VI
It
was in this winter after his coming to the grey street that Lucian first
experienced the pains of desolation. He had all his life known the delights of
solitude, and had acquired that habit of mind which makes a man find rich
company on the bare hillside and leads him into the heart of the wood to
meditate by the dark waterpools. But now in the blank interval when he was
forced to shut up his desk, the sense of loneliness overwhelmed him and filled
him with unutterable melancholy. On such days he carried about with him an
unceasing gnawing torment in his breast; the anguish of the empty page awaiting
him in his bureau, and the knowledge that it was worse than useless to attempt
the work. He had fallen into the habit of always using this phrase "the
work" to denote the adventure of literature; it had grown in his mind to
all the austere and grave significance of "the great work" on the
lips of the alchemists; it included every trifling and laborious page and the
vague magnificent fancies that sometimes hovered below him. All else had become
mere by-play, unimportant, trivial; the work was the end, and the means and the
food of his life - it raised him up in the morning to renew the struggle, it
was the symbol which charmed him as he lay down at night. All through the hours
of toil at the bureau he was enchanted, and when he went out and explored the
unknown coasts, the one thought allured him, and was the colored glass between
his eyes and the world. Then as he drew nearer home his steps would quicken,
and the more weary and grey the walk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of his
hermitage and of the curious difficulties that awaited him there. But when,
suddenly and without warning, the faculty disappeared, when his mind seemed a
hopeless waste from which nothing could arise, then he became subject to a
misery so piteous that the barbarians themselves would have been sorry for him.
He had known some foretaste of these bitter and inexpressible griefs in the old
country days, but then he had immediately taken refuge in the hills, he had
rushed to the dark woods as to an anodyne, letting his heart drink in all the
wonder and magic of the wild land. Now in these days of January, in the
suburban street, there was no such refuge.
He
had been working steadily for some weeks, well enough satisfied on the whole
with the daily progress, glad to awake in the morning, and to read over what he
had written on the night before. The new year opened with faint and heavy
weather and a breathless silence in the air, but in a few days the great frost
set in. Soon the streets began to suggest the appearance of a beleaguered city,
the silence that had preceded the frost deepened, and the mist hung over the
earth like a dense white smoke. Night after night the cold increased, and
people seemed unwilling to go abroad, till even the main thoroughfares were
empty and deserted, as if the inhabitants were lying close in hiding. It was at
this dismal time that Lucian found himself reduced to impotence. There was a
sudden break in his thought, and when he wrote on valiantly, hoping against
hope, he only grew more aghast on the discovery of the imbecilities he had
committed to paper. He ground his teeth together and persevered, sick at heart,
feeling as if all the world were fallen from under his feet, driving his pen on
mechanically, till he was overwhelmed. He saw the stuff he had done without
veil or possible concealment, a lamentable and wretched sheaf of verbiage,
worse, it seemed, than the efforts of his boyhood. He was not longer
tautological, he avoided tautology with the infernal art of a leader-writer,
filling his wind bags and mincing words as if he had been a trained journalist
on the staff of the Daily Post. There seemed all the matter of an insufferable
tragedy in these thoughts; that his patient and enduring toil was in vain, that
practice went for nothing, and that he had wasted the labor of Milton to
accomplish the tenth-rate. Unhappily he could not "give in"; the
longing, the fury for the work burnt within him like a burning fire; he lifted
up his eyes in despair.
It
was then, while he knew that no one could help him, that he languished for
help, and then, though he was aware that no comfort was possible, he fervently
wished to be comforted. The only friend he had was his father, and he knew that
his father would not even understand his distress. For him, always, the printed
book was the beginning and end of literature; the agony of the maker, his
despair and sickness, were as accursed as the pains of labor. He was ready to
read and admire the work of the great Smith, but he did not wish to hear of the
period when the great Smith had writhed and twisted like a scotched worm, only
hoping to be put out of his misery, to go mad or die, to escape somehow from
the bitter pains. And Lucian knew no one else. Now and then he read in the
paper the fame of the great littérateurs; the Gypsies were entertaining the
Prince of Wales, the Jolly Beggars were dining with the Lord Mayor, the Old
Mumpers were mingling amicably and gorgeously with the leading members of the
Stock Exchange. He was so unfortunate as to know none of these gentlemen, but
it hardly seemed likely that they could have done much for him in any case.
Indeed, in his heart, he was certain that help and comfort from without were in
the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin and grief were within, and
only his own assistance could avail. He tried to reassure himself, to believe
that his torments were a proof of his vocation, that the facility of the
novelist who stood six years deep in contracts to produce romances was a thing
wholly undesirable, but all the while he longed for but a drop of that
inexhaustible fluency which he professed to despise.
