CHAPTER II
A QUESTION OF EXCHANGE
Most of us need an opposite to sit by the hearth with us sometimes, and to stir us to wonder or to war. Julian was Valentine's singularly complete and perfect opposite, in nature if not in deeds. But, after all, it is the thoughts that are of account rather than the acts, to a mind like Valentine's. He knew that Julian's nature was totally unlike his own, so singularly unlike that Julian struck just the right note to give the strength of a discord to the chord—that often seemed a common chord—of his own harmony. Long ago, for this reason, or for no special reason, he had grown to love Julian. Theirs was a fine, clean specimen of friendship. How fine, Valentine never rightly knew until this evening.
They were sitting together in Valentine's flat in that hour when he became serious and expansive. He had rather a habit of becoming serious toward midnight, especially if he was with only one person; and no desire to please interfered with his natural play of mind and of feeling when he was with Julian. To affect any feeling with Julian would have seemed like being on conventional terms with an element, or endeavouring to deceive one's valet about one's personal habits. Long ago Julian and he had, in mind, taken up their residence together, fallen into the pleasant custom of breakfasting, lunching, and dining on all topics in common. Valentine knew of no barriers between them. And so, now, as they sat smoking, he expressed his mood without fear or hesitation.
The room in which they were was small. It was named the tentroom, being hung with dull-green draperies, which hid the ceiling and fell loosely to the floor on every side. A heavy curtain shrouded the one door. On the hearth flickered a fire, before which lay Valentine's fox-terrier, Rip. Julian was half lying down on a divan in an unbuttoned attitude. Valentine leaned forward in an arm-chair. They were smoking cigarettes.
"Julian," Valentine said, meditatively, "I sometimes wonder why you and
I are such great friends."
"How abominable of you! To seek a reason for friendship is as inhuman as to probe for the causes of love. Don't, for goodness' sake, let your intellect triumph over your humanity, Valentine. Of all modern vices, that seems to me the most loathsome. But you could never fall into anything loathsome. You are sheeted against that danger with plate armour."
"Nonsense!"
"But you are. It sometimes seems to me that you and I are like Elijah and
Elisha, in a way. But I am covetous of your mantle."
"Then you want me to be caught from you into heaven?"
"No. I should like you to give me your mantle, your powers, your nature, that is, and to stay here as well."
"And send the chariot of fire to the coach-house, and the horses of fire to the nearest stables?"
"Exactly!"
"Well, but give me a reason for this rascally craving."
"A reason! Oh, I hate my nature and I love yours. What a curse it is to go through life eternally haunted by one's self; worse than being married to an ugly and boring wife."
"Now you are being morbid."
"Well, I'm telling you just how I feel."
"That is being morbid. Recording to some people who claim to direct
Society."
"The world's County Council, who would like to abolish all the public bars."
"And force us to do our drinking in the privacy of our bedrooms."
"You would never do any drinking, Valentine. How could you, the Saint of
Victoria Street?"
"I begin to hate that nickname."
And he frowned slowly. Tall, fair, curiously innocent-looking, his face was the face of a blonde ascetic. His blue eyes were certainly not cold, but nobody could imagine that they would ever gleam with passion or with desire as they looked upon sin. His mouth seemed made for prayer, not for kisses; and so women often longed to kiss it. Over him, indeed, intellectuality hung like a light veil, setting him apart from the uproar which the world raises while it breaks the ten commandments. Julian, on the other hand, was brown, with bright, eager eyes, and the expression of one who was above all things intensely human. Valentine had ever been, and still remained, to him a perpetual wonder, a sort of beautiful mystery. He actually reverenced this youth who stood apart from all the muddy ways of sin, too refined, as it seemed, rather than too religious, to be attracted by any wile of the devil's, too completely artistic to feel any impulse towards the subtle violence which lurks in all the vagaries of the body. Valentine was to Julian a god, but in their mutual relations this fact never became apparent. On the contrary, Valentine was apt to look up to Julian with admiration, and the curious respect often felt by those who are good by temperament for those who are completely human. And Julian loved Valentine for looking up to him, finding in this absurd modesty of his friend a crowning beauty of character. He had never told Valentine the fact that Valentine kept him pure, held his bounding nature in leash, was the wall of fire that hedged him from sin, the armour that protected him against the assaults of self. He had never told Valentine this secret, which he cherished with the exceeding and watchful care men so often display in hiding that which does them credit. For who is not a pocket Byron nowadays? But to-night was fated by the Immortals to be a night of self-revelation. And Valentine led the way by taking a step that surprised Julian not a little. For as Valentine frowned he said:
"Yes, I begin to hate my nickname, and I begin to hate myself."
Julian could not help smiling at the absurdity of this bemoaning.
