"I say, you must think I've acted in a very queer way."

"Queer isn't the word for it. It's astounding."

"D'you really think so? You mean I 'adn't any rights—it—it wasn't fair to you—to come back as I've done?"

"Well, I don't know about its being very fair; it certainly wasn't very safe."

"Safe? Safe? Ah—I was afraid you'd think that. Won't you let me explain?"

"Certainly. I should like to know your reasons for running into me like a giddy locomotive."

"Well, but I can't explain anything if you go on rotting like that."

"All right. Only look sharp. I've got to meet a fellow in Baker Street at seven. If you'll get under weigh we might finish off the explanation outside, if you're going back that way."

"Going back. Oh Lord—don't you know that I've come back here to stay. I've got a room—"

"Oh, that's the explanation, is it?"

"No, that's the thing I've got to explain. I thought you'd think I'd acted dishonourably in—in following her like this. But I couldn't stand it over there without her. I tried, but on my soul I couldn't. I shall be all right if I can only see her sometimes, at meals and—and so forth. I shan't say a word. I haven't said a word. I don't even think she knows; and if she did—So it's perfectly safe, you know, Rickman, it's perfectly safe."

"Who doesn't know what? And if who did?" roared Rickman, overcome with laughter.

"Sh—sh—sh—Flossie. I mean—M—miss Walker."

Rickman stopped laughing and looked at young Spinks with something like compassion. "I say, old chap, what do you mean?"

"I mean that I should have gone off my chump if I'd hung on at that place. I couldn't get her out of my mind, not even in the shop. I used to lie awake at nights, thinking of her. And then, you know—I couldn't eat."

"In fact, you were pretty bad, were you?"

"Oh, well, I just chucked it up and came here. It's all right, Razors; you needn't mind. I never had a chance with her. She never gave me so much as a thought. Not a thought. It's the queerest thing. I couldn't tell you how I got into this state—I don't know myself. Only now she's engaged and so forth, you might think that—well, you might think"—young Spinks had evidently come to the most delicate and complicated part of his explanation—"well, that I'd no right to go on getting into states. But when it doesn't make any difference to her, and it can't matter to you—" He paused; but Rickman gathered that what he wished to plead was that in those circumstances he was clearly welcome to his "state." "I mean that if it's all up with me, you know, it's all right—I mean, it's safe enough—for you."

Poor Spinks became lost in the maze of his own beautiful sentiments. Adoration for Rickman (himself the soul of honour) struggled blindly with his passion for Flossie Walker. But the thought, which his brain had formed, which his tongue refused to utter, was that the hopelessness of his passion made it no disloyalty to his friend. "It can make no difference to her, my being here," he said simply.

"Nonsense, you've as much right to be here as I have."

"Yes, but under the circumstances, it mightn't have been perfectly fair to you. See?"

"My dear Spinky, it's perfectly fair to me; but is it—you won't mind me suggesting it—is it perfectly fair to yourself?"

Spinks sat silent for a minute, laying his hand upon the place of, thought, as if trying to take that idea in. "Yes," he said deliberately. "That's all right. In fact, nothing else will do my business. It sounds queer; but that's the only way to get her out of my head. You see, when I see her I don't think about her; but when I don't see her I can't think of anything else."

Rickman was interested. It struck him that latterly he had been affected in precisely the opposite way. It was curious to compare young Sidney's sensations with his own. He forgot all about the man in Baker Street.

"I don't mean to say I shall ever get over it. When a man goes through this sort of business it leaves its mark on him somewhere." And indeed it seemed to have stamped an expression of permanent foolishness on Spinks's comely face.

Rickman smiled even while he sympathized. "Yes, I daresay. I'm sorry, old man; but if I were you I wouldn't be too down in the mouth. It's not worth it—I mean; after all, there are other things besides women in the world. It wouldn't be a bad place even if there weren't any women in it. Life is good," said the engaged man. "You had better dress for dinner." He could give no richer consolation without seeming to depreciate the unique value of Flossie. As for Spinks's present determination, he thought it decidedly risky for Spinks; but if Spinks enjoyed balancing himself in this way on the edge of perdition it was no business of his.

As it happened, the event seemed to prove that Spinks knew very well what he was about. The callow youth had evidently hit on the right treatment for his own disease. In one point, however, his modesty had deceived him. His presence was far from being a matter of indifference to Flossie. A rejected lover is useful in so many ways. It may be a triumph to make one man supremely happy; but the effect is considerably heightened if you have at the same time made another man supremely wretched. Flossie found that the spectacle of young Sidney's dejection restored all its first fresh piquancy to her engagement. At Tavistock Place he more than justified his existence. True, he did not remain depressed for very long, and there was something not altogether flattering in the high rebound of his elastic youth; but, as Miss Bishop was careful to point out, his joyous presence would have a most salutary effect in disturbing that prosaic sense of security in which gentlemen's affections have been known to sleep.

But Spinks was destined to serve the object of his infatuation in yet another way.

It was in the second spring after Rickman's engagement. Flossie and Ada were in the drawing-room one half hour before dinner, putting their heads together over a new fashion-book.

"Shouldn't wonder," said Miss Bishop, "if you saw me coming out in one of these Gloriana coats this spring. I shall get a fawn. Fawn's my colour."

"I must say I love blue. I think I'm almost mad about blue; any shade of blue, I don't care what it is. I know I can't go wrong about a colour. But then there's the style—" Flossie's fingers turned over the pages with soft lingering touches, while her face expressed the gravest hesitation. "Keith likes me best in these stiff tailor-made things; but I can't bear them. I like more of a fancy style."

"I see you do," said Miss Bishop solemnly.

"Yes, that's because she's a bit of a fancy article herself," murmured a voice from the back drawing-room, where Mr. Spinks had concealed himself behind a curtain, and now listened with a voluptuous sense of unlawful initiation.

"I sy, we shall have to stop, if he will keep on listening that wy."

"Don't stop, please, Miss Ada. There, I've got my fingers in my ears. On my honour, I have. You can talk as many secrets as you like now. I can't hear a word."

The two girls dropped their voices to a low impassioned monotone.

"You've got to dress for somebody else besides yourself now—an engaged young lady."

"Oh, I don't know that he takes so much notice. But he's given me lots of things, besides my ring. I'm to have a real silver belt—a Russian—next birthday."

"I sy, he's orf'ly good to you, you know. Some gentlemen get so careless once they're sure of you. D'you know, we all think you acted so honourable, giving out your engagement as soon as it was on. When do you think you'll be married?"

"I can't say. I don't know yet. Never, I think, as long as I'm in that old Bank."

Even with his fingers in his ears, young Sidney heard that voice, and before he could stop himself he was listening again.

"Don't you like it?" said Miss Bishop.

"No. I hate it."

Spinks gave a cough; and Miss Bishop began reading to herself in ostentatious silence, till the provocations of the page grew irresistible.

"Look here, Floss," she said excitedly. "Look at me. 'Fawn will be the pree-vyling colour this year, and for morning wear a plain tailor-myde costume in palest fawn is, for 'er who can stand it, most undeniably chic.'" Hitherto Miss Bishop had avoided that word (which she pronounced "chick") whenever she met it; but now, in its thrilling connection with the fawn-coloured costume, it was brought home to her in a peculiarly personal manner, and she pondered. "I wish I knew what that word meant. It's always coming up in my magazine."

"I think," said Flossie, "it means something like smart. Stylish, you know."

Young Sidney leapt suddenly from his seat. "Go it, Flossie! Give us the French for a nice little cup er tea."

"Really, it's too bad we can't have a plyce to ourselves where we can talk. I'm going." And as Miss Bishop went she still pondered Flossie's rendering of the word chic. Little did any of them know what grave issues were to hang on it.

Then Mr. Spinks emerged from his hiding-place. "Miss Walker," he said (he considered it more honourable to call her Miss Walker now whenever he could think of it; only he couldn't always think), "I didn't know you knew the French language."

"And why shouldn't I know it as well as other people?"

"I expect you know it a jolly sight better. Do you think, now, you could read and write it easily?"

"I might," said Flossie guardedly, "if I had a little practice."

"Because, if you could—You say your're tired of the Bank?"

"I should think I was tired of it."

"Well, Flossie, do you know, a good typewriter girl who can read and write French can get twice as much as you're getting."

"How do you know?"

"Girl I know told me so. She's corresponding clerk for a big firm of wine merchants in the City. She's going to be married this autumn; and if you looked sharp, you might get her berth."

"In a wine-merchant's shop? Mr. Rickman wouldn't hear of it."

"It isn't a shop, you know, it's an office. You ask him."