He
drove himself out from that dreary contemplation of the white paper and the
idle pen. He went into the frozen and deserted streets, hoping that he might
pluck the burning coal from his heart, but the fire was not quenched. As he
walked furiously along the grim iron roads he fancied that those persons who
passed him cheerfully on their way to friends and friendly hearths shrank from
him into the mists as they went by. Lucian imagined that the fire of his
torment and anguish must in some way glow visibly about him; he moved, perhaps,
in a nimbus that proclaimed the blackness and the flames within. He knew, of
course, that in misery he had grown delirious, that the well-coated,
smooth-hatted personages who loomed out of the fog upon him were in reality
shuddering only with cold, but in spite of common sense he still conceived that
he saw on their faces an evident horror and disgust, and something of the
repugnance that one feels at the sight of a venomous snake, half-killed,
trailing its bleeding vileness out of sight. By design Lucian tried to make for
remote and desolate places, and yet when he had succeeded in touching on the
open country, and knew that the icy shadow hovering through the mist was a
field, he longed for some sound and murmur of life, and turned again to roads
where pale lamps were glimmering, and the dancing flame of firelight shone
across the frozen shrubs. And the sight of these homely fires, the thought of
affection and consolation waiting by them, stung him the more sharply perhaps
because of the contrast with his own chills and weariness and helpless
sickness, and chiefly because he knew that he had long closed an everlasting
door between his heart and such felicities. If those within had come out and
had called him by his name to enter and be comforted, it would have been quite unavailing,
since between them and him there was a great gulf fixed. Perhaps for the first
time he realized that he had lost the art of humanity for ever. He had thought
when he closed his ears to the wood whisper and changed the fauns' singing for
the murmur of the streets, the black pools for the shadows and amber light of
London, that he had put off the old life, and had turned his soul to healthy
activities, but the truth was that he had merely exchanged one drug for
another. He could not be human, and he wondered whether there were some drop of
the fairy blood in his body that made him foreign and a stranger in the world.
He
did not surrender to desolation without repeated struggles. He strove to allure
himself to his desk by the promise of some easy task; he would not attempt
invention, but he had memoranda and rough jottings of ideas in his note-books,
and he would merely amplify the suggestions ready to his hand. But it was
hopeless, again and again it was hopeless. As he read over his notes, trusting
that he would find some hint that might light up the dead fires, and kindle
again that pure flame of enthusiasm, he found how desperately his fortune had
fallen. He could see no light, no color in the lines he had scribbled with
eager trembling fingers; he remembered how splendid all these things had been
when he wrote them down, but now they were meaningless, faded into grey. The
few words he had dashed on to the paper, enraptured at the thought of the happy
hours they promised, had become mere jargon, and when he understood the idea it
seemed foolish, dull, unoriginal. He discovered something at last that appeared
to have a grain of promise, and determined to do his best to put it into shape,
but the first paragraph appalled him; it might have been written by an
unintelligent schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and shut and locked his
desk, heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart. For the rest of that day
he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after pipe in the hope of stupefying
himself with tobacco fumes. The air in the room became blue and thick with
smoke; it was bitterly cold, and he wrapped himself up in his great-coat and
drew the counterpane over him. The night came on and the window darkened, and
at last he fell asleep.
He
renewed the effort at intervals, only to plunge deeper into misery. He felt the
approaches of madness, and knew that his only hope was to walk till he was
physically exhausted, so that he might come home almost fainting with fatigue,
but ready to fall asleep the moment he got into bed. He passed the mornings in
a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with the
pattern of the paper, with the advertisements at the end of a book, with the
curious greyness of the light that glimmered through the mist into his room,
with the muffled voices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to
make out the design that had once colored the faded carpet on the floor, and
wondered about the dead artist in Japan, the adorner of his bureau. He speculated
as to what his thoughts had been as he inserted the rainbow mother-of-pearl and
made that great flight of shining birds, dipping their wings as they rose from
the reeds, or how he had conceived the lacquer dragons in red gold, and the
fantastic houses in the garden of peach-trees. But sooner or later the
oppression of his grief returned, the loud shriek and clang of the garden-gate,
the warning bell of some passing bicyclist steering through the fog, the noise
of his pipe falling to the floor, would suddenly awaken him to the sense of
misery. He knew that it was time to go out; he could not bear to sit still and
suffer. Sometimes she cut a slice of bread and put it in his pocket, sometimes
he trusted to the chance of finding a public-house, where he could have a
sandwich and a glass of beer. He turned always from the main streets and lost
himself in the intricate suburban byways, willing to be engulfed in the
infinite whiteness of the mist.
The
roads had stiffened into iron ridges, the fences and trees were glittering with
frost crystals, everything was of strange and altered aspect. Lucian walked on
and on through the maze, now in a circle of shadowy villas, awful as the buried
streets of Herculaneum, now in lanes dipping onto open country, that led him
past great elm-trees whose white boughs were all still, and past the bitter
lonely fields where the mist seemed to fade away into grey darkness. As he
wandered along these unfamiliar and ghastly paths he became the more convinced
of his utter remoteness from all humanity, he allowed that grotesque suggestion
of there being something visibly amiss in his outward appearance to grow upon
him, and often he looked with a horrible expectation into the faces of those
who passed by, afraid lest his own senses gave him false intelligence, and that
he had really assumed some frightful and revolting shape. It was curious that,
partly by his own fault, and largely, no doubt, through the operation of mere
coincidence, he was once or twice strongly confirmed in this fantastic
delusion. He came one day into a lonely and unfrequented byway, a country lane
falling into ruin, but still fringed with elms that had formed an avenue
leading to the old manor-house. It was now the road of communication between
two far outlying suburbs, and on these winter nights lay as black, dreary, and
desolate as a mountain track. Soon after the frost began, a gentleman had been
set upon in this lane as he picked his way between the corner where the bus had
set him down, and his home where the fire was blazing, and his wife watched the
clock. He was stumbling uncertainly through the gloom, growing a little nervous
because the walk seemed so long, and peering anxiously for the lamp at the end
of his street, when the two footpads rushed at him out of the fog. One caught
him from behind, the other struck him with a heavy bludgeon, and as he lay
senseless they robbed him of his watch and money, and vanished across the
fields. The next morning all the suburb rang with the story; the unfortunate
merchant had been grievously hurt, and wives watched their husbands go out in
the morning with sickening apprehension, not knowing what might happen at
night. Lucian of course was ignorant of all these rumors, and struck into the
gloomy by-road without caring where he was or whither the way would lead him.
