THE DIVINE FIRE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of _Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson_, _Two Sides of a Question_,
etc. etc.

1904







Mr. OWEN SEAMAN in _Punch_ says:--

     "Miss Sinclair is always quietly sure of herself. That is why she
     will not be hurried, but moves through her gradual scheme with so
     leisured a serenity; why her style, fluent and facile, never
     forces its natural eloquence; why her humour plays with a
     diffused light over all her work and seldom needs the
     advertisement of scintillating epigrams. Judged by almost every
     standard to which a comedy like this should be referred, I find
     her book, 'The Divine Fire' the most remarkable that I have read
     for many years."

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION_




CONTENTS

BOOK I
DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE

BOOK II
LUCIA'S WAY

BOOK III
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

BOOK IV
THE MAN HIMSELF




BOOK I

DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE




CHAPTER I


Horace Jewdwine had made the most remarkable of his many remarkable
discoveries. At least he thought he had. He could not be quite sure,
which was his excuse for referring it to his cousin Lucia, whose
instinct (he would not call it judgement) in these matters was
infallible--strangely infallible for so young a girl. What, he
wondered, would she say to Savage Keith Rickman?

On Saturday, when he first came down into Devonshire, he would have
been glad to know. But to-day, which was a Tuesday, he was not
interested in Rickman. To eat strawberries all morning; to lie out in
the hammock all afternoon, under the beach-tree on the lawn of Court
House; to let the peace of the old green garden sink into him; to look
at Lucia and forget, utterly forget, about his work (the making of
discoveries), that was what he wanted. But Lucia wanted to talk, and
to talk about Rickman earnestly as if he were a burning question, when
even lying in the hammock Jewdwine was so hot that it bothered him to
talk at all.

He was beginning to be sorry that he had introduced him--the exciting
topic, that is to say, not the man; for Rickman you could scarcely
introduce, not at any rate to Lucia Harden.

"Well, Lucia?" He pronounced her name in the Italian manner,
"Loo-chee-a," with a languid stress on the vowels, and his tone
conveyed a certain weary but polite forbearance.

Lucia herself, he noticed, had an ardent look, as if a particularly
interesting idea had just occurred to her. He wished it hadn't. An
idea of Lucia's would commit him to an opinion of his own; and at the
moment Jewdwine was not prepared to abandon himself to anything so
definite and irretrievable. He had not yet made up his mind about
Rickman, and did not want to make it up now. Certainty was impossible
owing to his somewhat embarrassing acquaintance with the man. That,
again, was where Lucia had come in. Her vision of him would be free
and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence.

Meanwhile, Rickman's poem, or rather the first two Acts of his
neo-classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, lay on Lucia's lap. Jewdwine had
obtained it under protest and with much secrecy. He had promised
Rickman, solemnly, not to show it to a soul; but he had shown it to
Lucia. It was all right, he said, so long as he refrained from
disclosing the name of the person who had written it. Not that she
would have been any the wiser if he had.

"And it was you who discovered him?" Her voice lingered with a
peculiarly tender and agreeable vibration on the "you." He closed his
eyes and let that, too, sink into him.

"Yes," he murmured, "nobody else has had a hand in it--as yet."

"And what are you going to do with him now you have discovered him?"

He opened his eyes, startled by the uncomfortable suggestion. It had
not yet occurred to him that the discovery of Rickman could entail any
responsibility whatever.

"I don't know that I'm going to do anything with him. Unless some day
I use him for an article."

"Oh, Horace, is that the way you treat your friends?"

He smiled. "Yes Lucy, sometimes, when they deserve it."

"You haven't told me your friend's name?"

"No. I betrayed his innocent confidence sufficiently in showing you
his play. I can't tell you his name."

"After all, his name doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't matter. Very likely you'll hear enough of it some
day. You haven't told me what you think of him."

"I don't know what I think--But then, I don't know him."

"No," he said, roused to interest by her hesitation, "you don't know
him. That's the beauty of it."

She gave the manuscript back into his hands. "Take him away. He makes
me feel uncomfortable."

"To tell the truth, Lucy, he makes me feel uncomfortable, too."

"Why?"

"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up
and stake your reputation on him--and all the time you can't be sure
whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It
happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire."

His eyes were fixed on the title page as if fascinated by the words,
_Helen in Leuce_.

"But this is not bad--it's _not_ bad for two and twenty."

"Only two and twenty?"

"That's all. It looks as if he were made for immortality."

She turned to him that ardent gaze which made the hot day hotter.

"Dear Horace, you're going to do great things for him."

The worst of having a cousin who adores you is that magnificence is
expected of you, regularly and as a matter of course. He was not even
sure that Lucia did not credit him with power to work miracles. The
idea was flattering but also somewhat inconvenient.

"I don't know about great things. I should like to do something. The
question is what. He's a little unfortunate in--in his surroundings,
and he's been ill, poor fellow. If one could give him a change. If one
were only rich and could afford to send him abroad for a year. I _had_
thought of asking him down to Oxford."

"And why didn't you?"

"Well, you know, one gets rather crowded up with things in term time."

Lucia looked thoughtfully at the refined, luxurious figure in the
hammock. Horace was entitled to the hammock, for he had been ill. He
was entitled also to the ministrations of his cousin Lucia. Lucia
spent her time in planning and doing kind things, and, from the sudden
luminous sweetness of her face, he gathered that something of the sort
was in preparation now.

It was. "Horace," she said, "would you like to ask him here?"

"No, Lucy, I wouldn't. I don't think it would do."

"But why not--if he's your friend?"

"If he's my friend."

