The Divine Fire

by May Sinclair

CHAPTER LXXV

"I don't know what to think of it, Kitty. What do you think?"

"I think you've been playing with fire, dear. With the divine fire. It's the most dangerous of all, and you've got your little fingers burnt."

"Like Horace. He once said the burnt critic dreads the divine fire. I'm not a critic."

"That you most certainly are not."

"Still I used to understand him; and now I can't. I can't make it out at all."

"There's only one thing," said Kitty, musing till an inspiration came. "You haven't seen him for more than three years, and you can't tell what may have happened in between. He may have got entangled with another woman."

Kitty would not have hazarded this conjecture if she had not believed it plausible. But she dwelt on it with a beneficent intention. No other theory, she opined, would so effectually turn and rout the invading idea of Keith Rickman.

Kitty was for once mistaken in her judgement, not having all the evidence before her. The details which would have thrown light on the situation were just those which Lucia preferred to keep to herself. All that the benevolent Kitty had achieved was to fill her friend's mind with a new torment. Lucia had dreaded Rickman's coming; she had lost all sense of security in his presence. Still she had understood him. And now she felt that her very understanding was at fault; that something troubled the fine light she had always viewed him in. Was it possible that she had never really understood?

Close upon Kitty's words there came back to her the tilings that Edith had said of him, that Horace had hinted; things that he had confessed to her himself. Was it possible that he was still that sort of man, the sort that she had vowed she would never marry? He was not bad; she could not think of him as bad; but was he good? Was he like her cousin Horace? No; certainly there was not the smallest resemblance between him and Horace. With Horace she had always felt—in one way—absolutely secure. If she had ever been uncertain it had not been with this obscure inexplicable dread.

How was it that she had never felt it before? Never felt it in the first weeks of their acquaintance, when day after day and evening after evening she had sat working with him, here, alone? When he had appeared to her in the first flush of his exuberant youth, transparent as glass, incapable of reservation or disguise? It was in those days (he had told her) that he had not been—good. And yet her own vision of him had never been purer, her divination subtler than then. Even in that last week, after her terrible enlightenment at Cannes, when she was ready to suspect every man, even Horace, she had never suspected him. And in the second period of their friendship, when his character was ripened and full-grown, when she had lived under the same roof with him, she had never had a misgiving or a doubt. And now there was no end to her doubt. She could not tell which was the instinct she should trust, or whether she were better able to judge him then or now. What had become of her calm and lucid insight? Of the sympathy in which they had once stood each transparent to the other.

For that was the worst of it; that he no longer understood her; and that she had given him cause for misunderstanding (this thought was beginning to keep her awake at night). She had made it impossible for him to respect her any more. He had his ideas of what a woman should and should not do, and he had been horrified at finding her so like, and oh, so unlike other women (here Lucia's mood rose from misery to anger). She had thought him finer, subtler than that; but he had judged her as he judged such women. And she had brought that judgement on herself.

In an ecstasy of shame she recalled the various episodes of their acquaintance, from the time when she had first engaged him to work for her (against his will), to the present intolerable moment. There rose before her in an awful vision that night when she had found him sleeping in the library; when she had stayed and risked the chances of his waking. Well, he could not think any the worse of her for that; because he had not waked. But she had risked it. The more she thought of it the more she saw what she had risked. He would always think of her as a woman who did risky things. Edith had said she had put herself in his power. She remembered how she had come between him and the woman whom he would have married but for her; how she had invited him to sit with her when the Beaver was away. He had liked it, but he must have had his own opinion of her all the same. That was another of the risky things. And of course he had taken advantage of it. That was the very worst of all. He had loved her in his way; she had been one of a series. Flossie had come before her. And before Flossie? All that was fine in him had turned against Flossie because of the feeling she inspired. And it had turned against her.

