“I think you are wise, and I shall mar my philosophy with no more murders. If, indeed, I have killed him; for I assure you that beyond administering the poison to his wretched body I have done nothing. Perhaps he is not dead. Can you hear his heart beating?”
“I can hear the spoons of my children beating on their empty platters!”
“Is it like that with you? Poor devil! Oh, poor, poor devil! Philosophers should have no wives, no children, no homes, and no hearts.”
Bennett turned from the man with unspeakable loathing.
“I hate you and such as you!” he cried weakly. “You justify the existence of the police. You make me despise myself because I realise that your crimes are no less mine than yours. I do not ask you to defend the deadness of that thing lying there. I shall stir no finger to have you hanged, for the thought of suicide repels me, and I cannot separate your blood and mine. We are common children of a noble mother, and for our mother’s sake I say farewell.”
And without waiting for the man’s answer he passed from the house to the street.
IV
Haggard and with rebellious limbs, Police-constable Bennett staggered into the superintendent’s office in the early morning.
“I have paid careful attention to your advice,” he said to the superintendent, “and I have passed across the city in search of crime. In its place I have found but folly–such folly as you have, such folly as I have myself–the common heritage of our blood. It seems that in some way I have bound myself to bring criminals to justice. I have passed across the city, and I have found no man worse than myself. Do what you will with me.”
The superintendent cleared his throat.
“There have been too many complaints concerning the conduct of the police,” he said; “it is time that an example was made. You will be charged with being drunk and disorderly while on duty.”
“I have a wife and three little children,” said Bennett softly–“and three pretty little children.” And he covered his tired face with his hands.
The Conjurer
Certainly the audience was restive. In the first place it felt that it had been defrauded, seeing that Cissie Bradford, whose smiling face adorned the bills outside, had, failed to appear, and secondly, it considered that the deputy for that famous lady was more than inadequate. To the little man who sweated in the glare of the limelight and juggled desperately with glass balls in a vain effort to steady his nerve it was apparent that his turn was a failure. And as he worked he could have cried with disappointment, for his was a trial performance, and a year’s engagement in the Hennings’ group of music-halls would have rewarded success. Yet his tricks, things that he had done with the utmost ease a thousand times, had been a succession of blunders, rather mirth-provoking than mystifying to the audience. Presently one of the glass balls fell crashing on the stage, and amidst the jeers of the gallery he turned to his wife, who served as his assistant.
“I’ve lost my chance,” he said, with a sob; “I can’t do it!”
“Never mind, dear,” she whispered. “There’s a nice steak and onions at home for supper.”
“It’s no use,” he said despairingly. “I’ll try the disappearing trick and then get off. I’m done here.” He turned back to the audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the mockers in a wavering voice, “I will now present to you the concluding item of my entertainment. I will cause this lady to disappear under your very eyes, without the aid of any mechanical contrivance or artificial device.” This was the merest showman’s patter, for, as a matter of fact, it was not a very wonderful illusion. But as he led his wife forward to present her to the audience the conjurer was wondering whether the mishaps that had ruined his chance would meet him even here. If something should go wrong–he felt his wife’s hand tremble in his, and he pressed it tightly to reassure her. He must make an effort, an effort of will, and then no mistakes would happen. For a second the lights danced before his eyes, then he pulled himself together. If an earthquake should disturb the curtains and show Molly creeping ignominiously away behind he would still meet his fate like a man. He turned round to conduct his wife to the little alcove from which she should vanish. She was not on the stage!
For a minute he did not guess the greatness of the disaster. Then he realised that the theatre was intensely quiet, and that he would have to explain that the last item of his programme was even more of a fiasco than the rest. Owing to a sudden indisposition–his skin tingled at the thought of the hooting. His tongue rasped upon cracking lips as he braced himself and bowed to the audience.
Then came the applause. Again and again it broke out from all over the house, while the curtain rose and fell, and the conjurer stood on the stage, mute, uncomprehending. What had happened? At first he had thought they were mocking him, but it was impossible to misjudge the nature of the applause. Besides, the stage-manager was allowing him call after call, as if he were a star. When at length the curtain remained down, and the orchestra struck up the opening bars of the next song, he staggered off into the wings as if he were drunk. There he met Mr. James Hennings himself.
“You’ll do,” said the great man; “that last trick was neat. You ought to polish up the others though. I suppose you don’t want to tell me how you did it? Well, well, come in the morning and we’ll fix up a contract.”
And so, without having said a word, the conjurer found himself hustled off by the Vaudeville Napoleon. Mr. Hennings had something more to say to his manager.
“Bit rum,” he said. “Did you see it?”
“Queerest thing we’ve struck.”
“How was it done do you think?”
“Can’t imagine. There one minute on his arm, gone the next, no trap, or curtain, or anything.”
“Money in it, eh?”
“Biggest hit of the century, I should think.”
“I’ll go and fix up a contract and get him to sign it tonight. Get on with it.” And Mr. James Hennings fled to his office.
Meanwhile the conjurer was wandering in the wings with the drooping heart of a lost child. What had happened? Why was he a success, and why did people stare so oddly, and what had become of his wife? When he asked them the stage hands laughed, and said they had not seen her. Why should they laugh? He wanted her to explain things, and hear their good luck. But she was not in her dressing-room, she was not anywhere. For a moment he felt like crying.
Then, for the second time that night, he pulled himself together. After all, there was no reason to be upset. He ought to feel very pleased about the contract, however it had happened. It seemed that his wife had left the stage in some queer way without being seen. Probably to increase the mystery she had gone straight home in her stage dress, and had succeeded in dodging the stage-door keeper. It was all very strange; but, of course, there must be some simple explanation like that. He would take a cab home and find her there already. There was a steak and onions for supper.
As he drove along in the cab he became convinced that this theory was right. Molly had always been clever, and this time she had certainly succeeded in surprising everybody. At the door of his house he gave the cabman a shilling for himself with a light heart. He could afford it now. He ran up the steps cheerfully and opened the door. The passage was quite dark, and he wondered why his wife hadn’t lit the gas.
“Molly!” he cried, “Molly!”
The small, weary-eyed servant came out of the kitchen on a savoury wind of onions.
“Hasn’t missus come home with you, sir?” she said.
The conjurer thrust his hand against the wall to steady himself, and the pattern of the wall-paper seemed to burn his finger-tips.
“Not here!” he gasped at the frightened girl. “Then where is she? Where is she?”
“I don’t know, sir,” she began stuttering; but the conjurer turned quickly and ran out of the house. Of course, his wife must be at the theatre. It was absurd ever to have supposed that she could leave the theatre in her stage dress unnoticed; and now she was probably worrying because he had not waited for her. How foolish he had been.
It was a quarter of an hour before he found a cab, and the theatre was dark and empty when he got back to it. He knocked at the stage door, and the night watchman opened it.
“My wife?” he cried. “There’s no one here now, sir,” the man answered respectfully, for he knew that a new star had risen that night.
The conjurer leant against the doorpost faintly.
“Take me up to the dressing-rooms,” he said. “I want to see whether she has been, there while I was away.”
The watchman led the way along the dark passages. “I shouldn’t worry if I were you, sir,” he said. “She can’t have gone far.” He did not know anything about it, but he wanted to be sympathetic.