"You _said_ he was your friend. You did, you know." (Another awkward
consequence of a cousin's adoration; she is apt to remember and attach
importance to your most trivial utterances.)

"Pardon me, I said he was my find."

"Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the City--in a shop."

She smiled at the rhythmic utterance. The tragedy of the revelation
was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.

"The shop doesn't matter."

"No, but he does. You couldn't stand him, Lucia. You see, for one
thing, he sometimes drops his aitches."

"Well, if he does,--he'll be out all day, and there's the open country
to drop them in. I really don't mind, if you'd like to ask him. Do you
think he'd like to be asked?"

"There's no possible doubt about that."

"Then ask him. Ask him now. You can't do it when father's not at
home."

Jewdwine repressed a smile. Even now, from the windows of the east
wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly
fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique.
It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil. If
all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was
going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was,
if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.

And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself
would not be staying at Court House. Really, he reflected. Lucia ought
to get some lady to live with her. It was the correct thing, and
therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it. An
expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.

"Father won't mind," she said.

"No, but I should." He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the
question.

She sat still, turning over the pages of the manuscript which she had
again taken on her lap.

"I suppose he is very dreadful. Still, I think we ought to do
something for him."

"And what would you propose to do?"

There was an irritating smile on her cousin's face. He was thinking,
"So she wants to patronize him, does she?"

He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for
she always knew. He only said, "I don't exactly see you playing
Beatrice to his Dante."

Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right. The Hardens
had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most
superbly patronizing women he knew. And Rickman might or might not be
a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great lady in
her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he smiled
again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more irritating
than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.

"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing
him down here."

He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous
vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought
you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think
about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and
his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never
had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if _he_
were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which
distinguishes his _Helen_. Really, for two and twenty, he is
marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to
her vagueness, "his _Helen_ is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me
some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,
polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what
she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations,
made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the
troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous
soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an
aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but
she had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford
critic had not been able to see.

The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over
the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the
enfolding hills.

Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great
chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to
Rickman.

But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.

"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool
of the evening."

"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."

Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful
pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands
and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these
things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only
beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which
appealed to him was the languor of fatigue.

"You might play to me, now," he said.

She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in
which, if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no
reproach, only a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered
what she was thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace
selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and
would not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction.
"No, he is not selfish, he is only ill."

And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into
the house.

His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her
figure.

Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His
entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia
satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was
really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her
absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came
to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her
charm. He could not say positively wherein her beauty consisted,
therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding
out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some
women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious
prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous
regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the
flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was
merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment
for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her
features, (though it was impossible to think of them, or anything
about her as incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their
subtlety. Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did
not commit him to any irretrievable opinion.

But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in
which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct
how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She
had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the
look out to go one better, and to catch you tripping. Her lucidity was
remarkable; but it served to show up other people's strong points
rather than her own. Lucia did not impress you as being clever, and
Jewdwine, who had a clever man's natural distaste for clever women,
admired his cousin's intellect, as well he might, for it was he who
had taught her how to use it. Her sense of humour, too (for Lucia was
dangerously gifted), that sense which more than any of her senses can
wreck a woman--he would have liked her just as well if she had had
none; but some, no doubt, she needed, if only to save her from the
situations to which her kindness and her innocence exposed her; and
she had just the right amount and no more. Heavens! Supposing, without
it, she had met Keith Rickman and had yielded to the temptation to be
kind to him! Even in the heat Jewdwine shivered at the thought.

He put it from him, he put Rickman altogether from his mind. It was
not to think about Rickman that he came down to Court House. On a day
as hot as this, he wanted nothing but to keep cool. The gentle
oscillation of the hammock in the green shadows of the beech-tree
symbolized this attitude towards Rickman and all other ardent
questions.

Still, it was not disagreeable to know that if he could only make up
his mind to something very definite and irretrievable indeed, Court
House would one day be his. It was the only house in England that came
up to his idea of what a country house should be. A square Tudor
building with two short, gable-ended wings, thrown out at right angles
to its front; three friendly grey walls enclosing a little courtyard
made golden all day long with sunshine from the south. Court House was
older than anything near it except Harmouth Bridge and the Parish
Church. Standing apart in its own green lands, it looked older than
the young red earth beneath it, a mass upheaved from the grey
foundations of the hills. Its face, turned seawards, was rough and
pitted with the salt air; thousands upon thousands of lichens gave it
a greenish bloom, with here and there a rusty patch on groin and
gable. It contained the Harden Library, _the_ Harden Library, one of
the finest private collections in the country. It contained also his
cousin Lucia.

He had always loved Court House, but not always his cousin Lucia. The
scholarly descendant of a long line of scholars, Jewdwine knew that he
had been a favourite with his grandfather, Sir Joseph Harden, the
Master of Lazarus, he was convinced (erroneously) that he was a Harden
by blood and by temperament, and of course if he had only been a
Harden by name, and not a Jewdwine, Court House and the great Harden
Library would have been his instead of his cousin Lucia's. He knew
that his grandfather had wished them to be his. Lucia's mother was
dead long ago; and when his uncle Sir Frederick definitely renounced
the domestic life, Lucia and Lucia alone stood between him and the
inheritance that should have been his. This hardly constituted a
reason for being fond of Lucia.

His grandfather had wished him to be fond of her. But not until
Jewdwine was five and twenty and began to feel the primordial manhood
stirring in his scholarly blood did he perceive that his cousin Lucia
was not a hindrance but a way. The way was so obvious that it was no
wonder that he did not see it all at once. He did not really see it
till Sir Joseph sent for him on his death-bed.

