"'I am all that has been and that is and that shall be, and no mortal has ever raised my veil,'" quoted Manning.
Paul looked up and away. "We cannot even touch it," he said suddenly. "I've never thought of that."
A suggestion of the after-glow still hung suspended in the sky as he bathed and dressed. He ran his blind up to see it as he stood in his shirt-sleeves before the glass. But even the poet in him could not be holden by such beauty to-night. The earth was too real beneath his feet. It was so wonderful that he, Paul Kestern, should be standing dressing there. Memories came and went like meteors through his mind. He remembered his first sonnet. He remembered how, for the first time, in the harsh atmosphere of a school class-room and through the, to him, uncertain medium of a Latin poet, the first glimpse of fairy lands forlorn had come to him, and the magic casement opened. A new master had found them plodding wearily through Horace and had, by an impulse, stayed the halting construe of—of—(yes, it was old Lammick; he thought he had forgotten Lammick!)—of Lammick, to render the thing himself. As he spoke, it was plain that he had forgotten the boys, and so far as Paul was concerned, he had very soon forgotten the master. Only he saw the old Roman singing woven words of music about unutterable things.
And he saw himself going up for his scholarship exam. He had painstakingly read Macaulay's essays in the train for style. He remembered putting his old Waterbury on the desk before him so that each question might have fifteen minutes. He remembered—oh, he remembered the look of the commons on his first breakfast table, a ploughed field the first time he walked to Coton, the stained glass in the Round Church East window seen from the Union writing-room, villas in the Cherry Hinton Road, a print on David's stall in the market-place, rain on Garret Hostel Bridge, Clare Avenue one very early morning. Then he saw, suddenly, grotesquely stretched bodies and legs, sprawled fervently by praying men in the Henry Martyn Hall. He heard one of them speak: "O God, make all slack men keen." Paul chuckled to himself, because he loved it so.
Then he wished vividly and acutely that he had finally rewritten that line in the proof of his book. It was about brown withered ivy on the trunk of a pine in Hursley Woods. There was a little curl of brown hair too that slipped always under Edith's ear. He would give her the first copy himself, if he had to go to Claxted personally and especially to do it. He would give it her in Hursley Woods. No he wouldn't; he would give it her in Lambeth Court. He would take her for a walk. They would go past the "South Pole." They would walk up to the lamp-post, and he would hand her the book. "That's yours," he would say, "all of it. And I still want to preach in Lambeth Court though I did write it. Now what do you say?"
Paul began to sing the Glory Song.
Manning put his head in. "Great Scott, Paul," he said, "what's all the noise about?"
Paul flushed guiltily. Then he laughed. "I can't help it, Manning," he said. "I feel too bucked for words. I know I'm quite mad, but I can't help it."
And it was jolly threading the busy Christmas streets in a taxi, arriving at the hotel door, having a man in uniform open it for you so importantly, hearing the girl in the office tell the page to take the gentlemen to the Literary Lounge dining-room, and the finding of it full of men awaiting them. There was Donaldson, explosive but genial, warmed with excitement already. "Hullo, Kestern! Damned glad to see you again. I say, I congratulate you, you know, but didn't I always say you'd do it?" And Strether, looking big and ungainly in his black clothes that never fitted particularly, but smiling grimly. "Felicitations, Kestern, and all that sort of thing." ("By Gad, Gussie, felicitations! Keep that for your speech, old horse. What's that? Always making a row? Ha, ha, ha—that's damned good! Good old Gussie!")
Tressor put Paul at his ease. He was so big and smiling; he talked so easily; it was all so natural to him. He was on Paul's right, of course, and Paul could look past him, down the table, at them all, Manning at the other end, glancing up now and again, with a reassuring nod. Judson, by the way, was there, for he had insisted on admission to the club and had turned out the coolest critic of them all. Paul smiled to see how he enjoyed himself; and he drank his unaccustomed wine and leaned back in his chair at last, when he had made his speech, with all self-consciousness gone from him.