Part 3

He finished his salted almonds regretfully, remembering that he was out of olives. He lighted another cigarette, and lay there smoking, trying to get calm. It was very still but for the music; for Davenant Street was as quiet as Dean's Yard. The windows were all blank and dark; people were sleeping. Big Ben's noble tone told the quarters. A policeman went past softly, feeling at the doors. Something went wrong in the street lamp a few yards from Roger's perch. It fluttered as though some great moth were struggling in the flame. It died down to a few flagging points of light, leaving the dark street even darker. Big Ben, lifting a solemn sweet voice, tolled two, with noble melancholy, resigned to death, but hungry for the beauty of life, like the spirit of Raleigh speaking. Ottalie was asleep now, the grey eyes shut, the sweet face lying trustful. John was with the pale young Spaniard, doing what? in the room high aloft there, over Queen Square. London was about to take its hour of quiet. Only the poets, the scholars, and the idlers were awake now. In a little while the May dawn would begin. Even now it was tingeing the cherry blossom in Aleppo. The roses of Sarvistan were spilling in the heat. The blades of green corn by Troy gleamed above the river as the wind shook them. Tenedos rose up black, watching the channel, now showing steel.

Roger lighted another cigarette from the embers of the last. It was too quiet to strike a match. The stillness gave him an emotional pleasure. It gave him a sense of power, as though he were the only living spirit in the midst of all this death. He was sorry when the music stopped, for it had made the stillness more impressive. If his thoughts had not been calmed by it, they had at least been made more beautiful, chaotic as they were. The bitterness of the night worked less bitingly. He was conscious of an exaltation of the mind. Up there in the quiet, his devotion to John, his passion for Ottalie, and his love of all high and noble art, seemed co-ordinated in a grand scheme in which he was both god and man. Standing up, he looked over the trellis into the street, deeply moved. He was here to perfect that magnificent work of art,--himself. John, who had pointed the way, was gone now. Ottalie, who had inspired him, was waiting with her crown; or perhaps only showing it to lure him, for Nature, prodigal of dust and weed, gives true beauty sparingly. It was for him to follow that lure and to gather strength to seize it. The world was a little dust under his feet. In his soul was a little green seed bursting. It would grow up out of all the grime and muck of modern life, among all the flying grit of the air, into a stately tree, which would shelter the world with beauty and peace. He would be a supreme soul. He would dominate this rabble which hooted him.

He lit another cigarette. John was like a man sent from God. John was unreal. John had marched before him with a torch. Now that ghostly master of his had thrust the torch into the road, pointing him forward with a gesture. The way to perfection lay further on, along a path too narrow for two. Far up the path he could see Ottalie, a glimmer of fragrant beauty, half hidden in a whirling dust-storm which almost swept him off the ledge. The dust should not keep him from her. He would climb to her. They would go on together.

At this instant, as the melancholy intensity of the bells tolled the quarter-hour, the window-door opened on the other side of the straw trellis. A lady came out on to the balcony. She hummed one of Heine's songs in a little low voice, which left the music full of gaps. Roger recognised the singer's voice. He wondered if her husband were with her. He supposed that he must be at the House, and that she was waiting for him. Her skirts rustled as she moved. A faint scent of violet attracted Roger to her. It was faint, exotic, and suggestive. There is an intoxication in perfumes. She stood there for a full ten seconds before she divined his presence beyond the screen. Her song stopped instantly. Two seconds more convinced her that the person was male and alone. A third suggested that he was a burglar.

"Who is there?" she said quietly. Her voice was anxious rather than fearful.

"I'm so sorry," said Roger. He did not know what else to say. "I live here." He thought that it would be polite to go indoors. He turned to go. To his surprise she spoke again.

"Can you give me a cigarette?" she said. She still spoke quietly. She spoke as if a maidservant were in the room behind her. Roger was flustered. He was a man of quick blood in a condition of excited nerves.

"Yes," he said. "Will you have Russian, or American, or Turkish?"

