The Divine Fire

by May Sinclair

For one year he would be free from all sordid demands on his time and energy. He would be free, for one year, from the shop and the Quarterly Catalogue. He would enrich his mind, and improve his manners, with travel, for one year. At the end of that year he would know if there was anything in him.

In other words she would give the little man his chance.

The plan had the further advantage that it would have given her grandfather pleasure if he could have known it. It was also to be presumed that it would give pleasure to Horace Jewdwine, since it was the very thing he himself had said he wished to do for Rickman. Of all conceivable ways of spending Sir Joseph's money it was the fittest and most beautiful. In its lesser way it was in line with the best traditions of the family; for the Hardens had been known for generations as the patrons of poor scholars and struggling men of letters. And as Lucia inherited the intellect of her forefathers in a more graceful, capricious and spontaneous form, so what in them had been heavy patronage, appeared in her as the pleasure-giving instinct. If she had inherited a large fortune along with it she would have been a lady of lavish and indiscreet munificence.

By way of discretion she slept on her programme before finally committing herself to it. In the morning discretion suggested that she had better wait a week. She decided to act on that suggestion; at the same time she stifled the inner voice which kept telling her that the thing she was doing "to please Horace" would not really please him at all.

She had already ignored the advice he had given her on one point; for Horace had long ago told her plainly that there was no use in editing their grandfather's posthumous works; that on any subject other than textual criticism, Sir Joseph was absurd.

Meanwhile, by sympathy perhaps, Rickman also had become discreet. He entered on his new week a new man. As if he had divined that he was on his trial, he redoubled his prodigious efforts, he applied himself to his hideous task with silent and concentrated frenzy. He seemed to live and move and have his being in the catalogue raisonné. Whenever Lucia had occasion to look up at him he was assiduous, rapid, absorbed, He never stopped to talk about Æschylus and Euripides. Now and then they exchanged a necessary word, but not more than once or twice in the morning. If Lucia by any chance gave him an opening he ignored it. He maintained a silence that was almost stern.

Mr. Rickman was undergoing a process of regeneration.

He would not have called it by so fine a name. In fact, in its earlier stages he seemed to himself to be merely pushing to the point of mania a strong predilection for personal cleanliness. He was first of all possessed, recklessly, ruinously, by a passion for immaculate shirts. He had telegraphed to Spinks to send down all of his linen that he could lay his hands on; meanwhile he had supplied deficiencies at the local haberdashers. At Mrs. Downey's there was a low standard for the more slender particulars of the toilette, and Mr. Rickman had compared favourably with his fellow-boarders. Now he looked back with incredulity and horror to his former self. Since his person had been brought into daily contact with Miss Harden he had begun to bestow on it a solemn, almost religious care. In the matter of the pocket handkerchief he practised an extreme ritual, permitting himself none but the finest lawn, which he changed after the first trivial crumpling. The pocket-handkerchief being thus glorified and exalted in the hierarchy of dress, one source of painful misgiving was removed.

For the first few days he had been merely formal in this cult of the person. Piety was appeased with external rites and symbols, with changes of vestment, excessive lustrations, and the like. Now he had grown earnest, uncompromising, in his religion; and consistency entailed a further step. Clearly his person, the object of such superstitious veneration, must be guarded from all unbecoming and ridiculous accidents; such an accident, for instance, as getting drunk. If you came to think of it, few things could be more compromising to the person than that (Heavens! if Miss Harden had seen it last Wednesday night!). And since any friendship with ladies of doubtful character might be considered equally derogatory from its dignity, he further resolved to eliminate (absolutely) Miss Poppy Grace. He took no credit for these acts of renunciation. They seemed to him no more morally meritorious than the removal of dust from his coat sleeves, or of ink-stains from his hands.

But though he exterminated the devil in him with so light a touch, it was gravely, tragically almost, that he turned to the expulsion of the Cockney. Intoxication was an unlucky casualty; so, if you came to think of it, was a violent infatuation for Miss Poppy Grace; infinitely more disastrous, more humiliating, were the fatal habits of his speech. Take the occasional but terrific destruction of the aitch. It was worse than drink; it wrecked a man more certainly, more utterly beyond redemption and excuse. It was anxiety on this point that partly accounted for his reserve. He simply dared not talk about Æschylus or Euripides, because such topics were exciting, and excitement was apt to induce this lapse.