Spiritual Adventures

ould possibly do, that I hated every profession, that I would rather starve than soil my hands with business, and that so long as I could just go on living as I was then living, I

t he dreaded my leaving home, and he knew that, for

oung girl. She had been pretty, and had all the little vanities of a coquette; she wore bright, semi-fashionable clothes, and conspicuous hats. She had much of the natural gaiety of my mother, who was her elder sister; and she was infinitely considerate to me, turning out one of her little rooms that I might have it for a study. She liked me to play to her, and would sit by the side of the old piano listening eagerly. The mad uncle was her brother, and he would come in sometimes from his cottage, bringing great bundles of flowers. He was very kind and gentle, and he would sometimes tell me of the l

t too far off to reach by driving. We had not an idea in common, and I always wondered how it was possible that my aunt, who was my mother's eldest sister, could ever have married my uncle. He was a kind man, and, in his way, intelligent; but he talked incessantly, insistently, and with something unctuo

r a ruffle. They went to the shop early in the morning, slaved there all day, taught in the Sunday-School on Sundays, said the obvious things to one another all day long, were perfectly content to be where they were, do what they did, think what they thought, and say w

he contrast that I found them busy preparing for a fête when I got back to Leamington; stringing up the Chinese lanterns to the branches of the trees, and putting out little tables on the grass. At Coventry I loved going through the narrow streets, looking up at the windows which leaned together under their gabled roofs. I saw Lady Godiva borne through the streets, more clothed than she appears in the pictures, in the midst of a gay and solemn procession, tricked out in old-fashioned frippery. And I spent a long day there, one of the days of the five-day fair, which feasted me with sensations on whic

e my head; the crowd was more varied than any crowd I had ever seen, and I discovered a blonde gipsy girl, in charge of a cocoanut-shy, who let me talk a little Romany with her. I thought Chester, with its arcades and its city-

had picked up a good many words of different languages, which he mispronounced in a scarcely intelligible jargon of his own. He had been left behind by his ship in Russia, where he had stayed on account of a woman: she could speak no English, and he but little Russian; but it did not seem to have mattered. It was th

pter after chapter, while the preacher preached I knew not what: I never heard a word of it, not even the text. I read, not for the Bible's sake, but to learn the language in which I was reading it. My parents knew this, but after all it was the Bible, and they could hardly object to my reading the Bible. Sometimes I scribbled down ideas that came into my head; sometimes I merely sat there, with a stony inattention, showing, I fancy, in

something, to me, beside the question. I could argue about dogma; I defended a liberal interpretation of doctrines; I insisted that there were certain questions which we were bound to leave open. But I was not alienated from Christ

hour or two more in London. I walked among the lights, through hurrying crowds of people, in long, dingy streets, not knowing where I was going, till I found myself outside a great building which seemed to be a kind of music-hall. I went in; it was the Agricultural Hall, and some show was being given there. There were acrobats, gymnasts, equilibrists, performing beasts; there was a vast din

epressed, anxious to get through with the task for which I had come to London, anxious to get back again to the country. I went back with a little book-learning, of the kind that I wanted to acquire; I began to have books sent down to me from a Library in London; I worked, more and more diligently, at reading and studying books; and I began to think of dev

the other girls. She was quite young, and still ingenuous enough to look forward to the day when she would have her name on the placards in letters I forget how many inches high. I had been to my first theatre, it was Irving in 'King Lear,' and now I was hearing about the stage from one who lived on it. A little actress, afterwards famous for her beauty, and then a child with masses of gold hair about her ears, lived next door, at another lodg

ad never cared greatly for the open air in the country, the real open air, because everything in the country, except the sea, bored me; but here, in the 'motley' Strand, among these hurrying people, under the smoky sky, I could walk and yet watch. If there ever was a religion of the eyes, I have devoutly practised that religion. I noted every face that passed me on the pavement; I looked into the omnibuses, the cabs, always with the same eager hope of seeing some beautiful or interesting person, some gracious mo

ER K

eople passed; there were never many children playing in the road; the women did not stand talking at their open doors. The doors opened and shut quietly; dark faces looked out from behind the windows; the Jews who lived there seemed always to be at work, bending over their tables, sewing and cutting, or else hurrying in and out with bun

the fear of knowing what went on behind those nailed shutters. She made up stories about the houses, but the stories never satisfied her. She imagined some great, vague gesture; not an incident, but a gesture; and it hung in the air susp

low cheeks; the two sisters, sharp and voluble, never at rest for a moment; the brother, with his air of insolent assurance, an immense self-satisfaction hooded under his beautifully curved eyelids; the grandmother, with her bent and mountainous shoulders, the vivid malice of her eyes, her hundreds of wrinkles. All these people, who had so many interests in common, who thought of the same things, cared for the same things, seemed so fond of one another in an instinctive way, with so much hostility for other people who were not belonging to them, sat the

se sight of them altogether and sit gazing straight before her, her eyes wide open, her lips parted. Her hand would make an unconscious movement, as if she were

nkey; she's clutching out after a soul, as they do. They look like little men,

that she would be more careful in future

wish enough for the beauty of suave curves and unemphatic outlines. The lips were thick, red, strung like a bow. The whole face seemed to await, with an infinite patience, some moulding and awakening force, which might have its way with it. It wanted nothing, anticipated nothing; it waited. Only the eyes pu

ough very slowly. She hated it, in her languid, smouldering way, partly because it was work and partly because it made her prick her fingers, and the skin grew hard and ragged where the point of the ne

anted to be let alone, to have her own way without other people's help or hindrance. She had no definite consciou

d to have money, of course, and she did not want people to think her stupid; but all this was to come to her, she knew, because of some fortunate quality in herself, as yet undiscovered. Then she would shake off everything that now clung to her, like a worn-out garm

there was a melodrama at the Standard, or at the Elephant and Castle, she would wait and struggle outside the door and up the narrow, winding stairs, for a place as near the front of the gallery as she could get. Once inside, she would never speak, b

always in the right, and became furious if any one contradicted her. She saw each part as a whole, and she blamed the actors for not being consistent with themselves. She could

They meant to be satirical, but Esther said, seriously enough: 'Yes, I could do it; but so coul

t she had refused them contemptuously. To her sluggish instinct men seemed only good for making money, or, perhaps, children; they had not come to have any definite personal meaning for her. A little man called Joel, who had talke

of the small theatres in the neighbourhood, asking for an engagement. After a long time the manager gave her a small part. The piece was called 'The Wages of Sin,' an

ing until supper-time. Then she said t

mother, with a sarcastic smile;

night,' s

ean it!' sai

'and I've got my part. I'm to be

know,' he said, 'she s

r; 'will you come on Monday

never get on.' They told her that she was taking the bread out of their mouths, and it was certain she would never put it back again. 'If I get on,' said Esther, 'I will pay you b

ot to seem exultant; they looked at one another, shook their heads again, and consented. The old grandmother mumbled something fiercely,

had felt nervous. She shook her head; it had seemed quite natural to her, she said. She did not tell them that a great wave of triumph had swept over her as she felt the heat of the gas foot

chance to play it, but, when the next piece was put on at the theatre, she was given a part of her own. She began to make a little money, and, as she had promised, she paid so much a week to her parents for ke

began to be looked upon as a promising actress. The papers praised her with moderation; some of the younger critics, who admired her type, praised her more than she deserved. She was making money; she had come to live in rooms of her own, off the Strand; at twenty-one she had done, in a measure, what she wanted to do; but she was not satisfi

rest in her, and who helped her with all the good advice that he had never

st fall in love; there's no other way. You think you can act, and you have never felt anything worse than a cut finger.

alked, argued, protested; the matter seriously troubled him. He felt he was giving Esther good advice; he wanted her to be the thing she wanted to be. Esther knew it and thanked him, w

he same entreaty in his eyes, not daring to speak it. Other men, very different men, had made love to her in very different ways. They had seemed to be trying to drive a hard bargain, to get the better of her in a matter of business; and h

study for the stage? All the examples pointed to it, and, what was worse,

nlikely to succeed in its purpose. She thought deliberately over all the men she knew; but who was

with thin lips and reflective, not quite honest eyes. His manner was cold, restrained, with a mingling of insolence and diffidence. He was a hard worker and a somewhat deliberately hard liver. He avoided society and preferred to find his relaxation among people with whom one did not need to keep up appearances, or talk sentiment, or pay