For now, when he had got over it, had forgotten that he had ever had that feeling, when all he wanted was to go his own way and let her go hers, she had tried to force herself upon him (Lucia was unaware of her violent distortion of the facts). He had come with his simple honourable desire for reparation; and she had committed the unpardonable blunder—she had mistaken his intentions. And for the monument and crown of her dishonour, she, Lucia Harden, had proposed to him and been rejected.

Her misery endured (with some merciful intermissions) for three weeks. Then Horace Jewdwine wrote and invited himself down for the first week-end in May.

"Can he come, Kitty?" she asked wearily.

"Of course he can, dear, if you want him,"

"I don't want him; but I don't mind his coming."

Kitty said to herself, "He has an inkling; Edith has been saying things; and it has brought him to the point." Otherwise she could not account for such an abrupt adventure on the part of the deliberate Horace. It was a Wednesday; and he proposed to come on Friday. He came on Friday. Kitty's observation was on the alert; but it could detect nothing that first evening beyond a marked improvement in Horace Jewdwine. With Lucia he was sympathetic, deferential, charming. He also laid himself out, a little elaborately, to be agreeable to Kitty.

In the morning he approached Lucia with a gift, brought for her birthday ("I thought," said Lucia, "he had forgotten that I ever had a birthday"). It was an early copy of Rickman's tragedy The Triumph of Life, just published. His keen eyes watched her handling it.

"He suspects," thought Kitty, "and he's testing her."

But Lucia's equanimity survived. "Am I to read it now?"

"As you like."

She carried the book up to her own room and did not appear till lunch-time. In her absence Horace seemed a little uneasy; but he went on making himself agreeable to Kitty. "He must be pretty desperate," thought she, "if he thinks it worth while." Apparently he did think it worth while, though he allowed no sign of desperation to appear. Lucia, equally discreet, avoided ostentatious privacy. They sat out all afternoon under the beechtrees while she read, flaunting The Triumph of Life in his very eyes. He watched every movement of her face that changed as it were to the cadence of the verse. It was always so, he remembered, when she was strongly moved. At last she finished and he smiled.

"You like your birthday present?"

"Very much. But Horace, he has done what you said was impossible."

"Anybody would have said it was impossible. Modern drama in blank verse, you know—"

"Yes. It ought to have been all wrong. But because he's both a great poet and a great dramatist, it's all right, you see. Look," she said, pointing to a passage that she dared not read. "Those are human voices. Could anything be simpler and more natural? But it's blank verse because it couldn't be more perfectly expressed in prose."

"Yes, yes. I wonder how he does it."

"It would have been impossible to anybody else."

"It remains impossible. If it's ever played, it will be played because of Rickman's stage-craft and inimitable technique, not because of his blank verse."

She put the book down; took up her work, and said no more. Horace seemed to have found his answer and to be satisfied. "A fool," thought Kitty; "but he shall have his chance." So she left them alone together that evening.

But Jewdwine was very far from being satisfied, either with Lucia or himself. Lucia had refused to play to him yesterday because she had a headache; she had refused to walk with him to-day because she was tired; and to-night she would not sit up to talk to him because she had another headache. That evening he had all but succumbed to a terrible temptation. It was so long since he had been alone with Lucia, and there was something in her face, her dress, her attitude, that appealed to the authority on Æsthetics. He found himself wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had kissed her his sense of propriety would have obliged him to propose to her and marry her.

He almost wished he had yielded to that temptation, done that desperate deed. It would have at least settled the question once for all.

For Jewdwine had found himself a third time at the turning of the ways. He knew where he was; but not where he was going. It had happened with Jewdwine as it had with Isaac Rickman; as it happens to every man bent on serving two masters. He had forbidden his right hand all knowledge of his left. He lived in two separate worlds. In one, lit by the high, pure light of the idea, he stood comparatively alone, cheered in his intellectual solitude by the enthusiasm of his disciples. For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred imperishable flame. Some suffered no painful disenchantment for their pilgrimage; and when the world that knew Jewdwine imparted to them its wisdom they smiled the mystic smile of the initiated. But many had become shaken in their faith. One of these, having achieved a little celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any public assistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had assured him that the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." And this had been Jewdwine's own confession and defence.

