The Gorgeous Isle Part 12

"I have never written a great poetical drama. My faculty has been mainly narrative, lyric, epic, with dramatic action in short bursts only. The power to build a great, sustained, and varied drama, the richness and ripeness of dramatic imagination, of character portrayal, representation as distinct from a.n.a.lysis, of vigorous scenes that sweep through the excited brain of the reader with the rush of the hurricane, and owe nothing to metrical sweetness, to lyrical melody--that has never come before--and now--now----"

"You will write it! Do you--can you imagine that I am jealous--that I am not as ambitious for you as you could be for yourself?"

"I have never been ambitious before. I have never cared enough about the world. I wrote first because the songs sang off the point of my quill, and then to keep a roof over my head. I have never placed any inordinate value on my work after it was done, although the making of it gave me the keenest happiness, the polishing delighted all the artist in me. It is only now, now, for the first time, that I have been fancying myself going down to posterity in the company of the immortals. Oh G.o.d, what irony! When it did not matter the inspiration lagged, and now it can do me no good!"

"But it shall! And as much for me as for your fame. Your work has been little less to me than yourself. I must have this!"

He turned to her for the first time and looked at her curiously. "Is it possible that you do not know the reason why I cannot write?" he asked. "We have avoided the subject, but I understood that you knew.

Hunsdon told me----"

"Oh, yes, but that was when you were physically and morally a----" she stopped short, blushing painfully.

"A wreck," he supplemented grimly.

"Well! You had let yourself go. Now it is different. You are well. You are happy. Even your brain is stronger--your will, as a matter of course."

"I never wrote a line in my earliest youth without stimulant."

"But you might have done so. It is only a freak of imagination that prompts you to believe that you cannot write alone, that you must take alcohol into partnership, as it were. Even little people are ruled by imagination; how much more so a great faculty in which imagination must follow many morbid and eccentric tracks? And habit, no doubt, is the greatest of all forces, while it is undisturbed. But that old habit of yours has been shattered these last months. You made no attempt to resist before. You could resist now. If I have been the inspiration of this poem, why cannot I take the place of brandy? It is no great compliment to me if I cannot. Try."

He put his hands on her shoulders and looked more the man than the poet for the moment. "Anne," he said solemnly. "Let well enough alone.

I made up my mind to write no more the day you promised to marry me. I told you that the lover had buried the poet, and I believed it. But I find that the poet must come to life now and again--for a while at least. But although the process will be neither pleasant nor painless, I shall strangle him in time."

"Can you?"

"Yes--I think so."

"And be quite as happy as before?"

"Oh, I am not prophet enough for that. I can never be unhappy while I have you."

"And I could never be happy if I let you kill a gift that is as living a part of yourself as your sense of vision or touch. Do you suppose I ever deluded myself with the dream that you would settle down into the domestic routine of years--write political pamphlets for Hunsdon? I knew this would come and I never have had a misgiving. I know you can write without stimulant. Nothing can be more fanciful than that the highest of all mental gifts must have artificial aid. That may be the need of the little man driving a pen for his daily bread, of the small talent trying to create, but never for you!"

"There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks--a beast--oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living for in the wretched present is that you never may."

"I do not believe in permanent congenital weaknesses with a free rich faculty like yours. I know how that fatal idea has wedged itself in your brain--but if you try--if you persist--you will overcome it.

Promise me that you will try."

"You are so strong," he said sadly. "You cannot conceive, with all your own imagination, the miserable weaknesses of the still half-developed human brain. The greatest scientific minds that have spent their lives in the study of the brain know next to nothing about it. How should you, dear child? I know the curse that is the other half of my gift to write, but of its cause, its meaning, I know nothing. You are strong by instinct, but you have not the least idea why or how you are strong. It is all a mysterious arrangement of particles."

"But that is no reason one should not strive to overcome weakness."

"Certainly not. But I have so much at stake that I think it wisest to kill the temptation outright, and not tempt providence by dallying with it. And this regarding the arbitrary exercise of the imagination: It is the small people of whom you spoke just now who are the slaves of what little imagination they have, who can make themselves ill or sometimes well under its influence. But when a man uses his imagination professionally as long as I have done it takes a place in his life apart. It has no influence whatever on his daily life, on his physical or even his mental being. He knows it too well. It would seem as if the imagination itself were cognisant of this fact and was too wise to court defeat."

"I can understand that, but I also know that genius is too abnormal to accept any such reasoning, no matter what the highly developed brain may be capable of. Unknown to yourself you have become the victim first of an idea, then of a habit. You will struggle and exhaust yourself and end by hating yourself and me. You have no doubt that this would be a greater work than your greatest?"

"Oh, no! no!"

"Then do me the justice to make one attempt at least to write it. Come to the library!"

His face had been turned from her for some moments, but at the last words, so full of concrete suggestion, he moved irresistibly and she saw that his eyes were blazing with eagerness, with a desire she had never seen.

"Come," she said.

He stared at her, through her, miles beyond her, then turned mechanically toward his library. "Perhaps," he muttered. "Who knows? Why not?"

