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To-morrow?

by Victoria Cross · English · Gutenberg #3609 · 360,519 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: To-morrow?

Author: Victoria Cross


        
Release date: January 1, 2003 [eBook #3609]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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Produced by Charles Franks, Johannes Blume and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.









To-morrow?


By

Victoria Cross




  "Cras te victurum, cras dicis Postume semper
  Dic mihi cras istud, Postume quando venit?
  Quam longe cras istud, ubi est? aut unde petendum?
  Cras istud quanti dic mihi, possit emi?
  Cras vives? hodie jam vivere, Postume, serum est
  Ille sapit, quisquis Postume, vixit heri."

  MART. v. lviii.




CHAPTER I.


"REJECTED! rejected!"

I crushed the letter spasmodically in my hand as I walked mechanically
up and down the length of the dining-room, a rage of anger filling my
brain and the blood thundering in my ears.

"Rejected! and that not for the first time. Another year and a half's
work flung away--simply flung away, and I am no nearer recognition than
ever. Incredible it seems that they won't accept that."

I stopped under the gasalier and glanced again through the letter I had
just received.

"DEAR SIR,--With reference to your last MS., we regret to say we cannot
undertake its publication, owing to the open way in which you express
your unusual religious views and your contempt for existing
institutions.

"At the same time, our reader expresses his admiration for your style,
and his regret that your unmistakably brilliant genius should be
directed towards unsatisfactory subjects.--We are," etc., etc.

The blood flowed hotly over my face, and my teeth closed hard upon my
lip.

Always the same thing! rejection from every quarter.

The last clause in the letter, which might have brought some momentary
gratification to a man less certain, less absolutely sure of his own
powers than I was, could bring none to me.

It only served to make sharper the edge of my keen disappointment.
Brilliant genius! I read the words with the shadow of a satirical smile.

What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every vein,
that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they seemed
buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the expectant
mother she has a life within her own.

I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of hearing
reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.

We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments, praise,
or felicitation.

These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here, at
six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and not a
single line of my writing had met the public eye.

I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken man
in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and desires of
the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has been surpassed,
death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire, but the longings of
the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit and without period; and
where a physical desire, ungratified, must eventually destroy itself as
it wears away the matter that has given it birth, a mental desire does
not wane with the flesh it wastes, but remains ravening to the last,
and reigns supreme over the death agony, up to the final moment of
actual dissolution.

I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of those
idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work, and who
are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the brilliant but
vague, unformed inspirations that visit them between the circling rings
of smoke from their cigar.

I had no thought, no expectation, no wish even to be offered that
celebrated sweet condition of the palm without the dust of the struggle
in the arena.

But for me it had been dust, dust, and nothing but dust, and there were
times when it seemed to blind, choke, overpower me.

My capacity for work was unlimited; labour was comparatively no labour
to me. The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a manuscript was as
nothing to me.

To write came to me as naturally as to speak.

Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written something
totally different.

And there they all stood in a pile, an irritating, distracting pile, a
monument of unrequited labour, an unrealised capital, a silent
testimony to the exceeding narrowness of the limits of British
indulgence to talent.

My persistent ill-luck was all the more aggravating as I was not
handicapped by poverty, as so many authors are. The question of terms
had not been one to present a difficulty.

I had no need to ask a publisher to accept my MSS. at his own financial
risk.

I was not the traditional struggling young writer of the lady novelist
who treats poverty and genius as convertible terms, making up with the
former quality whatever her hero lacks of the other.

No; although the combination may be very romantic, I confess,
notwithstanding that I was an unrecognised author, I was not living in
a garret, nor writing my MSS. by the proverbially flaring candle, nor
going without my dinner in order to pay for foolscap.

But my feelings were as bitter, and the sense of disappointment as
sharp, as any attic-dwelling genius' could have been, even if we
suppose the lady novelist to have thrown in a conventionally
consumptive wife.

In fact they were stronger because more absolute, more concentrated in
themselves.

There were no pangs of hunger to distract my attention, no
traditionally patient wife to look sadly at me, no responsibilities for
others lying upon me and my rejected MSS.

Simply all my own desires for myself centred in them.

There was one side issue which at times seemed to include everything,
to be everything in itself, but the moments when this forced itself in
overwhelming prominence upon my brain were few.

The wish that I had to publish my works could not be traced to distinct
motives; it did not spring from a desire to gain money, nor yet
celebrity.

I was not particularly keen on fame while I lived, and I certainly had
no sentimental ideas of my name surviving me.

I cared little in fact whether my name ever reached the public,
provided only my works were known and read. The wish to give them out
was not a thing of motive, nor thought, nor will. It was the fierce,
instinctive impulse that accompanies all creative power, the tremendous
impetus towards production that is an integral part of all conceptive
capacity. The same driving necessity that compels a writer in the
middle of the night to rise and take his pen and commit to paper some
thought or thoughts that are racing about in his brain, trying to find
an outlet, that compels him to produce them as far as he is able, this
same urgent impulse forces him to complete his manuscript, and when
completed, to strain his utmost to give it actual life in the thoughts
and brains of the public.

The pressing want to produce is as wholly natural, as innate, as
independent of the individual's volition as the conceptive impulse
itself.

And it was thus with me.

I could not be said to wish to publish from this or that motive,
because of this, that, or the other. I was simply dominated by the
instinct to do so, which grew more and more urgent as it found no
gratification.

It had risen now rampant at this last rebuff, and it seemed to rage
about in my brain like a Bengal tiger in a net.

I walked up and down the long dining-room, backwards and forwards, from
the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard at the
other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now and then
from sheer nervous irritation. "Cursed, infernal nuisance!"

I had just muttered this when the door was pushed open, but the
enterer, on hearing my exclamation, promptly drew it to again, and
would have shut it, but that I caught the handle.

It was the butler.

"What do you want, Simmonds," I said.

"Nothing, sir. I was told to enquire if you was in."

"Well, I am."

"Yes, sir. Please, Mr. Hilton said was you ready for dinner?"

"Certainly; and, Simmonds, where's Nous?"

"Tied up, sir, in the stable."

"Tied up! Again! I gave orders he was never to be tied up!"

"Yes, sir; but please, sir, he was that dirty and muddy to go
scrimmaging over the house, and it's the ruination of the furniture--"

"The dog is not to be tied up," I interrupted.

"Have him let loose at once, and in future remember, if he comes in wet
and muddy, and chooses to lie on the drawing-room couch, let him."

The man disappeared, and I walked over to the hearth.

A minute or two later there was a scratching and whining outside the
door, and I went to it and let Nous in.

He bounded over me, licked my face furiously, and scratched
enthusiastically at my shirt front.

He was wet, and his fur laden with mud, as the butler had said, and my
clothes suffered from his demonstrativeness, but his feelings were of
more import than a dress-coat, and I would not have hurt them by
checking his greeting.

"Dear old boy," I said, taking the collar off with which he had been
chained up,--and just then my father came into the room.

"Ah, got back, Victor?"

"Yes," I said, looking up.

"They've rejected your last, eh?" he said at once.

"Yes. Why? Have they sent it? How did you know it was rejected?"

"By your face, my dear boy," answered my father.

"It's odd that these failures knock you up still. You must be
accustomed to them now!"

That was cutting, and it cut.

"One does not easily get accustomed to anything that is against natural
law," I said, coldly.

"Oh! and you mean that it is against the natural law of things that so
brilliant a genius as yourself should be perpetually rejected?"

I nodded. "Just so," I answered.

"It is a pity they will not take your estimation of your own powers!"

"There is very little difference in the estimation," I said. "The
difference is in the courage. I have the courage to write things they
have not the courage to print. There is no question as to my powers. No
one, except yourself, perhaps, has ever denied those."

"Well, why the dickens don't you write something that they will accept?
Why not make up something quite conventional?"

I looked across the hearth at him with a half amused, half ironical
smile, and said nothing. It is so hard to explain to an outsider the
involuntariness of all real talent.

This great leading characteristic is invariably but imperfectly grasped
by others.

They cannot realise it.

I was too flat in spirits and too tired in body to feel inclined to
enter then into an abstruse discussion with him, and I would have let
the matter slide.

His last remark to the ear of anyone who has genuine talent, whether
artist or author or poet, or what you please, sounds like a
sacrilegious blasphemy.

"Make up something!"

Great heavens! What an expression!

Is a writer, then, a cook, preparing a new dish? Is he a nursery maid
soothing a refractory child? Is he a woman's dressmaker taking her
mistress's orders?

Dinner was served just then, and we took our seats at the table in
silence.

I thought I should have no need to answer.

However, when the butler had deposited the soup and shut the door after
him, my father returned to the attack.

"Yes, Victor," he said in a friendly way, as if a happy solution of my
difficulties had just occurred to him, "why don't you make up something
quite orthodox and keep your own opinions out of it?"

I sighed and took half a glass of claret to fortify me. I saw I was in
for propounding my views upon genius, and I did not feel up to it.

I could have avoided the argument, doubtless, by seeming to assent, by
promising to "make up something," and saved myself a number of words.

But there is a strong impulse in me to revolt against allowing myself
to seem to accept a false statement or opinion that I do not really
hold.

And I pulled myself together with an effort.

"I don't think you understand in the least my view of a writer and his
writings," I said. "It is not a voluntary thing, led up to by
pre-determination. There can be no question of making up. I never try
to write nor to think. I do not invoke my own ideas. They spring into
being of themselves, quite unsought. And, in a measure, they are
uncontrollable."

My father was staring at me in silence.

"Eh?" he said merely as I paused.

I laughed.

"What I mean is, that a man, as a man, endowed with will, control,
wishes, and so on, ceases to exist, you may say, while he is writing.
He becomes then the tool of that peculiar, mysterious power that is
moving in his brain. He writes as a clerk writes from dictation. He is
the clerk pro tem of the impulse stirring his being, which dictates to
him what it pleases. There is no consideration in his mind--'I will
write this or that' or 'I won't write the other.' He simply feels he
must write a particular thing; it crowds off his pen before he can stop
it. He does not know where, whence, how, or why the idea came to him.
But it is there, clamouring to be written, and he writes it because he
must. The expression, very often, of a thought is as uncontrollable as
a physical spasm, and the man who writes it cannot always be held
responsible for it."

"My dear Victor!"

"No, really," I said, laughing, "I am simply stating ordinary facts. I
believe any writer, any acknowledged writer of talent, will bear me
out, more or less. It is the old idea of inspiration--one cannot
express it better--a breathing into. It is exactly that. The man of
genius, in any form, feels at times-that is to say, when his fit is on,
that there is a breathing into his brain. It becomes full of images he
is unfamiliar with, crowded with thoughts that are quite foreign
perhaps to the man himself, to his life, to his habits, and invested
with a peculiar knowledge of things he has had no personal experience
of. Then as suddenly as it came the fit goes; it is over, and he can
write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his sentences become
mere linked chains of nouns and verbs; his inspiration has gone. He
cannot invoke it, cannot restrain it, cannot retain it, cannot recall
it, and only very slightly control it."

"Ha!" said my father reflectively, going on with his soup, "deuced
inconvenient."

"Inconvenient it may be," I said quietly. "All the same, that which is
written under inspiration is the only stuff worth reading. The Greeks
expressed the peculiar feeling that a man has when his inspiration
comes upon him by the phrase, entheos eimi, and we can hardly find a
better one, only unfortunately we don't believe in gods. Otherwise,
entheos eimi contains everything, for the man who was only common clay
before his inspiration, and will be common clay when it departs, feels,
for the time, as if a god had descended, and was within him. And when,
afterwards, he looks at what he has written he feels it is something
not wholly his own, but that it is the work of some powerful influence
he can hardly comprehend, and cannot certainly rule."

"But really I don't see that this has much relation to what I said
about your writing something to please the British public!"

"It is the whole gist of the matter," I said. "I am proving to you that
I am, to a certain extent, helpless in what I write; that it is
impossible for me to think of publics, British or otherwise, of
publishers or critics, when I am writing. I have no time to consider
them, no space in my brain for them, no memory that such things, or
anything outside of what I am describing, exists even. My only thought
is to drive along my pen fast enough, in obedience to the strenuous
impulse urging me. I do not 'make up,' as your phrase is, anything. I
simply put down on paper, as fast as I can, the thoughts that are
pouring into my brain, like the waves of a flood flowing over it. I am
whirled away on the stream myself; my identity is lost, submerged. Now
look here, I'll give you a cut and dried instance which will make clear
how it is that I offend the prejudices, or the proprieties, or whatever
you call it, in my books; at least I imagine it is in this way: Suppose
I have a death scene to write. My MS. is waiting for that to complete
it. I don't say to myself beforehand, Now there shall be a bed with
Tomkins dying in it; there shall be Maria at the left-hand corner, and
Jane at the right. The wife and doctor shall be grouped artistically at
the foot. Tomkins shall make two speeches before he dies; no,
three--three is more natural--uneven number. Now what shall Tomkins
say? Yes. Ah--hum--what the deuce shall I make him say? It must not be
too much like what a dying man would say, because the British public is
dead against realism. It must not either show any strong contempt for
religion; a little mild contempt, of course, goes down and is
fashionable, but I must not express it forcibly. He must not either
evince a disbelief in immortality--at least that's dangerous ground.
Some publishers will accept it and some won't.--Better leave it out.
Ah--hum--what shall Tomkins say? I have it! A retrospect of his past
life! And yet--No, stay! that won't do. Something that sounds like
something that might possibly be immoral might turn up in it, and that
would be fatal--damn the MS. utterly. Well, look here, Tomkins has got
to die, and I've got to finish the book, so I must get something down.
'Darling Mabel, this parting is terrible, but still I feel we shall
meet in another world.' Now, is that safe? Has a similar phrase been
put in heaps of novels before? Because the British public won't have
anything too new. It likes to head over again what it has heard at
least fifty thousand times before, and then it knows it won't be
shocked. Yes, that sentence will do. Now I must put in a few more and
then, thank goodness, the scene will be done! Now," I said, springing
up from the table, "do you call that art? do you call it genius? Is a
collection of bald phrases and second-hand sentiments, hooked together
like that, worth anything when it's done?"

"My dear boy, don't excite yourself like that," my father answered
deliberately. "Sit down and finish your soup."

"Oh, hang the soup!" I said, resuming my seat. "Shall I sound the gong?
I have not told you my way yet, but I'm coming to it when the man's
gone." I sounded the gong, and the butler came in with the next course.

There was no carving ever done at our table, so my father had only to
tranquilly continue eating while I talked. He had forced me into the
discussion, and now he should hear it to the end.

"Of course, if you do write the death of Tomkins like that you can keep
your scenes orthodox, or whatever word you have in view. But, supposing
my MS. is lying incomplete;--I have a conviction that I am going to
write of death, but the method of the man's death is at present unknown
to me, unthought of.--Then, some afternoon, I happen to be sitting
smoking, and just perhaps wondering whether I shall go round to the
club or not, when suddenly a scene, a death scene, the scene I have
been waiting for, comes rushing through my head. It comes upon me with
tremendous impetus; mechanically, almost unconsciously, I take up a pen
and write. Space opens before me and I see a hospital ward. A blaze of
light floods it. Rows of narrow beds are there, and on one I see
Tomkins--dying. I make my way to him: now I am by his bed. I see him
stretched beneath my eyes. I see the pillow dark with the sweat of his
death agony--the night-shirt torn at his throat to get air. Have I time
to consider then whether the British public like the word night-shirt,
and whether it would not be safer to put Tomkins into a dressing-gown?
The man is there before me, dying, and he is in his night-shirt, and I
must write it. Besides, my pen is tearing on. I cannot stop--he is
dying. Will he speak before he dies? I do not know yet. His eyelids
quiver, the black veins in his throat knot up, he gasps. I bend lower:
'his breath comes hurriedly: his eyes open and fix upon me: they are
red, vitreous but conscious: then I know he will speak, he is going
to--the next moment his half-strangled voice reaches my ear. He is
speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less, no
different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips whiten and
draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a convulsive spasm
wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid silence, and then one
deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and flesh collapse as the Life
is set loose. The damp body sinks back, leaving its death sweat on my
arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is dead. But the impulse is not done
with me yet. I cannot get out of that hospital ward till I have done
everything, passed through all the circumstances that crop up naturally
from the death of Tomkins. There is no 'making up.' The scene is being
enacted before me. It is. It exists. It is the truth for the time
being, and, as the truth, I write it. There is the miserable girl,
sobbing convulsively, with her arms out-stretched in the bed-clothes.
Can I leave her without some words of consolation? I must write down
that she is there, because I see her there. There are some arrangements
to be made with the nurse, and then, when I am leaving the ward, or at
least intend to, my brain hurries the doctor up the ward to me. I don't
'make him up.' I had not the remotest idea of the head doctor appearing
when I sat down to write. But now I see him approaching me between the
beds, and before I can pass him, as I want to, he button-holes me and
proceeds to explain that Tomkins never would have died if he had
undergone an operation that the doctor had perceived from the very
first moment was necessary. After a long talk with him, perhaps, my pen
stops. I pause: and when I pause I know the inspiration has gone. As
the ancients would say, the Muse or the God has departed and dictates
no more. I fling aside the paper and look at my watch. Several hours
passed in the hospital, but I'll go round to the club now. And I go. I
know Tomkins is dead. It only occurs to me afterwards, as a secondary
consideration, that in consequence the MS. is finished. Tomkins was not
for the manuscript, but the manuscript for Tomkins. Now the point
is--Can I be held responsible for that scene? It is not my fault that I
have mentally seen a private soldier dying in hospital. The whole thing
was involuntary."

"Very extraordinary views!" muttered my father.

I shrugged my shoulders in silence, and called up Nous to give him my
untouched dinner.

"The best joke of it is, too," I said, suspending a strip of sirloin
over the collie's nose, "the publishers admit if I had less talent they
would print my things. I could not understand why my 'Laura Dean' was
refused, so I went down to the publishers to try and find out. I saw
the reader himself, and an awfully nice fellow he is, too. In reply to
my question, he said the objection to the book was that it dealt with a
wife leaving her husband. I stared at him in amazement. 'But, great
Scott!' I said, 'that's a good old-fashioned theme enough. It's as old
as the hills. It's the subject of--' and I gave him a list of about a
dozen eminent novels. 'Yes,' he admitted. 'But they are not written in
the same way.' 'Is there anything coarse or low in the writing?' 'Oh,
no! I should not say that!' 'Well, what is the matter with it, then?'
'The thing is too much brought before you. Of course, in these books
you have mentioned the wife runs away, but it does not make much
impression. You have put it all so forcibly, and given the characters
and episode so much life, and driven the idea of her infidelity so far
home to one, that, well, it becomes a different thing--one realises
it.' 'Oh, then you admit the immoral theme and the language to be
unobjectionable, and the book would have been accepted by the British
public provided only it had been less well written?' 'Yes, I suppose it
comes to that.' And then I caught his eye, and we both laughed. He is a
clever fellow himself, I should think, and the ludicrousness of the
idea tickled him as much as it did me. I came away. His admission was
quite the truth. It is the British way to take the second-rate in every
art and scout the best. Write a book poorly and feebly, and it passes.
Write the same thing powerfully and well, and the cry is--It's
improper! It's just the same thing in painting. Paint a nude woman
snowy white, without a shade or a shadow, and looking altogether as no
mortal woman ever did look, and the picture will be hung at the
Academy, and people will say, 'How charming! So artistic!' But paint a
woman with a glow on her neck and bosom, and the warm blood running in
her arms, dare to make her a living, breathing thing on canvas, and
your picture will be rejected. 'Excellent, unequalled, perfect, but--it
cannot be seen!' And what is British art as a consequence? Justly is it
looked down upon by the other nations. We simply set our heel upon the
best men. And look at our productions! Look at the rot and the trash
that floods the libraries every year! Look at the average novel! It's a
disgrace to our intellect! Look at the woodeny dolls that are its men
and women! And behold our Academy! See our pictures!"

"Don't rock your chair like that, Victor; it annoys me."

"Very good," I said, bringing my chair down on its fore legs again.
"Are you ready for the cheese?"

"Yes; but won't you eat anything?"

"No, thanks. I am fed upon annoyance just now."

"You are getting thin on it, too," he answered, looking at me. "It's a
pity you are so excitable!"

