 Chapter 4 of Wittishans, this Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by C.J.K.C., Wittishans by Oliver Onions. Chapter 4. Benlyan. 1. It would be different if you had known Benlyan. It would be different if you had even that glimpse of him that I had the very first time I saw him, standing on the little wooden landing at the top of the flight of steps outside my studio door. I say studio, but really it was just a sort of loft looking out of the timber yard, and I used it as a studio. The real studio, the big one, was at the other end of the yard, and that was Benlyan's. It's curious to see anybody ever came there. I wondered many a time if the timber merchant was dead or had lost his money and forgotten all about his business. For his stacks of floorboards set criss-crossfires this season. You know how they pile them up. We're grimy with soot. Nobody ever disturbed the rows of scaffold poles that stood like palaces along the walls. The entrance was from the street through a door and a bill-post just hoarding, and on the river not far away the steamboats hooded, and in windy weather the floorboards hummed to keep them company. I suppose some of these real regular artists wouldn't have called me an artist at all, for I only painted miniatures, and it was trade work at that, copy from photographs and so on. Not that I wasn't jolly good at it, impunctual too. Lots of these high-flown artists had simply no idea of punctuality, and the loft was cheap, and suited me very well. But, of course, a sculptor wants a big place on the ground floor. It's the work that with blocks of stone and marble that cost you twenty pounds every time you lift them, so Benlyan had the studio. His name was on a plate on the door, but I'd never seen him till this time I'm telling you of. I was working that evening at one of the prettiest little things I'd ever done, a girl's head on ivory, that I'd stippled up just like—oh, you'd never had thought it was done by hand at all. The daylight had gone, but I knew that Prussian would be about the colour for the eyes and the bunch of flowers that are breast, and I wanted to finish. I was working at my little table with a shade over my eyes, and I jumped a bit when somebody knocked at the door. Not having heard anybody come up the steps and not having many visitors anyway, letters were always put into the box in the yard door. When I opened the door there he stood on the platform, and I gave a bit of a start. Having come straight from my ivory, you see, he was one of these very tall gaunt chaps that make us little fellows feel even smaller than we are, and I wondered at first where his eyes were. They were set so deep in the dark caves on either side of his nose, like a skull his head was. I could fancy his teeth curving round inside his cheeks, and his zygomatic stuck up under his skin like razorbacks, but if you're not one of us artists you'll not understand that. A bit of smoky greenish sky showed behind him, and then, as his eyes moved in their big pits, one of them caught the light of my lamp and flushed like a well of luster. He spoke abruptly in a deep, shaky sort of voice. I want you to photograph me in the morning, he said. I suppose he'd seen my printing frames out on the window-slash some time or other. Come in, I said, but I'm afraid if it's the miniature you want that I retain, my firm retains me, you'd have to do it through them. Well, come in, and I'll show you the kind of thing I do, though you ought to have come in the daylight. He came in. He was wearing a long grey dress again that came right down to his heels, and made him look something like a nozzok figure. Seen in the light, his face seemed more ghastly, bony still, and as he glanced for a moment at my little ivory, he made a sound of contempt. I knew it was contempt. I thought it rather cheek coming into my place, and he turned his cavernous eye holes on me. I didn't want anything of that sort. I want you to photograph me. I'll be here at ten in the morning. So, just to show him that I wasn't to be treated that way, I said quite shortly, I can't. I have an appointment at ten o'clock. What's that? He said. He wanted these rich, deep voices that always sound consumptive. Take that thing off your eyes and look at me. He ordered. Well, I was awfully indignant. If you think I'm going to be told to do things like this, I began. Take that thing off. He just ordered again. I've got to remember, of course, that you didn't know Bin Lian. I didn't, then. And for a chap dressed as stuck into a fellow's place and told him to photograph him and order him about. But you'll see in a minute. I took the shade off my eyes just to show him that I could browbeat a bit, too. I used to have a tall strip of looking glass leaning against my wall, for though I didn't use models much, it's awfully useful to go to nature for all bits now and then. And I've sketched myself in that glass, oh, hundreds of times. We must have been standing in front of it. For all at once, I saw the eyes at the bottom of his pits looking rigidly over my shoulder, without moving his eyes from the glass and scarcely moving his lips he muttered, get me a pair of gloves, give me a pair of gloves. It was a funny thing to ask for, but I got him a pair of my gloves from the drawer. His hands were shaking so that he hardly could get them on. And there was a little glistening of sweat on his face that looked like the salt that dries on you when you've been bathing in the sea. Then I turned to see what it was that he was looking at so earnestly and profoundly in the mirror. I saw nothing except just the pair of us. He, with my gloves on, he stepped aside and slowly drew the gloves off. I think I could have bullied him just then. He turned to me. Did that look all right to you? He asked. Oh, my dear chap, whatever ails you? I cried. I suppose you went on. You couldn't photograph me tonight. Now? I could have done with magnesium, but I hadn't a scrap in the place. I told him so. He was looking round my studio. He saw my camera standing in a corner. Ah! he said. He made a stride towards it. He unscrewed the lens, brought it to the lamp, and peered attentively through it, now into the air, now at his sleeve in hand, as if looking for a flaw in it. Then he replaced it, and pulled up the collar of his dressing gown as if he were as cold. Well, another night of it, he muttered. But he added, facing suddenly round on me, if the appointment was to meet your God himself, you must photograph me at ten tomorrow morning. All right. I said, giving in, freezing horribly ill, draw up to the stove and have a drink of something and a smoke. I neither drink nor a smoke, he replied, moving toward the door. Sit down and have a chat, then. I urged, for I always like to be decent with fellows. And it was a lonely sort of place, that yard. He shook his head. Be ready at ten o'clock in the morning. He said. He passed down my stairs and crossed the yard to his studio without even having said good night. Well, here's at my door again at ten o'clock in the morning, and I photographed him. I made three exposures, but the plates were some that I'd had in the place for some time, and they'd gone off and fogged in the developing. I'm awfully sorry, I said, but I'm going out this afternoon and we'll get some more, and we'll have another shot in the morning. One after the other, he was holding the negatives up to the light and examining them. Presently he put them down quietly, leading them methodically up against the edge of the developing bath. Never mind, it doesn't matter. Thank you, he said, and left me. After that I didn't see him for weeks, but at night I could see the light of his roof window shining through the wreathing river mists. And sometimes I heard him moving about, and the muffled knocking of his hammer and marble. Two. Of course I did see him again, or I shouldn't be telling you all this. He came to my door, just as he had done before, and at about the same time in the evening. He hadn't come to be photographed this time, but for all that it was something about a camera, something he wanted to know. He brought two books with him, big books, printed in German. They were on light, he said, and physics. There also was psychics. I always get those two words wrong. They were full of diagrams and equations and figures, and of course it was all miles of my head. He talked a lot about hyperspace, whatever that is, and at first I nodded, as if I knew all about it. But he very soon saw that I didn't, and then he came down to my level again. What he'd come to ask me was this. Did I know anything of my own experience about things photographing through? You know the kind of thing. A name that's been painted out on a board, say, comes up on the plate. Well, as it happened, I had once photographed a drawing for a fellow, and the easel I had stood it on had come up through the picture. And I knew, by the way, that that was the kind of thing he meant. More, he said. I told him I'd once seen a photograph of a man with a bullet hat on, and the shape of his crown had showed through the hat. Yes, yes, he said, musing, and then he asked, Have you ever heard of things not photographing at all? But I couldn't tell him anything about that, and off he started again about light and physics and so on. Then, as soon as I could get a word in, I said, But of course, the camera isn't art. Some of my miniatures, you understand, were jolly nice little things. No, no, he murmured absently. And then abruptly he said, What's that? What the devil do you know about it? Well, said I, in a dignified sort of way. Considering that for ten years I've been, Hold your tongue, he said, turning away. There he was, talking to me again. As if I'd asked him in to bully me. We've got to be decent to a fellow when he's in your own place, and by and by I asked him, but in a cold, off-hand sort of way. How his own work was going on? He turned to me again. Would you like to see it? He asked. Aha! thought I. He's got to a sticking-point with his work. It's all very well. I thought for you to sniff at my miniatures, my friend, but we all get stale on our work sometimes, and the fresh eye, even of a miniature painter. I shall be glad if I can be of any help to you, I answered, still a bit huffish, but bearing no malice. Then come, he said. We descended and crossed the timber-yard, and he held his door open for me to pass in. It was an enormous, great place, his studio, and all full of mist, and the gallery that was his bedroom was up a little staircase at the farther end. In the middle of the floor was the tall structure of scaffolding, with a stage or two to stand on, and I could see the dim, ghostly marble figure in the gloom. It had been jacked up on a heavy base, and as it would have taken three or four men to put it into position and scarcely a stranger had entered the yard since I had been there, I knew that the figure must have stood for a long time. Sculpture's weary, slow work. Ben-Liam was puttering about with a taper at the end of a long rod, and suddenly the overhead gas-fring burst into light. I placed myself before the statue to criticize, you know. Well, it didn't seem to me that he knew to have turned up his nose in my ivories before I didn't think much of a statue, except that it was a great, lumping, extraordinary piece of work. He had now a stretched arm that, I remember thinking, was absolutely misshapen. This proportioned big enough for a giant ridiculously out of drawing, and as I looked at the thing this way and that, I knew that his eyes and their deep-sillars never left my face for a moment. It's a god, he said, by and by. Then I began to tell him about that monstrous arm, but he cut me very short. I say it's a god, he interrupted. Looking at me, as if he would have eaten me. Even you, child, as you are, the gods men have made for themselves before this. Half gods they've made, all good or all evil, and then they've called them the devil. This is my god, the god of good and of evil also. I see, I said, rather taken aback, but quite sure he was off his head for all that. Then I looked at the arm again. A child could have seen how wrong it was. But suddenly, to my amazement, he turned me by the shoulders and turned me away. That'll do. He said, curtly, I didn't ask