The Divine Fire Part 30

His Helen, he said, was the eternal Beauty, the eternal Dream. Beauty perpetually desirous of incarnation, perpetually unfaithful to flesh and blood; the Dream that longs for the embrace of reality, that wanders never satisfied till it finds a reality as immortal as itself.

Helen couldn't stay in the house of Theseus, or the house of Menelaus or the house of Priam. Theseus was a fool if he thought he would take her by force, and Paris was a fool if he thought he could keep her for pleasure; and Menelaus was the biggest fool of all if he expected her to bear him children and to mind his house. They all do violence to the divinity in her, and she vindicates it by eluding them. Her vengeance is the vengeance of an immortal made victim to mortality.

Helen of Argos and Troy is the Dream divorced from reality.

"Yes--yes. I see." She leaned back in her chair, fascinated, while the wonderful voice went on, covering its own offences with exquisite resonances and overtones.

"This divorce is the cause of all the evil that can happen to men and women. Because of it Helen becomes an instrument in the hands of Aphrodite--Venus Genetrix--do you see? She's the marriage-breaker, the destroyer of men. She brings war and pestilence and death. She is the supreme illusion. But _Helen in Leuce_ is the true Helen. In Leuce, you know, she appears as she is, in her divine form, freed from the tyranny of perpetual incarnation. I can't explain it, but that's the idea. Don't you see how the chorus in praise of Aphrodite breaks off into a prayer for deliverance from her? And at the end I make Athene bring Helen to Achilles, who was her enemy in Troy.--That's part of the idea, too."

"And Achilles?"

"Achilles is strength, virility, indestructible _will_."

It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling purified his speech, and as he p.r.o.nounced these words every accent was irreproachable. A lyric exaltation seemed to have seized him as it had seized him in the reading of Sophocles.

"The idea is reconciliation, the wedding of the Dream to reality. I haven't made up my mind whether the last chorus will be the Epithalamium or the Hymn to Pallas Athene."

He paused for reflection, and in reflection the lyric rapture died.

He added pensively. "The 'Ymn, I think."

Lucia averted her ardent gaze before the horror in his young blue eyes. They were the eyes of some wild winged creature dashed down from its soaring and frenzied by the fall. Lucia could have wept for him.

"Then this," said she, feigning an uninterrupted absorption in the ma.n.u.script, "this is not what my cousin saw?"

"No, h--he only saw the first draft of the two first Acts. It was horribly stiff and cold. He said it was cla.s.sical; I don't know what he'd say it is now. I began it that way, and it finished itself this way, and then I re-wrote the beginning."

"I see. I see. Something happened to you." As she spoke she still kept her eyes fixed on the ma.n.u.script, as if she were only reading what was written there. "You woke up--in the middle of the second Act, wasn't it?--and came to life. You heard the world--the real world--calling to you, and Helen and Achilles and all the rest of them turned to flesh and blood on your hands."

"Yes," he said, "they were only symbols and I'd no notion what they meant till they left off meaning it."

She looked from the ma.n.u.script to him. "You know in your heart you _must_ be certain of yourself. And yet--I suspect the trouble with you is that _your_ dream is divorced from reality."

He stared in amazement at the young girl who thus interpreted him to herself. At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination. There were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but she had seized on the essential. It had been as she had said. That first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer of cla.s.sic form, the dreamer who found in his dreams escape from the grossness of his own lower nature and from the brutalities of the world he lived in. A great neo-cla.s.sic drama was to be his protest against modernity and actuality. Then came an interval of a year in which he learnt many things that are not to be found in books, or adequately expressed through neo-cla.s.sic drama; and the thing was finished and re-written at a time when, as she had said, something had happened to him; when that same gross actual world was making its claims felt through all his senses. And he was suffering now the deep melancholy of perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams but aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality. That was so; but how on earth did she know it?

"It's hardly a divorce," he said, laughing. "I think it's separation by mutual consent."

"That's a pity," said she, "life is so lovable."

"I don't always find it either lovable or loving. But then it's life in a fifth-rate boarding-house in Bloomsbury--if you know what that is."

She did not know what that was, and her silence suggested that she conceived it to be something too unpleasant to discuss with him.

"I work eight hours a day in my father's shop--"

"And when your work is done?"

"I go back to the boarding-house and dine."

"And after dinner?"

Mr. Rickman became visibly embarra.s.sed. "Oh, after dinner, there are the streets, and the theatres, and--and things."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing. Except a club I belong to."

"That's something, isn't it? You make friends."

"I don't know anybody in it, except Mr. Jewdwine; and I don't really know him. It's the shop, you know. You forget the shop."

"No I don't forget it; but I wish you would. If only you could get away from it, away from everything. If you could get away from London altogether for a while."

"If--if? I shall never get away."

"Why not? I've been thinking it over. I wonder whether things could not be made a little easier for you? You ought to make your peace with the world, you know. Supposing you could go and live where the world happens to be beautiful, in Rome or Florence or Venice, wouldn't that reconcile you to reality?"

"It might. But I don't see how I'm to go and live there. You see there's the shop. There always is the shop."

"Would it be impossible to leave it for a little while?"

"Not impossible, perhaps; but"--he smiled, "well--highly imprudent."

"But if something else were open to you?"

"Nothing else is, at present. Most doors seem closed pretty tight except the one marked Tradesmen's Entrance."

"You can't 'arrive' by that."

"Not, I admit, with any dignity. My idea was to walk up the steps--there are a great many steps, I know--to the big front door and keep on knocking at it till they let me in."

"I'm afraid the front door isn't always open very early in the day.

But there may be side doors."

"I don't know where to find them. And if I did, they would be bolted, too."

"Not the one I am thinking of. Would you like to go abroad, to Italy?"

"There are a great many things I should like to do, and not the remotest chance of doing them."

"Supposing that you got the chance, some way--even if it wasn't quite the best way--would you take it?"

"The chance? I wish I saw one!"

"I think I told you I was going abroad to join my father. We shall be in Italy for some time. When we are settled, in Rome, for the winter, I shall want a secretary. I'm thinking of editing my grandfather's unpublished writings, and I can't do this without a scholar's help. It struck me that if you want to go abroad, and nothing better turns up, you might care to take this work for a year. For the sake of seeing Italy."

Seeing Italy? Italy that he had once desired with all his heart to see. And now it was nothing to him that he would see Italy; the point was that he would see her. Talk of open doors! It was dawning on him that the door of heaven was being opened to him. He could say nothing.

He leaned forward staring at his own loosely clasped hands.

She mistook his silence for hesitation, and it was her turn to become diffident and shy. "The salary would not be very large, I'm afraid--"