,' except to jest at it; he concealed even the extent to which he was really disturbed by her presence; his words spoke only of friendship and of general topics. And yet there could never be any doubt as to his meaning; his whole attitude was a patient waiting. He i

operty, it had always seemed to her, free to dispose of as she pleased. The business element in her nature persisted. This bargain, this infinitely impor

felt it. How different had been her feeling when she walked across the stage for the first time! That had really been a new life, or the very beginning of life. But this was no more than a delightful episode, hardly to be disentangled from the visit to Paris which had acc

nto the words she spoke; her eyes, as they looked across t

When he sat down to write his own plays, something dry and hard came into the words, the life ebbed out of those imaginary people who had been so real to him, whom he had made so real to others as he talked. He constructed admirably and was an unerring judge of the construction of plays. And he had a sense of acting whic

ages catches a foreign language. She went through Ibsen as she had gone through Shakespeare; and Haygarth showed her how to take hold of this very different subject-matter, so definite and so elusive. And they studied good acting-plays together, worthless plays that gave the actress opportunities to create something out of nothing. Together they saw D

getting the words into her memory first. Then the meaning had to be explained to her, scene by scene, and she had to say the words over until she had found the right accent. Once found, she never f

uld be done, and she knew why it should be done; sound the right note in her ears, arrest her at the moment when the note came right, and she understood, by a backward process,

e senses, but through the mind. A kind of domesticity had crept into their relations, and this drew Esther nearer to him. She began to feel that he belonged to her. He had never, she knew, been wholly absorbed in her, and she had delighted him by showing no jealousy, no anxiety

to please Philip Haygarth; she worked now with a double purpose. And she made surprising advances as an actress. People b

e something, some slight, essential thing, almost unaccountably lacking. What was it? Was it a fundamental lack, that cou

e, working, not finding the time long, nor wishing it to go more slowly, she felt a kind of surprise at herself. How could she have gone through it all? She had not even been bored. She had had a purpose, and now that she

t, genius, whatever it was, as partly the work of his hands. It please

de love to an ignorant, beautiful creature who walked on in some corner of a Drury Lane melodrama. On principle, he did not like clever women. Esther, it is true, was not clever, in the ordinary, tiresome sense; and her startling intuitions, in matters of acting, had not repelled him, as an exhibition of the capabilities of a woman, while they preoccupied him for a long time in that part of his brain which worked critically upon any interesting material. But nothing that she could do as an

ich he had never even dreaded, somewhat disturbed him. She was adopting almost the attitude of a wife, and he had no ambition to play the

armth seemed more and more to threaten his liberty, the impulse to tug at his chain became harder to resist. His continued, unvarying interest in her acting, his patience in helping her, in working with her, kept her for some time from realising how little was

nsignificant creature, a peasant from the Campagna, who had nothing but her good looks and the distinction of her attitudes. Esther was beside herself with rage, jealousy, mortification; she lo

how to say, but scarcely attending to their meaning. Another thought was at work behind this mechanical speech, a continual throb of remembrance, going on monotonously. Her mind was full of other words, which she heard as if an inner voice were repeating them; her min

separate life as she opened the door at the back of the stage, and stood, waiting for the applause to subside, motionless under the eyes of the audience. There was something in the manner of her entrance that seemed to strike the fatal note of the play. She had never been more restrained, more effortless; she seemed scarcely to be acting; only, a magnetic current seemed to have been set in motion between her and those who were watching her. They held their breaths, as if they were assisting at a real tragedy; as if, at any moment, this acting might give place to some horrible, naked passion of mere nature. The curtain rose and rose again at the end of the first act; and she stood there, bowing gravely, in what seemed a deliberate continuation, into that interval, of the sentiment of the piece. Her d

c nature, in which a great shock had brought about a kind of release, she realised that all she had wanted, during most of her life, had at last come about. The note had been struck, she had responded to it, as she responded to every suggestion, faultlessly; she knew that she could repeat the note, w

IAN TR

rred a little in his memory, and with whole spaces blotted out of it, but in a steady return upon himself, as the past, it is said, comes back to a drowning man at the instant before death. There was that next step to take, the step that frightened him; was it into another, more pain

edge of the cliff, high up over the sea. He was conscious of it, because it hurt him, sooner than he was conscious of the many voices of the sea, which, all through his childhood, sang

not exacting now, and the place was good for an idle, helpless man, who was tired of what he called living, and had taken a late fancy to the open air, and, as soon as the child was old enough, to the companionship of his child. His wife sat indoors all day, crouching over the fire, except when the summer heat was extreme, and then she lay on the grass, under an umbrella. When they sat at table her fingers were always crumbling the bread into tiny crumbs, and often, at tea-time especially, she would take a large slice of bread and mould it into little figures, little nude figures exquisitely proportioned, with all the modelling of the limbs and shoulder-blades. Sometimes she woul

ng ago as he could remember, Christian had been put on the music-stool, and told to play what his father whistled. The first time he was put there he picked out every note correctly, with one finger. The father caught h

ith the sound of a sail flapping, seemed to surround the house with realisable forms of sound. The music which he played on the piano made lines, whenever he thought of it; never pictures. His mother, who did not seem to herself to know or care anything about music, sometimes described a little scene which the music he had been playing called up to her, but he could never see things in that way. When he played the first ballad of Chopin, for instance, she saw two lovers, sheltering under trees

he world, Schumann dreams about the roots of a flower; and they sit down to make music under that impulse. Well, the anger will be there, and the flower coming up out of the earth, but the music itself will have forgotten both the dream and the

hat was what moved him; and his own personal feelings, apart from some form of music which might translate them into a region where he could recognise them with interest, came to mean less and less to him, until he seemed hardly to have any personal feelings at

emory before he had returned to the house; it was as if he had been walking through underground passages, with only a little faint light on the roadway in front of his feet. He knew all the se

the house, where he could practise without disturbing anybody, and he shut himself in there, until he was dragged out unwillingly to his meals, grudging the time when he had to sit quiet at the table. 'What are you always thinking about?' they would ask him, as

ent to hear them, at first with a horrible apprehension, and then more boldly, as he saw what could be learned from them, and yet seemed to fancy that they, too, might have found something to learn from him. He heard their thunders, and laughed: that was not his idea of the instrument, a thing, in their hands, that could overtop an orchestra playing fortissimo. He saw these athletes fight with the poor instrument as if they fought with a dangerous wild beast. Some used it as an anvil to hammer sparks out of it; the chords rang and rebounded as if iron h

sketched out for himself; life, as he had lived it, a queer, silent, sullen, not unattractive boy, among the students in whom he took so little interest; all this passed before him in a single flash of memory. He had gone abroad, at the expense of the college; had travelled in Germany and Austria; had extorted the admiration of Brahms, who had said, 'I hate what you play, and I hate how you play it, but you play the piano!' Tschaikowsky was in Vienna; he had taken a warm personal liking to the unresponsive young Englishman, who seeme

of the curtain was the world, with many things to do besides listening to him, though he could arrest it when he liked, and make it listen; then it went on its way again, and the other things continued to occupy it. Well, for him, where were those other things? They hardly existed. The great men who had given him their friendship, all the people who came to

attract them as to something which they could perhaps find out, and then soothe, and put to rest. He had no morals, and was too indifferent to refuse much that was offered to him. When it was a simple adventure of the flesh, he accepted it simply, and, without knowing it, won the reputation of being both sensual and hard-hearted, a sort of coldly passionate creature, that pr

iano never responded to her, but she knew, better than all the professors, how it should respond; and Trevalga's playing was the only playing she had ever liked. She adored him because he could do what she wanted, above all things, to do; and it was with almost a vicarious ecstasy that she listened to him. She admired, pitied, wanted to help him

down to the root of things, her feeling for music was neither more nor less than her feeling for every form of art, and her feeling for art, which was unerring, was the same thing as her feeling for skating or dancing. She got as much pleasure from bending a supple binding in her hand as from reading the poems inside it. She

behind the caressing softness of their padded coverings, to be continually ready to amuse one's dangerous slave, with one's life for the forfeit. The strain of it, the trial to the nerves, the temper! it was not to be thought of calmly. He looked around

n, time, money, all the flesh and all the soul, one's nerves, one's attention, pleasure, duty, art itself! She is the rival of the idea, and she never

rt; she would hate him if he preferred her to his art. She said all that, sincerely; but he shook his head obstinately, a little sadly, knowing that for him possible things were i

no. He was such another as the equilibrist whirling around his fixed bar, or swinging from trapeze to trapeze in the air; a specialist in a particular kind of muscular movement, which in him communicated itself to the mechanism o

ing very acutely, music.' He was almost frightened as he saw, in a flash, within that narrow limits this one interest, this exercise of one instinct, caged him. Other men were curious about many things; the world existed for them, not only as substance, but as a matter for thought;

drift away from him, with an unavowed sense of failure, of having lost something which he could not bring himself to take, and which might yet have saved him. She parted from him, at the last, angrily, her pity worn

lways at one's side, whispering into one's ears. He was not always able to distinguish between what he actually heard, a noise in the street, for instance, which came to him for the most part with the suggestion of a cadence, which his ear completed as if it had been th

e had been something wrong from the beginning; the works did not wear evenly; one part or another was bound to use itself up be

ins and troubles of sound. He was always listening, with a frequent precipitation of pulses, to nothing, to something about to come, to the fancy of music.

