The Divine Fire Part 114

He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see. As far as he understood his own att.i.tude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see. Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing. Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see. And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia's ardour, he saw what he had missed.

They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia's part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.

By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw. It had become a plat.i.tude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication of _The Triumph of Life_. The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist. By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks.

Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more.

He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.

Lucia had come up with Kitty Palliser to see the great play. She looked wretchedly ill. Withdrawn as far as possible into the darkness of the box, she sat through the tremendous Third Act apparently without a sign of interest or emotion. Kitty watched her anxiously from time to time. She wondered whether she were over-tired, or overwrought, or whether she had expected something different and were disappointed with Keith's tragedy. Kitty herself wept openly and unashamed. But to Lucia, who knew that tragedy by heart, it was as if she were a mere spectator of a life she herself had once lived pa.s.sionately and profoundly. With every word and gesture of the actors she felt that there pa.s.sed from her possession something of Keith Rickman's genius, something sacred, intangible, and infinitely dear; that the triumphant movement of the drama swept between him and her, remorselessly dividing them. She was realizing for the first time that henceforth he would belong to the world and not to her. And yet the reiterated applause sounded to her absurd and meaningless. Why were these people insisting on what she had known so well, had seen so long beforehand?

She was glad that Horace was not with her. But when he came out of his study to greet them on their return she turned aside into the room and called him to her. It was then that she triumphed.

"Well, Horace, he has worked his miracle."

"I always said he would."

"You doubted--once."

"Once, perhaps, Lucia. But now, like you, I believe."

"Like me? I never doubted. I believed without a miracle."

She leaned against the chimney-piece, and he saw that she was trembling. She turned to him a face white with trouble and anxiety.

"Where is he, Horace?"

"He's still with Maddox. You needn't worry, Lucy; if he scores a success like this in Paris that will mean magnificence." There was something unspeakably offensive to her in her cousin's tone. He did not perceive the disgust in her averted profile. He puzzled her. One moment he seemed to be worshipping humbly with her at the inner shrine, the next he forced her to suspect the sincerity of his conversion. She could see that now his spirit bowed basely before the possibility of the great poet's material success.

"You'll meet him if you stay till next week, Lucy. He'll be dining here on the tenth."

Again the tone, the manner hurt her. Horace could not conceal his pride in the intimacy he had once repudiated. He so obviously exulted in the thought that some of Rickman's celebrity, his immortality, perhaps, must through that intimacy light upon him. For her own part she felt that she could not face Keith Rickman and his celebrity. His immortality she had always faced; but his celebrity--no. It rose up before her, crushing the tender hope that still grew among her memories. She said to herself that she was as bad as Horace in attaching importance to it; she was so sure that Keith would attach none to it himself. Yet nothing should induce her to stay for that dinner on the tenth; if it were only that she shrank from the spectacle of Horace's abas.e.m.e.nt.

Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal; and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection. He was not sure whether he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love should thus perish through her bad opinion. It was in something of his old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the proofs of his great article on "Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama."

There the author of the _Prolegomena to aesthetics_, the apostle of the Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation. He touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that "in modern art what we have to reckon with is the Man Himself." That utterance, he flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call himself Keith Rickman's friend. For Rickman had been his discovery in the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.

He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have said."

"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed it; but not now."

He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article, his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself.

Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that he was justified in his changes of att.i.tude. If his conscience joined with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short?

Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the _Prolegomena to aesthetics_? The _Prolegomena to aesthetics_ was not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not a prison.

But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it possible that he, the author of the _Prolegomena_, had ceased to care about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he, the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very imposing figure by his philosophic att.i.tude. In London he had found that the same att.i.tude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous.

Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view. Its vision had never been bound, even by the _Prolegomena_. If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own d.a.m.nation.

