Flames.
by Robert Smythe Hichens.
BOOK I--VALENTINE
CHAPTER I
THE SAINT OF VICTORIA STREET
Refinement had more power over the soul of Valentine Cresswell than religion. It governed him with a curious ease of supremacy, and held him back without effort from most of the young man"s sins. Each age has its special sins. Each age pa.s.ses them, like troops in review, before it decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided to join any regiment. The trumpets of vice rang in his ears in vain, mingled with the more cla.s.sical music of his life as the retreat from the barracks of Seville mingled with the click of Carmen"s castanets. But he heeded them not. If he listened to them sometimes, it was only to wonder at the harsh and blatant nature of their voices, only to pity the poor creatures who hastened to the prison, which youth thinks freedom and old age protection, at their shrieking summons. He preferred to be master of his soul, and had no desire to set it drilling at the command of painted women, or to drown it in wine, or to suffocate it in the smoke at which the voluptuary tries to warm his hands, mistaking it for fire.
Intellectuality is to some men what religion is to many women, a trellis of roses that bars out the larger world. Valentine loved to watch the roses bud and bloom as he sat in his flower-walled cell, a deliberate and rejoicing prisoner. For a long time he loved to watch them. And he thought that it must always be so, for he was not greatly given to moods, and therefore scarcely appreciated the thrilling meaning of the word change, that is the key-word of so many a life cipher. He loved the pleasures of the intellect so much that he made the mistake of opposing them, as enemies, to the pleasures of the body. The reverse mistake is made by the generality of men; and those who deem it wise to mingle the sharply contrasted ingredients that form a good recipe for happiness are often dubbed incomprehensible, or worse. But there were moments at a period of Valentine"s life when he felt discontented at his strange inability to long for sin; when he wondered, rather wearily, why he was rapt from the follies that other men enjoyed; why he could refuse, without effort, the things that they clamoured after year by year with an unceasing gluttony of appet.i.te. The saint quarrelled mutely with his holiness of intellectuality, and argued, almost fiercely, with his cold and delicate purity.
"Why am I like some ivory statue?" he thought sometimes, "instead of like a human being, with drumming pulses, and dancing longings, and voices calling forever in my ears, like voices of sirens, "Come, come, rest in our arms, sleep on our bosoms, for we are they who have given joy to all men from the beginning of time. We are they who have drawn good men from their sad goodness, and they have blessed us. We are they who have been the allegory of the sage and the story of the world. In our soft arms the world has learned the glory of embracing. On our melodious hearts the hearts of men have learned the sweet religion of singing." Why cannot I be as other men are, instead of the Saint--the saint of Victoria Street--that I am?"
For, absurdly enough, that was the name his world gave to Valentine.
This is not an age of romance, and he did not dwell, like the saints of old centuries, in the clear solitudes of the great desert, but in what the advertis.e.m.e.nt writer calls a "commodious flat" in Victoria Street.
No little jackals thronged about him in sinful circle by night. No school of picturesque disciples surrounded him by day. If he peeped above his blinds he could see the radiant procession of omnibuses on their halting way towards Westminster. The melodies of wandering organs sang in his ascetic ears, not once, nor twice, but many times a week. The milk-boy came, it must be presumed, to pay his visit in the morning; and the sparrows made the air alive, poising above the chimneys, instead of the wild eagles, whose home is near the sun. Valentine was a modern young man of twenty-four, dealt at the Army and Navy Stores, was extremely well off, and knew everybody. He belonged to the best clubs and went occasionally to the best parties. His tailor had a habitation in Sackville Street, and his gloves came from the Burlington Arcade. He often lunched at the Berkeley and frequently dined at Willis"s. Also he had laughed at the antics of Arthur Roberts, and gazed through a pair of gold-mounted opera-gla.s.ses at Empire ballets and at the discreet juggleries of Paul Cinquevalli. The romance of cloistered saintliness was not his. If it had been he might never have rebelled. For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste which leads many a Trappist to his fate, rather than the strange thought of G.o.d calling his soul to heavenly dreams and ecstatic renunciations? Is it not the wild poetry of the sleeping snows by night that gives to the St. Bernard monk his holiest meditations? When the organ murmurs, and he kneels in that remote chapel of the clouds to pray, is it not the religion of his wonderful earthly situation and prospect that speaks to him loudly, rather than the religion of the far-off Power whose hands he believes to hold the threads of his destinies? Even the tonsure is a psalm to some, and the robe and cowl a litany. The knotted cord is a ma.s.s and the sandal a prayer.
But Valentine had been a saint by temperament, it seemed, and would be a saint by temperament to the end. He had not been scourged to a prayerful att.i.tude by sorrow or by pain. Tears had not made a sea to float him to repentance or to purity. Apparently he had been given what men call goodness as others are given moustaches or a cheerful temper. When his contemporaries wondered at him, he often found himself wondering still more at them. Why did they love coa.r.s.e sins? he thought. Why did they fling themselves down, like dogs, to roll in offal? He could not understand, and for a long time he did not wish to understand. But one night the wish came to him, and he expressed it to his bosom friend, Julian Addison.