CHAPTER XXIII

When Anne rose the next morning and tapped on Warner's door there was no answer. She entered softly, but found that his bed had not been occupied. For this she was not unprepared, and although she had no intention of galling her poet with the routine of daily life, still must he be fed, and she went at once to the library to invite him to breakfast. He was not there. She glanced hastily over the loose sheets of paper on his writing table. There were a few scratches, unintelligible phrases, nothing more. In the gallery she met the major-domo, who informed her that the master had gone out in his boat about five o'clock. The day was clear and the waters calmer. There was no reason for either surprise or uneasiness, and Anne, who expected vagaries of every sort until the poem was finished, endeavoured to while away the long day with a new novel sent her by Medora Ogilvy.

But she had instinctively taken a chair by a window facing the sea, and as the day wore on and she saw no sign of boat of any sort, she finally renounced the attempt to keep her mind in tune with fiction.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed a brief luncheon and omitted siesta, returning to her seat by the window. The fate of Sh.e.l.ley haunted her in spite of her powerful will, and she sat rigid, her hands clasped about her knees, her face white. When Warner's boat shot suddenly round the corner of the island the relief was so great that without waiting to find a sunshade she ran out of the house and down to the sands, reaching his side before the boat was beached.

"You should not come out at this hour--and without a sunshade," he said, but keeping his face from her.

"If you could stand it for hours out on those hot waters it will not hurt me for a moment or two here. Have you had any luncheon?"

"I got a bite in Ba.s.seterre. Let us go in."

As he raised himself she saw that his face was haggard, his eyes faded. He looked as if he had not slept for weeks. When they reached the living-room he flung himself, with a word of muttered apology, on a sofa and slept until late. The dressing-bell roused him and he went to his room, reappearing at the dinner table. There he talked of his morning excursion, declaring that it had done him good, as he had long felt in need of a change of exercise, and had missed the water.

It was not until they were in the living-room again that he said abruptly: "I can't do it. Let us not talk about it. The air is delightfully cool. Shall we order the carriage and call on the Ogilvys?"

The roads were deep in mud, but the moon was bright, the air fresh and stirred by the trade wind that always found its way to Nevis even in summer during one hour of the twenty-four. Warner played billiards with Mr. Ogilvy and Anne listened to the hopes and fears of her hostess respecting Lord Hunsdon, while Felicia, the second daughter, poured out her envy of Medora's good fortune in enjoying a London season, and its sequel of visits to country houses.

They returned late. Warner was almost gay and very much the lover. The next few days were magnificent and Anne saw for the first time a West Indian island in all its glory of young and infinite greens. Less like a jewel than in her golden prime Nevis seemed to throb with awakening life like some great Bird of Paradise that had slept until spring.

Warner and Anne remained out of doors in all but the hotter hours, and the poet was once more the normal young husband, rich in the possession of a beautiful and sympathetic wife. Anne was wise enough to make no allusion to the unborn poem. When curiosity piqued or impatience beset, she invoked the ugly shade of Lady Byron, and resolved anew that while alert to play her part in Warner's life, she would be guided wholly by events.

The rains began again, those terrible rains of a tropic summer, when the heavens are in flood and open their gates, beating palm tops to earth, tearing the long leaves of the banana tree to ribbons, turning the roads into roaring torrents, and day into night. Boats were used in the streets of Charlestown. The heat was stifling. The Caribbean Sea roared as if boiling tides were forcing their way from Mount Misery on St. Kitts to the crater of Nevis. Warner pretended to read during the day, but it was not long before Anne discovered that he stole from his room every night, and she knew his goal. He appeared at the nine o'clock breakfast, however, and neither made allusion to the vigils written in his face. At first it was merely haggard, but before long misery grew and deepened, misery and utter hopelessness; until Anne could not bear to look at him.

The storms continued. Ten days pa.s.sed. Anne was not sure that he even slept in the daytime. He ceased to speak at all, although he managed to convey to Anne his grat.i.tude that she was good enough to let him alone. Once she suggested a trip to England as soon as they could get a packet for Barbadoes, but he merely shook his head, and Anne knew that he would not stir from Nevis.

There came a night when Anne too gave up all attempt to sleep. Even after her illness she had found no difficulty in resuming the long unbroken rest of youth, but youth had taken itself off in a fright.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Then she left the room again"]

On this night she wandered about and faced the truth. It was a night to a.s.sist the least imaginative to face an unhappy crisis. A small hurricane raged, seeming to burst in wild roars from Nevis itself.

The streams on the mountain were cataracts. The sea threatened the island. At another time, Anne, like other West Indians, would have paid incessant visits to the barometer, but to-night she cared nothing for the threat of the elements. A storm raged within her, and she had a perfect comprehension of the madness and despair in the library.

She was out of her fool's paradise at last. She knew that he would never write his drama without the aid that marvellous but rotten spot in his brain demanded. And its delivery was in her hands. He was the soul of honour, unselfish, high-minded. He had taken the woman he loved better than himself into his life and he would keep the promise he had voluntarily made her unless she released him. He would conquer and kill the best part of him.

Anne had no apprehension of his physical death. No doubt his mere bodily well-being would go on increasing after the struggle was over; but what of his maimed and thwarted intellect, the mind-emptiness of a man who had known the greatest of mortal joys, mental creation? What of the haunting knowledge throughout a possibly long life, of having deliberately done a divine gift to death?

Anne felt like a murderer herself. She went suddenly out into the gallery, and stood for a moment with her arms rigidly upraised to the black rolling sky. There was no response in the fury of the rain that drowned her face, and compelled her to bend her head.