"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: ELENE]

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 naivete 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.

But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so. As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman's and beyond it, shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead back there. He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of him to be made into a machine.

Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of this machine were hidden from Isaac. He hadn't even found out that the secret spring was not in the brain but the heart of it. He would look up a little uneasily as Keith pushed through the big swinging doors and took his seat at the table on the platform, and while he wondered what Keith was thinking of him, ten to one Keith wasn't thinking of him at all.

This morning, however, he was thinking of him, as it happened. And when the old man saw him up there, holding his poor bursting head in his hands, and said: "'Ead achin' my boy, again? That comes of studyin' too 'ard!" he thought with a touch of compunction, "What would he say if he knew I'd gone drunk to bed last night? And if he knew about Poppy?"

Isaac approached his son gingerly and with a certain fear. The only thing he had discovered about this admirable machine of his was that it went better when you left it alone. It had not been going quite so well lately though, and this morning it seemed decidedly out of order. He took a seat at the table and busied himself with a catalogue. Presently he rose and touched the boy gently on the shoulder.

"Come into the office a minute, will you?" he said, with a glance at the cashier. And Keith, wondering what on earth he wanted with him, followed into a recess shut on from the shop by a plate-glass and mahogany screen. Isaac hunted among the papers on his writing-table for a letter he could not find.

"You remember your old friend, Sir Joseph Harden, don't you?"

"Yes." Keith was in fact devoted to Sir Joseph's memory. He had often wondered what it was, that mysterious "something" which Sir Joseph would have done for him, if he had lived, and whether, if he had done it, it would have made a difference.

"Well, I got a letter from his place in Devonshire this morning. They've asked me to send them some one down to catalogue his library. They want an expert, and he must go at once and finish by the twenty-seventh, or it's no use. Dear me, where is that letter?"

Keith goaded his brain to an agonizing activity. It seemed to him that some such proposal had been made to him before. But where or when he couldn't for the life of him remember.

"Pilkington says he told you something about it, last night. I've heard from him this morning, too."

Pilkington—he remembered now. Dicky had bothered him about a library last night; and he had wished Dicky at the devil. He beat his brains till he struck from them an illuminating flash (Lord, how it hurt too!).

"He didn't say it was the Harden Library."

"It is, though." Isaac's coarse forehead flushed with triumph. "He's promised me the refusal of it when it comes into the market."

At any other time Keith would have been interested; but his head ached too much now. Still he was not too far gone to recognize the magnitude of the affair.

"You'll have to go down and look at it," continued Isaac persuasively, "and here's the opportunity. You go on their business, and do mine at the same time, and get well paid for it, too."

"I don't quite like going that way. If the thing's got to be sold why do they want it catalogued?"

"That's their business, not mine."

"It looks like 'their' mistake, whoever they are. Where's the letter?"

"I've mislaid it. That's not my business either. My business is to send you off before they find out their mistake. You can catch the eleven express from Waterloo if you look sharp."

Sharp? Never had he looked less so. Still, with his aching head he dimly perceived that his Easter was being tampered with.

"And supposing they want me to stay?"

"Stay then. The longer the better."

"I'll go after Easter then. I can't go before. I can't possibly. It's—it's out of the question."

His brain was clear enough on that point. He had suffered many things from the brutality of Rickman's; but hitherto its dealings had always been plain and above-board. It had kept him many an evening working overtime, it had even exacted an occasional Saturday afternoon; but it had never before swindled him out of a Bank holiday. The thing was incredible; it could not be. Rickman's had no rights over his Easter; whatever happened, that holy festival was indubitably, incontestably his.

"Don't be afraid. You'll get your holiday, my boy, when you come back. I'll make it worth your while."

"It isn't money—damn my head! It's so confoundedly inconvenient. You see, I'd made no end of engagements."

"It's a foolish thing to make engagements so long beforehand. We never know the day or the hour—"

"I knew both."

"Well, in any case you couldn't be going to any place of amusement on the Sunday."

Isaac and his conscience had agreed together to assume that young Keith walked habitually and of his own fancy in the right way.

"Come," he continued, "you're not going to fling up a chance like this without rhyme or reason."

"I don't know," said Keith, with a queer little one-sided smile, "I'd fling up a good many chances for a really good rhyme."

As for reason, there were at least two reasons why the present chance should not lightly be let go. One was the Harden Library. If the Harden Library was not great, it was almost historic, it contained the Aldine Plato of 1513, the Neapolitan Horace of 1474, and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde. The other reason was Dicky Pilkington, the Vandal into whose hands destiny had delivered it. Upon the Harden Library Pilkington was about to descend like Alaric on the treasures of Rome. Rickman's was hand in glove with Pilkington, and since the young barbarian actually offered them the chance of buying it outright for an old song, no time was to be lost. It would not do to trust too long to Dicky's ignorance. At any moment knowledge might enter into him and corrupt his soul.

No; clearly, he would have to go; he didn't see how he was to get out of it.

Isaac became uneasy, for the spirit of imprecation sat visibly on his son's brow. "When I said I'd make it worth your while I meant it."

"I know. It isn't that—"

"Wot is it? Wot is it then? Wot's the matter with you? Wot tomfoolery are you up to? Is it—" (Isaac's gross forehead flushed, his speech came thick through his stern lips.) "Is it a woman?"

He had also been young; though he had denied his youth.

The boy's white face quivered with a little wave of heat and pain. He clasped his forehead with his hands.

"Let me think."

His fingers tightened their hold, as if to grasp thought by holding the dizzy aching head that contained it. He could think of nothing but Poppy. He had seen his father's point quite steadily and clearly a minute ago; but when he thought of Poppy his brain began to turn round and round again. He gripped his forehead harder still, to stop it.

