VI

by Arthur Machen

　　It was in this winter after his coming to the grey street that Lucianfirst experienced the pains of desolation. He had all his life known thedelights of solitude, and had acquired that habit of mind which makes aman find rich company on the bare hillside and leads him into the heartof the wood to meditate by the dark waterpools. But now in the blankinterval when he was forced to shut up his desk, the sense of lonelinessoverwhelmed him and filled him with unutterable melancholy. On such dayshe carried about with him an unceasing gnawing torment in his breast; theanguish of the empty page awaiting him in his bureau, and the knowledgethat it was worse than useless to attempt the work. He had fallen intothe habit of always using this phrase "the work" to denote the adventureof literature; it had grown in his mind to all the austere and gravesignificance of "the great work" on the lips of the alchemists; itincluded every trifling and laborious page and the vague magnificentfancies that sometimes hovered below him. All else had become mereby-play, unimportant, trivial; the work was the end, and the means andthe food of his life—it raised him up in the morning to renew thestruggle, it was the symbol which charmed him as he lay down at night.All through the hours of toil at the bureau he was enchanted, and when hewent out and explored the unknown coasts, the one thought allured him,and was the colored glass between his eyes and the world. Then as he drewnearer home his steps would quicken, and the more weary and grey thewalk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of his hermitage and of thecurious difficulties that awaited him there. But when, suddenly andwithout warning, the faculty disappeared, when his mind seemed a hopelesswaste from which nothing could arise, then he became subject toa misery so piteous that the barbarians themselves would have been sorryfor him. He had known some foretaste of these bitter and inexpressiblegriefs in the old country days, but then he had immediately taken refugein the hills, he had rushed to the dark woods as to an anodyne, lettinghis heart drink in all the wonder and magic of the wild land. Now inthese days of January, in the suburban street, there was no such refuge.

　　He had been working steadily for some weeks, well enough satisfied on thewhole with the daily progress, glad to awake in the morning, and to readover what he had written on the night before. The new year opened withfaint and heavy weather and a breathless silence in the air, but in a fewdays the great frost set in. Soon the streets began to suggest theappearance of a beleaguered city, the silence that had preceded thefrost deepened, and the mist hung over the earth like a dense whitesmoke. Night after night the cold increased, and people seemed unwillingto go abroad, till even the main thoroughfares were empty and deserted,as if the inhabitants were lying close in hiding. It was at this dismaltime that Lucian found himself reduced to impotence. There was a suddenbreak in his thought, and when he wrote on valiantly, hoping againsthope, he only grew more aghast on the discovery of the imbecilities hehad committed to paper. He ground his teeth together and persevered, sickat heart, feeling as if all the world were fallen from under his feet,driving his pen on mechanically, till he was overwhelmed. He saw thestuff he had done without veil or possible concealment, a lamentable andwretched sheaf of verbiage, worse, it seemed, than the efforts of hisboyhood. He was not longer tautological, he avoided tautology with theinfernal art of a leader-writer, filling his wind bags and mincing wordsas if he had been a trained journalist on the staff of the Daily Post.There seemed all the matter of an insufferable tragedy in these thoughts;that his patient and enduring toil was in vain, that practice went fornothing, and that he had wasted the labor of Milton to accomplish thetenth-rate. Unhappily he could not "give in"; the longing, the fury forthe work burnt within him like a burning fire; he lifted up his eyes indespair.

　　It was then, while he knew that no one could help him, that he languishedfor help, and then, though he was aware that no comfort was possible, hefervently wished to be comforted. The only friend he had was his father,and he knew that his father would not even understand his distress. Forhim, always, the printed book was the beginning and end of literature;the agony of the maker, his despair and sickness, were as accursed as thepains of labor. He was ready to read and admire the work of the greatSmith, but he did not wish to hear of the period when the great Smith hadwrithed and twisted like a scotched worm, only hoping to be put out ofhis misery, to go mad or die, to escape somehow from the bitter pains.And Lucian knew no one else. Now and then he read in the paper the fameof the great littérateurs; the Gypsies were entertaining the Prince ofWales, the Jolly Beggars were dining with the Lord Mayor, the Old Mumperswere mingling amicably and gorgeously with the leading members of theStock Exchange. He was so unfortunate as to know none of these gentlemen,but it hardly seemed likely that they could have done much for him in anycase. Indeed, in his heart, he was certain that help and comfort fromwithout were in the nature of things utterly impossible, his ruin andgrief were within, and only his own assistance could avail. He tried toreassure himself, to believe that his torments were a proof of hisvocation, that the facility of the novelist who stood six years deep incontracts to produce romances was a thing wholly undesirable, but all thewhile he longed for but a drop of that inexhaustible fluency which heprofessed to despise.