Flossie did not ask him; she knew a trick worth two of that. But not very long after Mr. Spinks had made his suggestion, finding Keith very snug in his study one evening, reading Anatole France, to his immense delight she whispered into his ear a little shy request that some day, when he wasn't busy, he would help her a bit with her French. The lessons were arranged for then and there, at so many kisses an hour, payable by quarterly instalments, if desired. And for several evenings (sitting very close together, as persons must sit who are looking over the same book) they read, translating turn by turn, the delicious Livre de Mon Ami, until Flossie's interest was exhausted.

"Come, I'm not going on with any more of that stuff, so you needn't think it. I've no time to waste, if you have; and I haven't come across one word in that book yet that'll be any use to me."

"What a utilitarian Beaver!" He lay back in his chair laughing at her, as he might have laughed at the fascinating folly of a child.

"I'll tell you what it is, Mr. Savage; I'll get another French master, if you don't look out. Some one who'll teach me the way I want to learn."

"I'll teach you any way you like, Floss, on any system; if you'll only explain what you want. What's your idea?"

"My idea's this. How would it be if you and me were to write French letters to each other?"

"Rather! The Beaver's intelligence is going to its head. That's the way to learn, Floss; you'll get over the ground like winking. But you know—I shall have to raise my terms."

"All right. We'll see about that."

He was delighted with her idea. That Flossie should have an idea at all was something so deliciously new and surprising; and what could be more heartrending than these prodigious intellectual efforts, her evident fear that her limitations constituted a barrier between them? As if it mattered! As if he wanted a literary critic for his wife. And how brutally he had criticized her—as if it mattered! Still, in spite of his compunction, the French lessons were not altogether a success. There was too much disagreement and discussion about terms; for the master became more and more exorbitant in his charges as the days went on, and the pupil still complained that she was learning nothing. She was thoroughly dissatisfied with his method. He would break off at the most interesting, the most instructive point, and let loose his imagination in all sorts of ridiculous histories that followed from the idea of her being a Beaver; and when she desired him to tell her such simple things as the French for "Your esteemed favour to hand," "Cheque enclosed," "We have forwarded to you to-day as per invoice," he wanted to know what on earth a beaver had to do with invoices.

It was Spinks who explained the nature of the connection.

Poor Spinks, who had made the suggestion with an almost suicidally honourable intention, was to his immense astonishment merely sworn at for his interference. And when Flossie brought Keith his tea that evening she found him in a most ungentlemanly humour.

She waited demurely for a pause in the storm that raged round Spinks and his confounded wine-merchant. She cast a significant glance at the table strewn at that moment with the rough draft of Rickman's tragedy. (Flossie couldn't understand why he could never write a thing out clearly from the first, nor why she shouldn't write it for him at his dictation.)

"It's all very well, Keith," said she, "but if you can't do more, I must."

Before she left the room it was understood between them that Flossie would renounce her wine-merchant, and that they would be married, if possible, some time in the autumn. He felt curiously shaken by that interview.

He spent the evening reading over what he had written, vainly trying to recall his inspiration, to kindle himself anew at his own flame. Last night he had had more inspiration than he could do with; his ideas had come upon him with a rush, in a singing torrent of light. His mind had been then almost intolerably luminous; now, there was twilight on its high parts and darkness over the face of its deep. His ideas, arrested in mid-air, had been flung down into the deep; and from the farther shore he caught, as it were, the flutter of a gown and the light laughter of a fugitive Muse.



CHAPTER L

One day, four years after the publication of Saturnalia, Rickman received a letter in an unknown hand; a woman's hand, but with a familiar vivid signature, the signature that is to be seen beneath the portraits of Walter Fielding, the greatest among contemporary poets, the living god of Rickman's idolatry.

"Dear Sir," he wrote (or rather, some woman had written for him), "I came across your Poems the other day; by chance, I must confess, and not by choice. I have something to say to you about them, and I would therefore be glad if you could call on me here, to-morrow. I say, call on me; for I am an old man, and you, if I am not mistaken, are a young one; and I say to-morrow, because the day after to-morrow I may not have that desire to see you which I feel to-day.

"Faithfully yours,

"Walter Fielding.

"PS.—You had better come in time for lunch at one o'clock."

Rickman's hand trembled as he answered that letter. All evening he said to himself, "To-morrow I shall see Fielding"; and the beating of his heart kept him awake until the dawn of the wonderful day. And as he dressed he said to himself, "To-day I shall see Fielding." That he should see him was enough. He could hardly bear to think what Fielding had to say to him.

He had risen early, so as to go down into Surrey on his bicycle. About noon he struck into the long golden road that goes straight across the high moor where the great poet had built him a house. Inside his gates, a fork of the road sloped to the shore of a large lake fringed with the crimson heather. The house stood far back on a flat stretch of moor, that looked as if it had been cut with one sweep of a gigantic scythe from the sheltering pine-woods.

He saw Fielding far off, standing at the door of his house to welcome him. Fielding was seventy-five and he looked sixty. A strong straight figure, not over tall nor over slender, wearing, sanely but loosely, the ordinary dress of an English gentleman. A head with strong straight features, masses of white hair that hid the summit of the forehead, a curling moustache and beard, close-clipped, showing the line of the mouth still red as in his youth. A head to be carved in silver or bronze, its edges bitten by time, like the edges of an antique bust or coin.

"So you've come, have you?" was his greeting which the grasp of his hand made friendly.

He took Rickman straight into his study, where a lady sat writing at a table in the window.

"First of all," said he, "I must introduce you to Miss Gurney, who introduced you to me."

Miss Gurney rose and held out a slender feverish hand. She did not smile (her face narrowed so abruptly below her cheekbones that there was hardly room for a smile on it), but her eyes under their thick black brows turned on him an eager gaze.

Her eyes, he thought, were too piercing to be altogether friendly. He wondered whether it was the flame in them that had consumed her face and made it so white and small.

She made a few unremarkable remarks and turned again to her writing table.

"Yes, Gertrude, you may go."

Her sallow nervous hands had already begun gathering up her work in preparation for the word that banished her. When it came she smiled (by some miracle), and went.

They had a little while to wait before luncheon. The poet offered whisky and soda, and could hardly conceal his surprise when it was refused.

"You must forgive me," he said presently, "for never having heard of you till yesterday. My secretary keeps these things from me as a rule. This time she allowed herself to be corrupted."

Rickman felt a sudden interest in Miss Gurney.

"Your poems were sent to her by a friend of hers, with the request—a most improper one—that I should read them. I had no intention of reading them; but I was pleased with the volume at first sight. It was exactly the right length."

"The right length?"

"Yes, small octavo; the very best length for making cigar lighters."

Rickman had heard of the sardonic, the cruel humour with which Fielding scathed his contemporaries; still, he could hardly have expected even him to deal such a violent and devilish blow. Though he flushed with the smart he bore himself bravely under it. After all, it was to see Fielding that he had come.

"I am proud," said he, "to have served so luminous a purpose."

His readiness seemed to have disarmed the formidable Fielding. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the young man a moment or two without speaking. Then the demon stirred in him again with a malignant twinkle of his keen eyes.

"You see I was determined to treat you honourably, as you came to me through a friend of Miss Gurney's. But for her, you would have gone where your contemporaries go—into the waste-paper basket. They serve no purpose—luminous or otherwise." He chuckled ominously. "I had the knife ready for you. But if you want to know why I paused in the deed of destruction, it was because I was fascinated, positively fascinated by the abominations of your illustrator. And so, before I knew what I was doing (or I assure you I would never have done it), I had read, actually read the lines which the creature quotes at the bottom of his foul frontispiece. Why he quoted them I do not know—they have no more to do with his obscenities than I have. And then—I read the poem they were taken from."

He paused. His pauses were deadly.

"You have one great merit in my eyes."

Rickman looked up with a courageous smile, prepared for another double-edged pleasantry more murderous than the last.

"You have not imitated me."

For one horrible moment Rickman was inspired to turn some phrase about the hopelessness of imitating the inimitable. He thought better of it; but not before the old man divined his flattering intention. He shook himself savagely in his chair.

"Don't—please don't say what you were going to say. If you knew how I loathe my imitators. I shouldn't have sent for you if you had been one of them."

His mind seemed to be diverted from his present victim by some voluptuous and iniquitous reminiscence. Then he began again. "But you and your Saturnalia—Ah!"

He leant forward suddenly as he gave out the interjection like a growl.

"Do you know you're a very terrible young man? What do you mean by setting my old cracked heart dancing to those detestable tunes? I wish I'd never read the d——d things."

He threw himself back in his chair.

"No, no; you haven't learnt any of those tunes from me. My Muse wears a straighter and a longer petticoat; and I flatter myself she has the manners of an English gentlewoman."