"There's been some mistake, Horace," Sir Joseph had then said. "Your
mother should have been the boy and your uncle Frederick the girl.
Then Lucia would have been a Jewdwine, and you a Harden."

And Horace had said, "I'm afraid I can't be a Harden, sir; but is
there any reason why Lucia--?"

"I was coming to that," said Sir Joseph. But he never came to it.
Horace, however, was in some way aware that the same idea had occurred
to both of them. Whatever it was, the old man had died happy in it.

There was no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and
vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she
had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable
and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing could have
been more soothing than the golden concord of that understanding.

Needless to say if Lucia had been anybody but Lucia, such a solution
would have been impossible. He was fastidious. He would not have
married a woman simply because his grandfather wished it; and he could
not have married a woman simply because she inherited property that
ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman who
would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a
woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred,
nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact
that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed
that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined
harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for
Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking
of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be
added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir
Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable
possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about
played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of
the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a
hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its
utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through
Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused,
and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine
to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the
passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose
and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of
wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."

"So am I."

"Yes, but _you_ don't look it. What are you thinking of?"

She turned, and they walked together towards the house.

"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about
that friend of yours."

"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"

"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want
to be kind to him?"

"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to
everybody. It really doesn't do."

She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.

That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.




CHAPTER II


It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was
coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow
streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain
bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank
Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling
the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.

The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with
a decorated façade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish
cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its
neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed
cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary's. Whether
you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west,
you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so
new. Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over
the pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal of
dazzling globes hung over the doorway at the corner; there, as you
turned, the sombre windows of the second-hand department stretched
half way down the side street; here, in the great thoroughfare, the
newest of new books stood out, solicitous and alluring, in suits of
blazing scarlet and vivid green, of vellum and gilt, of polished
leather that shone like amber and malachite and lapis lazuli.

Within, a wall broken by a wide and lofty arch divided the front from
the back shop. On the right of the arch was the mahogany pew of the
cashier, on the left, a tall pillar stove radiating intolerable heat.
Four steps led through the arch into the back shop, the floor of
which was raised in a sort of platform. On the platform was a table,
and at the table sat the young man compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

Front shop and back shop reeked with the smells of new mahogany, dust,
pillar-stove, gum, hot-pressed paper and Russia leather. He sat in the
middle of them, in an atmosphere so thick that it could be seen
hanging about him like an aura, luminous in the glare of the electric
light. His slender, nervous hands worked rapidly, with a business-like
air of dexterity and dispatch. But every now and then he raised his
head and stared for quite a long time at the round, white, foolish
face of the clock, and whenever he did this his eyes were the eyes of
a young man who has no adequate sense of his surroundings.

The remarkable thing about the new shop was that already, like a bar
or a restaurant, it drew to it a certain group of young men,
punctually, irresistibly. A small group--you could almost count them
on the fingers of one hand--they came from Fleet Street, from the
Temple, from the Junior Journalists' Club over the way. They were
never seen looking in at the windows or hanging about the counter;
they were not the least bit of good to the shop, those customers. But
they were evidently some good to the young man. Whatever they did or
did not do, they always ended by drifting to the platform, to his
table. They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully
glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the
obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power,
his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.

It lay partly, no doubt, in his appearance; not, no, not at all, in
his make-up. He wore, like a thousand city clerks, a high collar, a
speckled tie, a straight, dark blue serge suit. But in spite of the
stiffness thus imposed on him, he had, unaccountably, the shy, savage
beauty of an animal untamed, uncaught. He belonged to the slender,
nervous, fair type; but the colour proper to it had been taken out of
him by the shop. His head presented the utmost clearness of line
compatible with irregularity of outline; and his face (from its heavy
square forehead to its light square jaw) was full of strange
harmonies, adjustments, compensations. His chin, rather long in a
front view, rather prominent in profile, balanced the powerful
proportions of his forehead. His upper lip, in spite of its slender
arch, betrayed a youthful eagerness of the senses; but this effect was
subtilized by the fineness of his lower lip, and, when they closed, it
disappeared in the sudden, serious straightening of the lines. Even
his nose (otherwise a firm feature, straight in the bridge and rather
broad at the end) became grave or eager as the pose of the head hid or
revealed the nostrils. He had queer eyes, of a thick dark blue, large,
though deep set, showing a great deal of iris and very little white.
Without being good-looking he was good to look at, when you could look
long enough to find all these things out. He did not like being looked
at. If you tried to hold him that way, his eyes were all over the
place, seeking an escape; but they held _you_, whether you liked it or
not.

It was uncanny, that fascination. If he had chosen to exert it in the
interests of his shop he could presumably have cleaned those friendly
young men out any day. But he never did exert it. Surrounded by wares
whose very appearance was a venal solicitation, he never hinted by so
much as the turn of a phrase that there was anything about him to be
bought. And after what had passed between them, they felt that to hint
it themselves--to him--would have been the last indelicacy. If they
ever asked the price of a book it was to propitiate the grim grizzled
fellow, so like a Methodist parson, who glared at them from the
counter.

They kept their discovery to themselves, as if it had been something
too precious to be handled, as if its charm, the poetry, the pathos of
it must escape under discussion. But any of them who did compare notes
agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too
big for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for
the shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being
the tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with
lowered voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor
fellow got excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt--no--no, he
skipped--his aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it
terrible that it should happen at all--to him. They touched it
tenderly; if it was not exactly part of his poetry it was part of his
pathos. The shop was responsible for it. He ought never, never to have
been there.

And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained
by what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he
should not know.

