V
And
he was at last in the city of the unending murmuring streets, a part of the
stirring shadow, of the amber-lighted gloom.
It
seemed a long time since he had knelt before his sweetheart in the lane, the
moon-fire streaming upon them from the dark circle of the fort, the air and the
light and his soul full of haunting, the touch of the unimaginable thrilling
his heart; and now he sat in a terrible "bed-sitting-room" in a
western suburb, confronted by a heap and litter of papers on the desk of a
battered old bureau.
He
had put his breakfast-tray out on the landing, and was thinking of the
morning's work, and of some very dubious pages that he had blackened the night
before. But when he had lit his disreputable briar, he remembered there was an
unopened letter waiting for him on the table; he had recognized the vague,
staggering script of Miss Deacon, his cousin. There was not much news; his
father was "just the same as usual," there had been a good deal of
rain, the farmers expected to make a lot of eider, and so forth. But at the
close of the letter Miss Deacon became useful for reproof and admonition.
"I
was at Caermaen on Tuesday," she said, "and called on the Gervases
and the Dixons. Mr. Gervase smiled when I told him you were a literary man,
living in London, and said he was afraid you wouldn't find it a very practical
career. Mrs. Gervase was very proud of Henry's success; he passed fifth for
some examination, and will begin with nearly four hundred a year. I don't
wonder the Gervases are delighted. Then I went to the Dixons, and had tea. Mrs.
Dixon wanted to know if you had published anything yet, and I said I thought
not. She showed me a book everybody is talking about, called the Dog and the
Doctor. She says it's selling by thousands, and that one can't take up a paper
without seeing the author's name. She told me to tell you that you ought to try
to write something like it. Then Mr. Dixon came in from the study, and your
name was mentioned again. He said he was afraid you had made rather a mistake
in trying to take up literature as if it were a profession, and seemed to think
that a place in a house of business would be more suitable and more practical.
He pointed out that you had not had the advantages of a university training,
and said that you would find men who had made good friends, and had the tone of
the university, would be before you at every step. He said Edward was doing
very well at Oxford. He writes to them that he knows several noblemen, and that
young Philip Bullingham (son of Sir John Bullingham) is his most intimate
friend; of course this is very satisfactory for the Dixons. I am afraid, my
dear Lucian, you have rather overrated your powers. Wouldn't it be better, even
now, to look out for some real work to do, instead of wasting your time over
those silly old books? I know quite well how the Gervases and the Dixons feel;
they think idleness so injurious for a young man, and likely to lead to bad
habits. You know, my dear Lucian, I am only writing like this because of my
affection for you, so I am sure, my dear boy, you won't be offended."
Lucian
pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the receptacle lettered "Barbarians."
He felt that he ought to ask himself some serious questions: "Why haven't
I passed fifth? why isn't Philip (son of Sir John) my most intimate friend? why
am I an idler, liable to fall into bad habits?" but he was eager to get to
his work, a curious and intricate piece of analysis. So the battered bureau,
the litter of papers, and the thick fume of his pipe, engulfed him and absorbed
him for the rest of the morning. Outside were the dim October mists, the dreary
and languid life of a side street, and beyond, on the main road, the hum and
jangle of the gliding trains. But he heard none of the uneasy noises of the
quarter, not even the shriek of the garden gates nor the yelp of the butcher on
his round, for delight in his great task made him unconscious of the world
outside.
He
had come by curious paths to this calm hermitage between Shepherd's Bush and
Acton Vale. The golden weeks of the summer passed on in their enchanted
procession, and Annie had not returned, neither had she written. Lucian, on his
side, sat apart, wondering why his longing for her were not shaper. As he
though of his raptures he would smile faintly to himself, and wonder whether he
had not lost the world and Annie with it. In the garden of Avallaunius his
sense of external things had grown dim and indistinct; the actual, material
life seemed every day to become a show, a fleeting of shadows across a great
white light. At last the news came that Annie Morgan had been married from her
sister's house to a young farmer, to whom it appeared, she had been long
engaged, and Lucian was ashamed to find himself only conscious of amusement,
mingled with gratitude. She had been the key that opened the shut palace, and
he was now secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few days after he had heard
the news he repeated the adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he
scaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expected violent
disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at the activity of boyish
imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now in the green bulwarks, and
the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any way extraordinary. Yet he did not
laugh at the memory of his sensations, he was not angry at the cheat. Certainly
it had been all illusion, all the heats and chills of boyhood, its thoughts of
terror were without significance. But he recognized that the illusions of the
child only differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque;
belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness
were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept. It
was better, he knew, and wiser, to wish for a fairy coach than to cherish
longings for a well-appointed brougham and liveried servants.
