For two months he fought it furiously.
He spent many hours of many days in trying to find work; a difficult thing when a man has cut himself loose from all his friends. Strangers were not likely to consider his superior claims when the kind of work for which he was now applying could be done by anybody as well or better. He counted himself uncommonly happy if he got a stray book to review or a job at the Museum, or if Vaughan held out the promise of giving him some translation by-and-by.
The conditions under which he worked were now appalling. It was hard to say whether the attic was more terrible in summer, or in the winter that forced him to the intimate and abominable companionship of his oil-stove. Nor was that all. A new horror was added to his existence.
He was aware that he had become an object of peculiar interest to the woman in the next room, that she waited for him and stealthily watched his going out and his coming in. As he pa.s.sed on the landing two eyes, dull or feverish, marked him through the c.h.i.n.k of the door that never closed. By some hideous instinct of her kind she divined the days when he was in luck. By another instinct she divined also his nature. His mystic apathy held her brute soul in awe; and she no longer revenged herself by furious and vindictive song. So he stayed on, for he owed rent, and removals were expensive.
He found also that there were limits to the advantages of too eccentric an asceticism in diet. No doubt the strange meals he prepared for himself on his oil-stove had proved stimulating by their very strangeness; but when the first shock and surprise of them had worn off he no longer obtained that agreeable result. Perhaps there was something cloying in so much milk and cocoa; he fancied he gained by diluting these rich foods with water. It certainly seemed to him that his veins were lighter and carried a swifter and more delicate current to his brain, that his thoughts now flowed with a remarkable fineness and lucidity. And then all of a sudden the charm stopped working. What food he ate ceased to nourish him. He grew drowsy by day, and had bad dreams at night. He had not yet reached the reconciling stage of nausea, but was forever tormented by a strong and healthy craving for a square meal. There was a poor devil on the floor below him whose state in comparison with his own was affluence. That man had a square meal every Sunday. Even she, the lady of the ever-open door, was better off than he; there was always, or nearly always, a market for her wares.
His sufferings would have been unendurable if any will but his own had imposed them on him in the beginning. Not that he could continue to regard his poverty as a destiny in any way angelic. It was because hitherto he had not known the real thing, because he had seen it from very far away, that it had worn for him that divine benignant aspect.
Now it was very near him; a sordid insufferable companion that dogged his elbow in the street, that sat with him by his fireless hearth, that lay beside him all night, a loathsome bedfellow, telling him a shameful, hopeless tale, and driving the blessed sleep away from him.
There were times when he envied his neighbour her nirvana of gin and water; times when the gross steam of the stew prepared for the man below awoke in him acute, intolerable emotion; times when the spiritual will that dominated him, so far from being purified by abstinence, seemed merged in the will of the body made conspicuous and clamorous by hunger.
There were ways in which he might have satisfied it. He could have obtained a square meal any day from Mrs. Downey or the Spinkses; but now that the value of a square meal had increased so monstrously in imagination, his delicacy shrank from approaching his friends with conscious designs upon their hospitality. Spinks was always asking him to dine at his house in Camden Town; but he had refused because he would have had abominable suspicions of his own motives in accepting.
Trust Flossie to find him out too. And latterly he had hidden himself from the eye of Spinks. There were moments now when he might have been tempted to borrow fifty pounds from Spinks and end it; but he could not bring himself to borrow from Flossie"s husband. The last time he had dined with them he thought she had looked at him as if she were afraid he was going to borrow money. He knew it so well, that gleam of the black eyes, half subtle and half savage. For Flossie had realized her dream, and her little hand clung pa.s.sionately to the purse that provided for Muriel Maud. He couldn"t borrow from Spinky. From Jewdwine? Never. From Hanson? Hardly. From Vaughan? Possibly. Vaughan was considering the expediency of publishing his tragedy, and might be induced to advance him a little on account. Such possibilities visited him in the watches of the night, but dawn revealed their obvious futility. And yet he knew all the time he had only to go to Maddox for the money, and he would get it. To Maddox or to Rankin, Rankin whose books stood open on every bookstall, whose face in its beautiful photogravure portrait smiled so impenetrably, guarding the secret of success. But he could not go to them without giving them the explanation he was determined not to give. He knew what they thought of him; therefore he would not go to them. If they had known him better they would have come to him.
