The Return of the Prodigal

by May Sinclair

Meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and to the point. They proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of her full-blooded personality in them. His own grew shorter and shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote: "Delightful. Only tell me when you've had enough of it."

The answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of the Atlantic. "Not yet. I shall never have enough of it. I've only been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. I'm not tired—not tired, Maurice, remember. I don't want to stop. I want to strike down—deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."

Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things, remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."

He remembered—that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what will she be in another three years? I will give her another three years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart (for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know. I will wait and see."

He waited. The three years passed; he saw nothing and he had ceased to hear. He concluded that Frida still loved the world.

As if in a passionate resentment against the rival that had fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the end of the century, a century that had been forced by the contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, he said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see. She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost come to believe that it was all he loved. The woman lived for him in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an Idea, an eternal dream. It was as if he could see nothing and paint nothing else. And when a clever versatile artist of Durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to give form and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the world is puzzled and fights shy of him.

Meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him: "Now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it will carry him far. Ten years hence the world will realize that Maurice Durant is a great painter. But in those ten years he must work hard."

As if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and bestirred himself for news of Frida Tancred.

It came at last—from Poona of all places. Frida wrote in high spirits and at length. "I like writing to you," she said, "because I can say what I like, because you always know—you've been there. Where? Oh, everywhere where I've been, except Whithorn-in-Arden. And, now I come to think of it, you were there, too—for a fortnight" ("three weeks—three long weeks—and for your sake, Frida!"). "No, I'm not 'coming home.' Why must I 'stop somewhere'? I can't stop, didn't I tell you? I can only strike down where it's deepest.

"It seems to be pretty deep here. If I could only understand these people—but what European can? They mean something we don't mean.... You should see my Munshi, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. I am trying to learn Sanscrit. He is trying to teach me. We sit opposite each other at a bamboo table with an immense Sanscrit dictionary between us. He smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between Europe and Asia with a Sanscrit dictionary. He is always smiling at me in his sleeve. I know it, and he knows that I know it, which endears me to him very much.