To-morrow? Part 21

I welcomed it gladly and went upstairs, got out paper and a pen, and the remembrance of my own life slipped away from me. All that night I wrote, and the next day, and the fresh ma.n.u.script was fairly started.

For a whole fortnight I wrote almost incessantly. I s.n.a.t.c.hed a little food in the cafe, hardly knowing what I ate.

The nights pa.s.sed feverishly without sleep, while the brain revolved, excitedly, scenes written or to be written. Towards the end of the fortnight the impulses to work steadily declined. I forced myself to write at intervals; but, as usual, the forced work was worthless, and I destroyed it when it was done. No, it was no use. I could merely shrug my shoulders and smoke and wait.

The hot, blank days of August drifted by, and as I saw the boulevards empty themselves day by day, and Paris grow hotter and duller each afternoon, I felt the solitary existence weigh heavier and heavier upon me. The loss of the dog seemed to have made a larger gap in my existence than I should have believed; his unused collars still lay upon my mantelpiece, his plate and saucer still stood in the corner by the hearth, and sometimes when I was climbing the dark stairs at night to my empty room I felt as if I would have given years of my life to have had the dog leap up into my arms in welcome.

One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I supposed it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too occupied, or indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other correspondents.

In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to my father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without explaining farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and begging him to release me from the arrangement made before I left England, I had received a derisive note from him, full of ironical sympathy with my misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to another year's work, with a good grace and a contented spirit.

My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.

I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony, and since then my letters to him had been short notes, out of which I studiously kept my own feelings. There was no one now to whom I could either speak or write a word of personal matters.

An anchorite in a cave of the desert could not have been more shut off from that dear communication with his fellows that a man hardly values till he loses it.

When I had lighted the lamp I sat staring at the loose sheets of the ma.n.u.script lying on the side table, noting painfully how far it was from completion, and it was only when I lifted it to the middle table for work that I glanced at the letter again.

As my eyes fell on the superscription the blood leapt into my face--it was Howard's. There was a strong disinclination in me to take up the letter, to read it, to let my thoughts flow in his direction at all.

Resolutely I had tried to banish the memory of him from my mind, to utterly throw out his image from my recollection. The thought of him was disagreeable, and therefore never welcomed.

The idea of one person cherishing, as the phrase is, hatred, envy, or anger against another, always seems to me incomprehensible. All these are unpleasant sensations, and I sweep them out of my mind as quickly as I possibly can, not from any exalted motives, but simply as useless, c.u.mbering lumber, for which I decline to use my brain at a storehouse.

Howard had injured me enough.

Was I to waste my time and my energies in hating him? And yet the time had not come when I could think of him with calm indifference.

Therefore, to scout the idea of him whenever it presented itself, to refuse to dwell upon him and what he had inflicted on me, was the only way to escape additional pain and discomfort for myself. And now, at sight of his handwriting, the beast, the monster of declining hate rose in me again, and I remembered him.

It came back upon me that evening, his image, and I knew that I hated him still. I took up the letter with a feeling of revolt and disgust, as if it had been a filthy object, broke it open, and read:--

"DEAR VICTOR,--I expect you will say to yourself it is the greatest cheek my writing to you, and I know it is, but I am reduced to that state of desperation when a man ceases to feel degradation."

"I am writing to ask you for help--you will wonder how I can. So do I.

I wonder at myself. But I know you are the best of fellows, and I feel you will help me now in spite of all that has happened. Victor send me what you can, as near 15 Pounds Sterling as possible, to save me from irrevocable disgrace. I have no one but yourself to apply to. If you refuse I am done for. You will know what a desperate position I am in, I must be in, to ask you at all.--Yours in despair and everlasting regret, HOWARD."

I read it through, and then dropped the letter and its envelope into the fire, glad to get rid of the sight of the familiar hand. And I watched it burn, and I thought of the ma.n.u.script which must have curled and writhed in the same way, leaf by leaf, as he lighted it, and I asked myself again--What is forgiveness?

I knew that I hated him. I had now the opportunity of consigning him to "irrevocable disgrace," as he put it. But I knew that I should send him the help he asked for on the same principle as I had refrained from injuring him, forgiven him, shaken hands with him. And why? I wondered.

What was my motive? Simply, I think, a mere instinct to preserve my own self-respect.

I enclosed a cheque for 20 Pounds Sterling in a blank sheet of paper, put it in an envelope, and went out that same night and posted it. When I had his letter of thanks I glanced through it hastily and then burnt it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain.

Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity, but slowly a ma.n.u.script grew and grew again into being.

The slow winter wore away, and the ice froze or the fog pressed on the long French windows of my room. My father invited me to run over and spend Christmas with him, but I dreaded the interruption and the delay in the work. I stayed and pressed forward with it, and in the last days of March the whole book stood complete.

It was one of the first nights of May. The first warm, spring-like night of the season, and the seats at the Concert des Amba.s.sadeurs were crowded by the Parisians consuming their brandied cherries under the canopy of fluttering light green leaves of the opening limes. I sat, one of the audience, and heard the band clashing, and watched the dancers flit on and off the glittering diminutive stage, with indifferent eyes and ears.