　　He drove himself out from that dreary contemplation of the white paperand the idle pen. He went into the frozen and deserted streets, hopingthat he might pluck the burning coal from his heart, but the fire wasnot quenched. As he walked furiously along the grim iron roads he fanciedthat those persons who passed him cheerfully on their way to friends andfriendly hearths shrank from him into the mists as they went by. Lucianimagined that the fire of his torment and anguish must in some way glowvisibly about him; he moved, perhaps, in a nimbus that proclaimed theblackness and the flames within. He knew, of course, that in misery hehad grown delirious, that the well-coated, smooth-hatted personages wholoomed out of the fog upon him were in reality shuddering only withcold, but in spite of common sense he still conceived that he saw ontheir faces an evident horror and disgust, and something of therepugnance that one feels at the sight of a venomous snake, half-killed,trailing its bleeding vileness out of sight. By design Lucian tried tomake for remote and desolate places, and yet when he had succeeded intouching on the open country, and knew that the icy shadow hoveringthrough the mist was a field, he longed for some sound and murmur oflife, and turned again to roads where pale lamps were glimmering, and thedancing flame of firelight shone across the frozen shrubs. And the sightof these homely fires, the thought of affection and consolation waitingby them, stung him the more sharply perhaps because of the contrast withhis own chills and weariness and helpless sickness, and chiefly becausehe knew that he had long closed an everlasting door between his heart andsuch felicities. If those within had come out and had called him by hisname to enter and be comforted, it would have been quite unavailing,since between them and him there was a great gulf fixed. Perhaps for thefirst time he realized that he had lost the art of humanity for ever. Hehad thought when he closed his ears to the wood whisper and changed thefauns' singing for the murmur of the streets, the black pools for theshadows and amber light of London, that he had put off the old life, andhad turned his soul to healthy activities, but the truth was that he hadmerely exchanged one drug for another. He could not be human, and hewondered whether there were some drop of the fairy blood in his body thatmade him foreign and a stranger in the world.

　　He did not surrender to desolation without repeated struggles. He stroveto allure himself to his desk by the promise of some easy task; he wouldnot attempt invention, but he had memoranda and rough jottings of ideasin his note-books, and he would merely amplify the suggestions ready tohis hand. But it was hopeless, again and again it was hopeless. As heread over his notes, trusting that he would find some hint that mightlight up the dead fires, and kindle again that pure flame of enthusiasm,he found how desperately his fortune had fallen. He could see no light,no color in the lines he had scribbled with eager trembling fingers; heremembered how splendid all these things had been when he wrote themdown, but now they were meaningless, faded into grey. The few words hehad dashed on to the paper, enraptured at the thought of the happy hoursthey promised, had become mere jargon, and when he understood the idea itseemed foolish, dull, unoriginal. He discovered something at last thatappeared to have a grain of promise, and determined to do his best to putit into shape, but the first paragraph appalled him; it might have beenwritten by an unintelligent schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, andshut and locked his desk, heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart.For the rest of that day he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe afterpipe in the hope of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes. The air in theroom became blue and thick with smoke; it was bitterly cold, and hewrapped himself up in his great-coat and drew the counterpane over him.The night came on and the window darkened, and at last he fell asleep.

　　He renewed the effort at intervals, only to plunge deeper into misery. Hefelt the approaches of madness, and knew that his only hope was to walktill he was physically exhausted, so that he might come home almostfainting with fatigue, but ready to fall asleep the moment he got intobed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoidthought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper, with theadvertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness of thelight that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the muffledvoices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to make outthe design that had once colored the faded carpet on the floor, andwondered about the dead artist in Japan, the adorner of his bureau. Hespeculated as to what his thoughts had been as he inserted the rainbowmother-of-pearl and made that great flight of shining birds, dippingtheir wings as they rose from the reeds, or how he had conceived thelacquer dragons in red gold, and the fantastic houses in the garden ofpeach-trees. But sooner or later the oppression of his grief returned,the loud shriek and clang of the garden-gate, the warning bell of somepassing bicyclist steering through the fog, the noise of his pipe fallingto the floor, would suddenly awaken him to the sense of misery. He knewthat it was time to go out; he could not bear to sit still and suffer.Sometimes she cut a slice of bread and put it in his pocket, sometimes hetrusted to the chance of finding a public-house, where he could have asandwich and a glass of beer. He turned always from the main streets andlost himself in the intricate suburban byways, willing to be engulfed inthe infinite whiteness of the mist.