He
turned his back on the green walls and the dark oaks without any feeling of
regret or resentment. After a little while he began to think of his adventures
with pleasure; the ladder by which he had mounted had disappeared, but he was
safe on the height. By the chance fancy of a beautiful girl he had been
redeemed from a world of misery and torture, the world of external things into
which he had come a stranger by which he had been tormented. He looked back at
a kind of vision of himself seen as he was a year before, a pitiable creature
burning and twisting on the hot coals of the pit, crying lamentably to the
laughing bystanders for but one drop of cold water wherewith to cool his
tongue. He confessed to himself, with some contempt, that he had been a social
being, depending for his happiness on the goodwill of others; he had tried hard
to write, chiefly, it was true, from love of the art, but a little from a
social motive. He had imagined that a written book and the praise of
responsible journals would ensure him the respect of the county people. It was
a quaint idea, and he saw the lamentable fallacies naked; in the first place, a
painstaking artist in words was not respected by the respectable; secondly,
books should not be written with the object of gaining the goodwill of the landed
and commercial interests; thirdly and chiefly, no man should in any way depend
on another.
From
this utter darkness, from danger of madness, the ever dear and sweet Annie had
rescued him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian thought, she had done her
work without any desire to benefit him, she had simply willed to gratify her
own passion, and in doing this had handed to him the priceless secret. And he,
on his side, had reversed the process; merely to make himself a splendid
offering for the acceptance of his sweetheart, he had cast aside the vain
world, and had found the truth, which now remained with him, precious and
enduring.
And
since the news of the marriage he found that his worship of her had by no means
vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of a happy love,
untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of gold without alloy,
bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defect in the woman that
she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived an affection for certain
moral or intellectual accidents, but for the very woman. Guided by the
self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged by literature, and not
literature by humanity, he detected the analogy between Lycidas and Annie. Only
the dullard would object to the nauseous cant of the one, or to the
indiscretions of the other. A sober critic might say that the man who could
generalize Herbert and Laud, Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond
and Lancelot Andrewes into "our corrupted Clergy" must be either an
imbecile or a scoundrel, or probably both. The judgment would be perfectly
true, but as a criticism of Lycidas it would be a piece of folly. In the case
of the woman one could imagine the attitude of the conventional lover; of the
chevalier who, with his tongue in his cheek, "reverences and
respects" all women, and coming home early in the morning writes a leading
article on St English Girl. Lucian, on the other hand, felt profoundly grateful
to the delicious Annie, because she had at precisely the right moment
voluntarily removed her image from his way. He confessed to himself that,
latterly, he had a little dreaded her return as an interruption; he had
shivered at the thought that their relations would become what was so terribly
called an "intrigue" or "affair." There would be all the
threadbare and common stratagems, the vulgarity of secret assignations, and an
atmosphere suggesting the period of Mr. Thomas Moore and Lord Byron an
"segars." Lucian had been afraid of all this; he had feared lest love
itself should destroy love.
He
considered that now, freed from the torment of the body, leaving untasted the
green water that makes thirst more burning, he was perfectly initiated in the
true knowledge of the splendid and glorious love. There seemed to him a
monstrous paradox in the assertion that there could be no true love without a
corporal presence of the beloved; even the popular sayings of "Absence
makes the heart grow fonder," and "familiarity breeds contempt,"
witnessed to the contrary. He thought, sighing, and with compassion, of the
manner in which men are continually led astray by the cheat of the senses. In
order that the unborn might still be added to the born, nature had inspired men
with the wild delusion that the bodily companionship of the lover and the
beloved was desirable above all things, and so, by the false show of pleasure,
the human race was chained to vanity, and doomed to an eternal thirst for the
non-existent.