“God knows,” the conjurer muttered, “I can’t understand this at all.”
In the dressing-room Molly’s clothes still lay neatly folded as she had left them when they went on the stage that night, and when he saw them his last hope left the conjurer, and a strange thought came into his mind.
“I should like to go down on the stage,” he said, “and see if there is anything to tell me of her.”
The night watchman looked at the conjurer as if he thought he was mad, but he followed him down to the stage in silence. When he was there the conjurer leaned forward suddenly, and his face was filled with a wistful eagerness.
“Molly!” he called, “Molly!”
But the empty theatre gave him nothing but echoes in reply.
The Poet’s Allegory
I
The boy came into the town at six o’clock in the morning, but the baker at the corner of the first street was up, as is the way of bakers, and when he saw the boy passing, he hailed him with a jolly shout.
“Hullo, boy! What are you after?”
“I’m going about my business,” the boy said pertly.
“And what might that be, young fellow?”
“I might be a good tinker, and worship god Pan, or I might grind scissors as sharp as the noses of bakers. But, as a matter of fact, I’m a piper, not a rat-catcher, you understand, but just a simple singer of sad songs, and a mad singer of merry ones.”
“Oh,” said the baker dully, for he had hoped the boy was in search of work. “Then I suppose you have a message.”
“I sing songs,” the boy said emphatically. “I don’t run errands for anyone save it be for the fairies.”
“Well, then, you have come to tell us that we are bad, that our lives are corrupt and our homes sordid. Nowadays there’s money in that if you can do it well.”
“Your wit gets up too early in the morning for me, baker,” said the boy. “I tell you I sing songs.”
“Aye, I know, but there’s something in them, I hope. Perhaps you bring news. They’re not so popular as the other sort, but still, as long as it’s bad news–“
“Is it the flour that has changed his brains to dough, or the heat of the oven that has made them like dead grass?”
“But you must have some news—-?”
“News! It’s a fine morning of summer, and I saw a kingfisher across the watermeadows coming along. Oh, and there’s a cuckoo back in the fir plantation, singing with a May voice. It must have been asleep all these months.”
“But, my dear boy, these things happen every day. Are there no battles or earthquakes or famines in the world? Has no man murdered his wife or robbed his neighbour? Is no one oppressed by tyrants or lied to by their officers.”
The boy shrugged his shoulders.
“I hope not,” he said. “But if it were so, and I knew, I should not tell you. I don’t want to make you unhappy.”
“But of what use are you then, if it be not to rouse in us the discontent that is alone divine? Would you have me go fat and happy, listening to your babble of kingfishers and cuckoos, while my brothers and sisters in the world are starving?”
The boy was silent for a moment.
“I give my songs to the poor for nothing,” he said slowly. “Certainly they are not much use to empty bellies, but they are all I have to give. And I take it, since you speak so feelingly, that you, too, do your best. And these others, these people who must be reminded hourly to throw their crusts out of window for the poor–would you have me sing to them? They must be told that life is evil, and I find it good; that men and women are wretched, and I find them happy; that food and cleanliness, order and knowledge are the essence of content while I only ask for love. Would you have me lie to cheat mean folk out of their scraps?”
The baker scratched his head in astonishment.
“Certainly you are very mad,” he said. “But you won’t get much money in this town with that sort of talk. You had better come in and have breakfast with me.”
“But why do you ask me?” said the boy, in surprise.
“Well, you have a decent, honest sort of face, although your tongue is disordered.”
“I had rather it had been because you liked my songs,” said the boy, and he went in to breakfast with the baker.
II
Over his breakfast the boy talked wisely on art, as is the wont of young singers, and afterwards he went on his way down the street.
“It’s a great pity,” said the baker; “he seems a decent young chap.”
“He has nice eyes,” said the baker’s wife.
As the boy passed down the street he frowned a little.
“What is the matter with them?” he wondered. “They’re pleasant people enough, and yet they did not want to hear my songs.”
Presently he came to the tailor’s shop, and as the tailor had sharper eyes than the baker, he saw the pipe in the boy’s pocket.
“Hullo, piper!” he called. “My legs are stiff. Come and sing us a song!”
The boy looked up and saw the tailor sitting cross-legged in the open window of his shop.
“What sort of song would you like?” he asked.
“Oh! the latest,” replied the tailor. “We don’t want any old songs here.” So the boy sung his new song of the kingfisher in the water-meadow and the cuckoo who had overslept itself.
“And what do you call that?” asked the tailor angrily, when the boy had finished.
“It’s my new song, but I don’t think it’s one of my best.” But in his heart the boy believed it was, because he had only just made it.
“I should hope it’s your worst,” the tailor said rudely. “What sort of stuff is that to make a man happy?”
“To make a man happy!” echoed the boy, his heart sinking within him.
“If you have no news to give me, why should I pay for your songs! I want to hear about my neighbours, about their lives, and their wives and their sins. There’s the fat baker up the street–they say he cheats the poor with light bread. Make me a song of that, and I’ll give you some breakfast. Or there’s the magistrate at the top of the hill who made the girl drown herself last week. That’s a poetic subject.”
“What’s all this!” said the boy disdainfully. “Can’t you make dirt enough for yourself!”
“You with your stuff about birds,” shouted the tailor; “you’re a rank impostor! That’s what you are!”
“They say that you are the ninth part of a man, but I find that they have grossly exaggerated,” cried the boy, in retort; but he had a heavy heart as he made off along the street.
By noon he had interviewed the butcher, the cobbler, the milkman, and the maker of candlesticks, but they treated him no better than the tailor had done, and as he was feeling tired he went and sat down under a tree.
“I begin to think that the baker is the best of the lot of them,” he said to himself ruefully, as he rolled his empty wallet between his fingers.
Then, as the folly of singers provides them in some measure with a philosophy, he fell asleep.
III
When he woke it was late in the afternoon, and the children, fresh from school, had come out to play in the dusk. Far and near, across the town-square, the boy could hear their merry voices, but he felt sad, for his stomach had forgotten the baker’s breakfast, and he did not see where he was likely to get any supper. So he pulled out his pipe, and made a mournful song to himself of the dancing gnats and the bitter odour of the bonfires in the townsfolk’s gardens. And the children drew near to hear him sing, for they thought his song was pretty, until their fathers drove them home, saying, “That stuff has no educational value.”
“Why haven’t you a message?” they asked the boy.
“I come to tell you that the grass is green beneath your feet and that the sky is blue over your heads.”
“Oh I but we know all that,” they answered.
“Do you! Do you!” screamed the boy. “Do you think you could stop over your absurd labours if you knew how blue the sky is? You would be out singing on the hills with me!”
“Then who would do our work?” they said, mocking him.
“Then who would want it done?” he retorted; but it’s ill arguing on an empty stomach.
But when they had tired of telling him what a fool he was, and gone away, the tailor’s little daughter crept out of the shadows and patted him on the shoulder.
“I say, boy!” she whispered. “I’ve brought you some supper. Father doesn’t know.” The boy blessed her and ate his supper while she watched him like his mother and when he had done she kissed him on the lips.
“There, boy!” she said.
“You have nice golden hair,” the boy said.
“See! it shines in the dusk. It strikes me it’s the only gold I shall get in this town.”