"It's a pity I was born in this confounded Britain! I should have got
on all right with Parisian readers. But I don't despair even here. They
can reject my MSS., but they can't take out my brains. I daresay I
shall stumble across some man at last with courage enough to stand by
me in the beginning and help me force open the British public's jaws
and cram my ideas down its throat; and that once done, it will digest
them perfectly, for it's a tough old beast, though very blind. Why on
earth has that fellow carried off the champagne?"

"You finished the bottle yourself just this minute!" returned my
father, in surprise.

"Did I? Oh, very likely! Absence of mind!"

"It seems to me if you had a little less of this talent you boast of
you would be considerably the gainer."

"Possibly," I rejoined. "But a gift is a gift. You can't say to nature,
take this back and let me have something more paying! Besides, I can't
admit that for any earthly reason I would change. I have no desire to
be a second-rate writer when I know I am a first!"

"By Jove! if conceit could carry the day!"

"No, there is no conceit," I persisted. "Is it conceit to say my hair
is black? It is black, and everybody can see it is. I have nothing to
do with it. Nature made it black, and black it is, and I know it.
Should I gain anything by contending that it was red? I don't see that
I should. However," I added, laughing, "The point is of no consequence.
Put me down as a fifth-rate writer, if you like, until I become the
fashion!"

"It does not seem you ever will, at this pace," he said quietly.

"Very good," I answered, equally quietly.

"Then you will not have the trouble of changing your opinion."

There was a long silence then. We each smoked without a word. At twenty
minutes to ten my father got up. He always went to bed horribly early.

"What are you going to do, Victor?"

"I am going out," I answered, getting up and stretching myself.

"Will you be late?"

"Probably. I got no sleep last night, nor the night before. It's no
earthly use my going to bed when I feel like this. I can't get to sleep
by repeating hymns, as some fellow suggested the other day."

"Why don't you take morphia or something to help you?"

"I don't care to begin taking drugs," I said, "I would rather wear
myself out, and induce sleep in that way. I shall take a three hours'
walk or so."

"Well, good-night."

"Good-night."

When he was gone, I sat a few minutes in the easy chair, with my head
in my hands thinking. I had meant to ask him a question at dinner, but
that argument on talent had put it on one side. Well, it would do later.

"Coming out, Nous?" I said to the collie. The dog started and pricked
his ears.

"Out?" I repeated, and he leapt to his feet and gave himself a joyful
shake, and then stood on the hearth-rug in front of me, swaying slowly
his great brush of a tail and poising his head at an intelligent angle.
I got up, felt for my latch-key, and went into the hall. Nous waited
impatiently while I put on my hat and overcoat, and then we went out
together. The night was cold, wet, and foggy. It was late in November,
and a light mist veiled the end of each black, deserted street.

I took no heed of anything, neither the atmosphere round me nor the
direction in which my feet carried me. I was wrapped up in a maze of
thoughts, and there was not a decently pleasant one in the whole lot.

They were warmed and brightened every now and then as a form that I
loved glided amongst them, but even that form dragged after it a chain
of painful, fettering considerations, and the gleams of light that it
threw round it were only like those weak, pallid flashes of sun that
flit through the clouds of thunder and storm in a hurricane.




CHAPTER II.


The next morning when I came down to breakfast it was late, and my
father had already withdrawn to his own library. I had missed again
speaking to him, as I could not seek and disturb him there.

He also was a writer, though quite of a different school from myself.
He wrote ardently upon politics, political economy, and statistics,
things which I took no interest in.

The nation might arrange itself how it pleased for all I cared. What I
wanted to arrange was my own life. I had no ambition to set my
country's affairs straight, my own thoughts were too much engaged in
tugging my own into some sort of order.

There were some letters for me, and I turned them over listlessly,
balancing them tip in succession against the toast-rack in front of me,
without opening any. The last I came to was quite different from any of
the others, and being the last, it stood foremost before me, and I
looked at it while I went on with my breakfast.

It is curious how representative a letter generally is of its writer.
The mere outside is like a psychological photograph. Of course it does
not give details, but it presents you with a wonderfully accurate
outline of the cut of a person's identity. This envelope was square,
and looked as hard, white and clean as if a stone-tablet had passed
through the post. It bore a delicate, weak, feminine superscription,
hurried and careless; the writing unformed, but graceful and
distinguished; and on the other side of the letter, stamped in grey,
stood a crest, and the motto subscrolled.

Yes, the woman who had written it was very like the letter. Immaculate
and perhaps somewhat hard, delicate, and in will a little weak,
impulsive and undecided, well-bred, and strikingly typical of the class
to which she belonged.

I broke the letter open after a minute and read--

"DEAREST VICTOR,--Do come and see me as soon as you possibly can. A
scheme for the next canvas occurred to me last night, but I want you to
help me execute it. What about the manuscripts? If you can't come, tell
me. Bring Nous.  LUCIA."

I smiled as I replaced the letter. The composition was rather
defective, and left the meaning decidedly indistinct. If I could not
come I was to tell her. Tell her what? About the MS., or that I
couldn't come?

And under what circumstances was I to take Nous? Apparently if I could
not do so.

I was not sneering at the little note, and it went into my breast
pocket, but it amused me.

"That is the way I ought to write for the British, I suppose?" I
muttered, with a yawn. "Muddle all one's language up until nobody has
the faintest idea of what the author's sentiments are, and then they
don't know whether he means anything heterodox or not."

I got up. I might as well obey the orders I had just received.

There was a tired confusion of thought in my brain--a floating mass of
half-formed embryonic ideas, wishes, plans and suggestions filled it
that were quite useless for prompting or guiding any definite
resolution as to what I should do in the immediate future.

Everything seemed to depend on something else, and it was impossible to
find any positive basis upon which I could found a resolve.

If I could succeed as an author, my way was clear, but if I could not,
and if ... and if... And so on through a wearying, perplexing series of
conditions.

Just then I felt unequal to regulating and giving order to this inward
chaos, and I abandoned the attempt.

Meanwhile I would go over to the house in South Kensington, whence the
letter had come.

It was about eleven when I arrived there, and I was told Miss Grant was
"upstairs, as usual."

I nodded, and went up the necessary six flights of stairs to a familiar
landing on the third floor.

A door in front of me stood ajar, and with a sign to Nous to remain on
the stairs, I knocked at it.

There was no answer and no sound from within, and thinking the room was
empty after all, I pushed the door wide and went in.

It was a huge room, used as a studio, facing the north light, and with
three large windows.

Before the middle one there was an easel, and the girl was in the room,
standing there in front of the canvas between me and the light. She was
seemingly entirely abstracted and absorbed. She was completely
motionless, and for the moment she communicated her stillness to me.

I paused, silent, looking at her.

She was standing directly in front of me, facing the canvas, that was
perfectly blank at present.

One hand rested on her hip, the other was raised and pressed to her
head, as when a person looks into distance, and the arm and elbow and
wrist traced a delicate curve against the dull grey square of London
window pane.

A twist of hair about as thick as my arm fell nearly to her waist. It
was decidedly not gold; that is, it did not suggest dye and the
Haymarket; but it was fair and curly, and seemed to hold light
imprisoned amongst it.

The figure was tall, and erred, perhaps, on the side of slightness.

Certainly it would have been too slight for those men whose scale of
admiration runs--so much in the pound. But the architecture of the form
was perfect. Each line was worthy of study in itself as a thing of
beauty, and the harmony of them all in the whole figure, whether it
moved or was at rest, gave an indefinable pleasure to the eye.

What a lovely thing it was this form, seeming to hold in itself the
light and pleasure and glow of life, as it stood, the only brilliant
thing in that cold north room.

And it might be mine, might have belonged to me long since if ... well
if ... that was just it.

I made a step forward and she turned.

"Oh, I'm so glad you've come," she said, laying her hand in mine. "I
want you so much."

We shook hands.

Although we were cousins, and had been engaged for the last two years,
this was our invariable method of greeting and leave-taking.

I had never kissed her, nor was I sure whether I ever really desired to.

There were times when the thought that precedes the impulse or the
impulse that gives birth to the thought came to me, but always when I
was away from her and not with her, and consequently the desire
culminated in nothing.

When I was actually beside her all my own feelings seemed suddenly held
in suspension, just as one stops with feet chained when one discovers
one has come abruptly upon sacred ground.

There had been times when I had hurried to this girl with words eager
to be spoken on my lips, and at the first sight of her they had died
unuttered on my tongue, just as words die into silence in the presence
of a somnambulist.

"Why am I specially necessary?" I said, smiling, as we stood in front
of the easel. "Will you let me paint you as Hyacinthus?" I went into a
fit of laughter. "My dear girl! anything to oblige you, but consider,"
I said, looking down into her eager eyes; "you ought not to have a
model of six-and-twenty. Hyacinthus was probably sixteen."

"You don't know how old he was!" she said, mockingly, her azure, sunny
eyes lighting up with laughter, too, as she leant on the bending
maul-stick and looked up at me.

"No, I don't know," I answered; "but I can infer it. If we only went
upon what we actually know we should not go very far."

"Well, he might have been as much as nineteen, and you don't look quite
six-and-twenty; and the remaining difference I can soften down. Have
you any other excuse to make to get out of the bother of sitting?"

"You are a horrid little wretch to put it like that," I answered, "and
I won't say another word of advice. Paint your Greek youth as you
please. Of course, you'll give him this mustache with waxed ends? It's
very appropriate!"

"No; of course I shan't. Now, Victor, do be sensible. You can be so
nice at times!"

"Can I really? You are kind!"

"I want to hear about the manuscript. Was it accepted?" she said very
gently, with her hand on mine.

"Well, that's soon told," I answered. "It wasn't."

She said nothing. Probably she knew that the mere expression "I am
sorry" would be inadequate to say to a man who felt every failure as
keenly as I did, and I hastened to remove her difficulty.

"Don't let us talk of it," I said. "Tell me of the new conception."

"It is to be called 'The Death of Hyacinthus,'" she said, glancing at
the vast, vacant canvas, on which, doubtless, her eye saw the whole
vision already. "The scene is to be flooded with sunlight, that pours
in upon a green, open glade. The life-sized figure of Hyacinthus will
be standing three-quarters towards the spectator, and a little towards
the rush of light from the setting sun. His eyes are to be fixed upon
the quoit which will be here, at this end of the canvas, opposite him.
It will be tinged blood-red in the sun's rays, and seem a little above
him."

She paused, with her eyes on the canvas. She had drifted away on the
stream of her idea. "And what about the two gods?" I asked.

She started.

"Oh yes, I was going to tell you. Zephyrus will only be represented by
the effect of the wind seen on the bushes, on the trees, and every
blade of grass or fern in the picture. These small tamarisk trees that
fringe the glade will be bent nearly double. The spirit of the wind
must be in the whole painting. That will be the great effect, of
course."

"And Apollo?"

"I cannot put him in. You see, I do want this to be taken at the
Academy next year, and though they have scores of nude women, they
would not have a nude god at any price: and it would be too inartistic
to clothe Apollo. So I have supposed him invisible; being a god, he
would be so to all except Hyacinthus. Simply his hand, holding the
quoit, will be faintly suggested, and the light allowed to fall through
it."

There was silence. "Do you like it?" she said suddenly to me.

"Yes. I think the idea is unconventional: but on that account you will
probably be rejected."

"I must risk it. Hyacinthus is to be in white, and must look radiantly,
gloriously happy."

"I say, do you want me to look radiantly, gloriously happy-because that
will be rather difficult just now."

"As far as you can. You see, the point is that he was struck and killed
in the moment of supreme confidence and light-hearted joy."

"How very uncomfortable! Is that to be my fate?" I said laughing.

"Well, will you, Victor?"

"Will I what?"

"Take your seat here, now, and let me sketch you?"

"Certainly; but I thought you said he was to be standing?"

"I don't think I can take you for the whole figure. You are too much
occupied to be able to spare the time. And I can find another model for
the figure. I should like to take you for the whole, but you may be
going away or something before the painting is finished. But in any
case I have set my heart on giving him your head and neck."

"You flatter me awfully," I returned. "You shall have them--but that
wretched Nous is outside all this time. May I let him in?"

"Oh yes! I did not know you had brought him!" she exclaimed, and ran
herself to the door and called him in.

He came in meekly. And I stood where she had left me by the easel, and
watched her bend over him and caress him, and I thought I was badly
used.

"Now, will you sit there?" she said, coming back and indicating a chair.

I took it in silence. Then she paused, looking at me.

"What is it?" I said, enquiringly.

"Would you--" and she hesitated.

"Continue: command me."

"Could you take off your collar?"

"I think, perhaps, I could," I said, looking up into her serious face.
"I am not aware that it is an absolute fixture!"

She laughed, but she was seldom chaffed out of a reply.

"It might have been in one with the shirt!" she said.

"Far-seeing intuitiveness! I admit it might; but fortunately in this
case it's not. Then you'll excuse me if I take off my coat?"

"Yes, I want you to--coat, collar, and tie; so that I can sketch your
neck down to the base of the throat."

"Ah!" I said, drawing off my coat, "I was wondering how you were going
to fix up Hyacinthus with a lavender tie!"

She deigned no answer to that, and sat down just in front of me. A
piece of plain drawing paper was put upon the easel before the canvas.

"Will you raise your head more? and throw your eyes up? higher, above
my head!"

"May I not look straight at you?"

"No: up! up! to the window above me!"

"Won't you come and put me in the right position?"

"No. I am sure you have intellect enough to understand verbal
directions."

"Well there," I said, throwing myself into the position she wanted;
"that is easy: but how about that jolly expression? where's that to
come from?"

"Can't you imagine for a moment that you are successful, and we are
married?"

"A pretty good stretch of the imagination that!" I muttered, "as things
are at present!"

And involuntarily I brought my eyes down from the window to the pale,
delicate, abstracted face opposite me. I did not intend to convey any
reproach to her, but perhaps she thought so, for she seemed to answer
that which she took to be in my mind.

"But, Victor, you know," she said, laying down the pencil she had just
taken up, "it is in your own hands. I am willing to marry you when you
like!"

She said it very gently, but with just a touch of cold restraint that
irritated me excessively.

"Oh yes, I know it's all my own confounded fault, but that does not
make it any pleasanter. However, let all that pass. I'll look as
cheerful as I can."

There was a long silence. She was absorbed in the drawing, and I in my
own thoughts, as I stared through the upper pane, as directed, at the
grey, drifting, hurrying November clouds. Had I descried a quoit there
about to descend upon me I should have been rather pleased than not. At
last I became conscious of an intolerable crick in my neck.

"May I move?"

"Oh, one minute! one minute!" she answered, and her voice struck me. It
was faint, breathless, mechanical: the voice of a person whose whole
being is tense with some straining effort. At least fifteen more
minutes of silence passed.

"I say! I really must turn my head now!"

"No, no! not for worlds! Keep still!"

I kept still, but I felt sick with the peculiar cramp in my neck.
Suddenly she dropped the crayon and started up.

"Now you may move, Victor! I've finished!"

I brought my head down to its ordinary level with considerable
thankfulness, and as my eyes fell upon her I was rather startled. Her
figure seemed expanded as she stood, and the white serge of her bodice
rose and fell heavily. All the blood had flowed from her face, leaving
it blanched, colourless. In her eyes the azure iris had disappeared,
the dilated pupils had brimmed over it, and left nothing behind the
lashes but shining, liquid blackness. Unconsciously, seemingly, her
left hand was pressed to her left side, beneath the heart, and I saw it
tremble; and the whole form quivered as she leaned slightly forward
with her gaze bent upon the canvas. There was for the time being some
great force lent her. Some power had stirred in the brain, and now
seemed overflowing through the physical system--doubtless at its
expense. This was inspiration, certainly, and valuable for its creative
power, but the merely physical life and physical frame panted and
fainted after its painful throes to produce that which the brain
commanded. I looked at the girl, oblivious of me, oblivious of herself
and of the pain that forced her hand mechanically to her side--looked
half with pleasure, half with alarm. It must always bring a delight to
the human being to watch the triumph of intellect over matter, of the
mental over the physical system, of the mind over the body. The
sympathy of our own mind must go with the fellow-mind in its struggles
for freedom. It is like one captive calling to another from behind his
prison bars. But when we love the body too, and when our reason tells
us that the striving captive, if set free, must die; when we remember
that by some horrible, unnatural anomaly this spirit, that at times
seems divinity itself, is condemned to live in this abominable prison
and to perish there, with and in its fetters, then the wave of exultant
pleasure, of exuberant, arrogant triumph, that swept over us, poor
fellow-prisoners, watching those fetters shaken and almost cast off,
thunders back upon us, turned into the bitterest humiliation. I felt it
all--the pitiable mockery of man's nature, the inexplicable, terrible
union of a god and a brute in one frame, and the god dependent on the
brute, and both mortal--as I looked at the slight, lovely form of the
woman I loved, and saw it rocked and swayed, and left pained and
breathless with the struggles of the powers within to assert and
express themselves. It had so happened that I had never seen her at
work before. It was only recently that she had been allowed to give up
set studies for her own creative fancy. For years she had been employed
in acquiring the technique of her art; and even beside these
considerations, I had not been with her in her moments of most tense
application, and I should not have been with her now but that I was
needed as a tool in the work. And as I saw her at this moment, filled
with mental energy and dominated by the pleasure of mental labour, a
quick sympathetic elation came over me, almost immediately after to be
replaced by simple fear.

"I am afraid you have overtaxed yourself rather," I said, in
conventional phrase; "I'm afraid you're in pain."

"Oh, that's nothing! Come and tell me what you think!" she said,
extending her hand, but not taking her eyes from the drawing. "This is
only the first study, of course. But tell me, have I got a
sufficiently--well--expectant--rapt expression? I am not quite sure."

I saw she was too utterly preoccupied to attend to anything I said of
herself then, so I did not insist farther, and went up to the easel. I
was not an artist nor a critic, nor in any way qualified to be a judge
of painting as painting; but of genius, who is not a judge? In any art
it is recognisable, patent, obvious to all. There is no human clod, no
boor who is utterly insensible to its influence. It needs no education
to perceive its presence, though the ignorant could not tell you what
that presence was. Genius is as the sun itself: as universally
perceptible. Even the rustic clown feels the sun hot upon his face. Ask
him what sun is, and he cannot say, but he feels the difference between
sun and no sun. And the power in this rough drawing beat in upon my
perceptions as the sun beats on the labourer's face.

"I think it's a triumph," I answered. "You have caught a most startling
look of concentration."

"I am so glad!" she said, lightly.

The strain was over, and she was descending into ordinary mundane life
again, but the hand she had put on my arm chilled through the shirt
sleeve like ice.

"Do you recognise yourself?"

"Ye--es," I said, slowly; "except for that very glorified nose you've
given me!"

She laughed, and moved the paper off the easel.

"Now I just want to give you an idea of how the tamarisk will be
swayed," she said, holding a crayon between her tiny white teeth, and
motioning me to a couch under the window. "Sit down there and wait a
minute. I'll just sketch them roughly for you to get an approximation."

I sat down on the couch facing her, and occupied myself by replacing my
collar, etc. The studio was fireless and uncommonly chilly. Then I
leaned back and studied the girl as she sat there, one little foot
crossed over the other, and a piece of mill-board supported on her
raised knee. The tamarisk seemed to call for little expense of the
divine energy, for she was as tranquil, smiling, and human as usual,
now, as she sketched the bushes. They were far more mechanical work,
naturally, than creating an expression and throwing it on a human face.
The light from the window behind me fell full upon her, and seemed
positively to brighten in her proximity. I wonder how, in their canons
of beauty, the Latins could possibly have inscribed Frons minima,
underrating the forehead, the sublimest feature in the human face, the
great distinction between our countenance and that of our Simian
prototypes. In this woman I thought it was, perhaps, her chief
attraction. Round the temples and summit her light hair lay in thick
loose curls. It did not "stray" anywhere. On the contrary, it was very
intelligent hair, and knew exactly what to do with itself, how to curl
upwards here and catch the light, how to cluster together there in
adorable circles and half-circles in the shadow. And then came her
forehead, a smooth band of white velvet, upon which two bow-like
eyebrows were delicately traced. Excepting these and the vivid blue
colouring in the eyes, and the rose and white tinting of the flesh, she
had no positive beauties. The nose was a straight little nose, but very
English, not the least sculptural, and the lips were rather too thick.
They looked best when she was speaking, and their crimson was divided,
and showed the small, even teeth behind them. Sitting watching her, now
that her face was no longer flushed and animated in conversation, I
noticed it looked white and tired, and all round the eyes were faint,
discoloured shades. She looked overworked: looked as I myself looked in
the early morning when I went upstairs from a night's work in my study
to dress for breakfast.