he piano. It was like grey smoke, forming and unforming as if it boiled up softly out of the pit where the wires were coiled up. It was so distinct that he shut his eyes for a moment, to see if it would be there when he opened them again. It was still there, getting darker in colour, and more distinct. He looked out of the corner of his eyes, to s

ying as clearly as he could have seen the notes if they had been there: but the wavy line was upright now, and drifted upwards swiftly, vanishing at a certain point; it swayed to and fro like a snake beating time to the music of the snake-

ghts, the crush and hurry of figures wrapped in dark clothes, the noise of the horses' hoofs striking the stones, the shouts of omnibus-conductors and newsboys, all the surge and struggle of horrible exterior forces, seeming to be tightened up into an inextricable disorder, but pushing out with a hundred arms this way and that, making some sort of headway against the opposition of things, brought over him a complete bewilderment. 'I can see no reason,' he said to himself, 'why I am here rather than there, why these atoms which know one another so little, or have lost some recognition of themselves, should coalesce in this pa

nd forgot her, and found himself in a lonely place where there were a number of cucumber-frames on the ground, and several convicts were laid out asleep in each, half-naked, and packed together head to heel. Then he remembered the woman, and went back to the farm where he had left her; but she was no long

he had finished playing he heard still more ravishing sounds in the air, a music which was like what Chopin might have written in Paradise. Tears of delight came into his eyes; he sat listening in an ecstasy. Now everything had come right;

he music that he had known before this new music spoke to him, he seemed to play better than he had ever played before. Only, when he had stopped playing, he sank back sleepily into his ecstatic oblivion, not distinguishing between those he talked with in his dream (the Chopin out of Paradise) and the few remaining f

tted down a few disconnected thoughts about music. They are, perhaps, worth giving, for they are more explicit than he ever c

of their voices which causes whatever they say to assume a form of beauty. Music comes nearer than any other of the human languages to the sound of these angelic voices. But painting is also a language, and sculpture, and poetry; only these have more of the atmosphere of the earth about them, a

air, and that they suffer if we clutch them roughly. Have you ever tried to catch a butterfly without brushing the dust off its wings? Every

ital. There are flowers on the pillow, great sickly pungent flowers, and he draws in their p

s scrupulous towards its whims, he indulges it like a spoilt child. Schumann comes back cloudily out of a d

music, putting those sufferings into the music, without remembering that sounds have their own agonies, which alone they can express in a perfect manner. He fo

lso passages from our operas. How can the same ears hear in two different ways? And how far behind these Eastern musicians are we, who cannot even un

But lately, I do not know why, I have been forced to think out many of the things which I used to know without thinking. It a

OOD OF LUC

g-rooms; the kitchen, with its stone floor, its shining rows of brass things around the walls, its great dresser, was at the back. It was through the kitchen that you found your way into the big garden, where the grass was always long and weedy and ill-kept, and so all the pleasanter for lying on; and where there were a few alder-trees, a pear-tree on which the pears never seemed to thrive, for it was quite close to Lucy's bedroom window, a flower-bed along the wall, and a great, old sundial, which Lucy used to ponder over when the shadows came and stre

t seventeen, and of a class beneath him, against the will of his relations, who had cast him off just as, at twenty-one, he had come into a meagre allowance from the will of his grandfather. He had been the last of eleven children, born when his mother was fifty years of age, and he had inherited the listless temperament of a dwindling stock. He had never been able to do anything seriously, or even to make up his mind quite what great thing he was going to do. First he had found a small clerkship, then he had dropped casually upon the post which he was to hold almost to the time of his death, as secretary to some Assurance Society, whose money it was his business to coll

rself to do without anybody's company, and then she would sit all alone, or with her doll, who was called Arabella, to whom she would chatter for hours together, in a low and familiar voice, making all manner of confidences to her, and telling her all manner of stories. Sometime

le, and she would walk in her sleep; and would spend whole hours almost without moving, looking vaguely and fixedly into the air: children ought n

usness of being really a princess was one of the joys of her imagination. She had composed all the circumstances of her state, many times over, indeed, and always in a different way. It was the heightening she gave to what her mother had taught her: that she was of a better stock than the other children who lived in the other small house

there, or, more often, gather flowers and leaves, and carry them to a low tomb, and sit there, weaving them into garlands. These garlands she used to offer to the ladies whose faces she liked, as they passed in and out of the church. The strange little girl

one of them who paid her the first compliment she ever had, comparing her face to a face in a picture. She had never heard of the picture, but she was immensely flattered; for she did not think a painter would ever paint any one who was not very pretty. She listened to their conversation, much of which she could not understand, as if she understood every word of it; and she wondered very much at some of the things they said. Her mother was a Catholic, and, though religion was rarely referred to, had taught her some little prayers; and it puzzled her that all this could be true, and yet that clever people should have doubts of it.

d sometimes, for as much as a few weeks together, he would set her lessons day by day, and be excessively severe with her, not permitting her to make a single slip in anything he had given her to learn. He would even punish her sometimes, if she still failed to learn some les

she did not bother him by coming to say her lessons. Both were quite happy then; she to be allowed to sit in his room with her lesson-book on her knees, dreaming; he not to be hindered in the new sketch he was making or the notes he was preparing for that great

ok of poetical selections; she never could remember the name of it afterwards; and there were the songs of Thomas Moore, and, above all, there was Mrs. Hemans. Those gentle and lady-like poems 'of the affections,' with their nice sentiments, the faded ribbons of their second-hand romance, seemed to the child like a beautiful glimpse into the real, tender, not too passionate world, where men and women loved magnanimously, and had heroic sufferings, and died, perhaps, but for a great love, or a great cause, and always nobly. She thought that the ways of the world blossomed naturally into Casabiancas and Gertrudes and Imeldas, who were faithful to death, and came into their inheritance of love or glory beyond the grave. She used to wonder if she, too, like Costanza, had a 'pale Madonna brow'; and she wished nothing more fervently than to be like those saintly and affectionate creatures, always so beautiful, and so often (what did it matter?) unfortunate, who took poison from the lips of their lovers, and served God

and as if she might get better, for the lips were still red, and sucked in readily all the spoonsful of calvesfoot jelly, and brandy and water, which were really just keeping her alive from hour to hour. On Friday night, in the middle of the night, as Lucy was sleeping quietly, she felt, in her dream, as it seemed to her, two lips touch her cheek, and, starting awake, saw her father standing by the bedside. He told her to get up, put on some of her things, and come quietly into the next room. She crept in, huddled up in a shawl, very pale and trembling, and it seemed to her that her mother must be a little better, for she drew her breath more slowly and not quite so loudly. One arm was lying outside the clothes, and every now and then this arm would raise itself up, and the hand would reach out, blindly, until the nurse, or her father, took it and laid it back gently in its place. They told her to kiss her mother, and she kissed her, crying very much, but her mother did not kiss her, or open her eyes; and as she touched her hair, which was coming out

h her mother was to be covered up to stay there for ever; after those first days of merely dull misery, broken by a few wild outbursts of tears, she accepted this new life into which she had come, as she accepted the black clothes which Linda the servant, now more a friend than ever, had had made for her. Her father could no longer bear to sleep in the room in which his wife had died, so Lucy gave up her own room to him, and moved into the room that had been her mother's; and it seemed to br

e was the secretary had overlooked it, as far as they could, on account of his trouble. But now he attended to his duties less than ever; and he was reminded, a little sharply, that things could not go on like this much longer. He took no heed of the warning, though the duns were beginning to gather about him. When there was a ring at the door, Lucy used to squeeze up against the window to see who it was; and if it was one of those troublesome people whom she soon got to know by sight, she would go to the door herself, and tell them that they could not see her father, and explain t

wnstairs and sit by the fireplace, smoking his pipe in silence, doing nothing, neither reading, nor writing, nor sketching. All his interest in life seemed to have gone out together; his very hopes had been taken from him, and without those fantastic hopes he was but the shadow of himself. It scarcely roused him when the direc

not receive her mother, and he would never see them, or take a penny of their money as long as he lived. One day a cab drove up to the door, and a hard-featured woman got out of it. Lucy, looking out of the bedroom window, recognised her aunt, Miss Marsden, her mother's eldest siste

ead very gravely when he had examined the patient; and spoke of foreign travel, and other impossible, expensive remedies. That was th

at happiness; and he would look at her with an almost impersonal scrutiny, and say: 'I think you will live happily, not with the happiness that we had, for you will never love as we loved, but you will find it easy to like people, and many people will find it easy to like you; and if you have troubles they will weigh on you lightly, for you will live always in the day, that is, without too much memory of the day that was, or too much thought of the day that will

bright, there was a slight flush on his cheek, and he seemed to move a little more easily than usual. 'Lucy,' he said, 'I think I should like some claret with my supper to-night, like old times. You must go into the town and get me some: I suppose there is none in the house.' Lucy took the money gladly, for she thought: 'He is beginning to be better.' 'Get it from Allen's,' he called after her, as she went to put on her hat and jacket; 'it won't take so very muc

eem to notice it; but took her into the sitting-room, and said: 'There has been an accident; no, you must not go upstairs'; and she said to herself, seeming to hear her own words at the back of her brain, where there was a dull ache that was like the coming-to of one who has been stunned: 'He is dead, he is dead.' She felt that her aunt was shaking her, and wondered why she shook her, and why everything looked so dim, and her aunt's face seemed to be fading away from her, and she caught at her; and then she heard her aunt say (she could hear her now), 'I thought you were going to faint: I'll have no fainting, if you please; I mus

derstood him; the fastidiousness which was part of his affection, and which made him refuse to be seen, by those he loved, under a

ighted room alone, and looking into the fire, in which the last dreams of her childhood seemed to flicker in little wavering tongues of flame, which throbbed, and went out, one after another, in smoke or ashes. She cried a little, quietly,

died suddenly in his sleep, and just before he turned over on his side for the last rest, he had said to her (she thought drowsily): 'I am very tired; if anything happens, cover my face.' When Lucy crept into the room, on tip-toe, his face was covered. I

ave anything to do with you.' She clung to the severe aunt who had been good to her father; and she tried to smile on her other uncle and aunt, and on her cousin, who was not many years older than she was: he had seemed to her so kind, and so ready to be her friend. 'I will go with my aunt,' she said. The rich relatives acquiesced, not unwillingly. They did not linger in the desol

