The Divine Fire

by May Sinclair

"And what d'you think," said Flossie, sitting down and spreading her plump arm on the secretary all over the accounts. "He's done it. He did it up there."

Mrs. Downey stared, and Flossie nodded as much as to say "Fact!"

"You don't mean to say so?"

"Nobody's more surprised than myself."

The rest was kisses and congratulations, wholly magnanimous on Mrs. Downey's part; for the announcement of Flossie's engagement cost her one of the gayest, most desirable, and most remunerative of her brilliant circle. Mr. Spinks (regarded by himself and everybody else as permanent) gave notice and vanished from that hour, carrying with him the hopes of Miss Ada Bishop. Meanwhile Flossie (hitherto regarded from a merely decorative point of view) became a person of considerable importance in the boarding-house. It was not merely that she was an engaged young lady; for, as Miss Bishop pointed out to her with some natural asperity, anybody can be engaged; but she had now the privilege, denied to any other boarder, of going in and out of Mr. Rickman's study. She said that she went in to tidy it; but strange to say, the more Flossie tidied it the more hopeless it became. Mr. Rickman's study was never what you might call a really tidy room; but at any rate there had always been a certain repose about it. And now you could not well imagine a more unrestful place, a place more suggestive of hurry and disorder, of an utter lack of the leisure in which ideas ripen and grow great.

The table had become a troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr. Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the waters. He had once profanely said that God's world was a chaos he had got to work on. Now it was his world that was chaos. A tempestuous chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were. Rickman's genius, like Nature, destroyed in order that it might create; yet it seemed to him that nowadays the destruction was out of all proportion to the creation. He sighed as he gazed at the piteous fragments that represented six months' labour; fragments that wept blood; the torn and mutilated limbs of living thoughts; with here and there huge torsos of blank verse, lopped and hewn in the omnipotent fury of a god at war with his world; mixed up with undeveloped and ethereal shapes, the embryos of dreams.

And yet it was not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was in his free evenings and on Sundays that his best thoughts came to him, the beautiful shy thoughts that must be delicately courted. And now his free evenings and his Sundays were given up to the courting of Flossie. And even on a week-day this was what would happen. He would rush home early from Fleet Street and settle down for two hours' work before dinner. Then a little timid knock would be heard at the door, and Flossie would come in bringing him a cup of tea. He couldn't just swill it down like a pig and send the dear little thing away. He had to let her sit and see him drink it, slowly, as if he thoroughly enjoyed it. Or he would come in (as on that blessed evening six months ago) and find Flossie dusting books; standing perhaps on two tottering hassocks and a chair, at an altitude perilous to so plump a person. And Flossie had to be lifted down from the hassocks and punished with hard kisses, and told not to do it again. And Flossie would do it again. So that a great deal of time was lost in this way. And with the touch of those soft little arms about his neck demoralization would set in for the evening.

And then there was Flossie's education to be attended to; and that took more time than anything. It meant that, as the November days drew in, he had to read or talk to Flossie as she sat in his armchair with her dear little feet on his fender, and her dear little hands mending his socks and shirts and things. They might have been married for years, only they weren't; that was what made it so exciting. Flossie's hands were always mending or making something (generally something to wear), and it was rather strange that it never occurred to such a busy person that other people might be busy too. He tried to break it to her. He told her (like a brute) that he thought all his things must be mended now, and that perhaps for another week he would be better without any tea. And Flossie (very naturally offended) didn't put her dear little nose in at his door for two weeks. And for all you could get through in that time it was hardly worth while offending her.

But he was very far wrong in supposing that Flossie never thought about his work. She had been thinking a great deal about it lately. One cold bright Sunday morning in November she tapped at his door and walked in dressed for the open air. "Aren't you coming for a walk," she said, "this lovely day?"

"Too busy." To signify his annoyance, or to keep himself from temptation, he bent closer over the article he was writing for The Museion. She came and stood beside him, watching him as he worked, still with his air of passionate preoccupation. Presently he found himself drawn against his will into the following conversation.