“Still it’s nice, don’t you think?” the girl whispered in his ear. She had her arms round his neck.
“I love it,” the boy said joyfully; “and you like my songs, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, I like them very much, but I like you better.”
The boy put her off roughly.
“You’re as bad as the rest of them,” he said indignantly. “I tell you my songs are everything, I am nothing.”
“But it was you who ate my supper, boy,” said the girl.
The boy kissed her remorsefully. “But I wish you had liked me for my songs,” he sighed. “You are better than any silly old songs!”
“As bad as the rest of them,” the boy said lazily, “but somehow pleasant.”
The shadows flocked to their evening meeting in the square, and overhead the stars shone out in a sky that was certainly exceedingly blue.
IV
Next morning they arrested the boy as a rogue and a vagabond, and in the afternoon they brought him before the magistrate.
“And what have you to say for yourself!” said the magistrate to the boy, after the second policeman, like a faithful echo, had finished reading his notes.
“Well,” said the boy, “I may be a rogue and a vagabond. Indeed, I think that I probably am; but I would claim the license that has always been allowed to singers.”
“Oh!” said the magistrate. “So you are one of those, are you! And what is your message!”
“I think if I could sing you a song or two I could explain myself better,” said the boy.
“Well,” replied the magistrate doubtfully, “you can try if you like, but I warn you that I wrote songs myself when I was a boy, so that I know something about it.”
“Oh, I’m glad of that,” said the boy, and he sang his famous song of the grass that is so green, and when he had finished the magistrate frowned.
“I knew that before,” he said.
So then the boy sang his wonderful song of the sky that is so blue. And when he had finished the magistrate scowled. “And what are we to learn from that!” he said.
So then the boy lost his temper and sang some naughty doggerel he had made up in his cell that morning. He abused the town and townsmen, but especially the townsmen. He damned their morals, their customs, and their institutions. He said that they had ugly faces, raucous voices, and that their bodies were unclean. He said they were thieves and liars and murderers, that they had no ear for music and no sense of humour. Oh, he was bitter!
“Good God!” said the magistrate, “that’s what I call real improving poetry. Why didn’t you sing that first? There might have been a miscarriage of justice.”
Then the baker, the tailor, the butcher, the cobbler, the milkman, and the maker of candlesticks rose in court and said–
“Ah, but we all knew there was something in him.”
So the magistrate gave the boy a certificate that showed that he was a real singer, and the tradesmen gave him a purse of gold, but the tailor’s little daughter gave him one of her golden ringlets. “You won’t forget, boy, will you?” she said.
“Oh, no,” said the boy; “but I wish you had liked my songs.”
Presently, when he had come a little way out of the town, he put his hand in his wallet and drew out the magistrate’s certificate and tore it in two; and then he took out the gold pieces and threw them into the ditch, and they were not half as bright as the buttercups. But when he came to the ringlet he smiled at it and put it back.
“Yet she was as bad as the rest of them,” he thought with a sigh.
And he went across the world with his songs.
And Who Shall Say—-?
It was a dull November day, and the windows were heavily curtained, so that the room was very dark. In front of the fire was a large arm-chair, which shut whatever light there might be from the two children, a boy of eleven and a girl about two years younger, who sat on the floor at the back of the room. The boy was the better looking, but the girl had the better face. They were both gazing at the arm-chair with the utmost excitement.
“It’s all right. He’s asleep,” said the boy.
“Oh, do be careful! you’ll wake him,” whispered the girl.
“Are you afraid?”
“No, why should I be afraid of my father, stupid?”
“I tell you he’s not father any more. He’s a murderer,” the boy said hotly. “He told me, I tell you. He said, `I have killed your mother, Ray,’ and I went and looked, and mother was all red. I simply shouted, and she wouldn’t answer. That means she’s dead. His hand was all red, too.”
“Was it paint?”
“No, of course it wasn’t paint. It was blood. And then he came down here and went to sleep.”
“Poor father, so tired.”
“He’s not poor father, he’s not father at all; he’s a murderer, and it is very wicked of you to call him father,” said the boy.
“Father,” muttered the girl rebelliously.
“You know the sixth commandment says `Thou shalt do no murder,’ and he has done murder; so he’ll go to hell. And you’ll go to hell too if you call him father. It’s all in the Bible.”
The boy ended vaguely, but the little girl was quite overcome by the thought of her badness.
“Oh, I am wicked!” she cried. “And I do so want to go to heaven.”
She had a stout and materialistic belief in it as a place of sheeted angels and harps, where it was easy to be good.
“You must do as I tell you, then,” he said. “Because I know. I’ve learnt all about it at school.”
“And you never told me,” said she reproachfully.
“Ah, there’s lots of things I know,” he replied, nodding his head.
“What must we do?” said the girl meekly. “Shall I go and ask mother?”
The boy was sick at her obstinacy.
“Mother’s dead, I tell you; that means she can’t hear anything. It’s no use talking to her; but I know. You must stop here, and if father wakes you run out of the house and call `Police!’ and I will go now and tell a policeman now.”
“And what happens then?” she asked, with round eyes at her brother’s wisdom.
“Oh, they come and take him away to prison. And then they put a rope round his neck and hang him like Haman, and he goes to hell.”
“Wha-at! Do they kill him?”
“Because he’s a murderer. They always do.”
“Oh, don’t let’s tell them! Don’t let’s tell them!” she screamed.
“Shut up!” said the boy, “or he’ll wake up. We must tell them, or we go to hell–both of us.”
But his sister did not collapse at this awful threat, as he expected, though the tears were rolling down her face. “Don’t let’s tell them,” she sobbed.
“You’re a horrid girl, and you’ll go to hell,” said the boy, in disgust. But the silence was only broken by her sobbing. “I tell you he killed mother dead. You didn’t cry a bit for mother; I did.”
“Oh, let’s ask mother! Let’s ask mother! I know she won’t want father to go to hell. Let’s ask mother!”
“Mother’s dead, and can’t hear, you stupid,” said the boy. “I keep on telling you. Come up and look.”
They were both a little awed in mother’s room. It was so quiet, and mother looked so funny. And first the girl shouted, and then the boy, and then they shouted both together, but nothing happened. The echoes made them frightened.
“Perhaps she’s asleep,” the girl said; so her brother pinched one of mother’s hands–the white one, not the red one–but nothing happened, so mother was dead.
“Has she gone to hell?” whispered the girl.
“No! she’s gone to heaven, because she’s good. Only wicked people go to hell. And now I must go and tell the policeman. Don’t you tell father where I’ve gone if he wakes up, or he’ll run away before the policeman comes.”
“Why?”
“So as not to go to hell,” said the boy, with certainty; and they went downstairs together, the little mind of the girl being much perturbed because she was so wicked. What would mother say tomorrow if she had done wrong?
The boy put on his sailor hat in the hall. “You must go in there and watch,” he said, nodding in the direction of the sitting-room. “I shall run all the way.”
The door banged, and she heard his steps down the path, and then everything was quiet.
She tiptoed into the room, and sat down on the floor, and looked at the back of the chair in utter distress. She could see her father’s elbow projecting on one side, but nothing more. For an instant she hoped that he wasn’t there–hoped that he had gone–but then, terrified, she knew that this was a piece of extreme wickedness.