Rickman blushed painfully this time. He had no reply to make to that.

"I didn't mean," Fielding went on, "to talk to you about your Saturnalia. But On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of Confession—those are great poems."

Rickman looked up, startled out of his self-possession by the unexpected words and the sudden curious vibration in the voice that uttered them. Yet he could hardly realize that Fielding was praising him.

"They moved me," said Fielding, "as nothing moves me now, except the Psalms of David. I have been a great poet, as poets go nowadays; but" (he smiled radiantly) "the painful conviction is forced upon me that you will be a greater—if you live. I wanted to tell you this, because nobody else is likely to find it out until you're dead. You may make up your mind to that, my friend."

"I had made up my mind to many things. But they don't matter—now."

Fielding ignored the compliment. "Has any one found it out? Except yourself?"

"Only one person."

"Man or woman?"

He thought of Maddox, that irresponsible person. "A man. And perhaps he hardly counts."

The old poet gave him a keen glance from his all-knowing eyes.

"There is one other person, who apparently doesn't count, either. Well, I think that was the luncheon-bell."

On their way to the dining-room he remarked: "That's another reason why I sent for you. Because I hear they've not been particularly kind to you. Don't suppose I'm going to pity you for that."

"I don't pity myself, sir."

"No—no—you don't. That's what I like about you," he added, taking his guest by the arm and steering him to his place.

At luncheon Miss Gurney took a prominent part in the conversation, which Rickman for her sake endeavoured to divert from the enthralling subject of himself. But his host (perceiving with evident amusement his modest intention) brought it up again.

"Don't imagine, for a moment," said he, "that Miss Gurney admires you. She hates young poets."

Miss Gurney smiled; but as Rickman saw, more in assent than polite denial. Throughout the meal she had the air of merely tolerating his presence there because it humoured the great man's eccentricity. From time to time she looked at him with an interest in which he detected a certain fear. The fear, he gathered, was lest his coming should disturb, or in any way do harm to the object of her flagrant adoration.

After she had left the table Fielding reproached him for mixing water with his wine.

"In one way," said he, "you're a disappointment. I should have preferred to see you drink your wine like a man."

"Unfortunately," said Rickman, "it's not so easy to drink it like a man, if you've ever drunk it like a beast."

"Ah-h. You're an even more remarkable person than I thought you were," said the poet, rising abruptly from the table.

He proposed that they should take a walk in the garden, or rather on the moor; for the heather ran crimson to the poet's doors, and the young pines stood sentinel at his windows.

They walked slowly towards the lake. On their way there Fielding stopped and drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with the pure, sweet air.

"Ah! that's better." He looked round him. "After all, we're right, Rickman. It's the poets that shall judge the world; and if we say it's beautiful, it is beautiful. And good."

Happy Fielding, thought Rickman. Fielding had never suffered as he had suffered; his dream had never been divorced from reality. It seemed fitting to the younger poet that his god should inhabit these pure and lofty spaces, should walk thus on golden roads through a land of crimson, in an atmosphere of crystal calm. He would have liked to talk to Fielding of Fielding; but his awe restrained him.

Fielding's mind did not wander long from his companion. "Let me see," said he, "do you follow any trade or profession?" He added with a smile, "besides your own?"

"I'm a journalist." Rickman mentioned his connection with The Museion and The Planet.

"Ah, I knew there was an unlucky star somewhere. Well, at any rate, you won't have to turn your Muse on to the streets to get your living. But a trade's better than a profession; and a craft's better than a trade. It doesn't monopolize the higher centres. I certainly had the impression that you had been in trade."

Rickman wondered who could have given it to him. Miss Gurney's friend, he supposed. But who was Miss Gurney's friend? A hope came to him that made his heart stand still. But he answered calmly.

"I was. I worked for two years in a second-hand bookshop as a bibliographical expert; and before that I stood behind the counter most of my time."

"Why did you leave it? You weren't ashamed of your trade?"

"Not of my trade, but of the way I had to follow it. I'm not ashamed of working for Mr. Horace Jewdwine."

He brought the name in awkwardly. In bringing it in at all he had some vague hope that it might lead Fielding to disclose the identity of the friend. Horace Jewdwine was a link; if his name were familiar to Fielding there would be no proof perhaps, but a very strong presumption that what he hoped was true.

"He is a friend of yours?"

"Yes." His hope leapt high; but Fielding dashed it to the ground.

"I never heard of him. I see," he said, "you've got a conscience. Have you also got a wife?"

"Not yet—but—"

"Good. So young a man as you cannot afford to keep both. I am so old that I may be pardoned if I give you some advice. But why should I? You won't take it."

"I should like to hear it all the same, sir."

"Well, well, it's cheap enough. Whatever you do, don't fritter yourself away upon the sort of women it may be your misfortune to have met."

It was beautifully done, this first intimation of his consciousness of any difference between them; between Rickman who had glorified a variety actress, and Walter Fielding whose Muse had "always had the manners of an English gentlewoman." And to Rickman's heart, amid vivid images of Poppies and Flossies, the memory of Lucia Harden stirred like a dividing sword.

"That is my advice," said Fielding. "But you will not take it."

"These things," said Rickman, "are not always in our power."

In the silence which followed he put the question that was burning in him.

"May I ask who the friend was who told Miss Gurney about me?"

"You may ask Miss Gurney; but I do not think she'll tell you. It seems to be a secret, and Miss Gurney, strange to say, is a young woman who can keep a secret."

He led the way to a seat overlooking the lake where they sat for awhile in silence, and Rickman found his thoughts roaming from his god.

Presently Fielding rose and turned back to the house. Rickman felt that the slow footsteps were measuring now the moments that he had to be with him. He was glad that they were slow.

Fielding stopped at his house-door, and stood for a second gazing earnestly at the young man.

"When you write anything," he said, "you may always send it to me. But no more—please—no more Saturnalia."

"There won't be any more Saturnalia."

"Good. I do not ask you to come again to see me."

Rickman struggled for an answer, but could not think of anything better than, "It's enough for me to have seen you once," which was not at all what he had meant to say.

Fielding smiled faintly; his humour pleased, Rickman fancied, with the ambiguity of his shy speech.

"I'm afraid I've tired you, sir," he said impulsively.

"You have not tired me. I tire myself. But here is Miss Gurney; she will look after you and give you tea."

"Geniality," he continued, "is not my strong point, as you may have perceived. And any unnatural effort of the kind fatigues me. My own fault."

"You have been very generous to me."

"Generous? There can't be any generosity between equals. Only a simple act of justice. It is you who have been good to me."

"I? To you?"

"Yes. You have satisfied my curiosity. I own that sometimes I have wanted to know what sort of voice will be singing after I am dead. And now I do know. Good-bye, and thank you."

He pressed his hand, turned abruptly and shuffled into the house. He was noticeably the worse for his walk, and Rickman felt that he had to answer for it to Miss Gurney.

"I'm afraid I've tired him. I hope I haven't done him harm."

Miss Gurney glanced sharply at him, turned, and disappeared through the study window. Her manner implied that if he had harmed Fielding she would make him feel it.

She came back still unsmiling. "No. You have not tired him."

"Then," said he as he followed her into the drawing-room, "I am forgiven?"

"Yes. But I did not say you had not done him harm."

The lady paused in her amenities to pour out his tea.

"Miss Gurney," he said as he took the cup from her, "can you tell me the name of the friend who sent my book to you?"

"No, I'm afraid I cannot."

"I see. After all, I am not forgiven?"

"I am not at all sure that you ought to be."

"I heard what he said to you," she went on almost fiercely. "That's why I hate young poets. He says there is only you to hate."

"So, of course, you hate me?"

"I think I do. I wish I had never heard of you. I wish he had never seen you. I hope you will never come again. I haven't looked at your poems that he praises so. He says they are beautiful. Very well, I shall hate them because they are beautiful. He says they have more life in them than his. Do you understand now why I hate them and you? He was young before you came here. You have made him feel that he is old, that he must die. I don't know what else he said to you. Shall I tell you what he said to me? He said that the world will forget him when it's listening to you."

"You misunderstood him." He thought that he understood her; but it puzzled him that, adoring Fielding as she did, she yet permitted herself to doubt.

"Do you suppose I thought that he grudged you your fame? Because he doesn't. But I do."

"You needn't. At present it only exists in his imagination."

"That's enough. If it exists there—"

"You mean, it will go down the ages?"

She nodded.

"And you don't want it to go?"

"Not unless his goes too, and goes farther."

"You need hardly be afraid."

"I'm not afraid. Only, he has always stood alone, so high that no one has touched him. I've always seen him that way, all my life—and I can't bear to see him any other way. I can't bear any one to touch him, or even to come anywhere near him."