you to come in here with a view to learning anything from you. I wanted to see how it struck you. I shall send for you again. And again. Then he began to jabber, half to himself. He muttered, Is that all they ask before a stupendous thing? Surely in the ocean, the heavens infinity, and they ask, Is that all? They saw their god face to face. They'd ask it. There's only one cause that works now in good and now in evil, but show it to them, and they put their heads on one side and begin to appraise and patronise it. I tell you, what's seen at a glance flies away at a glance. Gods come slowly over you, but presently, ha, they begin to grip you. And at the end there's no fleeing from them. You'll tell me more about my statue by and by. What was that you said? You ended facing swiftly round on me. That arm? Ah, yes. We'll see what you say about that arm six months from now. Yes. The arm. Now be off. He ordered me. I'll send for you again when I want you. He thrust me out. Asylum, Mr. Binlian. I thought as I crossed the yard. Is the place for you. You see, I didn't know him then. And that he wasn't to be judged as an ordinary man is. Just you wait till you see. And straight away I found myself bowing that I had nothing more to do with him. I found myself resolving that, as if I were making up my mind not to smoke or drink, and, I don't know why, with a similar sense that I was depriving myself of something. But somehow I forgot. And within a month he'd been in several times to see me, and once or twice had fetched me in to see his statue. In two months I was in an extraordinary state of mind about him. I was familiar with him in a way, but at the same time I didn't know one scrap more about him. Because I'm a fool. Oh yes, I know quite well now what I am. You'll think I'm talking folly. If I even begin to tell you what sort of a man he was, I don't mean just as knowledge. Though I think he knew everything. Sciences, languages, and all that. For it was far more than that. Somehow when he was there, he had me all restless and uneasy. When he wasn't there I was. There's only the one word for it. Jealous. As jealous as if he'd been a girl. Even yet I can't make it out. And he knew how unsettled he got me, and I'll tell you how I found that out. Straight out one night, when he was sitting at my place, he asked me, Do you like me pudgy? I forgot to say that I told him that he used to call me pudgy at home because I was little and fat. It was all the number of things I told him that I wouldn't have told anybody else. Do you like me pudgy? He said, As for my answer, I don't know how it spread it out. I was much more surprised than he was, for I really didn't intend it. It was for all the world as if somebody else was talking with my mouth. I loathe and adore you, it came. And then I looked around, awfully startled to hear myself saying that. But he didn't look at me. He only nodded. Yes, of good and evil too, he muttered to himself. And then all of a sudden he got up and went out. I didn't sleep forever so long after that, thinking how odd it was that I should have said that. Well, to get on. After that, something I couldn't account for began to come over me sometimes as I work. He began to come over me without any warning that he was thinking of me down there across the yard. I used to know. This must sound awfully silly to you that he was down yonder, thinking of me and doing something to me. And one night I was so sure that it wasn't fancy that I jumped straight up for my work, and I'm not quite sure what happened then until I found myself in his studio, just as if I'd walked there in my sleep. And he seemed to be waiting for me, for there's a chair by his own in front of the statue. I burst out. Ah, he said. Well, it's about that arm, Pudgy. I want you to tell me about the arm. Does it look as strange as it did? No, I said. I thought it wouldn't, he observed. But I haven't touched it, Pudgy. So I stayed the evening there. But you must not think he was always doing that thing, whatever it was, to me. On the other hand, I sometimes felt the oddest sort of release. I don't know how else to put it. Like when I'm one of these muggy, earthy smelling days and everything's melancholy, the wind freshens up suddenly and you breathe again. And that, I'm trying to take it in order, you see, so that it will be plain to you, brings me to the time I found out that he did that too. I knew when he was doing it. I'd gone and do his place one night to have a look at his statue. It was surprising what a lot I was finding out about that statue. It was still all out of proportion. That is to say, I knew it must be. Remembered, I'd thought so. Though it didn't annoy me now quite so much. I suppose I'd lost my fresh eye by that time. Somehow, too, my own miniatures had begun to look a bit kiddish. They made me impatient, and that's horrible, to be discontented with things that won't seem jolly good to you. Well, he'd been looking at me in the hungriest sort of way, and I, looking at the statue, when all I once had feeling of release and lightness came over me. The first I knew of it was that I found myself thinking of some rather important letters my firm had written to me, wanting to know when a job I was doing was when to be finished. I thought myself it was time I got it finished. I thought I'd better said about it at once, and I sat suddenly up in my chair. As if I'd just come out of a sleep. And, looking at the statue, I saw it as it had seemed at first, all misshapen and out of drawing. The very next moment, as I was rising, I sat down again as suddenly as if someone had pulled me back. Now, Trap doesn't like to be changed about like that. So, without looking at Benlyan, I muttered a bit, Tessie, don't Benlyan. Then I heard him get up and knock his chair away. He was standing behind me. Pudgy, he said, in a moved sort of voice, I'm no good to you. Get out of this. Get out. No, no, Benlyan, I pleaded. Get out, you hear, and don't come again. Go and live somewhere else. Go away from London. Don't let me know where you go. What have I done? I asked unhappily. He needs muttering again. Perhaps it would be better for me too, he muttered. And then he added, calm bundle out. So, in home I went and finished my ivory for the firm, but I can't tell you how friendless and unhappy I felt. Now, I used to know in those days, the little girl, and I swarmed hard at little things. Just friendly, you know. Used to come to me sometimes in another place. I lived at men for me and so on. It was an awful long time since I'd seen her. But she found me out one night, came to that yard, walked straight in, walked straight to my linen bag, and began to look over my things to see what wanted mending, just as she used to. I don't mind confessing that I was a bit sweet on her at one time, and it made me feel awfully mean the way she came in without asking any questions, and took up my mending. So she sat doing my things, and I sat at my work, glad I have a bit of company, and she chatted as she worked, just jolly and gentle, and not at all reproaching me. But it suddenly is a shot, right in the middle of it all. I found myself wondering about Bentley Ann again. And I wasn't only wondering, somehow it was horribly uneasy about him. It came to me that he might be ill or something, and all the fun of her having come to see me was gone. I found myself doing all sorts of stupid things in my work, and glancing at my watch that was lying on the table before me. At last I couldn't stand it any longer. I got up. Daisy, I said, I've got to go out now. She seemed surprised. Oh, why didn't you tell me I've been keeping you? She said, getting up at once. I muttered that I was awfully sorry. I packed her off. I closed the door in the hoarding behind her. Then I walked straight across the yard to Bentley Ann's. He was lying on a couch, not doing anything. I know I ought to have come sooner, Bentley Ann. I said, I had somebody with me. Yes, he said, looking hard at me. And I got a bit red. She's awfully nice, I stammered. But you never bother with girls, and you don't drink a smoke. No, he said. Well, I continued. You ought to have a little relaxation. You're knocking yourself up. And indeed, he looked awfully ill. But he shook his head. A man's only a definite amount of force in him, Pudgy. He said, and if he spins it in one way, he goes shortening another. Mine goes there. He glanced at the statue. I really asleep now, he added. Then you ought to see a doctor, I said, a bit alarmed. I felt sure he was ill. No, no, Pudgy. My force is all going there, all but the minimum that can't be helped, you know. You've heard artists talk about putting their soul into their work, Pudgy. Don't rub it in about my rotten miniatures, Binlian. I asked him. You've heard them say that, but they're charlatans. Professional artists all, Pudgy. They haven't got any souls bigger than six pence to put into it, you know, Pudgy. That force and matter are the same thing. That it's decided nowadays that you can't define matter otherwise than as a point of force. Yes, I found myself saying eagerly, as if I'd heard it dozens of times before. So that if they could put their souls into it, it would be just as easy for them to put their bodies into it. I'd run very close to him. And again, it was not fancy. I felt as if somebody, not me, was using my mouth. A flash of comprehension seemed to come into my brain. Not that, Binlian. I cried breathlessly. He nodded three or four times and whispered. I really don't know why we both whispered. Really that, Binlian? I whispered again. Shall I show you? I tried my heart as not to, you know. He still whispered. Yes, show me! I replied in a suppressed voice. Don't breathe a sound, then. I keep them up there. He put his finger to his lips as if we had been two conspirators. Then he tiptoed across the studio and went up to his bedroom in the gallery. Presently he tiptoed down again on the papers in his hand. There were photographs, and we souped together over a little table. His hand shook with excitement. You remember this? He whispered, showing me a rough print. It was one of the prints from the fog plates that I'd taken after that first night. Come closer to me if you feel frightened, Pudgy. He said, You said they're old plates, Pudgy. No, no, the plates were all right. It's I who am wrong. Of course. I said, It seems so natural. This one. He said, taking up one that was number one. There's a plain photograph in the flesh before it started. You know. Now look at this. And this. He spread them before me, all in order. Two was a little fogged, as if a novice had taken it. Three, a sort of cloudy veil, partly obliterated the face. Four was still further smudged and lost. And five was a figure with gloved hands held up, as a man holds up his hands when he has covered by a gun. The face of this one was completely blotted out. And it didn't seem in the least horrible to me, for I kept on murmuring, Of course, of course. Then Ben-Liam rubbed his hands and smiled at me. I'm making good progress, am I not? He said, Splendid, I breathed. Better than you know, too. He chuckled. For you're not properly under yet. But you will be, Pudgy. You will be. Yes, yes. Will it be long, Ben-Liam? No, he replied. Not if I can keep from eating and sleeping and thinking of other things than the statue. And if you don't disturb me by having girls about to place Pudgy. I'm awfully sorry, I said contritely. All right, all right. This, you know, Pudgy, is my own studio. I bought it. I bought it purposely to make my statue. My God, I'm passing nicely into it. And when I'm quite past, quite past, Pudgy, you can have the key and come in when you like. Oh, thanks awfully. I murmured gratefully. He nudged me. What would they think of it, Pudgy? Those of the exhibitions and academies who say their souls are in their work. What would the cacklers think of it, Pudgy? Aren't they fools? I chuckled. And I shall have one worshiper shanty, Pudgy. Rather, I replied, isn't it splendid? Would need I go back just yet? Yes, you must go now. But I'll send for you again very soon. You know what I try to do without you, Pudgy? I tried for thirteen days and it nearly killed me. That's past. I shan't try again. Now off you trot, my Pudgy. I winked at him knowingly and