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The Divine Fire written by May Sinclair

M >> May Sinclair >> The Divine Fire



THE DIVINE FIRE

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of _Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson_, _Two Sides of a Question_,
etc. etc.

1904







Mr. OWEN SEAMAN in _Punch_ says:--

"Miss Sinclair is always quietly sure of herself. That is why she
will not be hurried, but moves through her gradual scheme with so
leisured a serenity; why her style, fluent and facile, never
forces its natural eloquence; why her humour plays with a
diffused light over all her work and seldom needs the
advertisement of scintillating epigrams. Judged by almost every
standard to which a comedy like this should be referred, I find
her book, 'The Divine Fire' the most remarkable that I have read
for many years."

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
_TWO SIDES OF A QUESTION_




CONTENTS

BOOK I
DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE

BOOK II
LUCIA'S WAY

BOOK III
THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

BOOK IV
THE MAN HIMSELF




BOOK I

DISJECTA MEMBRA POETAE




CHAPTER I


Horace Jewdwine had made the most remarkable of his many remarkable
discoveries. At least he thought he had. He could not be quite sure,
which was his excuse for referring it to his cousin Lucia, whose
instinct (he would not call it judgement) in these matters was
infallible--strangely infallible for so young a girl. What, he
wondered, would she say to Savage Keith Rickman?

On Saturday, when he first came down into Devonshire, he would have
been glad to know. But to-day, which was a Tuesday, he was not
interested in Rickman. To eat strawberries all morning; to lie out in
the hammock all afternoon, under the beach-tree on the lawn of Court
House; to let the peace of the old green garden sink into him; to look
at Lucia and forget, utterly forget, about his work (the making of
discoveries), that was what he wanted. But Lucia wanted to talk, and
to talk about Rickman earnestly as if he were a burning question, when
even lying in the hammock Jewdwine was so hot that it bothered him to
talk at all.

He was beginning to be sorry that he had introduced him--the exciting
topic, that is to say, not the man; for Rickman you could scarcely
introduce, not at any rate to Lucia Harden.

"Well, Lucia?" He pronounced her name in the Italian manner,
"Loo-chee-a," with a languid stress on the vowels, and his tone
conveyed a certain weary but polite forbearance.

Lucia herself, he noticed, had an ardent look, as if a particularly
interesting idea had just occurred to her. He wished it hadn't. An
idea of Lucia's would commit him to an opinion of his own; and at the
moment Jewdwine was not prepared to abandon himself to anything so
definite and irretrievable. He had not yet made up his mind about
Rickman, and did not want to make it up now. Certainty was impossible
owing to his somewhat embarrassing acquaintance with the man. That,
again, was where Lucia had come in. Her vision of him would be free
and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence.

Meanwhile, Rickman's poem, or rather the first two Acts of his
neo-classic drama, _Helen in Leuce_, lay on Lucia's lap. Jewdwine had
obtained it under protest and with much secrecy. He had promised
Rickman, solemnly, not to show it to a soul; but he had shown it to
Lucia. It was all right, he said, so long as he refrained from
disclosing the name of the person who had written it. Not that she
would have been any the wiser if he had.

"And it was you who discovered him?" Her voice lingered with a
peculiarly tender and agreeable vibration on the "you." He closed his
eyes and let that, too, sink into him.

"Yes," he murmured, "nobody else has had a hand in it--as yet."

"And what are you going to do with him now you have discovered him?"

He opened his eyes, startled by the uncomfortable suggestion. It had
not yet occurred to him that the discovery of Rickman could entail any
responsibility whatever.

"I don't know that I'm going to do anything with him. Unless some day
I use him for an article."

"Oh, Horace, is that the way you treat your friends?"

He smiled. "Yes Lucy, sometimes, when they deserve it."

"You haven't told me your friend's name?"

"No. I betrayed his innocent confidence sufficiently in showing you
his play. I can't tell you his name."

"After all, his name doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't matter. Very likely you'll hear enough of it some
day. You haven't told me what you think of him."

"I don't know what I think--But then, I don't know him."

"No," he said, roused to interest by her hesitation, "you don't know
him. That's the beauty of it."

She gave the manuscript back into his hands. "Take him away. He makes
me feel uncomfortable."

"To tell the truth, Lucy, he makes me feel uncomfortable, too."

"Why?"

"Well, when you think you've got hold of a genius, and you take him up
and stake your reputation on him--and all the time you can't be sure
whether it's a spark of the divine fire or a mere flash in the pan. It
happens over and over again. The burnt critic dreads the divine fire."