She appeared to debate for an instant.

"Give me a Russian," she said. "Give it to me through this hole in the matting. Thanks."

"Have you a match?" Roger asked.

"No," she answered. "Give me a light from yours, please. Don't set the mat on fire, though."

He thrust his burning cigarette through the hole in the matting. He felt the pressure of her cigarette upon it. He heard her quickened breathing. He saw the glow brightening through the mat as the tobacco kindled.

"Thanks," she said softly, with a little half-laugh. "How did the play go?"

"The play?" Roger stammered. "It was---- Do you mean---- Which play do you mean?"

"Your play; _The Roman Matron_. You are Mr. Naldrett, aren't you? I met you once for a moment at a house in Chelsea. At Mrs. Melyard's, three years ago. I was just going."

He remembered that hectic beauty Mrs. Melyard. She was like a green snake. She used to receive her intimates (she had no friends) in a room hung with viridian. There were green couches, green-shaded lights, a gum burning greenly in a brazier with green glass sides. She herself was dressed in green, glittering, metallic scales, which made a noise like serpent's hissing as she glided. "Nothing is really interesting except vice," was the only phrase which he could remember of Mrs. Melyard's conversation. She was a feverish character, explained by inherited phthisical taint. Melyard collected tsuba, and fenced archæologically at the Foil Club. He was the best rapier and dagger man in England.

"You are Mrs. Templeton?" he asked. "I remember a lady at Mrs. Melyard's."

"I wasn't married then," she said quickly. "How did the play go?"

"It was booed off."

"I'm sorry," she said. She meant "I am sorry that I asked."

Roger wondered how he could get away. It depended on the lady.

"Can't you sleep?" she asked suddenly.

"No."

"I can't. Will it bore you to come in to talk to us?"

He was used to unconventional people. He saw nothing strange in the woman's invitation. Most of the women known to him would have acted as simply and as frankly in the same circumstances. He knew that Templeton seldom went to bed before two. He took it for granted that Templeton was in the sitting-room; possibly within earshot.

"I'm not very presentable," he said. "Let me change this robe."

"We shan't mind," she said, reassuring him. "Come on."

"Will you let me in?"

"We'll pull down this screen."

They pulled down the old matting with two vigorous jerks. Roger stepped across the partition into the further balcony.

"Come in," she said, passing through the window. "It's dark inside here. Take care of the chair there." She put out a hand to pull the chair away. She did it roughly, making a good deal of noise.

"You sit here," she said. "That chair's comfy. I'll sit here, opposite; here's an ash-tray."

"Could I light a lamp or candle?" Roger asked, taking out his match-box.

"No, thanks," she said. "Don't light up just yet; I'm sick of light. I wish we could live in the dark, like wild beasts."

"London is on your nerves," said Roger. "The noise and worry are upsetting you. You are tired of London, not of light."

He was disappointed by being asked to sit in darkness. He began to lose interest in the lady. She was only a modern dramatic heroine, i.e. a common woman overstrained. He had heard similar affected silliness from a dozen empty women, some of them pretty. He had heard that Mrs. Templeton was pretty. As she refused light, he decided that fame had lied. "She must be a blonde," he thought, "and this room is lit by electricity." He wished that Templeton would come. Templeton would make the situation easier, and his wife's talk more sensible. The lady was silently trying to sum him up.

"No; I'm not tired of London," she was saying. "Only one cannot _live_ in London."

"London is on your nerves," Roger repeated. "London is a feverish great spider. It sucks out vitality, and leaves its own poison instead. Look at the arts. A young artist comes up here full of vitality. Unless he is a truly great man, London will suck it all out of him, and make him as poisonous and as feverish as herself."

"Yes, that is quite true," she answered. "I wish we could all be simple and natural, and have time to live. Life is so interestin'. The only really interestin' thing."

"What kind of life do you wish to live?"

"I wish to live my own life. I want to know my own soul. To live. In London one is always livin' other people's lives, goin' dinin', doin' things because other people do them. But where else can you meet interestin' people?"

