The Divine Fire Part 96

"You're right there, Spinky. Of course it's true if she says so."

"She seemed to think you wouldn't mind her telling me. She said you'd understand."

"Oh yes, I think I understand. Did she tell you she had broken it off?" (He was really anxious to know how she had put it.)

"Yes, but she was most awfully nice about it. I made out--I mean she gave me the impression--that she did it, well, partly because she thought you wanted it off. But that's just what I want to be sure about. Do you want it off, or don't you?"

"Is that what she wants to know?"

"No. It's what I want to know. What's more, Rickets, I think I've got a fair right to know it, too."

"What do you want me to say? That I don't want to marry Miss Walker or that I do?"

Spinks's face flushed with the rosy dawn of an idea. It was possible that Rickets didn't want to marry her, that he was in need of protection, of deliverance. There was a great deed that he, Spinks, could do for Rickets. His eyes grew solemn as they beheld his destiny.

"Look here," said he, "I want you to tell me nothing but the bally truth. It's the least you can do under the circ.u.mstances. I don't want it for her, well--yes I do--but I want it for myself, too."

"All right, Spinky, you shall have the best truth I can give you at such uncommonly short notice. I can't say I don't want to marry Miss Walker, because that wouldn't be very polite to the lady. But I can say I think she's shown most admirable judgement, and that I'm perfectly satisfied with her decision. I wouldn't have her go back, on it for worlds. Will that satisfy you?"

"It would if I thought you really meant it."

"I do mean it, G.o.d forgive me. But that isn't her fault, poor little girl. The whole thing was the most infernal muddle and mistake."

"Ah--that was what she called it--a mistake." Spinks seemed to be clinging to and cherishing this word of charm.

"I'm glad for her sake that she found it out in time. I'm not the sort of man a girl like Flossie ought to marry. I ought never to have asked her."

"Upon my soul, Rickets, I believe you're right there. That's not saying anything against you, or against her either."

"No. Certainly not against _her_. She's all right, Spinky--"

"I know, I know."

Still Spinks hesitated, restraining his ardent embrace of the truth presented to him, held back by some scruple of shy unbelieving modesty.

"Then you think, you really _do_ think, that there isn't any reason why I shouldn't cut in?"

"No, Heaven bless you; no reason in the world, as far as I'm concerned. For G.o.d's sake cut in and win; the sooner the better. Now, this minute, if you feel like it."

But still he lingered, for the worst was yet to come. He lingered, nursing a colossal scruple. Poor Spinks's honour was dear to him because it was less the gift of nature than the supreme imitative effort of his adoring heart. He loved honour because Rickman loved it; just as he had loved Flossie for the same reason. These were the only ways in which he could imitate him; and like all imitators he exaggerated the master's manner.

"I say, I don't know what you'll think of me. I said I'd never let on to Flossie that I cared; and I didn't mean to, I didn't on my word. I don't know how it happened; but to-night we got talking--to tell you the truth I thought I was doing my best to get her to make it up with you--"

"Thanks; that was kind," said Rickman in a queer voice which put Spinks off a bit.

"I was really, Razors. I do believe I'd have died rather than let her know how I felt about her; but before I could say knife--"

"She got it out of you?"

"No, she didn't do anything of the sort. It was all me. Like a d.a.m.n fool I let it out--some'ow."

Nothing could have been more demoralizing than the spectacle of Spinks's face as he delivered himself of his immense confession; so fantastically did it endeavour to chasten rapture with remorse.

Rickman controlled himself the better to enjoy it; for Spinks, taken seriously, yielded an inexhaustible vein of purest comedy. "Oh, Spinky," he said with grave reproach, "how could you?"

"Well, I know it was a beastly dishonourable thing to do; but you see I was really most awkwardly situated."

"I daresay you were." It was all very well to laugh; but in spite of his amus.e.m.e.nt he sympathized with Spinky's delicacy. He also had found himself in awkward situations more than once.

"Still," continued Spinks with extreme dejection, "I can't think how I came to let it out."

That, and the dejection, was too much for Rickman's gravity.

"If you want the truth, Spinky, the pity was you ever kept it in."

And his laughter, held in, piled up, monstrous, insane, ungovernable, broke forth, dispersing the last scruple that clouded the beat.i.tude of Spinks.

CHAPTER LXV

Often, after half a night spent in a vain striving to shape some immense idea into the form of beauty, be had turned the thing neck and crop out of his mind and gone to sleep on it. Whenever he did this he was sure to wake up and find it there waiting for him, full-formed and perfect as he had dreamed it and desired. It had happened so often that he had grown to trust this profounder inspiration of his sleep.

Hitherto it was only the problems of his heart that had been thus divinely dealt with; he had been left to struggle hopelessly with the problems of his life; and of these Flossie was the most insoluble. And now that he had given up thinking of her, had abandoned her to her own mysterious workings, it too had been solved and in the same simple, inevitable way. His contempt for Flossie's methods could not blind him to the beneficence of the result.

He wrote to her that night to the effect that he gladly and entirely acquiesced in her decision; but that he should have thought that he and not Mr. Spinks had been ent.i.tled to the first intimation of it. He had no doubt, however, that she had done the best and wisest thing. He forbore to add "for both of us." His chivalry still persisted in regarding Flossie as a deeply injured person. He had wronged her from the beginning. Had he not laid on her, first the burden of his pa.s.sion, and yet again the double burden of his genius and his honour?