"What were you doing last night?" I asked, abruptly. If I interrupted
the work on the bushes, no matter; she must work less.

She looked up with a sudden flush.

"How did you know?" she answered, looking at me with confusion and
perplexity in her eyes.

"I know nothing. I merely ask you. You were up all night?"

Her face became quite pale again, and she raised her eyebrows with a
slight smile of indifference.

"Yes, I was."

I paled too, with annoyance.

"Lucia! this is the one thing I asked you to do for me; to give your
nights, at least, to rest!"

"I know you did," she said, passionately, looking at me, her lips
quivering and her face growing paler and paler. "But it is impossible
sometimes! What gain is there in discussing these things? A perfect
scheme came to me last night, and I sat here thinking of it--planning
it upon this canvas. I could not have slept had I left this room.
Besides, to close your brain to your ideas when they do come!--it is
madness! I might never have seen the picture so vividly before me again
if I had not stayed to think it out, to realise it, to impress it, as
it were, clearly on myself. I cannot promise you, Victor--I never have,
I would not before--to go to bed and try to sleep when a plan occurs to
me suddenly for a canvas, as it did last night!"

"But think of sitting in a room like this all night with no fire! This
studio is positively freezing!"

"Is it? I don't feel it."

"No. That is what I complain of. You feel nothing and think of nothing
while you are at work, and you will injure yourself unconsciously. If
you do these things you will certainly break down."

She merely shrugged her shoulders and looked past me through the
window, an arrogant determination filling her blue eyes. The next
minute she was speaking rapidly, and with an intonation of impatience
in her voice.

"You know I am given over to the work--entirely, utterly. It is useless
to expect me to sacrifice it to anything. On the contrary, everything
must be sacrificed to it. Health, life itself, must be in the second
place. I only value my life for the sake of this talent. Of course, I
know if I lose my life I lose it too; but, equally, I can produce
nothing without work. If I am to succeed I must work simply--it is
necessity."

Each word was incisive, and seemed to cut slightly like falling steel
from those soft, warm lips. A sudden desire rushed through me to teach
her--at any rate, to exert myself to the utmost to teach her--that her
life was valuable to her for other things than the capacity it gave to
work. But I checked the words and the thoughts that rose, acting on the
same principle as had guided me hitherto. To wake her to a sense of the
pleasure and the gifts life holds, without being able to confer
either--that could not be any gain. I merely said:

"And if you give up your life for the sake of this painting, Lucia, is
that fair to me?"

"You would have your work," she answered.

The tone was cold and calm, and she went on sketching.

"Do you think that would console me?"

"I do not think: I am convinced of it. You are a man to whom your work,
your genius, is everything. This holds the first, the ruling place in
your life, and will always do so. I am in the second, I believe; but it
is the second, and the step between is wide. It is quite right it
should be so. I am not complaining, but it is useless to deny that it
is so. Well, when one loses but the second object in one's life--"

A soft smile swept over her face, and she lifted the white lids and
dark lashes--that had been drooped as she looked down at the drawing
paper--with a brilliant, mocking flash in her eyes. I met them, and
though I was not looking at it, but directly back into her eyes, the
whole charming figure forced itself upon my vision. The round throat
and the fine shoulders and the delicate curves of the long figure,
sloping to the waist beneath the white serge bodice. Had she really but
a second place? If I realised at any time I was not to possess her
after all, what then? Should I be consolable? An angry denial leapt to
my lips. There was no question of first or second. These two passions
for this woman and for my own success were coordinate forces, and their
very equality it was that kept me passive, without decisive action
between them.

There was a sort of confusion in my brain--a longing to make some
protestations. The words crowded excitedly to my lips, but I kept them
closed. The conversation was on dangerous, critical ground. If I began
to speak now, in this frame of mind, I did not know what I might say.
My own brain was not sufficiently clear and collected. I did not know
myself quite how far that which she had said was the truth. It is
useless to talk vaguely and at random, or on mere passing sensations of
the moment. Before speaking to another, before entering on a
discussion, one must know exactly what one is saying--be prepared to
act in accordance with every statement, and accept and realise the
responsibility of each word, and all this at that moment I was
not,--far from it. I felt my thoughts disordered and confused. Before
my mental eye swam a mist of manuscript; before my physical eye rose
and fell that gently beating breast. I took out my watch.

"It's a quarter past twelve, Lucia," I said, rising; "I must go."

The girl started to her feet and came in front of me.

"Victor, are you offended at what I said?"

I looked down at her with a slight smile.

"I am not so easily offended," I said, quietly.

"I will talk about all these things with you another day--not now."

"And do forgive me for siting up at nights. I know you do not like it.
I know it ruins my looks, but I must work. Besides, all my excitement,
all my amusement, is in it too. When I am not with you it is all I
have. It is different for you, as a man, besides your work and besides
myself, you have all sorts of distractions and--"

"What sort of distractions do you think I have?" I asked, quietly, and
looking straight into her eyes.

Her words might mean and include a very great deal.

"Oh, how can I say! When you feel restless and unable to work at seven
in the evening, say from then till seven the next morning your time is
your own--balls, the Empire; there are a thousand things--all the
pleasure, or at any rate the passing excitement that you can take in
these ways, I crush into the excitement that there is in work--in
overwork."

There was nothing in the actual words, but I felt the thoughts that
underlay them, unexpressed. I resented the opinion she held of me. It
was untrue, and I meant to remove it. I was silent an instant, thinking
how to find words passably comprehensible and yet conventionally
circumlocutory and euphemistic. After a moment I said simply--

"If you think I am leading a fast life, it is a mistake. I am not. What
makes you think I have distractions, as you put it?"

"Oh, nothing, except that I know you are constantly not at home at--in
the evenings. But really, Victor--" she added, a scarlet flush leaping
across her face, and then leaving it pale and cold, with a shade of
reserve and pride upon it. "I have no wish to approach this subject at
all. I should never think of enquiring into or interfering with a man's
life. These are things that must rest in his own hands."

I looked at her, as the graceful figure seemed to expand with pride, at
the dignity of each line of her form and the pose of the distinguished
head, and an irritated flush crept into my own face.

"I am out constantly, as you say," I answered, "because I cannot sleep,
but I walk then simply in search of fatigue. Pleasure, Lucia! there can
be none for me now until you belong to me. As for my life, it is a
hard-working and as absolutely without relief as your own--absolutely."

She was silent.

"You don't believe me?"

"Of course I believe you," she answered, impulsively, putting her white
hand suddenly into mine. "If you say so, but--"

"But what?"

She hesitated and coloured. I had not the least idea of what she was
really going to say. I thought the "but" led to some condition more or
less contradictory to her expression of belief in me, or, perhaps, to
some statement she had heard, or something that she had thought. And I
pressed her.

"But what?" I repeated.

"I was going to say, I have no wish to make your life harder than it
is. I do not want our engagement to impose impossible laws upon you,
nor do I set up an imaginary standard for you. You have your honour and
your own self-respect, and I know I shall always be satisfied with the
standard you raise for yourself."

The voice was very soft, and her touch and eyes caressing. She had not
said in the least what I had expected, and she had touched, as she
always did in me, the best springs in my thoughts. Her own pride, and
her unquestioning assumption of mine, stung all that I had.

"Even you, Lucia, could not have a higher!" I answered on the impulse.

She smiled.

"That is exactly what I say," she said, and the smile went on into a
slight laugh. "When will you come again to sit for Hyacinthus?"

"To-morrow, at the same time! Will that do?"

"Yes. It's immensely good of you. How can I thank you?"

I looked down at the red lips, at the delightful neck and shoulders,
for a second in silence, then I pressed her hand, whistled to Nous, and
went out. As soon as I had passed down the stairs and reached the
street the bitter rush of feelings that the sight of this girl roused
in me, and that her actual presence held in check, swept over me
unrestrained. Why had I left her like that? I asked myself savagely.
Why had I not drawn her into my arms and kissed her till all that soft
delicate face was one flame of scarlet? Then a contemptuous smile came
with the answering thought. What use were mere empty kisses if she gave
me a thousand! This state of things could not go on. The life that I
led seemed growing more and more unendurable week by week. It was a
life of perpetual restraint, of refusal to every wish, of denial to
every desire that rose in me, in which there was a bar laid upon every
impulse, and an immovable chain upon every tendency. I was ambitious,
and I could get no recognition. I was gifted, at least in my own
estimation, and I could force open no field for my gifts. I was in
love, and there was no means of attaining its object. Patience!
patience! This was what I had been saying to myself hour by hour for
two years, but there were times when it seemed that my brain, my whole
system, was collapsing in the nervous irritation, in the chafing and
the straining of this existence, which was filled with nothing but
successless work, continuous disappointment, and unsatisfied desires.

Night succeeded night in which sleep was an impossibility, when my head
seemed light and turning as in delirium with the violence and intensity
of longing to shape my life differently. Could I have obtained the
fulfilment of one desire or of the other, the strength of my nature
would have flowed naturally into the channel opened before it. Could I
have seen my work succeeding I would have foregone everything else
willingly and worked with satisfied ardour, closing my eyes to the
pleasure of life. Could I have obtained Lucia I would have been content
to work and wait patiently till success chose to come to me. But the
latter desire depended on the former, and when I thought of Lucia, her
image only brought back upon me the stunning, deadening sense of the
necessity of success, and so my thoughts were dragged round in a
perpetual, wearying, dizzying circle, like a fixed wheel revolving
without motion forward.

I had grown to hate my present daily existence. It was a state of
enforced passive inaction that seemed corroding my nerves as the long
worn fetter eats into the flesh. The current of life was running at its
swiftest and fiercest in my veins. Vitality was ardent in the brain and
blood, but there was no worthy expense of my energies, and they simply
fell back upon themselves again and again, thwarted, baffled, unused,
until existence seemed an intolerable curse. I saw daily other men's
works accepted and received, and their talent and genius praised that
could produce such a work, which, when it drifted into my hands, I
recognised was no better than the MSS. lying in my study, unused,
wasted. Sometimes the morning of a day would pass in looking through
the reviews and criticisms of the favourite novel of the hour, the
afternoon in reading the book itself and forming a judgment of it, and
then an evening of sickly irritation would follow, in which, pacing
backwards and forwards, in the empty study, I had to admit that the
author, no more gifted, no more favoured with talent than myself, had
been successful and I had not. The very praise I received for my powers
from men who would not help me to employ them was a maddening stimulus.

"Talent? Yes, decidedly, but too heterodox for us."

This was the general resume of the opinion of the publishing world that
had determined to eject me and shut its door in my face. Had it been
hinted that the rejection was on the ground of incapacity it would have
been easier to bear, but, without exception, every declined manuscript
had been accompanied with a warm commendation of the art that the
critic chose to think was so misapplied. Often, walking up and down the
length of that study with these letters of empty compliment crowding
the mantelpiece, I felt like a captured tiger in a cage, being goaded
and thrust at through the bars. And, together with this excessive
longing of the brain to employ its power raged the useless, vehement
desire for the woman, until in those moments of silent solitude, it
seemed as if two living vultures were upon me, slowly tearing me
asunder. As I walked away from Lucia this morning, and when I reached
my own steps, I was conscious of a sense of physical illness; my head
seemed light and dizzy, as when one gets up after long fever. I was so
long opening the door that Nous, who had pushed his whole body close up
against it, looked at me with surprise. As we went in I had one clear
determination, and that was to apply once more to my father for help.
He could, if he would, enable me to marry Lucia. Success must come with
time. It was this time that would be transformed. This time, this daily
life of waiting work, that hung upon me now like a wolf, with its
fangs, gnawing my brain, would then, if I possessed her, pass by like a
dove upon wings. After luncheon, when he was standing by the hearth, I
thought, was a good time to approach the subject, and I came up to the
other end of the mantelpiece.

"Don't you think you could," I said, striking a lucifer and lighting up
a cigar, without the least wish to smoke at that moment, "manage to let
Lucia and myself arrange something?"

He looked at me a little ironically.

"Have you heard that the firm have rescinded their decision, and are
going to bring out the book after all?" he asked quietly.

I coloured with anger and annoyance at the sneer. "No," I answered,
simply, "I have not."

"Then, my dear Victor, you know it is quite useless to re-open this old
question. I have told you before, and I can only repeat it now, I am
not going to make you an independent allowance, that you may marry your
cousin and comfortably settle down into a do-nothing existence."

"I never propose such an existence," I answered calmly. "Have I ever
led it? am I leading it now?"

"No, because just now you have every incentive to work, and you have
all your energies turned in that one direction, but with a secured
income, independence, and married to this girl, I know exactly what you
would become, and if I can prevent it, I am not going to have my son a
confirmed idler about town."

"I can't think how you can so misjudge me," I said. "If you would make
me an allowance--say 300 Pounds Sterling a year--half the rent of this
house we live in!" I added bitterly. "I should marry Lucia, but on that
account I should not neglect the work. Incentive! I should have every
inducement to work then as now!--if inducement were necessary--Which it
is not. I work now, not because I am driven by motives and wishes, but
because to write is as natural to me as to sleep or breathe!"

"Please remember you are talking to a sane Englishman," he answered
coldly; "and if you want me to listen to you, you must talk sense."

"Very good," I said, bringing my teeth down nervously on the cigar.
"Put it entirely on the ground of motive if you like; I should want to
succeed then doubly, and success is only a thing of time. It will come
one day to me, as it has come to others who have had the same
difficulties at first."

My father smiled sceptically.

"We shall see. In any case, if you are so certain of success, you can't
object to the fulfilment of your wishes resting on so sure a
contingency!"

"That has nothing to do with it. I did not say how long success might
not be deferred, and I am unwilling to wait in these circumstances."

"Ah!--delightful frankness!" he returned derisively, and I looked away
from him into the fire.

It shot across me then, amongst my own worrying thoughts, how strange
it is that one human being should have so little sympathy with another,
that where one can, without the least annoyance to himself, confer all
that another desires, there seems always some inexplicable impulse to
withhold it. And I--if I had power to give, if I ever possessed money,
it should be to give, give freely and without conditions to those who
needed it.

Perhaps my father guessed what I was thinking of. At any rate, he
recommenced the conversation by saying--

"You have had a great deal done for you, Victor, though you may
consider yourself very ill-used. You had a most expensive education.
Then you passed into the army--brilliantly, I admit, but you were aided
in every possible way. Then you had a fancy to go to India. Well, I got
your regiment changed, and you went. Six months after you write that
you have determined to become an author. I assent to that, much against
my judgment, and you send in your papers. Good. What have you done
since then? Nothing but write things no one will print, and hang about
your cousin!"

A dull anger lit up in all my veins, and sent the blood to my head at
his words. Still, they were practically the truth, and I knew I had no
right to resent them.

"Now," he continued, "I make you a reasonable and just proposal, and
you know that it is so. I give you every opportunity to display your
talent, if you have any, which I very seriously doubt. You have leisure
and unlimited means at your disposal. I only stipulate that before I
make you independent, and before you marry, you shall give some proof
of your powers in literature. I don't say you must wait till you have
acquired a fortune. Your first production that is accepted and
acknowledged sets you free. When I see you are really on the way to a
profession, I will take care your finances don't trouble you, and as to
marriage, you can then, of course, do what you please. But as to
assisting you now to hurry into an affair that I don't under any
circumstances particularly approve of--No."

"Why don't you approve of it?" I said, with a faint smile; "if I were
in love with a housemaid or a ballet dancer I could understand your
objection, but a girl in our own rank, educated, pretty, clever--what
more would you have?"

My father shrugged his shoulders and elevated his eyebrows, and finally
answered--"I should have liked a little more sanity between you.
Remember there is insanity on her side and insanity on yours, and you
both of you seem half-cracky already, to my mind. Then you are cousins.
The relationship is near, unpleasantly near. You are both very much
alike, extremely excitable, and with both your heads stuffed full of
nonsense. She is exceedingly delicate, and no wonder, sitting up all
night sketching and sitting in all day painting! I wish you could have
chosen some strong, sensible, matter-of-fact young woman!"

I smiled as I listened. The combination of those three adjectives
fairly set my teeth on edge, and suddenly I seemed to see Lucia's pale
brilliant face, with its dilated eyes and genius-lit pupils, swimming
in the shaft of sunlight that fell between us on the rug.

"What the children of two such maniacs will be, I tremble to think of!"
he said after a minute.

I laughed outright, flung my cigar end into the fire, and stretched
myself.

"I don't think you need trouble about the children!" I said
significantly.

His remark sounded so ludicrous to me that my answer came
spontaneously, but it was the worst thing I could have said. My
father's old-fashioned ideas were the rock upon which we invariably
split. Otherwise we should have got on very well. But he was entirely
of the school of yesterday, and I was entirely of the school of
to-morrow. His forehead contracted violently, and he said curtly--

"Now, don't let me hear any of that ridiculous nonsense you were
talking the other day! I won't have these sentiments expressed in my
hearing!"

I laughed, and said nothing. I never wish to express sentiments in
anybody's hearing that they don't want.

"Of course," he said, finally, after a long pause, "you can please
yourself. If you like to try and find a situation as clerk or secretary
or shoe-black, and marry this girl on the proceeds, do so. But if you
do, you will get no help from me in future. Don't come to me then for
funds to bring out your MSS. If you choose to disgrace your family and
disappoint my expectations, consider yourself entirely cut off from me,
that's all."

There was another stretch of silence, and then--

"Well, which is it to be, Victor? Lucia or Genius?"

"I really hardly know," I answered, lightly. "I want them both. I'll
think it over."

And with Nous, who had sprung to his feet as I moved, closely following
me, I crossed the dining-room and went out, upstairs to my own writing
and sitting-room. Here I flung myself into an arm-chair and let my hand
hang over the side and rest on the collie's neck. And as I curled
absently the locks of fur round my fingers, the thought came--When
would my hand play as familiarly with those short, glistening curls on
Lucia's forehead? Of course, as far as that went, we were engaged, and
I might have put our relations on a far more intimate and familiar
footing than they were now. I might have kissed her, twisted and
untwisted that great cable of hair, put my arm round her waist, and so
on and so on. No one would have objected since we were fiances and, in
addition, cousins. And it is difficult to define exactly the impulse
that had prompted me to abstain from all of these things. Partly it was
an impulse in her defence, and partly in my own. I felt that it was
difficult enough, hard enough, to keep in perfect control my own
passionate impulses when I was with her, even now, while there was the
screen and shield between us of her abstracted calm; when there was a
certain coldness and reserve around her; when there was no beginning,
no opening, no invitation of demonstration; when her complete
unconsciousness of herself helped me to restrain and conceal all my own
feelings; but if this were dispelled; if she came to greet me with the
bright conscious flush of passion; if I saw reflected in her eyes the
fire that burnt in me; if I were permitted to take her into my arms and
cheat myself for a single illusive instant with the thought that she
was mine--what would it all mean? Only giving a sharper, more cutting
edge to the bit in my mouth and rousing in her a hunger I could not
satisfy. She was at present devoted to her art with a devotion that
left her practically indifferent to everything else, and there was a
thin frame of ice round her, which her abstraction and her ceaseless
work built up; but I was convinced that the smouldering fire of a
woman's nature lay underneath--that it was concealed never cheated me
for an instant into the belief it was not existent. She was
pure--perfectly, absolutely immaculate; but there was another power
within and transfused throughout her innocence that swayed and subdued
my will as innocence alone could never do. She reminded me of some
exquisite, delicate porcelain flagon filled with sparkling wine, that
sends its hot crimson glow through the snowy transparent tints of its
circling walls. The wine within lies, at present, in glowing
tranquillity, unshaken and unstirred, and the beauty and the purity of
the flagon grows upon one as one looks. One would hesitate certainly to
stretch an unclean hand to lift it, hesitate to touch it with lips that
were not pure--but as certainly one sees that, if hand and lip are
clean, and one may raise it to oneself, there is intoxication within
that cup. Though its brilliant walls are white, they are not so because
they hold thin water or turgid milk or yet vacancy. Of the nature of
porcelain, they are clear and brilliant, for as such they left the
potter's hands; but that faint flush stealing through them tells us
that that within is wine. And as the purity of a cup like this is
different from that of a clean, thick, common china cup standing empty
on the board, so was Lucia different from the ordinary virtuous English
girl. And for her I would do and suffer much, and feel glad in it. I
looked upon her as this vase, and since I had known her I had kept my
hand clean, that one day I might take it without remorse. And in my
treatment of herself I acted as I did because I saw that, as yet, her
passions and her nature slumbered, just as the wine, unshaken, is
steady within the cup.