CHAPTER LXXVII

Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amus.e.m.e.nt in discussing whether the great dramatist were Maddox's discovery or Jewdwine's. With the readers of _Metropolis_ he pa.s.sed as Jewdwine's--which was all that Jewdwine wanted. With the earnest aspiring public, striving to admire Keith Rickman because they had been told they ought to, he pa.s.sed as their own. The few who had known him from the first knew also that poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover themselves. Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the absurd pretension. Enough that he lived, and was known to live, with Rickman as his friend.

They shared that little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his bride. It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the religious pa.s.sion of his half-Celtic soul.

The poet had trusted the honour and the judgement of his friend so far as to appoint him his literary executor. Thus Maddox became possessed of the secret of the Sonnets. And here a heavy strain was put upon his judgement and his honour. Maddox had guessed that there was a power in Rickman's life more terrible than Jewdwine, who after all had never really touched him. There was, Maddox had always known, a woman somewhere. A thousand terrors beset the devotee when he noticed that since fame had lighted upon Rickman the divinity had again begun to furnish his part (the holy part) of the temple in a manner unmistakably suggestive of mortality. Maddox shuddered as he thought of the probable destination of that upper chamber which was the holiest of all. And now this terror had become a certainty. The woman existed; he knew her name; she was a cousin of the detestable Jewdwine; the Sonnets could never be given to the world as long as she withheld her consent, and apparently she did withhold it. More than this had not been revealed to Maddox, and it was in vain that he tried to penetrate the mystery.

His efforts were not the most delicate imaginable. One evening, sitting with Rickman in that upper chamber, he entered on the subject thus--

"Seen anything of the Spinkses lately?"

"I called there last Sat.u.r.day."

"How is the divine Flossie?"

"Flourishing. At least there's another baby. By the way Maddy you were grossly wrong about her there. The Beaver is absolutely devoid of the maternal instinct. She's decent to the baby, but she's positively brutal to Muriel Maud. How Spinky--He protests and there are horrid scenes; but through them all I believe the poor chap's in love with her."

"Curious illusion."

Curious indeed. It had seemed incredible to Rickman when he had seen the Beaver pushing her first-born from her knee.

"Good Heavens, Rickman, what a deliverance for you."

"I wonder if he's happy."

"Can't say; but possibly he holds his own. You see, Spinky's position is essentially sound. My theory is--"

But Rickman had no desire for a theory of marriage as propounded by Maddox. He had always considered that in these matters Maddox was a brute.

Maddox drew his own conclusions from the disgusted protest. He remembered how once, when he had warned Rickman of the love of little women, Rickman had said it was the great women who were dangerous. The lady to whom he had entrusted the immortality of his Sonnets would be one of these. As the guardian of that immortality Maddox conceived it was his duty to call on the lady and prevail on her to give them up.

Under all his loyalty he had the audacity of the journalist who sticks at nothing for his own glorious end.

There was after all a certain simplicity about Maddox. He considered himself admirably equipped by nature for this delicate mission. He was, besides, familiar with what he called the "society woman," and he believed that he knew how to deal with her. Maddox always had the air of being able to push his way anywhere by the aid of his mighty shoulders. He sent in his card without a misgiving.

Lucia knew that Maddox was a friend of Keith Rickman's, and she received him with a courtesy that would have disarmed a man less singularly determined. It was only when he had stated his extraordinary purpose that her manner became such that (so he described it afterwards) it would have "set a worm's back up." And Maddox was no worm.

It was a little while before Lucia realized that this rather overpowering visitor was requesting her to "give up" certain sonnets of Keith Rickman's, written in ninety-three. "I don't quite understand. Are you asking me to give you the ma.n.u.script or to give my consent to its publication?"

"Well--both. I _have_ to ask you because he never would do it himself."

"Why should he not?"

"Oh, well, you know his ridiculous notions of honour."

"I do indeed. I daresay some people would consider them ridiculous."

It was this speech, Maddox confessed, that first set his back up. He was irritated more by the calm a.s.sumption of proprietorship in Rickman than by the implied criticism of himself.

"Do you mind telling me," she continued, still imperturbably, "how you came to know anything about it?"