Again
and again he gave thanks for his own escape; he had been set free from a life
of vice and sin and folly, from all the dangers and illusions that are most
dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he remembered what would be the common view
of the situation. An ordinary lover would suffer all the sting of sorrow and
contempt; there would be grief for a lost mistress, and rage at her
faithlessness, and hate in the heart; one foolish passion driving on another,
and driving the man to ruin. For what would be commonly called the real woman
he now cared nothing; if he had heard that she had died in her farm in Utter
Gwent, he would have experienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might feel
at the death of any one he had once known. But he did not think of the young
farmer's wife as the real Annie; he did not think of the frost-bitten leaves in
winter as the real rose. Indeed, the life of many reminded him of the flowers;
perhaps more especially of those flowers which to all appearance are for many
years but dull and dusty clumps of green, and suddenly, in one night, burst into
the flame of blossom, and fill all the misty lawns with odor; till the morning.
It was in that night that the flower lived, not through the long unprofitable
years; and, in like manner, many human lives, he thought, were born in the
evening and dead before the coming of day. But he had preserved the precious
flower in all its glory, not suffering it to wither in the hard light, but
keeping it in a secret place, where it could never be destroyed. Truly now, and
for the first time, he possessed Annie, as a man possesses the gold which he
has dug from the rock and purged of its baseness.
He
was musing over these things when a piece of news, very strange and unexpected,
arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythical relative, known from
childhood as "Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight," had died, and by
some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand pounds. It was a pleasure to
give his father five hundred pounds, and the rector on his side forgot for a
couple of days to lean his head on his hand. From the rest of the capital,
which was well invested, Lucian found he would derive something between sixty
and seventy pounds a year, and hid old desires for literature and a refuge in
the murmuring streets returned to him. He longed to be free from the incantations
that surrounded him in the country, to work and live in a new atmosphere; and
so, with many good wishes from his father, he came to the retreat in the waste
places of London.
He
was in high spirits when he found the square, clean room, horribly furnished,
in the by-street that branched from the main road, and advanced in an unlovely
sweep to the mud pits and the desolation that was neither town nor country. On
every side monotonous grey streets, each house the replica of its neighbor, to
the east an unexplored wilderness, north and west and south the brickfields and
market-gardens, everywhere the ruins of the country, the tracks where sweet
lanes had been, gangrened stumps of trees, the relics of hedges, here and there
an oak stripped of its bark, white and haggard and leprous, like a corpse. And
the air seemed always grey, and the smoke from the brickfields was grey.
At
first he scarcely realized the quarter into which chance had led him. His only
thought was of the great adventure of letters in which he proposed to engage,
and his first glance round his "bed-sitting-room" showed him that
there was no piece of furniture suitable for his purpose. The table, like the
rest of the suite, was of bird's-eye maple; but the maker seemed to have penetrated
the druidic secret of the rocking-stone, the thing was in a state of unstable
equilibrium perpetually. For some days he wandered through the streets,
inspecting the second-hand furniture shops, and at last, in a forlorn byway,
found an old Japanese bureau, dishonored and forlorn, standing amongst rusty
bedsteads, sorry china, and all the refuse of homes dead and desolate. The
bureau pleased him in spite of its grime and grease and dirt. Inlaid
mother-of-pearl, the gleam of lacquer dragons in red gold, and hits of curious
design shone through the film of neglect and ill-usage, and when the woman of
the shop showed him the drawers and well and pigeon-holes, he saw that it would
be an apt instrument for his studies.
The
bureau was carried to his room and replaced the "bird's-eye" table
under the gas-jet. As Lucian arranged what papers he had accumulated: the
sketches of hopeless experiments, shreds and tatters of stories begun but never
completed, outlines of plots, two or three notebooks scribbled through and through
with impressions of the abandoned hills, he felt a thrill of exaltation at the
prospect of work to be accomplished, of a new world all open before him.
He
set out on the adventure with a fury of enthusiasm; his last thought at night
when all the maze of streets was empty and silent was of the problem, and his
dreams ran on phrases, and when he awoke in the morning he was eager to get
back to his desk. He immersed himself in a minute, almost a microscopic
analysis of fine literature. It was no longer enough, as in the old days, to
feel the charm and incantation of a line or a word; he wished to penetrate the
secret, to understand something of the wonderful suggestion, all apart from the
sense, that seemed to him the differentia of literature, as distinguished from
the long follies of "character-drawing," "psychological
analysis," and all the stuff that went to make the three-volume novel of
commerce.
