Chapter 6

'I am a self-educated man. My father was a wine merchant in Leeds. At sixteen he put me to serve in the shop of a cousin, a print-seller. It was there, I think, that my literary instincts awoke. I contributed occasional art notes to a local paper. At twenty I came up to London and began my definite career, as a reporter. I was soon earning thirty shillings a week, which seemed to me magnificent. But I aspired to higher things. I felt within me the stirrings of what I could not help believing to be genius--true genius. I longed to distinguish myself, to emerge from the crowd, from the background, to make myself remarked, to do something, to be somebody, to see my name a famous one. I was fortunate enough at this epoch to attract the notice of X----, the poet. He believed in me, and encouraged me to believe in myself. It is one of the regrets of my life that he died before I had achieved my celebrity. However, I have achieved it. My name is a household word wherever the English language is read. I have written the only novels of my time that are sure to live. They will live not only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality they possess which I must call _universal_--a quality which appeals with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy to-day. I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems. The novel,' he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights, 'the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the drama was that of Shakespeare's, the epic of Homer's. Do you follow me? Ah, here is a copy of "Crispin Dorr"--here is "The Card Dealer." Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished. Being author's copies, they possess an exceptional value. This is my autograph upon the fly-leaf. This is a photograph of my wife. She is a good woman, but has no great literary culture, and we are not so happy together as I could wish. Men of commanding parts seldom make good husbands, and I committed the imprudence of marrying very young. My wife, you see, belongs to that class of society from which I have risen. I am the son of a wine merchant, yet I dine with peers, and have been favoured with smiles from peeresses. My wife has not kept pace with me. This is my little girl--our only child--my daughter Judith. Here is the _Illustrated Gazette_ with the portrait of myself.'

Some of us in the Latin Quarter found the man's egotism insupportable, and gave him a wide berth. Others, more numerous, among them the irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.

'If he were only an ass,' Chalks urged, 'one might feel disposed to spare him. A merciful man is merciful to a beast. But he's such a cad, to boot--bandying his wife's name about the Latin Quarter, telling Tom, Dick, and Harry of their conjugal differences, and boasting of his successes with other women!'

A few of us, however, could not prevent an element of pity from tincturing our amusement. If his self-conceit was comical, by reason of its candour, it was surely pitiable, because of the poor, dwarfed starveling of a soul that it revealed. Here was a man, with life in his veins, and round about him the whole mystery and richness of creation--and he could seriously think of nothing save how, by his dress, by his speech, his postures, to render himself the observed of all observers!

Wherever he went, in whatever company he found himself, that was the sole thing he cared for--to be the centre of attention, to be looked at, listened to, recognised and admired as a celebrity. And if the event happened otherwise, if he had ground for the suspicion that the people near him were suffering their minds to wander to another topic, his face would darken, his attitude become distinctly one of rancour. With Chalks, familiarity bred boldness; he made the latter days of Blake's sojourn amongst us exceedingly unhappy.

'Now, Mr. Blake,' he would say, 'we are going to talk of art and love and things in general for a while, to rest our brains from the author of "Crispin Dorr." Please step into the corner there and sulk.'

And he had a bit of slang, which he set to a bar of music, and would sing, as if in absence of mind, whenever the conversation lapsed, to the infinite annoyance of Mr. Blake:--

'Git your hair cut--git your hair cut--git your hair cut--_short_!'

'If that is meant for me,' Blake once protested, 'I take it as discourteous in the last degree.'

'My dear sir, you were twenty thousand leagues from my thoughts. And as for getting your hair cut, I beseech you, don't. You would shear away the fabric of our joy,' Chalks answered.

Blake had a curiously exaggerated notion of his fame; and his jealousy thereof surpassed the jealousy of women. He took it for granted that everybody had heard of him, and bridled, as at a personal affront, when he met any one who hadn't. If you fell into chance talk with him, in ignorance of his identity, he could not let three minutes pass without informing you. And then, if you appeared not adequately impressed, he would wax ill-tempered. He was genuinely convinced that his person and his actions were affairs of consuming interest to all the world. To be something, to do something, perhaps he honestly aspired; but to _seem_ something was certainly his ruling passion.