Now, in my present helpless condition, to merely wake and rouse them,
to distract and disturb her, and lift her out of her art, to draw her
half from her own life, before I could take her wholly into my own,
seemed a sacrilegious cruelty. And this was why, from the commencement
of our engagement, I had said to myself--On this one condition only.

This was why, on the evening when I put the circlet of the engagement
ring over the delicate finger, I had not touched the lips thanking me.
I knew I could not kiss her coldly. These things depend upon one's
nature. Some men shake hands listlessly. I cannot. If I take a friend's
hand I grasp it warmly. How then, here, with those passive lips under
mine, could I prevent them from drawing in the enthusiasm from my own?
And this once done, I did not know how it might stir in her, and break
up her life and turn her aside from the tranquil path of abstraction
and occupation she was following now. I am not saying that, as a rule,
a woman waits for her lover's kiss to arouse her. On the contrary, I am
well aware that most women are uncommonly wide-awake from their
thirteenth year, and it is a very old-fashioned and quite exploded idea
to suppose that the springs of their nature lie dormant until one
particular individual unlocks them. I am only saying that this girl was
as yet entirely given over to her genius, and happy in it; and I loved
her too well to weaken an impulse towards art which she could gratify,
and create an impulse towards love which I could not for so long
satisfy. So with all this in my brain, and with a guard upon myself
that had never been relaxed since, I released her hand, with my ring
upon it, as gently as I had taken it, and the quiver of nervous,
painful excitement, that had shot through me as she laid it on my knee
confirmed my resolution. Why teach her also, one moment before she need
know it, the pain of self-repression?

"Is it not pretty," she had said.

"Which, the hand or the ring?"

"Why, the ring, of course," she had said, laughing. "You are too bad,
Victor!"

"I don't know. I think the hand is decidedly the lovelier. But the ring
is useful as a sign that now there is but one man in the world for you,
as, Lucia, there is for me henceforth but one woman."

She had looked up suddenly, and her eyes had met mine with the passion
kept out of them, and only reverence for her there. And even at that
the fugitive scarlet had stained the pale skin, and the eyes had
widened and darkened upon me, asking, Tell me, explain what this
mysterious feeling is that seems stirring faintly in me? And I had
looked back at her in silence, with a word unuttered, but still perhaps
divined by her, on my lips.

Later!

And now things had come to a crisis. I felt as if I could not stand any
longer, clear-headed and hard-working as I had been, against this
repeated raising, then deferring, then breaking down of hope.

Constantly I had given rein to my thoughts and wishes; many times I had
said, "This book will certainly be accepted, and then a month or a few
weeks and she is my own."

But the book had not been taken, the weeks passed by and Lucia was as
far from me as ever. And it could not continue. The perpetual
excitation and reaction was slowly injuring and confusing the brain
like a noxious drug administered to procure lunacy. And the temptation
swept over me now to let go my hold on work, on this bitter effort to
succeed, on this vain, useless striving for recognition, and sink into
some humble position which would supply the necessities for a quiet
obscure existence--shared with this woman. The weeks, months, years,
passed now, wasted, in a dull torture, in a low fever, filled with
long, dragging hopes, expectations, possibilities, and no realities.
Better sweep all these away and settle into a level, solid existence,
contented with the simple natural pleasures that life offers without
striving for. Contented! I laughed as the word drifted across my brain.
That was just what I felt I could not be in any life but the one I
coveted--a life of power, recognition, distinction. Other men were.
They married the women they loved, and dropped into quiet lives of
daily work and regular incomes, and were content in them. Yes; but that
was insufficient argument.

They had not within them the suffocating weight of a desire
ungratified, the stifling sense of a power unused. Nature, who has
appointed no greater joy for us than the exercise of the capacities she
has given us, has also no heavier, bitterer burden she can lay upon us
than these capacities barred down in us unemployed. As I thought, my
father's words recurred to me, "A secretary, a clerk or a shoeblack."
It was improbable I should descend to the shoeblack. It was possible
that I could become a secretary or a clerk. A secretary or a clerk! The
idea amused me. I leaned my elbows on my knees, my forehead on my
hands, as I sat and stared down at the bear-skin rug at my feet and saw
a vision of fifth-rate existence pass before me. A suburban villa or
squalid London lodgings; the hurried early breakfast served by a
slavey; the tram or bus to the city; the society of seedy clerks; the
pipe instead of the cigar; the public billiard room instead of the
club; the omnibus instead of the hansom; the fortnight up the Thames
instead of the spring at Cairo. A day of uncongenial work--but at the
end of it Lucia!

The thought seemed to come suddenly and stunningly through my brain
like a bullet. The blood rushed to my face and I got up and crossed to
the window, looking out and seeing nothing. Lucia daily, hourly, side
by side with me in my life, and utterly my own possession! Yes, it was
worth it! Worth all those petty considerations that had been passing
before me, but there was another heavier than all the others massed
together. My leisure would be taken from me. It would be impossible to
write then as I was writing now. Now, I was absolutely my own master,
and disposed of my time exactly as I pleased, and days passed
constantly which were wholly spent in the preparation of a manuscript
and when my train of thought was never interrupted. If all my days were
given to monotonous business work, how then, and when, would the
writing be accomplished? My evenings and nights would be my own--or
Lucia's; and this line of reflection finished in an ironical laugh. I
walked to and fro, one word hammering persistently on my
brain-sacrifice. To accept a humble, working position, and in it to
marry a woman as lovely, as vehemently desired, and as long waited for
as Lucia, would mean the sacrifice of my talent. It would mean a
suppression, a thrusting aside of work, and, to a certain extent, of
thought. In such a life there would be so little place for it. Between
the necessity of rejecting impersonal or imaginative thought to make
room for the diurnal business routine, and the irresistible temptations
to reject it at other times for present personal pleasure, it would be
rarely accepted or welcomed, and its impetus would gradually weaken or
lessen. Even as I thought of it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of all
the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The rebellion of
all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by the physical.
What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental sinews to gratify
the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental emotions to give reins
to the physical? It would be the work of a fool. A rooting-up fruit
trees to clear a space for weeds. And what of those twenty-six years of
life that lay behind me? Did they count for nothing? Was all the
repression and the hard work they contained to be flung aside now and
wasted? Was the whole principle that had shaped them, of living in and
for the intellect, to be utterly reversed now? And yet it was a
wretched, poor, burdensome thing, life, as it had been lived by me. The
past years stared me in the face mockingly. Clean, capable of being
scrutinised in the sunlight, estimable from a moral and mental
standpoint, but absolutely barren of pleasure, and, so far, barren of
result. I looked at them with little satisfaction or pride. They were
as immaculate, as bare, as denuded, as irritating, and as painful to
contemplate as a chalk cliff. The character that is summed up in the
line "video meliora proboque, detiora sequor" is supposed to be very
common, and meets with universal comprehension and commiseration. Mine,
perhaps, would find neither. I followed the good--that is, good as the
world's opinion goes--the straight line in life, without any of the
enthusiasm for virtue to form a consolation and support. I looked upon
vice without that repulsion that makes resistance to it easy, pleasant,
involuntary almost. I felt no sense of strong condemnation of those
acts or failings or lapses in others which I studiously avoided myself.
Therefore, I had neither the pleasure that might be derived from the
evil itself, nor the warm satisfaction and personal pride that comes
from conscious superiority to one's neighbours. I had lived the life of
a Puritan, but I had neither the heart nor brain of one. None of the
rigid bigotry, none of the exultant delight in morality, none of the
merciless joy in trampling upon pleasure which gives him his reward. I
looked round upon life and its many devious ways with eyes listless and
indifferent to its vice and sympathetic to its pleasure, and back upon
my own straight path with something of regret that my self-respect had
been strong enough to hold me to it. And now the temptation came to
sacrifice all that I had clung to. To abolish the thought and
remembrance of my talent, muffle and stifle the powers of the brain,
and remember only that I had the pulses and senses and blood of a man.
It came over me slowly, this phase of rebellious animalism, like a
mantle falling over me. Thought followed thought insidiously,
imperceptibly, like fold upon fold of a cloth dropped upon me, as I sat
in the silent room alone. To take this girl and force back her art upon
itself, to mutilate her brain-power and drug it with her roused
sensuality, to turn her into a simple instrument of pleasure for
myself, and lend myself to her as such. To yield to this inflowing tide
of desire that beat, now, heavily through all my veins, and let the
brain go down beneath its waves.

If I chose I could do it, and none but myself could gauge the depth of
my debasement. No eye could discern the high level ground now on which
I stood and the morass that swam before me. I should marry this girl
and the world asks no more. This other lower life that lay in my power
appealed to me in all its sweetness--this woman as she would be when
mine. Those lips with the mark of mine upon them; those delicate nerves
stung to frenzy; that form tense, and the limbs strung with passion;
those eyes terror-stricken between anguish and ecstasy.

The thought of the woman's personality clung to me like a viscous web.
I struggled against it, but it enwrapped me; I could not shake it from
me.

Again and again my arm encircled those soft yielding shoulders; the
warm agitated bosom was touching mine; my hands held, and felt within
it, the smooth muscles of the white arm--a vision of the whole
indefinably supple form swam giddily before me in a suffocating
proximity, till I pressed my hands on my eyes, and the thought came
involuntarily,--Is this insanity?

My brain gave her into my arms now as I sat there, and the blind
physical system clamoured in agony, Where is she? An hour passed, and
then I got up and laughed. The destructive wave of emotion had risen in
me, rolled through me and gone by. The struggle was over, and I lived
again but to work. I stood on the rug rolling a cigarette, and lighted
it leisurely, trying to recall a respectable calm, and when I had
fairly succeeded I went out and downstairs. I came into the dining-room
and found my father still there, looking through a budget of political
pamphlets that had just come in by the post.

He looked up, and I met his eyes with a laugh.

"I have decided not to look out for a vacancy in the shoeblack line," I
said; "but to go on--up the hill. Is there any claret or water or soda
about--I don't much care what it is?"

"There is claret and soda too--there on the cheffonier. What a pity it
is, Victor, you are so unreasonable! You make yourself look deplorably
ill about every trifle! You are certainly trying to find a short cut
out of the world! Why don't you take things more easily?"

"I am as I am," I muttered. "I'm going out now," I said, when I had
finished the soda.

"I'm going to look Howard up. I have got a new plan of work if he'll
join me in it. I shall see."

My father elevated his shoulders as much as to say, Some new phase of
dementia, I suppose, and I went out.

I took the underground to Baker Street, and thence two minutes' walk
brought me to the house I wanted. Howard was a friend of mine, an
intimate friend, though, strictly speaking, from his character he ought
not to have been.

As a general rule I steer clear of friendships with men who are very
much opposed to me in character; it saves a lot of bother in the end.
However, in this case, although I believed Howard to be a weak,
worthless, untrustworthy individual, I could not help liking him. He
was talented and of a pleasing--at least to me--personality. When I
came into his room he was sitting reading in a long chair by the fire.

"Oh! is that you, Vic? Come in," he said, turning a good-looking
discontented face towards me, not improved just now by the effects of a
severe attack of jaundice.

"How are you?" I said, shaking his saffron-hued hand.

"Pretty beastly. And you?"

"Your remark might serve, I think," I said, taking a chair opposite him.

"Aren't you any better?" and I scanned his face closely.

He was not more than twenty, and had a singularly fine type of
countenance.

"Oh yes, thanks! Crawling on."

"Any news?"

"None, I think, except that I've broken with Kitty."

I laughed.

"I knew you'd have to!" I said. "Did I not say so from the first? I
felt sure you could never stand her!"

"I am rather sorry, for she was very pretty; but the last straw she put
upon me was too much. I couldn't--after that--no, I couldn't, really."

"What was it?" I said, laughing, as he shook his head dubiously and
looked meditatively into the fire.

"Why, I sent her a sonnet--at least, no, a verse--and we were talking
about it afterwards, I had written--"

     'And leaning sideways, looks, and lifts
     The tresses of her heavy hair.'

"See?"

I nodded.

"Well, she objected to the adjective 'heavy,' and wanted me to insert
another. What word do you think she suggested?"

"Can't say at all. Golden, perhaps!"

"Worse!" he answered, with a groan. "Golden is hackneyed but still
conceivable. No--Crimpy! my dear fellow! Think of it!"

I went into a fit of laughter.

"Heavens! well I must say I never should have thought of that," I said.
"What a fearful girl. And what did you say?"

"Say! I tried to explain to her the awfulness of it, the incongruity,
but no, she couldn't see it! We jawed about it for a couple of hours
with the result that our engagement is now off!"

"Good. I am very glad to hear it; but perhaps a Breach of Promise will
come on?"

"Can't help it. Anything would be better than to go through life with a
girl who didn't feel there are some things no fellar can do; and one of
them, that he can't put a word like crimpy in his sonnet."

"Been doing any work?"

"Yes; one poem. Like to see it?"

"Very much."

He got up and went to a table littered all over with papers--written,
printed, and blank. After a time he extracted the one he wanted, handed
it to me, and then flung himself into the chair again.

"Whew! This title won't do. 'The Hermaphrodite!' That's far too
alarming for the British public."

"Oh, bother! Well, go on. Read the poem."

I did so in silence.

"First-rate," I said, when I had finished. "Not a weak line in it. Not
a single weak line. And there's nothing to prevent its being taken even
in this d----d England, I think. The title's the worst part. You'll
have to alter that."

"Why? Swinburne has a poem, 'Hermaphroditus.'"

"Yes--in a volume; and there it's Latinised; and then Swinburne has
made his name, which of course is everything. If you want to make your
debut before the English reading world you must do so with 'Ode to my
father's tombstone,' or something of that sort!"

"Well, if you think Latin would improve it, let's put 'Duplexus' as its
title," he answered, laughing and trying to snatch back the paper.

"Not on any account!" I said. "That would sound cynical, and cynical
when you're unknown you must not be."

"Oh, well, there! I leave it to you to find a title! I don't care what
it's called."

I looked through the verses trying to catch an idea for a name. Numbers
suggested themselves to me, but none sufficiently vague and indefinite
to suit the English ear. At last I said--

"Do you think Linked Spheres would do?"

"Linked Spheres?" replied Howard, with elevated brows. "What on earth
has that to do with the subject?"

"Well, I have taken it from this line where you say, 'And in his brain
are two divided worlds of thought.'"

"But I say that they are divided--divided isn't linked!"

"No, I quite admit it. But though divided they must be linked to a
certain extent by being both within his brain. It is not quite right
though, because the walls of the skull might, by encircling the two
worlds, be said to unite them, but they could not 'link' anything. I
follow all that, and I don't think the title is particularly artistic.
It's not clear enough. Your own is much better from the view of
intrinsic fitness. But the beauty of Linked Spheres is its
indistinctness. You must not be too clear. That has been my great
fault--perspicuity--and I am beginning to see it now. It has fatally
barred my getting on. I always do try to make people see exactly what I
mean, and that is apparently a mistake. When I write about passion
everybody feels it is passion, and is shocked in consequence. When
another fellow writes about it you feel he is trying to say something,
but you are not quite sure what, and so it doesn't matter."

"'Muddle it! muddle it!' must be your watchword if you want to pass
muster through the British press. Linked Spheres is a splendid
muddle--very indefinite, quite void of connection with the subject in
hand, and with a pleasant tinkle about the sound, just like Gladstone's
speeches! Linked Spheres! It's impossible, for how the deuce would you
link a sphere? Metaphor all wrong, and no one will know in the least
what you mean, but it sounds pleasant and polished, and perfectly
proper, and you'll find your editor will swallow the poem at a gulp."

Howard laughed.

"You're in an awful huff, Victor, with the British press, that's clear!"

I laughed too.

"Yes I am, I admit it, and all this leads up to the question I came to
ask you this afternoon. Will you come over to Paris with me? I am
going."

I got up and leant against the mantel-piece, pushing a place clear for
my elbow on it between a bottle of liqueur and a copy of "The Holy
Grail."

"You're great at springing mines upon one. Paris? why Paris? And how
can you tear yourself away from Lucia?"

"I wish you would not pronounce that word as if it rhymed with
Fuchsia," I said.

"Well, how do you want me to pronounce it?"

"You know quite well its Lu-chee-ah, and the accent is on the middle
syllable, not the first."

"Oh, all right: Lu-CHEE-ah. Ah! what a mouthful! I would rather say
Miss Grant!"

"It might be as well if you did," I said, coldly.

Howard looked at me and opened his eyes.

"You are uncommonly sticky to-day," he said, kicking a very old slipper
off his swinging foot and catching it on the toe again.

"Well, what about Paris? Let's hear."

"I am so sick of this rotten, wishy-washy England. They won't take my
things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First
Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall
turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends
itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as
men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular
vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen
must remain always a stick dipped in ink. It must never become what
mine is--a painter's brush, wet, dripping, overflowing with oil colour.
It struck me you might care to come too, and do the same with your
verse. If so--come, by all means."

I looked down at his intelligent face and hoped he would come. Selfish,
conceited, and self-sufficient as I may be, there is a strand of
weakness made up in my composition that forces me to find the
companionship of another intellect whenever possible.

"Yes; I'll come," he answered after a minute, getting on to his feet
and thrusting both hands into his pockets with an energetic air. "I'm
rather dubious about the books and the translation business; but anyway
we can have a high old time in Paris!"

"But look here, Howard," I returned, "whether I succeed or not, I am
not meditating having any high old time, or rather what you mean--a low
old time. I'm going there to work."

"Oh, we all know you're a saint!" he said derisively. "But--'A doubtful
throne is ice on summer seas!' We shall see how long your virtue lasts
at La Scala and in the Champs Elysees, with Lucia safely packed away in
England!"

I smiled and raised my eyebrows in silence. The point was not worth
discussing. Howard and I looked at some things from such an enormously
different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It
was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a
boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift
away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level
in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole
psychological system--self-control and self-respect--were entirely
absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of
utility, at his every bad one from the point of secrecy. He would do
the first if it were useful to him, and the last if it were secret.
These, I believe, were the only two conditions that ever occurred to
him. He was weak, even contemptible, in character, and I could not help
clearly seeing it, but my friendship to him was won over by his
talents, and by a certain good-tempered, easy, pleasant way he had.
Widely different though we were, we had never had a quarrel. We got on
together perfectly, and he might say things to me that would have
offended me from an other man. Liking! Liking! What is it? It is as
difficult to define, as impossible to imprison between the limits of
motives and reasons, of "Whys" and "becauses," as Loving. I liked
Howard, or rather I liked his society, which is not the same thing.
Often the people who are the most disappointing in the great issues of
life are the pleasantest to live with through the trifles of everyday
existence and vice versa. I would not have trusted Howard in a crisis
for any consideration, but then crises don't come every day, and he was
delightful to discuss a chapter or a sonnet with.

"When are you going, by the way? Not to-morrow, I hope, for behold this
room!" and he glanced round helplessly.

It was certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Masses
of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books
stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers occupied the chairs.

"No, next week. Shall we say Saturday?"

"All right. I'll be ready by then. Cross--evening, I suppose?"

"Very likely. But I shall see you again," I said, looking at my watch.
"By Jove! close to seven. I must go. Try and get rid of that confounded
jaundice. Good-bye!"

Howard extended his hand.

"By the way, what about the tin? Can you manage?"--

"Oh yes! That's all right," I said.

I was Howard's bank, upon which he drew fitfully and spasmodically:
that is to say, when any expensive little fancy seized him. He always
insisted on giving me I.O.U.'s and acknowledgments for the sums he
borrowed, which I as regularly tore in pieces and put in the fire. I
was half way down the stairs when I ran back and opened his door again.

"Howard!"

"Hullo!"

"Have you a copy of that verse? I have not half studied it this
evening."

"What?" he said, looking round his chair back. "Your precious Linked
Spheres? Yes; take that one if you like."

I took up the paper.

"Thanks!" I said, and re-descended the stairs.

Going down Baker Street, I stopped at the first lamp-post, and read
some lines of it again. A glow of admiration, almost of affection,
towards the curious lines, full of nascent genius, lit slowly in me.

"Splendid! magnificent!" I muttered. "If not here, I'll see it's got
out in Paris."




CHAPTER III.