He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of
everything, his great classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, was lying
finished in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the
last month those very modern poems that he called _Saturnalia_ had
been careering through the columns of _The Planet_. But at the moment
he was mainly supported by the coming of Easter.




CHAPTER III


The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and
well-appointed. But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the
dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a
boy. There was something soothing in its very obscurity and
retirement. He could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully
reading his Homer. In that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms
were dimmed with familiarity and dirt. His dreams took shape before
him, they came and went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision
with reality. There was hardly any part of it that was not consecrated
by some divine visitation. It was in the corner by the window,
standing on a step-ladder and fumbling in the darkness for a copy of
Demosthenes, _De Corona_, that he lit on his first Idea. From his seat
behind the counter, staring, as was his custom, into the recess where
the coal-scuttle was, he first saw the immortal face of Helen in
Leuce.

Here, all that beautiful world of thought lay open to the terrific
invasion of things. His dreams refused to stand out with sufficient
distinctness from a background of coloured bindings, plate glass and
mahogany. They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent
contours of customers. A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained
only by dint of much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often
as not Mr. Rickman's eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering
the cashier's eye in its passage from the clock to the paper.

But (as he reflected with some humour) though Mr. Rickman's ideas so
frequently miscarried, owing to that malignant influence, his genius,
like Nature irresistible and indestructible, compelled him perpetually
to bring forth. Exposed on his little daïs or platform, in hideous
publicity, he suffered the divine labour and agony of creation. He was
the slave of his passion and his hour.




CHAPTER IV


A wave of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the
shop, strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it. And through
it all, with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into
his young senses a something delicious and disturbing, faintly
discernible as the Spring.

He thrust his work from him, tilted back his chair at a dangerous
angle, and began reviewing his engagements for the coming Bank
Holiday.

He was only three and twenty, and at three and twenty an infinite
measure of life can be pressed into the great three days. He saw in
fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all
the gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of
_Saturnalia_. For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet
about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama,
but of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and
of a great many things besides. He had made his plans long beforehand,
and was prepared to consign to instant perdition the person or thing
that should interfere with them. Good Friday morning, an hour's
cycling before breakfast in Regent's Park, by way of pumping some air
into his lungs, then, ten hours at least of high Parnassian leisure,
of dalliance in Academic shades; he saw himself wooing some reluctant
classic, or, far more likely, flirting with his own capricious and
bewildering muse. (In a world of prose it is only by such divine
snatches that poets are made) Friday evening, dinner at his club, the
Junior Journalists'. Saturday morning, recovery from dinner at the
Junior Journalists'. Saturday afternoon, to Hampstead or the
Hippodrome with Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who lived in his
boarding-house and never had any fun to speak of. Saturday night,
supper with--well, with Miss Poppy Grace of the Jubilee Variety
Theatre. He had a sudden vision of Poppy as he was wont to meet her in
delightful intimacy, instantaneously followed by her image that
flaunted on the posters out there in the Strand, Poppy as she appeared
behind the foot-lights, in red silk skirts and black silk stockings,
skimming, whirling, swaying, and deftly shaking her foot at him.
Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably,
with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for
worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have
broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable
companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was
indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas.
Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they
floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally large, all made out of Mr.
Rickman's brain. And in the midst of the ideas a figure insanely
whirled, till it became a mere wheel of flying skirts and tossing
limbs.

At this point Mr. Rickman caught the cashier's eye looking at him over
the little mahogany rails of his pew, and he began wondering how on
earth the cashier would behave when they loosed him out for the Bank
Holiday. Then he set to and wrote hard at the Quarterly Catalogue. In
all London there was not a more prolific or versatile writer than
Savage Keith Rickman. But if in ninety-two you had asked him for his
masterpiece, his _magnum opus_, his life-work, he would mention
nothing that he had written, but refer you, soberly and benignly, to
that colossal performance, the Quarterly Catalogue.

"Vandam: Amours of Great Men (a little soiled). Rare. 30s." He was
in the middle of the Vs now and within measurable distance of the end.
Business being slack in the front shop, he finished earlier than
usual, and actually found himself with nearly a whole hour upon his
hands before dinner. He had half a mind to spend it at his club, the
Junior Journalists', in the side street over the way.

Only half a mind; for Mr. Rickman entertained the most innocent
beliefs with regard to that club of his. He was not yet sure whether
it belonged to him or he to it; but in going to the Junior
Journalists' he conceived himself to be going into society. So extreme
was his illusion.

Mr. Rickman's place was in the shop and his home was in a boarding
house, and for years he had thought of belonging to that club; but
quite hopelessly, as of a thing beyond attainment. It had never
occurred to him that anything could come of those invasions of the
friendly young men. Yet this was what had come of them. He was
friends, under the rose, that is to say, over the counter, with Horace
Jewdwine of Lazarus College, Oxford. Jewdwine had proposed him on his
own merits, somebody else had seconded him (he supposed) on
Jewdwine's, and between them they had smuggled him in. This would be
his first appearance as a Junior Journalist. And he might well feel a
little diffident about it; for, though some of the members knew him,
he could not honestly say he knew any of them, except Rankin (of _The
Planet_) who possibly mightn't, and Jewdwine who certainly wouldn't,
be there. But the plunge had to be made some time; he might as well
make it now.

From the threshold of the Junior Journalists' he looked back across
the side street, as across a gulf, at the place he had just left. His
eyes moved from the jutting sign-board at the corner, announcing
_Gentlemen's Libraries Purchased_, to the legend that ran above the
window, blazoned in letters of gold:

_Isaac Rickman: New & Second-Hand Bookseller._

His connexion with it was by no means casual and temporary. It was his
father's shop.




