reproach and reproof by his manner of entering it; he seemed
to vanish subtly, to withdraw himself, as into some sacred and
inviolable retreat.

Spinks crept away, saddened by the rebuff. After all, he was no nearer
to Rickman drunk than to Rickman sober. Half an hour later, he was
asleep in the adjoining room, dreaming a lightsome dream of ladies and
_mousselines de laine_, when suddenly the dream turned to a
nightmare. It seemed to him that there descended upon him a heavy
rolling weight, as of a bale of woollens. He awoke and found that it
was Rickman.

The poet lay face downwards across the body of his friend, and was
crooning into his ear the great chorus from the third act of Helen in
Leuce. He said that nobody but Spinky understood it. And Spinky
couldn't understand it if he wasn't drunk.

Whereupon Spinks was most curiously uplifted and consoled.




CHAPTER XIII


He woke tired out, as well he might be, after spending half the night
in the pursuit of young Joy personified in Miss Poppy Grace, young
Joy, who, like that little dancer, is the swiftest of all swift
things.

Rickman carried into this adventure a sort of innocence that renewed
itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin
because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the
gaiety, the naïveté of the pursuit. She was always in front of him,
that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all
the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on
her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was
that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the
secret of the world. And long before the morning she would pick up her
skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with
her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the
oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in
no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him,
formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the
burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching
in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in
all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew
the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling
it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard
before. He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the
loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent,
accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure
spirit inside him. And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet,
because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through
his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For
all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too,
somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the
great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and
turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he
had to bear.

Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after
that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April
fool of himself. He knew it by the pain in his head and other
disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the
shirt and trousers of the day.

And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go
down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet
Mr. Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's
wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey's tender womanly concern, as he
turned white over the bacon and the butter. He didn't know which were
worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones. He had to be at the shop
by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to
its eight hours' work.

In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and
body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of
"Rickman's". At nine o'clock in the morning it was more real to him
than any real thing; it even assumed an abominable personality; it was
an all-compelling, all-consuming power that sucked from him his time,
his life, his energy, and for six days out of the seven required of
him his soul. That at the same time it provided him with the means of
bodily subsistence only added to the horror of the thing. It was as if
"Rickman's", destroyer and preserver, renewed his life every quarter
day that it might draw in, devour, annihilate it as before. There was
a diabolical precision in the action of the machine that made and
unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part
of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer
pause--when for three days his soul would be given back to him. The
only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the
Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed,
the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up
and eager for the day. By the time Keith had got down to breakfast
Isaac had caught the early train that landed him in the City at nine.
Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.

And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on
the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his
assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great
front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and
frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart
swelled with thankfulness and pride. For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer,
too, in his way. There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable
merit and glory of Isaac's dreams was that they had all, or very
nearly all, come true. They were of the sort that can be handed over
the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank. His
latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it
towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola
at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son. Keith, presumably, took
after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the
supreme effort of his birth. On her own birth there had been something
in the nature of a slur. She had taken it to heart, and exhausted
herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband
the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City
restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village
sempstress and a village squire. Isaac, before he dreamed of
greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her
because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty. She left to her boy her
fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother's
passion. Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a
fleshless refinement of physique. Coarseness in grain, usually
revealed by the lower half of a man's countenance, had with the elder
Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region.
Isaac's eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the
rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the
spirit. Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat,
smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost
suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion. His lips were
hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was
smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a
meditative hand. Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain genius to the man who had raised that
mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art. Those stately premises, with their
clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings,
were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row
where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen. When Isaac grew
great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted
to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature. For
Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the
successful tradesman he aspired to be. There were, in fact, two
Rickman's: Rickman's in the City and Rickman's in the Strand.
Rickman's in the Strand bore on its fore-front most unmistakeably the
seal of the world; Rickman's in the City was sealed with the Lord's
seal.

So that now there was not a single need of the great book-buying,
book-loving Public that Rickman's did not provide for and represent.
It pandered to (Isaac said "catered for") the highest and the lowest,
the spirit as well as the flesh. Only Isaac was wise enough to keep
the two branches of the business separate and distinct. His right hand
professed complete ignorance of the doings of his left.

