The Divine Fire Part 60

"The stream then--' the stream of tendency that makes for '--muck."

"It isn't a stream, it's a filthy duck-pond in somebody's back yard.

There's just enough water for the rest to drown in, but it isn't deep enough to float a man of Rickman's size. He's only got his feet wet, and that won't hurt him."

"There are things," said Rankin, "in Saturnalia that lend themselves to Crawley's treatment."

"And there are things in it that Crawley can't touch. And look at the later poems--The Four Winds, On Harcombe Hill, and The Song of Confession. Good G.o.d! It makes my blood boil to compare the man who wrote that with Letheby. Letheby! I could wring Vaughan's neck and Hanson's too. I should like to take their heads and knock them together. As for Letheby I'll do for him. I'll smash him in one column, and I'll give Rickman his send-off in four."

(The Planet in those early days was liberal with its s.p.a.ce.)

"After all," he added in a calmer tone, "he was right. We can't help him, except by taking a back seat and letting him speak for himself. I shall quote freely. The Song of Confession is the best answer to Hanson."

"It seems to me," said Stables, "you'll want a whole number at this rate."

"I shall want six columns, if I'm to do him any justice," said Maddox, rising. "Poor beggar, I expect he's a bit off colour. I shall go and look him up."

At eight that evening he went and looked him up. He found him in his room tranquilly reading. Thinking of him as a man of genius who had courted failure and madly fooled away his chances, and seeing him sitting there, so detached, and so unconscious, Maddox was profoundly moved. He had come with cursing and with consolation, with sympathy, with prophecy, with voluble belief. But all he could say was, "It's all right, Rickman. It's great, my son, it's great."

All the same he did not conceal his doubts as to the sort of reception Rickman had to expect. That part of the business, he said, had been grossly mismanaged, and it was Rickman's own fault.

"Look here," he said, "what on earth possessed you to go and refuse that introduction to Hanson? Was it just your cheek, or the devil's own pride, or what?"

"Neither," said Rickman, in a tone that pathetically intimated that he was worn out. "I think it was chiefly my desire for peace and quiet. I'm writing some more poems, you see. I wouldn't have refused it at any other time."

"At any other time it wouldn't have mattered so much. You should be civil to the people who can help you."

"I rather distrust that sort of civility myself. I've seen too much of the dirty back stairs of Fleet Street. I've tumbled over the miserable people who sit on them all day long, and I don't mean anybody to tumble over me. When I've got my best trousers on I want to keep them clean."

"It's a mistake," said Maddox, "to wear your best trousers every day."

"Perhaps. But I mean to wear them."

"Wear them by all means. But you must make up your mind for a certain amount of wear and tear. In your case it will probably be tear."

"That's my look-out."

"Quite so. I wouldn't say anything if it was only Hanson you'd offended, but you shouldn't alienate your friends."

"My friends?"

"Yes. Why, oh why, did you make that joke about Mackinnon's head?"

"We were all making jokes about Mackinnon's head."

"Yes; but we weren't all of us bringing out poems the next day. Your position, Ricky-ticky, was one of peculiar delicacy--and danger."

"What does it matter?" said Rickman wearily. "I can trust my friends to speak the truth about me."

"Heaven bless you, Rickman, and may your spring suitings last for ever." He added, as Jewdwine had added, "Anyhow, this friend will do his level best for you."

At which Rickman's demon returned again. "Don't crack me up too much, Maddy. You might do me harm."

But before midnight Maddox burst into the office and flung himself on to his desk.

"Give me room!" he cried; "I mean to spread myself, to roll, to wallow, to wanton, to volupt!"

Before morning he had poured out his soul, in four columns of _The Planet_, the exuberant, irrepressible soul of the Celt. He did it in an hour and twenty minutes. As he said himself afterwards (relating his marvellous achievement) he was sustained by one continuous inspiration; his pa.s.sionate pen paused neither for punctuation nor for thought. The thoughts, he said, were there. As the critical notices only appeared weekly, to pause would have entailed a delay of seven days, and he meant that his panegyric should appear the very next day after the article in the _Literary Observer_, as an answer to Hanson's d.a.m.nable paragraph.

