The two men had barely exchanged the usual greetings which occur after long separations when Gawthorpe’s visitor experienced a queer sensation. A moment before he had been conscious of a gap between them; but, in a moment, the parenthesis of all those dissociated years was swept away.
“What do you smoke?” Gawthorpe had asked.
But it was far from a casual question. In the tone of his voice and the lift of his eyebrows the older man betrayed a half-mocking expectancy which amounted almost to a challenge, as though an answer which lacked a degree of fine discrimination would constitute an affront to his own admirably mannered elegance.
“They tell me that everybody smokes Turkish in America,” Gawthorpe went on, rapidly, with an air of avoiding the issue of his challenge. “But I hope you don’t; because I can’t offer you any. I detest them. Perhaps you’d like these. I get them—through some friends of mine—the Milónoffs— direct from Russia. You might say they are my only extravagance.”
The nicety of diction, the delicacy with which the little shallow green box was opened, the implied assumption that a person of his tastes could not be denied these little prodigalities, the whole meticulous solemnity enveloping a matter so trivial as cigarettes—all this, although occupying only a few seconds, served as well as a two-hour talk to bridge the years and convince the trans-Atlantic visitor that his former choirmaster had lost nothing of that exaggerated polish, that preciosity of manner and bearing which, as a boy, he had mimicked and admired.
A match flared between them and through the first whiff of smoke Densham mentally sized up his host: the same sloping shoulders, long pendent nose, dark brown eyes reposing in narrow sockets, the same sallow skin and high forehead, the same ascetic, oriental appearance, and that something about him which suggested the hangout—even the laziness—of the East.
“It’s a long time since I smoked Russians,” Densham remarked. “These are corking.”
He walked across the room and dropped the blackened match in an ashtray on the mantel. “Funny that you should mention that name, though. I’ve been trying to think of it all day.”
“Milónoff, you mean?”
“Yes. I saw Madame Milónoff this morning. That queer withered old giant was wheeling her in the little park beside the churchyard. George Pethick used to call him “Malachi,” do you remember? He looked so much like a prophet. They were the first people I recognized; but for the life of me I couldn’t think of her name. She never got better—eh?”
Gawthorpe dropped into a chair and motioned Densham to the lounge.
“No. I suppose you don’t remember her before her accident—before she was married?”
“O yes. She sang the solos at one of the Philharmonic concerts.”
“Of course. ‘The Martyr of Antioch.’ Yes, yes. What a beautiful voice! An exquisite personality! Born to a career, you know—to conquests of an unusual sort. All the qualities of a great artist! As the Lord liveth, a splendid women! What a tragedy!”
Densham leaned forward.
“She has never walked—since?”
“Only a step or two. She is not lame, you know. It’s her heart. A terrific shock to her whole system. She has been ill a great deal. It has aged her, of course. She can’t be more than … How long have you been away?”
“Close to fifteen years.”
“Well then, she is not much over forty. Getting about in a chair makes her look older, too, of course. She was never what you would call beautiful, you know; except her eyes. But she was always—well, you remember, probably—upright, vital, rather—rather splendid. One doesn’t use the word ‘superb’ much, but she was really that. And even now; yes,—now, perhaps, more so—like a deposed queen!”
Gawthorpe became thoughtful, sank back in his chair and drew at his cigarette.
Across the room Griffith Proctor Densham, his old chorister, also smoked silently. His appearance was youthful, in spite of his thirty-four years. He had not grown up. There was still a singular questing eagerness in his greenish eyes. His parted lips and the quick distension of his delicate nostrils bespoke a spirit which the world and the flesh had never completely yoked.
He had left Croydon at the age of nineteen to go to South Africa. His parents had died there during his schooling in England, and he went back to make his home with an uncle in Cape Town. For two years, until he came of age, he endured the routine of his uncle’s office. Being one of a family of seven his inheritance was not large; but on attaining his majority he sailed for Canada. The idea of a fruit-farm in the shadow of the Rockies had fired his imagination. From an early age he had been tantalized by literary ambitions. It seemed to him that “out there” he would have little to do; he could live a hermit-like existence and write without hindrance.