"No one ever will touch him. Whoever comes after him, he will always stand alone. And," he added gently, "you will always see him so."

"Yes," she said, but in a voice that told him she was still unconsoled. "If I had seen him when he was young, I suppose I should always see him young. Not that I care about that so much. His youth is the part of him that interests me least; perhaps because it was never in any way a part of me."

He looked at her. Did she realize how far Fielding's youth, if report spoke truly, had belonged to, or in her own words, "been a part of" other women? Did she resent their part in him? He thought not. It was not so much that she was jealous of Fielding's youth, as that she shrank from any appearance of disloyalty to his age.

"And yet," she said, "I feel that no one has a right to be young when he is old. I hate young poets because they are young. I hate my own youth—"

Her youth? Yes, it was youth that leapt quivering in her tragic face, like a blown flame. Her body hardly counted except as fuel to the eager and incessant fire.

"Don't hate it," he said. "It is the most beautiful thing you have to give him."

"Ah—if I could give it him!"

He smiled. "You have given it him. He isn't old when he can inspire such devotion. He is to be envied."

He rose and held out his hand. As she took it, Miss Gurney's flame-like gaze rested on him a moment and grew soft.

"If you want to know, it was Lucia Harden who sent me your poems," said she. And he knew that for once Miss Gurney had betrayed a secret.

He wondered what had made her change her mind. He wondered whether Lucia had really made a secret of it. He wondered what the secret had to do with Fielding. And wondering he went away, envying him the love that kept its own divine fire burning for him on his hearth.



CHAPTER LI

There were times when Rickman, harassed by his engagement, reviewed his literary position with dismay. Of success as men count success, he had none. He was recognized as a poet by perhaps a score of people; to a few hundreds he was a mere name in the literary papers; to the great mass of his fellow-countrymen he was not even a name. He had gone his own way and remained obscure; while his friends, Jewdwine and Maddox, had gone theirs and won for themselves solid reputations. As for Rankin (turned novelist) he had achieved celebrity. They had not been able to impart to him the secret of success. But the recognition and something more than recognition of the veteran poet consoled him for the years of failure, and he felt that he could go through many such on the strength of it.

The incident was so momentous that he was moved to speak of it to Jewdwine and to Maddox. As everything that interested him interested Maddox, he related it to Maddox in full; but with Jewdwine (such was his exceeding delicacy) he observed a certain modest reticence. Still there was no diminution in his engaging candour, his innocent assumption that Jewdwine would be as pleased and excited as Maddox and himself.

"He really seemed," said he, selecting from among Fielding's utterances, "to think the things were great."

Jewdwine raised his eyebrows. "My dear Rickman, I congratulate you." He paused for so long that his next remark, thoughtfully produced, seemed to have no reference to Rickman's communication. "Fielding is getting very old." If Rickman had been in a state of mind to attend carefully to Jewdwine's manner, he might have gathered that the incident had caused him some uneasiness.

It had indeed provided the editor of The Museion with much matter for disagreeable thought. As it happened (after months of grave deliberation), he had lately had occasion to form a very definite opinion as to the value of Rickman the journalist. He knew that Rickman the journalist had no more deadly enemy than Rickman the poet; and at that particular moment he did not greatly care to be reminded of his existence. Jewdwine's attitude to Rickman and his confidences was the result of a change in the attitude of The Museion and its proprietors. The Museion was on the eve of a revolution, and to Jewdwine as its editor Rickman the journalist had suddenly become invaluable.

The revolution itself was not altogether sudden. For many months the behaviour of The Museion had been a spectacle of great joy to the young men of its contemporary, The Planet. The spirit of competition had latterly seized upon that most severely academic of reviews, and it was now making desperate efforts to be popular. It was as if a middle-aged and absent-minded don, suddenly alive to the existence of athletic sports in his neighbourhood, should insist on entering himself for all the events, clothed, uniquely, if inappropriately, in cap and gown. He would be a very moving figure in the eyes of hilarious and immortal youth. And such a figure did The Museion in its latter days present. But the proprietors were going to change all that. The Museion was about to be withdrawn from circulation and reissued in a new form under the new title of Metropolis. As if aware of the shocking incongruity it was going to fling off its cap and gown. Whatever its staying power might be, its spirit and its outward appearance should henceforth in no way differ from those of other competitors in the race for money and position.

While the details of the change were being planned in the offices of The Museion, the burning question for the proprietors was this: would their editor, their great, their unique and lonely editor, be prepared to go with them? Or would he (and with him his brilliant and enthusiastic staff) insist on standing by the principles that had been the glory of the paper and its ruin? Mr. Jewdwine had shown himself fairly amenable so far, but would he be any use to them when it really came to the point?

To Jewdwine that point was the turning-point in his career. He had had to put that burning question to himself. Was he, after all, prepared to stand by his principles? It was pretty certain that if he did, his principles would not stand by him. Was there anything in them that would stand at all against the brutal pressure that was moulding literature at the present hour? No organ of philosophic criticism could (at the present hour) exist, unless created and maintained by Jewdwine single-handed and at vast expense. His position was becoming more unique and more lonely every day, quite intolerably lonely and unique. For Jewdwine after all was human. He longed for eminence, but not for such eminence as meant isolation. Isolation is not powerful; and even more than for eminence he longed for power. He longed for it with the passion of a weak will governed despotically by a strong intellect. It amounted to a positive obsession, the tyranny of a cold and sane idea. He knew perfectly well now what his position as editor of The Museion was worth. Compared with that great, that noble but solitary person, even Maddox had more power. But the editor of Metropolis, by a few trifling concessions to the spirit of modernity, would in a very short time carry all before him. He must then either run with the race or drop out of it altogether; and between these two courses, Jewdwine, with all his genius for hesitation, could not waver. After much deliberation he had consented (not without some show of condescension) to give his name and leadership to Metropolis; and he reaped the reward of his plasticity in a substantial addition to his income.

This great change in the organization of the review called for certain corresponding changes in its staff. And it was here that Rickman came in. He had been retained on The Museion partly in recognition of his brilliance, partly by way of satisfying the claims of Jewdwine's magnanimity. On The Museion he had not proved plastic either as sub-editor or as contributor. He did not fit in well with the traditions of the paper; for he was, to Jewdwine, modernity incarnate, the living spirit of revolt, to be bound down with difficulty by the editorial hand. Looking back on the record of the past four years Jewdwine marvelled how and why it was that he had kept him. A score of times he had been tempted to dismiss him after some fresh enormity; and a score of times Rickman had endeared himself by the seductive graces of his style. But Rickman on the staff of Metropolis was, Jewdwine considered, Rickman in the right place. Not only could he now be allowed to let loose his joyous individuality without prejudice to the principles of that paper (for the paper strictly speaking would have no principles), but he was indispensable if it was to preserve the distinction which its editor still desired. Jewdwine had no need of the poet; but of the journalistic side of Rickman he had endless need. It was a baser faculty, but his care must be to develop it, to train it, to handle it judiciously, until by handling he had made it pliable to all the uses of his paper. Jewdwine had a genius for licking young men into shape. He could hardly recognize that band of awkward and enthusiastic followers in his present highly disciplined and meritorious staff. None of them were like Rickman; none of them had done anything to rouse an uneasy suspicion of their genius. Still, none of them were precisely fitted for his present purpose. Rickman the poet, of course, you could not lick into shape. His shape, plastic only under the divine fire, was fashioned by the fingers of the god. But Rickman the journalist, once get him on to the right journal, would prove to be made of less unmanageable stuff. If he had not hitherto proved manageable, that was no doubt because hitherto he had been employed on the wrong journal.

And yet, when he came to discuss the change of programme with the different members of his staff (some of whom he was giving their dismissal), it was with Rickman (whom he proposed to retain) that he felt the most acute embarrassment. Rickman, although at the moment dining with Jewdwine, was so abominably direct.

"I see," he said, after listening to a lengthy exposition of the proprietors' view; "they want to popularize the thing."

Jewdwine winced perceptibly. "Well, hardly," said he. "In that case they would have been obliged to change their editor. We certainly want to draw a rather larger public than we have done; and to do that we must make some concessions to modernity. There's no doubt that the paper's interests have suffered from its tradition. We have been too exclusive, too detached. We can no longer afford to be detached. We propose to abandon the tradition in favour of—well—of a somewhat broader attitude." He looked keenly at Rickman, as if he defied him to put it any other way.

"I see. We've either got to take a more genial view of our contemporaries—or scoot."

