The Yellow Book Volume I Part 10

But when he thought of rising and moving to pour the whisky out, he shrunk from that effort as from an Herculean labour; no--he was too tired. Then his mind went back to the friends he had left in Chelsea half an hour ago; it seemed an indefinably long time ago, years and years ago; they were like blurred phantoms, dimly remembered from a remote past.

Yes, his life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could have forgotten its uselessness; but it had been both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won nothing for himself. Oh, but he had tried, he had tried. When he had left Oxford people expected great things of him; he had expected great things of himself. He was admitted to be clever, to be gifted; he was ambitious, he was in earnest. He wished to make a name, he wished to justify his existence by fruitful work. And he had worked hard. He had put all his knowledge, all his talent, all his energy, into his work; he had not spared himself; he had pa.s.sed laborious days and studious nights. And what remained to show for it? Three or four volumes upon Political Economy, that had been read in their day a little, discussed a little, and then quite forgotten--superseded by the books of newer men. "Pulped, pulped," he reflected bitterly. Except for a stray dozen of copies scattered here and there--in the British Museum, in his College library, on his own bookshelves--his published writings had by this time (he could not doubt) met with the common fate of unsuccessful literature, and been "pulped."

"Pulped--pulped; pulped--pulped." The hateful word beat rhythmically again and again in his tired brain; and for a little while that was all he was conscious of.

So much for the work of his life. And for the rest? The play? The living? Oh, he had nothing to recall but failure. It had sufficed that he should desire a thing, for him to miss it; that he should set his heart upon a thing, for it to be removed beyond the sphere of his possible acquisition. It had been so from the beginning; it had been so always. He sat motionless as a stone, and allowed his thoughts to drift listlessly hither and thither in the current of memory. Everywhere they encountered wreckage, derelicts: defeated aspirations, broken hopes.

Languidly he envisaged these. He was too tired to resent, to rebel. He even found a certain sluggish satisfaction in recognising with what unvarying harshness destiny had treated him, in resigning himself to the unmerited.

He caught sight of his hand, lying flat and inert upon the brown leather arm of his chair. His eyes rested on it, and for the moment he forgot everything else in a sort of torpid study of it. How white it was, how thin, how withered; the nails were parched into minute corrugations; the veins stood out like dark wires; the skin hung loosely on it, and had a dry l.u.s.tre: an old man's hand. He gazed at it fixedly, till his eyes closed and his head fell forward. But he was not sleepy, he was only tired and weak.

He raised his head with a start, and changed his position. He felt cold; but to endure the cold was easier than to get up, and put something on, or go to bed.

How silent the world was; how empty his room. An immense feeling of solitude, of isolation, fell upon him. He was quite cut off from the rest of humanity here. If anything should happen to him, if he should need help of any sort, what could he do? Call out? But who would hear?

At nine in the morning the porter's wife would come with his tea. But if anything should happen to him in the meantime? There would be nothing for it but to wait till nine o'clock.

Ah, if he had married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate bachelor chambers!

If he had married, indeed! It was his sorrow's crown of sorrow that he had not married, that he had not been able to marry, that the girl he had wished to marry wouldn't have him. Failure? Success? He could have accounted failure in other things a trifle, he could have laughed at what the world calls failure, if Elinor Lynd had been his wife. But that was the heart of his misfortune, she wouldn't have him.

He had met her for the first time when he was a lad of twenty, and she a girl of eighteen. He could see her palpable before him now: her slender girlish figure, her bright eyes, her laughing mouth, her warm brown hair curling round her forehead. Oh, how he had loved her. For twelve years he had waited upon her, wooed her, hoped to win her. But she had always said, "No--I don't love you. I am very fond of you; I love you as a friend; we all love you that way--my mother, my father, my sisters. But I can't marry you." However, she married no one else, she loved no one else; and for twelve years he was an ever-welcome guest in her father's house; and she would talk with him, play to him, pity him; and he could hope. Then she died. He called one day, and they said she was ill. After that there came a blank in his memory--a gulf, full of blackness and redness, anguish and confusion; and then a sort of dreadful sudden calm, when they told him she was dead.

He remembered standing in her room, after the funeral, with her father, her mother, her sister Elizabeth. He remembered the pale daylight that filled it, and how orderly and cold and forsaken it all looked. And there was her bed, the bed she had died in; and there her dressing-table, with her combs and brushes; and there her writing-desk, her bookcase. He remembered a row of medicine bottles on the mantelpiece; he remembered the fierce anger, the hatred of them, as if they were animate, that had welled up in his heart as he looked at them, because they had failed to do their work.

"You will wish to have something that was hers, Richard," her mother said. "What would you like?"