Almost eighteen months passed before he realized the folly of this headlong plunge into unfamiliar surroundings and an occupation for which he was entirely unfitted. He sold the farm for a wretched price and hastened to Winnipeg, where a great deal of money was being made in Western real estate. For a while his literary pursuits were entirely abandoned. The excitement of the “boom” enslaved him. He was even persuaded to make a profitless trip into the Peace River country. On his return he determined to “unload” his holdings, put the money into bonds, and definitely set himself to write a great Canadian epic.
The scope of the proposed novel was soon narrowed. During a cruise on Lake Winnipeg he became intensely interested in the life of the Icelanders who fish in those waters. They usurped his broader scheme, and through the following winter he roughed it in the northern country, gathering atmosphere for a powerful study of their rigorous, half-savage existence.
But in the early summer, at Minaki, where Densham had ensconced himself on a diminutive island with the intention of labouring faithfully at his fiction, a new experience lured him from his work. Sentimental by nature, his affairs of the heart had ever been tempestuous and temporary; but a suddenly conceived fancy for a young Calgary girl, who had been forced to land on his island during a storm, soon developed into a serious and lasting infatuation.
She was not of the type which usually attracted him. She was quiet, calm, downright. At first he had suspected an unusual elusiveness behind her level gaze. Later he discovered that it was the honest reflection of a practical, even-tempered personality. The glamour of the affair ebbed. In its place arose the thought that she would make him—the writer of books—an admirable wife.
There was nothing temperamental about her. She was younger than he, and a bit awed by what she smilingly—but not jokingly—called his “genius.” She believed in him. He knew that he could reckon on having pretty much his own way. And, of course, when his things began to be published, she would be inordinately proud of him. Besides, she was possessed of a quiet, contagious good-humour that would act as an antidote in his frequent fits of depression. They became excellent comrades; a relationship which, as it stood, loving patience with the fruits of success—fame, wealth, travel, the homage of superior people! All this made her feel necessary to him, and recognizing in him a sort of genius, she endured what actually amounted to something like martyrdom. She lived with him thus for five years, keeping out of his way as much as possible, and finally, after a brief illness, got out of his way for ever.
Her death was not so much of a shock as he had believed it would be. For, in his inmost heart, he had more than once contemplated the possibility of her death. It had seemed to him at times that he could get on better without her—without anyone. His aunt had “spoiled” him; and since marriage his wife had pampered him. “These women have ruined me,” he sometimes thought; and pictured himself thrown upon the world at an early age, to shift for himself, to starve in a garret, like Chatterton. He tortured himself with the half-belief that under some such circumstances he might have written a masterpiece.
His thirty-first birthday arrived a few weeks after his wife’s death. It did not occur to him what day it was until he was preparing for bed. The night was warm and he was leaning out of the window, gazing blankly at the stars, giving no conscious guidance to his thoughts. Suddenly the day of the month occurred to him; and he said, out loud—“Thirty-one; and nothing done!”
A frenzy overtook him. “This must not go on,” he said to himself, and immediately began to put his clothes on again, without any clear idea of what he was going to do. Presently he found himself in the street. It was past midnight; but he strode feverishly on for more than two hours, filling his lungs with deep draughts of the night air, and pumping into his soul a stern and inexorable determination to finish something.
He took up again his Icelandic novel, and worked at it intermittently until the beginning of summer. In July, in order to steep himself afresh in the atmosphere of the story, he planned to spend a few weeks at a quiet resort on Lake Winnipeg, near which, in his previous rambles, he had discovered a tiny Icelandic settlement.
It pleased him to take a pad and write in the open. One day he drove his canoe through a screen of high reeds into a creek that ran back into a marsh. Beyond the marsh was a sort of lagoon, enclosed on three sides by wild cherry and cranberry trees. “Like a natural amphitheatre,” he thought, “floored with crystal.” But the water, really, was not very clear; and he regretted that there were not water-lilies afloat on it.