"People are not essential to true life," said Roger. "I believe that all perfect life is communion with God, conversation, that is, with ideas; 'godly conversation.' People are to some extent like thoughts, like living ideas; for the inner and the outer lives correspond."

"You mean that life is a kind of curve?" the lady interrupted. The question was a moral boomerang. She often used it defensively; she had once felled a scientist with it.

"Life is whatever you like to make it."

"I'm thinkin' of goin' to live in Ireland," said the lady. "The people must be so exquisitely charmin'. Such a beautiful life, sittin' round the fire, singin' the old songs. And then their imagination!"

"Their charm is superficial," said Roger. "Taking the times together, I've lived in Ireland for seven years. I have a cottage there. I do not think that you will sit round many fires, to sing old songs, after the first fine careless rapture, which lasts a month. I'm an Englishman, of course. When in Ireland I'm only one of the English garrison. I may be wanting in sympathy; but I maintain that the Irish have no imagination. Imagination is a moral quality."

"I don't think an Englishman can understand the Irish," said the lady.

"When an Irishman is great enough to escape from the littleness of his race, he becomes a very splendid person," Roger answered. "But until that happens he seems to me to be wanting in any really fundamental quality."

"Oh," said the lady, "you are talking so very like an Englishman. You aren't interested in life, I see. You are only interested in morals. But you cannot say that the Irish have no imagination. They have wonderful imagination. Look at the way they talk. And their writers: Swift, Goldsmith, Sheridan. And their own exquisite Irish poets."

"I'd give the whole company for one act of Addison's _Cato_," said Roger. "Swift had a limited vision and a diseased mind. He diagnosed his own diseases. Goldsmith wrote some pretty verses. But I do not think that you have read them. Have you? Sheridan wrote a comedy at the age of twenty-four to prove that a sot is nobler than a scholar. Later, he tried to prove it in his own person. I do not read Irish. I have read translations from it. Its distinctive quality seemed to me to be just that kind of windy impersonality which one hears in their talk."

"That is so English of you," said the lady, laughing. "I think that I ought to be very thankful for my Celtic blood."

"Are you a Celt?"

"Yes; from Cornwall. I think it gives me an instinctive love of the beautiful."

"Those who love beauty make it. I, too, have been a Celt. I was a Celt from my twenty-second till my twenty-fifth year. Then I discovered a very curious fact--two facts."

"What were they?"

"First, that the Celt's love of the beautiful is all bunkum. Second, that the people of these islands are mongrels, bred from the scum of Europe. You can call yourself an Anglo-Saxon, or a Celt, or an Aryan, or a Norman, or a Long-Barrow Palæolith; but if you came from these islands, you are a mongrel, a mongrel of a most chequered kind."

At this instant the door opened suddenly, and the electric light was turned on. In the doorway stood Templeton--a tall, bald, thin-faced man, with foxy moustache and weak eyes. His face showed amazed anger.

"What is this?" he said.

"Let me introduce you," said the lady. "My husband, Mr. Naldrett."

Roger, standing up under the angry gaze of Templeton, was conscious of looking like a fool, in his robe of green silk dragons.

"I don't understand," said Templeton.

"I asked Mr. Naldrett here to talk to me," said the lady.

"So I presume," said Templeton.

"Have you had an interesting sitting?" Roger asked.

Templeton did not answer. He was glaring at his wife. His opera hat was tilted back; his overcoat was unbuttoned; an unlighted cigarette drooped from his mouth.

"Archie," said the lady suavely, "Mr. Naldrett is my friend. I asked him here to talk to me."

"So I see," said Templeton.

"To talk to me," the woman repeated, flaring up, "while you were with Mrs. Liancourt at her flat in St. Anne's Mansions. I know when the House rose, and where you went afterwards. If you're goin' to have your friends, I'm goin' to have mine."

Templeton seemed to gulp. He turned to Roger.

"Perhaps you will go," he said.

"Yes, I think I had better," said Roger. "I am sorry that I came."