"You may put it that way if you like. It simply means that if we are to appeal to a wider public, we must take a wider view. It's surely in the interests of the public, and of literature, that we should not narrow the influence of the paper any more than we can help. Not make the best criticism inaccessible." He continued to take the lofty and the noble view. The habit was inveterate. But his last remark started him on the way of self-justification. "Of course I couldn't go on with the paper if I hadn't come to see this for myself. The fact is, you cannot run a leading review on abstract principles."

Rickman forbore to smile at the fulfilment of his prophecy. Jewdwine's "Absolute" had been obliged to "climb down."

"Not," said Jewdwine, "if that review is really to lead public opinion."

"And certainly not," said Rickman, "if public opinion is to lead the review."

"In either case," said Jewdwine nobly, "the principles remain."

"Only they're not applied?"

"They are not applied, because there is nothing to apply them to. In the present state of literature a review like The Museion has no reason for its existence."

"I don't know. It was a very useful protest against some forms of modernity."

"My dear fellow, modernity simply means democracy. And when once democracy has been forced on us there's no good protesting any longer."

"All the same, you'll go on protesting, you know."

"As a harmless private person, yes. As a critic I must accept a certain amount of defeat at the hands of the majority."

"But you don't happen to believe in the majority?"

"I do believe in it," said he, bitterly. "I believe that it has destroyed criticism by destroying literature. A critic only exists through the existence of great men. And there are no great men nowadays; only a great number of little men."

"I see. Othello's occupation's gone."

"Not at all. Othello's occupation's only beginning. You can't criticize these people, but you must review them. And I assure you it means far more labour and a finer discrimination to pick out your little man from a crowd of little men than to recognize your great man when you see him."

"When you see him—"

"Ah yes—when I see him. But where is he? Show me," said Jewdwine, "one work of unmistakable genius published any time in the last five, the last ten years."

Rickman looked at him and said nothing. And to Jewdwine his silence was singularly uncomfortable. He would have been more uneasy still but for his conviction that the serenity in Rickman's eyes was reflected from the eyes of Fielding. Rickman, he thought, was rather too obviously elated at the great man's praise; and the exhibition of elation was unpleasant to him. Worse than all, he realized that Rickman, in spite of his serenity, was hurt. On the top of that came a miserable misgiving as to the worthiness of his own attitude to his friend.

As for Rickman, he had no feeling that he could have put into words, beyond owning in his heart that he was hurt. He had never before had any occasion for such a confession; he felt it to be humiliating both to Jewdwine and himself. Sometimes, in moments of depression he had suspected that it was Jewdwine's coldness that preserved his incorruptibility; but he had so sincere a desire for purity in their relations, that he had submitted without resentment to the freezing process that ensured it. He had in reserve his expectation of the day when, by some superlative achievement, he would take that soul, hitherto invincible, by storm. But now, in his inmost heart he owned that he was hurt.

Jewdwine changed the subject.



CHAPTER LII

When Jewdwine changed the subject, it was to intimate that his friend might now expect a salary rising steadily with the fortunes of Metropolis.

That promise to marry Flossie in the autumn had made Rickman very uneasy on this head. The sources of his income had been hitherto uncertain; for The Planet might at any moment cease to be, and only indomitable hope could say that The Museion would be long for this world.

The amount of his income, too, depended on conditions which were, to some extent, beyond his own control. It had never sunk below a hundred and fifty, and had never risen above three hundred, even in the years when he wrote more articles than poems. Whereas, if he wrote more poems than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the transformation of The Museion. It certainly promised him a larger and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage in the autumn. It had been expressly understood that his promise to Flossie was to be fulfilled only if possible. But meanwhile he had got to make it possible, for Flossie (in spite of her promise) kept the terror of her wine-merchant perpetually dangling above his head. He had visited Messrs. Vassell & Hawkins' detestable establishment; and it made him shudder to think of his pretty Beaver shut up in a little mahogany cage, with her bright eyes peeping sad and shy through the brass netting, and her dear little nostrils sniffing the villainous alcoholic air.

But as the time approached and their marriage grew every day more certain and more near, the joy and excitement of the bridegroom were mingled with an inexplicable terror and misgiving. He had been disagreeably impressed by the manner of Flossie's insistence on his poverty. He had not missed the fine contempt conveyed by all her references to his profession, which she not unjustly regarded as the cause of the poverty. He was well aware that his genius was a heavy burden for so small a thing to bear; and his chivalry had determined that it should lie lightly on her lest it should crush or injure her. It was part of her engaging innocence that she knew nothing of the world in which his supremacy began and hers ended, that she had not even suspected its existence. If he had any illusions about her it was his own mind that created and controlled them. He delighted in them deliberately, as in a thing of his creating; seeing through them with that extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the more. Flossie's weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him. As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way affecting him as a poet and a man of letters. While the little suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire. For those two flames could never mingle. In that dream he saw himself travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never touched and never diverged; a feat only possible given two Rickmans, not one Rickman. There used to be many more of him; it was something that he had reduced the quantity to two. And in dreams nothing is absurd, nothing impossible.

Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited. At first it had been only a simple question of time and space. Not that Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him plenty of time for the everyday work that paid. But where was that divine solitude? Where were those long days of nebulous conception? Where the days when he removed himself, as it were, and watched his full-orbed creations careering in the intellectual void? The days when Keith Rickman was as a god? He was hardly aware how fast they were vanishing already; and where would they be in two months' time? It was on his tragedy that he based his hopes for his future; the future, in which Flossie had no part. He knew that the plea of art sounded weak before the inexorable claims of nature; he felt that something ought to be sacrificed to the supreme passion; but he couldn't give up his tragedy. He was consumed by two indomitable passions; and who was to say which of them was supreme? Still, tragedies in blank verse were a luxury; and Flossie had more than once pointed out to him he couldn't afford luxuries. He would sit up working on the tragedy till long past midnight; and when he woke in the morning his sense of guilt could not have been greater if he had been indulging in the most hateful orgies. But you can't burn even genius at both ends; and his paying work began to suffer. Jewdwine complained that it was not up to his usual level. Maddox had returned several articles. So at last he stuffed his tragedy into a drawer to wait there for a diviner hour. "That would have been a big expensive job," he said to himself. "I suppose it's possible to put as good work into the little things that pay; but I shall have to cut myself in pieces." That was what he was doing now; changing his gold into copper as fast as he could, so many pennies for one sovereign. Nobody was cheated. He knew that in his talent (his mere journalistic talent) there was a genius that no amount of journalism had as yet subdued. But he had an awful vision of the future, when he saw himself swallowed up body and soul in journalism. The gods were dead; but there were still men and columns.

That would be the inevitable surrender to reality. To have no part in the triumph of the poetic legions; but to march with the rank and file, to a detestable music not his own; a mere mercenary ingloriously fighting in a foreign cause.

To Jewdwine, Jewdwine once incorruptible, it seemed that Rickman was preparing himself very suitably for the new campaign. But Maddox mourned as he returned those articles; and when he heard of the approaching marriage which explained them he was frantic. He rushed up on Sunday afternoon, and marched Rickman out into the suburbs and on to a lonely place on Hampstead Heath. And there, for the space of one hour, with his arm linked in Rickman's, he wrestled with Rickman for his body and his soul. Jewdwine's cry had been, "Beware of the friendship of little men"; the burden of Maddox was, "Beware of the love of little women."

"That's all you know about it, Maddy. The love of great women absorbs you, dominates you. The little women leave you free."

Maddox groaned.

"A fat lot of freedom you'll get, Ricky, when you're married." Rickman looked straight before him to the deep blue hills of the west, as if freedom lay on the other side of them. "Good God," he said, "what am I to do? I must marry. I can't go back to Poppy Grace, and her sort."

"If that's all," said Maddox, "I don't see much difference. Except that marriage is worse. It lasts longer." Whereupon Rickman blushed, and said that wasn't all, and that Maddox was a brute. He would change his opinion when he knew Miss Walker.

Before very long he had an opportunity of changing it.

Rickman had been in error when he told Flossie that if she would consent to marry him he would never again be ill. For he was ill the first week in September, not two years after he had made that ill-considered statement. The Fielding episode, when the first fine stimulus was over, had left him miserable and restless. It was as if he had heard the sound of Lucia Harden's voice passing through the immeasurable darkness that divided them. And now he seemed to be suffering from something not unlike the nervous fever that had attacked him once before at Harmouth; complicated, this time, by a severe cold on the chest, caught by walking about through pouring rain in great agony of mind.