He
had been driven out that day as with whips, another hopeless attempt to return
to the work had agonised him, and existence seemed an intolerable pain. As he
entered the deeper gloom, where the fog hung heavily, he began, half
consciously, to gesticulate; he felt convulsed with torment and shame, and it
was a sorry relief to clench his nails into his palm and strike the air as he
stumbled heavily along, bruising his feet against the frozen ruts and ridges.
His impotence was hideous, he said to himself, and he cursed himself and his
life, breaking out into a loud oath, and stamping on the ground. Suddenly he
was shocked at a scream of terror, it seemed in his very ear, and looking up he
saw for a moment a woman gazing at him out of the mist, her features distorted
and stiff with fear. A momentary convulsion twitched her arms into the ugly
mimicry of a beckoning gesture, and she turned and ran for dear life, howling
like a beast.
Lucian
stood still in the road while the woman's cries grew faint and died away. His
heart was chilled within him as the significance of this strange incident
became clear. He remembered nothing of his violent gestures; he had not known
at the time that he had sworn out loud, or that he was grinding his teeth with
impotent rage. He only thought of that ringing scream, of the horrible fear on
the white face that had looked upon him, of the woman's headlong flight from
his presence. He stood trembling and shuddering, and in a little while he was
feeling his face, searching for some loathsome mark, for the stigmata of evil
branding his forehead. He staggered homewards like a drunken man, and when he
came into the Uxbridge Road some children saw him and called after him as he
swayed and caught at the lamp-post. When he got to his room he sat down at
first in the dark. He did not dare to light the gas. Everything in the room was
indistinct, but he shut his eyes as he passed the dressing-table, and sat in a
corner, his face turned to the wall. And when at last he gathered courage and
the flame leapt hissing from the jet, he crept piteously towards the glass, and
ducked his head, crouching miserably, and struggling with his terrors before he
could look at his own image.
To
the best of his power he tried to deliver himself from these more grotesque
fantasies; he assured himself that there was nothing terrific in his
countenance but sadness, that his face was like the face of other men. Yet he
could not forget that reflection he had seen in the woman's eyes, how the
surest mirrors had shown him a horrible dread, her soul itself quailing and
shuddering at an awful sight. Her scream rang and rang in his ears; she had
fled away from him as if he offered some fate darker than death.
He
looked again and again into the glass, tortured by a hideous uncertainty. His
senses told him there was nothing amiss, yet he had had a proof, and yet, as he
peered most earnestly, there was, it seemed, something strange and not
altogether usual in the expression of the eyes. Perhaps it might be the
unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps a flaw in the cheap looking-glass, that
gave some slight distortion to the image. He walked briskly up and down the
room and tried to gaze steadily, indifferently, into his own face. He would not
allow himself to be misguided by a word. When he had pronounced himself
incapable of humanity, he had only meant that he could not enjoy the simple
things of common life. A man was not necessarily monstrous, merely because he
did not appreciate high tea, a quiet chat about the neighbors, and a happy
noisy evening with the children. But with what message, then, did he appear
charged that the woman's mouth grew so stark? Her hands had jerked up as if
they had been pulled with frantic wires; she seemed for the instant like a
horrible puppet. Her scream was a thing from the nocturnal Sabbath.
He
lit a candle and held it close up to the glass so that his own face glared
white at him, and the reflection of the room became an indistinct darkness. He
saw nothing but the candle flame and his own shining eyes, and surely they were
not as the eyes of common men. As he put down the light, a sudden suggestion
entered his mind, and he drew a quick breath, amazed at the thought. He hardly
knew whether to rejoice or to shudder. For the thought he conceived was this:
that he had mistaken all the circumstances of the adventure, and had perhaps
repulsed a sister who would have welcomed him to the Sabbath.
He
lay awake all night, turning from one dreary and frightful thought to the
other, scarcely dozing for a few hours when the dawn came. He tried for a
moment to argue with himself when he got up; knowing that his true life was
locked up in the bureau, he made a desperate attempt to drive the phantoms and
hideous shapes from his mind. He was assured that his salvation was in the
work, and he drew the key from his pocket, and made as if he would have opened
the desk. But the nausea, the remembrances of repeated and utter failure, were
too powerful. For many days he hung about the Manor Lane, half dreading, half
desiring another meeting, and he swore he would not again mistake the cry of
rapture, nor repulse the arms extended in a frenzy of delight. In those days he
dreamed of some dark place where they might celebrate and make the marriage of
the Sabbath, with such rites as he had dared to imagine.