He
found himself curiously strengthened by the change from the hills to the
streets. There could be no doubt, he thought, that living a lonely life,
interested only in himself and his own thoughts, he had become in a measure
inhuman. The form of external things, black depths in woods, pools in lonely
places, those still valleys curtained by hills on every side, sounding always
with the ripple of their brooks, had become to him an influence like that of a
drug, giving a certain peculiar color and outline to his thoughts. And from
early boyhood there had been another strange flavor in his life, the dream of
the old Roman world, those curious impressions that he had gathered from the
white walls of Caermaen, and from the looming bastions of the fort. It was in
reality the subconscious fancies of many years that had rebuilt the golden
city, and had shown him the vine-trellis and the marbles and the sunlight in
the garden of Avallaunius. And the rapture of love had made it all so vivid and
warm with life, that even now, when he let his pen drop, the rich noise of the
tavern and the chant of the theatre sounded above the murmur of the streets.
Looking back, it was as much a part of his life as his schooldays, and the
tessellated pavements were as real as the square of faded carpet beneath his
feet.
But
he felt that he had escaped. He could now survey those splendid and lovely
visions from without, as if he read of opium dreams, and he no longer dreaded a
weird suggestion that had once beset him, that his very soul was being molded
into the hills, and passing into the black mirror of still waterpools. He had
taken refuge in the streets, in the harbor of a modern suburb, from the vague,
dreaded magic that had charmed his life. Whenever he felt inclined to listen to
the old wood-whisper or to the singing of the fauns he bent more earnestly to
his work, turning a deaf ear to the incantations.
In
the curious labor of the bureau he found refreshment that was continually
renewed. He experienced again, and with a far more violent impulse, the
enthusiasm that had attended the writing of his book a year or two before, and
so, perhaps, passed from one drug to another. It was, indeed, with something of
rapture that he imagined the great procession of years all to be devoted to the
intimate analysis of words, to the construction of the sentence, as if it were
a piece of jewelry or mosaic.
Sometimes,
in the pauses of the work, he would pace up and down his cell, looking out of
the window now and again and gazing for an instant into the melancholy street.
As the year advanced the days grew more and more misty, and he found himself
the inhabitant of a little island wreathed about with the waves of a white and
solemn sea. In the afternoon the fog would grow denser, shutting out not only
sight but sound; the shriek of the garden gates, the jangling of the tram-bell
echoed as if from a far way. Then there were days of heavy incessant rain; he
could see a grey drifting sky and the drops plashing in the street, and the
houses all dripping and saddened with wet.
He
cured himself of one great aversion. He was no longer nauseated at the sight of
a story begun and left unfinished. Formerly, even when an idea rose in his mind
bright and wonderful, he had always approached the paper with a feeling of
sickness and dislike, remembering all the hopeless beginnings he had made. But
now he understood that to begin a romance was almost a separate and special
art, a thing apart from the story, to be practiced with sedulous care. Whenever
an opening scene occurred to him he noted it roughly in a book, and he devoted
many long winter evenings to the elaboration of these beginnings. Sometimes the
first impression would yield only a paragraph or a sentence, and once or twice
but a splendid and sonorous word, which seemed to Lucian all dim and rich with
unsurmised adventure. But often he was able to write three or four vivid pages,
studying above all things the hint and significance of the words and actions,
striving to work into the lines the atmosphere of expectation and promise, and
the murmur of wonderful events to come.
In
this one department of his task the labor seemed almost endless. He would
finish a few pages and then rewrite them, using the same incident and nearly
the same words, but altering that indefinite something which is scarcely so
much style as manner, or atmosphere. He was astonished at the enormous change
that was thus effected, and often, though he himself had done the work, he
could scarcely describe in words how it was done. But it was clear that in this
art of manner, or suggestion, lay all the chief secrets of literature, that by
it all the great miracles were performed. Clearly it was not style, for style
in itself was untranslatable, but it was that high theurgic magic that made the
English Don Quixote, roughly traduced by some Jervas, perhaps the best of all
English books. And it was the same element that made the journey of Roderick
Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of coarse jokes and common
experiences and burlesque manners, told in no very choice diction, essentially
a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century, carrying to one's very nostrils
the aroma of the Great North Road, iron-bound under black frost, darkened
beneath shuddering woods, haunted by highwaymen, with an adventure waiting
beyond every turn, and great old echoing inns in the midst of lonely winter
lands.