For Flossie (who may have felt latterly that she had chanced upon another season of depression in her woman's trade) that illness was a piece of amazing good luck, coming as it did at the moment of Keith's misgivings. It not only drew them together, just as they were drifting insensibly apart, but it revealed them to each other in a tenderer and serener light. There was a little hard spot in Flossie which was impervious to the subtler charm of Rickman when he was well. But Rickman ill and at her mercy, confined to the bed where (so long as Flossie waited on him) he lay very quietly, with the sheet drawn tight up to his chin, in a state of touching dependence and humiliation, was a wholly different person from the stormy and incomprehensible Rickman who for more than two years had struggled so madly in her toils. And if, to the eye of Mrs. Downey, Flossie appeared untouched by the really heartrending pathos of his attitude in sleep; beholding unmoved his huddled boyish form under the blankets, one half-naked arm laid slack along the bed, the other thrust out straight into the cold outside it; if she left Mrs. Downey to cover the poor fellow up, wondering why on earth the girl could sit there and never do it; if, when he woke, she missed the extreme poignancy of appeal in the murmurs that followed her as she went Beaver-like about her business in the room, it may be that in that unaccustomed service the hidden prescient motherhood in her was awakened and appeased (Flossie being still under the dominion of her dream). As yet it struggled blindly with her invincible propriety; a struggle poor Rickman was made aware of by the half-averted manner of her approaches, the secrecy and hesitation of her touch. But the little clerk undoubtedly found that patting pillows, straightening coverlets, and making mustard plasters, was an employment more satisfying to her nature than the perpetual handling of bank notes. And to Rickman lying there with his hungry heart filled for the time quite full with its own humility and gratitude, lying in a helplessness that had in it something soothing and agreeable, feeling the soft shy woman's hands about his bed, following with affectionate, remorseful eyes her coming and going, or watching as she sat patiently mending his socks, it came with the freshness of a new discovery that she was, after all, a very engaging little Beaver. He had never for one instant glorified his love for her; he understood it too thoroughly. It was love as Nature loves to have it; honest enough, too, but of its kind singularly devoid of any inspiring quality. Flossie had never moved him to the making of sonnets or of songs. Moreover, he had discovered in her a certain lack of tenderness, or of the outward signs of tenderness. Not but what Flossie commanded all the foolish endearing language of young love; only she was apt to lavish it on little details of attire, on furniture, on things seen in shop-windows and passionately desired. But there was something very transfiguring in the firelight of his bedroom hearth. As he lay in it, enjoying the pure sweet foretaste of domestic felicity, it was as if he saw more clearly into himself and her and the life that would so soon make them one. If it was not the best life, he told himself that of its kind it would be very good. He had no doubt now that Flossie loved him. He was led to this certainty by the maternal quality in her present dealings with him, when perhaps it should have warned him rather that these cares were not for him.

Flossie had somewhat elaborated her dream. Bearing the fascinating name of Muriel Maud, it had grown softer and rosier than ever. She could not any longer deny its mysterious association with Keith Rickman, though she would have died rather than that Keith should have suspected it. And now as she sat mending Keith's socks her fancy all the time was busy fashioning delicious garments for her dream. Flossie never pursued her vision of Muriel Maud beyond the period of enchanting infancy; when it outgrew the tender folly of those garments, it was dismissed from Flossie's fancy with unmaternal harshness. Therefore it appeared eternally innocent and young, mortal in a delicate immortality. In fact, viewing her life too in the light of the bedroom firelight, Flossie was herself deceived.

They were both blissfully unaware that Nature cares nothing about love, but was bent upon using them for the only end she does care about, the end that gives to love the illusion of its own eternity.

But Maddox saw through it in a minute. It was in the earlier stages of the poet's illness, and Maddox had happened to put his head into Rickman's room at the moment when Flossie, compelled by Mrs. Downey, was helping to put a stinging mustard plaster on his chest. They shrieked, and Maddox instantly withdrew.

He painted the scene afterwards for Rankin in the lurid and symbolic colours of his Celtic fancy. "Talk of Samson among the Philistines, it's nothing to Ricky-ticky in that d——d boarding-house. There was a woman on each side of his bed. They'd got him down on it; they were pinning the poor little chap in his blankets. I could just see Ricky-ticky's face between their shoulders; it was very red; and I shall never forget the expression on it, never. The agony, Rankin, the hopeless, unutterable agony."

"What were they doing to him?"

"I couldn't see properly. But I think they were cutting his hair off."

He declared later that he had distinctly heard the squeaking of that young Delilah's scissors. "We're not told whether Delilah was Samson's wife," said he. "But the Scriptures were never wrong on a point of human nature."

At which Rankin looked depressed; for he too was thinking of getting married; though, as Maddox reminded him for his comfort, not to Miss Flossie Walker.

"Is our Ricky-ticky," urged Rankin, "the man to show wisdom in choosing a wife?"

"He isn't the man to marry at all."

"Did you expect him to live like an anchorite, then?"

"I didn't expect anything. He might have lived as he liked, provided he didn't ruin himself as he's doing now."

And though Maddox now saw that young Delilah frequently, and always at her prettiest and her best, he did not change his opinion.



CHAPTER LIII

It was now the third week in September, and the wedding was fixed for the twenty-fifth of October. Everything was fixed, even Flossie's ideas on the subject of her trousseau. There never was a little woman so unwavering in her choice of such things as clothes and furniture. To be married in ivory white, and to go away in powder blue; to have a drawing-room furnished in imitation rosewood and tapestry, and a dining-room in stamped velvet and black oak (imitation, too), had been Flossie's firm determination from the first. It saves endless time and contention when a young woman so absolutely knows her own mind.

Not but what she required approval and support in her decisions; otherwise she would have been hardly recognizable as a young woman. And for Rickman to go shopping with the Beaver in Tottenham Court Road, to follow her undeviating course through the furniture galleries, to note the infallible instinct by which she made for and seized upon the objects of her choice, to see the austerity with which she resisted the seductions of the salesman who sought to entangle her with a more expensive article, the calmness of her mind in dealing with the most intricate problems of measurement and price, was to be led a helpless captive in a triumph of practical ability. Ability, good Lord! was there ever anything like Flossie's grasp of all facts that can be expressed in figures? His brain reeled before the terrifying velocity of her mental arithmetic. What a little woman it was to do sums in the top of its head!

Not that she dragged him on the chain for ever. There were idyllic resting-places, delicious, thrilling pauses in her progress; when she tried every chair in succession in the drawing-room suite; when she settled herself in the tapestry one, before the little rosewood tea-table (spread, for the heightening of the illusion, with a tea-service all complete); when she pretended to pour out tea, smiling over the tea-pot in the prettiest delight. With such a smile she would welcome him, with such a smile she would pour out his tea when he came back from Fleet Street to the home that was to be. (It did not occur to him that at the moment Flossie was only smiling at the tea-pot.) Though he stood aloof from the anticipatory scene, as he looked at her he grew positively weak with tenderness. In everything Flossie had her way. When they climbed (as they inevitably did) to the upper galleries he indeed offered some show of resistance when she insisted on choosing a terrible bedstead of brass with mother-o'-pearl ornaments. But to do him justice, it was sheer nervous terror which prompted the brutal remark that, "Really, mother-o'-pearl ornaments were more than he could stand"; for he melted and gave in at once at the sight of Flossie feeling the rosy down coverlet with her little hands. When their eyes met, Flossie's face was as rosy as the coverlet; so that the attendant spirit of commerce himself turned from them abashed. That there would, that there must be, such a moment Keith had had a horrible foreboding as he followed up the stairs.

Nobody could have been more happy than Flossie following the dream in Tottenham Court Road; and Rickman was happy because she was. Happy for a whole fortnight; and then for the first time they quarrelled.

And this was how it happened. They were going to live at Ealing; not because they liked it, but because the neighbourhood was cheap. Flossie had said, "When we're rich, we'll go to Kensington"; and he had answered with an odious flippancy, "Yes, and when we die we'll go to heaven"; but for the present, Flossie (wise Flossie who loved economy even more than Kensington) was content with Ealing. That she was obliged to be content with it made her feel, naturally, that she was entitled to gratification on every other point. It was not over Ealing, then, that they quarrelled, but over the choosing of the house. Flossie was all for a gay little brand-new, red-brick villa, with nice clean white paint about it, only two minutes from the tram; he for a little old-fashioned brown-brick house with jasmine all over it, and a garden all grass and lilac bushes at the back. He said the garden would be nice to sit in. She said, what was the good of sitting in a garden when you had to walk ever so far to the tram? He retorted that walking was a reason for sitting; and she that if it came to that they could sit in the house. She wouldn't hear of the old brown house, nor he of the brand-new villa. He was peculiarly sensitive to his surroundings.

"The villa," said he, "is a detestable little den."

"It isn't," said she, "it's got a lovely bay window in the drawing room, and a dear little balcony on the top."

"But there isn't a quiet place in it, dear, where I could write."

"Oh, that's all you're thinking of—"

"Well, there isn't, really. Whereas here" (they were going now through the little brown house), "there's a jolly big room at the back, where you can see miles away over the fields towards Harrow."