His eyes were fixed on the title page as if fascinated by the words,
_Helen in Leuce_.

"But this is not bad--it's _not_ bad for two and twenty."

"Only two and twenty?"

"That's all. It looks as if he were made for immortality."

She turned to him that ardent gaze which made the hot day hotter.

"Dear Horace, you're going to do great things for him."

The worst of having a cousin who adores you is that magnificence is
expected of you, regularly and as a matter of course. He was not even
sure that Lucia did not credit him with power to work miracles. The
idea was flattering but also somewhat inconvenient.

"I don't know about great things. I should like to do something. The
question is what. He's a little unfortunate in--in his surroundings,
and he's been ill, poor fellow. If one could give him a change. If one
were only rich and could afford to send him abroad for a year. I _had_
thought of asking him down to Oxford."

"And why didn't you?"

"Well, you know, one gets rather crowded up with things in term time."

Lucia looked thoughtfully at the refined, luxurious figure in the
hammock. Horace was entitled to the hammock, for he had been ill. He
was entitled also to the ministrations of his cousin Lucia. Lucia
spent her time in planning and doing kind things, and, from the sudden
luminous sweetness of her face, he gathered that something of the sort
was in preparation now.

It was. "Horace," she said, "would you like to ask him here?"

"No, Lucy, I wouldn't. I don't think it would do."

"But why not--if he's your friend?"

"If he's my friend."

"You _said_ he was your friend. You did, you know." (Another awkward
consequence of a cousin's adoration; she is apt to remember and attach
importance to your most trivial utterances.)

"Pardon me, I said he was my find."

"Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the City--in a shop."

She smiled at the rhythmic utterance. The tragedy of the revelation
was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.

"The shop doesn't matter."

"No, but he does. You couldn't stand him, Lucia. You see, for one
thing, he sometimes drops his aitches."

"Well, if he does,--he'll be out all day, and there's the open country
to drop them in. I really don't mind, if you'd like to ask him. Do you
think he'd like to be asked?"

"There's no possible doubt about that."

"Then ask him. Ask him now. You can't do it when father's not at
home."

Jewdwine repressed a smile. Even now, from the windows of the east
wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly
fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique.
It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil. If
all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was
going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was,
if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.

And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself
would not be staying at Court House. Really, he reflected. Lucia ought
to get some lady to live with her. It was the correct thing, and
therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it. An
expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.

"Father won't mind," she said.

"No, but I should." He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the
question.

She sat still, turning over the pages of the manuscript which she had
again taken on her lap.

"I suppose he is very dreadful. Still, I think we ought to do
something for him."

"And what would you propose to do?"

There was an irritating smile on her cousin's face. He was thinking,
"So she wants to patronize him, does she?"

He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for
she always knew. He only said, "I don't exactly see you playing
Beatrice to his Dante."

Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right. The Hardens
had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most
superbly patronizing women he knew. And Rickman might or might not be
a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great lady in
her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he smiled
again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more irritating
than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.

"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing
him down here."

He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous
vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought
you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think
about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and
his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never
had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if _he_
were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which
distinguishes his _Helen_. Really, for two and twenty, he is
marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to
her vagueness, "his _Helen_ is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me
some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,
polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what
she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations,
made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the
troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous
soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an
aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but
she had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford
critic had not been able to see.

The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over
the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the
enfolding hills.

Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great
chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to
Rickman.

But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.

"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool
of the evening."

"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."

Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful
pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands
and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these
things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only
beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which
appealed to him was the languor of fatigue.

"You might play to me, now," he said.

She looked at him again, a lingering, meditative look, a look in
which, if adoration was quiescent, there was no criticism and no
reproach, only a melancholy wonder. And he, too, wondered; wondered
what she was thinking of.

She was thinking a dreadful thought. "Is Horace selfish? Is Horace
selfish?" a little voice kept calling at the back of her brain and
would not be quiet. At last she answered it to her own satisfaction.
"No, he is not selfish, he is only ill."

And presently, as if on mature consideration, she rose and went into
the house.

His eyes followed, well pleased, the delicate undulations of her
figure.