CHAPTER V


The little booksellers of the Strand, in their death struggle against
Rickman's, never cursed that house more heartily than did the Junior
Journalists, in their friendly, shabby little den, smelling of old
leather and tobacco and the town. They complained that it cut on
two-thirds of the light from the front windows of the reading-room.
Not that any of them were ever known to read in it. They used it
chiefly as a place to talk in, for which purpose little illumination
was required.

To-night one of the windows in question was occupied by a small group
of talkers isolated from the rest. There was Mackinnon, of _The
Literary Observer_. There were the three wild young spirits of _The
Planet_, Stables, who had launched it with frightful impetus into
space (having borrowed a sum sufficient for the purpose), Maddox, who
controlled its course, and Rankin, whose brilliance made it twinkle so
brightly in the firmament. With them, but emphatically not of them,
was Horace Jewdwine, of Lazarus, who had come up from Oxford to join
the staff of _The Museion_.

Jewdwine and Mackinnon, both secure of a position and a salary, looked
solemn and a little anxious; but the men of _The Planet_, having
formed themselves into a sort of unlimited liability company, and
started a brand new "weekly" of their own (upon no sort of security
beyond their bare brains) were as persons without a single care, worry
or responsibility. They were exchanging ideas in an off-hand and
light-hearted manner, the only stipulation being that the ideas must
be new; for, by some unwritten law of the club, the conversational
currency was liable at any moment to be called in.

This evening, however, they had hit on a topic almost virgin from the
mint.

"S.K.R.? _Who_ is he? _What_ is he?" said Mackinnon.

"I can't tell you what he _is_; but I can pretty soon tell you what
he's not," said Stables. He was a very young man with a white face and
red eyelids, who looked as if he sat up all night and went to bed in
the day-time, as indeed he generally did.

"_Omnis negatio est determinatio_," murmured Jewdwine, without looking
up from the letter he was trying to write.

"What has he done?" persisted Mackinnon.

"He's done a great many remarkable things," said Rankin; "things
almost as remarkable as himself."

"Who unearthed him?"

"I did," said Rankin, so complacently that the deep lines relaxed
round the five copper-coloured bosses that were his chin and cheeks
and brow. (The rest of Rankin's face was spectacles and moustache.)

"Oh, did you?" said Maddox. Maddox was a short man with large
shoulders; heavy browed, heavy jowled, heavy moustached. Maddox's
appearance belied him; he looked British when he was half Celt; he
struck you as overbearing when he was only top-heavy; he spoke as if
he was angry when he was only in fun, as you could see by his eyes.
Little babyish blue eyes they were with curly corners, a gay light in
the sombre truculence of his face. They looked cautiously round.

"I can tell you a little tale about S.K.R. You know the last time
Smythe was ill--?"

"You mean drunk."

"Well--temporarily extinguished. S.K.R., who knows his music-halls,
was offered Smythe's berth. We delicately intimated to him that if he
liked at any time to devote a little paragraph to Miss Poppy Grace, he
was at perfect liberty to do so."

"A liberty he interpreted as poetic licence."

"Nothing of the sort. He absolutely declined the job."

"Why?"

"Well--the marvellous boy informed me that he was too intimate with
the lady to write about her. At any rate with that noble impartiality
which distinguishes the utterances of _The Planet_."

"Steady, man. He _never_ told ye _that_!" said Mackinnon.

"I didn't say he _told_ me, I said he informed me."

"And whar's the differ'nce? I don't see it at all."

"Trepan him, trepan him."

Stables took out his penknife and indicated by dumb show a surgical
operation on Mackinnon's dome-like head.

"I gathered it," continued Maddox suavely, "from his manner. I culled
his young thought like a flower."

"Perhaps," Rankin suggested, "he was afraid of compromising Poppy."

"He might have left that subtle consideration to Pilkington."

"That was it. He scented Dicky's hand in it, and wasn't particularly
anxious to oblige him. The point of the joke is that he happens to owe
Dicky a great deal more than he can conveniently pay. That'll give you
some faint notion of the magnificence of his cheek."

Stables was impressed. He wondered what sort of young man it could be
who had the moral courage to oppose Dicky Pilkington at such a moment.
He could not have done it himself. Dicky Pilkington was the great and
mysterious power at the back of _The Planet_.

"But this isn't the end of it. I told him, for his future guidance and
encouragement, that he had mistaken cause and effect--that little
variety _artistes_, like other people, are not popular because they
are written about, but written about because they are popular--that
_The Planet_ is the organ of public opinion, not of private opinions;
in short, that he wasn't in it, at all. I thought I'd sat on him till
he was about flat--and the very next week he comes bounding in with
his _Saturnalia_, as he calls them."

"That was your moment. Why didn't you rise up in your majesty and
r-r-reject them?"

"Couldn't. They were too damned good." Maddox smiled at the
reminiscence. "I wasn't going to let him sign them, but he took the
wind out of my sails by stating beforehand that he didn't want
to--that if I didn't mind--_mind_, if you please--he'd very much
rather not. It's only the last week (when the _Saturnalia_ were
getting better and better) that he graciously permitted his initials
to appear. S.K.R.--Savage Keith Rickman."

"Good Lord!" said Rankin; "what must he be like?"

"Ask Jewdwine," said Stables; "he's Jewdwine's man."

"Excuse _me_," said Maddox, "he is _mine_. I say, Jewdwine, what _is_
he like?"

Jewdwine did not respond very eagerly; he wanted to get on with his
letter. But the club had another unwritten law as to writing. If a
majority of members desired to write, silence was vigorously insisted
on. Any number short of a majority wrote as best they could. For this
unfortunate scribe there could be no concession; he was in a minority
of one.