He was reminded of them now by seeing in _The Planet_ an obituary notice of young Paterson. Paterson had been dying slowly all the year, and December finished him. Though Rickman had been expecting the news for months, the death accomplished affected him profoundly. And at the thought of the young poet whom he had seemed to have so greatly wronged, at the touch of grief and pity and divine regret, his own genius, defied and resisted, descended on him again out of heaven. It was as if the spirit of young Paterson, appeased and reconciled, had bequeathed to him its own immortal adolescence. He finished the poem in four nights, sitting in his great coat, with his legs wrapped in his blankets, and for the last two nights drinking gin and water to keep the blood beating in his head. In the morning he felt as if it were filled with some light and crackling and infinitely brittle substance, the ashes of a brain that had kindled, flamed, and burned itself away. It was the last onslaught of the G.o.d, the last mad flaring of the divine fire.
For now he could write no longer. His whole being revolted against the labour of capturing ideas, of setting words in their right order. The least effort produced some horrible sensation. Now it was of a plunging heart that suddenly reversed engines while his brain shivered with the shock; now of a little white wave that swamped his brain with one pulse of oblivion; now it was a sudden giving way of the floor of consciousness, through which his thoughts dropped downwards headlong into the abyss. He had great agony and distress in following their flight. At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the gabble of idiocy or aphasia. At such moments he trembled for his reason.
At first these horrors would vanish in the brief brilliance that followed the act of eating; but before long, in the next stage of exhaustion, food induced nothing but a drunken drowsiness. He had once said as an excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on anything else as well. In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk. But of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained the immortal Elegy was his last excess.
He sent the poem to Hanson. Hanson made no sign. But about the middle of January Rankin of all people broke the silence that had bound them for a year and a half. Rankin did not know his address, even Hanson had forgotten it. The letter had been forwarded by one of Hanson"s clerks.
"My dear Rickman," it said, "where are you? And what are you doing? I dined with Hanson the other night, and he showed me your Elegy. It"s too long for _The Courier_, and he"s sending it back to you with a string of compliments. If you have no other designs, can you let us have it for _The Planet_? For Paterson"s sake it ought to appear at once. My dear fellow, I should like to tell you what I think of it, but I will only state my profound conviction that you have given poor Paterson the fame he should have had and couldn"t get, anymore than we could get it for him; and I, as his friend, thank you for this magnificent tribute to his genius. Will you do me the honour of dining with me on Sunday if you have nothing better to do? There are many things I should like to talk over with you, and my wife is anxious to make your acquaintance.
"Sincerely yours,
"Herbert Rankin.
"PS.--Maddox is out of town at present, but you"ll meet him if you come on Sunday. By the way, I saw your friend Jewdwine the other day. He explained at my request a certain matter which I own with great regret should never have required explanation."
So Jewdwine had explained. And why had not Rankin asked for the explanation sooner? Why had he had to ask for it at all? Still, it was decent of him to admit that he ought not to have required it.
He supposed that he must accept Rankin"s invitation to dine. Except for his hunger, which made the prospect of dining so unique and great a thing, he had no reason for refusing. Rankin had reckoned on a scruple, and removed the ground of it. He knew that there was no approaching Rickman as long as there remained the shadow of an a.s.sumption that the explanation should have come from him.
The invitation had arrived just in time, before Rickman had sent the last saleable remnants of his wardrobe to the place where his dress-suit had gone before. He would have to apologize to Mrs. Rankin for its absence, but his serge suit was still presentable, for he had preserved it with much care, and there was one clean unfrayed shirt in his drawer.
But when Sunday came, the first febrile excitement of antic.i.p.ation was succeeded by the apathy of an immense fatigue, and at the back of it all a loathsome sense of the positive indecency of his going. It was hunger that was driving him, the importunate hunger of many months, apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure. And after all could any dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it? When at the last moment he discovered a loose b.u.t.ton on his trousers, he felt that there was no motive, no power on earth that could urge him to the task of securing it. And when it broke from its thread and fell, and hid itself under the skirting board in a sort of malignant frenzy, he took its behaviour as a sign that he would do well to forego that dinner at Rankin"s. He had hardly acquiesced in this decision when reason rea.s.serted itself and told him that everything depended on that dinner and that the dinner depended on the b.u.t.ton; therefore that in all G.o.d"s universe there was nothing so important, so essential to him as that b.u.t.ton. He went down on his knees and dislodged the b.u.t.ton with a penknife, after an agonizing search. He sat feebly on the edge of his bed, and with many sad, weak blasphemies bowed himself to a miserable, ignominious struggle. All malign and adverse fortunes seemed to be concentrated in the rolling, slippery, ungovernable thing.