Horace Jewdwine was the most exacting, the most fastidious of men. His
entire nature was dominated by the critical faculty in him; and Lucia
satisfied its most difficult demands. Try as he would, there was
really nothing in her which he could take exception to, barring her
absurd adoration of his uncle Frederick; and even that, when you came
to think of it, flowed from the innocence which was more than half her
charm. He could not say positively wherein her beauty consisted,
therefore he was always tempted to look at her in the hope of finding
out. There was nothing insistent and nothing obvious about it. Some
women, for instance, irritated your admiration by the capricious
prettiness of one or two features, or fatigued it by the monotonous
regularity of all. The beauty of others was vulgarized by the
flamboyance of some irrelevant detail, such as hair. Lucia's hair was
merely dark; and it made, as hair should make, the simplest adornment
for her head, the most perfect setting for her face. As for her
features, (though it was impossible to think of them, or anything
about her as incorrect) they eluded while they fascinated him by their
subtlety. Lucia's beauty, in short, appealed to him, because it did
not commit him to any irretrievable opinion.

But nothing, not even her beauty, pleased him better than the way in
which she managed her intellect, divining by some infallible instinct
how much of it was wanted by any given listener at a given time. She
had none of the nasty tricks that clever women have, always on the
look out to go one better, and to catch you tripping. Her lucidity was
remarkable; but it served to show up other people's strong points
rather than her own. Lucia did not impress you as being clever, and
Jewdwine, who had a clever man's natural distaste for clever women,
admired his cousin's intellect, as well he might, for it was he who
had taught her how to use it. Her sense of humour, too (for Lucia was
dangerously gifted), that sense which more than any of her senses can
wreck a woman--he would have liked her just as well if she had had
none; but some, no doubt, she needed, if only to save her from the
situations to which her kindness and her innocence exposed her; and
she had just the right amount and no more. Heavens! Supposing, without
it, she had met Keith Rickman and had yielded to the temptation to be
kind to him! Even in the heat Jewdwine shivered at the thought.

He put it from him, he put Rickman altogether from his mind. It was
not to think about Rickman that he came down to Court House. On a day
as hot as this, he wanted nothing but to keep cool. The gentle
oscillation of the hammock in the green shadows of the beech-tree
symbolized this attitude towards Rickman and all other ardent
questions.

Still, it was not disagreeable to know that if he could only make up
his mind to something very definite and irretrievable indeed, Court
House would one day be his. It was the only house in England that came
up to his idea of what a country house should be. A square Tudor
building with two short, gable-ended wings, thrown out at right angles
to its front; three friendly grey walls enclosing a little courtyard
made golden all day long with sunshine from the south. Court House was
older than anything near it except Harmouth Bridge and the Parish
Church. Standing apart in its own green lands, it looked older than
the young red earth beneath it, a mass upheaved from the grey
foundations of the hills. Its face, turned seawards, was rough and
pitted with the salt air; thousands upon thousands of lichens gave it
a greenish bloom, with here and there a rusty patch on groin and
gable. It contained the Harden Library, _the_ Harden Library, one of
the finest private collections in the country. It contained also his
cousin Lucia.

He had always loved Court House, but not always his cousin Lucia. The
scholarly descendant of a long line of scholars, Jewdwine knew that he
had been a favourite with his grandfather, Sir Joseph Harden, the
Master of Lazarus, he was convinced (erroneously) that he was a Harden
by blood and by temperament, and of course if he had only been a
Harden by name, and not a Jewdwine, Court House and the great Harden
Library would have been his instead of his cousin Lucia's. He knew
that his grandfather had wished them to be his. Lucia's mother was
dead long ago; and when his uncle Sir Frederick definitely renounced
the domestic life, Lucia and Lucia alone stood between him and the
inheritance that should have been his. This hardly constituted a
reason for being fond of Lucia.

His grandfather had wished him to be fond of her. But not until
Jewdwine was five and twenty and began to feel the primordial manhood
stirring in his scholarly blood did he perceive that his cousin Lucia
was not a hindrance but a way. The way was so obvious that it was no
wonder that he did not see it all at once. He did not really see it
till Sir Joseph sent for him on his death-bed.

"There's been some mistake, Horace," Sir Joseph had then said. "Your
mother should have been the boy and your uncle Frederick the girl.
Then Lucia would have been a Jewdwine, and you a Harden."

And Horace had said, "I'm afraid I can't be a Harden, sir; but is
there any reason why Lucia--?"

"I was coming to that," said Sir Joseph. But he never came to it.
Horace, however, was in some way aware that the same idea had occurred
to both of them. Whatever it was, the old man had died happy in it.

