A Comedy of Masks: A Novel

by Ernest Christopher Dowson; Arthur Moore

"Ah, well," he said, "you must take care of yourself, and give us a look in if you have time."

Eve looked up at him, flushing a little, as though she found her brother's formal politeness lacking in hospitality. She was struck then, as she had not been yet during her visit, by a curious lassitude in her old friend's face. It affected her with an unconscious pity, causing her to second her brother's somewhat chilly invitation more cordially.

The humour which had shone in Rainham's eyes while they had been talking seemed to have gone out suddenly, like a lamp, leaving them blank and tired. It shocked her to realize how old and ill he had become.

CHAPTER VI

Indolence and ill-health, in the opinion of many the salient points in Philip Rainham's character, had left him at forty with little of the social habit. The circle of his intimates had sensibly narrowed, and for the rest he was becoming more and more conscious that people whom one does not know exceedingly well are not worth knowing at all. The process of dining out two or three times a week in the company of two or three persons whose claims on his attention were of the slenderest he found a process attended with less and less pleasure the older he grew. There were few houses now which he frequented, and this year, when he had made an effort to devote a couple of evenings to the renewal of some acquaintance of the winter, and had discovered, as he had discovered anew each season, that the effort gave him no appreciable compensations for the disagreeables it involved, he made fresh resolutions of abstinence, and on the whole he kept them amazingly well.

For the most part, when he was not routed out by Lightmark (and since the young artist was in train to become a social acquisition this happened less frequently than of old), it was at Blackpool that he spent his evenings. He had, it is true, a standing invitation to dinner at Lady Garnett's when that old lady found herself at home; but Portman Square was remote, and evening dress, to a man with one lung in a climate which had so fickle a trick of registering itself either at the extreme top or bottom of the thermometer, presented various discomforts. His den behind the office—a little sitting-room with a bay-window facing Blackpool Reach, a room filled with books that had no relation to shipping, and hung round with etchings and pictures in those curiously-low tones for which he had so unreasonable an affection—was what he cherished most in London. He read little now, but the mere presence of the books he loved best in rough, uneven cases, painted black, lining the walls, caressed him. As with persons one has loved and grown used to loving, it was not always needful that they should speak to him; it was sufficient, simply, that they should be there. Neither did he write on these long, interminable evenings, which were prolonged sometimes far into the night. He had ended by being able to smile at his literary ambitions of twenty, cultivating his indolence as something choice and original, finding his destiny appropriate.

He spent the time in interminable reveries, sitting with a volume before him, as often as not unopened, smoking incessantly, and looking out of the window. The habit amused himself at times; it was so eminently symbolic of his destiny. Life, after all, had been to him nothing so much as that—a long looking out of window, the impartial spectatorship of a crowd of persons and passions from which he had come at last to seem strangely detached, almost as much as from this chameleon river, which he had observed with such satisfaction in all its manifold gradations of character and colour; its curious cold grayness in the beginning of an autumnal dawn; the illusion of warmth and depth which it sustained at noon, bringing up its burden of leviathans on the top of the flood; its sheen on moonless nights, when only little punctures, green and red and orange, and its audible stillness, reminded him that down in the obscurity the great polluted stream stole on wearily, monotonously, everlastingly to the sea. It was changeful and changeless. He thought he knew its effects by heart, but it had always new ones in reserve to surprise and delight him. He declared it at last to be inexhaustible. It was like a diamond on sunny days, flashing out light in every little ripple; in the late, sunless afternoon the light lay deeply within it, and it seemed jealous of giving back the least particle. He compared it then to an opal or a sapphire, which shine with the same parsimonious radiance.

One night, while he sat smoking in his wonted meditative fashion, he had a visitor—the painter Oswyn. He had almost forgotten his invitation, but he reminded himself of his first impression, and greeted him with a cordiality which the other seemed to find surprising. He took him into his sanctuary and found him whisky and a pipe; then he set himself to make the painter talk, a task which he found by no means arduous.

Oswyn was sober, and Rainham was surprised after a while at his sanity. He decided that, though one might differ from him, dissent from his premises or his conclusions, he was still a man to be taken seriously. His fluency was as remarkable as ever, and at first as spleenful; by-and-by his outrageous mood gave way, and, in response to some of Rainham's adroit thrusts, he condescended to stand on his defence. He could give a reasonable account of himself; was prepared clearly, and succinctly, and seriously with his justification. Rainham was impressed anew by his singleness, the purity of his artistic passion. His life might be disgraceful, indescribable: his art lay apart from it; and when he took up a brush an enthusiasm, a devotion to art, almost religious, steadied his hand.

"You may think me a charlatan," he said, with the same savage earnestness, "but I can tell you I am not. I may fail or I may succeed, as the world counts those things. It is all the same: I believe in myself. It is sufficient to me if I approve myself, and the world may go to damnation! What I care for is my idea!… yes, my idea, that's it! They can howl at me," he went on; "but they can never say of any stroke of my brush that I put it there for them. I could have painted pictures like Lightmark if I had cared, you know, but I did not care!"