V

by Arthur Machen

　　And he was at last in the city of the unending murmuring streets, a partof the stirring shadow, of the amber-lighted gloom.

　　It seemed a long time since he had knelt before his sweetheart in thelane, the moon-fire streaming upon them from the dark circle of thefort, the air and the light and his soul full of haunting, the touch ofthe unimaginable thrilling his heart; and now he sat in a terrible"bed-sitting-room" in a western suburb, confronted by a heap and litterof papers on the desk of a battered old bureau.

　　He had put his breakfast-tray out on the landing, and was thinking of themorning's work, and of some very dubious pages that he had blackened thenight before. But when he had lit his disreputable briar, he rememberedthere was an unopened letter waiting for him on the table; he hadrecognized the vague, staggering script of Miss Deacon, his cousin. Therewas not much news; his father was "just the same as usual," there hadbeen a good deal of rain, the farmers expected to make a lot of cider,and so forth. But at the close of the letter Miss Deacon became usefulfor reproof and admonition.

　　"I was at Caermaen on Tuesday," she said, "and called on the Gervases andthe Dixons. Mr. Gervase smiled when I told him you were a literary man,living in London, and said he was afraid you wouldn't find it a verypractical career. Mrs. Gervase was very proud of Henry's success; hepassed fifth for some examination, and will begin with nearly fourhundred a year. I don't wonder the Gervases are delighted. Then I wentto the Dixons, and had tea. Mrs. Dixon wanted to know if you hadpublished anything yet, and I said I thought not. She showed me a bookeverybody is talking about, called the Dog and the Doctor. She saysit's selling by thousands, and that one can't take up a paper withoutseeing the author's name. She told me to tell you that you ought to tryto write something like it. Then Mr. Dixon came in from the study, andyour name was mentioned again. He said he was afraid you had made rathera mistake in trying to take up literature as if it were a profession, andseemed to think that a place in a house of business would be moresuitable and more practical. He pointed out that you had not had theadvantages of a university training, and said that you would find men whohad made good friends, and had the tone of the university, would bebefore you at every step. He said Edward was doing very well at Oxford.He writes to them that he knows several noblemen, and that young PhilipBullingham (son of Sir John Bullingham) is his most intimate friend; ofcourse this is very satisfactory for the Dixons. I am afraid, my dearLucian, you have rather overrated your powers. Wouldn't it be better,even now, to look out for some real work to do, instead of wasting yourtime over those silly old books? I know quite well how the Gervases andthe Dixons feel; they think idleness so injurious for a young man, andlikely to lead to bad habits. You know, my dear Lucian, I am onlywriting like this because of my affection for you, so I am sure, my dearboy, you won't be offended."

　　Lucian pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the receptacle lettered"Barbarians." He felt that he ought to ask himself some seriousquestions: "Why haven't I passed fifth? why isn't Philip (son of SirJohn) my most intimate friend? why am I an idler, liable to fall into badhabits?" but he was eager to get to his work, a curious and intricatepiece of analysis. So the battered bureau, the litter of papers, and thethick fume of his pipe, engulfed him and absorbed him for the rest ofthe morning. Outside were the dim October mists, the dreary and languidlife of a side street, and beyond, on the main road, the hum and jangleof the gliding trains. But he heard none of the uneasy noises of thequarter, not even the shriek of the garden gates nor the yelp of thebutcher on his round, for delight in his great task made him unconsciousof the world outside.

　　He had come by curious paths to this calm hermitage between Shepherd'sBush and Acton Vale. The golden weeks of the summer passed on in theirenchanted procession, and Annie had not returned, neither had shewritten. Lucian, on his side, sat apart, wondering why his longing forher were not sharper. As he though of his raptures he would smile faintlyto himself, and wonder whether he had not lost the world and Annie withit. In the garden of Avallaunius his sense of external things had growndim and indistinct; the actual, material life seemed every day to becomea show, a fleeting of shadows across a great white light. At last thenews came that Annie Morgan had been married from her sister's house to ayoung farmer, to whom it appeared, she had been long engaged, and Lucianwas ashamed to find himself only conscious of amusement, mingled withgratitude. She had been the key that opened the shut palace, and he wasnow secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few days after he had heardthe news he repeated the adventure of his boyhood; for the second time hescaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expectedviolent disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at theactivity of boyish imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now inthe green bulwarks, and the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any wayextraordinary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory of his sensations, hewas not angry at the cheat. Certainly it had been all illusion, all theheats and chills of boyhood, its thoughts of terror were withoutsignificance. But he recognized that the illusions of the child onlydiffered from those of the man in that they were more picturesque; beliefin fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happinesswere equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well asinept. It was better, he knew, and wiser, to wish for a fairy coach thanto cherish longings for a well-appointed brougham and liveried servants.

