He thought, as he sat up, that an instant before his true self had walked in the spiritual kingdom, apprehending beauty. Now, with the shock of waking, the glory wavered, like a fire of wet wood, fitfully, among the smoke of the daily life flooding back in his brain's channels. The memory of the beauty came in gleams, moving him to the bone, for it seemed to him that the spirit of his love had moved in the chambers of his brain, bringing a message to him, while the dulnesses of his body lay arrested. A dream so beautiful must, he thought, be a token of all beauty, a sign, perhaps, that her nature was linked to his, for some ecstatic purpose, by the power outside life. Her beauty, her sweetness, her intense, personal charm, all the sacredness that clothed her about, had walked with him in one of the gardens of the soul. That was glory enough; but the dream was intense and full of mystery; it had brought him very near to something awful and immortal, so strange and mighty that only a heart's tick, something in the blood, had kept him from the presence of the symbol-maker, and from the full knowledge of the beauty of the meaning of life.
The vision seemed meaningless when pieced together. Words in it had seemed revelations, acts in it adventures, romances; but judged by the waking mind, it was unintelligible, though holy, like a Mass in an unknown tongue.
He had found her in the garden at her home, among flowers lovelier than earthly flowers, among flowers like flames and precious stones. That was the beginning of it. Then in the sweetness of their talk he had become conscious of all that her love meant to him, of all that it meant to the power which directs life, of all that his failure to win her would mean, here and hereafter. Life had seemed suddenly terrible and glorious, a wrestle of God and devil for each soul. With this consciousness had come a change in the dream. She had gone from him.
That was the middle of it. Then that also changed. She had left him to seek for her through the world. Suddenly she had sent a message to him. He was walking to meet her. Delight filled him as wine fills a cup. He would see her, he would touch her hand, her eyes would look into his. He had never before been so moved by the love of her. His delight was not the old selfish pleasure, but a rapturous comprehension of her beauty, and of that of which her beauty was the symbol. He knew, as he walked, that the beloved life in her was his own finer self, longing to transmute him to her brightness. A word, a touch, a look, and they would be together in nobleness; he would breathe the beauty of her character like pure air, he would be a part of her forever.
So he had walked the streets to her, noticing nothing except the brightness of the sun on the houses, till he had stood upon the stair-top knocking vainly at the door of an empty house. It came upon him then with an exhaustion of the soul, like death itself, that he had come too late. She had gone away disappointed, perhaps angry. The door would never open to him; he would never meet her again; never even enter the hall, dimly seen through the glass, to gather relics of her. Within, as he could see, lay a handkerchief and a withered flower once worn by her, little relics bitterly precious, to be nursed in his heart in a rapture of agony, could he only have them. But he had come too late; he had lost her; his heart, wanting her, would be empty always, a dead thing going through life like a machine. In his vision he could see across to Ireland, to her home. He could see her there; sad that she had not seen him. He had tried to wade to her through a channel full of thorns, which held him fast. From the midst of the thorns he could see a young man, with a calm, strong face, talking to her. Shaken as he was by grief, and prepared for any evil, he realised that this youth was to be her mate, now that he had lost her.
Lastly, at the end of the dream, he had received a letter from her, with the postmark Athens across the Greek stamp. The letter had been the most real part of the dream. It was her very hand, a dashing, virile hand, with weak, unusual f's, t's crossed far to the right of their uprights, and a negligent beauty in some of the curves of the capitals. The letters were small, the down-strokes determined but irregular, never twice the same. It was the hand of a vivid, charming, but not very strong character. He could not remember what the letter said. Only one sentence at the end remained. "I have read your last book," it ran; "it reads like the diary of a lost soul." There was no signature; nothing but the paper, with the intensely vivid writing, and that one sentence plainly visible. It was even sound criticism. The book of sketches had been self-conscious experiments in style, detached, pictorial presentation of crises, clever things in their way, but startling, both in colour and in subject, the results of moods, not of perfected personality. The sketches had been ill-assorted; that was another fault. But he had not thought them evil. Sitting up in bed, with the damning sentence still vivid, he felt that they must be evil, because she disliked them. He had created brutal, erring, passionate, and wicked types, with frank and natural creative power. At this moment he felt himself judged. He felt for the first time that the theories of art common to the little party of his friends, were not so much theories of art as declarations of youthful independence, soiled with personal failures of perception and personal antipathies. He was wrong; his art was all wrong; his art was all self-indulgence, not self-perfection. An artist had no right to create at pleasure, ignoble types and situations, fixing fragments of the perishing to the walls of the world, as a keeper nails vermin. Ottalie's fair nature was not nourished on such work. Great art called such work "sin," "denial of the Holy Ghost," "crucifixion of our Lord." He reached for the offending book; but the words seemed meaningless; some of the intricate prose-rhythms were clever. But anybody can do mechanics and transcribe. Style and imagination are the difficult things. He put the book aside, wondering if he would ever do good work.
He was haunted by the dream until he was dressed. Then the memories of the night before came in upon him, the yells of the mob, hooting his soul's child, the bloated face of the sot, his friend's farewell that had had neither warning nor affection, the indignity of the visit to the Templetons', till the world seemed to be pressing its shapeless head upon his windows, shrieking insults at him, through yielding glass. He began to realise that he had had the concentrated torment of months suddenly stamped upon him in a night. His work, his person, his affections, his social nature had all been trampled and defiled. He wondered what more torments were coming to him with the new day. Some forethought of what was coming crossed his mind when he saw his breakfast-table. Beside his teacup were three or four daily papers, in which, in clear type, were set forth the opinions of Britain's moral guardians concerning their immoral brother.
There were letters first, some of them left from the night before. An obscure acquaintance, a lady in Somersetshire, sent some verses, asking for his criticism, and for the address of "a publisher who would pay for them." One of the poems began
"Hark! hark! hark!
'Tis the song of the Lark,
Dewy with spangles of morn."
A second letter from the same lady enclosed a "Poem on My Cat Peter," which had been accidentally omitted from the other envelope. His agent sent him a very welcome cheque for £108, for his newly completed novel. Next came a letter from a stranger, asking for permission to set some verses to music. A charitable countess asked for verses for her new Bazaar Book. An American News Cutting Bureau sent a little bundle of reviews of his book of sketches. The wrapper on the bundle bore a legend in red ink:—