Quick Action Part 21

"What course is that?" he asked, deeply interested.

"I'm afraid you'd have to marry her."

"Good Lord!" he said. "I can't marry every girl I mean to study!"

"Oh! Do you mean to study very many?"

"I have my entire life and career before me."

"Yes. That is true. But--women are much alike. One model, thoroughly studied, might serve for them all--with a little imagination."

"I have no use for imagination in fiction," said Brown firmly. After a moment's silence, he added: "Is it settled, then?"

"About our--contract?"

"Yes."

She considered for a long while, then, looking up, she nodded.

"That's fine!" exclaimed Brown, with enthusiasm.

They walked back to the Villa Hibiscus together, slowly, through the blue starlight. Brown asked her name, and she told him.

"No," he said gaily, "your name is Thalomene, and you are the tenth muse. For truly I think I have never before been so thoroughly inspired by a talk with anyone."

She laughed. He had done almost all the talking. And he continued it, very happily, as by common consent they seated themselves on the veranda.

XV

The inhabitants of the Villa Hibiscus retired. But Brown talked on, quite unconscious that the low-voiced questions and softly modulated replies were magic which incited him to a perfect ecstasy of self-revelation.

Perhaps he thought he was studying her--for the compact by mutual consent was already in force--and certainly his eyes were constantly upon her, taking, as no doubt he supposed, a cold and impersonal measure of her symmetry. Calmly, and with utter detachment, he measured her slender waist, her soft little hands; noting the fresh, sweet lips, the clear, prettily shaped eyes, the delicate throat, the perfect little Greek head with its thick, golden hair.

And all the while he held forth about literature and its true purpose; about what art really is; about his own art, his own literature, and his own self.

And the girl was really fascinated.

She had seen, at a distance, such men. When Brown had named himself to her, she had recognised the name with awe, as a fashionable and wealthy name known to Gotham.

Yet, had Brown known it, neither his eloquence nor his theories, nor his aims, were what fascinated her. But it was his boyish enthusiasm, his boyish intolerance, his immaturity, his happy certainty of the importance of what concerned himself.

He was so much a boy, so much a man, such a candid, unreasonable, eager, selfish, impulsive, portentous, and delightfully illogical mixture of boy and man that the combination fascinated every atom of womanhood in her--and at moments as the night wore on, she found herself listening perilously close to the very point of sympathy.

He appeared to pay no heed to the flight of time. The big stars frosted Heaven; the lagoon was silvered by them; night winds stirred the orange bloom; oleanders exhaled a bewitching perfume.

As he lay there in his rocking chair beside her, it seemed to him that he had known her intimately for years--so wonderfully does the charm of self-revelation act upon human reason. For she had said almost nothing about herself. Yet, it was becoming plainer to him every moment that never in all his life had he known any woman as he already knew this young girl.

"It is wonderful," he said, lying back in his chair and looking up at the stars, "how subtle is sympathy, and how I recognise yours. I think I understand you perfectly already."

"Do you?" she said.

"Yes, I feel sure I do. Somehow, I know that secretly and in your own heart you are in full tide of sympathy with me and with my life's work."

"I thought you had no imagination," she said.

"I haven't. Do you mean that I only imagine that you are in sympathy with me?"

"No," she said. "I am."

After a few moments she laughed deliciously. He never knew why. Nor was she ever perfectly sure why she had laughed, though they discussed the matter very gravely.

A new youth seemed to have invaded her, an exquisite sense of lightness, of power. Vaguely she was conscious of ability, of a wonderful and undreamed of capacity. Within her heart she seemed to feel the subtle stir of a new courage, a certainty of the future, of indefinable but splendid things.

The ma.n.u.script of the novel which she had sent North two weeks ago seemed to her a winged thing soaring to certain victory in the empyrean.

Suddenly, by some magic, doubt, fear, distress, were allayed--and it was like surcease from a steady pain, with all the blessed and heavenly languor relaxing her mind and body.

And all the while Brown talked on.

Lying there in her chair she listened to him while the thoughts in her eased mind moved in delicate accompaniment.

Somehow she understood that never in her life had she been so happy--with this boy babbling beside her, and her own thoughts responding almost tenderly to his youth, his inconsistencies, to the arrogance typical of his s.e.x. He was _so_ wrong!--so far from the track, so utterly astray, so pitiably confident! Who but she should know, who had worked and studied and failed and searched, always _writing_, however--which is the only way in the world to learn how to write--or to learn that there is no use in writing.

Her hand lay along the flat arm of her rocking-chair; and once, when he had earnestly sustained a perfectly untenable theory concerning success in literature, unconsciously she laid her fresh, smooth hand on his arm in impulsive protest.

"No," she said, "don't think that way. You are quite wrong. That is the road to failure!"

It was her first expression of disagreement, and he looked at her amazed.

"I am afraid you think I don't know anything about real literature and realism," she said, "but I do know a little."

"Every man must work out his salvation in his own way," he insisted, still surprised at her dissent.

"Yes, but one should be equipped by long practice in the art before definitely choosing one's final course."

"I am practiced."

"I don't mean theoretically," she murmured.

He laughed: "Oh, you mean mere writing," he said, gaily confident.

"That, according to my theory, is not necessary to real experience.

Literature is something loftier."

In her feminine heart every instinct of womanhood was aroused--pity for the youth of him, sympathy for his obtuseness, solicitude for his obstinacy, tenderness for the fascinating combination of boy and man, which might call itself by any name it chose--even "author"--and go blundering along without a helping hand amid shrugs and smiles to a goal marked "Failure."

"I wonder," she said almost timidly, "whether you could ever listen to me."