"If"--said he, "you can imagine the soul of a young Sophocles,
battling with that of a--of a junior journalist in the body of a
dissipated little Cockney--"

"Can't," said Stables. "Haven't got enough imagination."

"The child of 'Ellas and of Ollywell Street'--innocent of--er--the
rough breathing," suggested Maddox.

As it was now seven o'clock, and the Junior Journalists were dropping
off one by one to the dining-room below, the young men of _The Planet_
began to stretch their legs, and raise their voices, and behave like
young men who believe their privacy to be inviolable and complete.
They soon had the place to themselves, except for one person whose
entrance had been covered by the outgoing stream; and he had
delicately turned his back on them, and taken a seat in the farthest
window, where his unobtrusive presence could be no possible hindrance
to conversation.

"I've seen him after supper," said Maddox. He was obliged to speak
rather loudly, because of the noise that came up from the overcrowded
dining-room.

"Well, then, how did he strike you?"

Maddox's eyes curled with limpid, infantile devilry.

"Well, I daresay he might be a bit of a bounder when he's sober, but
he's a perfect little gentleman when he's drunk. Softens him down
somehow."

"_In vino veritas_--a true gentleman at heart."

"One of Nature's gentlemen. _I_ know 'em," said Stables.

"One of Art's gentlemen," interposed Jewdwine severely, "and a very
fine gentleman too, if you take him that way."

Jewdwine raised his head from his letter and looked round uneasily.
Personalities were not altogether to his taste; besides, he was really
anxious to finish that letter. He caught sight of a back at the other
window.

"I think," said he quietly, "this conversation had better cease."

The owner of the back had moved, a little ostentatiously. He now got
up and crossed the room. The back was still towards the group of
talkers. Jewdwine followed its passage. He was fascinated. He gasped.

He could have sworn to that back anywhere, with its square but slender
shoulders, its defiant swing from the straight hips, the head tossed a
little backwards as if to correct the student's tendency to stoop. He
looked from the back to Maddox. Maddox could not see what he saw, but
his face reflected the horror of Jewdwine's.

Their voices were inaudible enough now.

"Do you know who it is?"

"I should think I did. It's the man himself."

"How truly damnable," said Rankin. After those words there was a
silence which Jewdwine, like the wise man he was, utilized for his
correspondence.

It was Maddox who recovered first. "Call him what you like," said he,
in a wonderfully natural voice, between two puffs of a cigarette, "I
consider him an uncommonly good sort. A bit of a bounder, but no end
of a good sort."

The others were evidently impressed by this bold though desperate
policy. Maddox himself was inclined to think that it had saved the
situation, but he was anxious to make sure. Edging his chair by slow
degrees, he turned discreetly round. With the tail of his eye he could
see "the man himself" standing at the far end of the room. He saw too
that his own effort, though supreme, had been unavailing. It had
deceived no one, least of all S.K.R. "The man himself" stood on the
very hearth of the club, with his back to the fireplace. It was the
attitude of mastery, a mastery the more superb because unconscious.
His eyes too, were the eyes of a master, twinkling a little as to
their light, but steady as to their direction, being fixed on Maddox.
He was smiling.

There was nothing malignant, or bitter, or sardonic about that smile.
No devilry of delight at their confusion. No base abandonment of the
whole countenance to mirth, but a curious one-sided smile, implying
delicacies, reservations. A slow smile, reminiscent, ruminant,
appreciative; it expressed (if so subtle and refined a thing could be
said to express anything) a certain exquisite enjoyment of the phrases
in which they had defined him.

And seeing it, Maddox said to himself, "He isn't a gentleman. He's
something more."

In that moment the Celtic soul of Maddox had recognized its master,
and had sworn to him unhesitating allegiance.




CHAPTER VI


It was not until Rankin and the others had left the room that Jewdwine
had courage to raise his head tentatively. He had only seen that young
man's back, and he still clung to the hope that it might not be
Rickman's, after all.

He looked up as steadily as he dared. Oh, no doubt that it was
Rickman's back; no doubt, too, that it was his, Jewdwine's, duty to go
up and speak to him. The young man had changed his place; he was at
his window again, contemplating--as Jewdwine reflected with a pang of
sympathy--the shop. So profound, so sacred almost, was his absorption
that Jewdwine hesitated in his approach.

"_Is_ it Rickman?" he asked, still tentative.

"Mr. Jewdwine!" Rickman's soul leapt to Jewdwine's from the depths;
but the "Mister" marked the space it had had to travel. "When did you
come up?"

"Three hours ago." ("He looks innocent," said Jewdwine to himself.)

"Then you weren't prepared for that?"

Jewdwine followed his fascinated gaze. He smiled faintly.

"You haven't noticed our new departure? We not only purchase
Gentlemen's Libraries, but we sell the works of persons who may or may
not be gentlemen."

Jewdwine felt profoundly uncomfortable. Rickman's face preserved its
inimitable innocence, but he continued to stare fixedly before him.

"Poor fellow," thought Jewdwine, "he must have heard those
imbecilities." He felt horribly responsible, responsible to the Club
for the behaviour of Rickman and responsible to Rickman for the
behaviour of the Club. What could he do to make it up to him? Happy
thought--he would ask him to dinner at--yes, at his sister's, Miss
Jewdwine's, house at Hampstead. That was to say, if his cousin, Lucia
Harden, did not happen to be staying there. He was not quite sure how
Rickman would strike that most fastidious of young ladies. And Rankin
had said he drank.

In the light of Lucia Harden's and his sister's possible criticism, he
considered him more carefully than he had done before.

