She had found it, the nameless, ineluctable charm.

And so for those last days the Dinner became a high funereal ceremony, increasing in valedictory splendour that proclaimed unmistakably, "Mr. Rickman is going."

In a neighbouring street he had found a room, cheap and passably clean, and (failing a financial miracle worked on his behalf) he would move into it to-morrow. He was going, now that he would have given anything to stay.

In the dining-room after dinner, Spinks with a dejected countenance, sat guarding for the last time the sacred silence of Rickman. They had finished their coffee, when the door that let out the maid with empty cups let in Miss Bishop, Miss Bramble and Miss Walker.

First came Miss Bishop; she advanced in a side-long and embarrassed manner, giggling, and her face for once was as red as her hair. She carried a little wooden box which with an unaccustomed shyness she asked him to accept. The sliding lid disclosed a dozen cedar pencils side by side, their points all ready sharpened, also a card with the inscription: "Mr. Rickman, with best wishes from Ada Bishop." At one corner was a date suggesting that the gift marked an epoch; at the other the letters P.T.O. The reverse displayed this legend, "If you ever want any typing done, I'll always do it for you at 6d. a thou. Only don't let on. Yours, A.B." Now Miss Bishop's usual charge was, as he knew, a shilling per thousand.

"Gentlemen," said she, explaining away her modest offering, "always like anything that saves them trouble." At this point, Miss Bishop, torn by a supreme giggle, vanished violently from the scene.

Mr. Rickman smiled sadly, but his heart remained as before. He had not loved Miss Bishop.

Next came Miss Bramble with her gift mysteriously concealed in silver paper. "All brain-workers," said Miss Bramble, "suffered from cold feet." So she had just knitted him a pair of socks—"bed-socks" (in a whisper), "that would help to keep him warm." Her poor old eyes were scarlet, not so much from knitting the bed-socks, as from contemplating the terrible possibility of his needing them.

Under Mr. Rickman's waistcoat there was the least little ghost of a quiver. He had not loved Miss Bramble; but Miss Bramble had loved him. She had loved him because he was young, and because he had sometimes repeated to her the little dinner-table jests that she was too deaf to hear.

Last of the three, very grave and demure, came Flossie, and she, like her friend, carried her gift uncovered. She proffered it with her most becoming air of correctness and propriety. It was a cabinet photograph of herself in her best attitude, her best mood and her best blue blouse. It was framed beautifully and appropriately in white silk, embroidered with blue forget-me-nots by Flossie's clever hands. She had sat up half the night to finish it. He took it gently from her and looked at it for what seemed to Flossie an excessively long time. He was trying to think of something particularly pretty and suitable to say. In his absorption he did not notice that he was alone with her, that as Flossie advanced Spinks and Soper had withdrawn.

"I don't know whether you'll care for it," said she. She was standing very close beside him, and her face under the gas-light looked pale and tender.

"Of course I'll care for it." He laid her gift on the table beside the others and stood contemplating them. She saw him smile. He was smiling at the bed-socks.

"You are all much too good to me, you know."

"Oh, Mr. Rickman, you've been so awfully good to me."

He looked round a little anxiously and perceived that they were alone.

"No, Flossie," he said, "I've not been good to anyone, I'm not very good to myself. All the same, I'm not an utter brute; I shan't forget you."

Flossie's eyes had followed, almost jealously, the movement of his hand in putting down her gift; and they had rested there, fixed on her own portrait, and veiled by their large white lids. She now raised them suddenly, and over their black profundity there moved a curious golden glitter that flashed full on his face.

"You didn't remember me, much, last time you went away."

"I didn't remember anybody, Flossie; I had too much to think of."

It struck him that this was the first time she had looked him full in the face; but it did not strike him that it was also the first time that he had found himself alone in a room with her, though they had been together many times out of doors and in crowded theatres and concert halls. Her look conveyed some accusation that he at first failed to understand. And then there came into his mind the promise he had made to her at Easter, to take her to the play, the promise broken without apology or explanation. So she still resented it, did she? Poor little Flossie, she was so plump and pretty, and she had been so dependent on him for the small pleasures of her life.