So she lay on the rough carpet, sobbing hopelessly, and seeing real and vicious devils of her brother’s imagining in all the corners of the room.
Presently, in her misery, she remembered a packet of acid-drops that lay in her pocket, and drew them forth in a sticky mass, which parted from its paper with regret. So she choked and sucked her sweets at the same time, and found them salt and tasteless.
Ray was gone a long time, and she was a wicked girl who would go to hell if she didn’t do what he told her. Those were her prevailing ideas.
And presently there came a third. Ray had said that if her father woke up he would run away, and not go to hell at all. Now if she woke him up–.
She knew this was dreadfully naughty; but her mind clung to the idea obstinately. You see, father had always been so fond of mother, and he would not like to be in a different place. Mother wouldn’t like it either. She was always so sorry when father did not come home or anything. And hell is a dreadful place, full of things. She half convinced herself, and started up, but then there came an awful thought.
If she did this she would go to hell for ever and ever, and all the others would be in heaven.
She hung there in suspense, sucking her sweet and puzzling it over with knit brows.
How can one be good?
She swung round and looked in the dark corner by the piano; but the Devil was not there.
And then she ran across the room to her father, and shaking his arm, shouted, tremulously–
“Wake up, father! Wake up! The police are coming!”
And when the police came ten minutes later, accompanied by a very proud and virtuous little boy, they heard a small shrill voice crying, despairingly–
“The police, father! The police!”
But father would not wake.
The Biography Of A Superman
“O limed soul that struggling to be free Art more engaged!”
Charles Stephen Dale, the subject of my study, was a dramatist and, indeed, something of a celebrity in the early years of the twentieth century. That he should be already completely forgotten is by no means astonishing in an age that elects its great men with a charming indecision of touch. The general prejudice against the granting of freeholds has spread to the desired lands of fame; and where our profligate ancestors were willing to call a man great in perpetuity, we, with more shrewdness, prefer to name him a genius for seven years. We know that before that period may have expired fate will have granted us a sea-serpent with yet more coils, with a yet more bewildering arrangement of marine and sunset tints, and the conclusion of previous leases will enable us to grant him undisputed possession of Parnassus. If our ancestors were more generous they were certainly less discriminate; and it cannot be doubted that many of them went to their graves under the impression that it is possible for there to be more than one great man at a time! We have altered all that.
For two years Dale was a great man, or rather the great man, and it is probable that if he had not died he would have held his position for a longer period. When his death was announced, although the notices of his life and work were of a flattering length, the leaderwriters were not unnaturally aggrieved that he should have resigned his post before the popular interest in his personality was exhausted. The Censor might do his best by prohibiting the performance of all the plays that the dead man had left behind him; but, as the author neglected to express his views in their columns, and the common sense of their readers forbade the publication of interviews with him, the journals could draw but a poor satisfaction from condemning or upholding the official action. Dale’s regrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clash of personalities to an arid discussion on art. The consequence was obvious. The end of the week saw the elevation of James Macintosh, the great Scotch comedian, to the vacant post, and Dale was completely forgotten. That this oblivion is merited in terms of his work I am not prepared to admit; that it is merited in terms of his personality I indignantly wish to deny. Whatever Dale may have been as an artist, he was, perhaps in spite of himself, a man, and a man, moreover, possessed of many striking and unusual traits of character. It is to the man Dale that I offer this tribute.
Sprung from an old Yorkshire family, Charles Stephen Dale was yet sufficient of a Cockney to justify both his friends and his enemies in crediting him with the Celtic temperament. Nevertheless, he was essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors. To these two central influences we may trace most of the peculiarities that rendered him notorious and ultimately great. Thus, while his Celtic aestheticism permitted him to eat nothing but raw meat, because he mistrusted alike “the reeking products of the manure-heap and the barbaric fingers of cooks,” it was surely his modernity that made him an agnostic, because bishops sat in the House of Lords. Smaller men might dislike vegetables and bishops without allowing it to affect their conduct; but Dale was careful to observe that every slightest conviction should have its place in the formation of his character. Conversely, he was nothing without a reason.
These may seem small things to which to trace the motive forces of a man’s life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our materials will be nearly complete. “Dale hates his fellow-human- beings,” wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. But he hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of individuals, and, _pace_ the critics, the love was no less sincere than the hatred. He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker German philosophers an image of the perfect man–an image differing only in inessentials from the idol worshipped by the Imperialists as “efficiency.” He did not find–it was hardly likely that he would find–that his contemporaries fulfilled this perfect conception, and he therefore felt it necessary to condemn them for the possession of those weaknesses, or as some would prefer to say, qualities, of which the sum is human nature.
I now approach a quality, or rather the lack of a quality, that is in itself of so debatable a character, that were it not of the utmost importance in considering the life of Charles Stephen Dale I should prefer not to mention it. I refer to his complete lack of a sense of humour, the consciousness of which deficiency went so far to detract from his importance as an artist and a man. The difficulty which I mentioned above lies in the fact that, while every one has a clear conception of what they mean by the phrase, no one has yet succeeded in defining it satisfactorily. Here I would venture to suggest that it is a kind of magnificent sense of proportion, a sense that relates the infinite greatness of the universe to the finite smallness of man, and draws the inevitable conclusion as to the importance of our joys and sorrows and labours. I am aware that this definition errs on the side of vagueness; but possibly it may be found to include the truth. Obviously, the natures of those who possess this sense will tend to be static rather than dynamic, and it is therefore against the limits imposed by this sense that intellectual anarchists, among whom I would number Dale, and poets, primarily rebel. But–and it is this rather than his undoubted intellectual gifts or his dogmatic definitions of good and evil that definitely separated Dale from the normal men–there can be no doubt that he felt his lack of a sense of humour bitterly. In every word he ever said, in every line he ever wrote, I detect a painful striving after this mysterious sense, that enabled his neighbours, fools as he undoubtedly thought them, to laugh and weep and follow the faith of their hearts without conscious realisation of their own existence and the problems it induced. By dint of study and strenuous observation he achieved, as any man may achieve, a considerable degree of wit, though to the last his ignorance of the audience whom he served and despised, prevented him from judging the effect of his sallies without experiment. But try as he might the finer jewel lay far beyond his reach. Strong men fight themselves when they can find no fitter adversary; but in all the history of literature there is no stranger spectacle than this lifelong contest between Dale, the intellectual anarch and pioneer of supermen, and Dale, the poor lonely devil who wondered what made people happy.
I have said that the struggle was lifelong, but it must be added that it was always unequal. The knowledge that in his secret heart he desired this quality, the imperfection of imperfections, only served to make Dale’s attack on the complacency of his contemporaries more bitter. He ridiculed their achievements, their ambitions, and their love with a fury that awakened in them a mild curiosity, but by no means affected their comfort. Moreover, the very vehemence with which he demanded their contempt deprived him of much of his force as a critic, for they justly wondered why a man should waste his lifetime in attacking them if they were indeed so worthless. Actually, they felt, Dale was a great deal more engaged with his audience than many of the imaginative writers whom he affected to despise for their sycophancy. And, especially towards the end of his life when his powers perhaps were weakening, the devices which he used to arouse the irritation of his contemporaries became more and more childishly artificial, less and less effective. He was like one of those actors who feel that they cannot hold the attention of their audience unless they are always doing something, though nothing is more monotonous than mannered vivacity.