It
was perhaps only the shock of a letter from his father that rescued him from
these evident approaches to madness. Mr. Taylor wrote how they had missed him
at Christmas, how the farmers had inquired after him, of the homely familiar
things that recalled his boyhood, his mother's voice, the friendly fireside,
and the good old fashions that had nurtured him. He remembered that he had once
been a boy, loving the cake and puddings and the radiant holly, and all the
seventeenth-century mirth that lingered on in the ancient farmhouses. And there
came to him the more holy memory of Mass on Christmas morning. How sweet the
dark and frosty earth had smelt as he walked beside his mother down the winding
lane, and from the stile near the church they had seen the world glimmering to
the dawn, and the wandering lanthorns advancing across the fields. Then he had
come into the church and seen it shining with candles and holly, and his father
in pure vestments of white linen sang the longing music of the liturgy at the
altar, and the people answered him, till the sun rose with the grave notes of
the Paternoster, and a red beam stole through the chancel window.
The
worst horror left him as he recalled the memory of these dear and holy things.
He cast away the frightful fancy that the scream he had heard was a shriek of
joy, that the arms, rigidly jerked out, invited him to an embrace. Indeed, the
thought that he had longed for such an obscene illusion, that he had gloated
over the recollection of that stark mouth, filled him with disgust. He resolved
that his senses were deceived, that he had neither seen nor heard, but had for
a moment externalized his own slumbering and morbid dreams. It was perhaps necessary
that he should be wretched, that his efforts should be discouraged, but he
would not yield utterly to madness.
Yet
when he went abroad with such good resolutions, it was hard to resist an
influence that seemed to come from without and within. He did not know it, but
people were everywhere talking of the great frost, of the fog that lay heavy on
London, making the streets dark and terrible, of strange birds that came
fluttering about the windows in the silent squares. The Thames rolled out
duskily, bearing down the jarring ice-blocks, and as one looked on the black
water from the bridges it was like a river in a northern tale. To Lucian it all
seemed mythical, of the same substance as his own fantastic thoughts. He rarely
saw a newspaper, and did not follow from day to day the systematic readings of
the thermometer, the reports of ice-fairs, of coaches driven across the river
at Hampton, of the skating on the fens; and hence the iron roads, the
beleaguered silence and the heavy folds of mist appeared as amazing as a
picture, significant, appalling. He could not look out and see a common
suburban street foggy and dull, nor think of the inhabitants as at work or
sitting cheerfully eating nuts about their fires; he saw a vision of a grey
road vanishing, of dim houses all empty and deserted, and the silence seemed
eternal. And when he went out and passed through street after street, all void,
by the vague shapes of houses that appeared for a moment and were then
instantly swallowed up, it seemed to him as if he had strayed into a city that
had suffered some inconceivable doom, that he alone wandered where myriads had
once dwelt. It was a town as great as Babylon, terrible as Rome, marvelous as
Lost Atlantis, set in the midst of a white wilderness surrounded by waste
places. It was impossible to escape from it; if he skulked between hedges, and
crept away beyond the frozen pools, presently the serried stony lines
confronted him like an army, and far and far they swept away into the night, as
some fabled wall that guards an empire in the vast dim East. Or in that
distorting medium of the mist, changing all things, he imagined that he trod an
infinite desolate plain, abandoned from ages, but circled and encircled with
dolmen and menhir that loomed out at him, gigantic, terrible. All London was
one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled
about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation
eternal loss. Or perhaps he was astray for ever in a land of grey rocks. He had
seen the light of home, the flicker of the fire on the walls; close at hand, it
seemed, was the open door, and he had heard dear voices calling to him across
the gloom, but he had just missed the path. The lamps vanished, the voices
sounded thin and died away, and yet he knew that those within were waiting,
that they could not bear to close the door, but waited, calling his name, while
he had missed the way, and wandered in the pathless desert of the grey rocks.
Fantastic, hideous, they beset him wherever he turned, piled up into strange
shapes, pricked with sharp peaks, assuming the appearance of goblin towers, swelling
into a vague dome like a fairy rath, huge and terrible. And as one dream faded
into another, so these last fancies were perhaps the most tormenting and
persistent; the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice of some half-human,
malignant race who swarmed in hiding, ready to bear him away into the heart of
their horrible hills. It was awful to think that all his goings were
surrounded, that in the darkness he was watched and surveyed, that every step
but led him deeper and deeper into the labyrinth.
When,
of an evening, he was secure in his room, the blind drawn down and the gas
flaring, he made vigorous efforts toward sanity. It was not of his free will
that he allowed terror to overmaster him, and he desired nothing better than a
placid and harmless life, full of work and clear thinking. He knew that he
deluded himself with imagination, that he had been walking through London
suburbs and not through Pandemonium, and that if he could but unlock his bureau
all those ugly forms would be resolved into the mist. But it was hard to say if
he consoled himself effectually with such reflections, for the return to common
sense meant also the return to the sharp pangs of defeat. It recalled him to
the bitter theme of his own inefficiency, to the thought that he only desired
one thing of life, and that this was denied him. He was willing to endure the
austerities of a monk in a severe cloister, to suffer cold, to be hungry, to be
lonely and friendless, to forbear all the consolation of friendly speech, and
to be glad of all these things, if only he might be allowed to illuminate the
manuscript in quietness. It seemed a hideous insufferable cruelty, that he
should so fervently desire that which he could never gain.