"You're always thinking," said Flossie, and laughed.

"I'm sorry, Flossie; it's a disgusting habit, I own. I'll make up for it some day. We'll do a lot of theatres and—and things together, when my ship comes in."

"Thank you, Mr. Rickman," said she with a return to her old demeanour. "And now I suppose I'd better say good-night?"

She turned. They said good-night. He sprang to open, the door for her. As she went through it, his heart, if it did not go with her, was touched, most palpably, unmistakably touched at seeing her go. He had not loved Flossie; but he might have loved her.

Mr. Soper, who had been waiting all the while on the stairs, walked in through the open door. He closed it secretly.

He laid his hand affectionately on Rickman's shoulder. "Rickman," he said solemnly, "while I 'ave the opportunity, I want to speak to you. If it should 'appen that a fiver would be useful to you, don't you hesitate to come to me."

"Oh, Soper, thanks most awfully. Really, no, I couldn't think of it."

"But I mean it. I really do. So don't you 'esitate; and there needn't be any hurry about repayment. That," said Mr. Soper, "is quite immaterial." Failing to extract from Rickman any distinct promise, he withdrew; but not before he had pressed upon his immediate acceptance a box of his favourites, the Flor di Dindigul.

By this time Rickman's heart was exceedingly uncomfortable inside him. He had hated Soper.

He thought it was all over, and he was glad to escape from these really very trying interviews to the quiet of his own room. There he found Spinks sitting on his bed waiting for him. Spinks had come to lay before him an offering and a scheme. The offering was no less than two dozen of gents' best all-wool knitted hose, double-toed and heeled. The scheme was for enabling Rickman thenceforward to purchase all manner of retail haberdashery at wholesale prices by the simple method of impersonating Spinks. At least in the long-run it amounted to that, and Rickman had some difficulty in persuading Spinks that his scheme, though in the last degree glorious and romantic, was, from an ethical point of view, not strictly feasible.

"What a rum joker you are, Rickman. I never thought of that. I wonder—" (He mused in an unconscious endeavour to restore the moral balance between him and Rickman). "I wonder who'll put you to bed, old chappy, when you're tight."

"Don't fret, Spinky. I'm almost afraid that I shall never be tight again in this world."

"Oh, Gosh," said Spinks, and sighed profoundly. Then, with a slight recovery, "do you mean you won't be able to afford it?"

"You can put it that way, if you like."

In time Spinks left him and Rickman was alone. Just as he was wondering whether or no he would pack his books up before turning in, there was a soft rap at his door. He said, "Come in" to the rap; and to himself he said, "Who next?"

It was Mrs. Downey; she glanced round the room, looked at Flossie's photograph with disapproval, and removed, not without severity, Miss Bramble's bed-socks from a chair. She had brought no gift; but she sat down heavily like a woman who has carried a burden about with her all day, and can carry it no farther. Her features were almost obliterated with emotion and glazed with tears that she made no effort to remove.

"Mr. Rickman," she said, "do you reelly wish to go, or do you not?"

He looked up surprised. "My dear Mrs. Downey, I don't; believe me. Did I ever say I did?"

Her face grew brighter and rounder till the very glaze on it made it shine like a great red sun. "Well, we'd all been wondering, and some of us said one thing, and some another, and I didn't know what to think. But if you want to stay perhaps—we can come to some arrangement." It was the consecrated phrase.

He shook his head.

"Come, I've been thinking it over. You won't be paying less than five shillings a week for your empty room, perhaps more?"

He would, he said, be paying six shillings.

"There now! And that, with your food, makes sixteen shillings at the very least."

"Well—it depends upon the food."

"I should think it did depend upon it." Mrs. Downey's face literally blazed with triumph. She said to herself, "I was right. Mr. Spinks said he'd take it out of his clothes. Miss Bramble said he'd take it out of his fire. I said he'd take it out of his dinner."

"Now," she continued, "if you didn't mind moving into the front attic—it's a good attic—for a time, I could let you 'ave that, and board you, for fifteen shillings a week, or for fourteen, I could, and welcome. As I seldom let that attic, it would be money in the pocket to me."