OF PETER

e of those ideas, as nature, quietly expressing herself before us, transformed the whole earth gradually into a new and luminous world of air. He did not seem to see the sunset; now and then he would pick up a pebble and throw it vehemently, almost angrily, into the water. We were talking of art. He began to explain to me what art meant to him, and what it was he wanted to do with his own art. I remember almost the very words he used, sometimes so serious, sometimes so petulant and boyish. I was interested in his ideas, and the man too interested me; so young and so experienced, so mature already and so enthusiastic under his cynicism. He puzzled me: it was as if there were a clue wanting; I could not get further with him than a certain point, frank, self-explanatory even, as he seemed to be. Of himself he never spoke, only of his ideas. I knew vaguely that he had been in Paris, and I supposed that he had been living there for some time. I had met him in London, in the street, quite casually, and he had looked so ill that I had asked him there and then to come with me to Bognor, where I was going. H

you observe, consists in seeing in a new, summarising way, getting rid of everything but the essentials; in seeing by patterns. You know how a child draws a house? Well, that is how the average man thinks he sees it, even at a distance. You have to train your eye not to see. Whistler sees nothing but the fine shades, which unite into a picture in an almost bodiless way, as Verlaine writes songs almost literally "without words." You ca

of my quite early work: Madonnas for Christmas cards and hallelujah angels for stained-glass windows. They were the prettiest things imaginable, immensely popular, and they brought me in se

rribly pale or horribly red faces, plastered white or red, leering professionally across a gulf of footlights, or a café-table, that does not live, live to the roots of the eyes, somewhere in the soul, I think! And if beauty is not the

as if he took me for one of his crit

t nine parts of beauty and imprison us with the poor tenth, which we have never even the space to frequent casually and grow familiar with. How much of the world itself do you think exists as a thing of beauty for the average man? Why, he has to know if the most exquisite leaf in the world, the thing I came upon just now

ds the sky with a youthful impertinence. For a little wh

nds with paint and not let the dye sink into their innermost selves. Do you know that you are the only man of my own world that I ever see, or have seen for years now? People call me eccentric; I am only logical. You can't paint the things I paint, and live in a Hampstead villa. You must come and s

nversation. Something in the way he spoke made me feel vaguely uneasy, but I was used to his exaggerations, h

ab, hopeless streets to which a Russian observer has lately attributed the 'spleen' from which all Englishmen are thought to suffer. There was a row of houses on each side of the way, every house exactly like every other house, each with its three steps leading to the door, its bow window on one side, its strip of dingy earth in which there were a few dusty stalks between the lowest step and the railing, the paint for the most part peeling off the door, the bell-handle generally hanging out from its hole in the wall. I rang at No. 3. I had to wait for some time, and t

thout any change of expression I recognised Peter Waydelin. The woman, seeing me in the glass, nodded at my reflection, and said, as she drew a black pencil through her eyelashes: 'You'll excuse me, won't you? I have to be at the hall in ten minutes. Don't stand on ceremony; there's Peter. He'll be glad to see you, poor dear!' She spoke in a common and affected voice, and

long, thin hand to me; 'Clara has to go out, and we ca

rassy eyes, the reckless, conscious attitude. Every line seemed to have been drawn with hatred. I looked at Mrs. Waydelin. She had finished dressing, and she came up to the bedside to say good-bye to Peter. 'Horrid thing,' she said, nodding her head at the drawing; 'not a bit like me, is it?

e a little defiantly, said: 'My theory, do you remember? of living the life of my models! She is a very nice woman and a

woman because I couldn't help doing it, but I knew what I was doing all the time. Have you ever been in Belgium? There is stuff they

you speak bitterly. I don't like to he

defend her against my brutality,' he said. 'I will g

ok my

idn't live in that way because I wanted to do it for my art, but something deeper than my art, a profound, low instinct, drew me to these people, to this life, without my own will having anything to do with it. My work has been much more sincere than any one suspected. It used to amuse me when the papers classed me with the Decadents of a moment, and said that I was probably living in a suburban villa, with a creeper on the front wall. I have never cared for anything but London, or in London for anything but here, or the Hampstead Road, or about the Docks. I never really chose the music-halls or the public

nt everything that such experiences could teach him, fell of a sudden into a revealing relation with each other. I did not know whether to feel that the man had been heroic or a fool; there had been, it was clear to m

do my own work; and if I die to-morrow (as likely enough I may), I shall have

very ill?

of precedence in these matters, which, I confess, I don't understand. So it was good of you to come; I would like to arrange with you about w

ut, as he said, she would not know what to do with them if they were left in her own hands, not even how to turn them into money. He wa

e when he was not working. But it amused him to talk, for a change. 'Clara talks when she is here,' he said, with one of

et Mrs. Waydelin, and he seemed better. He had shaved, his hair was brushed and comb

to paint in what we will call, if you please, my final manner?

you mean?

that they had studied them from the women of the Green Houses, the women who make up, and that Japanese women, made up for the stage or for the factitious life of the Green Houses, look exactly like these elegant, unnatural images of the painters. What a new kind of reality that opened up to me, as if a window had suddenly opened in a wall! Here, I said to myself, is something that the painters of Europe have never done; it remains for me to do it. I will study nature under the paint by which woman, after all, makes herself more woman; the ensign of her trade, her flag as the enemy. I will get at the nature of this artificial thing, at the skin underneath it, and the soul under t

wo or three years, I have done it. I am sure that what I have done is a ne

, it has so often seemed to me irrational. I am gradually finding out your logic. Do you remember t

rees, the leaves, very often the sea. But no, it isn't like that that it comes to me. To me it is an aniline dye, poisoning nature. I adore and hate it. I can never get away from it. If I paint a group outside a café at Montmartre by gas-light or electric light, I paint a green shadow on the faces, and I suppose the green shadow isn't there; yet I paint it. Some tin

of things for myself, deliberately; but this, in some unpleasant way, seemed horribly like "nature taking the pen out of one's hand an

him. His eyes, which had been very bright, had gone dull again

not talk any more. Try to go to sleep

said, looking

spoke of his wife, without affection and without bitterness; he spoke of death, with so little appreh

pose one ought to feel some sort of reverence for something, for an unknown power, at least, which has certainly worked to good purpose. Well, I can't. I don't know what reverence is. If I were quite healthy, I should be a pagan, and choose, well! Dionysus Zagreus, a Bacchus who has been in hell, to worship after my fashion, in some religious kind of "orgie on

id, painted when they were, but because I can get nothing out of them that is any good for me, now in this all but twentieth century. You won't expect me, of all people, to prate about progress, but, all the same, it's no use going to Botticelli for hints about modern painting. We have different things to look at, and see them

other voices, men's and women's, feet coming up the stairs. I looked apprehensively at Waydelin. He showed no surprise. I heard a door open on the landing; then, a moment after, it was shut, and Mrs. Waydelin came

'I have not the least objection,' he said. 'I must only ask you to a

clined; then went to the dressing-table, took up a pot of vaseline and looked at her eyelashes in the glass

ar a champagne-cork drawn, the shrill laughter of women, men talking loudly, and chairs being moved about the floor. 'I don't mind,' he said, seeing what I was

me again?

iling, and thereupon turned over on the

e cheeks were pinched with exhaustion, sweat stood out about the eyes. The sudden collapse into sleep alarmed me. I could not leave h

inking champagne with her friends of the music-hall while her husband, a man of genius in his way, lay dying in the next room. I forced myself to acknowledge that she had probably no suspicion of how

would see no doctor. In the next room the piano rattled and all the voices joined in the chorus. I distinguished the voice of Mrs. Waydelin. He seemed to be listening to it, and I said, 'Let me call her in.' 'Poor Clara may as well amuse herself,' he said, with his odd smile. 'What is the use? I feel very much as if I am going to die. Will it bother you: being here, I mean?' His voice seemed to grow weaker as he spoke, and his eyes stared. I left him and went hastily into the other room. The singer stopped abruptly, and the girl at the piano turned round. I saw the remains of su

nd forgive her. At that he looked, and as he looked life seemed to revive in his eyes. He motioned to me to lift him up. I lifted him against the pillows, and in a weak voice he asked me for drawing-paper and a pencil. 'Don't move,' he said to his wife, who knelt there struck into rigid astonishment, with terror and incomprehension in her eyes. The pose, its grotesque horror, were finer than the finest of his inventions. He made a few scrawls on the paper, trying to fix that last and best pose of hi