He
was led back to the old conclusion; he had lost the sense of humanity, he was
wretched because he was an alien and a stranger amongst citizens. It seemed
probable that the enthusiasm of literature, as he understood it, the fervent
desire for the fine art, had in it something of the inhuman, and dissevered the
enthusiast from his fellow-creatures. It was possible that the barbarian
suspected as much, that by some slow process of rumination he had arrived at
his fixed and inveterate impression, by no means a clear reasoned conviction;
the average Philistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would either
become inarticulate, ejaculating "faugh" and "pah" like an
old-fashioned Scots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd
reason, alleging that all "littery men" were poor, that composers
never cut their hair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that
sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly
these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist
from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his
nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and
dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled
the black savages to dismiss the white man on an even longer journey.
Lucian
was not especially interested in this hatred of the barbarian for the maker,
except from this point, that it confirmed him in his belief that the love of
art dissociated the man from the race. One touch of art made the whole world
alien, but surely miseries of the civilized man cast amongst savages were not
so much caused by dread of their ferocity as by the terror of his own thoughts;
he would perhaps in his last despair leave his retreat and go forth to perish
at their hands, so that he might at least die in company, and hear the sound of
speech before death. And Lucian felt most keenly that in his case there was a
double curse; he was as isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as his
reviewers. The consolation of the work had failed him, and he was suspended in
the void between two worlds.
It
was no doubt the composite effect of his failures, his loneliness of soul, and
solitude of life, that had made him invest those common streets with such grim
and persistent terrors. He had perhaps yielded to a temptation without knowing
that he had been tempted, and, in the manner of De Quincey, had chosen the
subtle in exchange for the more tangible pains. Unconsciously, but still of
free will, he had preferred the splendor and the gloom of a malignant vision
before his corporal pains, before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was
better to dwell in vague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city
doomed from ages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to
a gnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business would have
been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what he could never
perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoria of the mist, and
resolved that he would no longer make all the streets a stage of apparitions,
he hardly realized what he had done, or that the ghosts he had called might
depart and return again.
He
continued his long walks, always with the object of producing a physical
weariness and exhaustion that would enable him to sleep of nights. But even
when he saw the foggy and deserted avenues in their proper shape, and allowed
his eyes to catch the pale glimmer of the lamps, and the dancing flame of the
firelight, he could not rid himself of the impression that he stood afar off,
that between those hearths and himself there was a great gulf fixed. As he
paced down the footpath he could often see plainly across the frozen shrubs
into the homely and cheerful rooms. Sometimes, late in the evening, he caught a
passing glimpse of the family at tea, father, mother, and children laughing and
talking together, well pleased with each other's company. Sometimes a wife or a
child was standing by the garden gate peering anxiously through the fog, and
the sight of it all, all the little details, the hideous but comfortable
armchairs turned ready to the fire, maroon-red curtains being drawn close to
shut out the ugly night, the sudden blaze and illumination as the fire was
poked up so that it might be cheerful for father; these trivial and common
things were acutely significant. They brought back to him the image of a dead
boy - himself. They recalled the shabby old "parlor" in the country,
with its shabby old furniture and fading carpet, and renewed a whole atmosphere
of affection and homely comfort. His mother would walk to the end of the drive
and look out for him when he was late (wandering then about the dark
woodlands); on winter evenings she would make the fire blaze, and have his
slippers warming by the hearth, and there was probably buttered toast "as
a treat." He dwelt on all these insignificant petty circumstances, on the
genial glow and light after the muddy winter lanes, on the relish of the
buttered toast and the smell of the hot tea, on the two old cats curled fast
asleep before the fender, and made them instruments of exquisite pain and
regret. Each of these strange houses that he passed was identified in his mind
with his own vanished home; all was prepared and ready as in the old days, but
he was shut out, judged and condemned to wander in the frozen mist, with weary
feet, anguished and forlorn, and they that would pass from within to help him
could not, neither could he pass to them. Again, for the hundredth time, he
came back to the sentence: he could not gain the art of letters and he had lost
the art of humanity. He saw the vanity of all his thoughts; he was an ascetic
caring nothing for warmth and cheerfulness and the small comforts of life, and
yet he allowed his mind to dwell on such things. If one of those passers-by,
who walked briskly, eager for home, should have pitied him by some miracle and
asked him to come in, it would have been worse than useless, yet he longed for
pleasures that he could not have enjoyed. It was as if he were come to a place
of torment, where they who could not drink longed for water, where they who
could feel no warmth shuddered in the eternal cold. He was oppressed by the
grim conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket, imprisoned
by the green bastions of the Roman fort. He had never come out, but a
changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the earth.
Beset
by such ingenious terrors, it was not wonderful that outward events and common
incidents should abet his fancies. He had succeeded one day in escaping from
the mesh of the streets, and fell on a rough and narrow lane that stole into a
little valley. For the moment he was in a somewhat happier mood; the afternoon
sun glowed through the rolling mist, and the air grew clearer. He saw quiet and
peaceful fields, and a wood descending in a gentle slope from an old farmstead
of warm red brick. The farmer was driving the slow cattle home from the hill,
and his loud halloo to his dog came across the land a cheerful mellow note.