came skipping and dancing across the yard. Three. It's just silly, that's what it is, to say that something of a man doesn't go into his work. But even those wretched little ivories of mine, the thick-headed fellows who paid for them knew my touch in them, and once spotted it instantly when I tried to slip in another chap's who was hard up. Benlyan used to say that a man went about spreading himself over everything he came in contact with, diffusing some sort of influence, as far as I could make it out, and the mistake was, he said, that we went through the world just wasting it, instead of directing it. And if Benlyan didn't understand all about those things, I should jolly well like to know who does. A chap with a great abounding will and brain like him, it's only natural he should be able to pass himself on to a statue or anything else when he really tried, day without food and talk and sleep in order to save himself up for it. A man can't both do, and be, I remember he said to me once, he's so much force, no more, and he can either make himself with it or something else. If he tries to do both, he does both imperfectly. I'm going to do one perfect thing. Uh, he was a queer chap. Fancy if Benlyan making a thing like that statue out of himself and then wanting somebody to adore him. And I had in the faintest conception of how much I did adore him until yet again, as he had done before, he seemed to, you know, to take himself away from me again, leaving me all alone, and so wretched. And I was angry at the same time before he promised me he wouldn't do it again. This was one night. I don't remember when. I ran to my landing and shouted down into the yard, Benlyan, Benlyan! There's a light in the studio and I heard a muffled shout come back. Keep away, keep away, keep away! He was struggling. I knew he was struggling as I stood there on my landing, struggling to let me go. And I could only run and throw myself on my bed and sob while he tried to set me free, who didn't want to be set free. He was having a terrific struggle all alone there. He told me afterwards that he had to eat something now and then and to sleep a little. And that weakened him, strengthened him, strengthened his body and weakened the passing, you know. But the next day it was all right again. I was Benlyan's again. And I wondered when I remembered his struggle whether a dying man had ever fought for life as hard as Benlyan was fighting to get away from it and pass himself. The next time after that he fetched me, called me, whatever you like to name it. I burst into his studio like a bullet. He was sunk in a big chair, gone to his mummy now and all the life in him seemed to burn in the bottom of his deep eye sockets. At the sight of him I fiddled with my knuckles and giggled. You are going it, Benlyan, I said. Why not, he replied, in a voice that was scarcely a breath. You meant me to bring the camera on magnesium, didn't you? I snatched him up when I felt his call and I brought them. Yes, go ahead. So I placed the camera beforehand made already and took the magnesium ribbons and a pair of pinchers. Are you ready, I said, and leaded the ribbon. The studio seemed to leap with a blinding glare. The ribbon spat and spluttered. I snapped the shutter and the fumes drifted away and hung in clouds in the roof. You'll have to walk me about soon, Pudgy. He banged me with ladders as I do the opium in patience. He said sleepily, let me take one of the statue now, I said eagerly. He put up his hand. No, no, that's too much like testing our God. Faiths, the food they feed God's on, Pudgy. We'll let the SPR, people photograph it when it's all over. He said, now get it developed. I developed the plate. The obliteration now seemed complete. But Benion seemed dissatisfied. There's something wrong somewhere, he said. It isn't as perfect as that yet. I can feel within me it isn't. It's merely that your camera isn't strong enough to find me, Pudgy. I'll get another in the morning, I cried. Now he answered, I know something better than that. I have a cab here by ten o'clock in the morning and we'll go somewhere. By half past ten the next morning we had driven up to a large hospital and had gone down a lot of steps and a long corridor to a basement room. There was a stretcher couch in the middle of the room and all manner of queer appliances, frames of ground glass, tubes of glass blown out into extraordinary shapes, and a lot of other things all about. A couple of doctors were there too and Benion was talking to them. We'll try my hand first, Benion said by and by. He advanced to the couch and put his hand under one of the frames of ground glass. One of the doctors hid something in the corner. A harsh crackling filled the room and an unearthly fluorescent light shot and flooded across the frame where Benion's hand was. The two doctors looked and then started back. One of them gave a cry. He was sickly white. Let me on the couch, said Benion. I and the doctor who was not ill lifted him on the canvas stretcher. The green gleaming frame of fluctuating light was passed over the whole of his body. Then the doctor ran to a telephone and called a colleague. We spent the morning there with dozens of doctors coming and going. Then we left all the way home in the cab and Benion chuckled to himself. I had scared him, Pudgy, he chuckled. A man they can't x-ray. That scared him. He must put down in the diary. Wasn't it ripping? I chuckled back. He kept a sort of diary or record. He gave it to me afterwards, but they've borrowed it. It was as big as a ledger and immensely valuable I'm sure. They oughtn't to borrow valuable things like that and not return them. The laughing that Benion and I have had over that diary. They have fooled them all, the clever x-ray men, the artists, the academies, everybody. Written on the fly leaf was to my Pudgy. I shall publish it when I get it back again. Benion had now got frightfully weak. It's awfully hard work passing yourself. You had to take a little milk. Now and then, worried I'd die before he had quite finished. I didn't bother with miniatures any longer. And when angry letters came from my employers, we just put them into the fire. Benion and I, and we laughed. That is to say, I laughed. But Benion only smiled, being too weak to laugh really. He'd lots of money, so that was all right. And I slept in his studio to be there for the passing. And that wouldn't be very long now, I thought. And I was always looking at the statue. Things like that, in case you don't know, have to be done gradually. I suppose he was busy filling up the inside of it, and hadn't got to the outside yet. For the statue is much the same to look at. But reckoning off his sips of milk and snatches of sleep, he was making splendid progress. And the figure must be getting very full now. I was awfully excited. He was getting so near. And then somebody came bothering and nearly spoiling all. It's odd. But I really forgot exactly what it was. I only know there was a funeral, and people were sobbing and looking at me. And somebody said I was callous, but somebody else said, no, look at him. And that it was just the other way about. I think I remember now that it wasn't in London, for I was in a train. But after the funeral, I dodged them and found myself back at Houston again. They followed me, but I shook them off. I locked my own studio up, and they as quiet as a mouse in Binley Ann's place when they came hammering at the door. And now I must come to what you'll call the finish. I was awfully stupid to call things like that finishes. I had slipped into my own studio one night. I forget what for. And I had gone quietly, for I knew they were following me, those people, and would catch me if they could. It was a thick misty night, and I came streaming up through Binley Ann's roof window, with the shadows of the window divisions losing themselves like dark rays in the fog. A lot of hooting was going on down the river, steamers and barges. Oh, I know what I'd come into my studio for. It was for those negatives. Binley Ann wanted them for the diary, so that it could be seen there wasn't any fake about the prince. Before he'd said he would make a final spurt that evening and get the job finished. It had taken a long time, but I'll bet you couldn't have passed yourself any quicker. When I got back he was sitting in the chair, he'd hardly left for weeks, and the diary was on the table by his side. I'd taken all the scaffolding down from the statue, and he was ready to begin. He had to waste one last bit of strength to explain to me. But I drew as close as I could, so that he wouldn't lose much. Now, Pudgy, I just heard him say, you've behaved splendidly, and you'll be quite still up to the finish, won't you? I nodded. You mustn't expect the statue to come down and walk about or anything like that. He continued, those aren't the really wonderful things. No doubt people will tell you that it hasn't changed, but you'll know better. It's much more wonderful if you should be there than that they should be able to prove it, isn't it? And, of course, I don't know exactly how it will happen if I've never done this before. You have the letter for the SPR. They can photograph it if they want. By the way, you don't think the same of my statues you did at first, do you? Oh, it's wonderful, I breathe. Even if, like the god of the others, it doesn't vouchsafe a special sign of wonder. There's Binlian for all that. Oh, do be quick, Binlian. I can't bear another minute. Then for the last time he turned his great, eaten-out eyes on me. I seal you mine, Balgy. He said. Then his eyes fastened themselves on the statue. I waited for a quarter of an hour, scarcely breathing. Binlian's breath came in little flutters. Many seconds apart. He had a little clock on the table. Twenty minutes passed, then half an hour. I was a little disappointed, really, that the statue wasn't going to move. But Binlian knew best. And he was filling quietly up with him instead. Then I thought of those zigzag bunches of lightning they draw on the electric-built advertisements. I was rather glad, after all, that the statue wasn't going to move. It would have been a little cheap, that vulgar, in a sense. He was breathing a little more sharply now as if in pain. But his eyes never moved. The dog was hauling somewhere. And I hoped that the hooting of the togs wouldn't disturb Binlian. Nearly an hour had passed when, all of a sudden, I pushed my chair farther away and cowered back, gnawing at my fingers, very frightened. Binlian had suddenly moved. He'd set himself forward in his chair, as if to be strangling. His mouth was wide open, and he began to make long, harsh, I shouldn't have thought passing yourself such agony. And then I gave a scream, for he seemed to be thrusting himself back in his chair again, as if he'd changed his mind and didn't want to pass himself at all. But just you ask anybody, and you get yourself just over halfway past the others dragged out of you, and you can't help yourself. It became so loud and horrid that I shut my eyes and stopped my ears. Minutes that lasted, and then there came a high dinning that I couldn't shut out, and all once the floor shook with a heavy thumb. When all was still again, I opened my eyes. His chair had overturned, and he lay in a heap beside it. I called Binlian, but he didn't answer. He passed beautifully, quite dead. I looked up at the statue. It was just as Binlian had said. It didn't open his eyes, nor speak, nor anything like that. Don't you believe, chaps, to tell you the statues that have been passed in to do that? They don't. But instead in a blaze and flashed in shock, I knew now, for the first time, what a glorious thing that statue was. Have you ever seen anything for the first time like that? You never see very much afterwards, you know. The rest is all piffle after that. It was like coming out of fog and darkness into a split in the open heavens. My statue was so transfigured. I bet if you'd been there, you'd have clapped your hands as I did, and chucked the tablecloth over the Binlian on the floor till they should come to cart that empty shell away, and patted the statue's foot and cried, Is it all right, Binlian? I did this, and then I rushed excitedly out into the street to call somebody to see how glorious it was. They've brought me here for a holiday, and I'm to go back to the studio in two or three days. But they said that before, and I think it's catash of fellows not to keep their word, and not to return a valuable diary, too. But there isn't a people in my room. As there is in some of them, the emperor of Brazil told me that. And Binlian knows I haven't forsaken him, for they take me a message every day to the studio. And Binlian always answers that it's all right, and that I am to stay here where I am for a bit. So as long as he knows, I don't mind so much. But it is a bit rotten hanging on here, especially when the doctors themselves admit how reasonable it all is. Still, if Binlian says it's all right. