Chapter 14

“I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go back the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted to stir. As the day went on the exhaustion increased, instead of wearing off like the lassitude left by an ordinary night of insomnia: the effect of the eyes seemed to be cumulative, and the thought of seeing them again grew intolerable. For two days I struggled with my dread; but on the third evening I pulled myself together and decided to go back the next morning. I felt a good deal happier as soon as I’d decided, for I knew that my abrupt disappearance, and the strangeness of my not writing, must have been very painful for poor Alice. That night I went to bed with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the night I woke, and there were the eyes ...

“Well, I simply couldn’t face them; and instead of going back to my aunt’s I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped onto the first steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I crawled straight into my berth, and slept most of the way over; and I can’t tell you the bliss it was to wake from those long stretches of dreamless sleep and look fearlessly into the darkness, _knowing_ that I shouldn’t see the eyes ...

“I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and during that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough reason for prolonging my stay if I’d been on a desert island. Another was, of course, that I had perfectly come to see, on the voyage over, the folly, complete impossibility, of my marrying Alice Nowell. The fact that I had been so slow in making this discovery annoyed me, and made me want to avoid explanations. The bliss of escaping at one stroke from the eyes, and from this other embarrassment, gave my freedom an extraordinary zest; and the longer I savoured it the better I liked its taste.

“The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and wondering nervously if it would ever come back. But as time passed I lost this dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then that faded in its turn.

“The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I believe, to write another great book--a definitive work on Etruscan influences in Italian art. At any rate, I’d found some pretext of the kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and dabbling about indefinitely in the Forum; and there, one morning, a charming youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar--one to Antinous, say--but he’d come instead from New York, with a letter (of all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter--the first I’d had from her since our break--was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that he ‘had talent,’ and ‘wanted to write’; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite, during which he was to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval ‘ordeal.’ Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of my chance.

“Well, I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods. At any rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius. But he _was_ beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he began to talk literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well--the things he had ‘in him,’ and the things outside him that impinged! There’s the real test, after all. It was always--punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law--it was _always_ the wrong thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain grim fascination in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I acquired an astonishing skill at the game ...

“The worst of it was that his _betise_ wasn’t of the too obvious sort. Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent, something that he could make ‘do’ and be happy on; and wasn’t that, after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming--he continued to be so charming--that he called forth all my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was a chance for him ...

“Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace--it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry--an instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn’t--dear lad!--believe in himself. There wasn’t a trace of hypocrisy in his composition. He was sure that his ‘call’ was irresistible, while to me it was the saving grace of his situation that it _wasn’t_, and that a little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned him into an inoffensive idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of money, and with the grim alternative of the office desk before him he couldn’t postpone his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the absurdity of deciding a man’s whole future on a first trial seemed to justify me in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth to flower.

“At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point of getting his term of probation extended. When I left Rome he went with me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice. I said to myself: ‘If he has anything in him, it will come out now; and it _did_. He was never more enchanting and enchanted. There were moments of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually to pass into his face--but only to issue forth in a shallow flood of the palest ink ...

“Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal _pension_ when he had to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition. I hadn’t, of course, relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to advise him to drop literature. I had sent his stuff to various people--editors and critics--and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of comment. Really there was nothing on earth to say about it--

“I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters--but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on that plea? I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

“The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now ... I’d been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his future hung on my verdict--we’d tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript lay between us, on my table--a novel, his first novel, if you please!--and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at me with all his life in the look.

“I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his face and on the manuscript.

“‘The fact is, my dear Gilbert,’ I began--

“I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

“‘Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow! I’m not so awfully cut up as all that!’ His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.

“He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily longed to prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert--

“But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting myself in for if I didn’t tell the truth. I said to myself: ‘I shall have him for life’--and I’d never yet seen any one, man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in Gilbert’s arms.

“‘The thing’s all right, and you’re all wrong!’ I shouted up at him; and as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous clutch, I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy _has_ its charms--

“Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions, and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what their after-taste would be--so many of the finest don’t keep! Still, I wasn’t sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it _did_ turn a trifle flat.

“After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his eyes--his blissful eyes... Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk--and there were _the other eyes_ ...

“It was three years since I’d seen them, but I’d thought of them so often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them ... As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I’d seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can’t tell you how the fact added to their horror ...

“But it’s not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse. Worse by just so much as I’d learned of life in the interval; by all the damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the industrious years. Yes--it came to me that what made them so bad was that they’d grown bad so slowly ...