It
was this magic that Lucian sought for his opening chapters; he tried to find
that quality that gives to words something beyond their sound and beyond their
meaning, that in the first lines of a book should whisper things unintelligible
but all significant. Often he worked for many hours without success, and the
grim wet dawn once found him still searching for hieroglyphic sentences, for
words mystical, symbolic. On the shelves, in the upper part of his bureau, he
had placed the books which, however various as to matter, seemed to have a part
in this curious quality of suggestion, and in that sphere which might almost be
called supernatural. To these books he often had recourse, when further effort
appeared altogether hopeless, and certain pages in Coleridge and Edgar Allan
Poe had the power of holding him in a trance of delight, subject to emotions
and impressions which he knew to transcend altogether the realm of the formal
understanding. Such lines as:
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and
caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dews
that drip all over;
had for Lucian more than the
potency of a drug, lulling him into a splendid waking-sleep, every word being a
supreme incantation. And it was not only his mind that was charmed by such
passages, for he felt at the same time a strange and delicious bodily languor
that held him motionless, without the desire or power to stir from his seat.
And there were certain phrases in Kubla Khan that had such a magic that he
would sometimes wake up, as it were, to the consciousness that he had been
lying on the bed or sitting in the chair by the bureau, repeating a single line
over and over again for two or three hours. Yet he knew perfectly well that he
had not been really asleep; a little effort recalled a constant impression of
the wall-paper, with its pink flowers on a buff ground, and of the
muslin-curtained window, letting in the grey winter light. He had been some
seven months in London when this odd experience first occurred to him. The day
opened dreary and cold and clear, with a gusty and restless wind whirling round
the corner of the street, and lifting the dead leaves and scraps of paper that
littered the roadway into eddying mounting circles, as if a storm of black rain
were to come. Lucian had sat late the night before, and rose in the morning
feeling weary and listless and heavy-headed. While he dressed, his legs dragged
him as with weights, and he staggered and nearly fell in bending down to the
mat outside for his tea-tray. He lit the spirit lamp on the hearth with
shaking, unsteady hands, and could scarcely pour out the tea when it was ready.
A delicate cup of tea was one of his few luxuries; he was fond of the strange
flavor of the green leaf, and this morning he drank the straw-colored liquid
eagerly, hoping it would disperse the cloud of languor. He tried his best to
coerce himself into the sense of vigor and enjoyment with which he usually
began the day, walking briskly up and down and arranging his papers in order.
But he could not free himself from depression; even as he opened the dear
bureau a wave of melancholy came upon him, and he began to ask himself whether
he were not pursuing a vain dream, searching for treasures that had no
existence. He drew out his cousin's letter and read it again, sadly enough.
After all there was a good deal of truth in what she said; he had
"overrated" his powers, he had no friends, no real education. He
began to count up the months since he had come to London; he had received his
two thousand pounds in March, and in May he had said good-bye to the woods and
to the dear and friendly paths. May, June, July, August, September, October,
November, and half of December had gone by; and what had he to show? Nothing
but the experiment, the attempt, futile scribblings which had no end nor
shining purpose. There was nothing in his desk that he could produce as
evidence of his capacity, no fragment even of accomplishment. It was a thought
of intense bitterness, but it seemed as if the barbarians were in the right - a
place in a house of business would have been more suitable. He leaned his head
on his desk overwhelmed with the severity of his own judgment. He tried to
comfort himself again by the thought of all the hours of happy enthusiasm he
had spent amongst his papers, working for a great idea with infinite patience.
He recalled to mind something that he had always tried to keep in the
background of his hopes, the foundation-stone of his life, which he had hidden
out of sight. Deep in his heart was the hope that he might one day write a
valiant book; he scarcely dared to entertain the aspiration, he felt his
incapacity too deeply, but yet this longing was the foundation of all his
painful and patient effort. This he had proposed in secret to himself, that if
he labored without ceasing, without tiring, he might produce something which would
at all events be art, which would stand wholly apart from the objects shaped
like books, printed with printers' ink, and called by the name of books that he
had read. Giotto, he knew, was a painter, and the man who imitated walnut-wood
on the deal doors opposite was a painter, and he had wished to be a very humble
pupil in the class of the former. It was better, he thought, to fail in
attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly
contemptible; he had vowed he would be the dunce of Cervantes's school rather
than top-boy in the academy of A Bad Un to Beat and Millicent's Marriage. And
with this purpose he had devoted himself to laborious and joyous years, so that
however mean his capacity, the pains should not be wanting. He tried now to
rouse himself from a growing misery by the recollection of this high aim, but
it all seemed hopeless vanity. He looked out into the grey street, and it stood
a symbol of his life, chill and dreary and grey and vexed with a horrible wind.