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 5 of Widdishons This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by C.J. Casey. Widdishons. By Oliver Unions. Chapter 5 Eel As the young man put his hand to the uppermost of the four brass bell knobs to the right of the fan-leaded door, he paused, withdrew the hand again, and then pulled at the lowest knob. The sawing of bell-wire answered him, and he waited for a moment, uncertain whether the bell had rung before pulling again. Then there came from the basement a single cracked stroke. The head of a maid appeared in the white-washed area below, and the head was withdrawn, as apparently the maid recognized him. Steps were heard along the hall. The door was opened, and the maid stood aside to let him enter, the apron with which she had slipped the latch still crumpled in her greasy hand. Sorry, Daisy. The young man apologized. But I didn't want to bring her down all those stairs. How was she? Has she been out today? The maid replied that the person spoken of had been out, and the young man walked along the wide carpeted passage. It was cumbered like an antique shop with alabaster busts on pedestals, dusty palms and feigns vases, and trophies of spears and shields and asagaya. At the foot of the stairs was a rustling poacher of strung beads. And beyond it, the carpet was continued up the broad, easy flight, secured at each step by a brass rod. Where the stairs made a turn, the fading light to the December afternoon the maid still dimmer by a window to calcum any glass. Shown on a cloudy green aquarium with shallow goldfish, a number of cacti on a shabby console table, and a large and dirty white sheepskin rug. Passing along a short landing, the young man began the ascent to the second flight. This also was carpeted, but with the carpet that had done duty in some dining or bedroom before being cut up into strips to the width of the narrow space between the wall and the handrail, as he still mounted. The young man's feet sounded loud on oilcloth, and when he finally paused and knocked at a door, it was on a small landing of naked boards beneath the cold gleam of the skylight above the well of the stairs. "'Come in,' a girl's voice called. The room he entered at a low, sagging ceiling in which shone a low glow of firelight, making colder still the patch of eastern sky beyond the roofs and the cowls and hoods of chimneys framed by the square of the single window. The glow in the ceiling was reflected dullly in the old dark mirror over the mantelpiece. An old open door in the farthest corner hampered with skirts and bouses without a glimpse of the girl's bedroom. The young man set the paper bag he carried down on the littered round table and advanced to the girl who sat in an old booker chair before the fire. The girl did not turn her head as he kissed her cheek. He looked down at something that had muffled the sound of his steps as he had approached her. "'Hello, that's new, isn't it, Bessie? Where did that come from?' he asked cheerfully. The middle of the floor was covered with a common jute matting, but on the hearth was a magnificent leopard skin rug. Mrs. Hepburn set it up. There was a drop from under the door. It's much warmer for my feet. "'Very kind of, Mrs. Hepburn. Well, how are you feeling today, old girl?' "'Better, thanks, Ed. That's the style. You'll be yourself again soon. Daisy says you've been out today?' "'Yes. I went for a walk, but not far. I went to the museum and then sat down.' "'You're early, aren't you?' He turned away to get a chair, from which he had to move a mass of tissue paper patterns and buckram linings. He brought it to the rug. "'Yes. I stopped last night late to cash up for Vetter, and I'm coming to-night. Turn and turn about. Well, tell us all about it, Bess.' Their faces were red in the fire-light. Heirs had the prettiness, the first glance almost exhausts, the prettiness, amazing in its quantity, that one sees for a moment under the light to the street lamps and shops and offices closed for the day. She was short-nosed, pulpy-mouthed and fawnish-eyed, and only of the rather remarkable smallness of the head on the splendid thick throat saved her away from ordinariness. He, too, might have been seen in his thousands at the close of any day, hurrying home to Catford or Wallam Green or Truffin Park to tea in an evening with a girl or up in a billiard room or outstanding cheaply up-west perpetrator to smoking cigarettes from yellowed packets in the upper circle of a musical, four inches of white up-and-down collar encased his neck, and as he lifted his trousers with the need to clear his purple socks, he showed that he had protected his cuffs during the day at the office. To remove them, crumpled them up and threw them on the fire, and the momentary addition to the light of the upper chamber showed how curd-white was that superb net of hers and how moody and tired her eyes. From his face only one would have guessed and guessed wrongly, that his preferences were for billiard rooms and musicals. This conversation showed them to be otherwise. It was of polytechnic classes that he spoke, in English literature that had just begun. And, as if somebody had asserted that the pursuit of such studies was not compatible with a certain measure of physical development also, he announced that he was not sure that he should not devote, say, half an evening a week on Wednesdays to training in the gymnasium. Menzanan co porrezan no pesi, he said, a sound mind and a sound body, you know. That's tremendously important, especially when a fellow spends the day thinking I shall give it half Wednesdays from 8.30 to 9.30. Since you're home in a glow, I was going to tell you about the literature class. The second lecture is tonight. The first has splendid all about the languages of Europe and Asia, what they call the Indo-Germanic languages, you know, Aryans. I can't tell you exactly without my notes, but the Hindus and Persians, I think it was, across the Himalaya Mountains and spread westward somehow, as far as Europe. The way the lecturer put it, English is a Germanic language, you know, then came the Celts. I wish I brought my notes. I see you've been reading. Let's look. A book lay on her knees. It's back-worked by the heat of the fire. He took it and opened it. Ah, Keats. Gladly like Keats, Bessie. We need to be great readers, but it's important that what we do read should be all right. I don't know him, not really know him, that is, but he's quite all right. A1, in fact. And he's an example of what I've always maintained, that knowledge should be brought within the reach of all. It just shows he was a sort of a livery stablekeeper, you know. So what he'd have been if he'd really had chances, been to universities and so on, there's no knowing. But of course, there's more from the historical standpoint than I'm studying these things. Let's have a look. He opened the book where a hairpin between the leaves marked a place. The firelight glowed on the page and he read monotonously and inelastically. And as I sat over the light blue hills there came a noise of revelers, the reels. Into the wide stream came of purple hue, Toz Bakus and his crew. The earnest trumpet spake in silver thrills from kissing cymbals made a merry din. Toz Bakus and his kin like to a moving vintage down they came, crowned with green leaves and faces all on flame. All madly dancing through the pleasant valley, too scared the melancholy. It was the wondrous passage from Indimion of the descent of the wild inspired rabble into India. Ed plucked for a moment to his lower lip and then with a hmm, what's it all about, Bessie? continued. Within his car a loft young Bakus stood trefling his heavy dart in dancing mood with sidelong laughing, and little wheels of crimson wine and brood, his plump white arms and shoulders enough white for venuses pearly bite. And near him rode see Lenis on his ass, tilted with flowers as he did on pass, tipsily quaffing. Hmm. I see mythology. That's made up of tales and myths, you know, like Thor and those, only those were Scandinavian mythology, so it would be observed to take it too seriously. But, I think in a way, things like that do harm. You see, you explained, the more beautiful they are, the more harm they might do. We ought always to share virtue and vice in their true colors. And if you look at it from that point of view, this is just drunkenness. That's rotten. Destroyers your body and intellect. As I heard a chap say, once it's an insult to the beast, to call it beastly. I haven't been sorry for it yet. No. Now there's Vetter. He went off on a bend, as he called it. Last night, and even he says this morning it wasn't worth it. But let's read on. Again, he read with unresilient movement. I saw Osirian Egypt kneel down before the vine wreath crown. I saw a parched ebiscinia rouse and sing to the silver symbol's ring. I saw the wilming vintage hotly pierce. O Tartary, the fierce great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans. Hmm. Here's a Buddhist god, Brahma was. Mythology again. As I say, if you take it seriously, it's just glorifying intoxication. But I say, I can hardly see. Better light the lamp. We'll have tea first, then read. No, you sit still. I'll get it ready. I know where things are. There was a waterfall where the water rose crossed to a little cupboard with a sink in it, filled the kettle with the tap and brought it to the fire. Then he struck a match and leaded the lamp. The cheap glass shape was of a foolish Corolla shape. Clear glass below, shading the pink and deeping the red at the crimped edge. It gave a false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the mantelpiece. And Ed's figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the waist upward of red. The bright concentric circles that spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the old mirror above the mantelpiece, and the wintery eastern light beyond the chimney-hoods seemed suddenly almost to die out. Bessie, her white neck below the level of a lampshade, had taken up the book again, but she was not reading. She was looking over it at the upper part of the grate. Presently she spoke. I was looking at some of those things this afternoon at the museum. He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of paper, numbers of mirrors journaled in the delineator, already on his way to the cupboard he had put aside a rib bottle stress-makers' shape of wooden wire. What things, he asked, those you were reading about. Greek, aren't they? Oh, the Greek Room. But those people, Bacchus and those, weren't people in the ordinary sense. Gods and goddesses, most of them. Bacchus was the god. That's what mythology means. I wish sometimes our course took in Greek literature, but it's a dead language after all. German's more good in modern life. It would be nice to know everything, but one has to select, you know. Hello, I clean forgot. I brought you some grapes, Bessie. Here they are in this bag. I'll have them after tea. What? But, she said again after a pause, still looking at the great. They had their priests and priestesses and followers and people, hadn't they? It was their things I was looking at. Combs and brooches and hairpins and things they cut their nails with. They were all in a glass case there, and they had safety pins exactly like ours. Oh, they were a civilized people, said Ed cheerfully. It all gives you an idea. I only hope you didn't tire yourself out. You'll soon be all right, of course, but you have to be careful yet. Who will have a clean tablecloth, shall