He rose to go. Mrs. Templeton turned to him.

"A quarter to three," she said sweetly. "You will remember that?"

Roger looked hard at Mrs. Templeton. Never again would he speak civilly to a woman with high cheek-bones, steel eyes, and loose mouth. He bowed to her.

"I didn't deserve it," he said quietly. He walked to the window-door, feeling like some discovered lover in a play. As he entered the balcony, Templeton slammed to the door behind him with a snarl of "Now," as he opened fire on his wife. Templeton's flanks were turned. He was blowing up his ammunition wagons before surrendering.

For a moment Roger felt furious with Templeton. Then he blamed the lady. She had played him a scurvy trick. Lastly, as he began to understand her position, he forgave her. He blamed himself. He felt that he had mixed himself with something indescribably squalid.

As he undressed for bed he blamed the world for its vulgarity, and dreariness, and savagery. The world was too much with him. It was thwarting, and blighting, and destroying him. He longed to get away from the world. Anywhere. To those Irish hills above the sea, to his beautiful friend, to some peaceful, gentle life, where the squalor of his night's adventures would be unknown and unremembered. He felt contaminated. He longed to purify himself in the sea below his love's home. He thought of that water. He saw it lit by the sun, with tremulous brown sea-leaves folding. Sand at the bottom, six feet down, made a wrinkled blur of paleness, across which a lobster crawled. He would go there. In fifteen hours he would be tearing towards it through the night, past the great glaring towns, on into the hills, to the sea.

A thought of the shaking of the train, and of the uneasy sleep of the people in the carriage, merged gradually into the blur which precedes unconsciousness. Before Big Ben tolled four he was asleep, in that kind of restless nightmare which chains the will without chaining the intelligence. In that kind of sleep which is not sleep he dreamed a dream of Ottalie, which awakened him, in sudden terror, at seven.

III

I prythee, sorrow, leave a little room In my confounded and tormented mind For understanding to deliberate The cause or author of this accident. _The Atheist's Tragedy_.

He thought, as he sat up, that an instant before his true self had walked in the spiritual kingdom, apprehending beauty. Now, with the shock of waking, the glory wavered, like a fire of wet wood, fitfully, among the smoke of the daily life flooding back in his brain's channels. The memory of the beauty came in gleams, moving him to the bone, for it seemed to him that the spirit of his love had moved in the chambers of his brain, bringing a message to him, while the dulnesses of his body lay arrested. A dream so beautiful must, he thought, be a token of all beauty, a sign, perhaps, that her nature was linked to his, for some ecstatic purpose, by the power outside life. Her beauty, her sweetness, her intense, personal charm, all the sacredness that clothed her about, had walked with him in one of the gardens of the soul. That was glory enough; but the dream was intense and full of mystery; it had brought him very near to something awful and immortal, so strange and mighty that only a heart's tick, something in the blood, had kept him from the presence of the symbol-maker, and from the full knowledge of the beauty of the meaning of life.

The vision seemed meaningless when pieced together. Words in it had seemed revelations, acts in it adventures, romances; but judged by the waking mind, it was unintelligible, though holy, like a Mass in an unknown tongue.

He had found her in the garden at her home, among flowers lovelier than earthly flowers, among flowers like flames and precious stones. That was the beginning of it. Then in the sweetness of their talk he had become conscious of all that her love meant to him, of all that it meant to the power which directs life, of all that his failure to win her would mean, here and hereafter. Life had seemed suddenly terrible and glorious, a wrestle of God and devil for each soul. With this consciousness had come a change in the dream. She had gone from him.

That was the middle of it. Then that also changed. She had left him to seek for her through the world. Suddenly she had sent a message to him. He was walking to meet her. Delight filled him as wine fills a cup. He would see her, he would touch her hand, her eyes would look into his. He had never before been so moved by the love of her. His delight was not the old selfish pleasure, but a rapturous comprehension of her beauty, and of that of which her beauty was the symbol. He knew, as he walked, that the beloved life in her was his own finer self, longing to transmute him to her brightness. A word, a touch, a look, and they would be together in nobleness; he would breathe the beauty of her character like pure air, he would be a part of her forever.

