The Divine Fire
May Sinclair
CHAPTER XXXVIII Page 1
Rickman, it seemed, was doomed to inspire that sense of agonizing uncertainty.
It was the second evening after his return. The Dinner was not going off well. Miss Walker was depressed, Mr. Spinks was not in his accustomed spirits, and Mrs. Downey had been going about with red eyes all day. Mr. Rickman had confided to her the deplorable state of his finances. And Mrs. Downey had said to herself she had known from the first that he would not be permanent.
He didn't want to be permanent. He desired to vanish, to disappear from the boarding-house and the boarders, and from Poppy Grace on the balcony next door; to get away from every face and every voice that he had known before he knew Lucia Harden's. Being convinced that he would never see her again, he wanted to be alone with his vivid and piercing memory of her. At first it was the pain that pierced. She had taken out her little two-edged sword and stabbed him. It wouldn't have mattered, he said, if the sword had been a true little sword, but it wasn't; it had snapt and left a nasty bit of steel inside him. Her last phrase was the touch that finished him. But the very sting of it created a healthy reaction. By his revolt against that solitary instance of her cruelty he had recovered his right to dwell upon her kindness. He dwelt upon it until at times he entered again into possession of the tender, beautiful, dominating dream. So intense was his hallucination, that as he walked alone in any southerly direction he still felt Muttersmoor on his right hand and Harcombe on his left, and he had waked in the morning to the sound of the sea beating upon Harmouth beach.
But these feelings visited him more rarely in the boarding-house than elsewhere. That was why he wanted to get away from it. The illusion was destroyed by these irrelevant persons of the dinner-table. Not that he noticed them much; but when he did it was to discover in them some quality that he had not observed before. He found imbecility in the manners of Spinks, coarseness and violence in the figures of Mrs. Downey and Miss Bishop, insipidity in the whole person of Miss Flossie Walker. And now, as he looked round the table, he wondered how it was he ever came there. After living for four weeks with Lucia Harden or the thought of her, he had a positive difficulty in recognizing even Spinks and Flossie as people he had once intimately known. Miss Roots alone, for some inscrutable reason, seemed familiar, in keeping with that divine experience to which the actual hour did violence. It was almost as if she understood.
A shrewdly sympathetic glance went out from a pair of hazel eyes set in a plain, clever, strenuous face. Miss Roots was glad, she said, to see him back again. He turned to her with the question that had never failed to flatter and delight. Was Miss Roots doing anything specially interesting now? But there was no interest in his tone.
Miss Roots looked up with a smile that would have been gay if it had not been so weary. Yes, she was collecting material for a book on Antimachus of Colophon. No, not her own book.
(At the mention of Antimachus of Colophon, Mr. Soper folded his arms and frowned with implacable resentment. Mr. Soper was convinced that these subjects were introduced on purpose to exclude him from the conversation.)
Miss Roots, like Mr. Rickman, lived apart from the murmur of the boarding-house. She had raised a barrier of books in a bedroom six feet by nine, behind which she worked obscurely. She had never been known to converse until Mr. Rickman came. A sort of fluctuating friendship had sprung up between Mr. Rickman and Miss Roots. He had an odd feeling, half pity, half liking, for this humble servant of literature, doomed to its labour, ignorant of its delight. And yet Miss Roots had a heart which went out to the mad-cap journalist, wild with youth and the joy of letters. And now these things were coming back to her. The sources of intellectual desire had been drying up with the blood in her cheeks; but when Rickman came they began to flow again. When Rickman talked as only he could talk, Miss Roots felt a faint fervour, a reminiscent thrill. She preened her poor little thoughts as if for pairing time, when soul fluttered to soul across the dinner-table. She knew that, intellectually speaking, she had been assigned to Rickman; for Mrs. Downey held that just as Mr. Rickman was the first to rouse Miss Roots to conversation, so Miss Roots alone had the power of drawing him out to the best advantage.
"Indeed?" said Rickman in a voice devoid of all intelligence.
Now if anything could have drawn Mr. Rickman out it was Antimachus of Colophon. Four weeks ago he would have been more interested in Antimachus than Miss Roots herself, he would have talked about him by the hour together. So that when he said nothing but "Indeed?" she perceived that something was the matter with him. But she also perceived that he was anxious to be talked to, therefore she talked on.