　　He turned his back on the green walls and the dark oaks without anyfeeling of regret or resentment. After a little while he began to thinkof his adventures with pleasure; the ladder by which he had mounted haddisappeared, but he was safe on the height. By the chance fancy of abeautiful girl he had been redeemed from a world of misery and torture,the world of external things into which he had come a stranger, by whichhe had been tormented. He looked back at a kind of vision of himself seenas he was a year before, a pitiable creature burning and twisting on thehot coals of the pit, crying lamentably to the laughing bystanders forbut one drop of cold water wherewith to cool his tongue. He confessed tohimself, with some contempt, that he had been a social being, dependingfor his happiness on the goodwill of others; he had tried hard to write,chiefly, it was true, from love of the art, but a little from a socialmotive. He had imagined that a written book and the praise of responsiblejournals would ensure him the respect of the county people. It was aquaint idea, and he saw the lamentable fallacies naked; in the firstplace, a painstaking artist in words was not respected by therespectable; secondly, books should not be written with the object ofgaining the goodwill of the landed and commercial interests; thirdly andchiefly, no man should in any way depend on another.

　　From this utter darkness, from danger of madness, the ever dear and sweetAnnie had rescued him. Very beautifully and fitly, as Lucian thought, shehad done her work without any desire to benefit him, she had simplywilled to gratify her own passion, and in doing this had handed to himthe priceless secret. And he, on his side, had reversed the process;merely to make himself a splendid offering for the acceptance of hissweetheart, he had cast aside the vain world, and had found the truth,which now remained with him, precious and enduring.

　　And since the news of the marriage he found that his worship of her hadby no means vanished; rather in his heart was the eternal treasure of ahappy love, untarnished and spotless; it would be like a mirror of goldwithout alloy, bright and lustrous for ever. For Lucian, it was no defectin the woman that she was desirous and faithless; he had not conceived anaffection for certain moral or intellectual accidents, but for the verywoman. Guided by the self-evident axiom that humanity is to be judged byliterature, and not literature by humanity, he detected the analogybetween Lycidas and Annie. Only the dullard would object to thenauseous cant of the one, or to the indiscretions of the other. A sobercritic might say that the man who could generalize Herbert and Laud,Donne and Herrick, Sanderson and Juxon, Hammond and Lancelot Andrewesinto "our corrupted Clergy" must be either an imbecile or a scoundrel, orprobably both. The judgment would be perfectly true, but as a criticismof Lycidas it would be a piece of folly. In the case of the woman onecould imagine the attitude of the conventional lover; of the chevalierwho, with his tongue in his cheek, "reverences and respects" all women,and coming home early in the morning writes a leading article on StEnglish Girl. Lucian, on the other hand, felt profoundly grateful to thedelicious Annie, because she had at precisely the right momentvoluntarily removed her image from his way. He confessed to himself that,latterly, he had a little dreaded her return as an interruption; he hadshivered at the thought that their relations would become what was soterribly called an "intrigue" or "affair." There would be all thethreadbare and common stratagems, the vulgarity of secret assignations,and an atmosphere suggesting the period of Mr. Thomas Moore and LordByron and "segars." Lucian had been afraid of all this; he had feared lestlove itself should destroy love.

　　He considered that now, freed from the torment of the body, leavinguntasted the green water that makes thirst more burning, he was perfectlyinitiated in the true knowledge of the splendid and glorious love. Thereseemed to him a monstrous paradox in the assertion that there could be notrue love without a corporal presence of the beloved; even the popularsayings of "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," and "familiarity breedscontempt," witnessed to the contrary. He thought, sighing, and withcompassion, of the manner in which men are continually led astray by thecheat of the senses. In order that the unborn might still be added to theborn, nature had inspired men with the wild delusion that the bodilycompanionship of the lover and the beloved was desirable above allthings, and so, by the false show of pleasure, the human race was chainedto vanity, and doomed to an eternal thirst for the non-existent.