If Maddox was urged to these excesses by his contempt for Jewdwine's critical cowardice, Jewdwine was cooled by the spectacle of Maddox's intemperance. He had begun by feeling a little bitter towards Rickman on his own account. He was disappointed in him. Rickman had shown that he was indifferent to his opinion. That being so, Jewdwine might have been forgiven if he had had no very keen desire to help him. Still, he _had_ desired to help him; but his desire had ceased after reading Maddox's review. There was no pleasure in helping him now, since he had allowed himself to be taken up and caressed so violently by other people. The clumsy hand of Maddox had brushed the first bloom from his Rickman, that once delightful youth. He was no longer Jewdwine's Rickman, his disciple, his discovery.

But though Jewdwine felt bitter, he was careful that no tinge of this personal feeling should appear in his review of Rickman's poems. It was exceedingly difficult for him to review them at all. He had to take an independent att.i.tude, and most possible att.i.tudes had been taken already. He could not ignore Rickman's deplorable connection with the Decadents; and yet he could not insist on it, for that was what Hanson and the rest had done. Rickman had got to stay there; he could not step in and pluck him out like a brand from the burning; for Maddox had just accomplished that heroic feat. He would say nothing that would lend countenance to the extravagance of Maddox. There was really no room for fresh appreciation anywhere. He could not give blame where Hanson had given it; and Maddox had plastered every line with praise. He would have been the first to praise Rickman, provided that he _was_ the first. Not that Jewdwine ever committed himself. As a critic his surest resource had always lain in understatement. If the swan was a goose, Jewdwine had as good as said so. If the goose proved a swan, Jewdwine had implied as much by his magnificent reserve. But this time the middle course was imposed on him less by conviction than necessity. He had to hold the balance true between Hanson and Maddox.

In his efforts to hold it true, he became more than ever academic and judicial. So judicial, so impartial was he in his opinion, that he really seemed to have no opinion at all; to be merely summing up the evidence and leaving the verdict to the incorruptible jury. Every sentence sounded as though it had been pa.s.sed through a refrigerator.

Not a hint or a sign that he had ever recognized in Rickman the possibility of greatness.

Now, if Rickman had not been connected with _The Museion_, the review would have done him neither harm nor good. As it was, it did him harm.

It was naturally supposed that Jewdwine, so far from understating his admiration, had suppressed his bad opinion in the interests of friendship. Rickman's _Saturnalia_ remained where Hanson had placed it, rather low in the ranks of young Decadence.

And then, just because he had suppressed the truth about him, because he felt that he had given Rickman some grounds for bitterness, Jewdwine began to feel more and more bitter himself.

If Rickman felt any bitterness he never showed it. He had only two thoughts on reading Jewdwine's articles. "It wouldn't have mattered except that _she_ will see it"; and "I wouldn't have minded if it was what he really thought."

Maddox, rightly judging that Rickman would be suffering more in his affection than his vanity, called on him that afternoon and dragged him out for his usual Sat.u.r.day walk. As if the thought of Jewdwine dominated their movements, they found themselves on the way to Hampstead. Maddox attempted consolation.

"It really doesn't matter much what Jewdwine says. These fellows come up from Oxford with wet towels round their heads to keep the metaphysics in. Jewdwine's muddled himself with the Absolute Beauty till he doesn't know a beautiful thing if you stick it under his nose."

"Possibly not; if you keep it farther off he might have a better chance. Trust him to know."

"Well, if he knows, he doesn't care."

"Oh, doesn't he. That's where Jewdwine's great. He cares for nothing else. He cares more than any man alive--in his heart."

"D--n his heart! I don't believe he has one."

"Would you oblige me by not talking about him any more?"

Maddox obliged him.

They tramped far into the country, returning at nightfall by the great road that crosses the high ground of the Heath. Rickman loved that road; for by night, or on a misty evening, it was possible to imagine some remote resemblance between it and the long straight ridge of Harcombe Hill.

They paused by common consent where the Heath drops suddenly from the edge of the road; opening out the view towards London. The hollow beneath them, filled by a thin fog, had become mysterious and immense.

"By the way," said Maddox, following an apparently irrelevant train of thought, "what has become of your friendship for Miss Poppy Grace?"

"It has gone," said Rickman, "where the old trousers go. Look there--"

Above them heaven seemed to hang low, bringing its stars nearer. A few clouds drifted across it, drenched in the blue of the night behind them, a grey-blue, watery and opaque. Below, sunk in a night greyer and deeper, were the lights of London. The ridge they stood on was like the rampart of another world hung between the stars which are the lights of poets, and the lights which are the stars of men. Under the stars Maddox chanted softly the last verses of the _Song of Confession_ that Rickman had made.