Dale, then, was a man who was very anxious to be modern, but at the same time had not wholly succeeded in conquering his aeesthetic sense. He had constituted himself high priest of the most puritanical and remote of all creeds, yet there was that in his blood that rebelled ceaselessly against the intellectual limits he had voluntarily accepted. The result in terms of art was chaos. Possessed of an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his conception. It is in vain to seek in any of his plays or novels, tracts or prefaces, for the product of inspiration, the divine gift that enables one man to write with the common pen of humanity. He could only employ his curiously perfect technique in reproducing the wayward flashes of a mind incapable of consecutive thought. He never attempted–and this is a hard saying–to produce any work beautiful in itself; while the confusion of his mind, and the vanity that never allowed him to ignore the effect his work might produce on his audience, prevented him from giving clear expression to his creed. His work will appeal rather to the student of men than to the student of art, and, wantonly incoherent though it often is, must be held to constitute a remarkable human document.
It is strange to reflect that among his contemporary admirers Dale was credited with an intellect of unusual clarity, for the examination of any of his plays impresses one with the number and mutual destructiveness of his motives for artistic expression. A noted debater, he made frequent use of the device of attacking the weakness of the other man’s speech, rather than the weakness of the other man’s argument. His prose was good, though at its best so impersonal that it recalled the manner of an exceptionally well-written leading article. At its worst it was marred by numerous vulgarities and errors of taste, not always, it is to be feared, intentional. His attitude on this point was typical of his strange blindness to the necessity of a pure artistic ideal. He committed these extravagances, he would say, in order to irritate his audience into a condition of mental alertness. As a matter of fact, he generally made his readers more sorry than angry, and he did not realise that even if he had been successful it was but a poor reward for the wanton spoiling of much good work. He proclaimed himself to be above criticism, but he was only too often beneath it. Revolting against the dignity, not infrequently pompous, of his fellow-men of letters, he played the part of clown with more enthusiasm than skill. It is intellectual arrogance in a clever man to believe that he can play the fool with success merely because he wishes it.
There is no need for me to enter into detail with regard to Dale’s personal appearance; the caricaturists did him rather more than justice, the photographers rather less. In his younger days he suggested a gingerbread man that had been left too long in the sun; towards the end he affected a cultured and elaborate ruggedness that made him look like a duke or a market gardener. Like most clever men, he had good eyes.
Nor is it my purpose to add more than a word to the published accounts of his death. There is something strangely pitiful in that last desperate effort to achieve humour. We have all read the account of his own death that he dictated from the sick-bed–cold, epigrammatic, and, alas! characteristically lacking in taste. And once more it was his fate to make us rather sorry than angry.
In the third scene of the second act of “Henry V.,” a play written by an author whom Dale pretended to despise, Dame Quickly describes the death of Falstaff in words that are too well known to need quotation. It was thus and no otherwise that Dale died. It is thus that every man dies.
Blue Blood
He sat in the middle of the great cafe with his head supported on his hands, miserable even to bitterness. Inwardly he cursed the ancestors who had left him little but a great name and a small and ridiculous body. He thought of his father, whose expensive eccentricities had amused his fellow-countrymen at the cost of his fortune; his mother, for whom death had been a blessing; his grandparents and his uncles, in whom no man had found any good. But most of all he cursed himself, for whose follies even heredity might not wholly account. He recalled the school where he had made no friends, the University where he had taken no degree. Since he had left Oxford, his aimless, hopeless life, profligate, but dishonourable, perhaps, only by accident, had deprived even his title of any social value, and one by one his very acquaintances had left him to the society of broken men and the women who are anything but light. And these, and here perhaps the root of his bitterness lay, even these recognised him only as a victim for their mockery, a thing more poor than themselves, whereon they could satisfy the anger of their tortured souls. And his last misery lay in this: that he himself could find no day in his life to admire, no one past dream to cherish, no inmost corner of his heart to love. The lowest tramp, the least-heeded waif of the night, might have some ultimate pride, but he himself had nothing, nothing whatever. He was a dream-pauper, an emotional bankrupt.
With a choked sob he drained his brandy and told the waiter to bring him another. There had been a period in his life when he had been able to find some measure of sentimental satisfaction in the stupor of drunkenness. In those days, through the veil of illusion which alcohol had flung across his brain, he had been able to regard the contempt of the men as the intimacy of friendship, the scorn of the women as the laughter of light love. But now drink gave him nothing but the mordant insight of morbidity, which cut through his rotten soul like cheese. Yet night after night he came to this place, to be tortured afresh by the ridicule of the sordid frequenters, and by the careless music of the orchestra which told him of a flowerless spring and of a morning which held for him no hope. For his last emotion rested in this self-inflicted pain; he could only breathe freely under the lash of his own contempt.
Idly he let his dull eyes stray about the room, from table to table, from face to face. Many there he knew by sight, from none could he hope for sympathy or even companionship. In his bitterness he envied the courage of the cowards who were brave enough to seek oblivion or punishment in death. Dropping his eyes to his soft, unlovely hands, he marvelled that anything so useless should throb with life, and yet he realised that he was afraid of physical pain, terrified at the thought of death. There were dim ancestors of his whose valour had thrilled the songs of minstrels and made his name lovely in the glowing folly of battles. But now he knew that he was a coward, and even in the knowledge he could find no comfort. It is not given to every man to hate himself gladly.
The music and the laughter beat on his sullen brain with a mocking insistence, and he trembled with impotent anger at the apparent happiness of humanity. Why should these people be merry when he was miserable, what right had the orchestra to play a chorus of triumph over the stinging emblems of his defeat? He drank brandy after brandy, vainly seeking to dull the nausea of disgust which had stricken his worn nerves; but the adulterated spirit merely maddened his brain with the vision of new depths of horror, while his body lay below, a mean, detestable thing. Had he known how to pray he would have begged that something might snap. But no man may win to faith by means of hatred alone, and his heart was cold as the marble table against which he leant. There was no more hope in the world. . . .
When he came out of the cafe, the air of the night was so pure and cool on his face, and the lights of the square were so tender to his eyes, that for a moment his harsh mood was softened. And in that moment he seemed to see among the crowd that flocked by a beautiful face, a face touched with pearls, and the inner leaves of pink rosebuds. He leant forward eagerly. “Christine!” he cried, “Christine!”
Then the illusion passed, and, smitten by the anger of the pitiless stars, he saw that he was looking upon a mere woman, a woman of the earth. He fled from her smile with a shudder.
As he went it seemed to him that the swaying houses buffeted him about as a child might play with a ball. Sometimes they threw him against men, who cursed him and bruised his soft body with their fists. Sometimes they tripped him up and hurled him upon the stones of the pavement. Still he held on, till the Embankment broke before him with the sudden peace of space, and he leant against the parapet, panting and sick with pain, but free from the tyranny of the houses.
Beneath him the river rolled towards the sea, reticent but more alive, it seemed, than the deeply painful thing which fate had attached to his brain. He pictured himself tangled in the dark perplexity of its waters, he fancied them falling upon his face like a girl’s hair, till they darkened his eyes and choked the mouth which, even now, could not breathe fast enough to satisfy him. The thought displeased him, and he turned away from the place that held peace for other men but not for him. From the shadow of one of the seats a woman’s voice reached him, begging peevishly for money.