It may be that Isaac's heart was in his City shop. But there was
something in him greater than his heart, his ambition, which was
colossal. He meant, he always had meant, to be the founder of a great
House, which should make the name of Rickman live after him. He aimed
at nothing less than supremacy. He proposed to spread his nets till
they had drawn in the greater part of the book trade of London; till
Rickman's had reared its gigantic palaces in every district of the
capital. In '92 there was some talk of depression in the book trade.
Firms had failed. Isaac did not join in the talk, and he had his own
theory of the failure. Men went smash for want of will, for want of
brains, for want of courage and capital. Above all for want of
capital. As if any man need want capital so long as he had the pluck
to borrow, that is to say, to buy it. So ran his dream. And Isaac
believed in his dream, and what was more, he had made Mr. Richard
Pilkington, Financial Agent, of Shaftesbury Avenue, believe in it.
"Rickman's," backed by Pilkington, would stand firm, firm as a rock.

Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater. It was not only
by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman
had raised himself from those obscure beginnings. Isaac was an artist
in his own enormous way, and he had made an exhaustive study of the
Public. With incredible versatility he followed every twist and turn
of the great mind; the slow colossal movements which make capital, the
fitful balancing, the sudden start and mad rush forward by which, if
you can but foresee and keep pace with it, you reap the golden harvest
of the hour. He never took his eye off the Public. He laid his finger,
as it were, on that mighty pulse and recorded its fluctuations in his
ledger.

But there was a region beyond those fluctuations. With new books there
was always a pound's worth of risk to a pennyworth of profit; but
there was no end of money to be got out of old ones, if only you knew
how to set about it. And Isaac did not quite know how. In his front
shop it was the Public, in his side shop it was the books that
mattered, and knowledge of the one, however exhaustive, was no guide
to the other. Isaac by himself cut a somewhat unfortunate figure; he
stood fully equipped in the field where there was much danger and but
little gain; he was helpless where the price of knowledge ruled
immeasurably high. In the second-hand department audacity without
education can do nothing. What he still wanted, then, was brains and
yet more brains; not the raw material, mind you, he had plenty of
that, but the finished product, the trained, cultured intellect. Isaac
was a self-made man, a man ignorant of many things, religious, but
uneducated.

But he had a son, and the son had a head on his shoulders a
magnificent head that boy had. Mr. Horace Jewdwine had noticed it the
first minute he came into the shop. And the magnificence of Keith's
head had been pointed out to Isaac long before that, when Keith
couldn't have been more than ten--why, nine he was; that was the
beginning of it. Isaac could remember how Sir Joseph Harden of
Lazarus, the great scholar, who was one of Isaac's best customers,
poking round the little dingy shop in Paternoster Row (it was all
second-hand in those days), came on the young monkey perched on the
step-ladder, reading Homer. Sir Joseph had made him come down and
translate for him then and there. And Keith went at it, translating
for twenty minutes straight on end. Sir Joseph had said nothing, but
he asked him what he was going to be, and the young Turk grinned up at
him and said he was going to be a poet, "like 'Omer, that was what he
was going to be." Isaac had said that was just like his impudence, but
Sir Joseph stood there looking at him and smiling on the side of his
face that Keith couldn't see, and he told the little chap to "work
hard and mind his rough breathings." Isaac had supposed that was some
sort of a joke, for Keith, he tried hard to grin, though his face went
red hot all over. Then Sir Joseph had turned round very serious and
asked if he, Rickman, had any other sons, because, whatever he did
with the rest of them, he must make this one a scholar. Isaac had said
No, he hadn't any but that one boy, and he would have to be brought up
to the business. He was afraid he couldn't spare the time to make much
of a scholar of him. Time, said Isaac, was money. What Sir Joseph said
then Isaac had never forgotten. He had said; "True, time was money,
loose cash in your pockets; but brains were capital." And there wasn't
a better investment for them, he had added, than a good sound
classical education. Isaac was to send the boy to the City of London,
then to the London University, if he couldn't rise to Oxford; but Sir
Joseph's advice was Oxford. Let him try for a scholarship. He added
that he would like to do something for him later on if he lived. Isaac
had never forgotten it; his memory being assisted by the circumstance
that Sir Joseph had that very same day bought one hundred and
twenty-five pounds' worth of books for his great library down in
Devonshire.