His thinking drifted into a kind of moody metaphysics instead of concentrating itself on the matter in hand. "It takes a poet," he said to himself, "to create a world, and this world would disgrace a Junior Journalist." Was it, he wondered, the last effort of a cycle of transcendental decadence, melancholy, sophisticated? Or was it a cruel young jest flung off in the barbarous spring-time of creative energy? Either way it chiefly impressed him with its imbecility. He saw through it. He saw through most things, Himself included. He knew perfectly well that he had developed this sudden turn for speculative thought because he was baulked of an appointment with a little variety actress. That he should see through the little variety actress was not to be expected. Poppy was in her nature impenetrable, woman being the ultimate fact, the inexorable necessity of thought. Supposing the universe to be nothing more than a dance of fortuitous atoms, then Poppy, herself a fortuitous atom, led the dance; she was the whirligig centre towards which all things whirled. No wonder that it made him giddy to think of her.

Suddenly out of its giddiness his brain conceived and instantly matured a plan. A practical plan. He would catch that eleven-thirty express all right. He would go down into Devonshire, and stay in Devonshire till Saturday. If necessary, he would sit up with those abominable books all Thursday night and Friday night. And on Saturday he would return. At the worst he would only have to go down again on Monday. He would have missed the Junior Journalists' dinner, he would be lucky if he saw the ghost of an idea on this side Whit Sunday, but he would have torn the heart out of his holiday.

He rose abruptly. "All right. It's a most awful nuisance, as it happens, but I'll go."

"I'm glad you're willing to oblige me. You'll not regret it."

Isaac was really meditating something very handsome in the way of a commission. As he looked benignly into his son's face and saw its deep misery and repugnance, he answered his own question.

"It is a woman."



BOOK II

LUCIA'S WAY



CHAPTER XIV

He wondered how much longer they were going to keep him waiting. His head still ached, and every nerve was irritable. He began to suspect the servant of having failed to report his arrival; he thought of ringing for him and announcing himself a second time. Then he remembered that he was only the man who had come about the books; he was there on the Hardens' business, and their time was his time. And there were worse places to wait in than the library of Court House.

He found himself in a long low room that seemed to him immense. It was lighted by four deep-set windows, one to the south, one (a smaller side lattice) to the east, two to the west, and still the corners were left in gloom. The bookcases that covered the length and height of the walls were of one blackness with the oak floor and ceiling. The scattered blues and crimsons of the carpets (repeated in duller tones in the old morocco bindings), the gilded tracery of the tooling, and here and there a blood-red lettering-piece, gave an effect as of some dim rich arabesque flung on to the darkness. At this hour the sunlight made the most of all it found there; it washed the faded carpet with a new dye; it licked every jutting angle, every polished surface, every patch of vellum; it streamed out of the great golden white busts on their pedestals in the windows, it lay in pale gleams over the eastern walls till it perished in the marble blackness of the roof and floor, sucked in as by an upper and nether abyss. This blackness intensified the glory of the April world outside whose luminous greens and blues were held like blazonry in the leaded lozenge panes. The two western windows thrown open looked over the valley to the hills; Castle Hill with its black battlement of pines, and round-topped Core; to Harmouth Gap, the great doorway of the west wind, and the straight brown flank of Muttersmoor, stretching to the sea. He seated himself by one of these open lattices, looked at the view, one of the loveliest in south Devon, and thought of Miss Poppy Grace. The vision of her that had still attended him on his journey down faded as if rebuked by the great tranquil presence of the hills. He was left supremely, magically alone.

Now it may have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness, a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave a deep sigh and turned his back on it abruptly.

He picked up a book that lay on the window seat; it was the History of Harmouth, and the history of Harmouth was the history of the Hardens of Court House. Court House was older than Harmouth and the Hardens were older than Court House. In early Tudor times, the chronicler informed him, the house was the court of justice for east Devon. Under Elizabeth it and the land for miles around it passed to the Hardens as a reward for their services to the Crown. The first thing they did was to pull down the gibbet on the north side and build their kitchen offices there. Next they threw out a short gable-ended wing to the east, and another to the west, enclosing a pleasant courtyard on the south. The west wing was now thrown into one with the long room that held the Harden Library.

Rickman searched carefully for information under this head. He learnt that the Harden library was the work of ten generations of scholars beginning with Sir Thomas, a Jacobean maker of madrigals, and ending with Sir Joseph, the Victorian Master of Lazarus; that the founder's date is carved on the oak chimney-piece at the north end, with the Harden motto:

16 INVICTUS 20;

that the late Master of Lazarus bought books by the cartload, and was obliged to break through the south wall and sacrifice the west wing (his wife's boudoir) to make room for them. But where he looked for some record of these treasures he found nothing but an elaborate description of the Harden arms with all their quarterings. The historian was not useful for Rickman's purposes. He was preoccupied with the Hardens, their antiquity and splendour; he grovelled before them; every event in their history gave him an opportunity of observing that their motto was Invictus. He certainly seemed to have found them so; for when he wrote of them his style took on the curious contortions and prostrations of his spirit. The poor wretch, in the pay of the local bookseller, had saturated himself with heraldry till he saw gules.

To a vision thus inflamed book-collecting was simply a quaint hereditary freak, and scholarship a distinction wholly superfluous in a race that owned half the parish, and had its arms blazoned on the east windows of a church and the sign-board of a public-house. And with the last generation the hereditary passion had apparently exhausted itself. "The present owner, Sir Frederick Harden," said the chronicler, "has made no addition to the library of his ancestors." What he had done was not recorded in the history of the Hardens. It was silent also as to the ladies of that house, beyond drawing attention to the curious fact that no woman had ever been permitted to inherit the Harden Library. The inspired pen of the chronicler evoked the long procession of those Hardens whose motto was Invictus; crossed-legged crusading Hardens, Hardens in trunk hose, Hardens in ruff and doublet, in ruffles and periwig; Hardens in powder and patches, in the loosest of stocks and the tightest of trousers; and never a petticoat among them all. It was just as well, Rickman reflected, that Poppy's frivolous little phantom had not danced after him into the Harden library; those other phantoms might not have received it very kindly, unless indeed Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, had spared it a shadowy smile.