One Sunday afternoon, at his suggestion, we went together to the studio of Z----, and I introduced him to the Master. But, as we moved about the vast room, among those small, priceless canvases, the consciousness grew upon me that my companion was in some distress of mind. His eye wandered; his utterances were brief and dry. At length he got me into a corner, and remarked, 'You introduced me simply as Mr. Blake. He evidently doesn't realise who I am.'

'Oh, these Frenchmen are so indifferent to things not French, you know,' said I.

'Yes--but--still--I wish you could make an occasion to let him know. In introducing me you might have added "a distinguished English author."'

'But do you quite realise who _he_ is?' I cried. 'He's jolly near the most distinguished living painter.'

'Never mind. He is treating me now as he might Brown, Jones, or Robinson.' As this was with a superfine consideration, it seemed unreasonable to demand a difference. Nevertheless, I seized an opportunity to whisper in the Master's ear a word or two to the desired effect. '_Tiens_!' he returned composedly, and continued to treat his visitor precisely as he had done from the beginning.

Blake had announced that he wanted to gather information about the Latin Quarter; and I don't doubt that his purpose was sincere, but he employed a novel method of attaining it. We took him everywhere, we showed him everything; I could never observe that he either looked or listened. He would sit (or stand or walk), his eye craving admiration from our faces; his tongue wagging about himself; his early hardships, his first success, his habits of work, his troubles with his wife, his _liaison_ with Lady Blank, his tastes in fruits and wines, his handwriting, his very teeth and boots. He passed his life in a sort of trance, an ecstacy of self-absorption; he had fallen in love with his own conception of himself, like a metaphysical Narcissus. This idiosyncrasy was the means of defeating various conspiracies, in which Chalks, of course, was the prime mover, calculated to impose upon his credulity, and send him back to London loaded down with misinformation.

'His cheek, by Christopher!' cried Chalks. 'Live in the Quarter for a fortnight, keep his eyes and ears shut, talk perpetually of Davis Blake, and read nothing but his own works, and then go home and write a book about it. _I'll_ quarter him!'

But Chalks counted without his man. That Monsieur Bullier, the founder of the Closerie des Lilas, was also Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Collège de France; that the word _étudiante_ (for Blake had only a tourist's smattering of French) should literally be translated _student_, and that the young ladies who bore it as a name were indeed pursuing rigorous courses of study at the Sorbonne; that it was obligatory upon a freshman (_nouveau_) in the Quarter to shave his head and wear wooden shoes for the first month after his matriculation--from these and kindred superstitions Blake was saved by his grand talent for never paying attention.

In the meanwhile some of us had read his books: chromo-lithographs, struck in the primary colours; pasteboard complications of passion and adventure, with the conservative entanglement of threadbare marionnettes--a hero, tall, with golden brown moustaches and blue eyes; a heroine, lissome, with 'sunny locks;' then a swarthy villain, for the most part a nobleman, and his Spanish-looking female accomplice, who had an uncomfortable habit of delivering her remarks 'from between clenched teeth,' and, generally, 'in a blood-chilling hiss'--the narrative set forth in a sustained _fortissimo_, and punctuated by the timely exits of the god from the machine. Never a felicity, never an impression. I fancy he had made his notes of human nature whilst observing the personages of a melodrama at a provincial theatre. He loved the obvious sentiment, the obvious and but approximate word.

But the climax of his infatuation was not disclosed till the night before he left us. Again we were in session at the Café des Souris, and the talk had turned upon metempsychosis. Blake, for a wonder, pricked up his ears and appeared to listen, at the same time watching his chance to take the floor. Half-a-dozen men had their say first, however; then he cut in.

'Metempsychosis is not a theory, it is a fact. I can testify to it from my personal experience. I know it. I can distinctly recall my former life. I can tell you who I was, who my friends were, what I did, what I felt, everything, down to the very dishes I preferred for dinner.'

Chalks scanned Blake's features for an instant with an intentness that suggested a mingling of perplexity and malice; then, all at once, I saw a light flash in his eyes, which forthwith began to twinkle in a manner that struck me as ominous.