"Come," she went on, well pleased. "I know all about it. Why, Mr. Blenkinsop, when he first started to write, he lived up there six months at a time. He had his ups, you may say, and his downs. One year in the attic and the next on the second floor, having his meals separate and his own apartments. Then up he'd go again quite cheerful, as regularly as the bills came round." Here Mrs. Downey entered at some length upon the history of the splendour and misery of Mr. Blenkinsop. "And that, I suppose," said Mrs. Downey, "is what it is to be a poet."

"In fact," said Rickman relating the incident afterwards to Miss Roots, "talk to Mrs. Downey of the Attic Bee and she will thoroughly understand the allusion."

After about half an hour's conversation she left him without having received any clear and definite acceptance of her proposal. That did not prevent her from announcing to the drawing-room that Mr. Rickman was not going after all.

At the hour of the last post a letter was pushed under his door. It was from Horace Jewdwine, asking him to dine with him at Hampstead the next evening. Nothing more, nothing less; but the sight of the signature made his brain reel for a second. He stood staring at it. From the adjoining room came sounds made by Spinks, dancing a jig of joy which brought up Mr. Soper raging from the floor below.

Jewdwine? Why, he had made up his mind that after the affair of the Harden library, Jewdwine most certainly would have nothing more to do with him.

Jewdwine was another link. And at that thought his heart heaved and became alive again.



CHAPTER XXXIX

In the act of death, as in everything else that he had ever done, Sir Frederick Harden had hit on the most inappropriate, the most inconvenient moment—the moment, that is to say, when Horace Jewdwine had been appointed editor of The Museion, when every minute of his day was taken up with forming his staff and thoroughly reorganizing the business of his paper. It was, besides, the long-desired moment, for which all his years at Oxford had been a training and a consecration; it was that supreme, that nuptial moment in which an ambitious man embraces for the first time his Opportunity.

The news of Lucia's trouble found him, as it were, in the ardours and preoccupations of the honeymoon.

It was characteristic of Jewdwine that in this courting of Opportunity there had been no violent pursuit, no dishevelment, no seizing by the hair. He had hung back, rather; he had waited, till he had given himself value, till Opportunity had come to him, with delicate and ceremonious approach. Still, his head had swum a little at her coming, so that in the contemplation of his golden bride he had for the time being lost sight of Lucia.

As for marrying his cousin, that was a question with which for the present he felt he really could not deal. No doubt it would crop up again later on to worry him.

Meanwhile he gave to Lucia every minute that he could spare from the allurements of his golden bride. For more than a fortnight her affairs had been weighing on him like a nightmare. But only like a nightmare, a thing that troubled him chiefly in the watches of the night, leaving his waking thoughts free to go about the business of the day, a thing against which he felt that it was impossible to contend. For Lucia's affairs had the vagueness, the confusion of a nightmare. Details no doubt there were; but they had disappeared in the immensity of the general effect. Being powerless to deal with them himself, he had sent down his own solicitor to assist in disentangling them. But as the full meaning of the disaster sank into him he realized with the cold pang of disappointment that their marriage must now be indefinitely postponed.

To be sure, what had as yet passed between them hardly amounted to an understanding. All Jewdwine's understandings had been with himself. But the very fact that he was not prepared to act on such an understanding made him feel as responsible as if it actually existed. Being conscious of something rather more than cousinly tenderness in the past, he really could not be sure that he was not already irretrievably committed. Not that Lucia's manner had ever taken anything of the sort for granted. He had nothing to fear from her. But he had much (he told himself) to fear from his own conscience and his honour.