But now he had gone down into Devonshire, as Rickman had once gone before him, to find himself. He had returned to Lucia as to his own purer soul. That night Jewdwine sat up face to face with himself and all his doubts; his problem being far more complicated than before. Three years ago it might have been very simply stated. Was he or was he not going to marry his cousin Lucia? But now, while personal inclination urged him to marry her, prudence argued that he would do better to marry a certain cousin of Mr. Fulcher's. His own cousin had neither money nor position. Mr. Fulcher's cousin had both. Once married to Miss Fulcher he could buy back Court House, if the Pallisers would give it up. The Cabinet Minister's cousin was in love with him, whereas he was well aware that his own cousin was not.

But then he had never greatly desired her to be so.

Jewdwine had neither respect nor longing for Miss Fulcher's passionate love. To his fragile temperament there was something infinitely more alluring in Lucia's virginal apathy. Her indifference (which he confused with her innocence) fascinated him; her reluctance was as a challenge to his languid blood. He was equally fascinated by her indifference to the income and position that were his. He admired that immaculate purity the more because he was not himself in these ways particularly pure. He loved money and position for their own sakes and hated himself for loving them. He would have liked to have been strong enough to despise these things as Lucia had always despised them. But he did not desire that she should go on despising them, any more than he desired that her indifference should survive the marriage ceremony. He pictured with satisfaction her gradual yielding to the modest luxury he had to offer her, just as he pictured the exquisite delaying dawn of her wifely ardour.

The truth was he had lived too long with Edith. The instincts of his nature cried out (as far as anything so well-regulated could be said to cry out) in the most refined of accents for a wife, for children and a home. He had his dreams of the holy faithful spouse, a spouse with great dog-like eyes and tender breast, fit pillow for the head of a headachy, literary man. Lucia had dog-like eyes, and of her tenderness he had never had a doubt. He had never forgotten that hot June day, the year before he left Oxford, when he lay in the hammock in the green garden and Lucia ministered to him. Before that there was a blessed Long Vacation when he had over-read himself into a nervous breakdown, and Lucia had soothed his headaches with the touch of her gentle hands. For the sake of that touch he would then have borne the worst headache man ever had.

And now it seemed that it was Lucia that was always having headaches. He had, in fact, begun to entertain the very gravest anxiety about her health. Her face and figure had grown thin; they were becoming less and less like the face and figure of the ideal spouse. Poor Lucia's arms offered no reliable support for a tired man.

To his annoyance Jewdwine found that he had to breakfast alone with his hostess, because of Lucia's headache.

"Lucia doesn't seem very strong," he said to Kitty, sternly, as if it had been Kitty's fault. "Don't you see it?"

"I have seen it for some considerable time."

"She wants rousing."

And Jewdwine, who was himself feeling the need of exercise, roused her by taking her for a walk up Harcombe Hill. Half-way up she turned a white face to him, smiling sweetly, sat down on the hillside, and bent her head upon her knees. He sat beside her and waited for her recovery with punctilious patience. His face wore an expression of agonized concern. But she could see that the concern was not there altogether on her account.

"Don't be frightened, Horace, you won't have to carry me home."

He helped her to her feet, not ungently, and was very considerate in accommodating his pace to hers, and in reassuring her when she apologized for having spoilt his morning. And then it was that she thought of Keith Rickman, of his gentleness and his innumerable acts of kindness and of care; and she said to herself, "He would not be impatient with me if I were ill."

She rested in her room that afternoon and Kitty sat with her. Kitty could not stand, she said, more than a certain amount of Horace Jewdwine.

"Lucia," she asked suddenly, "if Horace Jewdwine had asked you to marry him five years ago, would you have had him?"

"I don't know. I don't really know. He's a good man."

"You mean his morals are irreproachable. It's quite easy to have irreproachable morals if you have the temperament of an iceberg that has never broken loose from its Pole. Now I call Keith Rickman a saint, because he could so easily have been the other thing."