He looked round and realized that his separation from Poppy would be disagreeably prolonged if he was expected to catalogue and arrange all the books in the Harden Library. Allowing so much time to so much space, (measuring by feet of bookshelf) hours ran rapidly to days, and days to weeks—why, months might pass and find him still labouring there. He would be buried in the blackness, forgotten by Poppy and the world. That was assuming that the Harden Library really belonged to the Hardens. And if it was to belong to Dicky Pilkington, what on earth had he been sent for?

"You were sent in answer to my letter, I suppose?"

Rickman's nervous system was still so far under the dominion of Dicky's champagne that he started violently. Double doors and double carpets deadened all sound of coming and going, and the voice seemed to have got into the room by itself. As from its softness he judged it to be still some yards distant, he suffered a further shock on finding a lady standing by his elbow.

It had been growing on him lately, this habit of starting at nothing, this ridiculous spasm of shoulder-blade, eyelids and mouth. It was a cause of many smiles to the young ladies of his boarding-house; and this lady was smiling too, though after another fashion. Her smile was remote and delicately poised; it hovered in the fine, long-drawn corners of her mouth and eyes; it sobered suddenly as a second and less violent movement turned towards her his white and too expressive face. He could not say by what subtle and tender transitions it passed into indifference, nor how in passing it contrived to intimate her regret at having taken him somewhat at a disadvantage. It was all done and atoned for in the lifting of an eyelid, before he could take in what she had actually said.

Her letter? He murmured some sort of assent, and entered on a dreamy and protracted search for his pocket handkerchief. He was miserably conscious that she was looking, looking down on him all the time. For this lady was tall, so tall indeed that her gaze seemed to light on his eyelids rather than his eyes. When he had found his courage and his handkerchief he looked up and their eyes met half way. Hers were brown with the tinge of hazel that makes brown eyes clear; they had a liquid surface of light divided from their darkness, and behind the darkness was more light, and the light and darkness were both unfathomable.

These eyes were entirely unembarrassed by the encounter. They still swept him with their long gaze, lucid, meditative, and a little critical.

"You have been very prompt."

"We understood that no time was to be lost."

She hesitated. "Mr. Rickman understood, did he not, that I asked for some one with experience?"

Most certainly Mr. Rickman understood.

"Do you think you will be able to do what I want?"

Her eyes implied that he seemed to her too young to have had any experience at all.

Knowing that a sense of humour was not one of the things required of him, he controlled a smile.

"We understood you wanted an expert, so I came myself."

"You are Mr. Rickman then?"

"Well—Mr. Rickman's son."

The lady puckered her brows as if trying to recall something, an idea, a memory that escaped her. She gave it up.

"Have you been waiting long?"

"Not more than half an hour or so."

"I am sorry. Perhaps you had better stay now and see what has to be done."

He was tired, he had eaten nothing all day, his nerves were out of order, and he had an abominable headache, but he intimated that he and his time were at her service. She spoke with authority, and he wondered who she was. Sir Frederick Harden's daughter? Or his sister? Or his wife?

"As you see, the books are fairly well arranged. It will not take very long to sort them."

Oh wouldn't it, though! His heart sank miserably as he followed her progress round the room.

"They'll have to be catalogued under their subjects—alphabetically, of course."

"Quite so."

She continued with the same swiftness and serenity, mistress of his time and intelligence, as of her own luminous and elaborate plan. "Their size will have to be given, the edition, the place and date of publication, the number of their shelf, and their place on the shelves."

Their place on the shelves indeed! If those books had got into Dicky Pilkington's clutches their place would know them no more. He wondered; did she know nothing about Dicky Pilkington? Her plan implied certainty of possession, the permanence of the Harden Library world without end. He wondered whether he ought not to remind her that it might be about to come into the market, if it were not already as good as sold?

"Besides the cataloguing I want notes on all the rare or remarkable books. I believe some of them are unique."

He wondered more and more, and ended by wondering whether Dicky Pilkington were really so sure of his game?

"I see. You want a catalogue raisonne."

"I want something like this." She opened a drawer and showed him one of Rickman's Special Quarterly Catalogues of a year back. He remembered; it used to be sent regularly to old Sir Joseph Harden, their best customer.

"My grandfather said these catalogues were models of their kind—they could only have been done by a scholar. He wanted the library catalogued on the same lines. It was to have been done in his lifetime—"

"I wish it had been. I should have liked to have worked for Sir Joseph 'Arden."

Stirred by the praise, and by a sudden recollection of Sir Joseph, he spoke with a certain emotion, so that an aitch went by the board.

"Are you quite sure," said she, "that you know all about this sort of work?"

Had she noticed that hideous accident? And did it shake her belief in his fitness for the scholarly task?

"This is my work. I made that catalogue. I have to make them every quarter, so it keeps my hand in."

"Are you a quick worker?"

"Yes, I can be pretty quick."

"Could you finish my catalogue by the twenty-seventh? That's a little more than three weeks."

"Well—it would depend rather on the number of notes you wanted. Let me see—there must be about fourteen or fifteen thousand books here—"

"There are fifteen thousand."

"It would take three weeks to make an ordinary catalogue; and that would be quick work, even for me. I'm afraid you must give me rather more time."

"I can't. I'm leaving England on the twenty-sixth."

"Couldn't I go on with it in your absence?"

"No, that would hardly do."

"If you could only give me another week—"

"I couldn't possibly. I have to join my father at Cannes on the twenty-seventh."

So she was Sir Frederick Harden's daughter then, not his wife. Her last words were illuminating; they suggested the programme of a family whose affairs were in liquidation. They also revealed Sir Frederick Harden's amazing indifference to the fate of the library, an indifference that argued a certain ignorance of its commercial value. His father who had a scent keen as a hound's for business had taken in the situation. And Dicky, you might trust Dicky to be sure of his game. But if this were so, why should the Hardens engage in such a leisurely and expensive undertaking as a catalogue raisonne? Was the gay Sir Frederick trying to throw dust in the eyes of his creditors?