"What is it in yourself that you hate so much?" he asked, with a decided curiosity.
Valentine sat considering.
"Well," he replied at length, "I think it is my inhumanity, which robs me of many things. I don't desire the pleasures that most men desire, as you know. But lately I have often wished to desire them."
"Rather an elaborate state of mind."
"Yet a state easy to understand, surely. Julian, emotions pass me by. Why is that? Deep love, deep hate, despair, desire, won't stop to speak to me. Men tell me I am a marvel because I never do as they do. But I am not driven as they are evidently driven. The fact of the matter is that desire is not in me. My nature shrinks from sin; but it is not virtue that shrinks: it is rather reserve. I have no more temptation to be sensual, for instance, than I have to be vulgar."
"Hang it, Val, you don't want to have the temptation, do you?"
Valentine looked at Julian curiously.
"You have the temptation, Julian?" he said.
"You know I have—horribly."
"But you fight it and conquer it?"
"I fight it, and now I am beginning to conquer it, to get it under."
"Now? Since when?"
Julian replied by asking another question.
"Look here, how long have we known each other?"
"Let me see. I'm twenty-four, you twenty-three. Just five years."
"Ah! For just five years I've fought, Val, been able to fight."
"And before then?"
"I didn't fight; I revelled in the enemy's camp."
"You have never told me this before. Did you suddenly get conversion, as
Salvationists say?"
"Something like it. But my conversion had nothing to do with trumpets and tambourines."
"What then? This is interesting."
A certain confusion had come into Julian's expression, even a certain echoing awkwardness into his attitude. He looked away into the fire and lighted another cigarette before he answered. Then he said rather unevenly:
"I dare say you'll be surprised when I tell you. But I never meant to tell you at all."
"Don't, if you would rather not."
"Yes, I think I will. I must stop you from disliking yourself at any cost, dear old boy. Well, you converted me, so far as I am converted; and that's not very far, I'm afraid."
"I?" said Valentine, with genuine surprise. "Why, I never tried to."
"Exactly. If you had, no doubt you'd have failed."
"But explain."
"I've never told you all you do for me, Val. You are my armour against all these damned things. When I'm with you, I hate the notion of being a sinner. I never hated it before I met you. In fact, I loved it. I wanted sin more than I wanted anything in heaven or earth. And then—just at the critical moment when I was passing from boyhood into manhood, I met you."
He stopped. His brown cheeks were glowing, and he avoided Valentine's gaze.
"Go on, Julian," Valentine said. "I want to hear this."
"All right, I'll finish now, but I don't know why I ever began. Perhaps you'll think me a fool, or a sentimentalist."
"Nonsense!"
"Well, I don't know how it is, but when I saw you I first understood that there is a good deal in what the parsons say, that sin is beastly in itself, don't you know, even apart from one's religious convictions, or the injury one may do to others. When I saw you, I understood that sin degrades one's self, Valentine. For you had never sinned as I had, and you were so different from me. You are the only sinless man I know, and you have made me know what beasts we men are. Why can't we be what we might be?"
Valentine did not reply. He seemed lost in thought, and Julian continued, throwing off his original shamefacedness:
"Ever since then you've kept me straight. If I feel inclined to throw myself down in the gutter, one look at you makes me loathe the notion. Preaching often drives one wrong out of sheer 'cussedness,' I suppose. But you don't preach and don't care. You just live beautifully, because you're made differently from all of us. So you do for me what no preachers could ever do. There—now you know."
He lay back, puffing violently at his cigarette.
"It is strange," Valentine said, seeing he had finished. "You know, to live as I do is no effort to me, and so it is absurd to praise me."
"I won't praise you, but it's outrageous of you to want to feel as I and other men feel."
"Is it? I don't think so. I think it is very natural. My life is a dead calm, and a dead calm is monotonous."
"It's better than an everlasting storm."
"I wonder!" Valentine said. "How curious that I should protect you. I am glad it is so. And yet, Julian, in spite of what you say, I would give a great deal to change souls with you, if only for a day or two. You will laugh at me, but I do long to feel a real, keen temptation. Those agonizing struggles of holy men that one reads of, what can they be like? I can hardly imagine. There have been ascetics who have wept, and dashed themselves down on the ground, and injured, wounded their bodies to distract their thoughts from vice. To me they seem as madmen. You know the story of the monk who rescued a great courtesan from her life of shame. He placed her in a convent and went into the desert. But her image haunted him, maddened him. He slunk back to the convent, and found her dying in the arms of God. And he tried to drag her away, that she might sin only once again with him, with him, her saviour. But she died, giving herself to God, and he went out cursing and blaspheming. This is only a dramatic fable to me. And yet I suppose it is a possibility."