Lucia did not respond; and Kitty left her.

Kitty's question had set her thinking. Would she have married Horace if he had asked her five years ago? Why not? Between Horace and her there was the bond of kindred and of caste. He was a scholar; he had, or he once had, a beautiful mind full of noble thoughts of the kind she most admired. With Horace she would have felt safe from many things. All his ideas and feelings, all his movements could be relied on with an absolute assurance of their propriety. Horace would never do or say anything that could offend her feminine taste. In his love (she had been certain) there would never be anything painful, passionate, disturbing. She had dreamed of a love which should be a great calm light rather than a flame. There was no sort of flame about Horace. Was Horace a good man? Yes. That is to say he was a moral man. He would have come to her clean in body and in soul. She had vowed she would never marry a certain kind of man. And yet that was the kind of man Keith Rickman had been.

She had further demanded in her husband the finish of the ages. Who was more finished than Horace? Who more consummately, irreproachably refined? And yet her heart had grown more tender over Keith Rickman and his solecisms. And now it beat faster at the very thought of him, after Horace Jewdwine.

For Horace's coming had brought her understanding of Keith Rickman and herself. She knew now what had troubled her once clear vision of him. It was when she had loved him least that she had divined him best. Hers was not the facile heart that believes because it desires. It desired because it believed; and now it doubted because its belief was set so high.

And, knowing that she loved him, she thought of that last day when he had left her, and how he had taken her hands in his and looked at them, and she remembered and wondered and had hope.

Then it occurred to her that Horace would be leaving early the next morning, and that she really ought to go down to the drawing-room and talk to him.

Again by Kitty's mercy he had been given another chance. He was softened by a mood of valediction mingled with remorse. He was even inclined to be a little sentimental. Lucia, because her vision was indifferent therefore untroubled, could not but perceive the change in him. His manner had in it something of benediction and something of entreaty; his spirit brooded over, caressed and flattered hers. He deplored the necessity for his departure. "Et ego in Arcadia"—he quoted.

"But you'll go away to-morrow and become more—more Metropolitan than ever."

"Ah, Lucia, can't you leave my poor rag alone? Do you really think so badly of it?"

"Well, I was prouder of my cousin when he had The Museion."

"I didn't ask you what you thought of me. Perhaps I'm not very proud of myself."

"I don't suppose it satisfies your ambition—I should be sorry if it did."

"My ambition? What do you think it was?"

"It was, wasn't it—To be a great critic?"

"It depends on what you call great."

"Well, you came very near it once."

"When?"

"When you were editor of The Museion."

He smiled sadly. "The editor of The Museion, Lucia, was a very little man with a very big conceit of himself. I admit he made himself pretty conspicuous. So does every leader of a forlorn hope."

"Still he led it. What does the editor of Metropolis lead?"

"Public opinion, dear. He has—although you mightn't think it—considerable power."

Lucia was silent.

"He can make—or kill—a reputation in twenty-four hours."

"Does that satisfy your ambition?"

"Yes. It satisfies my ambition. But it doesn't satisfy me."

"I was afraid it didn't."

"You needn't be afraid, dear; for you know perfectly well what would."

"Do I know? Do you know yourself, Horace?"

"Yes, Lucia," he said gently; "after ten years. You may not be proud of your cousin—"

"I used to be proud of him always—or nearly always."

"When were you proud of him?"

"When he was himself; when he was sincere."

"I ought to be very proud of my cousin; for she is pitilessly sincere."

"Horace—"

"It is so, dear. Never mind, you needn't be proud of me, if you'll only care—"

"I have always cared."

"Or is it—nearly always?"

"Well—nearly always."

"You're right. I am insincere, I was insincere when I said you needn't be proud of me. I want you, I mean you to be."

"Do you mean to give up Metropolis, then?"

"Well, no. That's asking rather too much."

"I know it is."

"Do you hate it so much, Lucia? I wish you didn't."