　　The roads had stiffened into iron ridges, the fences and trees wereglittering with frost crystals, everything was of strange and alteredaspect. Lucian walked on and on through the maze, now in a circle ofshadowy villas, awful as the buried streets of Herculaneum, now in lanesdipping onto open country, that led him past great elm-trees whose whiteboughs were all still, and past the bitter lonely fields where the mistseemed to fade away into grey darkness. As he wandered along theseunfamiliar and ghastly paths he became the more convinced of his utterremoteness from all humanity, he allowed that grotesque suggestion ofthere being something visibly amiss in his outward appearance to growupon him, and often he looked with a horrible expectation into the facesof those who passed by, afraid lest his own senses gave him falseintelligence, and that he had really assumed some frightful and revoltingshape. It was curious that, partly by his own fault, and largely, nodoubt, through the operation of mere coincidence, he was once or twicestrongly confirmed in this fantastic delusion. He came one day intoa lonely and unfrequented byway, a country lane falling into ruin, butstill fringed with elms that had formed an avenue leading to the oldmanor-house. It was now the road of communication between two faroutlying suburbs, and on these winter nights lay as black, dreary, anddesolate as a mountain track. Soon after the frost began, a gentleman hadbeen set upon in this lane as he picked his way between the corner wherethe bus had set him down, and his home where the fire was blazing, andhis wife watched the clock. He was stumbling uncertainly through thegloom, growing a little nervous because the walk seemed so long, andpeering anxiously for the lamp at the end of his street, when the twofootpads rushed at him out of the fog. One caught him from behind, theother struck him with a heavy bludgeon, and as he lay senseless theyrobbed him of his watch and money, and vanished across the fields. Thenext morning all the suburb rang with the story; the unfortunate merchanthad been grievously hurt, and wives watched their husbands go out in themorning with sickening apprehension, not knowing what might happen atnight. Lucian of course was ignorant of all these rumors, and struck intothe gloomy by-road without caring where he was or whither the way wouldlead him.

　　He had been driven out that day as with whips, another hopeless attemptto return to the work had agonised him, and existence seemed anintolerable pain. As he entered the deeper gloom, where the fog hungheavily, he began, half consciously, to gesticulate; he felt convulsedwith torment and shame, and it was a sorry relief to clench his nailsinto his palm and strike the air as he stumbled heavily along, bruisinghis feet against the frozen ruts and ridges. His impotence was hideous,he said to himself, and he cursed himself and his life, breaking out intoa loud oath, and stamping on the ground. Suddenly he was shocked at ascream of terror, it seemed in his very ear, and looking up he saw for amoment a woman gazing at him out of the mist, her features distorted andstiff with fear. A momentary convulsion twitched her arms into the uglymimicry of a beckoning gesture, and she turned and ran for dear life,howling like a beast.

　　Lucian stood still in the road while the woman's cries grew faint anddied away. His heart was chilled within him as the significance of thisstrange incident became clear. He remembered nothing of his violentgestures; he had not known at the time that he had sworn out loud, orthat he was grinding his teeth with impotent rage. He only thought ofthat ringing scream, of the horrible fear on the white face that hadlooked upon him, of the woman's headlong flight from his presence. Hestood trembling and shuddering, and in a little while he was feeling hisface, searching for some loathsome mark, for the stigmata of evilbranding his forehead. He staggered homewards like a drunken man, andwhen he came into the Uxbridge Road some children saw him and calledafter him as he swayed and caught at the lamp-post. When he got to hisroom he sat down at first in the dark. He did not dare to light the gas.Everything in the room was indistinct, but he shut his eyes as he passedthe dressing-table, and sat in a corner, his face turned to the wall. Andwhen at last he gathered courage and the flame leapt hissing from thejet, he crept piteously towards the glass, and ducked his head, crouchingmiserably, and struggling with his terrors before he could look at hisown image.