TUMN

of the influence of places, of the image a place makes for itself in the consciousness, of all that it might do in the formation of a beautiful or uncomely disposition. Places had virtues of their own for him; he supposed that he had the quality of divining their secrets; at all events, if they were places to which he could possibly be sensitive. Much of his time was spent in travelling, in a leisur

a delightful luxury, to be taken with discretion. He feared the influence of a companion in his delicate satisfactions: he realised that a woman might not even be a sympathetic companion. He had, it is true, often wished to

. Some who knew her very well said that it meant nothing, and was merely an accident of colour and form, like the green eye of the cat or the golden eye of the buffalo. Roserra tried to study her, but he could get no point of view. He felt something that he had n

gs and so many places and was never tedious about them: Livia thought him on the whole the most suitable husband whom she was

w surroundings. She had always wanted to see Paris, because of its gaiety, its bright wickedness, its names of pleasure and fashion. Everyth

months Livia was quite happy. She wore her Paris hats and gowns, she was admired, she

far, they had never had a dispute; he seemed to have put his own individuality aside as if it no longer meant anything to him. But he had not yet discovered her individuality from among her

o do: introduce the most intimate of his cities to a woman. Autumn was beginning; he thought of Arles, which

she was a little reluctant to leave the new London into which she had

sed with even slight, superficial things, she could get pleasure out of the empty sunlight and obvious sea of Marseilles. When the deeper

rrow streets, on that perilous journey. Here were the Arlesiennes, standing at doorways, walking along the pavements, looking out of windows. She scarcely liked to admit to herself that she had seen prettier faces elsewhere. The costume, certainly, was as fine as its reputation; she would get one, she though

d yourself into their midst. The first time I came here I was disappointed. Gradually I began to see why it was that

with its homely furniture, the gentle, picturesque woman who

ns of the theatre begun under Augustus, and among the coulisses of the great amphitheatre; they sat on the granite steps; they went up the hundred steps of the western tower. From the cloisters of St. Trophime they went across to the museum

s rocky plains, by the side of its river, among the tombs. Everything there seems to grow out of death, and to be returning thither. The town rises above its ruins, does not seem to be even yet detached from them. The remains of the theatre look down on the public garden; one comes suddenly on a Roman obelisk and the fragments of Roman walls; a Roman column has been built into

were dust-grey even in sunlight. The Aliscamps seemed to her drearier than even a modern cemetery, and she wondered what it was that drew Roserra to them, with a kind of fascination. On the way there, along the Avenue Victor Hugo, there were some few signs of life; the cafés, the Zouaves going in and out of their big barrack, the carts coming in from the country; and in the evening the people walked there. But she hated the little melancholy public garden at

rli ove 'l Ro

ne both sides of the way, empty stone trough after empty stone trough, with here and there a more pompous sarcophagus. There is a quiet path between th

had never heard such thunder, or seen such lightning, as that which shook the old roof under which she lay, and blazed and flickered at the window until it s

y through the streets in which the water gathered in puddles between the paving-stones, and ran in little streams down the gutters; he found a kind of autumnal charm in the dripping trees and soaked paths of the Aliscamps; a peaceful, and to him pathetic and pleasant, odour of decay. Livia went out with him once, muffled in a long cloak, and keeping her who

ery stone polished by the rain; the other houses in the square, most of them shuttered; the little church in the corner, with its monotonous bell, its few worshippers. She knew them all; they were mostly women, plain, elderly women; not one of them had any interest, or indeed existence, for her. She wondered vagu

sit down cheerfully by the stove, and really read the book which he had in his hand. She looked at him over the pages of hers, hating to see him occupi

the glass; or she would try on hat after hat, hats which had come from Paris, and were meant for Paris or London, hats which she could not possibly wear here, where her smallest and simpl

Hooded figures passed, and knelt with bowed heads; presently a light passed across the church, and a lamp was let down by a chain, lighted, and drawn up again to its place. Then a few candles were lighted, and only then did she see the priest kneeling motionless before the altar. The chanting was very homely, like that in a village church; there was even the village church's ha

t only the legends of the Church, but the legends that have their home about Arles. Again and again, among these na?ve sculptures, one sees the local dragon, the man-eating Tarasque who has given its name to Tarascon. The place is full of monsters, and of figures tortured into strange dislocations. Adam swings ape-like among the branches of the apple-tree, biting at the leaves before he reaches the apple. Flames break out among companies of the damned, and the devil sits enthroned above his subjects

for nothing seems very much to exist. In Livia, as Roserra was gradually finding out, there was none of that sympathetic submissiveness to things which meant for him so much of the charm of life. She wanted something definite to do, somewhere definite to go; her mind took no subtle colour from things, nor was there any active world within

ed out to the surprising remains of the abbey of Mont-Major, and it began to rain, and they lingered uncomfortably about the ruins and in the subterranean chapel. She walked back with him, nursing a fine hatred in silence. She turned it over in her heart, and it grew and gathered, like a snowball rolled over and over in the snow.

es wandered continually, and he had to read every page twice over. He wanted to speak, but never knew what to say, when she was in this prickly state of irritation. To her, his critical way of waiting, and doing nothing, became an

thy. He felt that he could hate her, and yet not free himself from that influence. What was to be done? He would have to choose; his life of the future could no longer be his life of the past. His introduction of a woman to his best friend had been unfortunate, as such introductions always are, in one way or another. He had tended his soul for more than half

came here') Livia flung herself into his arms with an uncontrollable delight. On the night before they left, he sat for a long time,

his hands to his forehead, as he leaned with Livia over the terrace above the sea; his head throbbed, it was an effort even to breathe. He remembered the grey coolness of the Allée des Tombeaux, where the old men sat among the tombs. A nausea, a suffocating nausea, rose up within him as he felt the heat and glare of this vulgar, exuberant paradise of snobs and tourists. He sickened with revolt before this over-fed

RD LA

the boy got the queer name of Seaward because his mother had looked out to sea, as soon as she had strength enough to be propped up in bed, praying for her husband every minute of the time until he came back. She could see the sea through the little leaded windows of the cottage wh

eld him in her arms, and when he got up from his knees he said: 'Mary, if the boy lives, please Go

ooling Peter ever

in the boat; this

e'll go to America, when h

Mount's Bay by sea, if what I feel is the truth. We've giv

son had been drowned at sea, her second had run away from home and gone to America; and she hardly dared think of what would happen to this one. But

his mother, and as soon as he had learned to read he would read to her out of a few books which she cared for, the Bible chiefly, and Bogatzky's 'Golden Treasury,' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Through reading it over and ov

which he found himself, half land and half water. It was always changing about him and yet always there, in the same place, with its regular and yet unaccountable tides and harvests. Sometimes there was a storm at sea and all the boats did not come back, and the people he had tal

!' from the watchman on the hill, and often sat beside him, or stared out to sea through his long telescope, longing to be the first to catch the moving glitter of silver. He talked with the men 'like a grown-up chap' they said, and

shipwrecked on a wild island and lived for a year among savages, and he was not like the other men, who had always been fishers, and thought Plymouth probably as good as Londo

bring the book out on the cliff and read over some of the confusing things; murders, with God's approval, it seemed, and treacheries which set nations free, and are called 'blessed,' and the sins of the saints; and then mysterious curses and unintelligible idolatries, and the Scarlet Woman and Jonah's whale. He liked best the Old Testament, and had formed a clear idea of God the Father as a perfectly

d promised. From that time he began to look on God, not with less awe, but with a more intimate sense of his continual presence, and a kind of filial feeling grew up in him quite simply, a love of God, which came as a great reality into his life. He felt that he must never dishonour this divine father, either by anything he d

rring season. His father was a silent man and rarely spoke to him; the other men half feared and half despised him, because he would not drink or play cards with them, and seemed to be ge

ing to the Methodists, all that was not enough. There must be a moment, they held, in every man's life when he becomes actively conscious of salvation; for every

eighed upon him; he could not put it aside; the more he thought of God, the more conscious did he become of that awful gulf which lay between him and God. Conversion, he had heard, bridged that gulf, or your sins fell off into it

with him, but to no avail. A year went by, and he grew more despondent; even his love for God seemed to be slackening. One winter evening he heard that a famous revivalist was coming to Lelant. He thought he would go and hear him, th

to have begun to feel that magnetic influence which he rarely failed to establish between himself and his hearers. After the hymn he stretched out his hand with a sudden gesture, and the people stood motionless for a moment and then gradually sank down on their knees as he began to pray rapidly. He seemed to be talking with God as if God were there in the midst of them, and as he passed from supplication into a kind of vivid statement, meant for the people rather than for t

y, but, from the first, in the manner of one who has some all-important, and perhaps fatal, secret to tell. An uneasiness spread gradually through the chapel, which increased as he went on, with more urgency. People shifted in their seats, looked sideways at their neighbours, as if they feared to have betrayed themselves. Seaward felt himself turning hot and cold, for no reason that he could think of, and he took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. Near him he saw a young woman begin to cry, quite qu

her coming near him, he felt a horrible fear, he did not know of what; and he rose quietly and stepped out into the night. But there, as he stood listening to some exultant voices which he still heard crying 'Hallelujah!' and as he felt the comfort of the cool air about him, and looked up at the stars and the thin white clouds which were rushing across the moon, a sense of quiet and well-being came o