we? She had been seriously ill. Her life had been disparate of, and somehow the young polytechnic student seemed anxious to assure her that she was now all right again, or soon would be. They were to be married as soon as things brightened up a bit, and he was very much in love with her. He watched her head and neck as he continued to lay the table, and then, as he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly and passing on her hair. She gave so quick a start that he too started. She must have been very deep in a reverie to have been so taken by surprise. I say best you don't jump like that! he grabbed with him voluntary quickness. Indeed, had his hand been red-hot or ice-cold or tall and she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened face to him. It was you touching me, she muttered, resuming her gazing into the grate. He stood anxiously down on her. He would have been better not to discuss her state, and he knew it, but in his anxiety he forgot it. That chompiness is the effect of your illness, you know. I shall be glad when it's all over. It's made you so odd. She was not pleased that he should speak of her oddness. For that matter, she too found him odd at any rate, found it difficult to realize that he was as he always had been. He began to irritate her a little. His club-footed reading of the verses had irritated her, and she had tried hard to hide from him that his cocksure opinions and the tone in which they were pronounced jarred on her was not that she was better than he knew any more than he did. Didn't, she supposed, love him still the same. These moods, that dated from realness, had nothing to do with those things. She reproached herself sometimes that she was subject to such doldrums. It's all right, Ed, but please don't touch me just now, she said. He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink and refrained. Poor old girl. He said sympathetically, what's the matter? I don't know. It's awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can't help it. I shall be better soon if you leave me alone. Nothing's happened, has it? Only those silly dreams I told you about bother the dreams, muttered the polytechnic student. During her realness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse, and then she had gone off into the dreams again. The curious thing had been that the dreams had seemed to be her vivid waking life. And the other things, the anxious faces, the details of a dingy bedroom, the thermometer under her tongue, had been the dream. And though she had come back to actuality, the dreams had never quite vanished. She could remember no more of them than that they seemed to hold a high singing in your kundity, issuing from some region of haze and golden light. And they seemed to hover ever on the point of being recaptured, yet ever alluding all her mental efforts. She was living now between reality and a vision. She had fewer words and sensations, and it was little pitiful to hear her vainly striving to make clear what she meant. It's so queer, she said. It's like being on the edge of something, a sort of tiptoe. I can't describe it. Sometimes I could almost touch it with my hand and then it goes away, but never quite away. It's like something just past the corner of my eye, over my shoulder. And I sit very still sometimes, trying to take it off its guard. But the moment I move my head, it moves too, like this. Again, he gave a quick start to the suddenness of her action. Very stealthily, her fondish eyes had stolen sideways. And then she had swiftly turned her head. Yeah, I'll say don't, Bessie. He cried nervously. Look awfully uncanny when you do that. You're brooding, he continued. That's what you're doing, brooding. You're getting into a low state. You aren't bucking up. I don't think I shall go to the Polytech tonight. I shall stay and cheer you up. You know, I really don't think you're making an effort, darling. His last word seemed to strike her. They seemed to fit in with something of which she too was conscious. Not making an effort, she wondered how he knew that. She felt in some vague way that it was important that she should make an effort. For while her dream ever evaded her, and yet never ceased to call her was such a voice as he who reads on a magic page of the calling of Elves hears Steely in his brain, yet somehow behind the suggestion was another and a stern voice. There is warning as well as fascination. Beyond that edge it was she strained on tiptoe, mingled with the jokun calls to hasten, hasten with deeper calls that made her beware. They puzzled her, beware of what? Of what danger? And to whom? How do you mean I'm not making an effort, Ed? She asked Steely, again, looking into the fire, where the kettle now made a net like singing. Why, in effort to get all right again. To be as he used to be, as of course he will be soon, as he used to be. The words came with a little check in her breathing. Yes, before all this, to be yourself, you know. Myself? All jolly, without all these jerks and jumps. We should get away. Fortnight by the sea would do you all the good in the world. She knew not what it was in the words, the sea that caused her suddenly to breathe more deeply. The sea was as if by the mere uttering of them you touched some secret spring. What a fulfillment some spell. What had he meant by speaking of the sea? A fortnight before had somebody spoken to her the sea would have been the sea of market, of Brighton, of Southend, that supplying the image that a word calls up as if by conjuration she would have seen before her. And what other image could she supply? Could she possibly supply it now? Yet she did or almost did supply one. What new experience had she had? Or what old, old one had been released in her. With that confused, joyous dinging just beyond the range of physical hearing, there had suddenly mingled a new illusion of sound, a vague, vast passion rustle, silky and harsh both at once as tired this voice holding meanings of stillness and solitude compared with which the silence that is mere absence of sound was vacancy. It was part of her dream invisible, intangible, inaudible, yet there. As if he had been an enchanter, it had come into being at the word upon his lips. Had he other such words? Had he the master word that she knew what the master word would do would make the vision the reality and the reality the vision deep within her, she felt something, her soul, herself, she knew not what thrill and turn over and settle again. The sea, she repeated in a low voice. Yes, that's what you want to set you up. Rather. Do you remember the fortnight little Hampton you, me, and your aunt? Surely that was. I like little Hampton isn't flashed like Brighton and Marguerite's always so beastly crowded. Do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I did love you that afternoon, Bessie. You continue to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why the words the sea were somehow part of it all the pins and brooches of the museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of hide and seek she had played as a child in which cries of warm, warm, warmer had announced the approach to the hidden object. She was getting warm, positively hot. He had ceased to talk and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness and closed her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded something. Then she said quickly, It's teenily ready, Ed. And as he turned to the table, took up the book again. She felt that even to touch the book brought her warmer. It fell open at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the babble's words that evoked of the pierrot and banjos and minstrels of Margate and Littlehampton. It was the era gladder, wilder, tumult, that she sat once more so still, so achingly listening. The earnest trumpet spake and silver thrills from kissing cymbals made a merry din. The words seemed to move on the page and her eyes another light, then the firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose in a thick white throat, a little inarticulate sound twanged. Eh, did you speak, Pessie? Ed asked, stopping in his buttering of bread. Eh, no. Nansering her head a turn for a moment, she had seen him. Suddenly a struck her with force. What a shaving of a man he was, dusk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little important lip and chin. Yes, he needed a polytechnic gymnastic course. And she remarked how once in Margate she had seen him in the distance. As in a hired baggy bathing dress he had bathed from a machine in muddy water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo ball about and shouting stridently, sound mine and a sound body. He was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his feet. And she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the chafing of his collar-stead. You know, she did not want him to touch her just now at any rate. His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch, somewhere, sometime, somehow, in that tantalizing dream that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite forgotten. What was that dream? What was it? She continued to gaze into the fire. All of a sudden she sprang to her feet with a choked cry of almost animal fury. The fool had touched her, carried away doubtless by the memory that afternoon by the windmill he had, and passing once more to the kettle, crept softly behind her and put a swift burning kiss on the side of her neck. Then he had retreated before her, stumbling against the table and causing the cups and saucers to jiggle. The basket-chair tilted up, but readied herself again. I told you, I told you! She choked, her stockish figure shaking with rage. I told you, you! He put his elbow up as if to ward off a blow. You touch me, you, you! The words broke from her. He put himself further around the table. He stammered. Hey, touch it, I'll best see what is the matter. You touch me. Right, he said suddenly, I want to touch you again. No fear, I didn't know you were such a firebrand. All right, chop it now. I won't again. Good Lord! Still the white fish she had drawn back sank to her side again. All right, now he continued to grumble resentfully. He didn't take on so. It said, I won't touch you again. Then, as if he remembered that after all she was ill and must be humored, he began, while her bosom still rose and fell rapidly, to talk with an assumption that nothing much should happen. Come, sit down again, Bessie. The tea's in the pot and I'll have it ready in a couple of jiffs. What a ridiculous little girl you are to take on like that. I'll say, listen, that's a muffin bill, and there's a grand fire for toast. You sit down while I run out and get them. Give me your key, so I can let myself in again. He took her key from her bag, caught up his hat, and hastened out. But she did not sit down again. She was no calmer for her quick disappearance. And that moment, when near recoil from her, she had the expression of some handsome and angered snake, its hood puffed, ready to strike. She stood dazed. One would have supposed that that ill-advised kiss of his had indeed been the master word she sought, the word she felt approaching, the word to which the objects of the museum, the book, that rustle of a sea she had never seen, had been but the ever-warming stages. Some mere strifle stood between her and those elfin cries, between her and that thin golden mist, in which faintly seen shapes seemed to move, shapes almost of tossed arms waving, brandishing objects strangely all but familiar. That roaring of the sea was not the rushing of her own blood, but in her ears, that rosy flushed not the artificial glow of the cheap red lampshade. The shapes were almost as plain as if she had saw them in some clear but black mirror. The sounds almost as audible as if she heard them through some not-very-thick muffling. Quick, the book! she muttered. But even as she stretched out her hand for it again came that solemn sound of warning. This is something sought to stay at. She had deliberately to thrust her hand forward. Again, the high dinning calls of hasten, hasten, hasten, where mingle with that deeper beware. She knew in her soul that once over that terrible edge the dream would become the reality, and the reality, the dream. She knew nothing of the fluidity of the thing called personality, not a thing at all, but a state, a balance, a relation, a resultant of forces so delicately equilibrium that a touch and poof, the horror of formlessness rushed over all. As she hesitated a new light appeared in the chamber. Within the frame of the small square window, beyond the ragged line of the chimney-cowles, an edge of orange brightness showed. She leaned forward. It was the full moon. Brusty and bloated and flattened by the earth-mist. The next moment her hand had clutched at the book. Whence came ye, Mary Damsel's? Whence came ye? So many, and so many, and such glee! Why have ye left your bowers desolate? Your loots and gentler fate. We follow Bacchus. Bacchus on the wing, a conquering. Bacchus, young Bacchus, good real, betide. We dance before him through kingdoms wide. Come with her, Lady Fair, and join to be to our wild minstrels thee. There was an instant in which darkness seemed to blot out all that's. Then it rolled aside. And in a blaze of brightness was gone. It was gone. And she stood face to face with her dream. That for two thousand years had slumbered in the blood of her and her line. She stood without the gape and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour. The other was the dream now. And these, they came down mad and noisy and bright. Menities, deities, sadders, fawns, naked, and hides of beasts, ungirded, disheveled, breathed, garlanded, dancing, singing, shouting. The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsie filled the air. They brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats. They struck the bronze cantaris. They tossed the silver up a loft. Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seashore with the red of the sunset behind them. She saw the evening light on the sleek and dappled hides. The gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs and shoulders. The white divider arms held up on high, their wide red mouths. The quivering of the twin flush-gelts on the necks of the leaping fawns. And, shutting out the glimpse of the sky, the head of the deep ravine, the Gotham self-descended, with his car full of drunken girls as up with the serpents coiled about them. Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidness laughter and beating one another with a half-strip thyrsie. They poured down to the yellow sands and the ineminent pools of the shore. They raced through the water. That gleam pale as knacker in the deep-bending twilight in the eye of the evening star. They ran along its edge over their images in the wet sand, calling their lost companion. Hasten, hasten! they cried. And one of them, a young man with a torso noble as a dawn and shoulder-line strong as those of the Eternal Hills, ran here and there, calling her name. Louder, louder! she called back at an ecstasy. Something dropped and tinkled against the fender. It was one of her hairpins. One side of her hair was in a loose tumble. She threw up the small head on the superb thick neck. Louder! I cannot hear! Once more! The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair had given her a glimpse of herself in the glass over the mantelpiece. For the last time that formidable beware sounded like thunder in her ears. The next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He, with a torso on those shoulders, was seeking her. How should he know her, that dreary garret, in those joyless abylments? He would have soon known his own in that crimson bodiced wire-framed dummy by the window yonder. Her fingers clutched at that odd remercerized silk of her blouse. There was a rip, and her arms and throat were free. She panted as she tugged at something I gave with a short click-click as a steel fastenings. Something fell against the fender. These also. She tore at them, and kicked them as they lay about her feet as these lie about the trunk of a tree in autumn. And as she stood there, as if within the screen of a spectrum that deep into the band of red her eyes fell on the leopard skin at her feet, she caught it up, and in doing so saw purple grapes, purple grapes that issued from the mouth of a paper bag on the table. With a dappled pelt about her, she sprang forward. The juice spitted through them into the mass of her loosened hair. Down her body there was a spilt of seeds and pulp. She cried hoarsely aloud. Once more! Oh, answer me! Tell me my name! Ed steps her herd on the oil-cloth portion of the staircase. My name! Oh, my name! She cried in an agony of suspense. Oh, they will not wait for me! They've lighted the torches. They run up and down the shore with torches. Oh, cannot you see me? Suddenly she dashed to the chair in which a litter of linings and tissue paper lay. She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the fire. They caught and flared. There was a call upon the stairs and the sound of somebody mounting in haste. Once, only once, my name! The soul of the Bacchanate rioted. Struggled to escape from her eyes. Then as the doors flung open she heard and gave a terrifying shot to recognition. I hear I was here but once more! Eeww! Eeww! Eeww! Eeww! Ed, in the doorway, stood for one moment agape. The next, ignorant of the full purpose of his own words. Ignorant that no man may come westwards, he may yet bring his worship with him. Ignorant that to make the dream the reality and the reality of the dream is heaven's dreadfulest favor. And ignorant that, that edge once crossed, there is no return to the sanity and sweetness and light that are only seen clearly in the moment when they are lost forever. He had dashed down the stairs, crying in a voice, hoarse and high with terror. She's mad! She's mad! End of Chapter 5 Recording by CJ Casey Recording by Adam Wybray Widdishens By Oliver Onions Chapter 6 The Accident The street did not change so much, but that, little by little, its influence had come over Romaran again. And as the clock a street or two away had struck seven, he had stood, his hands folded on his stick, first curious, then expectant, and finally, as the sound died away, oddly satisfied in his memory. The clock had a peculiar chime, a rather elaborate one, ending inconclusively on the dominant and followed after an unusually long interval by the stroke of the hour itself. Not until its last vibration had become too subtle for his ear had Romaran resumed the occupation that the peeling of the hour had interrupted. It was an occupation that especially tended to abstraction of mind, the noting in detail of the little things of the street that he had forgotten with such completeness, there awakened only tardy responses in his memory, now that his eyes rested on them again. The shape of the door-knocker, the grouping of an old chimney-stack, the crack still there in a flagstone, somewhere deep in the past these things had associations, but they lay very deep, and the disturbing of them gave Romaran a curious, desolate feeling, as of returning to things he had long outgrown. But, as he continued to stare at the objects, the sluggish memories roused more and more, and, for each bit of the old that reasserted itself, scores of yards of the new seemed to disappear. New shop frontages went, a wall, brought up flush where formerly a recess had been, became the recess once more. The intermittent electric sign at the street's end that wrote in green and crimson the name of a whisky across a lamp-lit facade ceased to worry his eyes, and the unfamiliar new front of the little restaurant he was passing and repassing took on its old and well-known aspect again. Seven o'clock, he had thought, in dismissing his handsome, that it had been later. His appointment was not until a quarter past, but he decided against entering the restaurant and waiting inside. Seeing who his guest was, it would be better to wait at the door. By the light of the restaurant window he corrected his watch, and then sauntered a few yards along the street to where men were moving flats of scenery from a back door of the new theatre into a sort of tumbrill. The theatre was twenty years old, but to Romeran it was the new theatre. There had been no theatre there in his day, in his day. His day had been twice twenty years before, forty years before, that street, that quarter, been bound up in his life. He had not, forty years ago, been the famous painter, honoured, decorated, taken by the arm by monarchs. He had been a student, wild and raw as any, with that tranquil and urbane philosophy that had made his success still in abeyance within him. As his eyes had rested on the door-knocker next to the restaurant, a smile had crossed his face. How had that door-knocker come to be left by the old crowd that had wrenched off so many others? By what accident had that survived to bring back all the old life now so oddly? He stood, against smiling, his hands folded on his stick. A crown prince had given him that stick, and had had it engraved to my friend, Romeran. You oughtn't to be here, you know, he said to the door-knocker. If I didn't get you, Marsden ought to have done so. It was Marsden whom Romeran had come to meet, Marsden of whom he'd thought was such odd persistency lately. Marsden was the only man in the world between whom, and himself, lay as much as the shadow of an enmity. And even that faint shadow was now passing. One does not guard, for forty years, animosities that take their rise in quick outbreaks of the young blood, and now that Romeran came to think of it, he hadn't really hated Marsden for more than a few months. It had been within those very doors, while Romeran was passing the restaurant again, that there had been that quick blow about a girl, and the tables had been pushed tastefully back, and he and Marsden had fought, while the other fellows had kept the waiters away. Romeran was now sixty-four. And Marsden must be a year older than the girl? Who knew? Probably dead long ago. Yes, time heals these things, thank God. And Romeran had felt a genuine flush of pleasure when Marsden had accepted his invitation to dinner. But Romeran looked at his watch again. It was rather like Marsden to be late. Marsden had always been like that, had come and gone pretty much as he had pleased, regardless of inconvenience to others. But doubtless, he had had to walk. If all reports were true, Marsden had not made very much of his life in the way of worldly success, and Romeran, sorry to hear it, had wished he could give him a leg up. Even a good man could not do much when the current of his life sets against him in a tide of persistent deal luck. And Romeran, honoured and successful, yet knew that he had been one of the lucky ones. But it was just like Marsden to be late, for all that. At first, Romeran did not recognise him when he turned the corner of the street and walked towards him. He hadn't made up his mind beforehand exactly how he had expected Marsden to look, but he was conscious that he didn't look it. It was not the short stubble of grey beard, so short that it seemed to hesitate between beard and unshavenness. It was not the figure nor carriage. Clothes alter that, and the clothes of the man who was advancing to meet Romeran were, to put it bluntly, shabby. Nor was it. But Romeran did not know what it was in the advancing figure that for the moment found no response in his memory. He was already within half a dozen yards of the men who were moving the scenery from the theatre into the tumbrill, and one of the workmen put up his hand as the edge of a fresh wing appeared. But at the sound of his voice, the same thing happened that had happened when the clock had struck seven. Romeran found himself suddenly expectant, attentive, and then again curiously satisfied in his memory. Marsden's voice, at least, had not changed. It was as in the olden days, a little envious, sarcastic, accepting low interpretation somewhat willingly, somewhat grudging of better ones. It completed the taking back of Romeran that the chiming of the clock, the door-knocker, the grouping of the chimney stack, and the crack in the flagstone had begun. Well, my distinguished academician, my Marsden's voice, sounded across the group of scene-shifters. After all, if you please, Governor, said another voice. For a moment, the painted wing shut them off from one another. In that moment, Romeran's accident