The next week saw myself and Howard installed in Paris. We had two
large, comfortable rooms on the second floor, opening into each other,
well furnished and upholstered in every way as sitting-rooms, as most
of the French bedrooms are.

They faced a corner where several boulevards met and diverged, and
there was a constant stream of Paris life flowing beneath our windows
every hour of the day. A balcony ran outside, and on this in the
evening we used to stand and smoke and flick paper balls on to the
heads of the grisettes and the bonnes passing far underneath. On the
ground floor of the hotel was a cafe that extended also over the
pavement with its chairs and tables, and was open to the general public
as well as to those who were staying in the hotel.

Howard and I got on admirably as usual. Although we were so different
we had the common ground of a similarity in intellect. On all strictly
intellectual subjects, in psychological discussions, on points of
artistic merit, we seldom differed. His brain was, when he chose to
exert it, singularly brilliant, and in a companion this compensates me
for everything else almost that is wanting. I could not certainly have
lived in the same intimacy with a fool who had been as high principled,
as moral, and as sober as Howard was the reverse of all these. Our mode
of life was very different, as naturally it would be, since I had come
with a predetermination to do nothing but work, and he with an equally
strong one to idle his days away in the most enjoyable manner he could
invent. For myself, I was fairly content with the prospect before me.
Work I was accustomed to, and it was easy. A new idea for a manuscript
had begun to hover fitfully before my mental vision, and was gradually
absorbing my thoughts into itself. Had I been able to write to and hear
from Lucia I should have been satisfied, but my father had made the
absence of all correspondence between us a sine qua non of my coming
here. When I had heard this I had looked at him with some little
amusement. Such a stipulation as this seemed to me to have only one
interpretation--he hoped and thought I should forget her!

"What is the meaning of this?" I asked. "What can be the benefit of it?
How can the fact of our writing or not writing be of importance? Do you
think I shall ever relinquish Lucia? I am resigned to wait as long as
must be, but I am utterly determined to have her in the end."

To which my father had answered grimly with a smile,--

"Very well, my dear Victor, see that you get her!"

Which remark had made me grind my teeth and then laugh and shrug my
shoulders.

"And you won't permit a letter a month?"

"No."

"Oh, dressed in your little brief authority!" I thought, looking at
him. Then I said--

"Very good--I agree."

"I consider I have your word that you will not write, nor hear from
her, directly or indirectly, within this year?"

"Certainly you have."

And so the matter was settled.

When Lucia heard of it, we met each other's eyes, and she elevated her
eyebrows, and a faint smile curved her lips.

"It will make no difference," she murmured, and nothing more.

After all, I don't know that I cared very greatly about the letters. It
was Lucia herself that I wanted--nothing less. It gives me very little
pleasure to read a letter, and I never have understood the cherishing
locks of hair and dead roses business.

The desire for the presence of the living personality is too
sharp-edged to let me feel satisfaction in substitutory objects and
vague associations. To have put my hand round Lucia's living throat;
yes, that would have been a keen delight, but I was not dead set on
possessing myself of her handkerchief that I might kiss in private. I
had one portrait of her--that was all--and that I rarely looked at.

The first thing I did in Paris was to find a translator for Howard's
poem, which, after a time, appeared in one of the literary papers in
its French dress, and returned to its original title. He came to me
suddenly one evening with a contemporary paper in his hand, and the
flush of gratified talent, and the pride that is its first cousin,
kindling in his face.

"Look here, Vic!" he said; "isn't this first-class? Here's a critique
on my verses, and just see how they crack them up!"

I took the paper and read the paragraph, Howard leaning over my
shoulder and resting his knee on the arm of my chair. When I had
finished I looked up at him.

"Not a word more than it deserves, old man!" I said. "Now you realise,
don't you, what you can be and do if you choose!"

"Yes. Well, really, if all that's true, I ought to make some sort of a
name some day, eh?"

And for a time it seemed that a lasting impression had been made upon
him. He seemed to feel that elation and enthusiasm stir in him which
makes it a joy to the genius to renounce all for his work. With regard
to my own manuscripts, I sent some of them, in English, to one of the
French publishing firms, and there ensued a blank of three weeks. At
the end of that time I received a peremptory note inviting me to call
at their office. When I presented myself I was shown into a bare,
square room, where an august little man was standing, using a silver
toothpick. He was short, with a large-sized lower chest; bald, with a
short, grey beard cut to a sharp point; waxed moustache ends, sticking
out ferociously; and brown eyes, keen with intelligence. He bowed
elaborately.

I could speak French, he supposed.

I assented, and the conversation then went on very fast.

Monsieur's works had been read by their Anglo-French reader and highly
approved. There was no doubt that Monsieur possessed a talent, a talent
that he would say was--colossal. At the same time, these works were all
too English in tone to catch the taste of the Parisian world, and
Monsieur had seemed to put a restraint upon his pen, that rendered his
works a touch too cold.

Great heavens! how I raised my eyebrows at that; remembering that in
England I had been always rejected on account of being too warm.

Now, his proposition was this:--If Monsieur felt disposed to write a
manuscript, in which the scene should be laid in France, and some of
the characters, at least, be French, and also allow himself a little
greater latitude, then he should be delighted to put the manuscript in
the hands of their very best translator, and give it out to an audience
that, above all things, admired vigour.

I heard all this with satisfaction. The offer meant a lot more work for
me, but I did not mind that, with success--dear success--in view. I
closed with his proposition at once, and after some formalities and
details had been gone into and settled, I rushed home to tell Howard.

So, for a time, settled into working intellectual grooves, our life ran
on quietly from day to day with a fair prospect on ahead of us.

And then came an unlucky incident which jerked the wheels of Howard's
existence out of the narrow, hard line of effort, and after that they
ran along anyhow, sometimes on and sometimes off it, and kept me in
dread of a total smash. The Champs Elysees were full of the late
afternoon sunlight, and we sauntered slowly, criticising the occupants
of the various carriages rolling up to the great arch of Napoleon, and
arguing in a broken, desultory way on our usual subject of
talk--literature.

Howard was on the outside, nearest the road, walking on the actual
kerb, and flicking up the leaves in the gutter, as he talked, with the
point of his cane. As we strolled, with our eyes more or less directed
on the string of vehicles moving in the centre of the sunny road, we
noticed one small, black brougham going the same way as ourselves, that
seemed conspicuous by being closed amongst the rest of the open
victorias. Suddenly it detached itself from the line of other carriages
and dashed up alongside of the pavement where we were walking. Its
wheels ground in the gutter, and I caught Howard's arm to draw him more
on to the pavement.

"Look out!" I exclaimed. "What a way to drive!" I added, as the
coachman whipped up his horses and drove on some fifty yards, close to
the kerb. There he pulled up abruptly. The door of the brougham was
pushed open and a woman got out. Such a figure it was that outlined
itself in the sunny light, standing on the white trottoir, and with the
vista of the Champs Elysees behind it--a form seductive in every line,
with a fine hip, and a tiny arched foot that tapped the pavement
impatiently.

"What's up?" I said to Howard. "Whom is she waiting for, I wonder?"

A few steps more brought us up to her, and then, to our astonishment,
she turned fully towards me, and said in her own language,--

"Will you come and dine with me this evening, Monsieur? The carriage
will take us home now!"

We both stopped short. There was a second of blank amaze, and the
woman's face stamped itself on our startled vision;--the eyes, liquid
and gleaming, behind a veil of black lashes; the smooth firm nose, with
its raised and tremulous nostril; the oval of either cheek, with the
damask glow in it; and the curled mouth of deepest crimson, with the
essence of sensuous languor in its curve.

For a second we stared at it in the sunlight, and that second sufficed
to let us take in the situation; and there was something in her words
and tone of confidence, and something of authority in the way she
pointed to her carriage, that annoyed me.

"Thank you! I only dine with my friends," I answered coldly.

I suppose she was not insensible to the contempt in my tone and eyes as
I looked down on her, for her next words came in a more humble,
ingratiating voice.

"Make me one of them, then, Monsieur!--at once;" and she smiled--a
lovely smile on such a mouth. Howard stood in silence, staring at her.
I was very much amused and a little annoyed.

"You flatter me!" I returned, satirically; "but I have as many as I
want already."

Howard broke in.

"Won't you extend your invitation to me?" he said, eagerly, and she
threw a quick side-glance over him.

"I can't invite you both--at the same time!" she said, with a laugh and
a little Parisian shrug; and then she looked at me again with a look
that one would say was abominable or charming, according as one's
particular mood at the moment was.

My mood was not such as to condemn it.

My next words were simply said for me, as it were, by my long habit of
self-restraint.

"My presence is not in the question at all, to embarrass you," I said,
curtly, and added to Howard--

"We may as well go on."

But that was not at all his view.

"Ask me," he said, with his shaky French accent; "I'll come!" and he
put his hand on her arm, with a glance that matched her own. She seemed
pretty well indifferent which of us it should be, and she merely said
imperiously,--

"Come, then!" and with a grimace over her shoulder at me, disappeared
into her brougham again.

Howard would have followed instantly, but I seized his arm.

"What are you doing?" I said in English. "Is it worth it, Howard? You
may regret it. She is probably some married woman!"

Howard wrenched himself free from me.

"Don't talk to me! I'm not the fellow to refuse a jolly good lark when
it's offered to me!"

He flung himself into the brougham without another word, drew the door
to after him, and they were gone, whirling up the Champs Elysees,
leaving me standing on the kerb looking after the polished black back
of the brougham receding and growing small in the distance.

"Well!" I thought, "if another fellow had told me this tale, I should
have thought it a howler!"

The suddenness of the whole thing had taken my breath away, and I must
have stood there many seconds in confused thought, in which a flexible
form and arched foot took a prominent part.

When I roused myself I saw Nous was lying down beside me with the
patience of a philosopher, and catching the flies that buzzed along the
sunny pavement--to kill time.

I called him, and went on up toward the Arc.

"I couldn't have done otherwise," I thought. I knew I did not wish to
have done otherwise. I knew I should say again exactly the same if the
brougham were again before me, but yet--

"I want nothing now that I have my work on hand," I told myself, as the
arched foot went on before me up the pavement.

"By-and-by"--but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.

I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went
back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to work.

Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was sitting
after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe, smoking,
under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a fiacre drew up
at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see me for a minute,
engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a pourboire, and then he
was just going straight across the lighted trottoir into the hotel when
I called to him.

"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see you
under the tree."

He came back and drew up a chair, with a scraping sound, to the
opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his hat
back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to where we
were sitting, from the windows and open glass doors of the cafe. He
looked well and uncommonly jolly; a man who lives his life, such as it
is, without thought, without reflection, and without philosophy--who
views the passing hour without grudging, the past without regret.

"You look awfully seedy," he said. "Anything up?"

"No," I answered. "Well? 'How have we sped in this contest?' How went
the dinner?"

"I'll tell you," he said, turning round to secure a passing garcon.
"Let's get hold of a drink first. Oh, she's got a jolly place!" he
said, when the garcon, and eventually the drink, had been captured.
"Nice house and all that. She's married, as you said, and of very good
family. Received everywhere, you know."

"Husband at the dinner?" I asked laconically.

"No; husband gone to Tunis on business."

"Expected back to-day, I suppose?"

"No, to-morrow."

"Pity."

"Yes. You should have gone, Vic! She'd have satisfied you! Lovely
figure! I never knew a lovelier!"

I said nothing.

"What did you think of her stopping us like that?" he went on after a
minute.

"I thought it consummate cheek," I said. "I should not have believed it
if it hadn't actually happened before my eyes."

"Yes, it was cheeky; but do you know, she is not very cheeky, really.
An awfully nice woman, and very clever. But aren't these Parisiennes
queer? You can't imagine any woman doing such a thing in England, can
you?"

"Hardly."

"It seems she had seen us once before. It was you she wanted, not me.
Why didn't you go, you duffer? I only came in a bad second!"

I laughed.

"She had read my things and likes them. Do you know, I think it is
rather a good thing I have met her, it will urge me to do more--don't
look at me 'in that tone of voice,' I am sure it will, really, Victor!"

"Are you going to see her again, then?" I asked.

"Yes, oh yes!"

"When the husband next visits Tunis, I suppose?"

"Yes, and before that, even when he's here. She is going to patronise
my talent--see?"

"I see."

"I must write my next thing to her, of course. It's a nuisance being
hampered with this beastly French language!"

And then the conversation went on. We sat there and talked and argued
from the particular to the general, and back again, until the waiters
came and cleared the chairs off the pavement and began to turn out the
lights in the cafe--and it was a conversation after which I slept badly.

After this incident I saw less of Howard, and our lives ran farther and
farther apart. I grew more and more absorbed in the developing
manuscript. He grew more and more taken up in the stream of amusement
he had entered. He wrote very little. A couple of lines that had
occurred to him perhaps at the theatre, and were jotted hastily on the
edge of a programme, was all that a whole week produced. And even these
would have been lost through his carelessness but for me.

The days were generally divided between headache and sleep; the nights
between the theatre and drink. I regretted it; and this life that was
being wasted, poured out in uselessness, within my sight oppressed me.
I should hardly have noticed it with another man, but I knew that this
one had been planned for higher things.

I used to try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at
any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read
sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by drink,
had almost forgotten.

"Are they not splendid?" I would say; "and you are the author! You are
their parent, Howard! Think! Any man could lead the life you are
leading! not one in a thousand could produce these lines!"

Howard would look at me suspiciously with heavy eyes.

"Are you sure I wrote that? I don't think I remember it!"

What a crime!

"I know you did," I would answer, and then urge him to give every day
and night in the week, if he liked, to pleasure except one--"let one be
sacred to work!"

"And just think," he would answer, lazily, "if I were dying, how those
days and nights wasted would come and stare me in the face!"

"Wasted! in the building of such lines as these?"

"But what's the good of them when they are built? They don't make me
enjoy life!"

And he pursued his own path and I could not stop him. I hoped and
thought he would get tired after a time of the Paris halls and drunken
nights and sick headaches, but I waited in vain. He had gradually got
intimate with the back as well as the front of the scenes, and this I
liked less than anything. The state of Howard's finances, too, threw an
extra weight of responsibility on me, for he must have trodden a
straighter road, and perhaps he would have worked more if he had had
less money. And the money--his superfluous cash--came generally from
me. His own allowance was small; just enough to keep him and no more.
Gifts, under the name of loans, from me supplied all extras, and filled
all deficiencies and gaps. What could I answer when he used to say,
"Dear old boy! let me have another twenty!" And yet I knew it was
handing him the razor to cut his throat. I hoped the sight of another
fellow working as persistently as I did would have been an
encouragement to him to make some sort of effort himself, but he looked
upon me as a misguided creature, and took pains not to follow my
example.

"How do you know that you will ever marry Lucia? or make a success of
your books or anything?" he asked me one evening as we went upstairs
after dinner, he to dress before going to La Scarletta, I to work on
the MS.

"You are working for an uncertainty, a dream. It may never come off,
and then where will you be. Now, at least, I know what I am going to
have this evening. Such enjoyment as there is I get it, and there's an
end of it, and no worry about it. As for you, you are all worry; and
even granted that you get, in the end, something superlatively
satisfactory, why, it will hardly make up to you for all you have gone
through to get it!"

I said nothing. We had got up to our rooms by this time, and I flung
myself into the easy chair.

Howard went into his room and brought back his dress shoes to put them
on in mine, that he might follow up his argument.

"Now, look here, Vic, which of us two fellows is the most ready to go
out of the world? In the Bible or prayer-book or somewhere we are told
to live so that we may be willing and prepared to die any minute. Well,
that's just what I do. I haven't a scrap of a tie to life. I don't
think there will be anything better in it than what I have had already.
I'd go to-morrow. But you, you would not like it a bit, and you can't
deny it. You have got all the ties of your unsatisfied desires. You
want to get Lucia--you want to make your name. You would be awfully cut
up now if you were told you were going to be bundled out of life in ten
minutes; and I--I shouldn't care!"

Howard had finished fastening his patent shoes, and now sat back in his
chair, one leg crossed over the other, and his hands behind his head.

"Being brought into life is just like being invited to a feast from
which you may be called away at any minute. Well, if you have eaten and
drunk to satiety you will be only too glad to get up and go away and
sleep. But if you have sat at the table, hungering all the time and
repressing yourself, then, when the sudden call comes, and you must
rise and leave it for ever, think what a misery and bitterness to be
dragged away from the brilliant table, with all its dishes and its
wines untasted, its flowers unsmelt, and be crammed away into the
darkness--hungry, thirsty, and unsatisfied. Take my word for it, Vic,
you'll have a bad five minutes on your deathbed!"

I listened in silence. I felt ill and dispirited and disinclined for
talk.

"That's all Horace. I don't care much about Latin as a whole, but I do
think he is splendid. I'd have that book made the general testament.
I'd have it taught in all the Board Schools and sworn on in the Law
Courts. I'd have every fellow take it as a guide through life; if he
really acts up to it, it ensures his happiness. Its philosophy beats
all the religions hollow. 'Take the day.' 'Put no trust in to-morrow.'
'Seek not to know the future; whatever it is, bear it.' 'Each night be
able to say I have lived.' 'Retire from life, satisfied, as from a
banquet.' And so on ad lib. You know it all, Victor. You were brought
up upon it, but you haven't profited by it--not a scrap. Well, I'm
going!"

He leant forward, picked up his shoes, and went into his own room. It
was about twelve when he came in that night and found me just finishing
off a chapter. The fire had gone out from neglect; the window stood
open and the lace curtains waved in the damp night wind. Howard stalked
across the room and banged the glass doors shut, and told me it was
beastly cold in here. I was just fully absorbed in the closing passages
of my scene, and felt a nervous irritation at being interrupted.

"There's a fire-lighter behind the scuttle, throw it into the grate and
you'll soon have a blaze," I said, without looking up.

Howard drew off his lavender gloves and flung them down on the table.
One fell on the last sheet I had written.

"Confound you! do be careful!" I muttered, picking it up, and noticing
the great blur it left on the page. "The sheets are wet."

"It doesn't matter, they're not a new pair!" answered Howard, coolly,
going down on his knees to light up the fire. He accomplished this in a
few minutes, and then settled down in the long chair with a cigar. I
wrote on feverishly, expecting to be addressed and interrupted every
moment. It was a great bore his coming in just now, disturbing me. I
had a difficult thing to express, and I was just pursuing the tail end
of an idea I could not quite grasp. My pen hovered uncertainly over the
paper. I could not exactly give words to the impression in my brain,
and the sense that he was going to speak, about to speak each second,
worried me. At the same time I never wished to be ungracious to Howard
when he did return to our rooms; never wished to feel it was my
execrably bad company that induced him to stay away from them all night
instead of half.

"I say, Vic!"

"Well?"

"Do you know that kissing song Embrasse moi?"

I nodded.

"Don't you think it awfully fetching? I like that refrain so
much--Embrasse moi, chumph! chumph!--and then the orchestra exactly
imitates the sound of a kiss--then Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph!
Don't you?"

"Yes; it isn't bad."

Silence.

"Victor!"

"What?"

"La Faina was there to-night!"

"Oh!"

"Do you know her?"

"I've heard of her."

Silence.

"Vic!"

"Yes?"

"Do you know what Faina means?"

"Of course I do!"

"Do you think it a nice name?"

"Not particularly."

"Well, it's better than Grille d'Egout anyway, isn't it?"

"About on a par, I should say." "How many frills do you think she had
on her petticoat?"

"Oh, I don't know--forty!"

"No; four. I counted them. Her figure is not much up atop, but her"--

"Oh, stow all that!" I interrupted; "there's a good fellow, I'm just
doing a convent interior."

"All right. The rest is silence. Ah!" with a yawn, and getting up to
saunter round the room, "that's a jolly good song--Embrace moi! chumph!
chumph! Encore une fois!! chumph! chumph!"

He did not address me again, but somehow my ideas were scattered. The
convent scene went wrong. Ballet dancers seemed standing in the aisle
where nuns should have been kneeling, and, after a second or so, I
flung my pen down and pushed away the paper.

"Done?" exclaimed Howard, delightedly.

"Yes," I said simply, rising.

"Come and have a smoke," he said, drawing up both easy chairs to the
fire.

I took the cigar he offered and sat down. Howard threw himself into the
other chair, crossed his legs, and proceeded to give me an account of
his experiences. I suppose I was rather silent, for after a time he
broke in upon himself by saying abruptly,--

"Are you very savage with me for interrupting your work?"