not the qualities that go to the easy making of friendships; and he found no one, neither man nor woman, with whom he had anything in common. The men respected him, for he was a good fisherman; but the women had for the most part a certain contempt for this large-boned, dull-eyed, heavy-jawed young man, who was never at his ease when he was with them, and who waited on no occasions for m

ices at Carbis, she came suddenly upon a name which startled her so much, that the broad sheet of paper fluttered off her knees to the floor. 'My boy,' she said, as Seaward pic

eadfast in the faith,

I wouldn't mind tru

first sermon. He was not afraid of them; he had something to say, and h

sermon. 'Do you think he is quite orthodox?' said one of them, dubiously. 'I don't know,' said another; 'there were some ideas, sure enough, I never heard before; but I wouldn't say for that th

or God also. The thought of his sins, which he believed God to have pardoned, came back to him again and again; he saw them still existing, like atoms which refused to go out into nothingness; even if pardoned, not literally extinct. What if his soul were one day to reinherit them, to slip back into their midst, havi

th prayer and thought everything would explain itself to him. Did not the Holy Ghost still descend into men's minds, illuminating that patient darkness? He waited more and more expectantly on that divine light, and it seemed to come to him with a more punctual answer. At night, on the water, while the other men lay across the seats, s

ng with the evil spirit on the edge of a tall cliff above the sea; and it said to him: Do you know that Seaward Lackland is damned? and he said No, and it said: He is damned because he has sinned the sin against the Holy Ghost; and the evil joy began to grow and grow in its eyes, and it was watching him as if

rgiven unto men'? It was the most terrible saying in the Bible. What was the sin which even God could not forgive? He remembered that reiteration in Matthew: 'And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost,

ore that change occurred. They were put away; yes, but was it not a kind of putting off the payment of a debt which might be still accumulating? And no

the stern of the boat, the other men were talking in low voices, but he was used not to hear them. He put his elbows on his knees, and bowed his head over till his hands met above it. He shut his eyes

to those who had refused him any of his desires for his own good? Had he not been heedless and self-willed as a young man, had he not even made a boast of his own righteousness after he had found Christ? Was there a day since he had come to a knowledge of good and evil when he had not sinned at least in

eyond that roof which was his pavement. He was afraid

s he heard voices, a sudden laugh, and then silence. The water was all about him, and the water was friendly, a great breathing thing, that had him in its arms. He only felt at home when he was on the water, because the water was so l

ommitted the one sin which should never be pardoned? He did not know what that sin was, but, he argued, my ignorance makes no difference. If I pick toad-stools for mushrooms, and eat them, I shall pay the penalty, just the same as

dge, and not swayed, as men are, by a pity which is only one form of partiality? He had always conceived sternly of God; the Jehovah of the Old Testament was always before him, a mighty avenger, a God of battles and judgments, inexorably just. If God was also love, God might forgive him; he would want to forgive him; but would it be right to accept mercy,

cted him; he had gone steadily on, year after year, preaching whenever he was wanted, and though one or two people had complained that his sermons were not strictly orthodox, most of the people spoke well of him

is. But if I can find one or two passages that recur to me, in some of the people who have written about the Gospels, I think they will throw some light on the matter.' He took down a big black book, and turned over the pa

d Lackland. 'The Bible says "bla

uaintly, but I like him better than the formal people. Let me see: "Whence, considering that ..." No, that doesn't concern us; here it is: "do I come to understand that a man then sins a

earer,' sa

d minds, obstinate in depravity."' Mr. Curnock shut the book, and put it back in its place. 'Now, do you see,' he said, sitting down by the table, 'this awful sin, such as it is, could not b

d I was wrong there, for certain: I never committed tha

t?' said th

t the only return we can make to God for his love

nly,' said

t might be that a good Christian wou

duty,' said

both true?'

ctly true,' said Mr. Curnock; 'only,

all over; I'm not very ready at thinking, I have to set my mind to things sl

, 'above all, don't worry over a text which none of us are very sure about. Be cer

t down on the edge of the cliff, just before getting to Carbis Bay, and looked along the uneasy water, which quivered all over with little waves, hunching themselves up, one after another, and leaping forward, all in a white froth, as they struck upon the beach. 'They are like the lives of men,' thought Lackland; 'all t

of those obligations; he could but strive towards them, and fail, and fall back on the mercy of God. At that thought something rose up in him like a pride on behalf of God, and he said to himself: 'I will never ask God to stoop in order that I may rise.' As he said the

his conversion, 'that he gave his only begotten Son ...' He brooded over the words, wondering if a mere man could imitate that supreme surrender. He was only a poor fisherman; the disciples had been that, and Jesus had called them to leave their fathers and their nets and follow him. Both his father and mother were dead; no one in the world depended on him; he was free to give up the world, if he chose, for God. The thought intoxicated him; he saw nothing but the thought, like a light beckoning to him in

not knowing quite how he would do the thing he had decided to do. It must be done publicly, and he must suffer for

f the Holy Spirit are the works of the devil'; and he tried to work out an argument, at which he shuddered, which would seem to show Jesus as one working miracles with the help of Satan. At first he could not put two words together, but gradually the task became easier; strange arguments came into his h

n the sand down below in the bay. A chill wind bit at his face, and made his body shiver. He shut the window, and lay down in bed again, staring for the dawn. He felt cold right through to the heart, and he felt horribly alone. By to-morrow night he would have cut himself adrift; he would be like that seaweed which the sea was to

s: 'I say unto you that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repe

he people passing his window on their way; some of them looked in, saw him, and nodded in a friendly manner. He looked again at the clock; now it was time

ng him aright. As he went on, his voice, which had at first been low, grew louder; he spoke as if he were hurrying through some message which had been laid upon him to deliver; yet with the calmness of one who has mastered his own fever. He was speaking the most terrible words they had ever heard, and they were at first too bewildered even to think. As he went on, they began to look at one another, wondering if he were mad or they; one or two women near the door got up quietly and went out; men stirred in their seats; a great shudder went through the whole congregation. Blasphemies such as they had never dreamed of filled their ears, dazed their senses; and Seaward Lackland stood there calmly, like a martyr, one of them said afterwards; the sweat stood out on his forehead, but he spoke in an even voice: was it Seaward Lackland or was it the devil who stood the

with some others as poor as himself, in a half-fallen shanty on the way to Lelant. Even his housemates mocked him, and held themselves more decent folks than he. It was thought that his brain had weakened, for he became more and more eccentric in his ways, and got to talk with himself, for hours together, in a low voice, but with the gestures of one explaining something to an unseen disputant. One day as he was racing up the hill by the side of his cart, urging on the horses, his foot slipped, and he fell under the near wheel, which had crushed into his breast-bone before the horses could be stopped. He was carried back, and laid on his ragged bed; and

THE JOURNAL OF

ing remarkable. He was never communicative about anything, but once or twice in later years, he spoke to me of his historical studies, and I gathered that he was making researches (for a book, I supposed) into the life of Attila: a subject remote and gloomy enough, I thought, to be naturally attractive to him. For some years I lost sight of him altogether, and then, to my surprise, met him at the house of a German Baron and his wife, who were settled in London, where they entertained lavishly. It was the last house at which I had ever expected to meet him; though indeed the Baroness was a woman of considerable learning, and very intelligent and sympathetic. I found that he had become her librarian, and was living in the house. He looked ill an

tative notes, mutually destructive and unresolved conjectures, baffled my utmost endeavours, and remained for me, and I fear must always remain, so much lost labour, like an enigma of which the key is missing. But in the midst of these papers, thrust as if hurriedly into one of the bundles, so that the string had cut into the outer leaves of

olly responsible; as, indeed, for the printing of the journal at all. It seems to me a genuine document; odd, disconcerting, like the man who wrote it; profoundly disconcerting to me, on reading it, as I discovered the real subterranea

and he tells me nothing I did not know already. Only, why tell me? That is just what it does me no good to think about. If I am to keep in even so sh

idently, 'why not? I tell you there is no reason why you should not die an old man.' And he thought he was comforting me! I only said, 'It is horrible.' 'In heaven's name,' he said, with real amazement, 'what is horrible?' I told him: this dwindling away, this continual losing of all the forces that hold one to life, this inevitable encroachment of the other thing, the darkness; and the uncertainty of

saying something fine, cou

oked at me and said: 'I have never met any one before who worried over the thought that he would have to die when he was seventy, eighty, ninety: how do you know you won't live to be ninety?' the simplicity of the man struck me as being laughable; a child could have reasoned better, and I said: 'If I live to be ninety I shall never have passed a day without thinking about death, and I know that I am logically right in never losing sight

ed with a woman, in the same house with her, every day and every night for three years: think, there are one thousand and ninety-five days in three years! well, something remains, in the very look and touch of the furniture, in

no hero to this serviceable valet, my journal; but it is partly the incapacity of good taste in them that makes women so intolerable. There are men of whom I have said to myself: Now, if Clare fell in love with this man, or that man, it would seem to me so natural, so legitimate; I could almost despise her for not submitting to a fascination which is insensitiv