The contrast between the two men was certainly rather marked. A
gentleman can be neither more nor less than a gentleman, and Rickman,
in a sense not altogether intended by Maddox, was decidedly more. His
individuality was too exuberant, too irrepressible. He had the
restless, emphatic air of a man who has but little leisure and is too
obviously anxious to make the most of what he has. He always seemed to
be talking against time; and as he talked his emotions played visibly,
too visibly, on his humorous, irregular face. Taking into account his
remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency
must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's
opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant
impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on
him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from
pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight
elision of the aspirate observed by some of them. But then, he had a
voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into
forgetfulness of these enormities.

It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to
charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye
his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman's. He
looked neither more nor less than he was--an Oxford don, developing
into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow.
There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared
in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the
ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined.
You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why
you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his
pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that
drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out
of sight.

Rickman had always looked up to him. For Jewdwine, as Rankin had
intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R. He was always
discovering him. Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this
argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was
always losing sight of him in between. These lapses in their
intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense),
but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented
Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and
interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him
from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City.
He felt responsible for that, too.

Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism. But he
mistook its nature and its grounds.

"Don't suppose," said he, "I'm ashamed of the shop. It isn't that. I
wasn't ashamed of our other place--that little rat 'ole in the City."

Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.

"--But I _am_ ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern. It's so brutally
big. It can't live, you know, without sucking the life out of the
little booksellers. They mayn't have made a great thing out of it, but
they were happy enough before we came here."

"I never thought of it in that light."

"Haven't you? I have."

It was evident that little Rickman was deeply moved. His sentiments
did him credit, and he deserved to be asked to dinner. At Hampstead?
No--no, not at Hampstead; here, at the Club. The Club was the proper
thing; a public recognition of him was the _amende honorable_.
Besides, after all, it was the Club, not Jewdwine, that had offended,
and it was right that the Club should expiate its offence.

"What are you doing at Easter?" he asked.

Rickman stroked his upper lip and smiled as if cherishing a joy as
secret and unborn as his moustache. He recited a selection from the
tale of his engagements.

"Can you dine with me here on Saturday? You're free, then, didn't you
say?"

Rickman hesitated. That was not what he had said. He was anything but
free, for was he not engaged for that evening to Miss Poppy Grace? He
was pulled two ways, a hard pull. He admired Jewdwine with simple,
hero-worshipping fervour; but he also admired Miss Poppy Grace. Again,
he shrank from mentioning an engagement of that sort to Jewdwine,
while, on the other hand concealment was equally painful, being
foreign to his nature.

So he flushed a little as he replied, "Thanks awfully, I'm afraid I
can't. I'm booked that night to Poppy Grace."

The flush deepened. Besides his natural sensitiveness on the subject
of Miss Poppy Grace, he suffered tortures not wholly sentimental
whenever he had occasion to mention her by her name. Poppy Grace--he
felt that somehow it did not give you a very high idea of the lady,
and that in this it did her an injustice. He could have avoided it by
referring to her loftily as Miss Grace; but this course, besides being
unfamiliar would have savoured somewhat of subterfuge. So he blurted
it all out with an air of defiance, as much as to say that when you
had called her Poppy Grace you had said the worst of her.

Jewdwine's face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite
disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How
a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could
care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was
incomprehensible to Jewdwine.

"I didn't know you cultivated that sort of person."

"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too
light for _that_.

"How long have you known her?"

"About six months, on and off."

"Oh, only on and off."

"On and off the _stage_, I mean. And that's knowledge," said Rickman.
"Anybody can know them on; but it's not one man in a thousand knows
them off--really knows them."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

He changed the subject. In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested;
but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.

Jewdwine had a weak digestion. When he sat at the high table, peering
at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his
fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of
undergraduates in Hall.

Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman's youth.
When it came to women, Rickman _was_ impossible.

Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had
Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and
wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for
dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club. Edith would be annoyed
if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not
good. But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for
one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny
cab, he would save one and tenpence.

"And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote _Helen in
Leuce_ was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."

Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical
faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical
method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be
quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty
accurately.

"Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow. A
poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal,
stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art."

As he looked up at Rickman's, blazing with all its lights, he felt
that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on
this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine's nature, something half-human,
half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly,
"Won't you hear me? I've so much to ask, so much to say. So many
ideas, and you're the only man that can understand them." Jewdwine
impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious
understanding.

The question was, having understood Rickman, having discovered in him
a neglected genius, having introduced him to the Club and asked him to
dinner on the strength of it, how much further was he prepared to go?
Why--provided he was sure of the genius, almost any length, short of
introducing him to the ladies of his family. But was he sure? Savage
Rickman was young, and youth is deceptive. Supposing he--Jewdwine--was
deceived? Supposing the genius were to elude him, leaving him saddled
with the man? What on earth should he do with him?

Things had been simpler in the earlier days of their acquaintance,
when the counter stood between them, and formed a firm natural barrier
to closer intercourse. Nobody, not even Jewdwine, knew what that
handshake across the counter had meant for Rickman; how his soul had
hungered and thirsted for Jewdwine's society; how, in "the little
rat'ole in the City," it had consumed itself with longing. It was his
first great passion, a passion that waited upon chance; to be
gratified for five minutes, ten minutes at the most. Once Jewdwine had
hung about the shop for half an hour talking; the interview being
broken by Rickman's incessant calls to the counter. Once, they had
taken a walk together down Cheapside, which from that moment became a
holy place. Then came the day when, at Jewdwine's invitation, _Helen
in Leuce_ travelled down from London to Oxford, and from Oxford to
Harmouth. Her neo-classic beauty appealed to Jewdwine's taste (and to
the taste of Jewdwine's cousin); he recognized in Rickman a disciple,
and was instantly persuaded of his genius. At one bound Rickman had
leapt the barrier of the counter; and here he was, enthusiastic and
devoted. To be sure, his devotion was not fed largely upon praise;
for, unlike the younger man, Jewdwine admired but sparingly. Neither
was it tainted with any thought of material advantage. Jewdwine was
very free with his criticism and advice; but, beyond these high
intellectual aids, it never occurred to Rickman that he had anything
to gain by Jewdwine's friendship. Discipleship is the purest of all
human relations.