All this was the result of deliberate reflection. In the beginning of the trouble, at the first news of his uncle's death, his sympathy with Lucia had been free from any sordid anxiety for the future which he then conceived to be inseparably bound up with his own. Rickman's letter was the first intimation that anything had gone wrong. It was a shock none the less severe because it was not altogether a surprise. It was just like his uncle Frederick to raise money on the Harden Library. The shock lay in Rickman's assumption that he, Jewdwine, was prepared, instantly, at ten days' notice, to redeem it. It was what he would have liked to have done; what, if he had been a rich man, he infallibly would have done; what even now, with his limited resources, he might do if it were not for the risk. Rickman had assured him that there was no risk, had implied almost that it was an opportunity, a splendid investment for his money. He could see for himself that it was his chance of doing the beautiful thing for Lucia. Looking back upon it all afterwards, long afterwards, he found consolation in the thought that his first, or nearly his first, impulse had been generous.

At first, too, he had not given a thought to Rickman except as the medium, the unauthorized and somewhat curious medium, of a very startling communication. Enough that he was expected to produce at ten days' notice a sum which might be anything you pleased over one thousand two hundred pounds. It was not until he realized that he was seriously invited to contend with Rickman's in a private bid for the Harden library that he began to criticize Rickman's movement in the matter. Everything depended on Rickman's estimate of the risk, and Rickman was not infallible. In denying Rickman's infallibility he had not as yet committed himself to any harsh judgement of his friend. His first really unpleasant reflection was that Rickman's information was unsatisfactory, because vague; his next that Rickman was giving him precious little time for deliberation. He was excessively annoyed with Rickman upon both these heads, but chiefly upon the latter. He was being hurried; he might almost say that pressure was being put on him. And why?

It was at this point he found himself drawn into that dangerous line, the attributing of motives.

He perceived in Rickman's suggestion a readiness, an eagerness to stand back and, as it were, pass on the Harden library. Rickman was a sharp fellow; he knew pretty well what he was about. Jewdwine's mind went back to the dawn of their acquaintance, and to a certain Florio Montaigne. Rickman had got the better of him over that Florio Montaigne. Hitherto, whenever Jewdwine had thought of that little transaction he had smiled in spite of himself; he really could not help admiring the smartness of a young man who had worsted him in a bargain. Jewdwine was a terror to all the second-hand booksellers in London and Oxford; he would waste so much of their good time in cheapening a book that it was hardly worth their while to sell it to him at double the price originally asked. The idea that he had paid five shillings for a book that he should have got for four and six would keep Jewdwine awake at night. And now his thought advanced by rapid steps in the direction unfavourable to Rickman. Rickman had driven a clever bargain over that Florio Montaigne; Rickman had cheated him, yes, cheated him infamously, over that Florio Montaigne. You could see a great deal through a very small hole, and a man who would cheat you over a Florio Montaigne would cheat you over a whole library if he got the chance. Not that there was any cheating in the second-hand book-trade; it was each man for himself and the Lord for us all.

The question was, what was young Rickman driving at? And what was he, Jewdwine, being let in for now? He found himself unable to accept Rickman's alleged motive in all its grand simplicity. It was too simple and too grand to be entirely probable. If young Rickman was not infallible, he was an expert in his trade. He was not likely to be grossly mistaken in his valuation. If the Harden library would be worth four or five thousand pounds to Jewdwine it would be worth as much or more to Rickman's. Young Rickman being merely old Rickman's assistant, he could hardly be acting without his father's knowledge. If young Rickman honestly thought that the library was worth that sum, it was not likely that they would let the prize slip out of their hands. The thing was not in human nature.

The more he thought of it the more he was convinced that it was a put-up job. He strongly suspected that young Rickman, in the rashness of his youth, had proceeded farther than he cared to own, that Rickman's found themselves let in for a bad bargain, and were anxious to get out of it. Young Rickman had no doubt discovered that the great Harden library was not the prize they had always imagined it to be. Jewdwine remembered that there was no record, no proper catalogue, or if there ever had been, it had been mislaid or lost. He had a vision (unconsciously exaggerated) of the inconceivable disorder of the place when he had last visited it; and as he recalled those great gaps on the shelves it struck him that the library had been gutted. His uncle Frederick had not been altogether the fool he seemed to be; nothing was more likely than that he knew perfectly well the value of the volumes that were the unique glory of the collection, and had long ago turned them into ready money. The rest would be comparatively worthless.