women and women; but I have never found

t is admirable. Her figure was firm, ample, almost majestic, and the face had once been not less finely designed, but over the whole left side, from the forehead to the neck, there was a great white scar, shapeless, horribly white, and scored as with deep cuts, which had formed cicatrices of a yet more ghastly white. The bloodless and livid skin, ploughed and wrinkled with these raised cicatrices, was drawn tightly over the cheek-bone. The eyelid, strangely misshapen, was alone the natural colour of flesh, but this eyelid looked as if it were artificially attached to the underpart of the eyebrow, and on the forehead above

ays been so lonely, both when Clare was with me, and before and after it. Just as I cannot get out of my head that there is some concealed conspiracy against me, in earthly things, so there seems to be, i

agnon dont le coe

o the power of self-expression. It bewilders, distracts yes, terrifies me. That women are better and worse than we think them, I am certain; and no doubt nature was wise in setting us on our knees before the enigma. To be so my

ess again. The Kahns have written asking me to dine with them on Sunday: will that woman be there? Hans Grege

h at the longest, and one's bodily pains troublesome enough without even the added risk of accidents; and yet we must do our best to aid the enemy of us all; we must make ourselves lieutenants of death; and for what? The thing begins in our fantasies of honour, precedence, patriotism, or by whatever name, big

oulness, and one breathes it, and seems to sicken. I am sure some loathsome gas is rising up out of the canal under my windows; my head turns if I lean out and look over; and now it is between two lights, almost too dark to see by daylight and

and for all, to this compromise. Was there ever any one so illogical? I hate life, and yet I want to go on living for ever. Sometimes, coming back at night, after a concert in which some great music has struck one into a profound seriousness, a strange and terrifying sensation takes hold of me as the cab turns suddenly, out of a tangle of streets, into a broad road between trees and houses: one enters into it as into a long dimly lighted alley, and at the end of the road is the sky, with one star hung like a lantern upon

or for deceiving me when I am ill. He tells me: You will be better to-morrow; knowing that the only way to m

nt, I cannot say that the fault was not partly mine, and partly that she was a woman. What a thing it is to be a woman, and how perplexing are even their virtues! They are not made, as we are, all of a piece; they are not made to be consistent; they think so little of what we think so much of; even sex is a light, simple, and natural thing to them, to which they attach none of our morbid valuations. It is for all this that, when I am not in this particular mood, I hate and fear them; b

g one a sort of phantom or ghostly peace, as if the present faded into the distance, and life became a memory, half sad and half happy

feeling, and, I think, some of the knowledge of an artist; we spoke of music, painting, the art of living; and, oddly enough, she has a passion for just my own subject; history is her favourite reading, and when I spoke of one of my own hobbies, of Attila, she quoted Jornandes, and a passage, I remembered, that Thierry has not translated: she must have read it in Latin. How has she found time to do all this? To me she does not seem very young, but I suppose she is ve

ut nearly all the little money I had, has failed; there has been swindling; I am ruined. What am I to do? I shall have to earn my living, heaven knows how; I shall have to give up my work, sell my books, find some cheaper rooms. This is the one thing I

had come to think had never existed. If she will really let me sometimes use her library, I can sell my books cheerfully. She has a remarkable intelligence. But for that scar she would have been singularly handsome. W

anticipate the worst. Nothing but rain without, and this int

ttle dark creature with red legs and a red bill, that swims between the swans, and clambers up on the grass, and runs about there stealthily with a shy grace. There is an island, to which all the water-birds go, and it is grown over with trees and bushes and green weeds, down to the edge of the water, and they go there when they want to be alone, as one goes into a deep wood, ou

through a long tunnel. All the blood went to my head, as if I were stifling, and I had a need of daylight. I turned on the electric light, but it made no difference; it was no more than the light in the railway-carriage while the darkness is thundering about one's ears, I had the sensation of a world in which the daylight had been blotted out, and men stumbled in a perpetual night, which the lamps did but make visible. I felt that I should not be able to go on breathing unless I thrust the

ome, but to-day a premature Summer leapt out on the world, in one of those distressing paroxysms of the elements in which I get more than my share of the general discomfort. It is only for the last few hours that I have recognised myself, and already I find it difficult to remember that other self, which lay on the sofa with half-shut eyes and a forehead eaten away by the little sharp teeth of the nerves. How we measu

d that it is this which makes me write down these ob

that I have lost all my money, and she offers me the post of librarian; I can live in the house, and I am to have

g. What can have induced her to offer me this immediate kindness? That she is ge

hes it to be put in order, catalogued, kept in order, added to; she saw my interest, she knew that I am perfectly capable t

t it will not be easy, and then afterwards, who knows? but that would be the worst of all, I may come to find a sort of perver

em almost mechanically. I am already in my new quarters; I have my rooms, near the library in which I work, in the vast house at Qu

me. Certainly that is a form of arrangement which suits me, and life here seems to go not less smoothly; I have but to accept it, not without a certain satisfaction. The Baron must be enormously rich; there is something almost ostentatious in the display of gold, silver, and silk. Nothing is simple; the cost of these expensive things seems as if ticketed upon

sort of enigmatical politeness, which hides I know not what, than the Baron's manner towards his wife. He is scrupulously, exaggeratedly, polite towards every one; and his excessive ceremony with me puts a certain restraint upon me. I imagine that he detests me, merely from the extreme care with wh

itself a negation. He is a great sportsman, and I have never seen him with a book in his hands; she cares passionately for reading, and hates every form of sport. But it is not merely a difference of temperament; there is, I am convinced, something very definite which sets a barrier between

ow strange, how fortunate, to be at the same time taken outside myself in my thoughts, and away from what becomes monotonous in my studies! I have found, it would seem, precisely th

blood, and I have always looked away when I have seen people crowding about a man or a horse fallen in the street. It is not pity, it is a very sensitive egoism: before an accident I imagine the thing happening to

s, a kind of eager sincerity. What does the Baron think, I wonder, behind that screen of the newspaper, if, as he sits motionless, he is listening, as I cannot but believe, to every word that is said? I often look at the newspaper, hoping to see it at least quiver, if not drop to the floor, and the man leap out of his ambush. The Baroness interests me a little more every day, and this interest is oddly balanced by my equal difficulty in looking or in not looking at her. When she is talking with me she invariably arranges herself so as to be on my left; often she leans her head on her left hand, as if to shield even what remains unseen. How horribly she must suffer from this living mask, under which she is condemned to exist! How long, I wonder, has she worn it, and shall I

ude with hard labour. I am sure neither of the Eckensteins gets the slightest personal pleasure out of these big dinners which they are so constantly giving. I am equally sure that the people who accept their invitations would generally rather not come; that they accept them largely because it i

my old headaches began to come back; and I was only too glad to say yes when the Baroness asked me, almost hesitatingly, if I would come with them. Here I have nothing to do; we walk on the cliffs, drive across Cornwall and back ag

e of the Baron, that we are getting to know one another better. In driving and walking she invariably keeps on

midst of a wood? That, and the stillness and unconfined space on the cliffs, where one can sit silent for so long, until only intimate words come; all that, I am sure, has had

hat I have up to now only confessed to my journal. How is it that she draws my

it seemed to stretch endlessly, as if it flowed over all the rest of the world. Ships were going by, with sails and black smoke, with a great haste to be somewhere. We sat silent for a time, and then she began to tell me about herself; little confidences of no mome

w as she fell asleep: in short, a very pretty, very German, sentimental education. Then the young English tutor, with his tragic beauty, his Byronic sighs; she pities, admires, falls in love with him; their meetings, declarations; they plot a romantic elopement, but the coachman turns traitor; the Byronic gentleman is dismissed, and the girl sent to her cousins in Vienna, where she begins to see the world, and to dream more worldly dreams. The Baron presents himself, with his title, his money, his serious reputation; the parents implore her to accept him, and she accepts him, in order that she may accomplish a social duty. By this time she has made

nd as she rose from the piano and flung herself passionately into his arms, she saw, over his shoulder, the reflection of her husband's face in the mirror. He had opened the door while she was playing, and stood motionless, holding the door half open, with his eyes fixed upon them. Before she could make a movement the door had closed silently. It did not open again. The lover left the castle hastily, meeting no one on the way. Hours passed, and she sat watching the door, quiet with terror. At last she could bear it no longer, and she went straight to her husband's apartments. The painters had been

her lover. She had not seen him, no word from him had reached her, since the accident. During dinner the Baron was cheerful, almost gay; he related amusing stories, turning from one to the other with an a

is the meanness of the revenge that horrifies me most in its atrocity. And that these two people, after that moment's revelation of the one to the other, should have gone on living together, under the same roof: it is incredible. Th

n not less intense than the physical revulsion which I must always feel towards the woman. Only, towards her, I have a new feeling, a kind of sympathetic confidence, mingled with pity; and i