"Savage?" I repeated. "Oh, no! the work can wait, I get plenty of time
at it!" Perhaps he misunderstood me, and my words conveyed to him more
than I meant. Any way, the next afternoon he came home early to dine
with me, and afterwards, when I was speaking of the evening's work, he
came up to me where I stood at the mantelpiece and took something out
of his pocket with a confident air.

"I've brought you something," he said, and he thrust suddenly into my
hand--under my eyes--a photograph.

My glance fell full on it, and I saw distinctly what it was--a
full-length figure of the danseuse Faina. Traditionally, perhaps, I
ought to have flung it into the fire--any way the grate--or torn it up.
But I am not fond of throwing other, people's things into the fire, nor
of tearing them up, simply because they offend my own views. He had no
right, perhaps, to thrust it upon me as he had, but that fact would
not, in my opinion, constitute my right to destroy it. So I merely laid
it on the mantelpiece.

"Extraordinary thing! Where did you pick that up?"

"Faina sent it to you with her love, and an invitation to supper
to-night after the last 'turn,'" replied Howard, rolling a cigarette,
sticking it with his lips, and looking at me over it.

"Oh! really?" I said, drily.

"Why, Victor, you've quite coloured up!" said Howard with a sort of
derisive triumph.

I felt I had. Why? I can hardly say. The word "love," the sudden view
of the portrait, dashed, whirling headlong over each other, through my
brain, followed by a sort of hazy cloud, out of which looked two azure
eyes.

"She is very lovely, isn't she?" Howard remarked affectionately,
setting the card upright against the wall.

"Very--in her own way," I assented.

I admitted it willingly, with pleasure. Why not?--an evident fact. The
blue slime in a blocked gutter of the road is very lovely also.

"Well, I'm going there to-night, because I admire the sister, and you
must come, too. You are killing yourself by sticking to the work in the
way you do. Come along! Where's the harm? Lucia will never know. I
won't split. God's in heaven and the Czar's a long way off! So you may
as well come and knock about a little. This monotonous life will put an
end to you!"

I was silent.

"Lucia won't know," he repeated.

"There's no question of Lucia's knowing anything," I said.

"Then why do you work as you do, and always refuse to come to a supper,
or a dance, or anything? You can't be really a quiet fellow or you
wouldn't write things the English won't have. You say it's not a
question of Lucia--then what the dickens is it that makes you live the
life you do?"

I did not answer him. I leant in silence against the mantelpiece,
staring absently at the portrait of Faina, and Howard got tired of
waiting for my answer. He went to dress, and I sat down at the
writing-table, absently sketching women's heads on my blotting paper.
Should I go with him or not? I felt tired of writing, tired of work.
Wine, laughter, sound, smiles, other voices?--Then four points rose
before me, very distinct and clear, like sharp mountain peaks from a
valley of mist.

FIRST. Supposing--if such a thing were possible--supposing on coming
out of this house I came face to face with Lucia, should I be entirely
pleased.

NEXT. Should I, when the present inclination were over, have a
satisfactory memory of this supper.

NEXT. Did I habitually mean to spend my evenings in this way?

LAST. Was it worth while spoiling a record for the sake of a single
deviation?

I answered No to each of these as they came before me in order, with
the upshot that I determined not to go. When Howard came in again I
looked up. He was dressed to the Enth, and as I glanced at his
good-looking, intelligent face, I thought how incongruous it seemed for
him to degrade himself with drink at this supper, and return, as he
probably would, a pitiable object to look at and listen to.

"Going to work, eh?"

I nodded. Howard hitched the cape of his overcoat straight, and went
out. As he shut the door I sprang suddenly to my feet. For a moment the
impulse towards distraction, amusement, relief from strain, physical
movement, overcame me. All the strong, ardent life rushed up within me.
A tremendous prompting came to shout after him, "Wait a minute, Howard!
I'll come, too, after all!" I was half way to the door. Then I laughed
and turned back. I went up to the mantelpiece and unlocked the doors of
a portrait frame that stood there, and flung them open. It was the
frame of Lucia's portrait, which, like the temple of Janus, stood
closed in times of peace and open in times of war. Now was war, and I
gazed at the picture within for encouragement. There was equal sinuous,
supple beauty in this form as in that outline on the Paris card, that
lay, perhaps, in the pocket of every flaneur on the boulevards. I
looked at the smooth, perfect shoulders, and those soft arms that had
never yet been drawn round a lover's neck; at the extreme pride and
dignity that lay in every line of the form that had never been touched
by a rough hand. It swept from me in one gust the thoughts and
tendencies struggling to rise. It brought back all the old revolt from
the lowest, all the old admiration for the highest, in human nature.
"Yes, you are worth it," I muttered, looking hard at the chaste,
exquisite pride in face and form; "you are worth being worthy of, and I
will not for an evening, nor for an hour, make myself a brute that you
would despise if you knew his nature. Whether you ever know or not,
what does that matter? I must know. Shall I come back to feel your
inferior? No! Not a day, nor a night, shall there be, the history of
which you might not read." All my own pride was stirred as I looked at
the portrait of this woman, who, I knew, was absolutely pure, and I
would not now have followed Howard had my life depended on it.

I gave the photograph of Faina, which still stood up against the wall,
a flick that sent it horizontal on the marble, and then, with Lucia's
eyes just above me, I sat down to write.

Seven o'clock came, and the bright light pouring into the room over the
table covered with loose sheets of paper found me writing still. I
looked up, then back on the page, decided I need not add another word,
flung down my pen, leaned back in my chair, and proceeded to light up a
cigar. "Good!" I thought with lazy satisfaction, as my eyes wandered
over the completely covered table and the drying sheets upon the floor.

"It was a splendid inspiration that! Had I gone out last night,
infallibly I should have missed it." Just then I heard a blundering,
uncertain step upon the stair, and then a dig in the centre of the door
panel.

I smiled.

"How long will it take him to find the lock, I wonder?" I thought.

The period was protracted. Round and round the keyhole did a shaky,
unsteady hand guide the wandering key. It scratched above, it dug at
the door beneath, while the low indistinct murmur of one repeated word
reached me within. At last, in sheer pity, I got up and opened the door
from the inside. Howard came unsteadily over the threshold, and half
blundered against me. His face was deadly pale; a bright greenish shade
lay close about his bloodshot eyes; his grey lips shook. With
difficulty he staggered to the chair opposite me and sat down. I shut
the door and resumed my seat and cigar.

"Enjoy yourself?" I asked.

He was not very steady on his feet, but fairly clear in his brain.

"Yes. But it's no good--can't stand it," he murmured, pressing his hand
hard upon his head and across his eyes.

His voice was little more than a gasp.

"God!--this weakness"--

We sat without speaking. In the bright light, in a glass opposite, I
caught sight of my own face. I was as pale as he from work, as he from
pleasure. My eyes were as bloodshot as his from sleeplessness, as his
from drink. My hand shook as much as his from mental excitement, as his
from physical exhaustion. He was the representative of those who
sacrifice to-morrow for to-day. I, of those who sacrifice to-day for
to-morrow. And I wondered, as I smoked on with his collapsed figure
before me, which was the greater fool. "Do neither" is the cry. "Take
the gifts of to-day without robbing to-morrow." Estimable rule, I
agree, if you are fortunate enough to have the chance of carrying it
out. But very few of us have. A man with Howard's constitution could
only purchase the hours last night with the hours of this morning.
Success would not come to me to-morrow unless I were willing to
struggle for it to-day.

"What did you drink?" I asked, after a pause.

"Maraschino, cognac, and clic," he answered, and a gesture of his hand
and first finger showed he meant in the same glass. I laughed.

"What a mixture! No wonder you're mixed yourself!"

"Can't stand it!" he only muttered again.

"No, you must sit it out or sleep it off now," I said, getting up with
a stretch. "Faina in good form?"

"Magnificent--Vic, you should have been there!"

"Thanks! yes, I think so!" I said, gathering up the precious pages from
the floor and table and piling them on a console. I wanted to go and
get my own breakfast, but the look of Howard's face, as it lay against
the chair back, bloodless, and the colour of ashes, made me hesitate to
leave him.

"Can I get you anything?" I said.

"No--help me into bed," he muttered, without opening his eyes, moving
his head restlessly from side to side.

"Come along, then," I answered, bending over him; "here's my arm."

He half raised his lids at that, and then feebly pushed a leaden hand
and arm through mine. There was a pause. He seemed unable to make a
farther movement, and sat, his head sunk into his chest, his arm
hanging through mine.

"Come, Howard, make an effort," I said, after a minute, and he
staggered uncertainly to his feet.

Getting him into the next room and into bed was a lengthy and difficult
matter, but at last, after protracted pauses, it was effected, and he
fell back upon the pillows--face and lips one tint with the linen. I
spoke to him, but I got no articulate answer, only groans in response.

"I am going to fetch you some coffee," I said, leaning over him.

His eyes opened wide, and fixed upon me with a sort of helpless terror.

"No, no! don't go!--stay!" he whispered, clutching my wrist with his
damp, shaking fingers. "Stay--a minute."

"But you want something to pull you round. I shan't be two seconds," I
answered, trying to unclasp his clinging fingers.

"Never mind! Oh, Vic, for God's sake stay."

There was an abject appeal in the bloodshot eyes, a desperate tenacity
in his clutch. He looked at me as if he dared look nowhere else. Some
horror seemed pressing upon his confused and weakened brain, and I
thought I could soothe him best by staying.

"Very well--there, I'm not going," I said, reassuringly.

Still he did not relax his grip upon me, but his eyes closed again, and
he seemed satisfied. I sat down on a chair at the bedside and waited.
The sun poured brighter and brighter through the blinds and touched up
the mantelpiece.

The photograph of Faina's sister, surrounded by some others of her set,
was propped up in the centre of it, on a couple of paper volumes. My
own head was aching violently now, and after a time the woman's figure
on the glossy, sun-flecked surface of the card began to sway and swim
before my eyes as I looked lazily at it.

The minutes passed by and Howard did not move. At last, I ventured to
try and withdraw my stiffening arm without rousing him, but at the
first movement his fingers tightened and his groans recommenced.

After a time my hunger passed into drowsiness. I leant forward
gradually, and at last my head sank down on the edge of his bed, and I
drifted into oblivion.




CHAPTER IV.


May had come round again. The days and weeks had glided by in a
monotony of work, varied by feverish blanks when I could do nothing,
and the pile of manuscript lay growing dusty in its corner. Then at
last the day arrived when the final line was written and the whole
despatched. That was three months back, three months of anxious
waiting, in which Howard had chaffed me daily on my looks and health.

"You're dwindling to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say.
"Catch me bothering myself about anything I wrote in the same way."

Now, however, it was over. I had just left the publisher's office. The
book had been accepted, and I was a free man. A gush of fresh life ran
through me and stirred in my veins in response to the fresh life of
spring that seemed in the sunny air, in the green leaves fluttering
round the Bourse, in the white butterflies that floated across the
dusty asphalt.

When I got back I found Howard half asleep in the armchair. He sat up
as I came in, and regarded me with a confused stare. I saw he had been
drinking, but his brain was still tolerably clear.

"Rejected, by Jove!" he remarked as he saw the MS.

"No," I answered, throwing it on to a side table and myself into the
chair opposite him--"no, thank heaven, it's all right now! They've
accepted it. Congratulate me!"

"But what on earth have you brought it back for, then?" he said,
blinking his heavy eyes and looking at me resentfully, as if he
suspected I was playing some practical joke.

"Oh, there are a few things they want altered, that's all," I answered.
"I am to let them have it again the day after to-morrow."

"And what about terms?" he continued, getting out a roll of cigarette
papers and beginning to roll himself some cigarettes.

He was wide awake now, and had shaken off his intoxicated stupor. His
face was bent slightly as he made the cigarettes, so that I could
hardly see it. I sat watching his trembling fingers rolling the papers
in an absent silence.

"Oh, terms?" I said at last. "Fairly good, I think. They pay me a small
sum and reserve me one-third of all profits from the book. I really
don't care much about the terms. Once the book is out my name is made,
and the money will come in all right in time. They've taken it; that is
the main point. If you knew the glorious relief it is to me!"

Howard laughed. He flung himself back in the chair and propped his feet
up against the support of the mantelpiece.

"I think you are very lucky," he said. There was silence, then he asked
abruptly--"How much are they going to give you for it?"

"Three thousand francs."

Howard paled suddenly and fixed his eyes upon me.

"And what will you do with it?" he asked, after a minute.

"Well," I answered, without reflection, "I thought you would like two
thousand to send home and get rid of that half-yearly interest."

The blood dyed all his face suddenly crimson, and he brought down his
feet upon the fender with a crash.

"I wish to hell you'd wait till I asked you for it!" he said savagely,
springing up and crossing to the window.

There he stood looking out with his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
I was fairly startled, and the colour rose uncomfortably in my own face.

It seemed, I almost felt, as if I had done something excessively
ill-bred. But Howard and I were on such intimate terms, and made so
little account of what we said to each other, that I had expressed the
thought uppermost in my mind at the moment of his question as a matter
of course. Then, too, he borrowed so constantly and so freely from me
that the idea of offence over money matters or mentioning them seemed
quite impossible.

"No," I thought, glancing at him as he still stood between me and the
light; "there must be something else in his mind," and I wondered.

He was seldom out of temper, and seldom made himself disagreeable to
me. In conversation, in all our life together, he generally yielded to
me with an almost womanly compliance. His present tone and manner were
absolutely new to me. I did not understand them, and I liked him well
enough to take the trouble to get up after a second and follow him to
the window.

"Howard," I said gently, "what is the matter? I am sorry if I have
annoyed you."

He turned upon me suddenly from the window.

"Did I ever say I wanted the money you might get from your cursed
book?" he said, passionately. "Do you suppose I couldn't get as much
for something of my own if I chose?"

Now, considering Howard was always in want of money, and perpetually
lamenting his inability, real or imagined, to get it, the last remark
seemed rather odd, and the vehemence with which he spoke against me was
altogether incomprehensible.

"Of course," I answered quietly, looking down into his excited face. "I
merely offered the money as a convenience, pro tem, as it happened to
be at hand, that's all. But surely it doesn't matter. Perhaps I should
not have done. I apologise. Doesn't that make it square?"

I thought he was out of health, irritable, disappointed that he had not
made more of his own work, and jealous of my success, and I was willing
to say anything to soften his feelings.

Howard simply turned away from me again, and I caught a mutter of
"damned impertinence."

Seeing it was useless to say anything further at the moment, I strolled
back into the centre of the room again, called Nous to me, and sat down.

"Jealous!" I thought, with contemptuous amusement; "how extraordinary!"

Then my thoughts rushed away in a sudden stream to Lucia, and I saw her
face, glowing with delight, look out upon me from the blank surface of
the wall.

"How soon now shall I possess you?" was my one thought. "How long to
our marriage?"

I began by allowing three months, but I shortened and shortened the
time till I cut it down to a fortnight.

"Could I persuade her to let it be in a fortnight?" and I thought I
could.

A quarter of an hour passed, and Howard had not moved from his position
in the window. A very little day-dreaming is enough for me, especially
about a woman. I yawned, stretched, and finally got up.

"Howard," I said, "I'm going out for a turn with Nous, but I will came
back in time for dinner."

I lingered, but he said nothing. I put on my hat, called the dog, and
went out. I started to walk to the Arc, and the distance there and back
would have taken me, as I had said, till our dinner hour, but half way
there the inclination failed. I felt tired and turned back.

"How utterly done up I feel!" I thought; "not worth anything. This last
book has thoroughly taken it out of me. Rest! Rest! That was what I
longed for now. My whole system seemed crying out for it. Of all the
benefits the just-accomplished work would bring, celebrity, money,
even, yes, even Lucia, seemed not so seductive in those moments as the
possibility of gratifying this intolerable mental and physical craving
for repose."

As I walked home a sense of tranquillity, a quiet, peaceful feeling of
relief was transfused through me, and seemed communicated from the mind
to the body and to every nerve of my frame, as if I were under the
influence of some soothing drug.

I reached the hotel considerably before the time I had mentioned to
Howard, and I supposed he would be out. However, as I came near I saw
that our window was well lighted up. In fact, there seemed an unusually
brilliant light in the room. Nous and I went up the stairs. He seemed
to know and feel his master's good spirits, and kept licking my hand at
intervals as he bounded up the stairs beside me, and then outstripping
me, he would wait on the landing above me impatiently till I got there,
in a hurry to race up the next flight.

As I opened my door a peculiar scent of smoke reached me, and the air
was clouded and singularly warm. Howard was in the room, and I could
not make out at first what he was doing. He was crouching on his heels
in front of the grate and seemingly stirring or poking something
beneath the bars. Some, I can hardly define what, instinct, guided my
eyes to the side table where I had left my manuscript. It was gone. At
that instant: the wind from the wide open window and door blew the lamp
flame and stirred the curtains, and a great sheet of whole black tinder
drifted across the carpet up to my feet.

Then I knew--he was burning, or had burnt, my work. A flame was dying
down in the grate, filled and overflowing with ragged black fragments.
With a curse I sprang towards the fender, but Nous was quicker than I.
Either divining my intention, or made suspicious by the queer, sinister
look Howard's figure had, the dog flew upon him with a growl, rolled
him over and seized the clothing at his neck.

In another instant I would have called him off, but Howard was an
inveterate coward. I saw his face turn livid with terror as the dog
pinned his throat to the floor. His hand stretched out convulsively and
grasped a long table knife that lay, together with the string that had
held my manuscript, beside him on the floor. He seized it, and in an
instant, before my eyes, he had plunged it deep into the breast of the
dog standing over him. It was all done in a second--a flash. There was
a gush of blood upon the floor, a broken moan from Nous, and then he
staggered and fell over on his side--motionless.

Howard struggled breathless, white as death, to his feet. For one
second I stood transfixed, watching him with blazing eyes. Then one
step forward and I was upon him. My two hands closed like steel round
his throat, and by his head, thus, I dragged him from the hearth out
into the centre of the room.

"You unutterable, unspeakable cur and devil!" I muttered, and I saw his
face blackening under my grip.

A gust of wind passed through the room, blowing to the door with a
bang, and it whirled aloft, round us, broken and quivering pieces of
black tinder. The air was full of them. And the dead dog lay in a pool
of blood before us. It seemed to me that my brain was rocking with the
fury and rage I felt--my whole frame convulsed in it. The loss, the
irreparable loss, the killed hopes I saw in those floating ashes round
me, came home to me till my brain seemed breaking asunder with anger.
To murder him came the impulse! How? There were a thousand ways! To
grind my fingers still deeper into his throat--THUS! THUS! Or that long
knife that lay there on the rug, driven into and twisted round in his
breast; or that sharp corner of the fender to batter out his brains; or
drag him through the long, open window and hurl him in the darkness
from that second floor balcony. Which? Devil! devil! Then as I held him
there the thought pierced me,--Was I a brute to feel a blind rage like
this? Had I ever in my life lost my own self-command, that command
which sets us where we stand as men, as sane, highly-organised beings?
And should a miserable, worthless cur like this have the power to break
that self-control?

My whole pride and self-respect rose within me and commanded my passion
back within its bounds. I unclosed my hands from his throat, and
dropped him upon the ground as I would have dropped a loathsome rag. I
watched him rise to his knees, trembling, livid, and terrified, and
then scramble to his feet, with satisfaction that such a thing as he
had not broken my own self-rule.

"Go out of this room," I said, and he hurried to the communicating door
and shut and locked it securely after him.

I heard him do so with a contemptuous smile. Had I wanted to follow
him, my weight flung against the flimsy door would have crushed it in.
And I was left standing there alone in the smoke-filled room with
nothing but the thunderings of my own pulses to break the silence.

"Inconceivable," I murmured, as the wind, stirring it, made the tinder
creak in the grate as it lay in thick masses; "simply inconceivable."

