The Divine Fire Part 22

She was so sorry for him. But she did not see at the moment what she could do for him besides being sorry. And yet, if he were Horace's friend, she must do more. She was aware that she had been sorry for him chiefly because he was not a gentleman. Well, she had seen men before who were not gentlemen and she had been very far from feeling any sort of sorrow for them. But she had never in all her life seen anything like this inspired young c.o.c.kney, with his musical voice and afflicting accent, a person whose emotions declared themselves publicly and painfully, whose thoughts came and went as transparently as the blood in his cheeks, who yet contrived somehow to remain in the last resort impenetrable.

She could not ignore him. Apart from Horace he had established his claim; and if he _was_ Horace's friend he had another and a stronger t.i.tle to consideration. But was he? She had really no proof.

She wondered whether Mr. Rickman had missed his sonnet. She laid it almost tenderly in a conspicuous place on his table, and put a bronze head of Pallas Athene on it to keep it down. Then she wondered again whether he enjoyed the bookshop, whether he enjoyed making catalogues _raisonnes_, whether he enjoyed himself generally, and she hoped that at any rate he would enjoy his Easter Sunday. Poor little man.

Lucia was so happy herself that she wanted Mr. Rickman to be happy too.

CHAPTER XXI

Mr. Rickman was anything but happy as he set out for his walk that glorious April morning.

Outside the gate of Court House he stood and looked about him, uncertain of the way he would go. All ways were open to him, and finally, avoiding the high road, he climbed up a steep and stony lane to the great eastern rampart which is Harcombe Hill. Beneath him lay Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles into the sea through a barrier of shingle. Two gigantic and flaming cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet. In any other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air, but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.

But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and apparently capricious versatility. Nature, round about Harmouth, is never in the same mood for a mile together. The cliffs change their form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their seams. Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods, pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day. It is not so much a landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing; and a great longing seizes him for vast level s.p.a.ces, for sameness, for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the hills and the p.r.o.ne backs of the long ridges are all of one height; the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that has no boundary but the sky. The country has revealed its august, eternal soul. He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman whose soul he knows.

Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the bay. To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia Harden, had put on a veil. The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to the valley and the town. Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth, divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more acutely conscious of his misery. He sat down among the furze and heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.

And Nature never turned to a poet a lovelier and more appealing face.

It had rained in the night. From the enfolding blue, sky blue and sea blue, blue of the aerial hills, the earth flung out her colours, new washed, radiantly, immaculately pure. Bared to the sea, she flamed from rose pink to rose red. Only the greater hills and the dark flank of Muttersmoor waited for their hour, the hour of the ling and the heather; the valleys and the lower slopes were glad with green. There was an art in Nature's way; for, lest a joyousness so br.i.m.m.i.n.g and so tender should melt and overflow into mere pathos, it was bounded and restrained by that solemn and tragic line of Muttersmoor drawn straight against the sky.

It was the same scene that had troubled him when he first looked at it, and it troubled him still; not with that thrill of prescient delight and terror, but with a feeling more mysterious and baffling, an exquisite and indefinable reproach. He stared, as if he could hope by staring to capture the meaning of the beautiful tender face; but beyond that inscrutable reproach it had no meaning for him and no expression. He had come to a land prophetic of inspiration, where, if anywhere, he might have hoped to hear the lyric soul of things; and the lyric soul of things absolutely refused to sing to him. It had sung loud enough in the streets last Wednesday; it had hymned the procession of his dreams and the loud tumultuous orgy of his pa.s.sions; and why could he not hear it now? For here his senses were satisfied to the full. Never had Nature's material loveliness been more vividly, piercingly present to him. The warm air was like a touch, palpable yet divine. He lay face downwards on the earth and pressed it with his hands; he smelt the good smell of the gra.s.s and young bracken, and the sweet almond-scented blossom of the furze. And he suffered all the torment of the lover who possesses the lips and body of his mistress, and knows that her heart is far from him and that her soul is not for him.

He felt himself to be severed from the sources of his inspiration; estranged, profoundly and eternally, from the beauty he desired. And that conviction, melancholy in itself, was followed by an overpowering sense of intellectual dissolution, the corruption and decay of the poetic faculty in him. He was aware, feverishly aware, of a faint flowing measure, the reverberation of dead songs; of ideas, a miserable attenuated procession, trailing feebly in the dark of his brain, which when he tried to grasp them would be gone. They were only the ghosts of the ideas that he had brought with him from London, that had died on the journey down. The beauty of this place was devilish and malign. He looked into Harmouth valley as if it had been a graveyard. They were all buried down there, his dead dreams and his dead power, buried without hope of any resurrection. Rickman's genius, the only thing he genuinely trusted, had forsaken him.