CHAPTER II
A QUESTION OF EXCHANGE
Most of us need an opposite to sit by the hearth with us sometimes, and to stir us to wonder or to war. Julian was Valentine"s singularly complete and perfect opposite, in nature if not in deeds. But, after all, it is the thoughts that are of account rather than the acts, to a mind like Valentine"s. He knew that Julian"s nature was totally unlike his own, so singularly unlike that Julian struck just the right note to give the strength of a discord to the chord--that often seemed a common chord--of his own harmony. Long ago, for this reason, or for no special reason, he had grown to love Julian. Theirs was a fine, clean specimen of friendship. How fine, Valentine never rightly knew until this evening.
They were sitting together in Valentine"s flat in that hour when he became serious and expansive. He had rather a habit of becoming serious toward midnight, especially if he was with only one person; and no desire to please interfered with his natural play of mind and of feeling when he was with Julian. To affect any feeling with Julian would have seemed like being on conventional terms with an element, or endeavouring to deceive one"s valet about one"s personal habits. Long ago Julian and he had, in mind, taken up their residence together, fallen into the pleasant custom of breakfasting, lunching, and dining on all topics in common. Valentine knew of no barriers between them. And so, now, as they sat smoking, he expressed his mood without fear or hesitation.
The room in which they were was small. It was named the tentroom, being hung with dull-green draperies, which hid the ceiling and fell loosely to the floor on every side. A heavy curtain shrouded the one door. On the hearth flickered a fire, before which lay Valentine"s fox-terrier, Rip.
Julian was half lying down on a divan in an unb.u.t.toned att.i.tude.
Valentine leaned forward in an arm-chair. They were smoking cigarettes.
"Julian," Valentine said, meditatively, "I sometimes wonder why you and I are such great friends."
"How abominable of you! To seek a reason for friendship is as inhuman as to probe for the causes of love. Don"t, for goodness" sake, let your intellect triumph over your humanity, Valentine. Of all modern vices, that seems to me the most loathsome. But you could never fall into anything loathsome. You are sheeted against that danger with plate armour."
"Nonsense!"
"But you are. It sometimes seems to me that you and I are like Elijah and Elisha, in a way. But I am covetous of your mantle."
"Then you want me to be caught from you into heaven?"
"No. I should like you to give me your mantle, your powers, your nature, that is, and to stay here as well."
"And send the chariot of fire to the coach-house, and the horses of fire to the nearest stables?"
"Exactly!"
"Well, but give me a reason for this rascally craving."
"A reason! Oh, I hate my nature and I love yours. What a curse it is to go through life eternally haunted by one"s self; worse than being married to an ugly and boring wife."
"Now you are being morbid."
"Well, I"m telling you just how I feel."
"That is being morbid. Recording to some people who claim to direct Society."
"The world"s County Council, who would like to abolish all the public bars."
"And force us to do our drinking in the privacy of our bedrooms."
"You would never do any drinking, Valentine. How could you, the Saint of Victoria Street?"
"I begin to hate that nickname."
And he frowned slowly. Tall, fair, curiously innocent-looking, his face was the face of a blonde ascetic. His blue eyes were certainly not cold, but n.o.body could imagine that they would ever gleam with pa.s.sion or with desire as they looked upon sin. His mouth seemed made for prayer, not for kisses; and so women often longed to kiss it. Over him, indeed, intellectuality hung like a light veil, setting him apart from the uproar which the world raises while it breaks the ten commandments. Julian, on the other hand, was brown, with bright, eager eyes, and the expression of one who was above all things intensely human. Valentine had ever been, and still remained, to him a perpetual wonder, a sort of beautiful mystery. He actually reverenced this youth who stood apart from all the muddy ways of sin, too refined, as it seemed, rather than too religious, to be attracted by any wile of the devil"s, too completely artistic to feel any impulse towards the subtle violence which lurks in all the vagaries of the body. Valentine was to Julian a G.o.d, but in their mutual relations this fact never became apparent. On the contrary, Valentine was apt to look up to Julian with admiration, and the curious respect often felt by those who are good by temperament for those who are completely human. And Julian loved Valentine for looking up to him, finding in this absurd modesty of his friend a crowning beauty of character. He had never told Valentine the fact that Valentine kept him pure, held his bounding nature in leash, was the wall of fire that hedged him from sin, the armour that protected him against the a.s.saults of self. He had never told Valentine this secret, which he cherished with the exceeding and watchful care men so often display in hiding that which does them credit. For who is not a pocket Byron nowadays?
But to-night was fated by the Immortals to be a night of self-revelation.
And Valentine led the way by taking a step that surprised Julian not a little. For as Valentine frowned he said:
"Yes, I begin to hate my nickname, and I begin to hate myself."
Julian could not help smiling at the absurdity of this bemoaning.
"What is it in yourself that you hate so much?" he asked, with a decided curiosity.
Valentine sat considering.
"Well," he replied at length, "I think it is my inhumanity, which robs me of many things. I don"t desire the pleasures that most men desire, as you know. But lately I have often wished to desire them."
"Rather an elaborate state of mind."
"Yet a state easy to understand, surely. Julian, emotions pa.s.s me by. Why is that? Deep love, deep hate, despair, desire, won"t stop to speak to me. Men tell me I am a marvel because I never do as they do. But I am not driven as they are evidently driven. The fact of the matter is that desire is not in me. My nature shrinks from sin; but it is not virtue that shrinks: it is rather reserve. I have no more temptation to be sensual, for instance, than I have to be vulgar."
"Hang it, Val, you don"t want to have the temptation, do you?"
Valentine looked at Julian curiously.
"You have the temptation, Julian?" he said.
"You know I have--horribly."
"But you fight it and conquer it?"