She spoke finally. “I—we all thought—you disappeared so abruptly—what am I saying?”
“You believed that I had returned to the pit out of which you—you alone, mind you—had dragged me. You might have known me better.”
“You should not put such a burden on me. You have character enough——”
“Oh yes, I had character enough, but doubtless you noticed when you first met me that I had ceased to exercise it. I went to the dogs quite deliberately, and, with my enfeebled will and frame, I should have stayed there, had not you magnetised me into your presence, where I was forced to behave if I would remain. Later, for reasons both prosaic and sentimental, I remained without effort. I have never had any real love of spirits, although I loved their effect well enough.”
“You must have loved that oth—that woman very much.”
“She made a fool of me. There is always a time in a man’s life when he can be made a complete ass of if the woman with the will to make an ass of him happens along coincidently. I fancied myself sated with fame, tired of life, a remote and tragic figure among men—the trail of Byron is over us all. That was the moment for the great and fatal passion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise; not only to inspire the passion, but to transform a frame of mind arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. Nobody pretended that it injured my work, and I remained in the pit.”
“And your self-respect? You were satisfied? Oh surely—you looked—when I first saw you——”
“I loathed myself, of course. My brain was unaffected, was it not? I abhorred my body, and would willingly have slashed it off could I have gone on writing without it. Either I compelled my soul to stand aside, or I was made on that plan—I cannot tell; but my inner life was never polluted by my visible madness. I have been vile but I have never had a vile thought. I fancy you understand this. And when I am writing my ego does not exist at all—my worst enemies have never accused me of the egoism common to poets. I have lived in another realm, where I have remembered nothing of this. Had it been otherwise no doubt I should have put it all at an end long ago.”
Anne had averted her eyes, caught in one of those inner crises where the faculties are almost suspended. She faltered out: “And after—when I come back next year, shall I find you like this?”