"I have hated it so much, Horace, that I once wished I had been a rich woman, that you might be"—she was going to say "an honourable man."

"What's wrong with it? It's a better paper than the old one. There are better men on it, and its editor's a better man."

"Is he?"

"Yes. He's a simpler, humbler person, and—I should have thought—more possible to like."

In her heart Lucia admitted that it was so. There was a charm about this later Horace Jewdwine which was wanting in that high spirit that had essayed to move the earth. He had come down from his chilly altitudes to mix with men; he had shed the superstition of omnipotence, he was aware of his own weakness and humanized by it. The man was soiled but softened by his traffic with the world. There was moreover an indescribable pathos in the contrast presented by the remains of the old self, its loftiness, its lucidity, and the vulgarity with which he had wrapped it round. Jewdwine's intellectual splendour had never been so impressive as now when it showed thus tarnished and obscured.

"At any rate," he went on, "he is infinitely less absurd. He knows his limitations. Also his mistakes. He tried to turn the republic of letters into a limited monarchy. Now he has surrendered to the omnipotence of facts."

"You mean he has lowered his standard?"

"My dear girl, what am I to do with my standard? Look at the rabble that are writing. I can't compare Tompkins with Shakespeare or Brown with Sophocles. I'm lucky if I can make out that Tompkins has surpassed Brown this year as Brown surpassed Tompkins last year; in other words, that Tompkins has surpassed himself."

"And so you go on, looking lower and lower."

"N-n-no, Lucia. I don't look lower; I look closer, I see that there is something to be said for Tompkins after all. I find subtler and subtler shades of distinction between him and Brown. I become more just, more discriminating, more humane."

"I know how fine your work is, and that's just the pity of it. You might have been a great critic if you hadn't wasted yourself on little things and little men."

"If a really big man came along, do you think I should look at them? But he doesn't come. I've waited for him ten years, Lucia, and he hasn't come."

"Oh, Horace—"

"He hasn't. Show me a big man, and I'll fall down and worship him. Only show him me."

"That's your business, isn't it, not mine? Still, I can show you one, not very far off, in fact very near."

"Too near for us to judge him perhaps. Who is he?"

"If I'm not mistaken, he's a sort of friend of yours."

"Keith Rickman? Oh—"

"Do you remember the day we first talked about him?"

He did indeed. He remembered how unwilling he had been to talk about him; and he was still more unwilling now. He wanted, and Lucia knew that he wanted, to talk about himself.

"It's ten years ago," she said. "Have you been waiting all this time to see him?"

He coloured. "I saw him before you did, Lucia. I saw him a very long way off. I was the first to see."

"Were you? Then—oh Horace, if you saw all those years ago why haven't you said so?"

"I have said so, many times."

"Whom have you said it to?"

"To you for one. To every one, I think, who knows him. They'll bear me out."

"The people who know him? What was the good of that? You should have said it to the people who don't know him—to the world."

"You mean I should have posed as a prophet?"

"I mean that what you said you might have written."

"Ah, litera scripta manet. It isn't safe to prophesy. Remember, I saw him a very long way off. Nobody had a notion there was anybody there."

"You could have given them a notion."

"I couldn't. The world, Lucia, is not like you or me. It has no imagination. It wouldn't have seen, and it wouldn't have believed. I should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing behind it. And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game. In the first place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets even when they're right."

"Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of butter."

"It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things. When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world retaliates and offers them a stone. And that stone, I need not tell you, has no butter on it."

"I see. You were afraid. You haven't the courage of your opinion."

"And I haven't much opinion of my courage. I own to being afraid."

"Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?"

"My first duty is to the public—my public; not to my friends. Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet—I think he is—but if my public doesn't want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can't insist on their hearing, can I?"

"No, Horace, after all you've told me, I don't believe you can."

"Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it."

"I'm to admire your frankness, am I? You say you're afraid. But you said just now you had such power."