I walked to the hearth and bent over the dog. He was already growing
cold. He had not moved after his first fall. That vicious, brutal stab
must have gone straight in to the heart. The knife was wet half way to
the hilt. I lifted the dog and laid him on the sofa, and then
mechanically went towards the blowing night-air and into the balcony.
My brain seemed only just maintaining its right balance. So: all my
labour, all my confident expectations, all the triumphant pleasure with
which I had come back that afternoon, all the result of this past
year's effort were now--nothing. Marked in a little floating dust. And
not one vestige, not an outline nor portion of an outline even,
remained. There was no rough draft, no sketch, no note or notes of the
work existing. I always wrote every manuscript, from its first word to
its last, on the paper that went to the publisher. My inspiration of
the time was transferred direct to the page before me, and there it
stood, without alteration, without correction. I never wanted to touch
it or change it after it was once written. I was struck down, back
again to the foot of the hill of work up which I had been struggling
twelve months. Lucia, celebrity, pleasure, liberty, everything I
coveted was now removed, taken far off into indefinite distance from
me. For twelve months they had been coming nearer, steadily nearer,
with each accomplished page, and to-day, only to-day, I had left the
publisher's office knowing they were close to me, almost within my very
arms. Like the prisoner serving his time in gaol, and living, as it
were, in the last day that sets him free, I had been living these
twelve months in the day when the last line should be written. Now all
to be recommenced from the wearying, sickening beginning. And why? Why
had he done it? That I could not understand. As a psychological enigma
it leapt fitfully before my brain between the spasms of personal
desperation. He had nothing to gain, everything to lose by my failure.
He knew I was a man to always do the utmost for my friend, simply
because he was my friend, and therefore from any increase of power in
me he could derive nothing but benefit. There was absolutely no motive,
could be no cause, for the act except undiluted jealousy and envy. I
stepped inside the room again and went again to the hearth. Except when
I saw the piles of black tinder I could not realise that he had done
it. It seemed incredible, as if I must be dreaming. But there they lay,
leaf upon leaf, some whole and perfect yet, sheets of black tinder,
curled round at the corners where the flames had rolled them up, and
lined still with white marks where the ink had been. Yes, it was so.
The whole of my work was a nothing, and I a dependent pauper again.

Where was that whole brilliant structure now that I had lived for and
so passionately loved through this past year? Along each line had
flowed the very essence of my feelings at the time the line was
written, and each one was irreplaceable. The fervour of a past
inspiration, like the fervour of a past desire, can never be recalled.
I gazed down into the grate and felt, stealthily creeping upon me, as
if it had been a beast with me in the empty room, my intense hatred of
this other man, divided from me by a few feet of space and one slight
partition. There was no outlet from his room except into this. A few
steps, force my way in, and what would follow?

I pressed both hands across my eyes and bowed my head till it leant
hard upon the mantelpiece, feeling the longing and the urging towards
physical violence against him rush upon me and tear me like wolves. The
mental rage diffused itself through all the physical system till it
seemed like poison pouring through my veins. Every pulse, beating
convulsively in arms and chest and neck, seemed to clamour together in
hungry fury. I leant there trying to stifle, to kill the thoughts that
came and beat down the brutal rage. And as I stood there I heard Howard
cough in the next room--that slight effeminate cough he gave when
nervous or confused. I felt my blood leap at the sound, and it rushed
in a scalding stream over my face. I raised my head and began
mechanically to pace the room.

Even now it hardly seemed real, and my eyes kept returning and
returning to the console where the manuscript had always lain out of
work hours through the past year. "Devil! devil!" I muttered at
intervals; "what an unutterable devil." I don't know how long I walked
up and down, but suddenly a sense of physical fatigue, of collapse,
forced itself upon me. I threw myself in the corner of the couch and
took the dog's dead head upon my knee. Dead! It seemed strange--the
constant companion of ten years. I had had him from his first earliest
days.

Even before his eyes had opened I was struck by the intelligent way he
had lain at his mother's side, and surnamed him Nous on the spot, after
my favourite quality. I admit, like all good intelligences, because
they have always their own particular views on everything, he had given
a great deal of trouble. He had gnawed up my important business letters
when cutting his teeth; he had made beds on my new light spring suits;
he had sucked his favourite, most greasy mutton bone on the couch where
my best manuscript lay drying; and out of doors he strongly objected to
follow.

It is extremely annoying on a hot August afternoon, when you have just
time to catch the Richmond train, and a friend is with you, to have
your collie suddenly start off at a gallop in the opposite direction to
the station, and pay absolutely no attention to the most distracted
whistling and calling. Nothing for it but to start in pursuit, to run
yourself into a fever, and after lapse of time to return with the
fugitive to find your train missed and your friend as savage as a bear.

"If that dog were mine I'd thrash him within an inch of his life!" was
the usual remark when I got back.

"Then I am extremely glad he is not yours," I used to answer, fastening
on the dog's collar, and making him walk at the end of a foot of chain
as a punishment.

"You'll never teach him like that, Vic. If you gave him a good kick in
the eye now he'd remember it!"

"Thanks very much for your advice," I returned, "but I should never
forgive myself if I kicked any animal in the eye."

"You are a queer, weak-hearted sort of fellow!" was the general answer,
in a contemptuous tone, at which I used to shrug my shoulders and
continue to manage my dog in my own way.

He would remember a blow, a kick, or a thrashing. I knew that. And that
was exactly what I meant to avoid, whatever it cost at times to keep my
temper with him. Besides, in all physical violence towards another
object there is a peculiar, dangerous, seductive fascination. Once
indulged in at all, it grows rapidly and imperceptibly into a
positively delicious pleasure and habit, just as, if never indulged in,
there grows up an always increasing horror and loathing of it.

Rage and anger, and their physical expression, become by habit a sort
of joy, similar to the joy in intoxication, but if only the habit can
be formed the other way there is an equal joy obtainable from
self-restraint.

Control of the strongest passions is supposed to be difficult to
attain, but the whole difficulty lies in laying the first stones of its
foundation. If this is done the fabric will then go on building itself.
Day by day a brick will be added to the walls, until finally no shock
can overthrow them.

More and more as a man holds in his passions, more and more as he feels
the pride of holding all the reins of his whole system firmly in his
hand, will he have an abhorrence of scattering them to the idle winds
at the bidding of the first fool who chances to vex him. But if he
forms the habit of holding those reins so loosely that they drag along
in the mud, and are trampled on at every instant, more and more
difficult is it to gather them up.

The man who begins striking his dog as a punishment will proceed to
kick it when it comes accidentally in his way, and then go on to
knocking it about, simply because he feels in a bad humour.

So I never would, when I came back from these chasings, crimson,
heated, breathless, made to look like a fool, and excessively annoyed
altogether, cheat myself with the excuse that Nous wanted correction,
or any other nonsense to cover my own ill-temper. As a matter of fact,
he soon learnt it was uninteresting to be brought back to the very same
corner from where he had started and have to walk all the rest of the
way at the end of a scrap of chain, and his education passed happily
over without a single rough word. It took longer perhaps than a
treatment by blows, but I had my reward.

The dog conceived a limitless, boundless affection for me which more
than repaid me. Some men, of course, don't want affection. They only
care for obedience, and not at all how it is attained.

For myself I can see no pleasure in being merely dreaded. I should hate
to see anything--man, woman, servant, dog, anything--start in terror at
my footstep; hate to feel I brought gloom wherever I came, and left
relief behind me.

Nous was extremely quick-witted, and it used to amuse me enormously the
way he behaved when, as sometimes happened, I trod upon his foot
accidentally, or fell over him in the dark. Knowing that he had never
had a voluntary blow from me in his life, he would leap
enthusiastically over me and lick my hands after his first yelp, as
much as to say--

"Yes; I know it was quite an accident. I know, I am sure you didn't
mean it."

We had been inseparable, he and I, for these ten years. He had walked
by my side, eaten from my plate, slept on my bed, and his death now in
my service left a heavy, jagged-edged wound. As I sat there in the
corner of the couch, with my hand absently stroking the glossy black
coat, there came the very soft jarring of a key in the lock.

I glanced towards Howard's door. The sound continued. The key was being
very slowly and gently turned, and then the handle was grasped and
cautiously revolved. He evidently hoped I was asleep, and wanted to
enter without disturbing me. I sat in silence with my eyes on the door,
which slowly opened.

Howard stood on the threshold. He saw I was sitting there facing him,
and he seemed to pause, unable to come forward or retreat. He did not
look particularly happy as a result of his work. His face was pallid
and haggard. Fool! to have flung away a valuable friend, and shackled
himself with the fear of another man!

"What do you want?" I said, as he did not move.

"My manuscripts, Victor. I left them here."

"There they are on the table. They are quite safe. Did you think I
should act as you have? Come and take them if you want them."

He had to pass close before me to do so, and I watched his nervous,
hurried approach to the table, and the trembling of his hand as he
gathered up the papers, with contemptuous eyes.

When he had grasped them all in his hand he gave an involuntary side
look at me and the motionless form beside me--a look that he seemed
unable to abstain from giving, though against his will. I met his
glance, and he hurried away back to his own door, and went through it
as a leper will shuffle and shamble away out of one's sight.

As soon as the morning came, I left the hotel without having tried the
vain attempt of sleep, and did not return to it till the evening. At
noon I called upon the publisher and explained that an unfortunate
accident had occurred, and the MS. I had received back from him
yesterday had been destroyed.

At that he beamed upon me blandly, and remarked that such a thing was
unfortunate, but that without doubt M'sieur would make all haste to
re-copy it, and would let him have a new draft as soon as possible.

I shook my head, feeling my lips and throat grow dry as I answered--

"That which you had was the original, not a copy. I have no copy of it
from which I can replace it."

"But M'sieur will certainly have his notes, his private work, his first
scheme?"

"None. I do not work in that way. There is not a scrap of paper
relative to it anywhere."

Upon this the publisher rose, looked at me in a long silence, and then
said in an icy tone,--

"Then M'sieur wishes me to understand that he does not intend to allow
our firm to publish his work at all?"

I flushed at the insult his words contained. They practically intimated
that he thought the whole thing an invention, and that I was going to
give the MS. elsewhere. I got up too, and said--

"I have told you the MS. is destroyed, and I have no means of
reproducing it, therefore it is impossible for it to be brought out by
your or any other firm."

The man before me merely raised his shoulders over his ears, bowed,
spread out the palms of his hands, raised his eyebrows, and muttered,--

"Comme vous voulez, M'sieur."

Confound him! was he a liar that he assumed me to be one. There was
nothing to do but to bow and leave.

As I walked out of his office into the fresh, sparkling, morning
sunlight, life to me had a very bitter savour. I walked through the
streets till I felt tired in every muscle. Then I sat thinking on a
bench in a green corner of the Champs Elysees, watching absently the
sun patches jump from leaf to neighbouring leaf as the wind elevated
and depressed them, and trying to mentally seize upon and analyse this
vile, low impulse of another man's envy.

It was dark when I came back to the hotel. When I came up to my room I
was surprised to see quite a little crowd of figures clustered round my
door, all talking at once in their shrill French tones, all
gesticulating at each other as if about to tear off each other's scalps.

Angry exclamations reached me as I came towards them.

"Mais je vous dis, je ne savais pas!"

"Mais c'est impossible!"

"Pas en regie!"

"Que voulez vous? C'est un barbare!"

Then as I came up there was a general cry of "Le voila! le voila!" and
in an instant they were all around me, all clamouring, screaming,
questioning me at once. The master of the hotel in the greatest
agitation, the manager in his shirt sleeves, two or three waiters, a
man looking like a gendarme, and another official with a paper in his
hand. For a second they shouted so--nothing could be distinguished
except broken phrases and the continual repetition of the words
"Notification" and "M'sieur le Commissionaire."

"A vous la responsibilite!"

"Moi? je n'en savais rien!"

"Il veut abimer notre sante!"

"Il partera tout de suite!"

I looked at them for a moment in amaze, and the fellow with the paper
thundered out--"Silence," which produced the effect of cold thrown
suddenly in boiling water. The little crowd pressed in upon me closely
and listened awe-struck as the Commissionaire spoke to me, in French,
of course.

"Monsieur," he said, in an impressive tone, "I am informed you have a
dog here!"

I nodded.

"A dog--dead!" and the accent on the last word was terrific.

"My dog unfortunately has died," I said. "Yes"--and I wondered more and
more the upshot of it all.

"Then," thundered the official, purple with excited rage, "how is it,
Monsieur, you have not sent a notification to the police?"

I was fairly taken aback. The matter, though I barely yet comprehended
it, was evidently, in their estimation, one of serious importance.
Involuntarily, I glanced round at the others as the Commissionaire
scowled threateningly at me. They noted my glance, and attributing it,
I suppose, to guilty confusion, there were suppressed and complacent
murmurs all round me, and shakes of the head.

"Pas d'explication!"

"Vous voyez ca?"

"Point d'excuse!"

"It is scandalous, it is shameful, it is abominable, M'sieur," shouted
the Commissionaire, "the way you have acted! Twenty-four hours you hide
the dead body of a dog in your bedroom! You hope to escape the eye of
the law! You would bring disgrace on the gendarmerie, on the
municipality of Paris! You laugh at our regulations, M'sieur, you
laugh!" and he brandished the paper violently. "But you will find the
authority of France is greater than you! There are cells, M'sieur,
there are courts, there are judges for your education!!!"

Matters were apparently growing serious for me. I had evidently
offended them all desperately somehow. "You go out in the morning," he
continued, furiously, "and you do not slink back here till it is dark!
You are a coward, M'sieur! a coward!"

No Englishman likes hearing himself abused, and my own anger now was
considerably roused. But still, in my way about life, I have found the
inestimable value of conciliation. It saves one such an infinity of
trouble. I suppose I lean naturally towards it. At any rate, I always
feel this--that if you have not the power on your side it is
undignified to assume that which you cannot enforce, and if you have
the power you can then afford to be civil.

A pleasant manner has never once failed me in bringing about an effect
which is highly convenient to oneself, and in the long run it spares
one's vanity considerably. There is hardly any human being, however
aggressive he may be at first, that does not melt into respect before
an imperturbable civility. I felt in this case, too, that I was
probably in the wrong from their point of view. It was the question of
another country's ways, and I have a lenient feeling towards the
epichortyon. So, annoyed and irritated as I was, I checked my own
feelings and said,--

"I think it is altogether a misunderstanding! I have no intention of
breaking any regulations. I was not aware that a dog's death would be a
matter where the law would interfere."

The fury on the purple face opposite me subsided somewhat.

"Is it then possible," he said, more quietly, "that you are in
ignorance of our rule, that, when any animal dies in a private
dwelling-house, the fact shall be notified within twelve hours to the
police, in order that the dead body may be immediately removed?"

All eyes fixed upon me with breathless uncertainty.

"Certainly," I said, "I did not know of the regulation. If I had, I
should have complied with it. There is no similar rule in England."

A great change took place in the official's manner. His face cleared,
and he waved his arm with a gesture of magnificent condescension. His
whole attitude expressed clearly that so enlightened and cultured a
person as himself was in the habit of making every allowance for any
poor, benighted pagan like me.

"Well, M'sieur; well, I accept your statement, and I withdraw my
expressions of a moment back. But think, M'sieur, of the risk to which
your conduct has exposed others. Think of the pollution of the air, the
contamination of the atmosphere! Think, M'sieur, of the typhoid! the
fever!! the cholera!!!"

He looked round upon the others, and a sympathetic shudder of horror
passed over them.

As an Englishman, of course, I felt strongly inclined to derisive
laughter. However, I merely said,--

"Well, what is to be done next?"

"The body must be removed, M'sieur!" he answered, with a touch of
severity, "at once!!"

"How?"

"A scavenger will remove it."

I stood silent. The idea repelled me. This thing that had been petted
and cared for by me for ten years, had slept at my side, and often been
held in my arms, now to be flung upon a dust heap, with the rotting
matter of a Paris street. The mind will not change its associations so
quickly. I looked at the man and said,--

"Can I not bury the dog somewhere myself?"

"I am afraid--I hardly know--" he said. "These are the rules,--that all
dead animals are taken by the municipality."

He spoke reluctantly now. His personal animosity against me was
evidently dead. Fortunate that I had not offended him earlier in the
interview; if I had, he would certainly now have dragged the dog from
me with every species of indignity and insult, and I could have done
nothing against him, armoured up as he was with the law. As things
stood, he was clearly on my side.

"Perhaps this gentleman," I said, indicating the master of the hotel,
"would let me purchase a piece of ground for a grave in his courtyard.
If so, would you allow me to bury the dog there?"

The master of the hotel, who saw now that after all there would be no
serious row with the police, nor discredit on his hotel, and began to
think his fury had been somewhat misdirected, hastened to assure me
that I need not consider the matter; that not only was a portion, but
the whole courtyard at my disposition, and not as a purchase, but as a
free gift, if M'sieur le Commissionaire sanctioned the proceeding.

The official hesitated, and the onlookers, their sympathies engaged,
murmured,--

"Ah, pauvre chien!"

"C'est l'affection vois-tu?"

"Il aime le chien, c'est naturel!"

"L'affection, c'est toujours touchante!"

The Commissionaire, his own inclination thus backed up by the
prevailing sentiment, turned to me, and said--

"Well, M'sieur, I ought to take your dog from you, but still, as you
say you will bury the dog yourself, and, as I am sure this gentleman
will see that the grave is deep enough to protect the health of the
public, I believe I may safely grant you the permission you ask. It is
accorded, M'sieur!" and he bowed, full of satisfied amiable authority
and friendly feeling.

I held out my hand to him on the impulse.

"I am extremely obliged to you!"

He grasped it warmly in his, and laid his left effusively on his heart.

"You have my sincere sympathy, M'sieur."

Then lifting his hat and bowing, and putting out of sight the
formidable document he had shaken in my face, he retreated down the
corridor, followed by the other official, and leaving the hotel manager
with me.

"I will have a grave dug at once, M'sieur," he said; "and you shall be
informed when it is ready."

I thanked him and entered my own room.

A good three hours later I was following the gardener downstairs, the
dead body of Nous, wrapped completely in one of my overcoats, in my
arms. We went into the courtyard. It was raining now, the night quite
dark, and a gusty wind blowing. We crossed the yard to where a broad
flower-bed was planted. Here a grave, wide and deep enough for a human
being, had been dug. A lantern, in which the flame blew fitfully, was
set on the huge heap of mould and sent an uncertain light over the
grave. I got down into it, and laid Nous gently, still wrapped in the
coat, on the damp earth, with a heavy heart.

I vaulted out of the grave and stood, while the man filled it in,
listening to the steady fall of the earth and its dull thud, thud. The
rain came down steadily, and the man looked at me and said--

"Monsieur will be drenched through, he had better go within."

"No, no," I said; "continue."

And I waited while he dug away the mound, and the chilly wind rattled
the branches of a tree near, and the rain soaked with a monotonous
splashing into the earth, and the light flickered, barely strong enough
to show me the man's working figure. When he had finished, when the
grave was filled and the upper soil smoothed over, I turned and,
mentally and physically chilled, went slowly back into the hotel. As I
entered the gas-lit corridor I saw a figure there at the door. It was
Howard. He was still in the hotel, and though I detested his proximity
even, I had no influence on his departure. He was evidently hanging
about there waiting for somebody or something, and to my intense
indignation, as he caught sight of me, he came towards me.

"Oh, Victor," he said hurriedly, in an uncertain tone, "I must speak to
you!"

What intolerable insolence to dare to come to me, the man he had so
mortally injured. My impulse was to stretch out my right arm and fell
him to the ground with a blow that should have the force of my whole
system in it. The colour came hot in all my face.

"Pray don't let us have a scene here," I said, coldly.

"Very good, then come outside. It is only for a few seconds. You always
used to say you would never refuse to hear a person once, whatever they
had done."

It was my principle, as he said, and I controlled the loathing I had of
him, of his voice, his look, his presence, and said--

"Come out, then," and we went down to the door.

There was an alley just outside the hotel, a cul de sac, black and
empty. Down this we turned, and when we had passed the side door of the
hotel he spoke.

"Victor, I am awfully sorry about the MS.; I am really. I would give
worlds to replace it now if I could. I have been utterly wretched
since. Is there anything I can do now to help you?"

"No," I said bitterly, "you cannot re-write my manuscript nor
resuscitate my dog."

"Oh, why did I do it? I can't think! I can't understand it! If you knew
what I have felt since!"

"Have you nothing more to say than this?" I asked; "because this sort
of thing is useless and leads to nothing."

"But what do you think of me? You hate me! But it was not premeditated,
I swear. I had no motive, no gain in doing it, and we have been great
friends always; but I suppose that can never be again now! But still it
was an impulse, a sudden impulse, only because I was so jealous of you!
It was irresistible at the moment! The thing was in flames before I
realised it! You know yourself what impulse is! You always knew I was
like that!"