"I see," he said, "Sir Frederick Harden is anxious to have the catalogue finished before you leave?"

"No, he isn't anxious about it at all. He doesn't know it's being done. It is entirely my affair."

So Sir Frederick's affairs and his daughter's were separate and distinct; and apparently neither knew what the other was about. Rickman's conscience reproached him for the rather low cunning which had prompted him to force her hand. It also suggested that he ought not to take advantage of her ignorance. Miss Harden was charming, but evidently she was a little rash.

"If I may make the suggestion, it might perhaps be wiser to wait till your return."

"If it isn't done before I go," said Miss Harden, "it may never be done at all."

"And you are very anxious that it should be done?"

"Yes, I am. But if you can't do it, you had better say so at once."

"That would not be strictly true. I could do it, if I worked at it pretty nearly all day and half the night. Say sixteen hours out of the twenty-four."

"You are thinking of one person's work?"

"Yes."

"But if there are two persons?"

"Then, of course, it would take eight hours."

"So, if I worked, too—"

"In that case," he replied imperturbably, "it would take twelve hours."

"You said eight just now."

"Assuming that the two persons worked equally hard."

She crossed to a table in the middle of the room, it was littered with papers. She brought and showed him some sheets covered with delicate handwriting; her work, poor lady.

"This is a rough catalogue as far as I've got. I think it will be some help."

"Very great help," he murmured, stung by an indescribable compunction. He had not reckoned on this complication; and it made the ambiguity of his position detestable. It was bad enough to come sneaking into her house as his father's agent and spy, and be doing his business all the while that this adorably innocent lady believed him to be exclusively engaged on hers. But that she should work with him, toiling at a catalogue which would eventually be Rickman's catalogue, there was something in the notion extremely repulsive to his sense of honour. Under its muffling of headache his mind wrestled feebly with the situation. He wished he had not got drunk last night so that he could see the thing clearly all round. As far as he could see at present the only decent course was to back out of it.

"What I have done covers the first five sections up to F."

"I see," he said with a faint interest, "you are keeping the classical and modern sections distinct."

"Yes, I thought that was better."

"Much better."

"I haven't begun the classical section yet. Can I leave that to you?"

"Certainly." He felt that every assent was committing him to he knew not what.

"You see a great deal of the work is done already. That makes a difference, doesn't it?"

"Oh, yes; it makes all the difference." And indeed it did.

"In this case you can undertake it?"

"No. I think that in this case I couldn't undertake it at all."

"But—why not?" she asked, as well she might.

Why not, indeed? He walked two or three paces from her, trying to think it out. If only his head didn't ache so abominably! To refuse to share the work with her was of course to lay himself open to a most disgusting suspicion.

He paced back again. Did she suspect him of mercenary motives? No; she suspected nothing. Her face expressed disappointment and bewilderment, so far as she allowed it to express anything. One more turn. Thank Goodness, she was not looking at him; she was giving him time. Only a second, though. She had seated herself, as much as to say she was now waiting for an explanation. He mustn't keep her waiting; he must say something, but what on earth was he going to say?

And as he looked at the lady so serenely seated, there rose up before him a sudden impertinent, incongruous vision of Miss Poppy Grace's legs. They reminded him that certain affairs of his own imperatively called him back to town. Happy thought—why not say so?

"I ought to have said that in any case I couldn't undertake it. I couldn't make time without giving up some very important engagements."

"Could you not have thought of that before you came?"

"I did think of it. I thought I could fit everything in by going up to town from Saturday to Monday. But if I'm to finish by the twenty-seventh, even—even with your help, I oughtn't to lose a day, much less three days."

"I see. You are afraid of not being able to finish?"

He wavered, selecting some form of expression that might shadow forth what was passing in his mind.

"I'm afraid of making any promises I mightn't be able to keep."

Man's vacillation is Fate's determination, and Miss Harden was as firm as Fate. He felt that the fine long hands playing with the catalogue were shaping events for him, while her eyes measured him with their meditative gaze.

"I must risk that," she said. "I should lose more than three days in finding a substitute, and I think you will do the work as I want it done."

"And supposing I can't do it in time?"

"Will you do your best—that's all?"

"Certainly; whatever I do, I shall do my best. And if I fail you—"

Left unfinished, hanging in mid air, the phrase suggested the vague phantasmal contingencies for which he could find no name.

"I am willing to take the risk."

Her phrase too was satisfying. Its generous amplitude covered him like a cloak.

"But we haven't arranged anything about terms."

No, they had not. Was it in her adorable simplicity, or in the mere recklessness of her youth, that she engaged him first and talked about terms afterwards? Or did she know an honest man when she saw one? He took his note-book and pencil and made out an estimate with the rapidity of happy inspiration, a fantastic estimate, incredibly and ludicrously small.

"Then," said she, "there will be your expenses."

He had not thought of that difficulty; but he soared above it, still reckless and inspired.

"Expenses? Oh, expenses are included."

She considered the estimate with the prettiest pucker of her meditative brows.

"I don't understand these things; but—it seems very little."

"Our usual charge."

So swiftly did the wings of his inspiration carry him into the blue ideal, high above both verbal verity and the gross material fact.

She acquiesced, though with some reluctance. "Well, and when do you think you can begin?"

"Whenever it's most convenient to you. I shall have to take a look round first."

"You can do that at once."

By this time he had forgotten that whatever he might have drunk he had eaten nothing since the dinner of last night. He had ceased to feel faint and headachy and hungry, having reached that stage of faintness, headache and hunger when the body sheds its weight and seems to walk gloriously upon air, to be possessed of supernatural energy. He went up and down library steps that were ladders, and stood perilously on the tops of them. He walked round and round the walls, making calculations, till the library began to swing slowly round too, and a thin circle of grey mist swung with it. And all the time he was obscurely aware of a delicate grey-clad figure going to and fro in the grey mist, or seated intent at the table, doing his work. He felt that her eyes followed him now and then.