The final victory was his, such a victory as amounted to a resurgence of the spiritual will.
CHAPTER LXX
All things seemed to work together to create an evening of misunderstanding rather than of reconciliation. To begin with he arrived at the Rankins" half an hour after the time appointed. Rankin lived in Suss.e.x Square, which seemed to him an interminably long way off. The adventure with the trouser b.u.t.ton, and a certain dizziness which precluded all swift and decided movement, would have been enough to make him late, even if he had not miscalculated the distance between Hyde Park and Bloomsbury.
He had also miscalculated the distance between Rankin the junior journalist and Rankin the celebrity. Rankin had achieved celebrity in a way he had not meant. There was a time when even Jewdwine was outdone by the young men of _The Planet_ in honest contempt for the taste and judgement of the many; when it had been Rankin"s task to pursue with indefatigable pleasantry the figures of popular renown.
And now he was popular himself. The British public had given to him its fatal love.
At first he looked on himself as a man irretrievably disgraced.
However proudly he might bear himself in the company of strangers, he approached his colleagues with the air of a man made absurd by unsolicited attentions, persecuted and compromised to the last degree.
The bosses of his ruddy face displayed all the quiverings and tortures and suffusions of a smiling shame. He was, however, compensated for the loss of personal dignity by a very substantial income. Not that at first he would admit the compensation. "Ricky," he would say in the voice of a man bowed and broken on the wheel of life, "you needn"t envy me my thousands. They are the measure of my abas.e.m.e.nt." Yet he continued to abase himself. Nothing was more amazing than his versatility. The public could hardly keep up with the flight of Rankin"s incarnations. Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral, fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one to Rankin. An infallible instinct told him which _genre_ should be chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour of his success. And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist. But latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant"s daughter) an insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate, then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence. The old ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability which was now the atmosphere of his home.
Rankin"s drawing-room (where he was now waiting for Rickman) was furnished with the utmost correctness in the purest Chippendale, upholstered in silver and grey and lemon and rose brocade; it had grey curtains, rose-lined, with a design of true lovers" knots in silver; straight draperies of delicate immaculate white muslin veiled the window-panes; for the feet an interminable stretch of grey velvet carpet whose pattern lay on it like a soft shadow. Globes of electric light drooped cl.u.s.tering under voluminously fluted shades. Rankin himself looked grossly out of keeping with the scene. It was (and they both knew it) simply the correct setting for his wife, who dominated it, a young splendour of rose-pink and rose-white and jewelled laces and gold.
Rickman, after many weeks" imprisonment between four dirty yellow ochre walls, was bewildered with the s.p.a.ce, the colours, the perfumes, the illumination. He was suffering from a curious and, it seemed to him, insane illusion, the illusion of distance, the magnifying of the s.p.a.ces he had got to traverse, and as he entered Mrs. Rankin"s drawing-room the way from the threshold to the hearthrug stretched before him as interminably as the way from Howland Street to Suss.e.x Square. But of any other distance he was blissfully unaware. Beside his vision of Lucia Harden Mrs. Herbert Rankin was an entirely insignificant person.
Now Rankin was a little afraid of the elegant lady his wife. He had had to apologise to her many times for the curious people he brought to the house, and he was anxious that Rickman should make a good impression. He was also hungry, as hungry as a man can be who has three square meals every day of his life. Therefore he was annoyed with Rickman for being late.