"Impulse!" I repeated. "Yes, I knew you were impulsive, but that such
an impulse could ever come to you as that--to burn, irreparably destroy
the year's work, and all the hopes of a man who was an intimate friend,
and against whom you had never had the shadow of a complaint, that I
never could have believed! Impulse! It is not one that I can conceive
existing except in hell!"

We were talking with voices moderated, rather low than otherwise; but
the hatred I felt of him I let come into each word and edge it like a
knife.

He drew in his breath.

"Then our friendship is at an end?" he said, in a weak nervous tone.

"Utterly. As if it had never been. You have cut out its very roots. I
had a great friendship for you--more, a great affection. It would have
stood a great deal. I would have passed over many injuries that you
might have done. Anything almost but this, that you knew was so
completely blasting to all my own desires. This shows me what your
feelings must have been at the time, at any rate, and remember a thick
manuscript is not burnt in a minute. How long must it have taken you to
destroy those sheets upon sheets of paper in which you knew another
man's very heart, and blood, and nerve had been infused? All that time
you must have been animated with the sheer lust of cruelly and brutally
ill-using and injuring me, and in return I"--

I shut and locked my lips upon the words that rose.

To abuse or curse another is almost as degrading to oneself as to
strike him.

We had come up to the end of the alley now, and we paused by the blank
brick wall. There was a lamp projecting from it which threw some light
upon us both, and, as his figure came distinctly before my eyes, I felt
one intolerable desire to leap upon him--this miserable creature who
had destroyed my work--fling him to the ground, and grind his face and
head to a shapeless mass in this slimy gutter that flowed at our feet.

Could he have faintly realised what my feelings were, coward as he was,
he would never have come up this empty alley with me.

"Well, Victor, I am leaving Paris to-night; but I felt I could not go
without telling you how infinitely I regret it all. If you can never be
my friend again, you can forgive me. Let me hear you say that you do
before I go."

Forgive him! Great God! Forgive an injury so wanton, so excuseless!
Every savage instinct in me leapt up at the word.

The manuscript! I felt inclined to shout to him. The manuscript! Give
that back to me and then come and talk about forgiveness. Had the act
and the motive been as loathsome, but the injury, the actual injury,
the positive loss to me been less, I could have forgiven; but the blow
was so sharp, the damage so irremediable, I could not. Even at his
words I seemed to see staring me in the face the months of toil
awaiting me before I could rebuild--if I could ever--the fabric he had
destroyed in half-an-hour.

And crowding upon this came the thought of what he had robbed me of,
the name, the freedom, the power that those vanished paper pages had
been pregnant with for me. He was leaving Paris, he said; and so might
I have been leaving free and successful, leaving to return to Lucia,
but for him.

And now I was to remain--remain here, a prisoner, to work on another
twelve weary months at that most nauseating of tasks, repairing undone
work. To recommence, to take up the old burden, to start it all over
again, now when I had just made myself free! To be shackled again with
the weight of uncertainty and expectancy for another year, through him,
and by God he talked of forgiveness!--to me!--now!

It was too soon. Later--later, perhaps, when I was calmer, when some of
the injury had been repaired, when a spark of hope had been rekindled;
then, if he asked, but now--The days before me stretched such a bitter,
hopeless blank! And how did I know that his act could ever be
nullified! It might so turn out that now I never should accomplish my
end.

My health had worn thin and my brain was tired out. Either might give
way, and then--a life blasted through him! Brute and devil! that was
what he had wished, and was perhaps wishing still, even now, when he
professed to be so anxious for forgiveness. I glanced towards his face
opposite me, but it was too dark to see its expression. A slight,
steady drizzle fell between us; I only saw his slight figure before me
in the uncertain light, and again something urged me.

Take your revenge now while you can get it. This man may have spoiled
all your life, but when you realise it, then he may be away and out of
your power. Thrash him! Half kill him now while you have the chance!
But I did not stir. Vengeance has always seemed to me a poor thing.
Supposing... After? ... If I satiated my rage then, what after. I
should have two things to regret instead of one. No. Let him go with
his vile act upon his head.

But forgive? I could not. He had taken the inside, the best of my life,
and I hated, purely hated him. I turned a step aside, his mere outline
before my eyes sent the hate running hotly through me.

"I can't," I muttered; "no, I can't."

Howard sprang forward and put his hand on my arm, and at the touch I
seemed to abhor him more.

"Victor, I wish I could say how I regret it. I wish I could express
myself, but I can't. If you knew--I would cut off my right hand now to
undo it! I would indeed!"

"Who wants you right hand" I said, savagely, stopping and turning on
him as I shook off his detestable touch. "Fool! You can talk now!
Replace a single chapter of that book I slaved at--that would be more
to the purpose!"

Howard's face grew paler. I saw that, even in the darkness.

"It is not open to me, Victor, now," he said; "but it is still open to
you to forgive."

His voice had a grave significance in it. No words that he could have
chosen would have been better. The short, quiet sentence was like a
sword to divide my hatred, and penetrate to the better part of man. The
truth, the unerring force, the reflections of this life's chances and
decrees in those words went home. It was not open to him now to repair;
later, it might not be open to me to forgive. And later, when all these
present vivid feelings were swept away in the past, should I not wish I
had forgiven.

I stood silent, and the query went through me--What is forgiveness? Is
it to feel again as we have felt before the injury? This is impossible.
Do what I would that affection I had had for him could never re-awaken.
It was stamped out, obliterated, as a flower is ground into the dust
beneath one's heel.

Still the loathing and the hatred I had for him now would pass. Years
would cancel it all, and bring with them mere indifference towards him,
the thought of him and of his act. To say the words now, and let the
time to come slowly fill them with truth, was better, surely, than to
reiterate my hatred of him--hatred which years hence would seem almost
foolish to me myself.

"I can't think that my forgiveness can be of very serious import to
you," I said quietly. "However, it is yours."

"You will shake hands with me, then, won't you?" and he held out his
hand.

With an effort I stretched out mine and took his, and held it for a
second as in old times.

"Good-bye, Victor," he said, in rather a strained voice, "I shall never
cease to regret what I have done."

He hesitated, as if wondering if I should speak. I did not, and he
turned and went down the alley, and the darkness closed up after him. I
leant silent against the wall, hating myself for forgiving him and
letting him go, and yet knowing I would do the same again.

"One must forgive, one must forgive; otherwise one is no better than
brute," I thought mechanically. "Later I shall be glad,"--and similar
phrases by which Principle excuses itself to furious, disappointed
Nature.

After a time I grew calmer, and I went back to the hotel and up to my
room. It seemed emptier, blanker still, now that even the dead body of
the dog had gone. In the grate, and scattered over the carpet, remained
still remnants of black tinder. I felt suddenly tired, worn out. I
flung myself, dressed as I was, upon the bed, and lay there in a sort
of stupor. And the slow, dark hours of that terrible night of
depression tramped over me with leaden footsteps.




CHAPTER V.


The next morning, just as I had dropped into an uneasy doze, there came
a knocking and a hammering, and a muttering outside my door.

"M'sieur! M'sieur!" Tap-tap-tap. "Que diable donc! Qu'il dort! M'sieur!
Profondement! Est ce qu'il est mort? Ah! c'est une bete Anglaise!"
Tap-tap-tap.

All this came through the wall in a hazy sort of confusion, mingling
with my sleep, before it roused me to go and open the door. Finally,
however, I stumbled off the bed and unlocked the door, and threw it
open.

"What now" I thought. "Have I broken any more of your confounded Gallic
regulations."

It was not a Commissary of Police this time, but a uniformed
commissionaire, with a note in his hand. Possibly serenely unconscious
that I had heard his polite remarks outside, he bowed urbanely.

"Bonjour, M'sieur! A thousand apologies for disturbing M'sieur! But
Madame said I was to deliver this note personally."

I looked at him with elevated eyebrows. I knew no Madame in Paris.

"I think there is some mistake," I said.

"But why? Monsieur Eeltone? Numero quinze, is it not?"

"Hilton. Yes, that is my name."

He gave me a triumphant glance, and handed me the note with a flourish.
The envelope was that of the Grand Hotel; but the writing on it was
Lucia's writing. Lucia here in Paris! Close to me! How? Why? The blood
poured over my face. With a sense of delight I tore the envelope open:--

"I am at the above hotel. I shall remain at home all to-day in the hope
that you may be able to come and see me." "LUCIA."

I looked up the man in the doorway bowed with a deprecating air.

"Madame said I was to wait for an answer."

He had a subdued smile upon his face, which seemed to say--"We know all
about these little notes! We are accustomed to them here in Paris!"

I told him to enter, and he followed me into the room and took an
interested glance round. Probably, to his view, my pallid face and
blood-shot eyes, my last night's clothes, my boots on my feet, and the
bed unslept-in, conveyed the idea of a drunken fit only just over in
time to make room for the morning's intrigue. A young, beautiful
English madame--for the title Miss is barely recognised, never
understood in Paris--staying at the hotel and sending notes to a young
English M'sieur in another. Yes, this was plainly an intrigue of the
genuine order, and the mari would doubtless arrive from England later.
All was plain, and he stood with a patronising smile by the table,
while I scribbled a note to Lucia.

"My Dearest Life,--I am rushing, flying to you now. I will be with you
as soon as fiacre can bring me." "VICTOR."

I closed it, and made him wait while I sealed it, lest he should
interfere with it. Then I handed it to him with a two-franc piece, and
with bon jours and remerciments and grins he withdrew.

I dressed hurriedly and yet carefully, and shaved with a dangerously
trembling hand. The first fiacre that was passing as I left the hotel I
took, and was driven, through the bright sunshine that filled the Paris
boulevards, to the Grand. I sat back in it, with my arms folded,
feeling my heart like a stone within me. Lucia's coming, that,
thirty-six hours back, would have infused the extreme of delight
through me, was now useless, worthless.

I could do nothing, say nothing. I was a prisoner again, fettered,
bound, as if I had an iron collar on my neck, and manacles on my
wrists. I looked through the shining, quivering sunlight that fell on
every side with blank, unseeing eyes, and the bitterest curses against
Howard rose to my lips, checked only by the knowledge that I had
forgiven him.

When I reached the hotel, and mentioned her name, I was shown up to a
private sitting-room on the first floor, facing the gay Paris
boulevard, and with the bright light streaming in through its
half-closed persiennes. A figure rose at the opening of the door, and
came towards me with outstretched hands.

"Lucia!"

My eyes fixed on her, and my glance rushed over her in a second, and
poured with feverish haste their report back into my brain. Within the
first moment of my entry of the room, I was conscious of, I recognised
that there was a great change, an almost indefinable, but nevertheless
distinctly perceptible, metamorphosis in this woman since I had seen
her last. Lucia was a somnambulist no longer. She had awakened. It was
a lovely, living woman who crossed the room to me now; a woman awake to
her own powers, conscious of the sceptre, and the gifts, and the
kingdom that Nature puts into the hands of a woman for a few years, I
felt all this as I looked at her, saw it in her advance towards me,
heard it in the soft tones of her voice as she said,--

"Well, Victor, are you glad I have come?"

And it was with my heart suddenly beating hard, and my face pale, and a
mist before my eyes, that I came forward to her. What had been the
first slight shock to her sleeping woman's passions I had no idea.

Perhaps some chance glance from a man's eyes upon her as she passed him
in a crowd had suddenly struck through the ice of her abstraction.
Perhaps some pressure of an arm meaning she did not even comprehend.
Perhaps some word, overheard between two men, whose meaning she did not
even comprehend. Perhaps it was only Nature unaided that had whispered
to her,--"Life is passing, and its greatest pleasure is as yet untried.
Get up and seek it."

Perhaps any of these, or all or none. I could not say. The change was
there. Lucia was conscious, awake. Pure, delicate, as from her integral
nature she would always, but still awake. As she stood, the sun fell
upon her light hair and seemed to get tangled there, a hot, rose glow
was in her face, and the smooth scarlet lips parted in a faint seducing
smile.

"Now, tell me everything," she said, softly, "I am sure the manuscript
is finished by now."

She pointed to a wicker chair for me, and drew one just opposite it in
which she threw herself, full in the morning light, but just avoiding
the stabbing sun-rays. I saw in a sort of mechanical manner the way in
which she was dressed. It was as a woman only dresses once or twice,
perhaps, in her lifetime; and that is when she is determined to win,
through the sheer strength and force of her beauty, in the face of
every obstacle, the man she desires.

Every detail had been thought of, every beauty of her form studied and
enhanced, from the light curls on her forehead, and the curves of her
bosom rising and falling under its lace bodice, to the tiny shoes that
came from beneath the folds of her delicate-coloured skirt.

It was presumably of cotton, for Lucia herself had informed me that she
never wore anything in the mornings except cotton or serge; if so, it
was a glorified cotton of a clear rose tint. Film upon film of lace
hung over it in transparent folds, through which the glowing colour
deepened and blushed at her slightest movement, as the hot colour in
the heart of a rose flushes through all its leaves.

Above her supple hips, clasping her waist, shone an open-work band of
Maltese silver, and above this rose delicate vase-like lines, swelling
and expanding at last into the rounded curves of her bosom; here the
colour seemed to glow deeper and warmer where her heart was beating
tumultuously, and then towards her neck it paled again, beneath ruffle
and ruffle of lace that lay like foam against the soft, snow-white
throat. It was a symphony of colour. A perfect harmony of perfect tones
in union with the brilliant fairness of her skin. The sleeves, half
open to the elbow, revealed a white, rounded, downy arm, and the
thousand subtle pink-and-white tints of her flesh seemed to melt and
merge themselves into a bewildering, distracting glow within that
rose-hued sleeve. She made one exquisite, intoxicating vision to the
senses. In those moments I can hardly say I saw her. She rather seemed
to sway before the dizzy sight of my excited eyes.

Dimly yet keenly, vaguely yet convincingly, I felt she had come as an
adorable antagonist to my resolutions. Traditionally speaking, such a
knowledge should have made me instantly on my guard.

I ought certainly to have summoned my control, my judgment, and so on,
to say nothing of an icy reserve. But I did not. My whole heart seemed
to rush out to her, my whole being to strain towards her. I longed to
take her entirely in my arms, to kiss her on the lips and throat, and
say,--

"Ask whatever you will and it shall be granted."

"The manuscript is finished, isn't it?" she repeated.

Oh, bitter, bitter, and cruel fate that had dragged the fruits of my
labour, and with them everything, out of my hand!

"It was finished, Lucia, a few days ago," I said, speaking calmly with
a great effort; "but an accident happened and it was destroyed."

I felt myself growing paler and paler as I spoke, meeting her lovely,
eager eyes fixed on mine.

"Destroyed?" she echoed, growing white to the lips. "Oh, Victor! How?"

"I would rather not say, Lucia, exactly how it occurred, but it had
been accepted by a publisher here, and I was going to make one or two
trifling alterations in it to please him, and so I had it back. Well,
then, as I say, something happened, and the thing was destroyed."

There was a dead silence.

I saw her heart beating painfully beneath the laces on her bosom, and
pain stamped on all her face. Then she said abruptly,--

"Have you Howard with you still?"

"No. He left Paris last night," I answered.

Her eyes met mine full across the sunlight. We looked at each other in
silence.

She asked nothing farther.

I believe she comprehended the whole case as it stood, because she
would know that had I lost or injured the MSS. myself I should have no
reason for concealing it. As a matter of honourable feeling I wanted to
keep the fact from her, but I could not help her guessing it. Curiously
enough her next question, after a long pause--though I did not see that
in her mind there could have been connection between the subjects--was:

"Where is Nous?"

"Nous is dead."

"How did he die?"

"That, also, I would rather not say."

At that, in addition to a sharper look of distress, a puzzled surprise
came into her face. She raised her delicate eyebrows and looked at me
with a perplexed, half-frightened expression.

"Victor," she said, leaning forward a little in her chair, "was it he
that tore up the manuscript? and did you kill him in a fit of rage?"

I looked back at her, also with surprise, that she could suggest such a
thing of me as possible.

"Oh, no!" I said hastily; "nothing at all of the sort. No! If either
the loss of the book or the dog's death had occurred in any way through
my fault I would tell you. I have no secrets of my own from you, but
both of these concern another man, and therefore I would rather let
them pass."

There was silence.

Then I asked, looking at her,--

"Are you alone here, Lucia?"

"Except, of course, for my maid--Yes."

My heart beat harder. Why? I hardly know, except that the word "alone"
has such a charm in it connected with a woman we love.

"Of course," she said, leaning back, "it is a little unconventional my
coming here alone; but Mama was not well enough, and I--Victor," she
said, with a sudden indrawn breath, "I felt I must come and see you. I
told her I felt I should die there if they would not let me come!"

I saw her breast heave as she spoke, her cheek flushed and paled
alternately, the azure of her eyes deepened slowly as the pupils
widened in them, till there seemed midnight behind the lashes.

I felt a dangerous current stirring in all my blood at her words, a dry
spasm seemed in my throat, blocking all speech.

"I thought you must have finished by now, and I came to say--I came to
say"--she murmured.

The blood rushed scarlet, staining all the fair skin, across the face
before me, and the bright lips fluttered in uncertain hesitation.

I guessed the situation.

She had come to say to me phrases that seemed quite easy, quite simple
to her, murmuring them to herself in the silence of an empty studio,
and now face to face with me, listening and expectant, they had become
difficult, impossible. I leant forward, the blood hot in my own cheek,
a dull flame waking in every vein.

"Darling," I said, taking her soft left hand within both my own, "I
cannot tell exactly what you wish to tell me; but listen--I had
finished all, and had things not turned out as they have I should have
been starting now to come to you and say, 'Lucia I am free now to be
your slave.' All this year we have been separated I have thought only
of you, waking and sleeping, longed for you, dreamed of you, lived in
the hour of our re-union, desired with an intensity beyond all words
that day that gives you to me; and, forty hours back, that day, Lucia,
seemed so near, but now--dearest"--

I stopped, choked, suffocated with the weight of hopeless, despairing
passion that fell back upon itself within me.

Lucia leant forward, the beating, palpitating bosom was close to me,
her white, nerveless hand lay close in mine.

"And now, Victor?"

"Now all is vanished. I am exactly in the position where I was when I
left you in England a year ago."

"And what do you mean--what are we--what?"--

"My sweet, what can we do? I must recommence. I must work on another
year."

I felt the burning, tremulous fingers grow cold in mine. Her face paled
till it was like white stone. Then suddenly she withdrew her hand from
my clasp, and started to her feet.

"Victor, I cannot! no, I cannot! I cannot wait another year! It will
kill me!" she said, passionately, looking away from me, and pacing a
short length of the floor backwards and forwards before me, as I rose,
too, and stood watching dizzily the incomparable figure pass and
repass, hardly master of myself.

"Dearest," she continued; "this is what I came to say--let us marry
now. I thought you would have successfully finished your work, and we
might do so; but now, now, even as it is, let it be as it is, let it be
unfinished, and still, still let us marry. There is no real bar as
there might be. There is no question of wrong to any one. We are to be
married--it cannot matter to any one when we are. Continue to work
afterwards. I am willing to be second always, in every thing, to your
work. But don't drive me from you altogether. Let me stay with you now
I have come. Let us marry now--here. Let us go before some
official--the Maire, or some one, or English consul, no matter
whom--this afternoon! Victor, if not now, that day you desire will
never come. I shall never be your own. Think how it has receded and
receded into time! We have been engaged now more than three years!"

She paused in front of me, and lifted her face--brilliant, glowing,
appealing--with an intensity of passionate, eager longing in it that
defied her words to express. Her whole form quivered with excitement,
till I saw the laces of her dress tremble. On the bodice beneath my
eyes, the lace fell from the shoulders, and its folds on each side
divided slightly in the centre, leaving a depression there in which the
rose-colour glowed crimson. It riveted my eyes this line--this channel
of colour burnt fiercely beneath my lids.

I could see nothing but it; it seemed everywhere, to fill the room, to
scorch into my brain, this palpitating, throbbing, crimson line. That
terrible impulse of blind excitement was rapidly drawing me into
itself--the impulse that counts nothing, knows nothing, reckons nothing
but itself; that will buy the present hour at any sacrifice--that
accepts everything, ignores everything but that one moment it feels
approaching. This impulse urged me, pressed me, strained violently upon
me.

It left me barely conscious of anything except the absorbing longing to
take her, draw her close, hard into my arms, and say, "Yes, let all go;
from this day henceforward you are mine." But almos

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