There were the dull inhabitants of the quarter going about their common
business; a man was crying "mackerel" in a doleful voice, slowly
passing up the street, and staring into the white-curtained
"parlors," searching for the face of a purchaser behind the India-rubble
plants, stuffed birds, and piles of gaudy gilt books that adorned the windows.
One of the blistered doors over the way banged, and a woman came scurrying out
on some errand, and the garden gate shrieked two melancholy notes as she opened
it and let it swing back after her. The little patches called gardens were
mostly untilled, uncared for, squares of slimy moss, dotted with clumps of
coarse ugly grass, but here and there were the blackened and rotting remains of
sunflowers and marigolds. And beyond, he knew, stretched the labyrinth of
streets more or less squalid, but all grey and dull, and behind were the mud
pits and the steaming heaps of yellowish bricks, and to the north was a great
wide cold waste, treeless, desolate, swept by bitter wind. It was all like his
own life, he said again to himself, a maze of unprofitable dreariness and
desolation, and his mind grew as black and hopeless as the winter sky. The
morning went thus dismally till twelve o'clock, and he put on his hat and
great-coat. He always went out for an hour every day between twelve and one;
the exercise was a necessity, and the landlady made his bed in the interval.
The wind blew the smoke from the chimneys into his face as he shut the door,
and with the acrid smoke came the prevailing odor of the street, a blend of
cabbage-water and burnt bones and the faint sickly vapor from the brickfields.
Lucian walked mechanically for the hour, going eastward, along the main road.
The wind pierced him, and the dust was blinding, and the dreariness of the
street increased his misery. The row of common shops, full of common things,
the blatant public-houses, the Independent chapel, a horrible stucco parody of
a Greek temple with a façade of hideous columns that was a nightmare, villas
like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden
blasted and riven by the builder, these were the pictures of the way. When he
got home again he flung himself on the bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer
hunger roused him. He ate a hunch of bread and drank some water, and began to
pace up and down the room, wondering whether there were no escape from despair.
Writing seemed quite impossible, and hardly knowing what he did he opened his
bureau and took out a book from the shelves. As his eyes fell on the page the
air grew dark and heavy as night, and the wind wailed suddenly, loudly,
terribly.
"By
woman wailing for her Demon lover." The words were on his lips when he
raised his eyes again. A broad band of pale clear light was shining into the room,
and when he looked out of the window he saw the road all brightened by
glittering pools of water, and as the last drops of the rain-storm starred
these mirrors the sun sank into the wrack. Lucian gazed about him, perplexed,
till his eyes fell on the clock above his empty hearth. He had been sitting,
motionless, for nearly two hours without any sense of the passage of time, and
without ceasing he had murmured those words as he dreamed an endless wonderful
story. He experienced somewhat the sensations of Coleridge himself; strange,
amazing, ineffable things seemed to have been presented to him, not in the form
of the idea, but actually and materially, but he was less fortunate than
Coleridge in that he could not, even vaguely, image to himself what he had seen.
Yet when he searched his mind he knew that the consciousness of the room in
which he sat had never left him; he had seen the thick darkness gather, and had
heard the whirl of rain hissing through the air. Windows had been shut down
with a crash, he had noted the pattering footsteps of people running to
shelter, the landlady's voice crying to some one to look at the rain coming in
under the door. It was like peering into some old bituminous picture, one could
see at last that the mere blackness resolved itself into the likeness of trees
and rocks and travelers. And against this background of his room, and the
storm, and the noises of the street, his vision stood out illuminated, he felt
he had descended to the very depths, into the caverns that are hollowed beneath
the soul. He tried vainly to record the history of his impressions; the symbols
remained in his memory, but the meaning was all conjecture.