From another side a cart was approaching the clustered barns, hesitating,
pausing while the great horses rested, and then starting again into lazy
motion. In the well of the valley a wandering line of bushes showed where a
brook crept in and out amongst the meadows, and, as Lucian stood, lingering, on
the bridge, a soft and idle breath ruffled through the boughs of a great elm.
He felt soothed, as by calm music, and wondered whether it would not be better
for him to live in some such quiet place, within reach of the streets and yet
remote from them. It seemed a refuge for still thoughts; he could imagine
himself sitting at rest beneath the black yew tree in the farm garden, at the
close of a summer day. He had almost determined that he would knock at the door
and ask if they would take him as a lodger, when he saw a child running towards
him down the lane. It was a little girl, with bright curls tossing about her
head, and, as she came on, the sunlight glowed upon her, illuminating her
brick-red frock and the yellow king-cups in her hat. She had run with her eyes
on the ground, chirping and laughing to herself, and did not see Lucian till
she was quite near him. She started and glanced into his eyes for a moment, and
began to cry; he stretched out his hand, and she ran from him screaming,
frightened no doubt by what was to her a sudden and strange apparition. He
turned back towards London, and the mist folded him in its thick darkness, for
on that evening it was tinged with black. It was only by the intensest strain
of resolution that he did not yield utterly to the poisonous anodyne which was
always at hand. It had been a difficult struggle to escape from the mesh of the
hills, from the music of the fauns, and even now he was drawn by the memory of
these old allurements. But he felt that here, in his loneliness, he was in
greater danger, and beset by a blacker magic. Horrible fancies rushed wantonly
into his mind; he was not only ready to believe that something in his soul sent
a shudder through all that was simple and innocent, but he came trembling home
one Saturday night, believing, or half-believing, that he was in communion with
evil. He had passed through the clamorous and blatant crowd of the "high
street," where, as one climbed the hill, the shops seemed all aflame, and the
black night air glowed with the flaring gas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing
and wavering before the February wind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable,
were belched out of the blazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro,
and above these doors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a
violent blast of air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing
the people. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that
never stopped or paused, and, as a respond, a deeper, louder voice roared to
him from across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of his piano-organ in a
fury, and a ring of imps danced mad figures around him, danced and flung up
their legs till the rags dropped from some of them, and they still danced on. A
flare of naphtha, burning with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of
the circle, and Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen as she came round and
round to the flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away,
and the crowd howled laughter and applause at her. Her black hair poured down
and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt round the ring, laughing
in Bacchic frenzy, and led the orgy to triumph. People were crossing to and
fro, jostling against each other, swarming about certain shops and stalls in a
dense dark mass that quivered and sent out feelers as if it were one writhing
organism. A little farther a group of young men, arm in arm, were marching down
the roadway chanting some music-hall verse in full chorus, so that it sounded
like plainsong. An impossible hubbub, a hum of voices angry as swarming bees,
the squeals of five or six girls who ran in and out, and dived up dark passages
and darted back into the crowd; all these mingled together till his ears
quivered. A young fellow was playing the concertina, and he touched the keys
with such slow fingers that the tune wailed solemn into a dirge; but there was
nothing so strange as the burst of sound that swelled out when the public-house
doors were opened.
He
walked amongst these people, looked at their faces, and looked at the children
amongst them. He had come out thinking that he would see the English working
class, "the best-behaved and the best-tempered crowd in the world,"
enjoying the simple pleasure of the Saturday night's shopping. Mother bought
the joint for Sunday's dinner, and perhaps a pair of boots for father; father
had an honest glass of beer, and the children were given bags of sweets, and
then all these worthy people went decently home to their well-earned rest. De
Quincey had enjoyed the sight in his day, and had studied the rise and fall of
onions and potatoes. Lucian, indeed, had desired to take these simple emotions
as an opiate, to forget the fine fret and fantastic trouble of his own existence
in plain things and the palpable joy of rest after labor. He was only afraid
lest he should be too sharply reproached by the sight of these men who fought
bravely year after year against starvation, who knew nothing of intricate and
imagined grief, but only the weariness of relentless labor, of the long battle
for their wives and children. It would be pathetic, he thought, to see them
content with so little, brightened by the expectation of a day's rest and a
good dinner, forced, even then, to reckon every penny, and to make their
children laugh with halfpence. Either he would be ashamed before so much
content, or else he would be again touched by the sense of his inhumanity which
could take no interest in the common things of life. But still he went to be at
least taken out of himself, to be forced to look at another side of the world,
so that he might perhaps forget a little while his own sorrows.
He
was fascinated by what he saw and heard. He wondered whether De Quincey also
had seen the same spectacle, and had concealed his impressions out of reverence
for the average reader. Here there were no simple joys of honest toilets, but
wonderful orgies, that drew out his heart to horrible music. At first the
violence of sound and sight had overwhelmed him; the lights flaring in the
night wind, the array of naphtha lamps, the black shadows, the roar of voices.
The dance about the piano-organ had been the first sign of an inner meaning,
and the face of the dark girl as she came round and round to the flame had been
amazing in its utter furious abandon. And what songs they were singing all
around him, and what terrible words rang out, only to excite peals of laughter.