　　Again and again he gave thanks for his own escape; he had been set freefrom a life of vice and sin and folly, from all the dangers and illusionsthat are most dreaded by the wise. He laughed as he remembered what wouldbe the common view of the situation. An ordinary lover would suffer allthe sting of sorrow and contempt; there would be grief for a lostmistress, and rage at her faithlessness, and hate in the heart; onefoolish passion driving on another, and driving the man to ruin. For whatwould be commonly called the real woman he now cared nothing; if he hadheard that she had died in her farm in Utter Gwent, he would haveexperienced only a passing sorrow, such as he might feel at the death ofany one he had once known. But he did not think of the young farmer'swife as the real Annie; he did not think of the frost-bitten leaves inwinter as the real rose. Indeed, the life of many reminded him of theflowers; perhaps more especially of those flowers which to all appearanceare for many years but dull and dusty clumps of green, and suddenly, inone night, burst into the flame of blossom, and fill all the misty lawnswith odor; till the morning. It was in that night that the flower lived,not through the long unprofitable years; and, in like manner, many humanlives, he thought, were born in the evening and dead before the coming ofday. But he had preserved the precious flower in all its glory, notsuffering it to wither in the hard light, but keeping it in a secretplace, where it could never be destroyed. Truly now, and for the firsttime, he possessed Annie, as a man possesses the gold which he has dugfrom the rock and purged of its baseness.

　　He was musing over these things when a piece of news, very strange andunexpected, arrived at the rectory. A distant, almost a mythicalrelative, known from childhood as "Cousin Edward in the Isle of Wight,"had died, and by some strange freak had left Lucian two thousand pounds.It was a pleasure to give his father five hundred pounds, and the rectoron his side forgot for a couple of days to lean his head on his hand.From the rest of the capital, which was well invested, Lucian found hewould derive something between sixty and seventy pounds a year, and hisold desires for literature and a refuge in the murmuring streets returnedto him. He longed to be free from the incantations that surrounded him inthe country, to work and live in a new atmosphere; and so, with manygood wishes from his father, he came to the retreat in the waste placesof London.

　　He was in high spirits when he found the square, clean room, horriblyfurnished, in the by-street that branched from the main road, andadvanced in an unlovely sweep to the mud pits and the desolation thatwas neither town nor country. On every side monotonous grey streets, eachhouse the replica of its neighbor, to the east an unexplored wilderness,north and west and south the brickfields and market-gardens, everywherethe ruins of the country, the tracks where sweet lanes had been,gangrened stumps of trees, the relics of hedges, here and there an oakstripped of its bark, white and haggard and leprous, like a corpse. Andthe air seemed always grey, and the smoke from the brickfields was grey.

　　At first he scarcely realized the quarter into which chance had led him.His only thought was of the great adventure of letters in which heproposed to engage, and his first glance round his "bed-sitting-room"showed him that there was no piece of furniture suitable for his purpose.The table, like the rest of the suite, was of bird's-eye maple; but themaker seemed to have penetrated the druidic secret of the rocking-stone,the thing was in a state of unstable equilibrium perpetually. For somedays he wandered through the streets, inspecting the second-handfurniture shops, and at last, in a forlorn byway, found an old Japanesebureau, dishonored and forlorn, standing amongst rusty bedsteads, sorrychina, and all the refuse of homes dead and desolate. The bureau pleasedhim in spite of its grime and grease and dirt. Inlaid mother-of-pearl,the gleam of lacquer dragons in red gold, and hints of curious designshone through the film of neglect and ill-usage, and when the woman ofthe shop showed him the drawers and well and pigeon-holes, he saw thatit would be an apt instrument for his studies.

　　The bureau was carried to his room and replaced the "bird's-eye" tableunder the gas-jet. As Lucian arranged what papers he had accumulated: thesketches of hopeless experiments, shreds and tatters of stories begunbut never completed, outlines of plots, two or three notebooks scribbledthrough and through with impressions of the abandoned hills, he felt athrill of exaltation at the prospect of work to be accomplished, of anew world all open before him.

　　He set out on the adventure with a fury of enthusiasm; his last thoughtat night when all the maze of streets was empty and silent was of theproblem, and his dreams ran on phrases, and when he awoke in the morninghe was eager to get back to his desk. He immersed himself in a minute,almost a microscopic analysis of fine literature. It was no longerenough, as in the old days, to feel the charm and incantation of a lineor a word; he wished to penetrate the secret, to understand something ofthe wonderful suggestion, all apart from the sense, that seemed to himthe differentia of literature, as distinguished from the long folliesof "character-drawing," "psychological analysis," and all the stuff thatwent to make the three-volume novel of commerce.

　　He found himself curiously strengthened by the change from the hills tothe streets. There could be no doubt, he thought, that living a lonelylife, interested only in himself and his own thoughts, he had become in ameasure inhuman. The form of external things, black depths in woods,pools in lonely places, those still valleys curtained by hills on everyside, sounding always with the ripple of their brooks, had become to himan influence like that of a drug, giving a certain peculiar color andoutline to his thoughts. And from early boyhood there had been anotherstrange flavor in his life, the dream of the old Roman world, thosecurious impressions that he had gathered from the white walls ofCaermaen, and from the looming bastions of the fort. It was in realitythe subconscious fancies of many years that had rebuilt the golden city,and had shown him the vine-trellis and the marbles and the sunlight inthe garden of Avallaunius. And the rapture of love had made it all sovivid and warm with life, that even now, when he let his pen drop, therich noise of the tavern and the chant of the theatre sounded above themurmur of the streets. Looking back, it was as much a part of his life ashis schooldays, and the tessellated pavements were as real as the squareof faded carpet beneath his feet.

