The Divine Fire
May Sinclair
CHAPTER XXIV Page 2
Kitty was right. He was nice to look at. She was beginning to know the changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features became suddenly subtle and serious and straight. At the moment his eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under the shadow of the eye-bone. But when he grew excited (as he frequently did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at you, then light, then fire. was what they were doing now; for now he let himself go.
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.
"And Achilles?"
"Achilles is strength, virility, indestructible _will_."
It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling purified his speech, and as he pronounced 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 manuscript, "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 classical; 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."
"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 manuscript 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 classic 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-classic 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-classic 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 its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality. That was so; but how on earth did she know it?
"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 embarrassed. "Oh, after dinner, 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 whetthings 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."
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--"
The salary? He smiled. She had opened the door of heaven for him and she actually proposed to pay him for walking in!
And still he said nothing. But the fine long nervous hands tortured each other in their clasp. So this was what came of keeping up the farce?
"Of course," she said, "you must think it over."
"Miss Harden, I don't know how to thank you. I don't know what to say."
"Don't say anything. Think."
And yet her scheme was entirely in keeping with that ideal and fantastic world he lived in; a world which in the last six days had yet, for him, the illusion of reality. He was aware that it _was_ illusion. An illusion which she blindly shared.
He wondered how much of him she understood. Should he tell her that she did not understand him at all; that she was engaging as her private secretary a young man who drank, who was quite shockingly drunk no longer ago than the middle of last week; a young man who was an intimate friend of a lady whom it was impossible to describe accurately in her presence? Or did she understand him better than he understood himself? Had she, with her child's innocence, the divine lucidity of a child? Did she fail to realize his baser possibilities because they were the least real part of him? Or was she, in this, ideal and fantastic too?
Whichever it was, her fascination was so persuasive that he found himself yielding to her proposal as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He accepted it as humbly, as gratefully, as gravely, as if it were a thing actually in her power to bestow. If he could have suspected her of any intention to patronize him, he could not have resented it, knowing as he did its pathetic impotence.
"I know it isn't the best way," she said, "but it _is_ a way.
"It's a glorious way."
"I don't know about the glory. But you will see Florence and Venice and Rome, and they are glorious."
Yes, he would see them, if she said so. Why not? In this ideal and fantastic world, could any prospect be more ideal and fantastic than another?
"And you will have plenty of time to yourself. You will be a great deal alone. Too much alone perhaps. You must think of that. It might really be better for you to stay in London where you are beginning to make friends."
Was she trying to break it to him as gently, as delicately as possible that there would be no intimacy between him and her? That as her private secretary his privacy would be painfully unbroken?
She saw it and corrected herself. "Friends, I mean, who may be able to help you more. You must choose between the two advantages. It will be a complete break with your old life."
This time she did not see. "Well--don't be in a hurry. isn't any hurry. Remember, it means a whole year out of your life."
A whole year out of his life? Was that the way she looked at it?
Yes. She was giving him his chance; but she did not conceive herself to be giving him anything more. She understood him sufficiently to trust him; her insight went so far and no farther. She actually believed that there could be a choice for him between seeing her every day for a whole year and never seeing her again. Evidently she had not the remotest conception of his state of mind. He doubted whether it could have occurred to her to allow for the possibility of her private secretary falling in love with her in the innermost privacy of his secretaryship. He saw that hers was not the order of mind that entertains such possibilities on an intimate footing. She was generous, large-sighted; he understood that she would let herself be carried away on the superb sweep of the impersonal, reckless of contingencies. He also understood that with this particular private secretary she would consider herself safe. The social difference was as much her protection as some preposterous incompatibility of age. And as if that were not enough, in their thoughts they were so akin that she might feel herself guarded from him by some law of spiritual consanguinity.
"Oh, my life--" he said with a queer short laugh that sounded like a sob,--"well, I must be getting back to my work."
"You are _not_ going to work again to-night?"
"I must." Yet he did not get up to go. He seemed to be waiting to say something. "I--I haven't thanked you. I don't know how to."
"Don't try. I've done nothing. There is little that one person can do for another."
"There's something that you might do for me--some day--if I might ask--if you would."
"What is that?"
She followed his gaze as it travelled into the depth of the room beyond the circle of the lamp-light, where the grand piano stood. Its keyboard shone in an even band of white, its massive body merged in the gleaming darkness.
"If you would play to me--some day."
"I will play to you with pleasure." Her voice sounded as if she were breathing more freely; perhaps she had wondered what on earth he was going to say. "Now, if you like."
Why not? If she had enjoyed his music, had he not a right to enjoy hers? Why should she not give him that little pleasure, he who had so few?
"What shall I play?"
"I should like to hear that thing you were playing the other night."
"Yes, if it isn't too late." The moment he had said it he reflected that that was a scruple that might have been better left to the lady.
He watched her grey-white figure departing into the dusk of the room. He longed to follow, but some fear restrained him. He remained where he was, leaning back in the deep chair under the lamp while she sat down there in the dusk, playing to him the Sonata Appassionata.
The space around the lamp grew dim to him; she had gathered into herself all the whiteness of the flame; the music was a part of her radiance, it was the singing of her pulses, the rhythm of her breath.
When she had stopped playing he rose and held out his hand to say good-night.
"Thank you. I don't think so badly of my life now. You've given me one perfect moment."
"Are you so fond of music?"
She was about to ring when he prevented her.
"Please don't ring. I can find my way. I'd rather."
She judged that he desired to keep the perfection of his moment unimpaired. She understood his feeling about it, for the Sonata Appassionata is a most glorious and moving composition, and she had played it well.
It was true that he desired to be alone; and he took advantage of his solitude to linger in the picture gallery. He went down the double row of portraits that began with Sir Thomas, the maker of madrigals, and ended with Sir Frederick, the father of Lucia. He paused at each, searching for Lucia's likeness in the likeness of those dead and gone gentlemen and ladies; gentlemen with grave and intellectual faces, some peevish, others proud (rather like Jewdwine), ladies with faces joyous, dreamy, sad, voluptuous, tender and insipid, faces alike only in their indestructible racial distinction. Lucia had taken nothing from them but what was beautiful and fine; hers was the deep-drawn unconscious beauty of the race; beauty of flesh and blood purified, spiritualized in its passage through the generations, beauty that gives the illusion of eternity, being both younger and older than the soul. It was as Nature had become Art in the making of Lucia, forming her by the subtlest processes of selection and rejection.
Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room. Sir Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously, incredibly like his daughter's (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference). His eyebrows had a far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth and eyes. And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested Lucia's with its long-drawn subtle curve.
He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door. Lucia stood beside him. She had a lamp in her hand which she raised for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait. Her own face appeared as illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of love.
"That is my father," she said simply, and passed on.
He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.
"There are some things," he said to himself, "that she could never see."