It may be that every poet once in his lifetime has to come to this Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani. For Rickman no agony could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul. He could see nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk. His ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive them. But this time, though he had not been drinking, he felt that they had gone for ever, and that all his songs were sung. And over his head high up in the sky, a lark, a little fiend of a lark, had chosen that moment for bursting into music. With diabolical ease and maddening ecstasy, he flung out his perfect and incommunicable song. A song of joy and mockery and triumph.

He did not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty. Was it, he wondered, the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of the soul? Was he a precocious genius? Had he taken to the immortal drink too early and too hard? Or was it, as Jewdwine had suggested, that there were too many Rickmans, and that this poor seventh part of him had been crushed by the compet.i.tion of the other six? The horrible thing was that they would live on for years, eating and getting drunk and falling in love and buying suits of clothes, while the poet in him was dead, like Keats, at three and twenty.

Then suddenly, for no reason whatever, a vision of Lucia Harden rose before him like a light and refused to leave him.

It wrought in him, as he contemplated it, a gradual burning illumination. He perceived that it was he himself who was responsible for all this. He perceived the real nature of the things he had pursued so pa.s.sionately, the thing he called pleasure, the thing he called love, and the thing he called his imagination. His notion of pleasure was getting drunk and making love to Miss Poppy Grace; the love he made was better described by a stronger and coa.r.s.er monosyllable, and he had used his imagination to glorify it. Oh yes, because he had imagination, because he was a poet, he had not gone down into the clay-pits and wallowed in the clay; neither had he been content to dabble in it; he had taken it up in his hands and moulded it into the form of a divinity, and then fallen down and worshipped it. Fallen down and worshipped at the feet, the gaily twirling feet of Miss Poppy Grace.

Poor Poppy, if he could have thought of her at all, he might have felt a sort of pity for her transience, the transience of the feeling she inspired. But he did not think of her; he did not even try to think of her. Her image, once so persistent, had dropped clean out of his mind, which was one reason why it was so empty. It had not been much to boast of, that infatuation for Poppy, and yet somehow, after living so intimately with it, he felt quite lost without it. It was a little odd, if you came to think of it, that the thing he called his genius, and the thing he called his love, should have chosen the same moment to abandon him. Was it--was it possible--that there was some vital connection between them? As the singing of birds in the pairing season, was his genius merely a rather peculiar symptom of the very ordinary condition known as falling in love? So that, failing that source of inspiration--? That no doubt _was_ what was the matter with him. His imagination languished because his pa.s.sion for Poppy was played out, and he had nothing to put in its place.

Well, yes, there was something; something that was not an instinct or a pa.s.sion, but an acquired taste. To be sure he had acquired it very quickly, it had only taken him three days. In those three days he had developed a preference for the society of ladies (the women of his own cla.s.s were not ladies but "young ladies," a distinction he now appreciated for the first time). It was a preference that, as things stood, he would never be able to gratify; there was something about it ruinous and unhappy, like a craze for first editions in an impecunious scholar, for ever limited to the twopenny bundle and the eighteenpenny lot. He could not hope to enjoy Miss Harden's society for more than three weeks at the outside. He only enjoyed it at all through an accident too extraordinary, too fantastic to occur again. Between him and her there stood the barrier of the counter. The barrier itself was not insuperable: he might get over the counter, so might Miss Harden; but there were other things that she never could get over. Though in some ways he was all right, in others, again, he was not--he could see very well that he was not--what Miss Harden would call a gentleman. He was, through that abominable nervousness of his, an impossible person, hopelessly, irredeemably involved in social solecisms. Or if not impossible, he was, at any rate, highly improbable.

Perceiving all this, he was still unable to perceive the meaning of his insight and his misery. He did not know, and there was n.o.body to tell him, that this emptiness of his was the emptiness created by the forerunners and servants of Love, who sweep and purify the death-chamber where a soul has died and another soul is waiting to be born. For in the house of Love there is only one chamber for birth and for dying; and into that clean, unfurnished place the soul enters unattended and endures its agony alone. There is no Mother-soul to bear for it the birth-pains of the new life.

But Mr. Rickman was young, and youth's healthy instinct urged him to vigorous exercise as the best means of shaking off his misery. He crossed the road that runs along the top of Harcombe Hill and made for the cliffs in a south-easterly direction across the fields. He then kept along the coast-line, dipping into Harcombe valley, climbing again to Easton Down. Here the coast was upheaved into terraces of grey limestone, topped by a layer of sand riddled with rabbit holes.