I suppose it is that, as I accustom myself to look for my interest outside the circle of my own brain, I become less personal, less sick with myself. My old terrors, my old preoccupations, have loosened their hold on me, I think; my brain is getting more quiescent, more conventional. If only the nerves do not break out again, as I find it so easy to realise

ast year. The Baroness and I are better friends than ever. I am more accustomed to her, she is kindness itself. Ah yes, that is it. Her kindness begins to become fatiguing; I would prefer a little liberty. Why is it that good people forge chains with their kindness, adding link to link with the b

la fatigue de son amour.' And, even if it is not love, the heaviest of all burdens when it comes unasked, there is still a fatiguing weight in that affectionate vigilance which is one long appeal for gratitude, i

me a kind of commercialism of the mind, a mere business transaction, in which an honest exchange is not always either possible or needful. The demand for gratitude in return for a gift comes largely from the respect which most people have for money; from the idea that money is the most 'serious' thing in the world, the symbol of a physical necessity, but a thing having no real existence in itself, no real importance to the mind which refuses to realise its existence. Only the miser really possesses it in itself, in any significant way; for the miser is an idealist, the poet of gold. To all others it is a kind of mathematics, and a synonym for being 'respected.' You may say it is necessary, almost as necessary as breathing, and I will not deny it. On

at no man can ever be friends with any woman? It is the woman, usually, who puts the question. And she, I am certain that she never wanted to be anything but my friend. Then she wanted to be my only friend; she wanted to make my mind her possession. I see it step by step, now that I think back. Then what we call nature came in to trouble the balance. She is a healthy, normal woman; she ha

t she was veiled, and when she called my name her voice sounded far away, as if the veil muffled it; and I put up my hand to lift her veil, and she prayed me not to l

sense, which other people have is lacking in me? I have never found that peace in nature of which I have heard so often, and which, on such a morning as this, when the light begins to glow softly over the world, and the wi

uld help her: yes, here it is written down, last August: 'if I could aid her, in some way that I cannot even conjecture, to avenge herself on that diabolical tyrant, her husband.' I certai

probable things have happened, and who am I, or who is she, after all, th

to her.' Shall I ever be able to say more than that?

ld come in to take up all the room? But I have never had any gift for p

e has seemed really, not affectedly indifferent. Do I altogether wish that it were so? Have I not got used to being looked after not quite as a stranger

ifferent rooms. After dinner the Baron looks up sometimes from his newspaper; the talk is quite formal, because he joins in it. Can she have shown him some sign of enco

uneasiness which women used to cause me, but which I have so long given up feeling. I miss the old freedom of her talk, her confidences to me, her faculty for taking an interest in one's ideas, one's personal sensations. How odd that this should have come to mean so much more to me than I knew! And there is something else that I miss, in her new r

the seaside, and alone. Has the man, the turgid fop and brute, whom I criticised her and all her sex for caring about, left her, then? It looks like it. Could one imagine, on his part, anything else? I knew him

on; it would be kinder if I called; and heaven knows there is no danger. Her letter is full of dignity; she knows me and there are no tears in it; the regrets are duly temperate; she does not even ask to be forg

her face was terrible, more terrible than I have ever seen it. The scar seemed to whiten, the blood rushed to her other cheek and made her forehead purple; her eyes glowed. I stooped to pick up the letter, and began to smooth it out on my knee. I fixed my eyes on it, so as not to see her; and she knew why I did not look at her. She seemed to make a great effort to recover her self-control, and I saw her fingers clutch a fold of her skirt and clench tightly upon it. 'You want to see her?' she said, still in a low voice; and I said, what was quite the truth: 'No, I do not want to see her, I only want to help her, and I think it would be kinder, as well as more satisfactory, to go tha

sincerity. She dried her eyes, smiled sadly, and said, 'Then you promise me you will not go and see her.' 'But no, I said, 'I have told you that it is best to go and see her; but you know the whole reason why I mean to do so.' She tur

eakness, I have let her see her own strength. Does it matter how one gives way, or how a woman overcomes? To-day I honestly wanted to do the right thing, to be kind to a woman I had once cared for, and I am powerless to do it. These agitations, these restrictions, this sentimental ce

always, that one is unjust to a woman. And why is it? Is it because I pity this woman so much, that I have been unjust to the other? I did not know till yesterday how much she cared for me. What is going to happen? I ask myself, not liking, or not daring, to wait for an answer. How one evades coming to a conclusion, precisely whe

over? Passions, then, are real things in women, and, if no one is responsible, at least one cannot always hold aloof from them, or go by on the other side. She loves me, and she can conceal it no longer; and she is ashamed that I should see her as she is, and she exults in her shame, and is reckless and timorous, and is at my mercy, and does not know that it is just this that holds me, and that I cannot, if I

ly because she loves me, and because she is the most unfortunate of women, that ... No, there is something else, some animal attraction, which comes to me in spite of my repugnance; a gross, un

rrible it would be if she fell in love again, and did I not mean, for the main part, because she could expect no return? And I was wrong. Something has taken hold of me, an appeal, a partly honest and partly perverse at

old labour, and now I am troubled with all a woman's ingenuity of trouble: her nerves, her cares, her affections, her solicitudes, her whole minute and never-ceasing possession. How am I to exp

urious feeling that something is going to happen; I find myself listening to noises, unable to sit quiet, watching my own brain. All the restl

And it is this, nothing but this, which turns my thoughts morbid, whenever I think over a situation which might otherwise have had nothing unusual in it. The husband studies me with a kind of curious and mocking interest, which he allows to remain on his face when he sees us together. Does he s

always the same things. I will shut t

ream of changing them, any more than I dream of changing the course of life itself, on its inevitable way. But a rage in me never quite dies out: against this woman who has taken me from myself, and against life that is wasting me daily. I have no happiness if I look either forward or backward. I have always succumbed to what I have most dreaded, and every reluctance has turned in me to an irresistible force of attraction. And now I am softly, stealthily entangled, held by loving hands

house on the Giudecca, where one is islanded even from the island life of Venice: I look across and see land, the square white Dogana, the Salute, like a mosque, the whole Riva, with the Doges' Palace. There lies all that is most beautiful in t

or even to think that they are in flight. How often I have chased some divine shadow, through a whole d

any floating strays of life as a post in the sea gathers weeds. And it is all a sort of immense rest, literally a dream, for there is sleep all over Venice. I have been sitting for a long time in St. Mark's, thinking of nothing. The voices of the priests chanting hummed and buzzed like echoes i

ust begin over again. I do not dread it, because I do not remember it. I am still weak, and I must not excite myself; I must sink into this delicious Venice, where forgetfulne

is walled up or boarded off here and there. Some of the windows look right over the court, the two stone angels on the gateway, and the broad green and brown orto, the fruit garden which stretches to the lagoon, its vine trellises invisible among the close leaves

teness of Venice drive people mad? Two ma

p against the sky, between the black, compact bulk of the forts. The water lapped around the oar as it dipped and lifted, and trickled with a purring sound from the prow. I lay and felt perfectly happy, not thinking of anything, hardly conscious of myself. I had closed my eyes, and when I opened them again we were drifting close to a small island, on which the

nice is turning evil. Is it in the place, in myself, is it my disease returning to take hold of me? Is it the power of the woman coming back across land and water to take hold of me? I am gett

g the shriek of a steam-engine. I am hardly too far, I suppose, from the railway-statio

waken like a flower, some poison comes to me out of this perhaps too perfect beauty. I dread the day, which seems to follow

dark and the first lamps, begins to grow visible. As I look across at Venice from this island, I see darkness, and lights growing like trees and flowers out of the creeping water, and, white and immense, with its black windo

r it. Bells break out, and ring wildly, as if out of the water. Steamers hoot, with that unearthly sound to which one can never get accustomed. The barking of a dog

out, and, pressing my face close against the glass, I could just distinguish the black bundle of stakes in the dim water, which I could see throbbing under a very faint light, where the gas-lamp, hung from the next house, shone upon it. Beyond, there was nothing but

g in the world, but there is something here which is hardly of the world, a vague, persistent image of death, impalpable, unintelligible, not to be shaken off; and I know

we must wait, and I saw one or two gondolas hurrying up the Grand Canal, carried along by the tide, the men rowing hard. As the rain began I went into the Grand Hotel, and sat looking out on the water, which blackened and whitened and flung itself forward in actual waves, and splashed right up the steps and over the balcony. The rain came down steadily, and the lightning flickered across the sky behind the Salute, and lit up the domes, the windows, the steps, and a few people huddled there. Every now and then the water turned white; I saw every outline as it shouldered forward like a sea and broke on the marble steps; and the water was empty, not a gondola, not ev

en, in which I can forget there is any water in Venice; I am near the land and I see nothing but trees. The house is full of pictures, beautiful old Venetian things; it is like living in another century, yet in the midst of a comfort which rest

zac, 'à quel point un homme, seul dans son lit et malade, devient personnel.' Since I have been lying in bed, in this queer fever which keeps me shaking and hot (some Venetian chill which has got into my very bones), I have had so singularly little

d the writing of the last

e the Eckensteins had gone to live; and a sort of curiosity, I suppose, more than any friendly feeling I had for them, suggested to me that I should call upon them in the palace which they had taken in the Via Giulia. The concierge was not in his loge, and I went up the first flight of broad low marble stairs and rang at the

on of correct melancholy, he spoke in a subdued and slightly mournful voice. He told me that his beloved wife had succumbed to a protracted illness, that she had suffered greatly, but, at the end, through the skilful aid of the best surgeons in Europe, she had passed into a state of somnolency, so that her death had been almost unconscious. He raised his eyes with an air of pious resignation, and said that he thanked God for having taken to himself so admirable, so perfect a being, whose loss, indeed, must leave him inconsolable for the rest of his li

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