In the public-houses the workmen's wives, the wives of small tradesmen,
decently dressed in black, were drinking their faces to a flaming red, and
urging their husbands to drink more. Beautiful young women, flushed and
laughing, put their arms round the men's necks and kissed them, and then held
up the glass to their lips. In the dark corners, at the openings of side
streets, the children were talking together, instructing each other, whispering
what they had seen; a boy of fifteen was plying a girl of twelve with whisky,
and presently they crept away. Lucian passed them as they turned to go, and
both looked at him. The boy laughed, and the girl smiled quietly. It was above
all in the faces around him that he saw the most astounding things, the Bacchic
fury unveiled and unashamed. To his eyes it seemed as if these revelers
recognized him as a fellow, and smiled up in his face, aware that he was in the
secret. Every instinct of religion, of civilization even, was swept away; they
gazed at one another and at him, absolved of all scruples, children of the
earth and nothing more. Now and then a couple detached themselves from the
swarm, and went away into the darkness, answering the jeers and laughter of
their friends as they vanished.
On
the edge of the pavement, not far from where he was standing, Lucian noticed a
tall and lovely young woman who seemed to be alone. She was in the full light
of a naphtha flame, and her bronze hair and flushed cheeks shone illuminate as
she viewed the orgy. She had dark brown eyes, and a strange look as of an old
picture in her face; and her eyes brightened with an urgent gleam. He saw the
revelers nudging each other and glancing at her, and two or three young men
went up and asked her to come for a walk. She shook her head and said "No
thank you" again and again, and seemed as if she were looking for somebody
in the crowd.
"I'm
expecting a friend," she said at last to a man who proposed a drink and a
walk afterwards; and Lucian wondered what kind of friend would ultimately
appear. Suddenly she turned to him as he was about to pass on, and said in a
low voice:
"I'll
go for a walk with you if you like; you just go on, and I'll follow in a
minute."
For
a moment he looked steadily at her. He saw that the first glance has misled
him; her face was not flushed with drink as he had supposed, but it was radiant
with the most exquisite color, a red flame glowed and died on her cheek, and
seemed to palpitate as she spoke. The head was set on the neck nobly, as in a
statue, and about the ears the bronze hair strayed into little curls. She was
smiling and waiting for his answer.
He
muttered something about being very sorry, and fled down the hill out of the
orgy, from the noise of roaring voices and the glitter of the great lamps very
slowly swinging in the blast of wind. He knew that he had touched the brink of
utter desolation; there was death in the woman's face, and she had indeed
summoned him to the Sabbath. Somehow he had been able to refuse on the instant,
but if he had delayed he knew he would have abandoned himself to her, body and
soul. He locked himself in his room and lay trembling on the bed, wondering if
some subtle sympathy had shown the woman her perfect companion. He looked in
the glass, not expecting now to see certain visible and outward signs, but
searching for the meaning of that strange glance that lit up his eyes. He had
grown even thinner than before in the last few months, and his cheeks were
wasted with hunger and sorrow, but there were still about his features the
suggestion of a curious classic grace, and the look as of a faun who has
strayed from the vineyards and olive gardens. He had broken away, but now he
felt the mesh of her net about him, a desire for her that was a madness, as if
she held every nerve in his body and drew him to her, to her mystic world, to
the rosebush where every flower was a flame.
He
dreamed all night of the perilous things he had refused, and it was loss to
awake in the morning, pain to return to the world. The frost had broken and the
fog had rolled away, and the grey street was filled with a clear grey light.
Again he looked out on the long dull sweep of the monotonous houses, hidden for
the past weeks by a curtain of mist. Heavy rain had fallen in the night, and
the garden rails were still dripping, the roofs still dark with wet, all down
the line the dingy white blinds were drawn in the upper windows. Not a soul
walked the street; every one was asleep after the exertions of the night
before; even on the main road it was only at intervals that some straggler
paddled by. Presently a woman in a brown Ulster shuffled off on some errand,
then a man in shirt-sleeves poked out his head, holding the door half-open, and
stared up at a window opposite. After a few minutes he slunk in again, and
three loafers came slouching down the street, eager for mischief or beastliness
of some sort. They chose a house that seemed rather smarter than the rest, and,
irritated by the neat curtains, the little grass plot with its dwarf shrub, one
of the ruffians drew out a piece of chalk and wrote some words on the front
door. His friends kept watch for him, and the adventure achieved, all three
bolted, bellowing yahoo laughter. Then a bell began, tang, tang, tang, and here
and there children appeared on their way to Sunday-school, and the chapel
"teachers" went by with verjuice eyes and lips, scowling at the
little boy who cried "Piper, piper!" On the main road many
respectable people, the men shining and ill-fitted, the women hideously
bedizened, passed in the direction of the Independent nightmare, the stuccoed
thing with Doric columns, but on the whole life was stagnant. Presently Lucian
smelt the horrid fumes of roast beef and cabbage; the early risers were
preparing the one-o'clock meal, but many lay in bed and put off dinner till
three, with the effect of prolonging the cabbage atmosphere into the late afternoon.