"Oh, you've got time to look out of the window, have you, though you are so busy?"

"Never mind the window, let's look at the house. What's wrong with it?"

"What's wrong with the house? It won't suit the furniture, that's what's wrong with it."

"You mean the furniture won't suit it?"

"The furniture's chosen and the house isn't. There's no good going back on that."

"Look here, this is the room I meant." They had climbed to the top of the little brown house, and Flossie had hardly condescended to glance through the doors he had opened on their way. He opened one now at the head of the stairs, and this time she looked in.

"It would make all the difference to me, Floss," he said humbly, "if I had a place like this when I want to get away to write."

"When you want to get away from me, you mean." Her lips shook; she looked round her with angry eyes, as if jealous of the place, and all that he meant to do in it.

It was a large room, with a wide window looking on to the garden and away across meadows and cornfields to Harrow Hill with its thin church spire. The window was guarded with iron bars. The wall-paper was designed in little circles; and in each circle there were figures of little boys and girls, absurd and gay. So many hundreds of little figures, and so absurd and gay, that to sit in that room surrounded by them, to look at them and endeavour to count them, was to go mad. But those figures fascinated Flossie.

"Oh, Lord, what a beastly wall-paper," said he.

"I think it's sweet," said she. And though she wasn't going to let him have the house, she was ready to quarrel with him again about the wall-paper. And then, in the corner by the window they came upon a child's toy, a little wooden horse, broken. He pointed it out to her, half-smiling. "Some kiddy must have left that there."

"Of course," said she, "it's been a nursery. And, I say, Keith, I think it must have died."

"How do you make that out?"

"It couldn't have been long here. Don't you see, the wall-paper's all new." (He thought that was rather sharp of her, the practical Beaver!) "And yet," she said continuing her train of induction; "it couldn't. If it had, they'd never have left that here."

Ah, that was not sharp; it was something better. There was, after all, about his Beaver a certain poetry and tenderness.

She picked up the little wooden horse, and held it in her hands, and adjusted its loosened mane, and mended its broken legs, fitting the edges delicately with her clever fingers. And it seemed to him that as she bent over the toy her face grew soft again. When she lifted her head her eyes rested on him, but without seeing him. Never had Flossie had so poignant a vision of Muriel Maud.

He looked at her with a new wonder in his heart. For the first time he was made aware of the change that two years had worked in her. She had grown, he thought, finer in growing firmer; her body in its maturity was acquiring a strength and richness that had been wanting in its youth; as if through that time of waiting it were being fashioned for the end it waited for. But that was not all. She had clothed herself unconsciously with poetry. She stood for a moment transfigured before him; a woman with sweet eyes beholding her desired destiny from far. Her soul (for a moment) rose in her face like a star—a dim prophetic star that trembled between darkness and dawn. He knew that she saw herself now as the possible mother of his children.

The anger and the jealousy were over; and all of a sudden she gave in.

"You can have the house, if you like, Keith."

"All right; I do like it. That's a dear little Beaver."

As he approached her her glance fled. "I didn't say you could have the room. I want to keep it empty."

He put his arm round her and led her to the window. "What do you want to keep it empty for, Flossie?"

Her poor little thoughts, surprised and dismayed, went scurrying hither and thither, trying to hide their trail.

"Oh," she said, still looking away from him. "To store things in." He drew her closer to him and kissed her tenderly.

It seemed to him that a serene and happy light rested on the garden, on the empty house, and on the empty room that she had peopled already with her innocent dream. It seemed to him that in that remote gaze of her woman's eyes, abstracted from her lover, unconsciously desirous of the end beyond desire, he saw revealed the mystery, the sanctity, the purity of wedded love. And seeing it he forgave her that momentary abstraction.

But the Beaver never dreamed; she was far too practical. She was building, that was all.



CHAPTER LIV

That evening as they sat down to dinner, it might have been noticed that Mrs Downey's face was more flushed and festal than it had been since the day was fixed for Mr. Rickman's wedding and departure. She seated herself expansively, with a gay rustling of many frills, and smiled well pleased upon the arrangements of her table. From these signs it was evident that Mrs. Downey was expecting another boarder, a boarder of whom she had reason to be proud. Rickman noticed with dismay that the stranger's place was laid beside his own. He knew them so well, these eternal, restless birds of passage, draggled with their flight from one boarding-house to another. The only tolerable thing about them was that, being here to-day, they were gone to-morrow.

The new boarder was late, culpably late. But Mrs. Downey was proud of that too, as arguing that the poor bird of passage had stayed to smooth her ruffled plumage. Mrs. Downey approved of all persons who thus voluntarily acknowledged the high ceremonial character of the Dinner. She was glad that Mr. Rickman would appear to-night in full evening dress, to rush away in the middle of the meal, a splendour the more glorious, being brief. She was waiting for the delightful moment when she would explain to the visitor that the gentleman who had just left the room was Mr. Rickman, "the reviewer and dramatic critic." She would say it, as she had said it many times before, with the easy accomplished smile of the hostess familiar with celebrity.

But that moment never came. The very anticipation of it was lost in the thrill of the visitor's belated entrance. Yet nothing could have been quieter than the manner of it. She (for it was a lady) came into the room as if she had lived at Mrs. Downey's all her life, and knew her way already from the doorway to her chair. When she said, "I'm so sorry, I'm afraid I'm rather late," she seemed to be taking for granted their recognition of a familiar personal characteristic. Perhaps it was because she was so tall that her voice sounded like music dropped downward from a height.

There was a stir, a movement down each side of the table; it was subtle, like the flutter of light and wind, and sympathetic, answering to her footfall and the flowing rhythm of her gown. As it passed, Mrs. Downey's face became if possible more luminous, Miss Bramble's figure if possible more erect. A feeble flame flickered in Mr. Partridge's cheeks; Mr. Soper began feeling nervously in his pocket for the box of bon-bons, his talisman of success; while Mr. Spinks appeared as if endeavouring to assume a mental attitude not properly his own. Miss Bishop searched, double-chinned, for any crumbs that might have lodged in the bosom of her blouse; and Flossie, oh, Flossie became more demure, more correct, more absolutely the model of all propriety. Each was so occupied with his or herself that no one noticed the very remarkable behaviour of Mr. Rickman. He rose to his feet. He turned his back on Flossie. There was a look on his face as of a man seized with sudden terror, and about to fly.

In turning he found himself face to face with Lucia Harden.

He had the presence of mind to stand back and draw her chair from the table for her; so that his action appeared the natural movement of politeness.

Though she held out her hand by an instinct of recognition, there was a perceptible pause before she spoke. He had known that it was she before he saw her. She had to look at him twice to make quite sure.

And then, being sure, she smiled; not the slow, cold smile of politeness that dies downwards on the lips, but the swift smile of pleasure that leaps to the eyes and forehead.

"Mr. Rickman—? I think I should have known you anywhere else; but I didn't expect to meet you here."

He looked at her courageously.

And as he looked there fell from him the past five years, the long estranging years of bitterness and misery and vain desire, and the years, still more estranging, of his madness and his folly; and not the thinnest phantom shadow of time divided him from the days of Harmouth, That moment of recognition annihilated all between; a lustre of his life swept away in one sweep of her eyelids, dropped fathom deep and forgotten in the gaze of her pure and tender eyes. It was not the Lucia of their last meeting; the tragic and terrible Lucia who had been so divided from him by her suffering and her grief. As she had appeared to him on that evening, the last of his brief, incredible happiness, when he sat with her alone in the drawing-room at Court House, and she had declared her belief in him, so she appeared to him now. The unforgettable movements of her face, the sweet curve of her mouth (the upper lip so soft and fine that it seemed to quiver delicately with the rhythm of her pulses and her breath), the turn of her head, the lifting of her eyebrows, told him that she had kept no memory of his part in the things that had happened after that.

And he too forgot. With Lucia sitting at his right hand, he forgot the woman sitting at his left; he forgot the house of bondage, and he forgot that other house where the wedding chamber yet waited for the bride.

"I should have known you anywhere." His eyes dropped and he said no more.

That act of recognition had only lasted a second; but it had made its mark. Over the dim, fluttering table was the hush of a profound astonishment. He neither saw nor felt it; nor did he hear Mrs. Downey scattering the silence with agitated apologies.

"You'll excuse us beginning, Miss Harden; but it's Mr. Rickman's night at the theatre."

Miss Harden looked at him again, lifting her eyebrows with that air of interested inquiry that he knew so well. And yet, beyond those first half dozen words he said nothing.

"Silly boy," said Mrs. Downey to herself, "why can't he say he's sorry he has to go. I'm sure I gave him his opportunity." She was annoyed at his rudeness.