Heroism sustained him for an hour. At the end of the hour his progress round the room grew slower; and in passing by the table where she sat, he had to steady himself with one hand. A cold sweat broke on his forehead. He mopped it furtively. He had every reason to believe that his appearance was repulsive; and, in the same painful instant in which this conviction sank into him, she raised her head and he saw that she was beautiful. The upward look revealed her. It was as if some veil, soft but obscuring, had dropped from her face. As her eyes scanned him gently, it occurred to him that she had probably never before had an opportunity of intimately observing a gentleman suffering from the remoter effects of intoxication.

"You look tired," she said. "Or are you ill?"

He stood shame-faced before her; for her eyes were more disconcerting than when they had looked down on him from their height. They were tranquil now, full of kind thought and innocence and candour. Of innocence above all, a luminous innocence, a piercing purity. He was troubled by her presence; but it was not so much her womanhood that troubled him as the deep mystery of her youth.

He could not look at it as it looked at him; for in looking at it he remembered last night and many nights before. Somehow it made him see the things it could not see, his drunkenness, his folly, his passion, the villainous naked body of his sin. And it was for their work, and their marks upon him, that she pitied him.

"Have you had anything to eat?" said she.

"Oh, yes, thanks," he answered vaguely.

"When?"

"Well—as far as I can remember it was about eight o'clock last night."

"Oh—how very thoughtless of me. I am so sorry."

"It's my own fault entirely. I wouldn't have mentioned it, except to account for my stupidity."

She crossed the room with a quick movement of distress and rang the bell. With horror he perceived her hospitable intention.

She was actually ordering his dinner and his room. He heard every word of her soft voice; it was saying that he was to have some soup, and the chicken, and the tart—no, the jelly, and a bottle of burgundy, in the morning-room. He saw the young footman standing almost on tip-toe, winged for service, fired with her enthusiasm and her secrecy.

Coming on that sinister and ambiguous errand, how could he sleep under her roof? How could he eat her chicken, and drink her burgundy, and sit in her morning-room? And how could he explain that he could not? Happily she left him to settle the point with the footman.

With surprise and a little concern Lucia Harden learnt that the rather extraordinary young man, Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, had betaken himself to an hotel. It appeared, that courteously, but with an earnestness that admitted of no contradiction, he had declined all hospitality whatever.



CHAPTER XV

It was Friday morning, and Mr. Rickman lay in bed, outwardly beholding through the open window the divinity of the sea, inwardly contemplating the phantoms of the mind. For he judged them to be phantoms (alcoholic in their origin), his scruples of last night. Strictly speaking, it was on Wednesday night that he had got drunk; but he felt as if his intoxication had prolonged itself abnormally, as if this were the first moment of indubitable sobriety.

And as he lay there, he prepared himself to act the part of the cold, abstracted, supercilious man of business, the part already too horribly familiar to him as young Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He reflected how nearly he had wrecked his prospects in that character. He bade himself beware of woman and of drink, the two things most fatal to stability of judgement. He recalled, painfully, the events of last evening. He was not quite sure what he had done, or hadn't done; but he believed he had all but flung up the chance of securing for Rickman's the great Harden Library. And he had quite a vivid and disturbing recollection of the face, the person that had inspired him with that impulse of fantastic folly.

In the candid light of morning this view of his conduct presented itself as the sane thinking of a regenerated intellect. He realized, as he had not realized before, how colossal was the opportunity he had so narrowly let slip. The great Harden Library would come virgin into the market, undefiled by the touch of commerce, the breath of publicity. It had been the pure and solitary delight of scholar lovers who would have been insulted by the suggestion that they should traffic in its treasures. Everything depended on his keeping its secret inviolate. Heavens! supposing he had backed out of that catalogue, and Miss Harden had called in another expert. At this point he detected in himself a tendency to wander from the matter in hand. He reminded himself that whatever else he was there for, he was there to guard the virginal seclusion of the Aldine Plato, the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde. He tried to shut his eyes against his vivid and disturbing vision of the lady of the library. It suggested that he was allowing that innocent person to pay fifteen pounds for a catalogue which he had some reason to believe would be of no earthly use to her. He sat up in bed, and silenced its suggestions with all the gravity of his official character. If the young lady insisted on having a catalogue made, he might as well make it as any one else; in fact, a great deal better. He tried to make himself believe that he regretted having charged her fifteen pounds when he might have got fifty. It was more than unbusiness-like; it was, even for him, an incredibly idiotic thing to do; he would never have done it if he had not been hopelessly drunk the night before.

He got out of bed with a certain slow dignity and stepped into his cold bath solemnly, as into a font of regeneration. And as he bathed he still rehearsed with brilliance his appointed part. No criticism of the performance was offered by his actual self as revealed to him in the looking-glass. It stared at him with an abstracted air, conspicuous in the helpless pathos of its nakedness. It affected absorption in the intricate evolutions of the bath. Something in its manner inspired him with a vague distrust. He noticed that this morning it soaped itself with a peculiar care, that it displayed more than usual interest in the trivial details of dress. It rejected an otherwise irreproachable shirt because of a minute wine stain on the cuff. It sniffed critically at its coat and trousers, and flung them to the other end of the room. It arrayed itself finally in a brand-new suit of grey flannel, altogether inexpressive of his role. He could not but feel that its behaviour compromised the dignity of the character he had determined to represent. It is not in his best coat and trousers that the book-dealer sets out on the dusty quest of the Aldine Plato and the Neapolitan Horace and the Aurea Legenda of Wynkyn de Worde.

He could no longer conceal the fact that he had dressed himself elaborately for an interview with Miss Harden. But he endeavoured to adjust his mind to a new and less disturbing view of the lady. He had seen her last night through a flush of emotion that obscured her; he would see her to-day in the pure and imperturbable light of the morning, and his nerves should not play the devil with him this time. He would be cool, calm, incorruptibly impersonal, as became Rickman, the man of business, Rickman of Rickman's.