I was thinking of my success. The band might thunder its hardest, but it could not drown the publisher's voice in my ears, which repeated over and over the words I had heard that morning. "Yes, M'sieur, your book has been accepted. We shall hope to bring it out in September."

I sat there at peace with all the world. Howard was entirely forgiven now; my father's treatment forgotten. Let the past go. What did anything matter? And I tapped my stick on the flooring at the end of the songs I had barely heard, out of sheer good humour, and swallowed the second-rate brandy and smoked an infamous cigar with imperturbable complacence; and as I got up with the ma.s.s at the finale I heard my nearest neighbour's remark to his companion, which might be freely translated thus:

"How jolly these pigs of English always look!"

As I was leaving, a woman ran down the gravel walk after me, and slipped her arm through mine. I turned and paused. She was very small, pretty, and Parisian from her black eyebrows, c.o.c.ked like one of her own circ.u.mflex accents, to her patent shoes under her silk skirt.

"What do you want" I said, in her own tongue, of course. "Money?"

"We don't put it like that!" she said, thrusting out her red lips.

"Well, it comes to that in the end generally," I said, whirling my cane round in my hand and smiling." It will save you trouble if you take it now," and I offered her two five-franc pieces and withdrew my arm. "Go to the bar and drink my health with it!" She took the money, but still looked at me.

"Give me a kiss!" she said in a low tone, so low that I did not catch the last word.

"Give you what" I asked.

She stamped her foot.

"Un baiser!" she said, with a little French scream. "Embra.s.se moi!

Stupide!"

I laughed slightly as I looked down upon her. It seemed so ludicrous, the proposition, just then to me. I had hardly lived the life I had in Paris for the last thirty months, to now, in the moment of success and freedom, mar its remembrance by even so much as a chance kiss to a cafe chantant girl.

For a second we looked at each other. I noted the tint and the curl of the offered lips, damp with cosmetic, and suggestive of past kisses, and the untouched lips of Lucia seemed almost against my own as I looked. Then I loosened her hand, which clung to my sleeve, and turned from her, and went on down the path. She shrieked some vile French words after me, and sent the five-franc piece rolling after me down the gravel slope.

I laughed and shrugged my shoulders without looking back, and went on out of the gardens down into the now silent streets. What a flood of good spirits poured through my frame as I pa.s.sed on! I hardly seemed to walk. The buoyant, almost intolerable, unbearable sense of elation within me seemed pressing me forward without volition.

The incident just pa.s.sed, the woman's hand on mine, the woman's words, though from her they were nothing to me, had yet touched and unlocked those impulses which, until now, had been so sternly repressed, barred down, sepulchred and sealed. They rose upwards, and with an exultant triumph I remembered I was free now to live and to love. My work was done, honourably and faithfully accomplished.

Thirty months lay behind me, an unblemished scroll in time, recording one unbroken stretch of labour, suffering, and repression. And now it was over, and I was at liberty. An unspeakable animation swelled in me; and through all the excited, burning frame seemed to run living fire that formed one thought in my brain, one loved word on my lips--Lucia!

Like two planets, at the end of each dark street I turned, I seemed to see her eyes. To her, to her my feet seemed carrying me. I was only returning to my empty room, but no matter! A few days more and then England and Lucia!

I was glad now of everything I had suffered, every emotion repressed, every weakness vanquished. Strange, wonderful power that lies in that slight, grey tissue which we call brain! It seemed hardly credible that this buoyant sense of exultation, this overflowing, stupendous joy of gratified pride and ambition, this triumphant pleasure in my own powers and their recognition at last, these brilliant vistas that opened in my thoughts, could come from the movements of a little matter with a little blood flowing through it. And yet, so soon, a few years and I, who seemed now like some eternal being carried through worlds of s.p.a.ce and endless cycles of years, should be--nothing. Well, no matter; I lived now and Lucia lived!

The street was quite empty, and, half unconsciously, I began to sing the song Bella Napoli, always a favourite of mine, for the sake of the refrain, Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia! The notes echoed down the silent street as the words flowed from my tongue in the intoxication of pleasure--pure, simple, single, undiluted pleasure of the relief after those weary months of strain. The ground beneath my feet seemed buoyant air, each pulse within me beat with keen life, and the name of the woman I loved formed itself again and again on my lips, fluttered and lingered there, almost like the touch of a pure and invisible kiss.

CHAPTER VI.

The lamps burned in a subdued way under their dark, rose-coloured shades, the trail of the women's skirts hardly made any sound on the thick carpet, the room was large, and the piano that was being played mildly at the other end of it failed to disturb our conversation.

"Well, now, then?"

I leant over the back of Lucia's low easy-chair and waited eagerly for her answer. It was the second night after my return to England. I had dined with the Grants, and now in this dim, secluded corner of the drawing-room I had the first opportunity of serious conversation with her.

"I don't know, Victor; not at present."