"So you've been staying in Harmouth?"
"Why?" he asked. "Have you been there?"
"I've not only been there, I was born there."
He looked at her. Miss Roots had always been, to say the least of it, prosaic, and now it was as if poetry had dropped from her lips, as if she had said, "I too was born in Arcadia."
"I suppose," she said, "you saw that beautiful old house by the river?"
"Which beautiful old house by the river?"
"Court House. You see it from the bridge. You must have noticed it."
"Oh, yes, I know the one you mean."
"Did you happen to see or hear anything of the lady who lives in it? Miss Lucia Harden?"
His words seemed to be torn from him in pieces, shaken by the violent beating of his heart.
"Know her?" said Miss Roots. "I lived five years with her. I taught her."
He looked at her again in wonder, in wonder and a sort of tenderness. For a second his heart had come to life again and leapt like a lunatic to his lips. Happily his wits were there before it. He stroked his upper lip, as if brushing away some wild phrase that sat there.
"Then I'm sure," he said, contriving a smile, "that Miss Harden is an exceedingly well educated lady."
Miss Roots' hazel eyes looked up at him intelligently; but as they met that unnatural smile of gallantry there was a queer compression of her shrewd and strenuous face. She changed the subject. He wondered if by any chance she knew; if she corresponded with Miss Harden; if Miss Harden had mentioned him in the days before her troubles came; if Miss Roots were trying to test him, to draw him out as she had never drawn him out before. No, it was not in the least likely that Miss Harden should have mentioned him; if she had, Miss Roots would have said so. She would never have set a trap for him; she was a kind and straightforward little lady. Her queer look meant nothing, it was only way of dealing with a compliment.
The sweat on his forehead witnessed to the hot labour of his thought. He wondered whether anybody had observed it.
Mr. Soper had, and drew his own conclusions.
"'E's been at it again," said Mr. Soper, with significance. But nobody took any notice of him; and upstairs in the drawing-room that night his bon-bons failed to charm.
"I suppose you're pleased," said he, approaching his hostess, "now you've got Mr. Rickman back again?"
A deeper flush than the Dinner could account for was Mrs. Downey's sole reply.
"'is manners 'aven't improved since 'is residence in the country. I met 'im in the City to-day--wy, we were on the same slab of pavement--and 'e went past and took no more notice of me than if I'd been the Peabody statue."
"Depend upon it, he was full of something."
"Full of unsociability and conceit. And wot is 'e? Wot is 'e? 'Is father keeps a bookshop."
"A very fine bookshop, too," said Miss Roots. It was the first time that she had ever spoken of her own accord to Mr. Soper.
"He may have come out lately, but you should have seen the way 'e began, in a dirty little second 'and shop in the City. A place," said Mr. Soper, "I wouldn't 'ave put my nose into if I was paid. Crammed full of narsty, mangy, 'Olloway Street rubbish."
"Look here now," said Mr. Spinks, now scarlet with fury, "you needn't throw his business in his face, for he's chucked it."
"I don't think any the better of him for that."
"Don't you? Well, he won't worry himself into fits about your opinion."
"'Ad he got a new berth then, when he flung up the old one?"
Now one thing Mrs. Downey, with all her indulgence, did not permit, and that was any public allusion to her boarders' affairs. She might not refuse to discuss them privately with Miss Bramble or Miss Roots, but that was a very different thing. Therefore she maintained a dignified silence.
"Well, then, I should like to know 'ow he's going to pay 'is way."
Before the grossness of this insinuation Mrs. Downey abandoned her policy of silence.
"Some day," said Mrs. Downey, "Mr. Rickman will be in a very different position to wot he is now. You mark my words." (And nobody marked them but little Flossie Walker.)
Two tears rolled down Mrs. Downey's face and mingled with the tartan of her blouse. A murmur of sympathy went round the room, and Mr. Soper perceived that the rest of the company were sitting in an atmosphere of emotion from which he was shut out.
"I beg of you, Mr. Soper, that you will let Mr. Rickman be, for once this evening. Living together as we do, we all ought," said Mrs. Downey, "to respect each other's feelings."
