The Divine Fire
May Sinclair
CHAPTER LXI Page 1
He came into Lucia's presence with a sense of doing something voluntary and yet inevitable, something sanctioned and foreappointed; a sense of carrying on a thing already begun, of returning, through a door that had never been shut, to the life wherein alone he knew himself. And yet this life, measured by days and hours and counting their times of meeting only, ran hardly to six weeks.
Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-classic drama. Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day. Between _Helen in Leuce_ and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul.
"So many questions? They're all answered, aren't they, if I say I consent?"
"And do you?" There was acute anxiety in his voice and eyes. It struck her as painful that the man, whom she was beginning to look on as possibly the greatest poet of his age, should think it necessary to plead to her for such a little thing.
"Without reservations?"
"What reservations should there be? Of course I could only be glad--and proud--that you should do me so much honour. If I can't say very much about it, don't think I don't feel it. I feel it more than I can say."
"Do you really mean it? I was afraid that it might offend you; or that you'd think I oughtn't to have written the things; or at any rate that I'd no business to show them to you. And as for the dedication, I couldn't tell how you'd feel about that."
"I can't tell either," she replied, "I don't know whether I ought to feel proud or humble about it; but I think I feel both. Your wanting to dedicate anything to me would have been enough to make me very proud. Even if it had been a little thing--but this thing is great. In some ways it seems to me the greatest thing you've done yet. I did think just at first that I ought perhaps to refuse because of that. And then I saw that, really, that was what made it easy for me to accept. It's so great that the dedication doesn't count."
"But it _does_ count. It's the only thing that counts to me. You can't take it like that and separate it from the rest. Those sonnets would still be dedicated to you even if you refused to let me write your name before them. I want you to see that they _are_ the dedication."
Lucia shook her head. She had seen it. She could see nothing else when she read them. How was it that the poet's bodily presence made inclined to ignore the reference to herself; to take these poems dedicated to her as an event, not in her life or his, but in the history of literature?
"But it is--"
"No, not to me. You wouldn't be so great a poet if it were. I don't see myself here; but I see you, and your idea of me. It's--it's dedicated to that dream of yours. Didn't I tell you your dream was divorced from reality?"
"You told me it would be reconciled to it."
"And it is, isn't it? And the reality is worth all the dreams that ever were?"
He could have told her that so it appeared to those who are bound in the house of bondage; but that in Leuce, the country of deliverance, the dream and the reality are indivisible, being both divine. He could have told her that he had known as much five years ago; even before he knew her.
"After all," he said, "that's admitting that they _are_ divided. And that, if you remember, was what I said, not what you said."
Lucia evaded the issue in a fashion truly feminine. "It doesn't matter a bit what either of us said then, so long as _you_ know now."
"There's one thing I don't know. I don't know how you really take it; or whether you will really understand. Just now I thought you did, But after all it seems you don't. You think I'm only trying to pay you a stupid literary compliment. You think when I wrote those things I didn't mean them; my imagination was simply taking a rather more eccentric flight than usual. Isn't that so?"
"I'm certainly allowing for your imagination. I can't forget that you are a poet. You won't let me forget it. I can't separate your genius from the rest of you."
"And I can't separate the rest of me from it. That makes the difference, you see." He was angry as he said that. He had wondered whether she would deal as tenderly with his passion as she had dealt with his dream; and she had dealt just as tenderly. But it was because she identified the passion with the dream. He had not been prepared for that view of it; and somehow it annoyed him. But for that, he would never have spoken as he now did. "When I wondered how you would take it I thought it might possibly strike you as something rattoo real, almost offensively so. Do you know, I'd rather you'd taken it way than that you should talk about my dreams. My _dreams_." (It was shocking, the violent emphasis of disgust the poet, the dreamer, flung into that one word.) "As if I'd dreamed that I knew you. As if I'd dreamed that I cared for you. Would you rather think I dreamed it? You can you like. Or would you rather think it was the most real thing that ever happened to me? So real that after it happened--_because_ it happened--I left off being the sort of man and the sort of poet I was, and became another sort. So real and so strong that it saved me from one or two other things, uncommonly strong and real, that had got a pretty tight hold of me, too. Would you rather think that you'd really done this for me, or I'd dreamed it all?"