"If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the rôle of Vates I should have lost my power. Nobody would have listened to me. I began that way, by preaching over people's heads. The Museion was a pulpit in the air. I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary transcendentalism. Nobody listened. When I condescended to come down and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened. It wouldn't have done Rickman any good if I'd pestered people with him. But when the time comes I shall speak out."

"I daresay, when the time comes—it will come too—when he has made his name with no thanks to you, then you'll be the first to say 'I told you so.' It would have been a greater thing to have helped him when he needed it."

"I did help him. He wouldn't be writing now if it wasn't for me."

"Do you see much of him?"

"Not much. It isn't my fault," he added in answer to her reproachful eyes. "He's shut himself up with Maddox in a stuffy little house at Ealing."

"Does that mean that he's very badly off?"

"Well, no; I shouldn't say so. He's got an editorship. But he isn't the sort that's made for getting on. In many things he is a fool."

"I admire his folly more than some people's wisdom."

From the look in Lucia's eyes Jewdwine was aware that his cousin no longer adored him. Did she adore Rickman?

"You're a little hard on me, I think. After all, I was the first to help him."

"And the last. Are you quite sure you helped him? How do you know you didn't hinder him? You kept him for years turning out inferior work for you, when he might have been giving us his best."

"He might—if he'd been alive to do it."

"I'm only thinking of what you might have done. The sort of thing you've done for other people—Mr. Fulcher, for instance."

Jewdwine blushed as he had never blushed before. He was not given to that form of self-betrayal.

"You said just now you could either kill a book in twenty-four hours, or make it—did you say?—immortal."

"I might have said I could keep it alive another twenty-four hours."

"You know the reputations you have made for people."

"I do know them. I've made enough of them to know. The reputations I've made will not last. The only kind that does last is the kind that makes itself. Do you seriously suppose a man like Rickman needs my help? I am a journalist, and the world that journalists are compelled to live in is very poor and small. He's in another place altogether. I couldn't dream of treating him as I treat, say, Rankin or Fulcher. The best service I could do him was to leave him alone—to keep off and give him room."

"Room to stand in?"

"No. Room to grow in, room to fight in—"

"Room to measure his length in when he falls?"

"If you like. Rickman's length will cover a considerable area."

Lucia looked at her cousin with genuine admiration. How clever, how amazingly clever he was! She knew and he knew that he had failed in generosity to Rickman; that he had been a more than cautious critic and a callous friend. She had been prepared to be nice to him if they had kept Rickman out of their conversation; but as the subject had arisen she had meant to give Horace a terribly bad quarter of an hour; she had meant to turn him inside out and make him feel very mean and pitiful and small. And somehow it hadn't come off. Instead of diminishing as he should have done, Horace had worked himself gradually up to her height, had caught flame from her flame, and now he was consuming her with her own fire. It was she who had taken, the view most degrading to the man she admired; she who would have dragged her poet down to earth and put him on a level with Rankin and Fulcher and such people. Horace would have her believe that his own outlook was the clearer and more heavenly; that he understood Rickman better; that he saw that side of him that faced eternity.

His humility, too, was pathetic and disarmed her indignation. At the same time he made it appear that this was a lifting of the veil, a glimpse of the true Jewdwine, the soul of him in its naked simplicity and sincerity. And she was left uncertain whether it were not so.

"Even so," she said gently; "think of all you will have missed."

"Missed, Lucia?"

"Yes, missed. I think, to have believed in any one's greatness—the greatness of a great poet—to have been allowed to hold in your hands the pure, priceless thing, before the world had touched it—to have seen what nobody else saw—to feel that through your first glorious sight of him he belonged to you as he never could belong to the world, that he was your own—that would be something to have lived for. It would be greatness of a kind."

He bowed his head as it were in an attitude as humble and reverent as her own. "And yet," he said, "the world does sometimes see its poet and believe in him."

"It does—when he works miracles."

"Someday he will work his miracle."

"And when the world runs after him you will follow."

"I shall not be very far behind."

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