“I have none,” he said automatically. Then he remembered and flung coins, all the money he had, into her lap. “I give it to you because I hate you!” he shrieked, and hurried on lest her thanks should spoil his spite.
Then the black houses and the warped streets had him in their grip once more, and sported with him till his consciousness waxed to one white-hot point of pain. Overhead the stars were laughing quietly in the fields of space, and sometimes a policeman or a chance passer-by looked curiously at his lurching figure, but he only knew that life was hurting him beyond endurance, and that he yet endured. Up and down the ice-cold corridors of his brain, thought, formless and timeless, passed like a rodent flame. Now he was the universe, a vast thing loathsome with agony, now he was a speck of dust, an atom whose infinite torment was imperceptible even to God. Always there was something–something conscious of the intolerable evil called life, something that cried bitterly to be uncreated. Always, while his soul beat against the bars, his body staggered along the streets, a thing helpless, unguided.
There is an hour before dawn when tired men and women die, and with the coming of this hour his spirit found a strange release from pain. Once more he realised that he was a man, and, bruised and weary as he was, he tried to collect the lost threads of reason, which the night had torn from him. Facing him he saw a vast building dimly outlined against the darkness, and in some way it served to touch a faint memory in his dying brain. For a while he wandered amongst the shadows, and then he knew that it was the keep of a castle, his castle, and that high up where a window shone upon the night a girl was waiting for him, a girl with a face of pearls and roses. Presently she came to the window and looked out, dressed all in white for her love’s sake. He stood up in his armour and flashed his sword towards the envying stars.
“It is I, my love!” he cried. “I am here.”
And there, before the dawn had made the shadows of the Law Courts grey, they found him; bruised and muddy and daubed with blood, without the sword and spurs of his honour, lacking the scented token of his love. A thing in no way tragic, for here was no misfortune, but merely the conclusion of Nature’s remorseless logic. For century after century those of his name had lived, sheltered by the prowess of their ancestors from the trivial hardships and afflictions that make us men. And now he lay on the pavement, stiff and cold, a babe that had cried itself to sleep because it could not understand, silent until the morning.
Fate And The Artist
The workmen’s dwellings stood in the northwest of London, in quaint rivalry with the comfortable ugliness of the Maida Vale blocks of flats. They were fairly new and very well built, with wide stone staircases that echoed all day to the impatient footsteps of children, and with a flat roof that served at once as a playground for them and a drying-ground for their mothers’ washing. In hot weather it was pleasant enough to play hide-and-seek or follow-my-leader up and down the long alleys of cool white linen, and if a sudden gust of wind or some unexpected turn of the game set the wet sheets flapping in the children’s faces, their senses were rather tickled than annoyed.
To George, mooning in a corner of the railings that seemed to keep all London in a cage, these games were hardly more important than the shoutings and whistlings that rose from the street below. It seemed to him that all his life–he had lived eleven years–he had been standing in a corner watching other people engaging in meaningless ploys and antics. The sun was hot, and yet the children ran about and made themselves hotter, and he wondered, as when he had been in bed with one of his frequent illnesses he had wondered at the grown-up folk who came and went, moving their arms and legs and speaking with their mouths, when it was possible to lie still and quiet and feel the moments ticking themselves off in one’s forehead. As he rested in his corner, he was conscious of the sharp edge of the narrow stone ledge on which he was sitting and the thin iron railings that pressed into his back; he smelt the evil smell of hot London, and the soapy odour of the washing; he saw the glitter of the dust, and the noises of the place beat harshly upon his ears, but he could find no meaning in it all. Life spoke to him with a hundred tongues, and all the while he was longing for silence. To the older inhabitants of the tenements he seemed a morbid little boy, unhappily too delicate for sense to be safely knocked into him; his fellow-children would have ignored him completely if he had not had strange fancies that made interesting stories and sometimes inspired games. On the whole, George was lonely without knowing what loneliness meant.
All day long the voice of London throbbed up beyond the bars, and George would regard the chimneys and the housetops and the section of lively street that fell within his range with his small, keen eyes, and wonder why the world did not forthwith crumble into silent, peaceful dust, instead of groaning and quivering in continual unrest. But when twilight fell and the children were tired of playing, they would gather round him in his corner by the tank and ask him to tell them stories. This tank was large and open and held rain water for the use of the tenants, and originally it had been cut off from the rest of the roof by some special railings of its own; but two of the railings had been broken, and now the children could creep through and sit round the tank at dusk, like Eastern villagers round the village well.
And George would tell them stories–queer stories with twisted faces and broken backs, that danced and capered merrily enough as a rule, but sometimes stood quite still and made horrible grimaces. The children liked the cheerful moral stories better, such as Arthur’s Boots.
“Once upon a time,” George would begin, “there was a boy called Arthur, who lived in a house like this, and always tied his bootlaces with knots instead of bows. One night he stood on the roof and wished he had wings like a sparrow, so that he could fly away over the houses. And a great wind began, so that everybody said there was a storm, and suddenly Arthur found he had a little pair of wings, and he flew away with the wind over the houses. And presently he got beyond the storm to a quiet place in the sky, and Arthur looked up and saw all the stars tied to heaven with little bits of string, and all the strings were tied in bows. And this was done so that God could pull the string quite easily when He wanted to, and let the stars fall. On fine nights you can see them dropping. Arthur thought that the angels must have very neat fingers to tie so many bows, but suddenly, while he was looking, his feet began to feel heavy, and he stooped down to take off his boots; but he could not untie the knots quick enough, and soon he started falling very fast. And while he was falling, he heard the wind in the telegraph wires, and the shouts of the boys who sell papers in the street, and then he fell on the top of a house. And they took him to the hospital, and cut off his legs, and gave him wooden ones instead. But he could not fly any more because they were too heavy.”
For days afterwards all the children would tie their bootlaces in bows.
Sometimes they would all look into the dark tank, and George would tell them about the splendid fish that lived in its depths. If the tank was only half full, he would whisper to the fish, and the children would hear its indistinct reply. But when the tank was full to the brim, he said that the fish was too happy to talk, and he would describe the beauty of its appearance so vividly that all the children would lean over the tank and strain their eyes in a desperate effort to see the wonderful fish. But no one ever saw it clearly except George, though most of the children thought they had seen its tail disappearing in the shadows at one time or another.
It was doubtful how far the children believed his stories; probably, not having acquired the habit of examining evidence, they were content to accept ideas that threw a pleasant glamour on life. But the coming of Jimmy Simpson altered this agreeable condition of mind. Jimmy was one of those masterful stupid boys who excel at games and physical contests, and triumph over intellectual problems by sheer braggart ignorance. From the first he regarded George with contempt, and when he heard him telling his stories he did not conceal his disbelief.
“It’s a lie,” he said; “there ain’t no fish in the tank.”
“I have seen it, I tell you,” said George.
Jimmy spat on the asphalt rudely.
“I bet no one else has,” he said.
George looked round his audience, but their eyes did not meet his. They felt that they might have been mistaken in believing that they had seen the tail of the fish. And Jimmy was a very good man with his fists. “Liar!” said Jimmy at last triumphantly, and walked away. Being masterful, he led the others with him, and George brooded by the tank for the rest of the evening in solitude.