The
next morning, when he awoke, he could scarcely understand or realize the bitter
depression of the preceding day. He found it had all vanished away and had been
succeeded by an intense exaltation. Afterwards, when at rare intervals he
experienced the same strange possession of the consciousness, he found this to
be the invariable result, the hour of vision was always succeeded by a feeling
of delight, by sensations of brightened and intensified powers. On that bright
December day after the storm he rose joyously, and set about the labor of the
bureau with the assurance of success, almost with the hope of formidable
difficulties to be overcome. He had long busied himself with those curious
researches which Poe had indicated in the Philosophy of Composition, and many
hours had been spent in analyzing the singular effects which may be produced by
the sound and resonance of words. But he had been struck by the thought that in
the finest literature there were more subtle tones than the loud and insistent
music of "never more," and he endeavored to find the secret of those
pages and sentences which spoke, less directly, and less obviously, to the soul
rather than to the ear, being filled with a certain grave melody and the
sensation of singing voices. It was admirable, no doubt, to write phrases that
showed at a glance their designed rhythm, and rang with sonorous words, but he
dreamed of a prose in which the music should be less explicit, of names rather
than notes. He was astonished that morning at his own fortune and facility; he
succeeded in covering a page of ruled paper wholly to his satisfaction, and the
sentences, when he read them out, appeared to suggest a weird elusive chanting,
exquisite but almost imperceptible, like the echo of the plainsong reverberated
from the vault of a monastic church.
He
thought that such happy mornings well repaid him for the anguish of depression
which he sometimes had to suffer, and for the strange experience of
"possession" recurring at rare intervals, and usually after many
weeks of severe diet. His income, he found, amounted to sixty-five pounds a
year, and he lived for weeks at a time on fifteen shillings a week. During
these austere periods his only food was bread, at the rate of a loaf a day; but
he drank huge draughts of green tea, and smoked a black tobacco, which seemed
to him a more potent mother of thought than any drug from the scented East.
"I hope you go to some nice place for dinner," wrote his cousin;
"there used to be some excellent eating-houses in London where one could
get a good cut from the joint, with plenty of gravy, and a boiled potato, for a
shilling. Aunt Mary writes that you should try Mr. Jones's in Water Street,
Islington, whose father came from near Caermaen, and was always most
comfortable in her day. I daresay the walk there would do you good. It is such
a pity you smoke that horrid tobacco. I had a letter from Mrs. Dolly (Jane
Diggs, who married your cousin John Dolly) the other day, and she said they
would have been delighted to take you for only twenty-five shillings a week for
the sake of the family if you had not been a smoker. She told me to ask you if
you had ever seen a horse or a dog smoking tobacco. They are such nice,
comfortable people, and the children would have been company for you. Johnnie,
who used to be such a dear little fellow, has just gone into an office in the
City, and seems to have excellent prospects. How I wish, my dear Lucian, that
you could do something in the same way. Don't forget Mr. Jones's in Water
Street, and you might mention your name to him."
Lucian
never troubled Mr. Jones; but these letters of his cousin's always refreshed
him by the force of contrast. He tried to imagine himself a part of the Dolly
family, going dutifully every morning to the City on the bus, and returning in
the evening for high tea. He could conceive the fine odor of hot roast beef
hanging about the decorous house on Sunday afternoons, papa asleep in the
dining-room, mamma lying down, and the children quite good and happy with their
"Sundays books." In the evening, after supper, one read the Quiver
till bedtime. Such pictures as these were to Lucian a comfort and a help, a
remedy against despair. Often when he felt overwhelmed by the difficulty of the
work he had undertaken, he thought of the alternative career, and was
strengthened.
He
returned again and again to that desire of a prose which should sound faintly,
not so much with an audible music, but with the memory and echo of it. In the
night, when the last tram had gone jangling by, and he had looked out and seen
the street all wrapped about in heavy folds of the mist, he conducted some of
his most delicate experiments. In that white and solitary midnight of the
suburban street he experienced the curious sense of being on a tower, remote
and apart and high above all the troubles of the earth. The gas lamp, which was
nearly opposite, shone in a pale halo of light, and the houses themselves were
merely indistinct marks and shadows amidst that palpable whiteness, shutting
out the world and its noises. The knowledge of the swarming life that was so
still, though it surrounded him, made the silence seem deeper than that of the
mountains before the dawn; it was as if he alone stirred and looked out amidst
a host sleeping at his feet. The fog came in by the open window in freezing
puffs, and as Lucian watched he noticed that it shook and wavered like the sea,
tossing up wreaths and drifts across the pale halo of the lamp, and, these
vanishing, others succeeded. It was as if the mist passed by from the river to
the north, as if it still passed by in the silence.