So he had walked the streets to her, noticing nothing except the brightness of the sun on the houses, till he had stood upon the stair-top knocking vainly at the door of an empty house. It came upon him then with an exhaustion of the soul, like death itself, that he had come too late. She had gone away disappointed, perhaps angry. The door would never open to him; he would never meet her again; never even enter the hall, dimly seen through the glass, to gather relics of her. Within, as he could see, lay a handkerchief and a withered flower once worn by her, little relics bitterly precious, to be nursed in his heart in a rapture of agony, could he only have them. But he had come too late; he had lost her; his heart, wanting her, would be empty always, a dead thing going through life like a machine. In his vision he could see across to Ireland, to her home. He could see her there; sad that she had not seen him. He had tried to wade to her through a channel full of thorns, which held him fast. From the midst of the thorns he could see a young man, with a calm, strong face, talking to her. Shaken as he was by grief, and prepared for any evil, he realised that this youth was to be her mate, now that he had lost her.

Lastly, at the end of the dream, he had received a letter from her, with the postmark Athens across the Greek stamp. The letter had been the most real part of the dream. It was her very hand, a dashing, virile hand, with weak, unusual f's, t's crossed far to the right of their uprights, and a negligent beauty in some of the curves of the capitals. The letters were small, the down-strokes determined but irregular, never twice the same. It was the hand of a vivid, charming, but not very strong character. He could not remember what the letter said. Only one sentence at the end remained. "I have read your last book," it ran; "it reads like the diary of a lost soul." There was no signature; nothing but the paper, with the intensely vivid writing, and that one sentence plainly visible. It was even sound criticism. The book of sketches had been self-conscious experiments in style, detached, pictorial presentation of crises, clever things in their way, but startling, both in colour and in subject, the results of moods, not of perfected personality. The sketches had been ill-assorted; that was another fault. But he had not thought them evil. Sitting up in bed, with the damning sentence still vivid, he felt that they must be evil, because she disliked them. He had created brutal, erring, passionate, and wicked types, with frank and natural creative power. At this moment he felt himself judged. He felt for the first time that the theories of art common to the little party of his friends, were not so much theories of art as declarations of youthful independence, soiled with personal failures of perception and personal antipathies. He was wrong; his art was all wrong; his art was all self-indulgence, not self-perfection. An artist had no right to create at pleasure, ignoble types and situations, fixing fragments of the perishing to the walls of the world, as a keeper nails vermin. Ottalie's fair nature was not nourished on such work. Great art called such work "sin," "denial of the Holy Ghost," "crucifixion of our Lord." He reached for the offending book; but the words seemed meaningless; some of the intricate prose-rhythms were clever. But anybody can do mechanics and transcribe. Style and imagination are the difficult things. He put the book aside, wondering if he would ever do good work.

He was haunted by the dream until he was dressed. Then the memories of the night before came in upon him, the yells of the mob, hooting his soul's child, the bloated face of the sot, his friend's farewell that had had neither warning nor affection, the indignity of the visit to the Templetons', till the world seemed to be pressing its shapeless head upon his windows, shrieking insults at him, through yielding glass. He began to realise that he had had the concentrated torment of months suddenly stamped upon him in a night. His work, his person, his affections, his social nature had all been trampled and defiled. He wondered what more torments were coming to him with the new day. Some forethought of what was coming crossed his mind when he saw his breakfast-table. Beside his teacup were three or four daily papers, in which, in clear type, were set forth the opinions of Britain's moral guardians concerning their immoral brother.

There were letters first, some of them left from the night before. An obscure acquaintance, a lady in Somersetshire, sent some verses, asking for his criticism, and for the address of "a publisher who would pay for them." One of the poems began

"Hark! hark! hark! 'Tis the song of the Lark, Dewy with spangles of morn."