Next day George went up to Jimmy confidently. “I was right about the fish,” he said. “I dreamed about it last night.”
“Rot!” said Jimmy; “dreams are only made-up things; they don’t mean anything.”
George crept away sadly. How could he convince such a man? All day long he worried over the problem, and he woke up in the middle of the night with it throbbing in his brain. And suddenly, as he lay in his bed, doubt came to him. Supposing he had been wrong, supposing he had never seen the fish at all? This was not to be borne. He crept quietly out of the flat, and tiptoed upstairs to the roof. The stone was very cold to his feet.
There were so many things in the tank that at first, George could not see the fish, but at last he saw it gleaming below the moon and the stars, larger and even more beautiful than he had said. “I knew I was right,” he whispered, as he crept back to bed. In the morning he was very ill.
Meanwhile blue day succeeded blue day, and while the water grew lower in the tank, the children, with Jimmy for leader, had almost forgotten the boy who had told them stories. Now and again one or other of them would say that George was very, very ill, and then they would go on with their game. No one looked in the tank now that they knew there was nothing in it, till it occurred one day to Jimmy that the dry weather should have brought final confirmation of his scepticism. Leaving his comrades at the long jump, he went to George’s neglected corner and peeped into the tank. Sure enough it was almost dry, and, he nearly shouted with surprise, in the shallow pool of sooty water there lay a large fish, dead, but still gleaming with rainbow colours.
Jimmy was strong and stupid, but not ill-natured, and, recalling George’s illness, it occurred to him that it would be a decent thing to go and tell him he was right. He ran downstairs and knocked on the door of the flat where George lived. George’s big sister opened it, but the boy was too excited to see that her eyes were wet. “Oh, miss,” he said breathlessly, “tell George he was right about the fish. I’ve seen it myself!”
“Georgy’s dead,” said the girl.
The Great Man
To the people who do not write it must seem odd that men and women should be willing to sacrifice their lives in the endeavour to find new arrangements and combinations of words with which to express old thoughts and older emotions, yet that is not an unfair statement of the task of the literary artist. Words–symbols that represent the noises that human beings make with their tongues and lips and teeth–lie within our grasp like the fragments of a jig-saw puzzle, and we fit them into faulty pictures until our hands grow weary and our eyes can no longer pretend to see the truth. In order to illustrate an infinitesimal fraction of our lives by means of this preposterous game we are willing to sacrifice all the rest. While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods with beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look into the eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. Love is an occasion for songs; Death but the overburdened father of all our saddest phrases. We are of those who are born crying into the world because they cannot speak, and we end, like Stevenson, by looking forward to our death because we have written a good epitaph. Sometimes in the course of our frequent descents from heaven to the waste-paper basket we feel that we lose too much to accomplish so little. Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh the smile of a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate the author for months of lost adventure? We have only one life to live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the history of dead hours. Our lives lack balance because we find it hard to discover a mean between the triolet we wrote last I night and the big book we are going to start tomorrow, and also because living only with our heads we tend to become top-heavy. We justify our present discomfort with the promise of a bright future of flowers and sunshine and gladdest life, though we know that in the garden of art there are many chrysalides and few butterflies. Few of us are fortunate enough to accomplish anything that was in the least worth doing, so we fall back on the arid philosophy that it is effort alone that counts.
Luckily–or suicide would be the rule rather than the exception for artists–the long process of disillusionment is broken by hours when even the most self-critical feel nobly and indubitably great; and this is the only reward that most artists ever have for their labours, if we set a higher price on art than money. On the whole, I am inclined to think that the artist is fully rewarded, for the common man can have no conception of the Joy that is to be found in belonging, though but momentarily and illusively, to the aristocracy of genius. To find the just word for all our emotions, to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative, to feel that it is our lot to keep life’s gladdest promises, to see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as stars in a windless pool–these, indeed, are no ordinary pleasures. Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with bitteress. We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer for our rare adventure. We have been permitted to explore the ultimate possibilities of our nature, and if we might not keep this newly-discovered territory, at least we did not return from our travels with empty hands. Something of the glamour lingers, something perhaps of the wisdom, and it is with a heightened passion, a fiercer enthusiasm, that we set ourselves once more to our life-long task of chalking pink salmon and pinker sunsets on the pavements of the world.
I once met an Englishman in the forest that starts outside Brussels and stretches for a long day’s journey across the hills. We found a little cafe under the trees, and sat in the sun talking about modern English literature all the afternoon. In this way we discovered that we had a common standpoint from which we judged works of art, though our judgments differed pleasantly and provided us with materials for agreeable discussion. By the time we had divided three bottles of Gueze Lambic, the noble beer of Belgium, we had already sketched out a scheme for the ideal literary newspaper. In other words, we had achieved friendship.
When the afternoon grew suddenly cold, the Englishman led me off to tea at his house, which was half-way up the hill out of Woluwe. It was one of those modern country cottages that Belgian architects steal openly and without shame from their English confreres. We were met at the garden gate by his daughter, a dark-haired girl of fifteen or sixteen, so unreasonably beautiful that she made a disillusioned scribbler feel like a sad line out of one of the saddest poems of Francis Thompson. In my mind I christened her Monica, because I did not like her real name. The house, with its old furniture, its library, where the choice of books was clearly dictated by individual prejudices and affections, and its unambitious parade of domestic happiness, heightened my melancholy. While tea was being prepared Monica showed me the garden. Only a few daffodils and crocuses were in bloom, but she led me to the rose garden, and told me that in the summer she could pick a great basket of roses every day. I pictured Monica to myself, gathering her roses on a breathless summer afternoon, and returned to the house feeling like a battened version of the Reverend Laurence Sterne. I knew that I had gathered all my roses, and I thought regretfully of the chill loneliness of the world that lay beyond the limits of this paradise.
This mood lingered with me during tea, and it was not till that meal was over that the miracle happened. I do not know whether it was the Englishman or his wife that wrought the magic: or perhaps it was Monica, nibbling “speculations” with her sharp white teeth; but at all events I was led with delicate diplomacy to talk about myself, and I presently realised that I was performing the grateful labour really well. My words were warmed into life by an eloquence that is not ordinarily mine, my adjectives were neither commonplace nor far-fetched, my adverbs fell into their sockets with a sob of joy. I spoke of myself with a noble sympathy, a compassion so intense that it seemed divinely altruistic. And gradually, as the spirit of creation woke in my blood, I revealed, trembling between a natural sensitiveness and a generous abandonment of restraint, the inner life of a man of genius.
I passed lightly by his misunderstood childhood to concentrate my sympathies on the literary struggles of his youth. I spoke of the ignoble environment, the material hardships, the masterpieces written at night to be condemned in the morning, the songs of his heart that were too great for his immature voice to sing; and all the while I bade them watch the fire of his faith burning with a constant and quenchless flame. I traced the development of his powers, and instanced some of his poems, my poems, which I recited so well that they sounded to me, and I swear to them also, like staves from an angelic hymn-book. I asked their compassion for the man who, having such things in his heart, was compelled to waste his hours in sordid journalistic labours.