However, the spot was almost ideal. Densham visited it often. Lying face downward in the sand he wrote slowly, pausing often, chin in hand, seeking the ‘right’ word. Occasionally he would stand up, throw back his shoulders, and, in conscious imitation of Flaubert, declaim his sentences out loud, at the top of his voice; attempting to detect flaws in his phrases by the constriction of his breath at certain points in their bellowed utterance.
One day, when he was doing this, a man appeared through the bush on the opposite side of the lagoon, visibly astounded at the sight of Densham standing with his feet planted wide apart, shouting strange sentences at the sky.
“What the devil?” he cried. “I thought someone was drowning. Is this a new game of hide-and-seek, or something?”
Densham went round to him, rather red in the face, and explained that he was a writer; rather expecting that this news would not only account for his eccentricity, but would occasion a certain amount of awe in the attitude of the other, who was roughly attired and wore a week’s growth of beard. To his surprise, however, the announcement rather amused the newcomer, who turned out to be a lawyer named Potter, a bachelor, and something of a hermit, who lived in a shooting-lodge on the edge of the marsh, just behind the strip of bush through which he had lately struggled.
They began to talk of literature and it ended in Densham staying for a meal at the lawyer’s shack. Potter announced that he spent his summers in almost utter seclusion, fishing and reading. “Mostly the same books, too,” he declared, “over and over again. I rarely pick up new ones; but this year I’m reading Henry Adams.”
Densham had barely heard of Adams, which meant that the conversation drifted into late afternoon, carried over another hastily prepared meal, and lasted far into the night. After that Densham spent most of his days with his new acquaintance, while at night, in spite of the mosquitoes, he burned his lamp and devoured Adams’s Works, which Potter lent him in rotation.
He discovered in Adams a justification for his lack of will. One phrase from the “Degradation” he repeated to himself many times—“Thought then appears in nature as an arrested,—in other words, as a degraded,—physical action.”
“I have been living a lop-sided life,” Densham said to himself. “Like everybody else I have glorified my brain, my reason; I have preferred to think—rather than feel. All this time I have been trying to write with my intellect—a lower energy than instinct! It has never occurred to me that I lack emotional experience. I must throw myself into the stream of life.”
The thought had a strange and delicious thrill for him. He endeavoured to picture himself as a man of action, holding the attention of crowds, or perhaps on some lonely adventure, with a few loyal followers, questing, conquering! But he found it difficult to thrust himself into this unwonted role.
“No,” he thought, “this new slant Adams has given me must be translated somehow into terms of writing.”
He began thinking over, in turn, the great masterpieces of literature.
“It is the wealth of feeling, not the subtlety of thought, that makes them masterpieces,” he told himself, and began thrashing about in his mind for the memory of a book he had once read which had applied some such test to the works of great authors.
He did not think of it until his holiday was over and he had got back to Winnipeg. Then, of a sudden, in the jostle of Portage Avenue, late one afternoon, it came to him. He experienced an overwhelming desire to run about—like Archimedes—shouting his discovery to the thronging stream of people making their way homeward.
“Ecstasy! Ecstasy! That’s it!” he bellowed, inwardly. “By a chap named Machen. What’s the name of that book? But, never mind. I’ve got it, now. That’s the supreme test of literature. It must have ecstasy in it.”
As he looked about him at the dull faces swarming past he felt that perhaps it was a test, too, of the worthiness of life. What was life worth without it? And yet how few of these groundlings possessed it!
“Nine out of ten of them,” he said to himself, “have scarcely ever pronounced the word. It has become altogether remote from common life.”
That being so he must seek it in places apart from the seething and swarming of cities. And before he knew it the idea of returning to England had seeped into his mind.