　　To the best of his power he tried to deliver himself from these moregrotesque fantasies; he assured himself that there was nothing terrificin his countenance but sadness, that his face was like the face of othermen. Yet he could not forget that reflection he had seen in the woman'seyes, how the surest mirrors had shown him a horrible dread, her soulitself quailing and shuddering at an awful sight. Her scream rang andrang in his ears; she had fled away from him as if he offered some fatedarker than death.

　　He looked again and again into the glass, tortured by a hideousuncertainty. His senses told him there was nothing amiss, yet he had hada proof, and yet, as he peered most earnestly, there was, it seemed,something strange and not altogether usual in the expression of the eyes.Perhaps it might be the unsteady flare of the gas, or perhaps a flaw inthe cheap looking-glass, that gave some slight distortion to the image.He walked briskly up and down the room and tried to gaze steadily,indifferently, into his own face. He would not allow himself to bemisguided by a word. When he had pronounced himself incapable ofhumanity, he had only meant that he could not enjoy the simple things ofcommon life. A man was not necessarily monstrous, merely because he didnot appreciate high tea, a quiet chat about the neighbors, and a happynoisy evening with the children. But with what message, then, did heappear charged that the woman's mouth grew so stark? Her hands had jerkedup as if they had been pulled with frantic wires; she seemed for theinstant like a horrible puppet. Her scream was a thing from the nocturnalSabbath.

　　He lit a candle and held it close up to the glass so that his own faceglared white at him, and the reflection of the room became an indistinctdarkness. He saw nothing but the candle flame and his own shining eyes,and surely they were not as the eyes of common men. As he put down thelight, a sudden suggestion entered his mind, and he drew a quick breath,amazed at the thought. He hardly knew whether to rejoice or to shudder.For the thought he conceived was this: that he had mistaken all thecircumstances of the adventure, and had perhaps repulsed a sister whowould have welcomed him to the Sabbath.

　　He lay awake all night, turning from one dreary and frightful thought tothe other, scarcely dozing for a few hours when the dawn came. He triedfor a moment to argue with himself when he got up; knowing that his truelife was locked up in the bureau, he made a desperate attempt to drivethe phantoms and hideous shapes from his mind. He was assured that hissalvation was in the work, and he drew the key from his pocket, and madeas if he would have opened the desk. But the nausea, the remembrances ofrepeated and utter failure, were too powerful. For many days he hungabout the Manor Lane, half dreading, half desiring another meeting, andhe swore he would not again mistake the cry of rapture, nor repulse thearms extended in a frenzy of delight. In those days he dreamed of somedark place where they might celebrate and make the marriage of theSabbath, with such rites as he had dared to imagine.

　　It was perhaps only the shock of a letter from his father that rescuedhim from these evident approaches to madness. Mr. Taylor wrote how theyhad missed him at Christmas, how the farmers had inquired after him, ofthe homely familiar things that recalled his boyhood, his mother's voice,the friendly fireside, and the good old fashions that had nurtured him.He remembered that he had once been a boy, loving the cake and puddingsand the radiant holly, and all the seventeenth-century mirth thatlingered on in the ancient farmhouses. And there came to him the moreholy memory of Mass on Christmas morning. How sweet the dark and frostyearth had smelt as he walked beside his mother down the winding lane, andfrom the stile near the church they had seen the world glimmering to thedawn, and the wandering lanthorns advancing across the fields. Then hehad come into the church and seen it shining with candles and holly, andhis father in pure vestments of white linen sang the longing music of theliturgy at the altar, and the people answered him, till the sun rose withthe grave notes of the Paternoster, and a red beam stole through thechancel window.

　　The worst horror left him as he recalled the memory of these dear andholy things. He cast away the frightful fancy that the scream he hadheard was a shriek of joy, that the arms, rigidly jerked out, invited himto an embrace. Indeed, the thought that he had longed for such an obsceneillusion, that he had gloated over the recollection of that stark mouth,filled him with disgust. He resolved that his senses were deceived, thathe had neither seen nor heard, but had for a moment externalized his ownslumbering and morbid dreams. It was perhaps necessary that he should bewretched, that his efforts should be discouraged, but he would not yieldutterly to madness.