There was no engagement, only a something altogether intangible and
vague, understood to be an understanding. And Lucia adored him. If she
had not adored him he might have been urged to something irretrievable
and definite. As it was, there was no need, and nothing could have
been more soothing than the golden concord of that understanding.

Needless to say if Lucia had been anybody but Lucia, such a solution
would have been impossible. He was fastidious. He would not have
married a woman simply because his grandfather wished it; and he could
not have married a woman simply because she inherited property that
ought to have been his. And he could not have married any woman who
would have suspected him of such brutality. He could only marry a
woman who was consummately suitable to him, in whom nothing jarred,
nothing offended; and his cousin Lucia was such a woman. The very fact
that she was his cousin was an assurance of her rightness. It followed
that, love being the expression of that perfect and predestined
harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for
Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking
of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be
added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir
Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable
possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about
played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of
the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a
hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its
utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through
Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused,
and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine
to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the
passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose
and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of
wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."

"So am I."

"Yes, but _you_ don't look it. What are you thinking of?"

She turned, and they walked together towards the house.

"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about
that friend of yours."

"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"

"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want
to be kind to him?"

"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to
everybody. It really doesn't do."

She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.

That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.




CHAPTER II


It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was
coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow
streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain
bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank
Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling
the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.

The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with
a decorated facade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish
cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its
neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed
cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary's. Whether
you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west,
you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so
new. Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over
the pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal of
dazzling globes hung over the doorway at the corner; there, as you
turned, the sombre windows of the second-hand department stretched
half way down the side street; here, in the great thoroughfare, the
newest of new books stood out, solicitous and alluring, in suits of
blazing scarlet and vivid green, of vellum and gilt, of polished
leather that shone like amber and malachite and lapis lazuli.

Within, a wall broken by a wide and lofty arch divided the front from
the back shop. On the right of the arch was the mahogany pew of the
cashier, on the left, a tall pillar stove radiating intolerable heat.
Four steps led through the arch into the back shop, the floor of
which was raised in a sort of platform. On the platform was a table,
and at the table sat the young man compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

Front shop and back shop reeked with the smells of new mahogany, dust,
pillar-stove, gum, hot-pressed paper and Russia leather. He sat in the
middle of them, in an atmosphere so thick that it could be seen
hanging about him like an aura, luminous in the glare of the electric
light. His slender, nervous hands worked rapidly, with a business-like
air of dexterity and dispatch. But every now and then he raised his
head and stared for quite a long time at the round, white, foolish
face of the clock, and whenever he did this his eyes were the eyes of
a young man who has no adequate sense of his surroundings.

The remarkable thing about the new shop was that already, like a bar
or a restaurant, it drew to it a certain group of young men,
punctually, irresistibly. A small group--you could almost count them
on the fingers of one hand--they came from Fleet Street, from the
Temple, from the Junior Journalists' Club over the way. They were
never seen looking in at the windows or hanging about the counter;
they were not the least bit of good to the shop, those customers. But
they were evidently some good to the young man. Whatever they did or
did not do, they always ended by drifting to the platform, to his
table. They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully
glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the
obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power,
his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.

It lay partly, no doubt, in his appearance; not, no, not at all, in
his make-up. He wore, like a thousand city clerks, a high collar, a
speckled tie, a straight, dark blue serge suit. But in spite of the
stiffness thus imposed on him, he had, unaccountably, the shy, savage
beauty of an animal untamed, uncaught. He belonged to the slender,
nervous, fair type; but the colour proper to it had been taken out of
him by the shop. His head presented the utmost clearness of line
compatible with irregularity of outline; and his face (from its heavy
square forehead to its light square jaw) was full of strange
harmonies, adjustments, compensations. His chin, rather long in a
front view, rather prominent in profile, balanced the powerful
proportions of his forehead. His upper lip, in spite of its slender
arch, betrayed a youthful eagerness of the senses; but this effect was
subtilized by the fineness of his lower lip, and, when they closed, it
disappeared in the sudden, serious straightening of the lines. Even
his nose (otherwise a firm feature, straight in the bridge and rather
broad at the end) became grave or eager as the pose of the head hid or
revealed the nostrils. He had queer eyes, of a thick dark blue, large,
though deep set, showing a great deal of iris and very little white.
Without being good-looking he was good to look at, when you could look
long enough to find all these things out. He did not like being looked
at. If you tried to hold him that way, his eyes were all over the
place, seeking an escape; but they held _you_, whether you liked it or
not.