Unfortunately, though the role was rehearsed with ease in the privacy of his bedroom, it proved impossible to sustain it under Miss Harden's candid eyes. At the first sight of them he lost all grasp and memory of his part; he broke down disgracefully, miserably. The sound of her voice revived his agony of the previous night. True, the flush of emotion had subsided, but in the fierce intellectual light that followed, his doubts and scruples showed plainer than ever. They even acquired a certain logical order and cohesion.

He concealed himself behind the projecting wing of a bookcase and wrestled with them there. Dispassionately considered, the situation stood thus. He was possessed of certain knowledge relating to Sir Frederick Harden's affairs. That was neither bad nor good. He had allowed Sir Frederick Harden's daughter to engage him in a certain capacity, knowing perfectly well that she would not have done so had she herself possessed that knowledge. That was bad—distinctly bad. He was going to take advantage of that engagement to act in another capacity, not contemplated by his employer, namely, as valuer of said employer's property and possibly as the agent for its purchase, well knowing that such purchase would be effected without reference to its intrinsic or even to its market value. That was worse.

These were the simple data of his problem. The problem (seen with excruciating lucidity) stated itself thus. Assuming, first of all, Miss Harden's ignorance and his own knowledge, what was the correct attitude of his knowledge to her ignorance? In other words, was it his business to enlighten her as to the state of her father's finances?

No; it might be somebody else's business, but most decidedly it was not his. His business, as far as he could see it, was simply to withdraw as gracefully as possible from a position so difficult to occupy with any decency.

He must then make another attempt to back out of it. No doubt it would be an uncommonly awkward thing to do. The lady had already shown a very pretty little will of her own, and supposing she insisted on holding him to his bargain? There was that estimate, too; it seemed to have clinched things, somehow, between him and Miss Harden. He did not exactly know how to deal with that high-handed innocence, but he would ask her to allow him to re-consider it.

He approached her with his head tossed up a little more than usual, his way when he was about to do something disagreeable, to drive a bargain or to ask a favour.

"Miss Harden, may I speak to you one moment?"

She looked up. Her face and figure were radiant in the light from the south window.

"What is it?" she asked.

She was busy at one of the bookcases with a note-book and pencil, cataloguing on an absurd but independent plan of her own. He gave a rueful glance at her.

"I'm not sure that I ought to have let you engage me last night. I wonder if I might ask you—"

"To release you from your engagement?"

"You must think I'm behaving very badly."

She did not contradict him; neither did she assent. She held him for the moment under her long penetrating gaze. Her eyes were not of the detective sort, quick to penetrate disguises. They were (though she did not know it) eyes that possessed the power of spiritual seduction, luring souls to confession. Your falseness might escape them; but if there was any truth in you, she compelled you to be true.

She compelled Rickman to be impulsive.

"I'd give anything to know what I ought to do."

She did not help him out.

"I can't make up my mind about this work."

"Is it the question of time? I thought we had made that clear? You didn't undertake to finish by the twenty-seventh."

"The question is whether I should have undertaken it at all."

"It might have been as well to have answered that question first."

"I couldn't answer it. There were so many things—"

"Do you want a longer time in town?"

"I want a longer time here, to think it over, to make up my mind whether I can go on—"

"And in the meanwhile?"

"The work goes on just the same."

"And if you decide that you can't continue it?"

"I should find a substitute."

"The substitute might not be just the same. For instance, he might not have so scrupulous a conscience."

"You mean he might not be so eager to back out of his engagements."

"I mean what I said. Your position seems to be a little difficult."

"I wish to goodness, Miss Harden, I could explain it."

"I don't suggest that you should explain it. It doesn't seem to be so very clear to yourself."

"It isn't. I really don't know what I ought to do."

"No more do I. But I can tell you what you ought to have done. You ought to have made up your mind last night."

"Well, the fact is—last night—I hadn't very much mind left to make up."

"No, I remember. You were rather done up. I don't want to bind you by last night, if it's at all unfair to you."

"It isn't in the least unfair to me. But I'm not sure that it mightn't be very unfair to you; and, you see, I want to think it out."

"Very well, think it out, and let me know some time to-night. Will that satisfy you?"

"It ought to."

And for the moment it did satisfy him. He felt that conscience, that stern guardian of his conduct, was off duty for the day. He was free (for the day) to abandon himself to the charm of Miss Harden's society. The experience, he told himself, would be altogether new and delightful.

New it undoubtedly was; but he remained a little uncertain as to the delight; the immediate effect of Miss Harden's presence being an intellectual disturbance amounting almost to aberration. It showed itself, first of all, in a frightful exaltation of the consciousness of self. To Mr. Rickman, striving to be noiseless, it seemed that the sound of his boots, as he crossed the library, reverberated through the immensity of space, while the creaking of his new braces advertised in the most horrible manner his rising up and his sitting down. Things were worse when he sat down; for then his breathing, light but noticeably frequent, made him the unquiet centre of the room. In the surrounding stillness the blowing of his nose became a monstrous and appalling act. And no sooner was his attention abstracted from his nose than it settled in his throat, producing a series of spasmodic contractions which he imagined to be distinctly audible. It was really as if his body had somehow detached itself, and was rioting in a conspicuous and unseemly individuality of its own. He wondered what Miss Harden thought of its behaviour.

This state of things was bad enough when he was separated from her by the entire length of the room; but their work required a certain collaboration, and there were occasions when he was established near her, when deliberately, in cold blood and of his own initiative, he was compelled to speak to her. No language could describe the anguish and difficulty of these approaches. His way was beset by obstacles and perils, by traps and snares; and at every turn there waited for him the shameful pitfall of the aitch. He whose easy courtesy charmed away the shyness of Miss Flossie Walker, whose conversation (when he deigned to converse) was the wonder and delight of the ladies of his boarding-house, now blushed to hear himself speak. The tones of his voice were hateful to him; he detected in them some subtle and abominable quality that he had not observed before. How would they appeal to Miss Harden? For this miserable consciousness of himself was pervaded, transcended by his consciousness of her.