“There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of fat flesh making a muddy shadow underneath--and as their filmy stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that some day I should ... Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time they came back to me ...

“For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal, but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted ...”

III

THE fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator’s gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur.

Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes steadily fixed on his old friend’s face, had not moved since the tale began. He continued to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally asked: “But how long did you keep on seeing them?”

Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question. He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.

“How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never got used to them. I grew really ill.”

Frenham shifted his attitude silently, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin’s face. Something in his stare embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question:

“And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?”

“Oh, no. The fact is I didn’t have to. He did it for me, poor infatuated boy!”

“Did it for you? How do you mean?”

“He wore me out--wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing--oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he _really_ had to give. I’d foreseen this solution from the beginning--felt sure that, once the first ardour of authorship was quenched, he’d drop into his place as a charming parasitic thing, the kind of chronic Cherubino for whom, in old societies, there’s always a seat at table, and a shelter behind the ladies’ skirts. I saw him take his place as ‘the poet’: the poet who doesn’t write. One knows the type in every drawing-room. Living in that way doesn’t cost much--I’d worked it all out in my mind, and felt sure that, with a little help, he could manage it for the next few years; and meanwhile he’d be sure to marry. I saw him married to a widow, rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I actually had my eye on the widow ... Meanwhile I did everything to facilitate the transition--lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many thousand sloppy pages. Now and then he would send a pailful to a publisher, and of course it would always come back.

“At first it didn’t matter--he thought he was ‘misunderstood.’ He took the attitudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he wrote another to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair, and accused me of deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at that, and told him it was he who had deceived himself. He’d come to me determined to write, and I’d done my best to help him. That was the extent of my offence, and I’d done it for his cousin’s sake, not his.

“That seemed to strike home, and he didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said: ‘My time’s up and my money’s up. What do you think I’d better do?’

“‘I think you’d better not be an ass,’ I said.

“He turned red, and asked: ‘What do you mean by being an ass?’

“I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.

“‘I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger’s: to be her secretary at a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it than that.’

“He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from mine. ‘Oh, I know well enough what’s in it!’ he said, scarlet to the roots of his hair.

“‘And what’s your answer, if you know?’ I asked.

“He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door. There, with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to ask, almost under his breath: ‘Then you really think my stuff’s no good?’

“I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don’t defend my laugh--it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I’d done my best for him--I really had.

“He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That afternoon I left for Frascati, where I’d promised to spend the Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when their visitations ceased; and when I woke the next morning, in my peaceful painted room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that repairing slumber. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone ... Oh, nothing tragic had happened--the episode never rose to _that_. He’d simply packed his manuscripts and left for America--for his family and the Wall Street desk. He left a decent little note to tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether, in the circumstances, as little like a fool as it’s possible for a fool to behave ...”

IV

CULWIN paused again, and again Frenham sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.

“And what became of Noyes afterward?” I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.

Culwin twitched his shoulders. “Oh, nothing became of him--because he became nothing. There could be no question of ‘becoming’ about it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn’t shaved. I was told he drank. He didn’t recognize me.”

“And the eyes?” I asked, after another pause which Frenham’s continued silence made oppressive.

Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the shadows. “I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and two together if you can. For my part, I haven’t found the link.”

He rose stiffly, his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the table on which reviving drinks had been set out.

“You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear fellow. Here, Phil--” He turned back to the hearth.

Frenham still sat in his low chair, making no response to his host’s hospitable summons. But as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in a long look; after which, to my intense surprise, the young man, turning suddenly in his seat, flung his arms across the table, and dropped his face upon them.

Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.

“Phil--what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared _you?_ My dear boy--my dear fellow--I never had such a tribute to my literary ability, never!”

He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearth-rug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down in honest perplexity at the youth’s bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a step or two nearer.

“Cheer up, my dear Phil! It’s years since I’ve seen them--apparently I’ve done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my present evocation of them has made _you_ see them; which would be their worst stroke yet!”

His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the lad’s shoulders.

“Phil, my dear boy, really--what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer? _Have_ you seen the eyes?”

Frenham’s face was still pressed against his arms, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his perplexed congested face, and I caught its sudden reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head.

Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go of Frenham’s shoulders, and drew back a step, covering his eyes with his hands ...

Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.

THE BLOND BEAST

I

IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner’s first feeling, as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at his feet.

Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared to remember Rastignac’s apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard recklessly under his small fair moustache: “Who knows?”

He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour’s talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who knew the rest.