A drizzly rain began as the people were coming out of church, and the mothers
of little boys in velvet and little girls in foolishness of every kind were
impelled to slap their offspring, and to threaten them with father. Then the
torpor of beef and beer and cabbage settled down on the street; in some houses
they snorted and read the Parish Magazine, in some they snored and read the
murders and collected filth of the week; but the only movement of the afternoon
was a second procession of children, now bloated and distended with food, again
answering the summons of tang, tang, tang. On the main road the trams, laden
with impossible people, went humming to and fro, and young men who wore bright
blue ties cheerfully haw-hawed and smoked penny cigars. They annoyed the shiny
and respectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful stench of the cigars,
but because they were cheerful on Sunday. By and by the children, having heard
about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in the Lion's Den, came straggling home
in an evil humor. And all the day it was as if one a grey sheet grey shadows
flickered, passing by.
And
in the rose-garden every flower was a flame! He thought in symbols, using the
Persian imagery of a dusky court, surrounded by white cloisters, gilded by
gates of bronze. The stars came out, the sky glowed a darker violet, but the
cloistered wall, the fantastic trellises in stone, shone whiter. It was like a
hedge of may-blossom, like a lily within a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam
tossed on the heaving sea at dawn. Always those white cloisters trembled with
the lute music, always the garden sang with the clear fountain, rising and
falling in the mysterious dusk. And there was a singing voice stealing through
the white lattices and the bronze gates, a soft voice chanting of the Lover and
the Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and the Way. Oh! the language was
unknown; but the music of the refrain returned again and again, swelling and
trembling through the white nets of the latticed cloisters. And every rose in
the dusky air was a flame.
He
had seen the life which he expressed by these symbols offered to him, and he
had refused it; and he was alone in the grey street, with its lamps just
twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast of a ribald chorus sounding
from the main road, a doggerel hymn whining from some parlor, to the
accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered why he had turned away from that
woman who knew all secrets, in whose eyes were all the mysteries. He opened the
desk of his bureau, and was confronted by the heap and litter of papers, lying
in confusion as he had left them. He knew that there was the motive of his
refusal; he had been unwilling to abandon all hope of the work. The glory and
the torment of his ambition glowed upon him as he looked at the manuscript; it
seemed so pitiful that such a single desire should be thwarted. He was aware
that if he chose to sit down now before the desk he could, in a manner, write
easily enough - he could produce a tale which would be formally well
constructed and certain of favorable reception. And it would not be the utterly
commonplace, entirely hopeless favorite of the circulating library; it would
stand in those ranks where the real thing is skillfully counterfeited, amongst
the books which give the reader his orgy of emotions, and yet contrive to be
superior, and "art," in his opinion. Lucian had often observed this
species of triumph, and had noted the acclamation that never failed the clever
sham. Romola, for example, had made the great host of the serious, the
portentous, shout for joy, while the real book, The Cloister and the Hearth,
was a comparative failure.
He
knew that he could write a Romola; but he thought the art of counterfeiting
half-crowns less detestable than this shabby trick of imitating literature. He
had refused definitely to enter the atelier of the gentleman who pleased his
clients by ingeniously simulating the grain of walnut; and though he had seen
the old oaken ambry kicked out contemptuously into the farmyard, serving
perhaps the necessities of hens or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the
masters of veneer. He paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his
papers, and wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could
never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuine
pages.
He
was stirred again to this fury for the work by the event of the evening before,
by all that had passed through his mind since the melancholy dawn. The lurid
picture of that fiery street, the flaming shops and flaming glances, all its
wonders and horrors, lit by the naphtha flares and by the burning souls, had
possessed him; and the noises, the shriek and the whisper, the jangling rattle
of the piano-organ, the long-continued scream of the butcher as he dabbled in
the blood, the lewd litany of the singers, these seemed to be resolved into an
infernal overture, loud with the expectation of lust and death. And how the
spectacle was set in the cloud of dark night, a phantom play acted on that
fiery stage, beneath those hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a
violent blast. As all the medley of outrageous sights and sounds now fused
themselves within his brain into one clear impression, it seemed that he had
indeed witnessed and acted in a drama, that all the scene had been prepared and
vested for him, and that the choric songs he had heard were but preludes to a
greater act. For in that woman was the consummation and catastrophe of it all,
and the whole stage waited for their meeting. He fancied that after this the
voices and the lights died away, that the crowd sank swiftly into the darkness,
and that the street was at once denuded of the great lamps and of all its awful
scenic apparatus.
Again,
he thought, the same mystery would be represented before him; suddenly on some
dark and gloomy night, as he wandered lonely on a deserted road, the wind
hurrying before him, suddenly a turn would bring him again upon the fiery
stage, and the antique drama would be re-enacted. He would be drawn to the same
place, to find that woman still standing there; again he would watch the rose
radiant and palpitating upon her cheek, the argent gleam in her brown eyes, the
bronze curls gilding the white splendor of her neck. And for the second time
she would freely offer herself. He could hear the wail of the singers swelling
to a shriek, and see the dusky dancers whirling round in a faster frenzy, and
the naphtha flares tinged with red, as the woman and he went away into the
dark, into the cloistered court where every flower was a flame, whence he would
never come out.
His
only escape was in the desk; he might find salvation if he could again hide his
heart in the heap and litter of papers, and again be rapt by the cadence of a
phrase. He threw open his window and looked out on the dim world and the
glimmering amber lights. He resolved that he would rise early in the morning,
and seek once more for his true life in the work.
But
there was a strange thing. There was a little bottle on the mantelpiece, a
bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shuddered before it, as if it
were a fetish.