Of her beauty he grew every minute more aware. It was not of the conspicuous and conquering kind; it carried no flaming banner of triumphant sex; indeed, it demanded a kindred fineness of perception to discern it, being yet vague with the softness of her youth. Her hair was mere darkness without colour or flame, her face mere whiteness without a flush; all her colour and her light were, where her soul was, in her mouth and eyes. These showed more vivid for that toneless setting; they dominated her face. However he looked at her his gaze was led up to them. For the long dim lines of her body flowed upwards from her feet like the curves of a slender flame, mingling, aspiring, vanishing; the edges of her features were indistinct as the edges of a flame. This effect of an upward sweep was repeated in the tilt of her vivid mouth and emphasised by the arch of her eyebrows, giving a faintly interrogative expression to her face. All this he noticed. He noticed everything about her, from the fine curling flame-like edges of her mouth and the flawless rim of her ears, to her finger-tips and the slope of her small imperious feet. He caught every inflection of her voice; without looking at her, he was aware of every turn of her head, every movement of her eyelids; he watched with furtive interest her way of touching and handling things, of rising and sitting, of walking and being still. It was a new way, unlike Poppy's way, or Flossie's way, or the way of any woman he had yet seen. What struck him most was the intense quiet of her presence; it was this that made his own so noisy and obtrusive.

And yet, she didn't, she really didn't appear to notice it. She might have been unaware that there was any such person as Mr. Savage Keith Rickman in the room. He wondered how on earth she achieved that serene unconsciousness; he came to the conclusion that it was not her own achievement at all, but the achievement of her race. Theirs too that something subtly imperious in her bearing, which seemed not so much the attitude of her mind as the way her head was set on her shoulders. He could not say that she betrayed any sense of his social inferiority, unless it were in a certain courtesy which he gathered to be rather more finished than any she would have shown to a man of her own class.

It was not only finished, it was final. The thing was so perfect in itself that obviously it could lead no further. She would say in her exquisite voice, "Would you mind taking these five volumes back to your shelf?" or, "I'm sorry to interrupt you, but can you tell me whether this is the original binding?" Under no circumstances could he imagine himself replying, "I wouldn't mind taking fifty volumes," or "I like being interrupted." All this was a complete inversion of the rules that Keith Rickman was acquainted with as governing polite intercourse between the sexes, and he found it extremely disconcerting. It was as if some fine but untransparent veil had been hung between him and her, dividing them more effectually than a barricade.

The wonder, which grew with the morning, was not so much in the things she said as in the things she didn't say. Her powers of reservation seemed to Rickman little short of miraculous. Until yesterday he had never met a woman who did not, by some look or tone or movement of her body, reveal what she was thinking about him. Whatever Miss Harden thought about him she kept it to herself. Unfortunately the same high degree of reticence was expected from him, and to Keith Rickman, when not restrained by excess of shyness, reticence came hard. It was apt to break down when a severe strain was put on it, as had been the case that morning. And it was appointed that the same thing should happen to him this afternoon.

As far as he could remember it happened in this way. He was busy getting the Greek dramatists into their places, an enterprise which frequently took him to her end of the room where Sir Joseph had established his classical library. He was sitting on the top of the steps, when she approached him carrying six vellum bound volumes in her arms, Sir Joseph's edition of Euripides of which the notes exceeded the text. He dismounted and took the books from her, turning very red as he did so.

"You should let me do all the carrying. These books are too heavy for you."

"Thank you, I think they ought to go with the others, on this shelf."

He did not answer all at once. He was absorbed in the Euripides. It was an edition de luxe, the Greek text exquisitely printed from a fount of semi-uncial type, the special glory of the Harden Classics.

He exclaimed, "What magnificent type!"

She smiled.

"It's rare too. I've never seen any other specimen—in modern printing."

"There is no other specimen," said she.

"Yes, there is. One book at least, printed, I think, in Germany."

"Is there? It was set up from a new fount specially made for this edition. I always supposed my grandfather invented it."

"Oh no, he couldn't have done that. He may have adapted it. In fact, he must have adapted it."

This young man had set aside a cherished tradition, as lightly as if he were blowing the dust off the leaves. She was interested.

"How can you tell that?"

"Oh, I know. It's very like a manuscript in the British Museum."

"What manuscript?"

"The Greek text of the Complutensian Polyglot." (He could not help saying to himself, 'That ought to fetch her!') "But it doesn't follow that it's the same type. Whatever it is, it's very beautiful."

"It's easier to read, too, than the ordinary kind."

He was still turning over the pages, handling the book as a lover handles the thing he loves. The very touch of the vellum thrilled him with an almost sensual rapture. Here and there a line flashed from a chorus and lured him deeper into the text. His impulse was still to exclaim, but a finer instinct taught him to suppress his scholarly emotion. Looking up as she spoke he saw her eyes fixed on him with a curious sympathy. And as he thought of the possible destiny of the Euripides he felt guilty as of a treachery towards her in loving the same book.

"Do you read Euripides?" he asked with naive wonder.

"Yes."

"And AEschylus and Sophocles and Aristoph—?" Mr. Rickman became embarrassed as he recalled certain curious passages, and in his embarrassment he rushed upon his doom—"and—and 'Omer?"

It was a breakdown unparalleled in his history. Never since his childhood had he neglected the aspirate in Homer. A flush made manifest his agony. He frowned, and gazed at her steadily, as if he defied her to judge him by that lapse.

"Yes," said the lady; but she was not thinking of Homer.

"By Jove," he murmured pensively. His eyes turned from her and devoured the text. He was torn between abject admiration of the lady and of the book.

"Which do you like best?" he asked suddenly. AEschylus or Sophocles? But it's an absurd question."

