V
THE MAGIC NIGHT
Coming home one night along the Lonsdale Road, Arthur found Hilary Vickars standing at his garden gate, taking the air. It was June, that most exquisite of all months in London, when the perfume of summer finds its way into the narrowest streets, and the imprisoned people thrill with a new sense of freedom and deliverance. In the soft twilight even Lonsdale Road was touched with the idyllic; its impudence of newness was concealed under a faint wash of mauve, and its tiny gardens were fresh with the scent of mown gra.s.s.
Hilary Vickars himself seemed softened with the hour; when he spoke to Arthur there was a new kindness in his voice. Perhaps he could not have explained his mood; few of us can explain these sudden softenings that come to us, sometimes through the influence of external things, sometimes from the welling up in us of founts of tenderness which we had thought for ever sealed. A gust of wind among the trees, a bird"s song in the dusk, a girl"s voice at her piano, in its first fresh, unrestrained sweetness--who of us cannot recall how things as slight as these have had a strange power to provoke some crisis of emotion, which perhaps has coloured all our after-life? Hilary Vickars had been listening that night to his daughter as she sang. She had sung a song her mother had been fond of, and in the mind of the widowed man all the past had leapt into agonised distinctness. And from that he had pa.s.sed to the perception of the daughter"s likeness to her mother, and to the pathos of her youth. Her voice yet lingered in the air, as he stole out of the room, and stood bareheaded at the garden gate. And then he saw Arthur coming up the road, and as his eye rested on the slim, graceful figure he again realised this infinite pathos of youth.
"He wants help, and I ought to help him," was his instant thought.
Hitherto a kind of pride had imposed a barrier of reserve between himself and Arthur. He had seen him as a rich man"s son, the member of a cla.s.s for which he had only scorn and anger. But now he saw him simply as a youth launching his frail bark upon the perilous sea of life, and he loved him. So Nature wrought within him, using his softened mood for her own ends, and with Nature came Destiny, casting the first threads of her inscrutable design upon the loom of life.
He held his hand with a lingering pressure, and then said, as if obeying a resolve imposed upon his own will rather than suggested by it, "Won"t you come in?"
He led the way into the house, and Arthur followed with a glad alacrity.
The narrow hall-way opened upon a room at the back of the house, which served both as living-room and library. The only light in the room came from two candles on the piano brackets. Between them sat a young girl, her fingers still upon the keys, her face, rayed with the nimbus of the candlelight, turned upward with a charming air of expectation and surprise.
She was not beautiful, judged by the canons of exacting art; yet there was no artist who could have been indifferent to her, for she possessed an element of charm much more rare than beauty. The hair, dark and abundant, was very simply dressed above a low white forehead; the face was beautifully moulded, and expressed a delicate fatigue; the mouth, too large for beauty, was mobile and eager; the eyes were a stag"s eyes, brown and full and limpid. It was in these that her charm was concentrated. They held depth beyond depth, eyes into which the gaze sank, fathomless as water in a well.
She rose as her father and his guest entered the room.
"My daughter, Elizabeth," he said.
She bowed, and turned toward Arthur the regard of her unfathomable eyes. Arthur stood transfixed. For a long moment his gaze clung to hers, and a new, strange, pleasurable heat thrilled his blood. A subtle, undecipherable telegraphy was in that clinging gaze. It was as though soul challenged soul; the citadel of sentience in each awoke to sudden life, and quivered at the shock of contact, with an emotion half alarm and half delight. Then the veil fell between them, and the soul of each receded into secrecy.
It was a relief to each when Vickars lit the gas, and began to speak in accents of conventional courtesy.
"This is my work-room," he said.
And indeed the room told its own tale. Bookshelves, closely packed, covered each wall; the books lay in heaps upon the floor; and in their midst stood a wide table piled with ma.n.u.scripts, proofs, and notebooks.
There was not a single picture in the room, not an ornament of any kind. Near the window stood a typewriter and a small table, and on the other side of the window the piano.
"I suppose there are few rooms in London that know more about brain-toil than this room--that is, if rooms can receive impressions, as I sometimes think they can," he continued. "Certainly none in Lonsdale Road," he added with a smile. "Ah! that reminds me of a story. When I first came to live here, there was the greatest curiosity to know what I did for a living. Lonsdale Road could not account for any man who did not go to the city every day, and therefore refused to accept his credentials of respectability. I never knew how far this aversion went till one day our little servant told us with tears that she must leave us. It took a long time to draw from her her reason. You would never guess it. At last she said, "Mother say she thinks you are a burglar." And then I found that our neighbours had actually woven this ingenious romance about us, and I am not sure that they have discarded it even yet."
He spoke lightly, and yet with an accent of resentment and of hurt pride. To Arthur the story was a revelation of the social loneliness of Vickars"s life. But he was thinking less of the father than the daughter. Once more his eyes sought that fair face, and he was surprised to find no laughter in it; it was evident the story had pained her.
"Elizabeth does not like that story," said her father, noticing her silence.
"No, father, I do not. It makes me hate the world to think it treats you unjustly."
"Oh! the world"s very well, little girl," he replied. "One doesn"t expect justice from it. One should be content if the world merely allows him to live."
"Yet you are always fighting for justice. You know you are, father."
"Ah! justice for other people--that"s a different thing. But the condition of such a fight as that is to be indifferent to the question of justice to one"s self. That is a very small matter indeed."