Jewdwine divined this purity, and was touched by it. He prepared to
accept a certain amount of responsibility. He looked at his watch. He
could still get to Hampstead by eight o'clock, if he took a
cab--say,--twenty minutes. He could spare him another ten. The Junior
Journalists were coming back from their dinner and the room would soon
be crowded. He took his disciple's arm in a protecting manner and
steered him into a near recess. He felt that the ten minutes he was
about to give him would be decisive in the young man's career.

"You've still got to find your formula. Not to have found your
formula," he said solemnly, "is not to have found yourself."

"Perhaps I haven't been looking in very likely places," said Rickman,
nobly touched, as he always was by the more personal utterances of the
master.

"The Jubilee Variety Theatre, for instance. Do you go there to find
the ideal, or in pursuit of the fugitive actuality?"

"Whichever you like to call it. Its name on the programme is Miss
Poppy Grace."

"Look here, Rickman," said Jewdwine, gently; "when are you going to
give up this business?"

"Which business?"

"Well, at the moment I referred to your situation in the Gin Palace of
Art--"

"I can't chuck it just yet. There's my father, you see. It would spoil
all his pleasure in that new plate-glass and mahogany devilry. He's
excited about it; wants to make it a big thing--"

"So he puts a big man into it?"

"Oh, well, I must see him started."

He spoke simply, as of a thing self-evident and indisputable. Jewdwine
admired.

"You're quite right. You _are_ handicapped. Heavily handicapped. So,
for Goodness' sake, don't weight yourself any more. If you can't drop
the Gin Palace, drop Miss Poppy Grace."

"Poppy Grace? She weighs about as much as a feather."

"Drop her, drop her, all the same."

"I can't. She wouldn't drop. She'd float."

"Don't float with her."

As he rose he spoke slowly and impressively. "What you've got to do
is to pull yourself together. You can't afford to be dissolute, or
even dissipated."

Rickman looked hard at Jewdwine's boots. Irreproachable boots, well
made, well polished, unspotted by the world. And the only
distinguishable word in Rickman's answer was "Life." And as he said
"Life" he blushed like a girl when for the first time she says "Love,"
a blush of rapture and of shame, her young blood sensitive to the
least hint of apathy in her audience.

Jewdwine's apathy was immense.

"Another name for the fugitive actuality," he said. "Well, I'm afraid
I haven't any more time--" He looked round the room a little vaguely,
and as he did so he laid on the young man's shoulder a delicate
fastidious hand. "There are one or two men here I should have liked to
introduce you to, if I'd had time.--Another night, perhaps--" He
piloted him downstairs and so out into the Strand.

"Good night. Good night. Take my advice and leave the fugitive
actuality alone."

Those were Jewdwine's last words, spoken from the depths of the
hansom. It carried him to the classic heights of Hampstead, to the
haunts of the cultivated, the intellectual, the refined.

Rickman remained a moment. His dreamy gaze was fixed on the massive
pile before him, that rose, solidly soaring, flaunting a brutal
challenge to the tender April sky. It stood for the vast material
reality, the whole of that eternal, implacable Power which is at
enmity with dreams; which may be conquered, propitiated, absorbed, but
never annihilated or denied.

_That_ actuality was not fugitive.




CHAPTER VII


Perhaps it was not to be wondered at if Mr. Rickman had not yet found
himself. There were, as he sorrowfully reflected, so many Mr.
Rickmans.

There was Mr. Rickman of the front shop and second-hand department,
known as "our Mr. Rickman." The shop was proud of him; his appearance
was supposed to give it a certain _cachet_. He neither strutted nor
grovelled; he moved about from shelf to shelf in an absent-minded
scholarly manner. He served you, not with obsequiousness, nor yet with
condescension, but with a certain remoteness and abstraction, a noble
apathy. Though a bookseller, his literary conscience remained
incorruptible. He would introduce you to his favourite authors with a
magnificent take-it-or-leave-it air, while an almost imperceptible
lifting of his eyebrows as he handed you _your_ favourite was a subtle
criticism of your taste. This method of conducting business was called
keeping up the tone of the establishment. The appearance and
disappearance of this person was timed and regulated by circumstances
beyond his own control, so that of necessity all the other Mr.
Rickmans were subject to him.

For there was Mr. Rickman the student and recluse, who inhabited the
insides of other men's books. Owing to his habitual converse with
intellects greater--really greater--than his own, he was an
exceedingly humble and reverent person. A high and stainless soul. You
would never have suspected his connection with Mr. Rickman, the Junior
Journalist, the obscure writer of brilliant paragraphs, a fellow
destitute of reverence and decency and everything except consummate
impudence, a disconcerting humour and a startling style. But he was
still more distantly related to Mr. Rickman the young man about town.
And that made four. Besides these four there was a fifth, the serene
and perfect intelligence, who from some height immeasurably far above
them sat in judgement on them all. But for his abnormal sense of
humour he would have been a Mr. Rickman of the pure reason, no good at
all. As it was, he occasionally offered some reflection which was
enjoyed but seldom acted upon.