The more he mulled the matter over the more it appealed to him. This Western country, he decided, was too young, too crude, too obsessed with the mere task of making ends meet. No wonder he had been unable to write. Culture was almost entirely lacking. Ecstasy was unknown. In England he felt sure he would find vestiges of it. It was to be a high quest, pursued with fanatical fervour. His heart leaped.
Before he could get away his thirty-second birthday came round. “Thirty-two,” he said to himself, “and still nothing done. But I am about to start life all over again.”
To his friends Densham indicated that it was only a trip he was taking; but he sold up most of his belongings, put a few half-precious things in storage, packed his books, and told himself that he would not come back.
The first glimpse of English fields—seen from the boat-train to London—confirmed him in this belief. He found it difficult to understand how he could have stayed away so long.
And now, in Gawthorpe’s study, with Gawthorpe’s familiar sallow face opposite him, he wanted to dismiss the hiatus, those wasted, vacillating, purposeless years. He could not bring himself to confess his failure. When it became necessary, at Gawthorpe’s prompting, to speak at length of his experience, he deleted any reference to his literary ambitions. Instead, he talked a great deal about his dead wife. He had thought of her very little for some months; but as he talked it began to appear wonderful to him that she had been able to give so much when he had been prepared to give so little. Her mere kindness—to put it only at that—in the face of his neglect, his selfishness, his lack of sympathy with her type of mind, became transfigured in his memory, and made him humble. He extolled her. He complained that he had never been worthy of her. He was in a mood to flagellate himself.
It soon passed. A photograph of George Pethick, his chief crony in the old days, attracted his attention on the wall above Gawthorpe’s head.
“Where is George?” asked Densham. “Has he kept in touch with you at all?”
“He’s on the halls,” remarked Gawthorpe, a bit drily. “Doing rather well, I’m told. Imitations, barnyard noises, and that sort of thing.”
“George! Barnyard noises! Are you serious?”
“Quite. I haven’t seen him for some time; but I understand he appears quite often at the Hippodrome or the Tivoli, I don’t know which. Perhaps both.”
Densham threw himself back in his chair and laughed heartily. “Life will be the death of me yet,” he cried; “I was only just then about to tell you of the solemn ambitions George and I entertained as boys. He was going to be a great actor. I was to be a great writer. We used to go on the most terrific hikes and discuss our respective futures. How confident we were! It didn’t seem easy, mind. We were determined to work very hard. We pictured ourselves starving, even. We were prepared to sacrifice everything that everybody else seemed to prize. We were convinced, of course, that neither of us would ever marry. Life—at least, the sort we mapped out for ourselves—was pretty austere, pretty bleak. That was in the bargain. We felt superior to the sort of people who took life easily. I remember that we often talked of you. We admired you so much, you see; and until these ambitions formed themselves we were modeling ourselves after your—your graceful pattern.”
Densham looked up and met the other’s glance. Gawthorpe nodded knowingly. He was hugely amused.
“Then we began to feel that you were too easily contented. We would have admired you more if—instead of your lessons, the choir, concert engagements, and all that—you had starved yourself and written stupendous compositions. These compositions, of course, would have been frightfully neglected. Nobody would recognize your genius—except us—and perhaps a handful of others. And then you would have died. We should have liked to have attended your funeral.”
They both laughed aloud simultaneously.
“Yes, out of our meagre earnings, we would have got a wreath for your grave. And then, of course, almost at once, your works would become famous. And we would go about, appropriately melancholy, telling people— ‘Yes, we knew Gawthorpe. He was a wonderful artist—a great genius.’”
Gawthorpe was half-reclining, both hands clasped behind his head, and his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’m inclined to think, Griffith,” he remarked, in a sober voice, and without changing his position or the direction of his glance, “that this last—this idea of me—was more of your conception that George’s. Eh?”
“Perhaps,” said Griffith. “I have never wanted to take things easily for myself, and yet things have never really been hard for me. If I had been thrown on my own resources I might have got somewhere. Even out there—if things had not prospered with me quite so well—I might have accomplished something.”