"That is how he always talks," she answered, with a charming friendliness of appeal to Arthur. "He never thinks about himself."
"There, there! we"re getting very serious, little girl," Vickars replied. "Suppose we change the subject. We don"t often have a guest.
Don"t you think a little supper and some music afterwards might fit the occasion?"
"How forgetful of me!" she said. She rose and left the room.
"You mustn"t take my fine sentiments too seriously, so I give you due warning," he remarked. "Men who write books get into the way of talking their own books. You"ll find, as you come to know me better, that there"s a good deal of--of the artificial in me. The only merit I have above other men is that I am conscious of it."
"I have read your last book," said Arthur, "and I found nothing artificial in it. I thought it a great book."
"Have you? Well, I"m glad." His pale face was illumined for an instant by the boy"s ingenuous praise. "No, Arthur," he added, "it"s not great. It is merely true. And I think I can say this with real sincerity--I care much more for its truth than for its greatness."
"Are they not the same?" said Arthur.
"Not for this generation. This is the age of "best sellers," and the book that is called great is usually the book that has least to say about the truth of life."
"I was not thinking of contemporary opinion."
"Contemporary opinion is the only court of appeal we have. A book must justify itself to the generation in which it is written, or be sure of it no other generation will know anything about it. Yet I do sometimes think that truth must make itself heard. I cherish the belief, in spite of history and experience."
He spoke with an accent of infinite dejection. Arthur could find no words of reply. If, an hour before, he had been asked what kind of life came nearest his ideal, perhaps he would have replied, "The literary life," and he would have instanced Vickars. Now, as he looked at the writer"s tired face, it was as though the naked realities of such a life lay before him, stripped of all delusive trappings. To drain one"s life-blood into books that no one read, to prophesy to deaf ears and undiscerning eyes, ah! surely there must be a better way of life than this; and on the instant he knew what that way was. That warmth which still pierced his veins spoke to him more clearly than any voice. To love--that was life. To live the lyric life of love--that was better than to write of it. And straightway there came to him a vision of wide plains and deep forests, dotted with the homes of men, beneath whose roofs lip met lip in faithful kisses, and heart beat to heart through long nights of sleep, and all the primeval life of man went on in birth and death, as it had done since the gates of Eden closed. Ah! infinite desirable delight of love, strong, and natural, and enduring, on which the great seal of G.o.d had always rested! In that moment he ceased to be a boy; his manhood rushed upon him; he blushed, and in his heart a voice cried, "Elizabeth!"
She re-entered the room at that moment, carrying a supper-tray, and Arthur could not but observe the supple poise and grace of her young figure. She moved easily, with a soft gliding motion; she was dressed wholly in white, and conveyed an impression of a creature inimitably virginal. The face had not lost its look of delicate fatigue, but it was clear that this fatigue was of the mind rather than the body, and owed itself to no physical defect. Both he and Vickars rose together to clear a place upon the littered writing-table for the supper-tray, and in performing this act his hand touched hers. It was but a feather"s touch, but it thrilled him, and his very flesh seemed to dissolve in a fire of rapture. Again he sought her eyes, but now they were averted. The moment pa.s.sed like a chord of music that left the air vibrating. It seemed to him that all the world must know what had happened.
Then the current of his life ran back into its normal channels, and he found himself talking with excited eagerness. The meal was as simple as a meal could be, but for him it had ambrosial flavours. She sat quite silent, listening, apparently unaware that he talked for her alone. Vickars caught the gaiety of his good spirits, and talked as eagerly as he. The conversation soon found its accustomed grooves--books, and London, and the interminable comedy and tragedy of man. Presently Vickars happened to mention a young poet who had lately died, and Arthur asked if he had known him.
"Yes, he came here once. It was in his last days, when he had finally discovered that the world had rejected him. But he never knew why he was rejected."
"Why was he rejected?"
"Because he could only sing of the past. He had no vision of the modern world. He despised it, and his contempt blinded him to its real significance.
"I do not think that is quite just, father," said Elizabeth.
"Ah! I forgot to say," said Vickars, with an admiring glance at his daughter, "that Elizabeth is a much better critic than I. She is a better critic because she is a kinder."
"No, it"s not that, father. My criticism, such as it is, is only feeling, and I felt that poor Lawson was just finding his way to the right method when he died. Don"t you remember those lines on London in his last sonnet?--
O Calvaries of the poor, dim hills of pain, Whose utmost anguish is not nail or thorn, The beaten blood-smeared brow, the soft flesh torn, But this, that ye are crucified in vain.
The man who wrote those lines surely saw the modern world, and realised its significance."
She recited the lines slowly, in a low fluty voice which would have imparted dignity and music to much worse lines. Arthur listened entranced. Surely there was magic in this summer"s night, a magic of the soul as well as of the flesh. His hand had touched hers, but now her mind revealed itself, and thrilled his with a subtler contact. In one swift glimpse he understood her exquisite sensitiveness, her pitifulness and tenderness, her strength and goodness; it was as though the Madonna"s halo rested for an instant on that fair brow, and awed him into worship. He drew a long breath, and now, when his eyes sought hers, her gaze was not averted. She accepted the challenge of his eyes with complete sincerity, and with a frankness which was the last effect of complete innocence and modesty.
The voice of Vickars broke the spell.
"Yes, you are right," he said; "you usually are." And then, turning to Arthur with a whimsical smile, "Do you know Elizabeth writes my books for me?"
"Typewrites, he means. That is all, I a.s.sure you," she said.