befell him. If its essential nature is related in arbitrary terms, it is that there are no other terms to relate it in. It is a decoded cipher, which can be restored to its cryptic form as Romeran subsequently restored it. As the painter took Marsden's arm and entered the restaurant, he noticed that while the outside of the place still retained traces of the old, its inside was entirely new. Its cheap, glittering wall mirrors that gave a false impression of the actual size of the place. Its loves and shepherdesses painted in the style of the carts of the vendors of ice cream. Its hat racks and its four-bladed propeller that set the air slowly in motion at the farthest end of the room might all have been matched in a dozen similar establishments within the hail of a cab whistle. Its gelatin-written menu cards announced that one might dine their a la carte or tabla dote for two shillings. Neither the cooking nor the service had influenced Romeran in his choice for a place to dine at. He made a gesture to the waiter who advanced to help him on with his coat that Marsden was to be assisted first, but Marsden, with a grunted, all right, had already helped himself. A glimpse of the interior of the coat told Romeran why Marsden kept waiters at arm's length. A little twinge of compunction took him that his own overcoat should be fur-collared and lined with silk. They sat down at a corner table, not far from the slowly moving four-bladed propeller. Now we can talk, Romeran said. I'm glad. Glad to see you again, Marsden. It was a peculiarly vicious face that he saw, corrugated about the brows and with stiff iron-grey hair untrimmed about the ears. It shocked Romeran a little. He had hardly looked to see certain things so accentuated by the passage of time. Romeran's own brow was high and bold and benign, and his beard was like a broad shield of silver. You're glad, are you? said Marsden, as they sat down facing one another. Well, I'm glad to be seen with you. It'll revive my credit a bit. There's a fellow across there has recognised you already by your photographs in the papers. I assume I may. He made a little upward movement of his hand. It was a gin and bitters, Marsden assumed he might have. Romeran ordered it. He himself did not take one. Marsden tossed down the apparatus at one gulp. Then he reached for his roll, pulled it to pieces, and Romeran remembered how, in the old days, Marsden had always eaten bread like that. Began to throw bullets of bread into his mouth. Formally, this habit had irritated Romeran intensely. Now, well, well life uses some of us better than others. Small blame to these if they throw up the struggle. Marsden, poor devil, but the arrival of soup interrupted Romeran's meditation. He consulted the violet-ridden card, ordered the succeeding courses, and the two men ate for some minutes in silence. Well, said Romeran presently, pushing away his plate and wiping his white moustache, you still a romanticist, Marsden? Marsden, who had tucked his napkin between two of the buttons of his frayed waistcoat, looked suspiciously across the glass with the dregs of the gin and bitters, that he had half raised to his lips. Eh? he said. I say, Romeran, don't let's go grave-digging among memories merely for the sake of making conversation. Yours may be pleasant, but I'm not in the habit of wasting much time over mine. Might as well be making new ones. I'll drink whiskey and soda. It was brought, a large one, and Marsden nodding took a deep gulp. Health, he said. Thanks, said Romeran, instantly noting that the mollove syllable, which matched the others in curtness, was not at all the reply he had intended. Thank you, yours. He amended, and a short pause followed in which fish was brought. This was not what Romeran had hoped for. He had desired to be reconciled with Marsden, not merely to be allowed to pay for his dinner. Yet, if Marsden did not wish to talk, it was difficult not to defer to his wish, it was true that he had asked if Marsden was still a romanticist largely for the sake of something to say, that Marsden's prompt pointing out of this was not encouraging. Now that he came to think of it, he had never known precisely what Marsden meant by the word romance, he had so frequently taken into his mouth. He only knew that this creed of romanticism, whatever it was, had been worn rather challengingly, a chip on the shoulder to be knocked off at some peril or other, and it seemed to Romeran a little futile in the violence with which it had been maintained. But that was neither here nor there. The point was that the conversation had begun not very happily, and must be mended at once, if at all. To mend it, Romeran leaned across the table. Be as friendly as I am, Marsden, he said. I think, pardon me, the differed positions were reversed, and I saw in you the sincere desire to help that I have, I take it in the right way. Again, Marsden looked suspiciously at him. To help? How to help? he demanded. That's what I should like you to tell me, but I suppose, for example, you still work? How am I work? Marsden made a little gesture of contempt. Try again, Romeran. You don't do any... Come, I'm no bad friend to my friends, and you'll find me, especially so. But Marsden put up his hand. Not quite so quickly, he said. Let's see what you mean by help first. Do you really mean that you want me to borrow money from you? That's help as I understand it nowadays? Then you've changed, said Romeran, wondering, however, in his secret heart, whether Marsden had changed very much in that respect after all. Marsden gave a short honk of a laugh. You didn't suppose I hadn't changed, did you? Then he leaned suddenly forward. This is rather a mistake, Romeran. Rather a mistake, he said. What is? This, our meeting again, quite a mistake. Romeran sighed. I had hoped not, he said. Marsden leaned forward again, with another gesture Romeran remembered very well. Dinner knife in hand, edge and palm upwards, punctuating and expounding with a point. I tell you it's a mistake, he said. Knife and hand balanced. You can't reopen things like this. You don't really want to reopen them. You only want to reopen certain of them. You want to pick and choose among them, to approve and disapprove. There must have been somewhere or other something in me you didn't all together dislike. I can't for the life of me think what it was, by the way, and you want to lay stress on that and to sink the rest. Well, you can't. I won't let you. I'll not submit my life to you like that. If you want to go into things, all right. There must be all or none. And I'd like another drink. He put the knife down with a little clap, as Romeran beckoned to the waiter. There was distress on Romeran's face. He was not conscious of having adopted a superior attitude, but again he told himself that he must make allowances. Men who don't come off in life struggle are apt to be touchy. And he was, after all, the same old Marsden, the man with whom he desired to be at peace. Are you quite fair to me? He asked presently in a low voice. Again the knife was taken up and its point advanced. Yes I am, said Marsden, in a slightly raised voice, and he indicated with the knife the mirror at the end of the table. You know you've done well, and I, to all appearances, haven't. You can't look at that glass and not know it. But I've followed the line of my development too, no less logically than you. My life's been mine, and I'm not going to apologise for it to a single breathing creature, but I'm proud of it. At least there's been singleness of intention about it. So I think I'm strictly fair in pointing that out when you talk about helping me. Perhaps so, perhaps so, Romeran agreed a little sadly. It's your tone more than anything else that makes things a little difficult. Believe me, I've no end in my mind except pure friendliness. No, said Marsden, a long no that seemed to deliberate to examine and finally to admit. No, I believe that, and you usually get what you set out for. Oh yes, I've watched your rise, I've made a point of watching it. Spin a bit at a time, but you've got there. You're that sort, it's on your forehead, your destiny. Or Romeran, smile. Hello, that's new isn't it? He said. It wasn't your habit to talk much about destiny, if I remember rightly. Let me see, wasn't this more your style? Will, passion, laughs at impossibilities and says etc and so forth. Wasn't that it? We've always the suspicion not far away that you did things more from theoretical conviction than real impulse after all. A dispassionate observer would have judged that the words went somewhere near home. Marsden was scraping together with the edge of his knife the crumbs of his broken roll. He scraped them into a little square and then trimmed the corners. Not until the little pile was shaped his liking did he look solely up. Let it rest Romeran, he added. Let it alone. If I begin to talk like that too, we shall only cut one another up. Clink glasses there and let it alone. Mechanically Romeran clinked, but his bold brow was perplexed. Cut one another up, he repeated. Yes, let it alone. Cut one another up, he repeated once more. You puzzle me entirely. Well, perhaps I'm altogether wrong. I only wanted to warn you that I've dared a good many things in my time. Now drop it. Romeran had fine brown eyes and oriental arch browns. Again, they noted the singularly vicious look of the man opposite. They were full of mistrust and curiosity and he stroked silver beard. Drop it, he said slowly. No, let's go on. I want to hear more of this. I'd much rather have another drink in peace and quietness. Waiter! Eva leaned back in his chair surveying the other. You're a perverse devil still. Was Romeran's thought? Marston's, apparently, was of nothing but the whiskey and soda. The waiter had gone to fetch. Romeran was inclined to look as scarred as a man who could follow up the gin and bitters with three or four whiskeys and soda without turning a hair. It argued the seasoned cask. Marston had bitten the waiter leave the bottle and the siphon on the table, and was already mixing himself another stiff peg. Well, he said, since you will have it so, to the old days. To the old days, said Romeran, watching him gulp it down. Queer, looking back across all that time at him, isn't it? How do you feel about it? In a mixed kind of way, I think. The usual thing, pleasure and regret mingled. Oh, you have regrets, have you? For certain things, yes. Now let me say, my turn up with you, Marston, he laughed. That's why I chose the old place. He gave a glance round at glittering newness. Do you happen to remember what all that was about? I've only the vaguest idea. Marston gave him a long look. That all, he asked. Oh, I remember in a sort of way that romantic soap bubble of yours was really at the bottom of it, I suspect. Tell me, he smiled. Did you really suppose life could be lived on those mad lines you used to lay down? My life, said Marston calmly, has been. Not literally, literally. You mean to say that you haven't outgrown that? I hope not. Romeran had thrown up his handsome head. Well, well, he murmured incredulously. Why, well, well, Marston demanded. But of course you never did, and never will know what I meant. By romance. No, I can't say that I did, but as I conceived it, it was something that began in an appetite and ended in diabetes. Not philosophic, eh? Marston inquired, picking up a chicken bone. Highly unphilosophic, said Romeran, shaking his head. Hmm, grunted Marston, stripping the bone. Well, I grant it pays in a different way. Oh, it does pay then, Romeran asked. Oh yes, it pays. The restaurant had filled up. It was one frequented by young artists, musicians, journalists, and the clingers to the rather frayed fringes of the arts. From time to time, heads returned to look at Romeran's portly and handsome figure, which the press, the Regent Street photographic establishments, and the academy supplements had made well known. The plump young Frenchwoman, within the glazed cash office near the door, at whom Marston had several times glanced in a way at which Romeran had frowned, was aware of the honour done the restaurant, and several times the blonde-bearded proprietor had advanced and inquired with concern whether the dinner and the service was to the liking of