Gawthorpe sat forward and looked at him searchingly. “Got somewhere? Accomplished something? You seem to be accusing yourself.”
“Well, I am. You see, the ambition stuck. It’s still there. But that’s all. George did get behind the footlights, at least; if only to make barnyard noises. I have not even clucked in print.”
“You mean to say that it still torments you—this aspiration?” In Gawthorpe’s voice the younger man detected a strong element of curiosity, amounting almost to anxiety—to a desire for the fullest confidence.
“Yes,” Griffith answered. “Nothing else seems to satisfy me. There will be no peace for me until—well, until I have created something. I sometimes wonder if other people experience quite the same urge—to create—to …” But he did not finish. Something in Gawthorpe’s aspect arrested his groping thought. The musician was bent forward. He had become suddenly older. At the same time there was an expression on his face and a flare in his eyes which Griffith had never seen before, and never dreamed of seeing. It was as though Gawthorpe had removed a mask that had been there for years. He seemed uncomfortable, too, almost bashful, as one might be who shows his true features for the first time to an old friend.
He did not speak at once, and when he did it was not in the familiar, languid, carefully-articulated tone. His voice was hollow. It seemed to come from some deep place within him, long disused. “In the image of God— eh?”
“What?” cried Griffith. The ejaculated word seemed to explode and slap against all four walls of the room. Not only Gawthorpe’s phrase, nor his unaccustomed tone, but the dead silence in the room, in the house—a vibrating stillness which impinged upon the senses—had startled him. His own voice, uttering that single word, had crashed in his ears. Immediately afterward the silence came rushing back, enveloping them, a more unearthly stillness than before, like darkness after a flash of lightning.
Gawthorpe was the first to speak. The recital of that boyish estimate of him had penetrated to the secret core of his thoughts. It stripped him of his elegance, his poise. It recalled those early aspirations so relentlessly sacrificed to a mode of life, a mere attitude. The dead bones of those old ambitions clattered into life and thrust accusing fingers at him. He had to acknowledge their grinning presence.
“Perhaps we all have in us the impulse of the Creator!”
Their eyes were boring into each other. They were no longer two men. Their lives, their temperaments, their very names dropped from them. For a thrilled moment they became creatures—naked souls—abreast in a dark tide, aghast at the mysteriousness, the cluelessness of the sweeping enigma of life.
“Do you believe in a Creator?” asked Densham, in a hushed whisper.
“Yes.”
The unhesitating and passionate affirmative rang across the room. It seemed to Griffith that it was uttered too readily, too violently; but he had no opportunity to probe the other’s faith. The question had unleashed a flood of words.
“Yes, we are all creators in miniature. Even the lowest forms of life are born with that instinct—to reproduce themselves—create a new generation. Think of it. Millions of creatures plunged into passionate existence out of dead clay. They have their ecstatic hour and are gone, as the grass withers. But the race is re-created over and over again. Man arrives. His first act is to create a weapon. We do not know him as man until he does that. Then he gets up on his hind legs, develops a brain, becomes lord of the mud-heap!”
The glowing end of Gawthorpe’s cigarette described a wide arc in the air. “And what happens? This brain of his is a new thing, an entity in itself, able to detach itself, contemplate itself, calculate, invent. It generates a passion of its own. What shall we call it? The frenzy of genius, if you like. But look; to what end does this passion burn. The same end, my dear fellow; always the same … Creation! Beethoven creates a symphony; Wren a cathedral; Shakespeare a tragedy … and the verger at the church—you remember old Hawkins—well, you should see his garden. It’s a creation too. Yes, we have in us the impulse of the Creator!”
Two deep parallel lines suddenly engraved themselves across Densham’s forehead.
“And we squander it!” he cried, as though the words were wrung out of him.
“Yes,” Gawthorpe admitted, “the older will of the senses is too much for it. That ancient impulse of pagan Nature thwarts the uprushing inspiration. As yet our blood is too hot and our minds too cold.”
