The Divine Fire Part 29

"No--please--it doesn't matter. It happens every day."

"And it puts a visitor on an agreeable footing at once. You _can't_ keep up any stiffness or formality, when what you took for a drawing-room turns itself into a skating rink."

"Quite so," said Rickman, "and if you fall, it breaks the ice." He was entering shyly into her humour. "I'm afraid my be-h-haviour wasn't quite so h-happy and spontaneous as it might have been."

"I a.s.sure you it was extremely nave and natural, as far as it went,"

said Kitty, laughing.

"I think you were very clever to keep your balance," said Lucia.

"Too clever by half. If you'd been a really genial person, Mr.

Rickman, you'd have lost it."

Thus lightly did they cover his confusion, thus adroitly turn the malignant hand of circ.u.mstance.

"Kitty," said Lucia, "I don't want to hurry you, but it's past nine, and you'll _have_ to hurry if you don't want to be late."

"But I do want to be late. I mean to be late. I can't eat sandwiches for more than two hours."

And Kitty flung herself on her settee again in crosslegged, unpremeditated ease, and there she conversed with Mr. Rickman as if she had known him all her life. Kitty was amused at last.

So was Mr. Rickman. He found himself answering with appropriate light-heartedness; he heard himself laughing in the manner of one infinitely at ease. It was impossible to be anything else in Kitty Palliser's society. He was, in fact, surprised. Though it was only by immense expenditure of thought and effort that he managed to secure the elusive aspirate, still he secured it. Never for a moment did he allow himself to be cheated into the monstrous belief that its absence was, or could be unperceived.

But though he was grateful to Miss Palliser, he wished all the time that she would go. At last she rose and drew her fur-collared cloak about her with a slow, reluctant air.

"Well, I suppose I must be off. I shall be back before eleven, Lucy.

Good-night, Mr. Rickman, if I don't see you again."

He was alone with Lucia Harden.

It was one thing to be alone with Lucia Harden in the library or on Harcombe Moor, and quite another thing to be left with her in that lamp-lit, fire-lit room. The library belonged to her race and to their historic past; the moor to nature and to all time; this room to her and to the burning present. There was no sign or suggestion of another presence.

A kindly room (barring that parquet floor!); a beautiful room; full of warm lights, and broad and pleasing shadows; furnished with an extreme simplicity, such bareness as musicians love. He was struck by that absence of all trivial decoration, all disturbing and irrelevant detail. In such a room, the divinity of the human form was not dwarfed or obscured by excess of furniture. Such a room, he reflected, was also eminently disadvantageous to any figure that was not entirely sure of its divinity. But for two persons who desired to know each other better there couldn't be a better place. It left them so securely, so intimately alone.

For the first time, then, he was alone with Lucia Harden.

She had risen and had unlocked a drawer in the writing-table near her, and taken out the thick pile of ma.n.u.script. He noticed that she detached from it some loose pencilled sheets and put them back into the drawer. She seated herself in her old place and signed to him to take the low chair beside her.

He approached her (for the first time) without nervousness or embarra.s.sment; for he saw his _Helen_ lying on her knees and knew that she held his dreams in her soul. He had made her acquainted with the best and highest in him, and she would judge him by that alone. In her sight his genius would stand apart from all in him that was jarring and obscure. It at least was untouched by the accident of his birth, the baseness of his false position.

"I sent for you," said she, "because I wanted to talk to you about this, while it is all fresh in my mind. I thought we could talk better here."

"Thanks. I want awfully to know what you have to say."

"I can't have anything to say that you don't know already."

"I--I know nothing." (What a hypocrite he felt as he said it!)

"Nor I. As far as knowledge goes I haven't any right to speak.

Only--the other evening, you expressed such absolute disbelief in yourself--"

"I was perfectly sincere."

"I know you were. That's what made me believe in you."

(Well then, if _that_ was what made her believe in him he would continue to express disbelief in himself.)

She paused. "It's the little men, isn't it, the men of talent, that are always so self-conscious and so sure? I don't know much about it, but it seems to me that genius isn't bound to be like that. It might be so different from your ordinary self that you couldn't be aware of it in the ordinary way. There would always be a sort of divine uncertainty about it."

"I'm afraid I don't agree with you. All the great geniuses have been not only aware of themselves, but most uncommonly certain."

"Still, their genius may have been the part of themselves they understood least. If they had tried to understand it, they would have doubted too."

"There's something in that. You mean genius understands everything--except itself?

"I think that's what I meant."

"Yes; but whether genius understands itself or not, whatever it does, you see, it doesn't doubt."

"Doesn't it? Have you read Keats' letters? _He_ doubted."

"Only when he was in love with f.a.n.n.y Brawne."

He paused abruptly. He was seized by an idea, a rushing irresistible idea that lifted him off his feet and whirled him suddenly into a region of light, tumultuous and profound. Keats was in love when he doubted. Could that be the explanation of his own misgiving?

"That," he said hastily, "that's another thing altogether. Any way, if you don't believe in yourself, you'll have some difficulty in making other people believe in you."

"And if other people _do_ believe in you, before you believe in yourself?"

"Before? It might be done before, but not after. You may make a man conceited, but you can't give him back the conceit he had on Sat.u.r.day, if he's lost it all by Monday."

"That means that you know you've written a beautiful thing and you only think you'll never write another."

"Perhaps it does." (He had to keep it up for the pleasure of hearing her say she believed in him.)

"Well, I don't suppose you will write another _Helen in Leuce_."

"I'm afraid not." He went on to tell her that the wonder was how he wrote the thing at all. It had been done anyhow, anywhere, in successive bursts or spasms of creative energy; the circ.u.mstances of his life (he referred to them with some diffidence) not being exactly favourable to sustained effort. "How did _you_ feel about it?" he inquired.

"I can hardly tell you. I think I felt as you feel about anything beautiful that comes to you for the first time. I don't know what it is you've done. It's as if something had been done to me, as if I'd been given a new sense. It's like hearing Beethoven or Wagner for the first time." As she spoke she saw the swift blood grow hot in his face, she saw the slight trembling of the hand that propped his chin and she thought, "Poor fellow, so much emotion for a little praise?"

"What did you mean by it?" she said.

He considered a moment--as who should say "What the d.i.c.kens did I mean by it?"

Lucia leaned back now, for the first time, in the breathing s.p.a.ce he gave her, attentively watching the man she proposed to make her secretary; and as she watched him she found herself defending him against her own criticism. If he dropped his aitches it was not grossly as the illiterate do; she wouldn't go so far as to say he _dropped_ them; he slipped them, slided them; it was no more than a subtle slur, a delicate elision. And that only in the commoner words, the current coin of his world. He was as right as possible, she noticed, in all words whose acquaintance he had made on his own account. And his voice--his voice pleaded against her prejudice with all its lyric modulations. Much may be forgiven to such voices. And there were other points in his favour.

Kitty was right. He was nice to look at. She was beginning to know the changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features became suddenly subtle and serious and straight. At the moment his eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under the shadow of the eye-bone. But when he grew excited (as he frequently did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at you, then light, then fire. That was what they were doing now; for now he let himself go.