'In my early youth,' Blake continued, 'this memory of mine was, if I may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional. Feeling that I was no ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a former state. Then they would go, not for long intervals to return. As time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last, one day on Hampstead Heath, I identified myself in a sudden burst of insight. I was walking on the Heath, and thinking of my work--marvelling at a certain quality I had discerned in it, which, I was convinced, would assure it everlasting life: a quality that seemed not unfamiliar to me, and yet which I could associate with none of the writers whose names passed in review before my mind; not with Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, not with Wordsworth or Coleridge, Goethe or Dante, not even with Homer. I mean the quality which I call universal--universal in its authenticity, universal in its appeal. By-and-bye, I took out a little pocket mirror that I always carry, and looked into it, studying my face. One glance sufficed. There, suddenly, on Hampstead Heath, the whole thing flashed upon me. I saw, I understood; I realised who I was, I remembered everything.'

'Stop right there, Mr. Blake,' called out Chalks in stentorian tones. 'Don't you say another word. I'm going to hail you by your right name in half-a-minute. I guess I must have recognised you the very first time I clapped eyes on your distinguished physiognomy; only I couldn't just _place_ you, as we say over in America. But there was a _je ne sais quoi_ in the whole cut of your jib as familiar to me as rolls and coffee. I tried and tried to think when and where I'd had the pleasure before. But now that you speak of a former state of existence--why, I'm _there_! It was all I needed, just a little hint like that, to jog my memory. Talk about entertaining angels unawares! The beard, eh? And the yaller cloak? And ain't there a statue of you up Boulevard Haussmann way? Shakesy, old man, shake!'

And Chalks got hold of his victim's hand and wrung it fervently. 'I'm particularly glad to meet you this way,' he added, 'because I was Queen Elizabeth myself; and I can't begin to tell you how sort of out of it I felt, alone here with all this degenerate posterity.'

Blake coldly withdrew his hand, frowning loftily at Chalks. 'You should reserve your nonsense for more appropriate occasions,' he said. 'Though you speak in a spirit of foolish levity, you have builded better than you knew. I am indeed Shakespeare re-incarnated. My books alone would prove it; they could have been dictated by no other mind. But--look at this.'

He produced from an interior pocket a case of red morocco and handed it to me. 'You,' he said, with a flattering emphasis upon the pronoun, 'you are a man who can treat a serious matter seriously. What do you think of that?'

The case contained a photograph, and the photograph represented the head and shoulders of Mr. Blake and a bust of Shakespeare, placed cheek by jowl. In the pointed beard and the wide-set eyes there were, perhaps, the rudiments of something remotely like a likeness.

'Isn't that conclusive?' he demanded. 'Doesn't that place the fact beyond the reach of question?'

'You've got more hair than you used to have,' said Chalks. 'I'm talking of the front hair--your forehead ain't as high as it was. But your back hair is all right enough.'

'You have put your finger on the one, the only, point of difference,' assented Blake,

On our way home he took my arm, and pitched his voice in the key of confidence. 'I am writing my autobiography, from my birth in Stratford down to the present day. It will be in two parts; the interim when people thought me dead, marking their separation. I was not dead; I slept a dreamless sleep. Presently I shall sleep again; as men say, die; then doubtless wake again. Life and death are but sleeping and waking on a larger scale. Our little life is rounded with a sleep. It is the swing of the pendulum, the revolution of the orb. Yes, I am writing my autobiography. So little is known of the private history of Shakespeare, conceive the boon it will be to mankind. I shall leave the manuscripts to my executors, for them to publish after I have lain down to my next long rest. Of special value will be the chapters telling how I wrote the plays, settling disputed readings, closing all controversy upon the sanity of Hamlet, and divulging the true personality of Mr. W.H.'

He came into my room for a little visit before going to bed. There, candle in hand, he gazed long and earnestly into my chimney-glass.

'Yes,' he sighed at last, 'it is solely in the quantity of my hair that the resemblance fails.'

I understood now why he trained it back and plastered it down over his scalp, as he did; at a rough glance, you might have got the impression that the crown of his head was bald. I suppose he is the only man in two hemispheres who finds the opposite condition a matter of regret.

FLOWER O' THE QUINCE

I.

Theodore Vellan had been out of England for more than thirty years. Thirty odd years ago the set he lived in had been startled and mystified by his sudden flight and disappearance. At that time his position here had seemed a singularly pleasant one. He was young--he was seven- or eight-and-twenty; he was fairly well off--he had something like three thousand a year, indeed; he belonged to an excellent family, the Shropshire Vellans, of whom the titled head, Lord Vellan of Norshingfield, was his uncle; he was good-looking, amiable, amusing, popular; and he had just won a seat in the House of Commons (as junior member for Sheffingham), where, since he was believed to be ambitious as well as clever, it was generally expected that he would go far.