"Ah--feelings. Wot sort of respect does your young gentleman ever show to mine? Takes me up one day and cuts me dead the next."
"He wouldn't have dreamed of such a thing if he hadn't been worried in his mind. Mr. Rickman, Mr. Soper, is in trouble."
Mr. Soper was softened. "Is he? Well, really, I'm very sorry to hear it, very sorry, I'm sure."
"My fear is," said Mrs. Downey, controlling her voice with difficulty, "that he may be leaving us."
"If he does, Mrs. Downey, nobody will regret it more than I do."
"Well, I hope it won't come to that."
Mrs. Downey did not consider it politic to add that she was prepared to make any sacrifice to prevent it. It was as well that Mr. Soper should realize the consequences of an inability to pay your way. She was not prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of keeping _him_.
"But what," said Mrs. Downey to herself, "will the Dinner be without Mr. Rickman?"
The Dinner was, in her imagination, a function, a literary symposium. At the present moment, if you were to believe Mrs. Downey, no dinner-table in London could show such a gathering of remarkable people. But to none of these remarkable people did Mrs. Downey feel as she felt to Mr. Rickman, who was the most remarkable of them all. By her own statement she had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for studying the ways of genius. was a room at Mrs. Downey's which she exhibited with pride as "Mr. Blenkinsop's room." Mr. Blenkinsop was a poet, and Mr. Rickman had succeeded him. If Mrs. Downey did not immediately recognize Mr. Rickman as a genius it was because he was so utterly unlike Mr. Blenkinsop. But she had felt from the first that, as she expressed it, "there was something about him," though what it was she couldn't really say. Only from the first she had had that feeling in heart--"He will not be permanent." The joy she had in his youth and mystery was drenched with the pathos of mutability. Mrs. Downey rebelled against mutability's decree. "Perhaps," she said, "we might come to some arrangement."
All night long in her bedroom on the ground-floor, Mrs. Downey lay awake considering what arrangement could be come to. This was but a discreet way of stating previous determination to make any sacrifice if only she could keep him. The sacrifice which Mrs. Downey (towards the small hours of the morning) found herself contemplating amounted to no less than four shillings a week. Occupying his present bed-sitting room he should remain for twenty-one shillings a week instead of twenty-five.
Unfortunately, at breakfast the next morning their evil genius prompted Mr. Spinks and Mr. Soper to display enormous appetites, and Mrs. Downey, to her everlasting shame, was herself tempted of the devil. A fall of four shillings a week, serious enough in itself, was not to be contemplated with gentlemen eating their heads off in that fashion. It would have to be made up in some way, to be taken out of somebody or something. She would--yes, she would take it out of them all round by taking it out of the Dinner. And yet when it came to the point, Mrs. Downey's soul recoiled from the immorality of this suggestion. There rose before her, as in a vision, the Dinner of the future, solid in essentials but docked of its splendour, its character and its pride. No; that must not be. What the Dinner was now it must remain as long as there were eight boarders to eat it. If Mrs. Downey made any sacrifice she must make it pure.
"On the condition," said Mrs. Downey by way of putting a business-like face on it, "on the condition of his permanence."
But it seemed that twenty-one shillings were more than Mr. Rickman could afford to pay.
Mrs. Downey spent another restless night, and again towards the small hours of the morning she decided on a plan. After breakfast she watched Mr. Soper out of the dining-room, closed the door behind him offensive and elaborate precaution, and approached Mr. Rickman secretly. If he would promise not to tell the other gentlemen, she would let him have the third floor back for eighteen shillings.
Mr. Rickman stood by the door like one in great haste to be gone. He could not afford eighteen shillings either. He would stay he was on the old terms for a fortnight, at the end of which time, he said firmly, he would be obliged to go. Mr. Rickman's blue eyes were dark and profound with the pathos of recent illness and suffering, so that he appeared to be touched by Mrs. Downey's kindness. But he wasn't touched by it; no, not the least bit in the world. His heart inside him was like a great lump of dried leather. Mrs. Downey looked at him, sighed, and said no more. Things were more serious with him than she had supposed.