He read Rickman's letter over again and had a moment of compunction. It seemed a very simple and straightforward letter. But then, Rickman was a very clever fellow, he had the gift of expression; and there was that Florio Montaigne. He wouldn't have suspected him if only his record had been pure.

So instead of committing himself by writing to Rickman, he had sent his solicitor down to look into these matters. A day or two later, in reply to his further inquiries his solicitor assured him that there could be no doubt that the library was intact.

To Jewdwine in his present state of mind this information was upsetting. It not only compelled him to modify his opinion of Rickman after having formed it, but it threw him back on the agony and responsibility of decision. On the last morning of the term allowed him for reflection he received that hurried note from Rickman, who had flung all his emotions into one agonized line, "For God's sake wire me what you mean to do." The young poet, so careful of his prose style, had not perceived that what he had written was blank verse of the purest; which to Jewdwine in itself sufficiently revealed the disorder of his mind.

That cri de coeur rang in Jewdwine's brain for the next twenty-four hours. Then at the last moment he came forward with an offer of one thousand three hundred. The next day he heard from Lucia (what indeed he feared) that he had stepped in too late. The library was sold, to Isaac Rickman.

His dominant emotion was now anger; he was furious with Rickman for not having given him more time. He forgot his own delay, his fears and vacillations; he felt that he would have done this thing if he had only had more time. He had no doubt that Rickman had meant honestly by him; but he had blundered; he could and he should have given him more time. But gradually, as the certainty of his own generosity grew on him, his indignation cooled. Reinstated in his self-esteem he could afford to do justice to Rickman. What was more, now that the danger was over he saw his risk more clearly than ever. He had a vision of his brilliant future clouded by a debt of one thousand three hundred pounds impetuously raised on the unknown, of the Harden library hung like a mill-stone round his neck. He had no doubt that Rickman, in the very ardour of his honesty, had greatly exaggerated its value. And as he surveyed the probable consequences of his own superb impulse, he was almost grateful to Rickman for not having given him time to make a fool of himself. Thanks to Rickman, he had now all the credit of that reckless offer without the risk.

A week later he had a long letter from Lucia. She thanked him with much warmth and affection for his generosity; it was evident that it had touched her deeply. She assured him (as she had assured him before) that she needed no help. The library had sold for twelve hundred pounds, and two hundred had been handed over to her. Mr. Pilkington was afraid that no further sum would be forthcoming from the sale of the pictures and furniture, which had been valued over rather than under their present market price, and represented the bulk of the security. Still, she hoped to sell Court House; it could not bring in less than five thousand. That and a small part of her capital would pay off all remaining debts. It was a wearisome business; but Horace would be glad to hear that she would come out of it not owing a farthing to anybody, and would still have enough to live on.

Yes. Jewdwine had his pride. He was glad that his disreputable uncle's affairs had not landed him in the Bankruptcy Court after all; but he had a movement of indignation on Lucia's account and of admiration for Lucia.

No more of herself or her affairs; the rest was concerned with Rickman and his. "My dear Horace," she wrote, "we must do something for this poor little friend of yours. You were quite right about him. He is a genius; but fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, for himself, he is so much else besides. To think that he of all people should be entangled in our miserable business! He has got badly hurt, too. First of all, it preyed on his mind till he worried himself into a nervous fever. Kitty Palliser, who saw him, said he was nearly off his head. It seems he considered his honour implicated. As it happens he has behaved splendidly. He did everything in his power to prevent our losing the library, or at any rate to keep it out of his father's hands; and the mere fact that he failed doesn't lessen our obligation. He has simply ruined his own prospects in the attempt. Do you know, he tried to force his father to withdraw by threatening to leave their business if he didn't; and he had to keep his word. The horrible thing is that I actually owe him money—money which he won't take. He had been working hard for three weeks on a catalogue for me, and is insulted at the bare suggestion of payment. And here he is—absolutely stranded; in debt, I believe, and without a farthing. What in the world am I to do?"

"Poor Lucy!" thought Jewdwine, "as if she hadn't enough to bear without having Rickman on her shoulders."