On her dressing-table there was a small looking-gla.s.s in an ivory frame. He asked if he might have that, and carried it away with him. She had looked into it a thousand times, no doubt; she had done her hair in it; it had reflected her, enclosed her, contained her. He could almost persuade himself that something of her must remain in it. To own it was like owning something of herself. He carried it home with him, hugging it to his side with a kind of pa.s.sion.

He had prized it, he prized it still, as his dearest treasure; the looking-gla.s.s in which her face had been reflected a thousand times; the gla.s.s that had contained her, known her; in which something of herself, he felt, must linger. To handle it, look at it, into it, behind it, was like holding a mystic communion with her; it gave him an emotion that was infinitely sweet and bitter, a pain that was dissolved in joy.

The gla.s.s lay now, folded in its ivory case, on the chimney-shelf in front of him. That was its place; he always kept it on his chimney-shelf; so that he could see it whenever he glanced round his room. He leaned back in his chair, and looked at it; for a long time his eyes remained fixed upon it. "If she had married me, she wouldn't have died. My love, my care, would have healed her. She could not have died."

Monotonously, automatically, the phrase repeated itself over and over again in his mind, while his eyes remained fixed on the ivory case into which her looking-gla.s.s was folded. It was an effect of his fatigue, no doubt, that his eyes, once directed upon an object, were slow to leave it for another; that a phrase once p.r.o.nounced in his thought had this tendency to repeat itself over and over again.

But at last he roused himself a little, and leaning forward, put his hand out and up, to take the gla.s.s from the shelf. He wished to hold it, to touch it and look into it. As he lifted it towards him, it fell open, the mirror proper being fastened to a leather back, which was glued to the ivory, and formed a hinge. It fell open; and his grasp had been insecure; and the jerk as it opened was enough. It slipped from his fingers, and dropped with a crash upon the hearthstone.

The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back into his chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered gla.s.s at his feet. But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness; that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound. On--on--on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of s.p.a.ce.

"Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead," the doctor said. "He has been dead some hours. He must have pa.s.sed away peacefully sitting here in his chair."

"Poor gentleman," said the porter's wife. "And a broken looking-gla.s.s beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-gla.s.s."

Portrait of a Lady

By Will Rothenstein

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait of a Lady]

Two Poems

By Edmund Gosse

I--Alere Flammam

To A. C. B.

In ancient Rome, the secret fire,-- An intimate and holy thing,-- Was guarded by a tender choir Of kindred maidens in a ring; Deep, deep within the house it lay, No stranger ever gazed thereon, But, flickering still by night and day, The beacon of the house, it shone; Thro' birth and death, from age to age, It pa.s.sed, a quenchless heritage;

And there were hymns of mystic tone Sung round about the family flame, Beyond the threshold all unknown, Fast-welded to an ancient name; There sacrificed the sire as priest, Before that altar, none but he, Alone he spread the solemn feast For a most secret deity; He knew the G.o.d had once been sire, And served the same memorial fire.

Ah! so, untouched by windy roar Of public issues loud and long, The Poet holds the sacred door, And guards the glowing coal of song; Not his to grasp at praise or blame, Red gold, or crowns beneath the sun, His only pride to tend the flame That Homer and that Virgil won, Retain the rite, preserve the act, And pa.s.s the wors.h.i.+p on intact.

Before the shrine at last he falls; The crowd rush in, a chattering band But, ere he fades in death, he calls Another priest to ward the brand; He, with a gesture of disdain, Flings back the ringing brazen gate, Reproves, repressing, the profane, And feeds the flame in primal state; Content to toil and fade in turn, If still the sacred embers burn.

II--A Dream of November

Far, far away, I know not where, I know not how, The skies are grey, the boughs are bare, bare boughs in flower: Long lilac silk is softly drawn from bough to bough, With flowers of milk and buds of fawn, a broidered shower.

Beneath that tent an Empress sits, with slanted eyes, And wafts of scent from censers flit, a lilac flood; Around her throne bloom peach and plum in lacquered dyes, And many a blown chrysanthemum, and many a bud.

She sits and dreams, while bonzes twain strike some rich bell, Whose music seems a metal rain of radiant dye; In this strange birth of various blooms, I cannot tell Which spring from earth, which slipped from looms, which sank from sky.

Beneath her wings of lilac dim, in robes of blue, The Empress sings a wordless hymn that thrills her bower; My trance unweaves, and winds, and shreds, and forms anew Dark bronze, bright leaves, pure silken threads, in triple flower.

Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

By Aubrey Beardsley

_Reproduced by the Swan Electric Engraving Company_

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait of Mrs. Patrick Campbell]

The Dedication