"Of course. Val, I could imagine myself doing as that monk did, but for you. Only that I could never have been a monk at all."
"I am glad if I help you to any happiness, Julian. But—but—oh! to feel temptation!"
"Oh, not to feel it! By Jove, I long to have done with the infernal thing that's always ready to bother me. Fighting it is no fun, Val, I can tell you. If you would like to have my soul for a day or two, I should love to have yours in exchange."
Valentine smoked in silence for two or three minutes. His pure, pale, beautiful face was rather wistful as he gazed at the fire.
"Why can't these affairs be managed?" he sighed out at length.
"Why can't we do just the one thing more? We can kill a man's body. We can kill a woman's purity. And here you and I sit, the closest friends, and neither of us can have the same experiences, as the other, even for a moment. Why isn't it possible?"
"Perhaps it is."
"Why? How do you mean?"
"Well, of course I'm rather a sceptic, and entirely an ignoramus. But
I met a man the other day who would have laughed at us for doubting.
He was an awfully strange fellow. His name is Marr. I met him at Lady
Crichton's."
"Who is he?"
"Haven't an idea. I never saw or heard of him before. We talked a good deal at dessert. He came over from the other side of the table to sit by me, and somehow, in five minutes, we'd got into spiritualism and all that sort of thing. He is evidently a believer in it, calls himself an occultist."
"But do you mean to tell me he said souls could be exchanged at will?
Come, Julian?"
"I won't say that. But he set no limit at all to what can be done. He declares that if people seriously set themselves to develop the latent powers that lie hidden within them, they can do almost anything. Only they must be en rapport. Each must respond closely, definitely, to the other. Now, you and I are as much in sympathy with one another as any two men in London, I suppose."
"Surely!"
"Then half the battle's won—according to Marr."
"You are joking."
"He wasn't. He would declare that, with time and perseverance, we could accomplish an exchange of souls."
Valentine laughed.
"Well, but how?"
Julian laughed too.
"Oh, it seems absurd—but he'd tell us to sit together."
"Well, we are sitting together now."
"No; at a table, I mean."
"Table-turning!" Valentine cried, with a sort of contempt. "That is for children, and for all of us at Christmas, when we want to make fools of ourselves."
"Just what I am inclined to think. But Marr—and he's really a very smart, clever chap, Val—denies it. He swears it is possible for two people who sit together often to get up a marvellous sympathy, which lasts on even when they are no longer sitting. He says you can even see your companion's thoughts take form in the darkness before your eyes, and pass in procession like living things."
"He must be mad."
"Perhaps. I don't know. If he is, he can put his madness to you very lucidly, very ingeniously."
Valentine stroked the white back of Rip meditatively with his foot.
"You have never sat, have you?" he asked.
"Never."
"Nor I. I have always thought it an idiotic and very dull way of wasting one's time. Now, what on earth can a table have to do with one's soul?"
"I don't know. What is one's soul?"
"One's essence, I suppose; the inner light that spreads its rays outward in actions, and that is extinguished, or expelled, at the hour of death."
"Expelled, I think."
"I think so too. That which is so full of strange power cannot surely die so soon. Even my soul, so frigid, so passionless, has, you say, held you back from sins like a leash of steel, And I did not even try to forge the steel. If we could exchange souls, would yours hold me back in the same way?"
"No doubt."
"I wonder," Valentine said thoughtfully. After a moment he added, "shall we make this absurd experiment of sitting, just for a phantasy?"
"Why not? It would be rather fun."
"It might be. We will just do it once to see whether you can get some of my feelings, and I some of yours."
"That's it. But you could never get mine. I know you too well, Val. You're my rock of defence. You've kept me straight because you're so straight yourself; and, with that face, you'll never alter. If anything should happen, it will be that you'll drag me up to where you are. I shan't drag you down to my level, you old saint!"
And he laid his hand affectionately on his friend's shoulder.
Valentine smiled.
"Your level is not low," he said.
"No, perhaps; but, by Jove, it could be, though. If you hadn't been chucked into the world, I often think the devil must have had me altogether. You keep him off. How he must hate you, Val. Hulloh! What's that?"
"What?"
"Who's that laughing outside? Has Wade got a friend in to-night?"
"Not that I know of. I didn't hear anything."
Valentine touched the electric bell, and his man appeared.
"Any one in with you to-night, Wade?" he asked.
The man looked surprised.
"No, sir; certainly not, sir."
"Oh! Don't sit up; we may be late to-night. And we don't want anything more, except—yes, bring another couple of sodas."
"Yes, sir."
He brought them and vanished. A moment later they heard the front door of the flat close. The butler was married and slept out of the house. Valentine had no servant sleeping in the flat. He preferred to be alone at night.