A heavier load, that, and wholly unfitted for the poor little back that would have had to bear it. It never occurred to him that he had been in any way the victim of Flossie's powerful instincts. It was Maddox who said that Mr. Spinks had made himself immortal by his marriage; that he should be put on the Civil List for his services to literature.

Of Rickman's place in literature there could be no question for the next two or three years. He foresaw that the all-important thing was his place on _The Planet_, his place on _Metropolis_, his place (if he could find one) on any other paper. He had looked to journalism for the means to support a wife, and journalism alone could maintain him in his struggle with Pilkington. Whether Maddox was right or wrong in his opinion of the disastrous influence of Flossie, there could be no doubt that for the present Rickman's genius had no more formidable rival than his honour. If it is perdition to a great tragic dramatist when pa.s.sion impels him to marry on three hundred a year, it can hardly be desirable that conscience should constrain him to raise seven hundred and fifty pounds in three years. Fate seemed bent in forcing him to live his tragedies rather than write them; but Rickman, free of Flossie, faced the desperate prospect with the old reckless spirit of his youth.

For the first year the prospect did not look so very desperate. He had found cheap rooms unfurnished in Torrington Square where the houses are smaller and less sumptuous than Mrs. Downey's. He had succeeded in letting the little house in Ealing, where the abominable furniture that had nearly cost so dear justified its existence by adding a small sum to his income. He had benefited indirectly by Rankin's greatness; for Rankin seldom contributed anything to _The Planet_ now beyond his lively column once a week; and Rickman was frequently called on to fill his place. _The Planet_ was good for at least a solid hundred a year; _Metropolis_ (once it began to pay) for a solid two hundred and fifty or more; other papers for small and varying sums. When he totted it all up together he found that he was affluent. He could reckon on a round four hundred all told. In Torrington Square, by the practice of a little ingenious economy, he could easily live on a hundred and twenty-five; so that by the end of the first year he should have saved the considerable sum of two hundred and seventy-five pounds. At that rate, in three years--no, in two years and a--well, in rather more than two and a half years the thing would be done. By a little extra exertion he might be able to reduce it to two years; to one, perhaps, by a magnificent stroke of luck. Such luck, for instance, as a stage success, a run of a hundred nights for the tragedy whose First Act he was writing now.

That, of course, it would be madness to count on; but he had some hopes from the sudden and extraordinary transformation of _The Museion_.

Sudden enough, to the uninitiated, seeing that in September, ninety-seven, the organ of philosophic criticism to all appearances died, and that in October it burst into life again under a new cover and a new t.i.tle, Jewdwine himself sounding the trump of resurrection.

_The Museion's_ old contributors knew it no more; or failed to recognise it in _Metropolis_. On the tinted cover there was no trace of the familiar symbolic head-piece, so suggestive of an Ionic frieze, but the new t.i.tle in the broadest, boldest, blackest of type proclaimed its almost wanton repudiation of the old tradition.

Jewdwine's first "concession to modernity," was a long leading review of the "Art of Herbert Rankin." Herbert Rankin was so much amused with it that it kept him quiet for at least three weeks in his playground of _The Planet_. After such a handsome appreciation as that, he had to wait a decent interval before "going for Jewdwine." When he remarked to Rickman that it would have been more to the purpose if Jewdwine had devoted his six columns to the Art of S.K.R., Rickman blushed and turned his head away, as if Rankin had been guilty of some gross indelicacy. He was still virginally sensitive where Jewdwine was concerned.

But, in a sense not intended by Rankin, Jewdwine was very much occupied, not to say perturbed by the art of S.K.R. Not exactly to the exclusion of every other interest; for Rickman, looking in on the great editor one afternoon, found him almost enthusiastic over his "last discovery." A new poet, according to Jewdwine, had arisen in the person of an eminent Cabinet Minister, who in ninety-seven was beguiling the tedium of office with a very pretty playing on the pastoral pipe. Mr. Fulcher's _In Arcadia_ lay on the editorial table, bound in white vellum, with the figure of the great G.o.d Pan symbolizing Mr. Fulcher, on the cover. Jewdwine's att.i.tude to Mr.

Fulcher was for Jewdwine humble, not to say reverent. He intimated to Rickman that in Fulcher he had found what he had wanted.

Jewdwine in the early days of _Metropolis_ wore the hungry look of a man who, having swallowed all his formulas, finds himself unnourished.

"The soul," Jewdwine used to say (perverting Emerson) "is appeased by a formula"; and it was clear that his soul would never be appeased until it had found a new one. Those who now conversed intimately with Jewdwine were entertained no longer with the Absolute, but they heard a great deal about the "Return to Nature." Mr. Fulcher's pipings, therefore, were entirely in harmony with Jewdwine's change of mood.

But Rickman, who had once protested so vigorously against the Absolute, would not hear of the Return to Nature, either. That cry was only a symptom of the inevitable sickness of the academic spirit, surfeited with its own philosophy. He shook his head mournfully over Mr. Fulcher. What looked to Jewdwine like simplicity seemed to him only a more intolerably sophisticated pose than any other.

"I prefer Mr. Fulcher in Downing Street to Mr. Fulcher in Arcadia. Mr.