"It seems to me that as he has done all this for us, we ought to stand by him. If you could do anything for him—couldn't you help him with some introductions? Or, better still, give him work, at any rate till he has found his feet? I'm sure you can count on his devotion—"

"Dear Lucy, she might be recommending me a valet."

"Do do something for him, and you will oblige me more than I can say."

That letter of Lucia's gave Jewdwine much matter for reflection and some pain. He had winced at the sale of Court House; it struck him as a personal blow. He had had a kind of tacit understanding with himself that, in that future which he had meant to share with Lucia, Court House would be the home of his retirement. Still, it must go. He had to live in town, and if at the moment he could have afforded to marry a penniless Lucia he could not have afforded two establishments.

As for the redemption of the Harden library he realized with a sharp pang that risk there had been none. He saw that what young Rickman had offered him was a unique and splendid opportunity, the opportunity of doing a beautiful thing for Lucia, and that without the smallest inconvenience to himself. And this opportunity had been missed. Just because he could not make up his mind about Rickman, could not see what Lucia had always seen, what he too saw now, that positively luminous sincerity of his. He saw it even now reluctantly—though he could never veer round again to his absurd theory of Rickman's dishonesty. He would have liked, if he could, to regard him as a culpable bungler; but even this consoling view was closed to him by Lucia. It was plain from her account that Rickman's task had been beyond human power. Jewdwine, therefore, was forced to the painful conclusion that for this loss to himself and Lucia he had nothing to blame but his own vacillation.

As for Rickman—

Lucia had taken a great deal of pains with that part of her subject, for she was determined to do justice to it. She was aware that it was open to her to take the ordinary practical view of Rickman as a culpable blunderer, who, by holding his tongue when he should have spoken, had involved her in the loss of much valuable property. To an ordinary practical woman the fact that this blunder had entailed such serious consequences to herself would have made any other theory impossible. But Lucia was not a woman who could be depended on for any ordinary practical view. Mere material issues could never confuse her estimate of spiritual values. To her, Rickman's conduct in that instance was a flaw in honour, and as such she had already sufficiently judged it. The significant thing was that he too should have so judged it; that he should have been capable of such profound suffering in the thought of it.

And now, somehow, it didn't seem to her to count.

It simply disappeared in her final pure and luminous view of Rickman's character. What really counted was the alertness of his whole attitude to honour, his readiness to follow the voice of his own ultimate vision, to repudiate the unclean thing revealed in its uncleanness; above all, what counted was his passionate sincerity. With her unerring instinct of selection Lucia had again seized on the essential. The triumph of Rickman's greater qualities appealed to her as a spectacle; it was not spoiled for her by the reflection that she personally had been more affected by his failure. If she showed her insight into Rickman's character by admitting the relative insignificance of that failure, she showed an equal insight into Jewdwine's by suppressing all mention of it now. For Horace would have regarded it as essential. It would have loomed large in his view by reason of its material consequences. Allowing for Horace's view she kept her portrait truer by omitting it.

And Jewdwine accepted her portrait as the true one. It appealed irresistibly to his artistic sense. He was by profession a connoisseur of things beautifully done. Rickman's behaviour, as described by Lucia, revived his earlier amused admiration for his young disciple. It was so like him. In its spontaneity, its unexpectedness, its—its colossal impertinence, it was pure Rickman.

Lucia had achieved a masterpiece of appreciation.

But what helped him in his almost joyous re-discovery of his Rickman was his perception that here (in doing justice to Rickman) lay his chance of rehabilitating himself. If he could not buy back the Harden library, he could at any rate redeem his own character. He did not hold himself responsible for Lucia's father's debts, but he was willing, not to say glad, to take up Lucia's. It was certainly most improper that she should be under any obligation to Rickman. In any case, Rickman's action concerned Lucia's family as much as Lucia; that is to say, it was his (Jewdwine's) affair. And personally he disliked indebtedness.

Another man might have handed Rickman a cheque for fifty pounds (the price of the catalogue raisonne) and washed his hands of him. But Jewdwine was incapable of that grossness.