Then, quite suddenly, he had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and left England. His motives for this unlikely course he explained to no one. To a few intimate friends he wrote brief letters of farewell. 'I am off for a journey round the world. I shall be gone an indefinite time.' The indefinite time ended by defining itself as upwards of thirty years, for the first twenty of which only his solicitor and his bankers could have given you his address, and they wouldn't. For the last ten he was understood to be living in the island of Porto Rico, and planting sugar. Meanwhile his uncle had died, and his cousin (his uncle's only son) had succeeded to the peerage. But the other day his cousin, too, had died, and died childless, so that the estates and dignities had devolved upon himself. With that, a return to England became an obligation; there were a score of minor beneficiaries under his cousin's will, whose legacies could not, without great delay, be paid unless the new lord was at hand.

II.

Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow--at Bowden's Hotel, in Cork Street,' and asking when he might come to her. She had answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night,' to which he had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.

She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates together at Oxford. She thought of the three handsome, happy, highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church, and Vellan--not in politics, she could never understand his political aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his character--but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead, and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events, for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his youth.

Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache. Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all things, gentle--with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief element of his charm--his gentleness, which was really a phase of his modesty. 'He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful and kind,' she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his gentleness, his modesty, his kindness. Oh, but he was no milksop. He had plenty of spirit, plenty of fun; he was boyish, he could romp. And at that, a scene repeated itself to her mind, a scene that had passed in this same drawing-room more than thirty years ago. It was tea-time, and on the tea-table lay a dish of pearl biscuits, and she and her husband and Vellan were alone. Her husband took a handful of pearl biscuits, and tossed them one by one into the air, while Vellan threw back his head, and caught them in his mouth as they came down--that was one of his accomplishments. She smiled as she remembered it, but at the same time she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

'Why did he go away? What could it have been?' she wondered, her old bewilderment at his conduct, her old longing to comprehend it, reviving with something of the old force. 'Could it have been...? Could it have been...?' And an old guess, an old theory, one she had never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again presented itself interrogatively to her mind.

The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall, white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands. It took her a little while to realise who it was. With an unthinking disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.

Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a middle-aged lady in a cap.

III.

After dinner he would not let her leave him, but returned with her to the drawing-room, and she said that he might smoke. He smoked odd little Cuban cigarettes, whereof the odour was delicate and aromatic. They had talked of everything; they had laughed and sighed over their ancient joys and sorrows. We know how, in the Courts of Memory, Mirth and Melancholy wander hand in hand. She had cried a little when her husband and her brother were first spoken of, but at some comic reminiscence of them, a moment afterwards, she was smiling through her tears. 'Do you remember so-and-so?' and 'What has become of such-a-one?' were types of the questions they asked each other, conjuring up old friends and enemies like ghosts out of the past. Incidentally, he had described Porto Rico and its negroes and its Spaniards, its climate, its fauna and its flora.

In the drawing-room they sat on opposite sides of the fire, and were silent for a bit. Profiting by the permission she had given him, he produced one of his Cuban cigarettes, opened it at its ends, unrolled it, rolled it up again, and lit it.

'Now the time has come for you to tell me what I most want to know,' she said.

'What is that?'

'Why you went away.'

'Oh,' he murmured.

She waited a minute. Then, 'Tell me,' she urged.

'Do you remember Mary Isona?' he asked.

She glanced up at him suddenly, as if startled. 'Mary Isona? Yes, of course.'

'Well, I was in love with her.'

'You were in love with Mary Isona?'

'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm afraid.'

She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face, luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair--Mary Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was professional. She came into it for an hour or two at a time now and then, to play or to give a music lesson.

'Yes,' he repeated; 'I was in love with her. I have never been in love with any other woman. It seems ridiculous for an old man to say it, but I am in love with her still. An old man? Are we ever really old? Our body grows old, our skin wrinkles, our hair turns white; but the mind, the spirit, the heart? The thing we call "I"? Anyhow, not a day, not an hour, passes, but I think of her, I long for her, I mourn for her. You knew her--you knew what she was. Do you remember her playing? Her wonderful eyes? Her beautiful pale face? And how the hair grew round her forehead? And her talk, her voice, her intelligence! Her taste, her instinct, in literature, in art--it was the finest I have ever met.'