He
would shut his window gently, and sit down in his lighted room with all the
consciousness of the white advancing shroud upon him. It was then that he found
himself in the mood for curious labors, and able to handle with some touch of
confidence the more exquisite instruments of the craft. He sought for that
magic by which all the glory and glamour of mystic chivalry were made to shine
through the burlesque and gross adventures of Don Quixote, by which Hawthorne
had lit his infernal Sabbath fires, and fashioned a burning aureole about the village
tragedy of the Scarlet Letter. In Hawthorne the story and the suggestion,
though quite distinct and of different worlds, were rather parallel than
opposed to one another; but Cervantes had done a stranger thing. One read of
Don Quixote, beaten, dirty, and ridiculous, mistaking windmills for giants,
sheep for an army; but the impression was of the enchanted forest, of Avalon,
of the San Graal, "far in the spiritual city." And Rabelais showed
him, beneath the letter, the Tourainian sun shining on the hot rock above
Chinon, on the maze of narrow, climbing streets, on the high-pitched, gabled
roofs, on the grey-blue tourelles, pricking upward from the fantastic labyrinth
of walls. He heard the sound of sonorous plain-song from the monastic choir, of
gross exuberant gaiety from the rich vineyards; he listened to the eternal
mystic mirth of those that halted in the purple shadow of the sorbier by the
white, steep road. The gracious and ornate châteaux on the Loire and the Vienne
rose fair and shining to confront the incredible secrets of vast, dim,
far-lifted Gothic naves, that seemed ready to take the great deep, and float
away from the mist and dust of earthly streets to anchor in the haven of the
clear city that hath foundations. The rank tale of the garderobe, of the
farm-kitchen, mingled with the reasoned, endless legend of the schools, with
luminous Platonic argument; the old pomp of the Middle Ages put on the robe of
a fresh life. There was a smell of wine and of incense, of June meadows and of
ancient books, and through it all he hearkened, intent, to the exultation of
chiming bells ringing for a new feast in a new land. He would cover pages with
the analysis of these marvels, tracking the suggestion concealed beneath the
words, and yet glowing like the golden threads in a robe of samite, or like
that device of the old binders by which a vivid picture appeared on the shut
edges of a book. He tried to imitate this art, to summon even the faint shadow
of the great effect, rewriting a page of Hawthorne, experimenting and changing
an epithet here and there, noting how sometimes the alteration of a trifling
word would plunge a whole scene into darkness, as if one of those blood-red
fires had instantly been extinguished. Sometimes, for severe practice, he attempted
to construct short tales in the manner of this or that master. He sighed over
these desperate attempts, over the clattering pieces of mechanism which would
not even simulate life; but he urged himself to an infinite perseverance.
Through the white hours he worked on amidst the heap and litter of papers;
books and manuscripts overflowed from the bureau to the floor; and if he looked
out he saw the mist still pass by, still passing from the river to the north.
It
was not till the winter was well advanced that he began at all to explore the
region in which he lived. Soon after his arrival in the grey street he had
taken one or two vague walks, hardly noticing where he went or what he saw; but
for all the summer he had shut himself in his room, beholding nothing but the
form and color of words. For his morning walk he almost invariably chose the
one direction, going along the Uxbridge Road towards Notting Hill, and
returning by the same monotonous thoroughfare. Now, however, when the new year
was beginning its dull days, he began to diverge occasionally to right and
left, sometimes eating his luncheon in odd corners, in the bulging parlors of
eighteenth-century taverns, that still fronted the surging sea of modern
streets, or perhaps in brand new "publics" on the broken borders of
the brickfields, smelling of the clay from which they had swollen. He found
waste by-places behind railway embankments where he could smoke his pipe
sheltered from the wind; sometimes there was a wooden fence by an old
pear-orchard where he sat and gazed at the wet desolation of the
market-gardens, munching a few currant biscuits by way of dinner. As he went
farther afield a sense of immensity slowly grew upon him; it was as if, from
the little island of his room, that one friendly place, he pushed out into the
grey unknown, into a city that for him was uninhabited as the desert.
He
came back to his cell after these purposeless wanderings always with a sense of
relief, with the thought of taking refuge from grey. As he lit the gas and
opened the desk of his bureau and saw the pile of papers awaiting him, it was
as if he had passed from the black skies and the stinging wind and the dull
maze of the suburb into all the warmth and sunlight and violent color of the
south.
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