He gave the matter a fortnight's delicate consideration. At the end of that time he had made up his mind not only to invite Rickman to contribute regularly to The Museion (a thing he would have done in any case) but to offer him, temporarily, the sub-editorship. Rash as this resolution seemed, Jewdwine had fenced himself carefully from any risk. The arrangement was not to be considered permanent until Rickman had proved himself both capable and steady—if then. In giving him any work at all on The Museion Jewdwine felt that he was stretching a point. It was a somewhat liberal rendering of his editorial programme.

The Museion was the one solitary literary journal that had the courage to profess openly a philosophy of criticism. Its philosophy might be obsolete, it might be fantastic, it might be altogether wrong; the point was that it was there. Its presence was a protest against the spirit of anarchy in the world of letters. The paper had lost influence lately owing to a certain rigidity in the methods of its late editor, also to an increasing dulness in its style. It was suffering, like all old things, from the unequal competition with insurgent youth. The proprietors were almost relieved when the death of its editor provided them with a suitable opportunity for giving it over into the hands of younger men. "We want new blood," said the proprietors. The difficulty was how to combine new blood with the old spirit, and Horace Jewdwine solved their problem, presenting the remarkable combination of an old head upon comparatively young shoulders. He was responsible, authoritative, inspired by a high and noble seriousness. He had taken his Aristotle with a high and noble seriousness; and in the same spirit he had approached his Kant, his Hegel and his Schopenhauer in succession. He was equipped with the most beautiful metaphysical theory of Art, and had himself written certain Prolegomena to AEsthetics.

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

Thus Jewdwine in his Prolegomena to AEsthetics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course, that makes all the difference."

"It does; if it isn't good enough—"

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

"Make what all right?"

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

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

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

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

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

"My family," said Jewdwine with a stiff smile, "will not have anything to do with you. It has nothing to do with The Museion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Self expansion—it seems an innocent impulse."

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

"I believe you!"

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

"It's given us one or two artists—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We want it—some of us."

"Do you understand it?"

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

"It never is in the street."

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

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

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

"What, Helen?"

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Alone?"

"Yes. Mrs. Palliser is dead."

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XLI

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

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

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

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

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

"Not now, I think—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Which?"

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

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

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

"Business."

"Too busy to write, I suppose?"

"Much too busy."

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

"Oh, well—a certain amount—Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, he is such a nice little boy, When there's nothing you do to annoy; But he's apt to stand aloof If you arsk him for the oof, And it's then that he looks coy. Oh, he'll show the cloven hoof, If you put him to the proof. When you want him to hand you the boodle He's not such a nice little boy.

"Yes, dickee, I see you!"

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

"Going?"

"Yes. I must go."

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

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

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

"You are a little nuisance.

"A d——d little nuisance."

"A d——d little nuisance."

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

"All right. I'll pay him."

"To-morrow?"

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

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

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

"What should happen?"

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

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

"What did you think I did it for?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XLII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Some devil, I think."

"You certainly might have done better."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewdwine made a gesture of disgust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I do not lump you with Letheby or anybody. On the contrary, I think you stand by yourself. Quite one half of this book is great poetry."

"You really think that?"

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

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

"Now? What on earth have you been doing to her?"

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

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

"After all—what's wrong with them?"

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

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

"Too much Rickman?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet this was not that Rickman either.

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

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

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

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

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

What had he let himself in for?



CHAPTER XLIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No!"

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

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

"Anyhow, he hasn't helped him."

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

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

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

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

"How about the Literary Observer? Mackinnon was friendly."

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

"How?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He isn't in with them."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Perhaps. But I mean to wear them."

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

"That's my look-out."

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

"My friends?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maddox obliged him.

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Ricky-ticky," he said, "you know everything. How did you know it?"

"Because I've been there."

"But—you didn't stay?"

"No—no. I didn't stay. I couldn't."

"I'm still there. And for the life of me I see no way out. It's like going round in the underground railway—a vicious circle. Since you're given to confession—own up. Don't you ever want to get back there?"