Before one of these two young hawks were watching, perched on a projecting boulder. So intent was their gaze and they so motionless that the air seemed to stand still and wait for the sweep of their wings. Mr. Rickman, whom youth made reckless, lay flat on his stomach and peered over the edge of the cliff. He was fascinated, breathlessly absorbed. He pressed the turf a little closer in his eagerness, and so loosened a large stone that rolled down, starting a cataract of sand and rubble. He had just time to throw himself back sideways, as the hollow fringe of turf gave way and plunged down the cliff-side. So far from taking his escape with becoming seriousness, he amused himself by trying to feel as he would have felt if he had actually gone over the cliff. He found that his keenest emotion was a thrill of horror, as he imagined Miss Harden a possible spectator of the ridiculous evolutions performed by his person in its pa.s.sage through the air.

After an hour of dipping and climbing he reached a small fishing village. Here he dined and rested, and it was mid-afternoon before he turned again towards Harmouth. There was no chance of missing his way; he had nothing to do but follow the coast-line as he had done before.

There were signs in the valley of the white fog that sometimes, even in April, comes in before sunset; already a veil of liquid air was drawn across the hills, and when he crossed Easton Down (if it was Easton Down) again the sea's face was blurred with mist.

As he went on westwards the mist kept pace with him, gradually diminishing the view he had hoped to see. And as it shifted and closed round him, his movements became labyrinthine, then circular.

And now his view was all foreground; he was simply walking through circles of moor, enclosed by walls of fine grey fog. He pa.s.sed through these walls, like a spirit, into smaller and smaller circles; then, hopelessly bewildered, he stopped, turned, and walked in what he took to be a contrary direction, feeling that the chance of going over the cliff-side lent an agreeable excitement to a pastime that threatened to become monotonous. This was a.s.suming the cliff-side to be somewhere near; and he was beginning to feel that it might be anywhere, under his feet for all he knew, when the fog lifted a little from the high ground, and he saw that he had lost his bearings altogether. He had been going round and round through these circles without returning to the point he started from. He went forward less cautiously in a larger round, and then he suddenly stood still. He was not alone.

His foreground had widened slightly and a figure stood in the middle of it. There was something familiar in the blurred outlines, traced as if by a watery finger on the wall of mist. An idea had taken shape stealthily behind him and flung its shadow there. The idea was Lucia Harden. The fog hung in her hair in drops like rain; it made her grey dress cling close about her straight, fine limbs; it gave its own grandeur and indistinctness to her solitary figure.

She turned, unstartled, but with an air of imperfect recognition. He raised his hat; the hat with the green ribbon on it.

"I beg your pardon, but can you tell me the shortest cut to Harmouth?

I think I've lost my way."

She answered absently. "You are all right. Turn to the left, and you'll find the path along the cliff. It will bring you out on to Harmouth beach."

He followed the path she had pointed out. Still absently she looked after him, a dim figure going down into the fog, and it occurred to her that she had sent him on a dangerous way. There were rabbit wires and pitfalls on that path; places where the cliff was eaten away under its curling edge of turf, and for Mr. Rickman, who didn't know his ground, a single step might mean death.

She could not see him now. She called to him; "Mr. Rickman!" but there was no answer; only the sound of Mr. Rickman going down deeper. She called again, a little imperiously, and yet again. The last time her voice carried well, for there was the vibrating note of terror in it.

He turned and saw her coming down the path towards him.

"I forgot," she said, still with the slight tremor of fear in her voice. It seemed to draw out and intensify its sweetness. "That path isn't safe in a fog like this. You had better go round by the road."

"Oh, thanks. You shouldn't have troubled. I should have got on all right." They were climbing up the moor together.

"I'm afraid you wouldn't. I wasn't thinking, or I would never have sent you that way."

"Why not? It was a very good way."

"Yes. But you were going down into the thick of the fog. You might easily have walked over the cliff--and broken your neck."

He laughed as if that was the most delightfully humorous idea.

"I don't know," said he, "that it would have mattered very much if I had."

She said nothing. She never did when he made these excursions into the personal. Of course it would not have mattered to Miss Harden if he had gone over the cliff. He had been guilty, not only of an unpardonable social solecism, but of a still more unpardonable plat.i.tude.

They had reached the top of the cliff, and Lucia stood still.

"Isn't there another short cut cut across the valley?" he asked.

"There is; but I don't advise you to try it. And there is a way round by the road--if you can find it."

He smiled. Had he tried to approach her too soon, and was she reminding him that short cuts are dangerous? There was a way round--if he could find it. If indeed!

"Oh, I shall find it all right," said he, inspired by his double meaning.

"I don't think you will, if the fog lasts. I am going that way and I had better show you."

Show him? Was it possible?

She led the way, all too swiftly, yet with a certain leisure in her haste. He followed with a shy delight.

He was familiar enough by this time with her indoor aspect, with her unique and perfect manner of sitting still; now he saw that her beauty was of that rare kind that is most beautiful in movement. He would have liked that walk to last for ever, for the pure pleasure of following, now the delicate poise of her head, now the faint ripple of her shoulders under her thin coat, now the lines of her skirt breaking and flowing with the almost imperceptible swinging of her hips.