"I live here--at least for the present--name, Hampson--"
"Why, weren"t you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years back?" asked Siegmund.
They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused himself for having addressed Siegmund:
"I saw you with your nose flattened against the window," he said, "and as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be re-acquainted."
Siegmund looked at the man in astonishment.
"I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It"s a pity to try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don"t you think?"
"Stare beyond it, you mean?" asked Siegmund.
"Exactly!" replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. "I call a day like this "the blue room". It"s the least draughty apartment in all the confoundedly draughty House of Life."
Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express something in his own soul.
"I mean," the man explained, "that after all, the great ma.s.s of life that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can"t stop it, once we"ve begun to leak."
"What do you mean by "leak"?" asked Siegmund.
"Goodness knows--I talk through my hat. But once you"ve got a bit tired of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the dark--as you were doing."
"But, to use your metaphor, I"m not tired of the House--if you mean Life," said Siegmund.
"Praise G.o.d! I"ve met a poet who"s not afraid of having his pocket picked--or his soul, or his brain!" said the stranger, throwing his head back in a brilliant smile, his eyes dilated.
"I don"t know what you mean, sir," said Siegmund, very quietly, with a strong fear and a fascination opposing each other in his heart.
"You"re not tired of the House, but of your own particular room-say, suite of rooms--"
"Tomorrow I am turned out of this "blue room"," said Siegmund with a wry smile. The other looked at him seriously.
"Dear Lord!" exclaimed Hampson; then: "Do you remember Flaubert"s saint, who laid naked against a leper? I could _not_ do it."
"Nor I," shuddered Siegmund.
"But you"ve got to-or something near it!"
Siegmund looked at the other with frightened, horrified eyes.
"What of yourself?" he said, resentfully.
"I"ve funked-ran away from my leper, and now am eating my heart out, and staring from the window at the dark."
"But can"t you _do_ something?" said Siegmund.
The other man laughed with amus.e.m.e.nt, throwing his head back and showing his teeth.
"I won"t ask you what _your_ intentions are," he said, with delicate irony in his tone. "You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five hundred a year by hard work; but it"s no good. If you have acquired a liking for intensity in life, you can"t do without it. I mean vivid soul experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and physical excitement."
Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.
"Well, and what then?" he said.
"What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other craving. You become a _concentre_, you feed your normal flame with oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are always semi-transparent."
Siegmund laughed.
"At least, I am quite opaque," he said.
The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.
"Not altogether," said Hampson. "And you, I should think, are one whose flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking."
Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.
"You haven"t much reserve. You"re like a tree that"ll flower till it kills itself," the man continued. "You"ll run till you drop, and then you won"t get up again. You"ve no dispa.s.sionate intellect to control you and economize."
"You"re telling me very plainly what I am and am not," said Siegmund, laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it.
"Oh, it"s only what I think," replied Hampson. "We"re a good deal alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn"t; but women have always done as they liked with me."
"That"s hardly so in my case," said Siegmund.
Hampson eyed him critically.
"Say one woman; it"s enough," he replied.
Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.
"The best sort of women--the most interesting--are the worst for us,"
Hampson resumed. "By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and animal in us. Then they are supersensitive--refined a bit beyond humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an acc.u.mulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her force becomes evident.
"She can"t live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting women don"t want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us--that is, us altogether."
"You"re a bit downright are you not?" asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements were arbitrary.
"That"s according to my intensity," laughed Hampson. "I can open the blue heaven with looking, and push back the doors of day a little, and see--G.o.d knows what! One of these days I shall slip through. Oh, I am perfectly sane; I only strive beyond myself!"
"Don"t you think it"s wrong to get like it?" asked Siegmund.
"Well, I do, and so does everybody; but the crowd profits by us in the end. When they understand my music, it will be an education to them; and the whole aim of mankind is to render life intelligible."
Siegmund pondered a little....
"You make me feel--as if I were loose, and a long way off from myself,"
he said slowly.