Whether he were sorry or not, he went at his appointed time. He never knew how he got out of the room, nor how he had behaved before going. He had simply looked at her, held her hand and left her. And he had not said a word; or none at least that he could remember.

Miss Harden was, it seemed, the guest, or the ostensible guest, of Miss Roots. And Miss Roots enjoyed herself, delighting openly in the recovery of the friend she had lost sight of for so many years. But from Mrs. Downey's point of view the Dinner that night was not exactly a success. Mr. Rickman had behaved in an extraordinary manner. Mr. Soper and Miss Bishop had never looked so—well, so out of place and common. And she could see that Mr. Spinks had taken advantage of the general consternation to help himself outrageously to ginger.

Lucia took her friend aside when it was over. "You might have told me he was here," said she.

"My dear, I didn't know you knew him."

"Then, did he never—" Whatever Lucia was going to say she thought better of it.

She did not see him till the next night, after dinner, when he came to her as she was sitting in a corner of the back drawing-room alone. And as he came, she looked at him with a curiously intent yet baffled gaze, as if trying to fit a present impression to one past. And yet she could hardly have had any difficulty in recognizing him; for his face was unforgettable, unique; but she missed something in it which used to be familiar. And now she saw that what she had missed was the restless look of youth; the sensuous eagerness that had helped to make it so irregular. It had settled into the other look that she had found there more rarely; the look that strengthened and refined the mobile features, and brought them into harmony with the clean prominent lines of the chin and of the serious level brows. Of all his looks it was the one that she used to like best.

"So you've come back again?" he said.

"But I never was away."

"I thought you were abroad?"

"Who told you that?"

"I don't know. I suppose I must have dreamt it."

"I think you must. I've been in town for the last six weeks."

"In town?"

"Yes, if Hampstead's town. I've been staying with the Jewdwines. Didn't he tell you?"

"No, he never told me anything."

She was silent for a moment. "So that's why you never came to see me."

"To see you? I didn't know—and if I had I shouldn't have thought—" He hesitated.

"Of what? Of coming to see me?"

"No, that you would have cared for me to come."

"I think that's not a thing you ought to say. Of course I cared."

"Well, but I couldn't take that for granted, could I?"

"Couldn't you? Not after the messages I sent you?"

"But I never got any messages."

"Didn't you?" Her upper lip quivered; it was as if she winced at some thought that struck her like a blow. "Then my cousin must have forgotten to give them to you. Just like him; he is shockingly careless."

Now Rickman knew it was not just like him; Jewdwine was not careless, he was in all things painfully meticulous; and he never forgot.

"I don't think I can forgive him for that."

"You must forgive him. He is overwhelmed with work. And he isn't really as thoughtless as you might suppose. He has given me news of you regularly. You can't think how glad I was to hear you were getting on so well. As for the latest news of all—" She lifted her face and looked at him with her sweet kind eyes. "It is true that you are going to be married?"

"Quite true."

"I was so glad to hear that, too."

"Thanks." There was a slight spasm in his throat. That thick difficult word stuck in it and choked him for the moment.

"I hope I shall meet your wife some day."

"You have met her." Lucia looked puzzled and he smiled, a little sadly for a bridegroom. "You sat next her at dinner. She's here somewhere."

Lucia turned her head to where Flossie was sitting by a table, sitting very upright, with her little air of strained propriety.

"Is it—is it that pretty lady? Do you think I might go up and speak to her? I would so like to know her."

"I'll bring her to you. There's rather a crowd just now in the other room."

He went to her, hardly knowing how he went.

"Flossie," he said, "I want to introduce you to Miss Harden."

Flossie's eyes brightened with surprise and pleasure; for she had learnt from Mrs. Downey that the visitor was the daughter of Sir Frederick Harden; and Lucia's distinction subdued her from afar. Keith, being aware of nothing but Lucia, failed to perceive, as he otherwise might have done, that he had risen in Flossie's opinion by his evident intimacy with Miss Harden. She came blushing and smiling and a little awkward, steered by Keith. But for all her awkwardness she had never looked prettier than at that moment of her approach.

If Keith had wanted to know precisely where he stood in the order of Lucia's intimacies, he might have learnt it from her reception of Miss Walker. By it he might have measured, too, the height of her belief in him, the depth of her ignorance. She who had divined him was ready to take his unknown betrothed on trust; to credit her, not with vast intellect, perhaps (what did that matter?), but certainly with some rare and lovely quality of soul. He loved her; that was enough. Lucia deduced the quality from the love, not the love from the quality. His pretty lady must be lovable since he loved her. He had noticed long ago that Lucia's face had a way of growing more beautiful in the act of admiration; as if it actually absorbed the loveliness it loved to look upon. And now, as she made a place for Flossie at her side, it wore that look of wonder, ardent yet restrained, that look of shy and tentative delight with which five years ago she had approached his Helen. It was as if she had said to herself, "He always brought his best to show me. Five years ago he brought me his dream, to read and care for. Now he brings me the real thing, to read and care for too." She was evidently preparing to read Flossie as if she had been a new and beautiful poem.

He was unaware of all this; unaware of everything except the mingled beatitude and torture of the moment. He sat leaning forward, staring over his clasped hands at Lucia's feet, where he longed to fall down and worship. He heard her telling Flossie how glad she was to meet her; how unexpected was her finding of him here, after fire years; how five years ago she had known him in Devonshire; and so on. But in his ears the music of her voice detached itself wholly from the meaning of her words. Thus he missed the assurance which, if he had only listened intelligently, they might have had for him; the assurance of an indestructible friendship that welcomed and enfolded his pretty lady for his sake.

But whatever her almost joyous acceptance of the pretty lady promised for the future, it could not be said that, conversationally, Lucia was getting on very fast with Flossie in the present; and Rickman's abstraction did not make things easier. Therefore she was a little relieved when Miss Roots joined them, and Rickman, startled into consciousness, got up and left the room. He feared that lady's sympathy and shrewdness. Nothing could be hidden from her clever eyes.

And now, perceiving that the conversation flagged, Miss Roots endeavoured to support it.

"Have you seen Metropolis?" she asked in her tired voice.

Lucia shook her head. "I don't know that I want to see it."

"You'd better not say so before Miss Walker."

"Oh, never mind me," said Miss Walker. "I haven't been yet. Is it good?"

"Some people seem to think so. It depends."

"Yes; there's such a difference in the way they put them on the stage, too."

Miss Roots' face relaxed, and her fatigued intelligence awoke.

"Who's on in it?" asked Flossie, happy and unconscious; and the spirit of mischief seized upon Miss Roots.

"I can't tell you. I'm not well posted in these things. But I think you'd better not ask Mr. Rickman to take you to see Metropolis."

Flossie was mystified, and a little indignant. If the play was so improper, why had Miss Roots taken for granted that she had seen it?

"That wasn't at all nice of her, was it?" said Lucia, smiling as Miss Roots went away. Her look was a healing touch laid on Flossie's wounded vanity. "That's the sort of little trap she used to lay for me."

"I suppose you mean she was rotting me. I always know when other people are rotting. But that's the worst of her; you never can tell, and she makes you look so ignorant, doesn't she?"

"She makes me feel ignorant, but that's another thing."

"But whatever did she mean just now?"

"Just now she meant that you knew all about Metropolis."

"Why should I? Do you know anything about it?"

"Not much; though it is my cousin's paper. But as Mr. Rickman writes for it, you see—"

"Well, how was I to know that? He's always writing for something; and he'd never think of coming to me every time. I never talk shop to him, and he never talks shop to me. Of course he told me that he'd got on to some better paying thing," she added, anxious to show that she was not shut out from the secrets of his heart; "but when you said Metropolis I didn't take it in."

Lucia made no further attempt to converse. She said good-night and followed Sophie Roots to her tiny room.

"That was rather dreadful," she said to herself. "I wonder—" But if she did not linger long over her wondering neither did she stop to find out why she was so passionately anxious to think well of the woman who was to be Keith Rickman's wife, and why it was such a relief to her to be angry with Sophie for teasing the poor child.



CHAPTER LV

He asked himself how it was that he had had no premonition of the thing that was about to happen to him; that the supreme moment should have come upon him so casually and with so light a step; that he went to meet it in a mood so commonplace and unprepared? (Good Heavens! He remembered that he had been eating pea soup at the time, and wishing it were artichoke.)

Had he not known that she would come back again, and in just that way? Had he not looked for her coming five years ago? And what were five years, after all? How was it that he had heard no summons of the golden and reverberant hour?

And what was he going to do with it, or it with him, now that it had come? That was a question that he preferred to leave unanswered for the present.