Monsieur. And the eyes that were turned to Romeran plainly wondered who the scallywag dining with him might be. Since Romeran had chosen that their conversation should be of the old days and without picking and choosing, Marston was quite willing that it should be so. Again he was casting the bullets of bread into his mouth, and again Romeran was conscious of irritation. Marston too noticed it, but in awaiting the roti, he still continued to roll and bolt the pellets, washing them down with gulps of whiskey and soda. Oh yes, it paid, he resumed. Not in that way, of course. He indicated the head, quickly turned away again, of an eerie old youngster with a large bunch of black satin tie, not in admiration of that sort, but in other ways. Tell me about it. Certainly, if you want it. Be you're my house. Won't you let me hear your side of it all first? But I thought you said you knew that, had followed my career. So I have. It's not your list of honours and degrees. Let me see. What are you? R.A. D. C. L. Doctor of Literature. Whatever that means. And Professor of this, that and the other. And not at the end of it yet. I know all that. I don't say you haven't earned it. I admire your painting. But it's not that. I want to know what it feels like to be up there where you are. It was a childish question, and Romeran felt foolish in trying to answer it. Such things were the things the adoring, eerie old youngster a table to a way would have liked to ask. Romeran recognised in Marsden the old craving for sensation. It was part of the theoretical creed Marsden had made for himself of doing things not for their own sakes, but in order that he might have done them. Of course, it had appeared to a fellow like that that Romeran himself had always had a calculated end in view. He had not. Marsden merely measured Romeran's peck out of his own bushel. It had been Marsden who, in self-consciously seeking his own life, had lost it, and Romeran was more than a little inclined to suspect that the vehemence with which he protested that he had not lost it was precisely the measure of the loss. But he essayed it, essayed to give Marsden a resume of his career. He told him at the stroke of sheer luck that it had been the foundation of it all, the falling ill of another painter who had turned over certain commissions to him. He told him of his poor but happy marriage, and of the windfall, not large but timely, that had come to his wife. He told him of fortunate acquaintanceships, happily cultivated, of his first important commission, of the fresco that had procured for him his associateship, of his sale to the chantry, and of his quietly renumerative visitorships, and his work on boards and committees. And, as he taught, Marsden drew his empty glass to him, moistened his finger with a little spilt liquid, and began to run the finger round the rim of the glass. They had done that formally, a whole roomful of them, producing, when each had found the note of his instrument, a high, thin, intolerable singing. To this singing, Romerand strove to tell his tale. But that thin and bat-like note silenced him. He ended lamely, with some empty generalisation on success. Ah, but success in what? Marsden demanded, interrupting his playing on the glass for a moment. In your aim, whatever it may be. Nah! said Marsden, resuming his performance. Romerand had sought, in his recital, to minimise differences in circumstances, but Marsden seemed bent on aggravating them. He had the miserable advantage of the man who has nothing to lose, and, bit by bit, Romerand had begun to realise that he was going considerably more than half way to meet this old enemy of his, and that Amity seemed as far on as ever. In his heart he began to feel the foreknowledge that their meeting could have no conclusion. He hated the man, the look of his face, the sound of his voice, as much as ever. The barata approached, with profoundest apology in his attitude. Massure would pardon him, but for the noise of the glass, it was annoying, another Massure had made complaint. Eh? cried Marsden. Oh, that! Certainly, it could be put to a much better purpose. He refilled the glass. The liquor had begun to tell on him. A quarter of the quantity would have made a clean living man incapable drunk, but it only made Marsden's eyes bright. He gave sarcastic laugh. And is that all? he asked. Romerand replied shortly that that was all. You've missed out the RA and the DCL. Then let me add that I'm a doctor of civil law and a full member of the Royal Academy. Said Romerand almost at the end of his patience. And now, since you don't think much of it, may I hear your own account? Oh, by all means! I don't know, however, the... He broke off to throw a glance at a woman who had just entered the restaurant. A divesting glance that caused Romerand to redden to his crown and drop his eyes. I was going to say that you may think as little of my history as I do of yours. Supple woman, that! When the rather scraggly blonde does take it into her head to be a devil, she's the worst kind there is. Without apology, Romerand looked at his watch. All right, said Marsden, smiling. For what I've got out of life then. But I warn you, it's entirely discreditable. Romerand did not doubt it. But it's mine, and I boast of it. I've done. Baring, receiving honours and degrees. Everything. Everything. If there's anything I haven't done, tell me, and lend me a sovereign, and I'll go and do it. You haven't told the story. And that's so. Here goes then. Well, you know, unless you've forgotten how I began. Fruits and nut shells and nutcrackers lay on the table between them. And at the end of it, shielded from drafts by the menu cards, the coffee apparatus simmered over its elusive blue flame. Romerand was taking the rind of a pear with a table knife, and Marsden had declined port in favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy. Every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed with the apparatus in one hand with his napkin in the other. Marsden was already well into his tail. The frightful unction with which he told it appalled Romerand. It was as he had said. There was nothing he had not done to not exult him with a sickening exultation. It had indeed ended in diabetes. In the pitiful hunting down a sensation to the last inch, he had been fiendishly ingenious and utterly unimaginative. His unholy curiosity had spared nothing, his unnatural appetite to know no truth. It was grinning sin. The details of it simply cannot be told. And his vanity little was prodigious. Romerand was pale as he listened. What? In order that this malignant growth in society's breath should be able to say, I know, had sanctities been profaned, sweet conventions assailed, purity blackened, soundness infected, and all that was bride, and of the day he'd been sunk in the quagmire that this creature of the night had called, yes, still called, by the gentle name of romance. Yes, so it had been. Not only had men and women suffered dishonour, but manhood and womanhood and the clean institutions by which alone the creature was suffered to exist had been brought to shame. And what was he to look at when it was all done? Romance, beauty, the beauty of things as they are, he croaked. If faces in the restaurant were now turned to Romerand, it was the horror on Romerand's own face that drew them. He drew out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. But, but, his stomach presently, he was speaking of generalities, horrible theories, things diabolically conceived to be done. What? cried Marston, checked for a moment in his horrible triumph. No, by God, I've done him. Done him? Did you understand if you don't question me? No, no, cried Romerand. But I say, yes, you came for this and you shall have it. I tried to stop you, but you wanted it and, by God, you shall have it. You think your life's been fallen, mine empty. Romance! I had the conviction of it and I've had the courage to. I haven't told you a temp of it. What would you like? Chamber windows when love was hot, the killing of a man who stood in my way. I fought a duel and killed, the squeezing of the juice out of life like that. He pointed to Romerand's plate. Romerand had been eating grapes. Did you find me saying I do a thing and then drawing back from it, when we, he made a quick gesture of both hands towards the middle of the restaurant floor. When we fought. Yes, when we fought here. Oh no, oh no, I've lived. I tell you every moment, not a title, not a degree, but I've lived such a life as you never dreamed of. Thank God. But suddenly, Marston's voice, which had risen, dropped again. He began to shake with interior chuckles. They were the old, old chuckles, as they filled Romerand, with a hatred hardly to be borne. The sound of the animal's voice had begun it, and his every word, look, movement, gesture, since they'd entered the restaurant had added to it. And he was now chuckling, chuckling, shaking with chuckles, as if some monstrous kick bit still remained to be told. Already, Romerand had tossed aside his napkin, beckoned to the waiter, and said, Monsieur dines with me. And you really don't remember what it was all about. Ho, ho, ho, ho! came the drunken sounds. It's a long time since Monsieur dined here with his old friend, Romerand. Do you remember the last time? Do you remember it? Pip-span, two snacks across the table, Romerand. Oh, you got it in very well, and then, quick, back with the tables, all the fellow's round. Farcueson, for me, and Smith for you, and then to it, Romerand! And you really don't remember what it was all about. Romerand had remembered. His face was not the face of the philosophic master of life now. You said she shouldn't. Little patty hines, you know. You said she shouldn't. Romerand sprang half from his chair and brought his fists down on the table. And by heaven she didn't! At least that's one thing you haven't done. Marsden, too, had risen unsteadily. Ho, ho, ho! You think that! A wild thought flashed across Romerand's brain. You mean? I mean! Ho, ho, ho! Yes, I mean! Oh, she did, Romerand! The mirrors mistly seen through the smoke of half a hundred cigars and cigarettes. The loves and shepherdesses of the garish walls, the diners starting up in their places, all suddenly seemed to swing round in a great half-circle before Romerand's eyes. The next moment, feeling as if he had stood on something on which he found it difficult to keep his balance, he had caught up the table-knife with which he had peeled the pear and had struck at the side of Marsden's neck. The rounded blade snapped, but he struck again with the broken edge and left the knife where it entered. The table appeared up tilted almost vertical. Over it Marsden's head disappeared. It was followed by a shower of glass, cigars, artificial flowers, and the tablecloth at which he clutched. And the dirty American cloth at the table-top was left bare. But the edge behind which Marsden's face had disappeared remained vertical. A group of scene-shifters were moving a flat of scenery from a theatre in a tumble-like cart. And Romerand knew that, past, present and future, he had seen it all in an instant, and that Marsden stood behind that painted wing. And he knew, too, that he had only to wait until that flat past, and to take Marsden's arm and enter the restaurant. And it would be so. The drowning man is said to see all in one unmeasurable instant of time. A year-long dream is but, they say, an instantaneous arrangement in the moment of waking of the molecules we associate with ideas. In the past of history and the future of prophecy are folded up in the mystic moment we call the present. It would come true. For one moment Romerand stood. The next he had turned and run for his life. At the corner of the street he collided with a loafer, and only the wall was saved them from going down. Feverishly, Romerand plunged his hand into his pocket and brought out a handful of silver. He crammed it into the loafer's hand. Here, quick, take it. He gasped. There's a man there, by that restaurant door. He's waiting for Mr Romerand. Tell him, tell him that Mr Romerand's had an accident. And he dashed away, leaving the man looking at the silver in his palm. The end of The Accident, Chapter 6 of Widdishens by Oliver Onions, read by Adam Wye Brang.