The happy days sped by in an atmosphere of love and laughter, yet filled not only with the sweet doings of idleness. Olivia discovered that the poet-artist must work, impelled thereto by his poet-artistry. He must write of the passing things which touched his imagination and which his imagination, in turn, transmuted into impressions of beauty. These were like a painter’s sketches, said he, for use in after-time.
“It’s for you, my dear, that I am making a hoard of our golden moments, so that one of these days I may lay them all at your feet.”
And he must read, too. During the years that the locust of war had eaten, his educational development had stood still. His English literary equipment fell far short of that required by a successful English man of letters. Vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had as yet left unexplored. The great Elizabethan dramatists, for instance. Thick, serious volumes from the London Library strewed the furniture of the wind-swept sitting-room. Olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius, read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty of Marlowe, the subtle beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher, the haunting gloom of Webster. In the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage, he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the burning words. It was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch.
Once, reading Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, he clutched her tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked unheeding Heaven, and declaimed:
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,
Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
Whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,
Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue! This had been a life