　　But he felt that he had escaped. He could now survey those splendid andlovely visions from without, as if he read of opium dreams, and he nolonger dreaded a weird suggestion that had once beset him, that his verysoul was being molded into the hills, and passing into the black mirrorof still waterpools. He had taken refuge in the streets, in the harbor ofa modern suburb, from the vague, dreaded magic that had charmed hislife. Whenever he felt inclined to listen to the old wood-whisper or tothe singing of the fauns he bent more earnestly to his work, turning adeaf ear to the incantations.

　　In the curious labor of the bureau he found refreshment that wascontinually renewed. He experienced again, and with a far more violentimpulse, the enthusiasm that had attended the writing of his book a yearor two before, and so, perhaps, passed from one drug to another. It was,indeed, with something of rapture that he imagined the great processionof years all to be devoted to the intimate analysis of words, to theconstruction of the sentence, as if it were a piece of jewelry or mosaic.

　　Sometimes, in the pauses of the work, he would pace up and down his cell,looking out of the window now and again and gazing for an instant intothe melancholy street. As the year advanced the days grew more and moremisty, and he found himself the inhabitant of a little island wreathedabout with the waves of a white and solemn sea. In the afternoon the fogwould grow denser, shutting out not only sight but sound; the shriek ofthe garden gates, the jangling of the tram-bell echoed as if from a farway. Then there were days of heavy incessant rain; he could see a greydrifting sky and the drops plashing in the street, and the houses alldripping and saddened with wet.

　　He cured himself of one great aversion. He was no longer nauseated at thesight of a story begun and left unfinished. Formerly, even when an idearose in his mind bright and wonderful, he had always approached the paperwith a feeling of sickness and dislike, remembering all the hopelessbeginnings he had made. But now he understood that to begin a romance wasalmost a separate and special art, a thing apart from the story, to bepracticed with sedulous care. Whenever an opening scene occurred to himhe noted it roughly in a book, and he devoted many long winter eveningsto the elaboration of these beginnings. Sometimes the first impressionwould yield only a paragraph or a sentence, and once or twice but asplendid and sonorous word, which seemed to Lucian all dim and richwith unsurmised adventure. But often he was able to write three or fourvivid pages, studying above all things the hint and significance of thewords and actions, striving to work into the lines the atmosphere ofexpectation and promise, and the murmur of wonderful events to come.

　　In this one department of his task the labor seemed almost endless. Hewould finish a few pages and then rewrite them, using the same incidentand nearly the same words, but altering that indefinite something whichis scarcely so much style as manner, or atmosphere. He was astonished atthe enormous change that was thus effected, and often, though he himselfhad done the work, he could scarcely describe in words how it was done.But it was clear that in this art of manner, or suggestion, lay all thechief secrets of literature, that by it all the great miracles wereperformed. Clearly it was not style, for style in itself wasuntranslatable, but it was that high theurgic magic that made the EnglishDon Quixote, roughly traduced by some Jervas, perhaps the best of allEnglish books. And it was the same element that made the journey ofRoderick Random to London, so ostensibly a narrative of coarse jokesand common experiences and burlesque manners, told in no very choicediction, essentially a wonderful vision of the eighteenth century,carrying to one's very nostrils the aroma of the Great North Road,iron-bound under black frost, darkened beneath shuddering woods, hauntedby highwaymen, with an adventure waiting beyond every turn, and great oldechoing inns in the midst of lonely winter lands.

　　It was this magic that Lucian sought for his opening chapters; he triedto find that quality that gives to words something beyond their sound andbeyond their meaning, that in the first lines of a book should whisperthings unintelligible but all significant. Often he worked for many hourswithout success, and the grim wet dawn once found him still searching forhieroglyphic sentences, for words mystical, symbolic. On the shelves, inthe upper part of his bureau, he had placed the books which, howevervarious as to matter, seemed to have a part in this curious quality ofsuggestion, and in that sphere which might almost be called supernatural.To these books he often had recourse, when further effort appearedaltogether hopeless, and certain pages in Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poehad the power of holding him in a trance of delight, subject to emotionsand impressions which he knew to transcend altogether the realm of theformal understanding. Such lines as:

　　Bottomless vales and boundless floods,

　　And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,

　　With forms that no man can discover

　　For the dews that drip all over;