She looked at his face, the unforgotten, unforgetable face, which when she first knew it had kindled and darkened so swiftly and inexplicably. She knew it now. She held the key of all its mysteries. It was the face that had turned to her five years ago with just that look; in the mouth and lifted chin that imperious impetuous determination to make her see; in the eyes that pathetic trust in her seeing. The same face; and yet it would have told her, if he had not, that he was anotman. No, not another man; but of all the ways that were then open to him to take he had chosen the noblest. And so, of all the expressions in its youth had played on singularly expressive face, it was the finest only had become dominant. That face had never lied to her. Why should he not plead for the sincerity of his passion, since it was all over now? Was it possible that there was some secret insincerity in her? How was it that she had made him think that she desired to ignore, to repudiate her part in him? That she preferred a meaningless compliment to the confession which was the highest honour that could be paid to any woman? Was it because the honour was so great that she was afraid to take it?
"Of course I would rather think it was really so."
He smiled sadly. "You know it _does_ sound as if you wanted to keep out of it."
"Does it? If I had really been in it, do you think that I wouldn't be glad and thankful? I am, even for the little that I have done. Even though I know another woman might have done as much, or more, I'm glad I was the one. But, you see, I didn't know I was in it at all. I didn't know the sort of help you wanted. Perhaps, if I had known, I couldn't have helped you. But my knowing or not knowing doesn't matter one bit. If I _did_ help you--that way--I helped some one else too. At least I should like to think I did. I should like to think that one reason why you care for your wife so much is because you cared a little for me. There is that way of looking at it." Then, lest she should seem to be seeking some extraneous justification of a fact that in her heart she abhorred, she added, "Every way I look at it I'm glad. I'm glad that you cared. I'm glad because it's been, and glad because it's over. For if it hadn't been over--"
"were you going to say?"
"I was going to say that if it hadn't been over you couldn't have given me these. I didn't say it; because it would have sounded as if that were all I cared about. As if I wouldn't have been almost as glad if you'd never written a line of them. Only in that case I should never have known."
"No. You would never have known."
"I think I should have been glad, even if the poems had been--not very good poems."
"You wouldn't have known in case either. I wouldn't have shown them to you if they had not been good. As it is, when I wrote them I never meant to show them to you."
"Oh, but I think--"
"Of course you do. But I wasn't going to print them before you'd seen them. Do you know what I'd meant to do with them--what in fact I _did_ do with them? I left them to you in my will with directions that they weren't to be published without your consent. It seems a rather unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time they might be valuable. I don't know whether they would have sold for three thousand pounds--I admit it was a draft on posterity that posterity might have dishonoured--but I thought they might possibly go a little way towards paying my debt."
"Your debt? I don't understand." But the trembling of her mouth belied its words.
"Don't you? Don't you remember?"
"No, I don't. I never _have_ remembered."
"Probably not. But you can hardly suppose that I've forgotten it."
"What has it to do with you, or me--or this?"
"Not much, perhaps; but still something, you'll admit."
"I admit nothing. I can't bear your ever having thought of it. I wish you hadn't told me. It spoils everything."
"Does it? Such a little thing? Surely a friend might be allowed to leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead? And it wasn't _his_ fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?"
The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.
"I can't--I can't--"
"Well," he said gently, fearing the appearance of grossness in pressing the question, "we can settle that afterwards, can't we? Meanwhile at all events the publication rests you."
"The publication has nothing whatever to do with me--The dedication, _perhaps_."
"You've accepted that. Still, you might object to your name appearing before the public with mine."
Lucia looked bewildered. She thought she had followed him in all his subtleties; but she had had difficulty in realizing that he was actually proposing to suppress his poems in deference to her scruples, if she had any. Some shadowy notion of his meaning was penetrating her now.
"My name," she said, "will mean nothing to the public."
"Then you consent?"
"Of course. It's absurd to talk about my consent. Besides, why should I mind now--when it is all over?"
His anxiety had deepened to an agony which seemed to have made his face grow sharp and thin almost as she looked at him. She judged that this question was vital, and that the truth was required of her.
"No, not to that. You see, it's only because it's all over that I've consented now."
"I see; that's the condition? You would never have consented but for that."
"Why should we talk about that now?"
"I wanted to know the truth."
"Why should you? It's a truth that has nothing to do with things as they are, only with things as they might have been. Isn't it enough to be glad that they weren't, that it is all over, and that this is the end of it?"
Even as she said the words it struck her that there was something ominous in this reiteration.
"But it isn't all over. This isn't the end of it."
His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the intense vibration of the tones. There was a pause in which they seemed still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the passionate pulse of sound.
"I didn't mean to tell you. I know you'd rather think it wasn't so. And I would have let you think it if it hadn't been for what you told me--what I made you tell me."
"I don't understand. What did I tell you?"
"You told me the truth." He spoke with a sudden savage energy. "How could I go on lying after that?"
She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes there was pain and a vague terror.
"I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it. But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one condition, and I know that I can't possibly fulfil the condition, what am I to do? Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for doing you knew?"