The boy was sent to an "Academy," then to the City of London; Isaac
had not risen to Oxford. Keith never tried for a scholarship, and if
he had, Isaac would have drawn the line at a university education, as
tending towards an unholy leisure and the wisdom of this world.
Otherwise he had spared no expense, for he had grasped the fact that
this was an investment, and he looked to have his money back again
with something like fifty per cent. interest. And the boy, the boy was
to come back, too, with a brain as bright as steel, all its queer
little complicated parts in working order; in short, a superb machine;
and Isaac would only have to touch a spring to set it going.

But the question was, what spring? And that, unfortunately, was what
old Rickman never could lay his finger on.

Still it went, that machine of his, apparently of its own accord. It
went mysteriously, capriciously, but fairly satisfactorily on the
whole. And Isaac was wise; his very respect for the thing that had
cost him so much prevented him from tampering with it.

It was in accordance with this policy of caution that they lived
apart. Isaac loved the suburbs; Keith loved the town, and it was as
well for one of them to live in it, near to their place of business.
Isaac had married again, and though he was proud of his boy and fond
of him, he contrived to be completely happy without him. He loved his
little detached villa residence at Ilford in Essex, with its little
flower-garden showing from the high road, its little stable for the
pony and little paddock for the cow. He loved his large smooth-faced
second wife, with her large balance at the bank and still larger
credit in the Wesleyan circle they lived and moved in. He loved that
Wesleyan circle, the comfortable, safe community that knew only the
best, the Sunday best, of him. And Keith loved none of these things.
By the education he had got and which he, Isaac, had given him, by the
"religion" he hadn't got, and which nothing would induce him to take,
by the obscure barriers of individuality and temperament, the son was
separated from the father. As for meeting each other half-way, Isaac
had tried it once or twice of a Sunday, when Keith had met him indeed,
but with a directness that shocked Isaac and distressed him. He was
made positively uncomfortable by his son's money-bought superiority;
though the boy didn't bring it out and show it, Isaac felt all the
time that it was there. He was very much happier without the boy.
Keith among other things suggested vividly the thoughts which the
Wesleyan desired to put away from Saturday afternoon to Monday
morning, thoughts of the present evil world, for which, on Sundays, he
more than half suspected that he might be imperilling his immortal
soul.

Sometimes in the watches of the night, especially of a Sunday night,
it occurred to him that (owing to the domestic arrangement which kept
the boy in a place which, when all was said and done, was a place of
temptation) Keith's soul, no less immortal, might be in jeopardy too.
He thought of him, an innocent lad, thrown on the mercy of London, as
it were. But Isaac had faith in the mercy of the Lord. Besides, he
wasn't the sort, a quiet, studious young fellow like Keith wasn't. And
when Isaac's conscience began to feel a little uncertain upon that
point, he simply laid the case circumstantially before the Lord, who
knew all his difficulties and all his sins, and was infinitely able
and eternally willing to bear them for him. By casting Keith upon the
Lord an immense burden of responsibility was slipped from his
conscience; and by the time Monday morning came round Isaac was again
convinced that he had made the very best arrangements.

For not only was the state of Keith's soul a reproach to Isaac's
conscience, but the brilliance of Keith's intellect was a terror to
it. Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to
the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable
discrepancies between his inner and his outer life. He wanted his son
and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith's lucid sincerity
at times appalled him. He had not yet discovered that his protection
was in the very thing he feared. Keith was so recklessly single-minded
that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double
life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the
Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so
lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply
could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in
itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The
book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply
the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it
all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In
fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father
as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.

But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop.
He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop
had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell. It was books found
in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the
glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his
Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single
gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender
recollection of Paternoster Row. It was to Rickman's that he owed his
education. Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically,
abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do. At times he even
appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate.
Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the
thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for
that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his
father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him. He
simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that
he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn't going to throw him
over at the start.