So by degrees I brought them to the present time, when, fatigued by a world that would not acknowledge the truth of his message, the man of genius was preparing to retire from life, in order to devote himself to the composition of five or six masterpieces. I described these masterpieces to them in outline, with a suggestive detail dashed in here and there to show how they would be finished. Nothing is easier than to describe unwritten literary masterpieces in outline; but by that time I had thoroughly convinced my audience and myself, and we looked upon these things as completed books. The atmosphere was charged with the spirit of high endeavour, of wonderful accomplishment. I heard the Englishman breathing deeply, and through the dusk I was aware of the eyes of Monica, the wide, vague eyes of a young girl in which youth can find exactly what it pleases.
It is a good thing to be great once or twice in our lives, and that night I was wise enough to depart before the inevitable anti-climax. At the gate the Englishman pressed me warmly by the hand and begged me to honour his house with my presence again. His wife echoed the wish, and Monica looked at me with those vacant eyes, that but a few years ago I would have charged with the wine of my song. As I stood in the tram on my way back to Brussels I felt like a man recovering from a terrible debauch, and I knew that the brief hour of my pride was over, to return, perhaps, no more. Work was impossible to a man who had expressed considerably more than he had to express, so I went into a cafe where there was a string band to play sentimental music over the corpse of my genius. Chance took me to a table presided over by a waiter I singularly detested, and the last embers of my greatness enabled me to order my drink in a voice so passionate that he looked at me aghast and fled. By the time he returned with my hock the tale was finished, and I tried to buy his toleration with an enormous _pourboire_.
No; I will return to that house on the hill above Woluwe no more, not even to see Monica standing on tiptoe to pick her roses. For I have left a giant’s robe hanging on a peg in the hall, and I would not have those amiable people see how utterly incapable I am of filling it under normal conditions. I feel, besides, a kind of sentimental tenderness for this illusion fated to have so short a life. I am no Herod to slaughter babies, and it pleases me to think that it lingers yet in that delightful house with the books and the old furniture and Monica, even though I myself shall probably never see it again, even though the Englishman watches the publishers’ announcements for the masterpieces that will never appear.
A Wet Day
As we grow older it becomes more and more apparent that our moments are the ghosts of old moments, our days but pale repetitions of days that we have known in the past. It might almost be said that after a certain age we never meet a stranger or win to a new place. The palace of our soul, grown larger let us hope with the years, is haunted by little memories that creep out of corners to peep at us wistfully when we are most sure that we are alone. Sometimes we cannot hear the voice of the present for the whisperings of the past; sometimes the room is so full of ghosts that we can hardly breathe. And yet it is often difficult to find the significance of these dead days, restored to us to disturb our sense of passing time. Why have our minds kept secret these trivial records so many years to give them to us at last when they have no apparent consequence? Perhaps it is only that we are not clever enough to read the riddle; perhaps these trifles that we have remembered unconsciously year after year are in truth the tremendous forces that have made our lives what they are.
Standing at the window this morning and watching the rain, I suddenly became conscious of a wet morning long ago when I stood as I stood now and saw the drops sliding one after another down the steamy panes. I was a boy of eight years old, dressed in a sailor suit, and with my hair clipped quite short like a French boy’s, and my right knee was stiff with a half-healed cut where I had fallen on the gravel path under the schoolroom window, it was a really wet, grey day. I could hear the rain dripping from the fir-trees on to the scullery roof, and every now and then a gust of wind drove the rain down on the soaked lawn with a noise like breaking surf. I could hear the water gurgling in the pipe that was hidden by the ivy, and I saw with interest that one of the paths was flooded, so that a canal ran between the standard rose bushes and recalled pictures of Venice. I thought it would be nice if it rained truly hard and flooded the house, so that we should all have to starve for three weeks, and then be rescued excitingly in boats; but I had not really any hope. Behind me in the schoolroom my two brothers were playing chess, but had not yet started quarrelling, and in a corner my little sister was patiently beating a doll. There was a fire in the grate, but it was one of those sombre, smoky fires in which it is impossible to take any interest. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, and I realised that an eternity of these long seconds separated me from dinner-time. I thought I would like to go out.
The enterprise presented certain difficulties and dangers, but none that could not be surpassed. I would have to steal down to the hall and get my boots and waterproof on unobserved. I would have to open the front door without making too much noise, for the other doors were well guarded by underlings, and I would have to run down the front drive under the eyes of many windows. Once beyond the gate I would be safe, for the wetness of the day would secure me from dangerous encounters. Walking in the rain would be pleasant than staying in the dull schoolroom, where life remained unchanged for a quarter of an hour at a time; and I remembered that there was a little wood near our house in which I had never been when it was raining hard. Perhaps I would meet the magician for whom I had looked so often in vain on sunny days, for it was quite likely that he preferred walking in bad weather when no one else was about. It would be nice to hear the drops of rain falling on the roof of the trees, and to be quite warm and dry underneath. Perhaps the magician would give me a magic wand, and I would do things like the conjurer last Christmas.
Certainly I would be punished when I got home, for even if I were not missed they would see that my boots were muddy and that my waterproof was wet. I would have no pudding for dinner and be sent to bed in the afternoon: but these things had happened to me before, and though I had not liked them at the time, they did not seem very terrible in retrospect. And life was so dull in the schoolroom that wet morning when I was eight years old!
And yet I did not go out, but stood hesitating at the window, while with every gust earth seemed to fling back its curls of rain from its shining forehead. To stand on the brink of adventure is interesting in itself, and now that I could think over the details of my expedition was no longer bored. So I stayed dreaming till the golden moment for action was passed, and a violent exclamation from one of the chess-players called me back to a prosaic world. In a second the board was overturned and the players were locked in battle. My little sister, who had already the feminine craving for tidiness, crept out of her corner and meekly gathered the chessmen from under the feet of the combatants. I had seen it all before, and while I led my forces to the aid of the brother with whom at the moment I had some sort of alliance, I reflected that I would have done better to dare the adventure and set forth into the rainy world.
And this morning when I stood at my window, and my memory a little cruelly restored to this vision of a day long dead, I was still of the same opinion. Oh! I should have put on my boots and my waterproof and gone down to the little wood to meet the enchanter! He would have given me the cap of invisibility, the purse of Fortunatus, and a pair of seven-league boots. He would have taught me to conquer worlds, and to leave the easy triumphs of dreamers to madmen, philosophers, and poets, He would have made me a man of action, a statesman, a soldier, a founder of cities or a digger of graves. For there are two kinds of men in the world when we have put aside the minor distinctions of shape and colour. There are the men who do things and the men who dream about them. No man can be both a dreamer and a man of action, and we are called upon to determine what role we shall play in life when we are too young to know what to do.
I do not believe that it was a mere wantonness of memory that preserved the image of that hour with such affectionate detail, where so many brighter and more eventful hours have disappeared for ever. It seems to me likely enough that that moment of hesitation before the schoolroom window determined a habit of mind that has kept me dreaming ever since. For all my life I have preferred thought to action; I have never run to the little wood; I have never met the enchanter. And so this morning, when Fate played me this trick and my dream was chilled for an instant by the icy breath of the past, I did not rush out into the streets of life and lay about me with a flaming sword. No; I picked up my pen and wrote some words on a piece of paper and lulled my shocked senses with the tranquillity of the idlest dream of all.