That phrase from Adams which had changed Densham’s whole outlook on life now stole across the younger man’s consciousness. He uttered it aloud, quietly:
“Thought is an arrested, a degraded physical action!”
“What do you say?” questioned Gawthorpe, looking sharply up.
“Our minds are cold precisely because we divorce them from what we feel. We think too much and feel too little. That ‘impulse of pagan Nature,’ as you call it, is Life itself. All the bright, virile things in Nature are unconscious. They do not contemplate themselves. They are! They content themselves with being! Only this little, doubting, rebellious, festering spot that we call our brain, this last arrived and degraded scrap of once passionate matter, this alone, in all the immense garden of existence, distils poison—the poison of doubt! That snake in the Eden story is a splendid bit of allegory. It prefigures the coiling, venomous brain of Eve, mother of this whole sceptical race, the first creature who believed it more blessed to know than to be.”
His greenish eyes paled with the vehemence of his mood, until they appeared almost yellow. The little red flecks that stained his pupils were more than usually prominent.
“That queer, puzzling old Tree of Knowledge, too—eh? What a miracle of inspiration! Here we have been at it, generation after generation, biting deeper and deeper into the apple, and never getting any nearer the core. It isn’t possible for us to know anything—in its essence. But we can feel! And if we’d let them alone—our senses, I mean—there would come flooding in to us all the infinite glamour of life, the inexplicable joy in merely being alive … Heavens! What is there to know that can surpass that? What is there to doubt?”
His upflung hands crushed themselves against his temples. He spoke again, but in a low tone, as though to himself;
“Only the flaming rebelliousness of our own minds keeps us out of Paradise.”
Gawthorpe, who had been aroused from his usual lethargic acceptance of things by Densham’s vehemence, felt himself out of his natural element. He had been surprised into an unexpected, impassioned avowal, devastating to his peace of mind. His eyes narrowed and with a slow nestling movement against the cushions of his chair he relapsed into his accustomed languor. “You are more orthodox than when you went away, Griffith, aren’t you?” he observed, with a touch of cynicism.
“Because I speak of Paradise?” asked Densham, getting up and striding to the fireplace. “No. I’m far from orthodox; but I am changing. I’m beginning to believe again in some sort of Paradise—not a place that we are going to, so much, as a place we have become estranged from. There’s a passage in Pascal that I often think about. He says that the wretchedness of man is proof of his former high estate. What man is wretched, he says, because he has not three eyes? But who, having had two, is not inconsolable at the loss of one. I forget just how he puts it; but the idea is that man is wretched because he has lost something—some former glory. No one regrets that he is not a king, he says, except a deposed king.”
Densham stopped. The quotation from Pascal suddenly reminded him of the words Gawthorpe had used in describing Madame Milónoff.
“A deposed queen! Born to unusual conquests!”
For some moments he was lost in thought.
“I was thinking of what you said about Madame Milónoff, ‘A deposed queen.’ You know, for years I have seen nothing regal—except mountains. And today, even at a distance, there was—as you say—an air about her. The chair might have been a throne.”
Gawthorpe stretched himself with feline gravity and pointed to a photograph hanging above the lounge. “There is a photograph of her, before she was married. She presented me with it the night we did ‘The Martyr.’”
Densham went over and examined it intently.
“Yes. I recall her now. What wonderful eyes! I don’t remember them!”
Gawthorpe rose, crossed the room and threw his arm about Densham’s shoulder. “If you care,” he said, with an air of mockery, “I might secure an audience for you.”
“Oh,” cried Densham, a trifle abashed. “I never knew her, you know.”
“But wouldn’t you like to? She has quite a court. I often drop in on Sunday nights—after church. Usually there are a few people there. Will you come along some time?”
‘Yes, I’d like to,” said Densham. His quest for Ecstasy came into his mind.
“Her eyes,” he thought, “look as though they have glimpsed it.”