"Why absurd?"

"Because they're so different."

"Are they?" To tell the truth she was not thinking of them any more than she had been thinking of Homer.

He became perfectly hectic with excitement. "Rather! Can't you see the difference? Sophocles carved his tragedies. He carved them in ivory, polished them up, back and front, till you can't see the marks of the chisel. And AEschylus jabbed his out of the naked granite where it stood, and left them there with the sea at their feet, and the mist round their heads, and the fire at their hearts."

"But—but he left the edges a little rough."

"He did. God leaves them so sometimes when he's making a big thing."

Something like a faint ripple of light passed over her face under the obscuring veil it wore for him.

"But Sophocles is perfect," said she. She was not thinking of Sophocles one bit; she was thinking that when God made Mr. Rickman he had left the edges rough, and wondering whether it was possible that he had made "a big thing."

"Oh yes, he's perfect." He began to quote softly and fluently, to her uttermost surprise. His English was at times a thing to shudder at, but his Greek was irreproachable, perfect in its modulation and its flow. Freed from all flaws of accent, the musical quality of his voice declared itself indubitably, marvellously pure.

The veil lifted. Her smile was a flash of intelligence, the sexless, impersonal intelligence of the scholar. This maker of catalogues, with the tripping tongue that Greek made golden, he had touched the electric chain that linked them under the deep, under the social gulf.

"Did you ever hear such a chorus? Pure liquid gold, every line of it. Still, you can read Sophocles with your hair on. I should have thought most worn—most ladies would like Euripides best?"

"Why? Because they understand him best?"

"No. Because he understood them best."

"Did he understand them? Euripides," said the young lady with decision, "was a decadent."

"Was he? How about the Bacchae? Of course, it's worth all the rest of his plays put together; they're not in the same street with it. It's a thing to dream about, to go mad about."

"My grandfather says it's not Euripidean." "Good Lord! How do we know it isn't the most Euripidean of the lot?"

"Well, it stands alone, doesn't it?"

"Yes. And he stands with it."

"Does he? My grandfather was judging him by his average."

"His average? Oh, I say, you know, you could reduce some very great poets to mediocrity by striking their average. Wouldn't you allow a man to be at least as great as his greatest achievement?"

"I wonder—"

"Anyhow, those are ripping good notes in that edition."

"They ought to be. They were by a good scholar—his greatest achievement."

He put down the Harden Euripides; and it struck Lucia that if Sir Joseph had been there this truthful young man would not have hesitated to put him down too. She laid her hand on the book with an air of possession and protection, which was a lesson in tact for the truthful young man. He leaned up against the bookcase with his hands in his pockets.

"I say," said he, "I hope you don't mind my talking like this to you?"

"No. Why shouldn't you?"

"Well, it isn't exactly what I'm here for."

That exciting conversation had lasted barely fifteen minutes; but it had set him for the time being at his ease. He had at any rate proved himself a scholar, and he was so far happier. He felt that he was beginning to get on with Miss Harden, to see a little way across the gulf, discerning the outlines of the further shore where that high lady walked unveiled.

Then suddenly, owing to a most humiliating incident, the gulf yawned again.

It was five o'clock, and he was left alone in the company of a fascinating little tea-table, laid, as if for a guest, with fine white linen, silk embroidered, with early Georgian silver and old china. It was laid for him, that little tea-table. He had delayed a little before beginning his repast, and it happened that when Miss Harden appeared again she found him holding a tea-cup to his lips with one hand, while the other groped in a dish of cream cakes, abstractedly, and without the guidance of a selective eye. Both eyes indeed were gazing dreamily over the rim of the tea-cup at her empty chair. He was all right; so why, oh why did he turn brick-red and dash his cup down and draw back his innocent hand? That was what he had seen the errand boy at Rickman's do, when he caught him eating lunch in a dark passage. He always had compassion on that poor pariah and left him to finish his meal in privacy; and with the same delicacy Miss Harden, perceiving his agony, withdrew. He was aware that the incident had marked him.

He stood exactly where he stood before. Expert knowledge was nothing. Mere conversational dexterity was nothing. He could talk to her about Euripides and Sophocles till all was blue; he could not blow his nose before her, or eat and drink before her, like a gentleman, without shame and fear.

They talked no more that evening.



CHAPTER XVI

At seven he again refused Miss Harden's hospitality and withdrew to his hotel. He was to return before nine to let her know his decision, and as yet he had done nothing towards thinking it out.

A letter had come for him by the evening post. It had been forwarded from his rooms and ran thus.

"My dear Rickets:

"I haven't forgotten about your little supper, so mind you turn up at our little pic-nic before Dicky drinks all the champagne. It's going to be awfully select.

"Ever your own and nobody else's,

"Poppy Grace.

"P.S.—How is your poor head?"

There are many ways of being kind and that was Poppy's way. She wanted to tell him not to be cut up about Wednesday night; that, whatever Dicky Pilkington thought of his pretensions, she still reckoned him in the number of the awfully select. And lest he should have deeper grounds for uneasiness her postscript hinted in the most delicate manner possible that she had not taken him seriously, attributing his utterances to their true cause. And yet she was his own and nobody else's. She was a good sort, Poppy, taking her all round.

He tried to think about Poppy and found it difficult. His mind wandered; not into the realms of fancy, but into paths strange and humiliating for a scholar and a poet. He caught himself murmuring, "Harmouth—Harcombe—Homer—Harden." He had got them all right. He never dreamed of—of dropping them when he wasn't excited. It was only in the beaten tracks where his father had gone before him that he was apt to slide. He was triumphant over Harmouth where he might have tripped over Hammersmith. Homer and Hesiod were as safe with him as with Horace Jewdwine. (He couldn't think how he had managed to come to grief over Homer just now. It was nerves, or luck, or pure accident, the sort of thing that might have happened to anybody.) Thank Heaven, his tongue was almost virgin to the aitch in Harden.