But his annoyance vanished at the first sight of him. His handshake was significant of atonement and immutable affection. He introduced him almost fearlessly to his wife. He had been at some pains to impress upon her that she was about to entertain a much greater man than her husband, and that it would be very charming of her if she behaved accordingly. At this she pouted prettily, as became a bride, and he pointed out that as Keith Rickman was a poet his greatness was incommensurable with that of her husband, it left him undisturbed upon his eminence as the supreme master of prose. So that Mrs. Rankin smiled dimly and deferentially as an elegant hostess must smile upon a poet who has kept her waiting. There were two other ladies there (Rankin"s mother and sister from the provinces); their greeting conveyed a rustling and excited consciousness of the guest"s distinction.
As Rankin"s family retreated, Maddox heaved himself forward and grasped Rickman"s hand without a word.
Rickman had no very clear idea of what happened in the brief pause before dinner. His first sensation was one of confused beat.i.tude and warmth, of being received into an enfolding atmosphere of friendliness. He was sure it was friendliness that made Maddox pluck him by the arm and draw him down beside him on the sofa; and he was too tired to wonder why Maddy should think it necessary to whisper into his collar, "Steady, you"ll be all right if you sit still, old man." The strange voices of the women confused him further, and standing made him giddy: he was glad to sit still in his corner obliterated by Maddy"s colossal shoulders. It was friendliness, he knew, that made Rankin dispense with ceremony and pilot him through those never-ending s.p.a.ces to the dining-room. And it must have been an exaggeration of the same feeling that made him (regardless of his wife"s uplifted eyebrows) insist on placing the guest of the evening between Maddox and himself. It was later on, about the time when the wine went round, that Rickman became aware of a change, of a subtle undefined hostility in the air. He wondered whether the Rankins were annoyed with him because of his inability to take a brilliant part in the conversation or to finish any one thing that he took upon his plate. But for the life of him he couldn"t help it. He was too tired to talk, and he had reached that stage of hunger when the desire to eat no longer brought with it the power of eating, when the masterpieces of Rankin"s _chef_ excited only terror and repugnance. He ate sparingly as starving men must eat, and he drank more sparingly than he ate; for he feared the probable effect of unwonted stimulants.
So that his gla.s.s appeared ever to be full.
The hostility was more Mrs. Herbert Rankin"s att.i.tude than that of her husband, but he noticed a melancholy change in Rankin. His geniality had vanished, or lingered only in the curl of his moustache. He was less amusing than of old. His conversation was no longer that of the light-hearted junior journalist flinging himself recklessly into the tide of talk; but whatever topic was started he turned it to himself.
He was exceedingly indignant on the subject of the war, which he regarded more as a personal grievance than as a national calamity. No doubt it was his eminence that const.i.tuted him the centre of so vast a range.
"The worst of it is," said he, "whichever side beats it"s destruction to royalties. I lost a clean thousand on Spion Kop and I can tell you I didn"t recover much on Mafeking, though I worked Tommy Atkins for all he was worth. This year my sales have dropped from fifty to thirty thousand. I can"t stand many more of these reverses."
He paused, dubious, between two _entrees_.
"If it"s had that effect on _me_," said the great man, "Heaven only knows what it"s done to other people. How about you, Rickman?"
"Oh, I"m all right, thanks." The war had ruined him, but his ruin was not the point of view from which he had yet seriously regarded it. He was frankly disgusted with his old friend"s tone.
"If it goes on much longer, I shall be obliged," said Rankin solemnly, "to go out to the seat of war."
Rickman felt a momentary glow. He was exhilarated by the idea of Rankin at the seat of war. He said he could see Rankin sitting on it.
Rankin laughed, for he was not wholly dead to the humour of his own celebrity; but there was a faint silken rustle at the head of the table, subtle and hostile, like the stirring of a snake. Mrs. Herbert Rankin bent her fine flat brows towards the poet, with a look ominous and intent. The look was lost upon Rickman and he wondered why Maddox pressed his foot.
"Have you written anything on the war, Mr. Rickman?" she asked.
"No; I haven"t written anything on the war."
She looked at him almost contemptuously as at a fool who had neglected an opportunity.
"What do you generally write on, then?"
Rickman looked up with a piteous smile. He was beginning to feel very miserable and weary, and he longed to get up and go. It seemed to him that there was no end to that dinner; no end to the pitiless ingenuity of Rankin"s _chef_. And he always had hated being stared at.
"I don"t--generally--write--on anything," he said.