　　Yet when he went abroad with such good resolutions, it was hard toresist an influence that seemed to come from without and within. He didnot know it, but people were everywhere talking of the great frost, ofthe fog that lay heavy on London, making the streets dark and terrible,of strange birds that came fluttering about the windows in the silentsquares. The Thames rolled out duskily, bearing down the jarringice-blocks, and as one looked on the black water from the bridges it waslike a river in a northern tale. To Lucian it all seemed mythical, of thesame substance as his own fantastic thoughts. He rarely saw a newspaper,and did not follow from day to day the systematic readings of thethermometer, the reports of ice-fairs, of coaches driven across the riverat Hampton, of the skating on the fens; and hence the iron roads, thebeleaguered silence and the heavy folds of mist appeared as amazing as apicture, significant, appalling. He could not look out and see a commonsuburban street foggy and dull, nor think of the inhabitants as at workor sitting cheerfully eating nuts about their fires; he saw a vision of agrey road vanishing, of dim houses all empty and deserted, and thesilence seemed eternal. And when he went out and passed through streetafter street, all void, by the vague shapes of houses that appeared for amoment and were then instantly swallowed up, it seemed to him as if hehad strayed into a city that had suffered some inconceivable doom, thathe alone wandered where myriads had once dwelt. It was a town as great asBabylon, terrible as Rome, marvelous as Lost Atlantis, set in the midstof a white wilderness surrounded by waste places. It was impossible toescape from it; if he skulked between hedges, and crept away beyond thefrozen pools, presently the serried stony lines confronted him like anarmy, and far and far they swept away into the night, as some fabled wallthat guards an empire in the vast dim East. Or in that distorting mediumof the mist, changing all things, he imagined that he trod an infinitedesolate plain, abandoned from ages, but circled and encircled withdolmen and menhir that loomed out at him, gigantic, terrible. All Londonwas one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stonescircled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, everyinitiation eternal loss. Or perhaps he was astray for ever in a land ofgrey rocks. He had seen the light of home, the flicker of the fire on thewalls; close at hand, it seemed, was the open door, and he had heard dearvoices calling to him across the gloom, but he had just missed the path.The lamps vanished, the voices sounded thin and died away, and yet heknew that those within were waiting, that they could not bear to closethe door, but waited, calling his name, while he had missed the way, andwandered in the pathless desert of the grey rocks. Fantastic, hideous,they beset him wherever he turned, piled up into strange shapes, prickedwith sharp peaks, assuming the appearance of goblin towers, swelling intoa vague dome like a fairy rath, huge and terrible. And as one dream fadedinto another, so these last fancies were perhaps the most tormenting andpersistent; the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice of somehalf-human, malignant race who swarmed in hiding, ready to bear him awayinto the heart of their horrible hills. It was awful to think that allhis goings were surrounded, that in the darkness he was watched andsurveyed, that every step but led him deeper and deeper into thelabyrinth.

　　When, of an evening, he was secure in his room, the blind drawn down andthe gas flaring, he made vigorous efforts toward sanity. It was not ofhis free will that he allowed terror to overmaster him, and he desirednothing better than a placid and harmless life, full of work and clearthinking. He knew that he deluded himself with imagination, that he hadbeen walking through London suburbs and not through Pandemonium, and thatif he could but unlock his bureau all those ugly forms would be resolvedinto the mist. But it was hard to say if he consoled himself effectuallywith such reflections, for the return to common sense meant also thereturn to the sharp pangs of defeat. It recalled him to the bitter themeof his own inefficiency, to the thought that he only desired one thingof life, and that this was denied him. He was willing to endure theausterities of a monk in a severe cloister, to suffer cold, to be hungry,to be lonely and friendless, to forbear all the consolation of friendlyspeech, and to be glad of all these things, if only he might be allowedto illuminate the manuscript in quietness. It seemed a hideousinsufferable cruelty, that he should so fervently desire that which hecould never gain.

　　He was led back to the old conclusion; he had lost the sense of humanity,he was wretched because he was an alien and a stranger amongst citizens.It seemed probable that the enthusiasm of literature, as he understoodit, the fervent desire for the fine art, had in it something of theinhuman, and dissevered the enthusiast from his fellow-creatures. It waspossible that the barbarian suspected as much, that by some slowprocess of rumination he had arrived at his fixed and inveterateimpression, by no means a clear reasoned conviction; the averagePhilistine, if pressed for the reasons of his dislike, would eitherbecome inarticulate, ejaculating "faugh" and "pah" like an old-fashionedScots Magazine, or else he would give some imaginary and absurd reason,alleging that all "littery men" were poor, that composers never cut theirhair, that painters were rarely public-school men, that sculptorscouldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly theseimbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artistfrom a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien tohis nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," anddismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usuallyimpelled the black savages to dismiss the white man on an even longerjourney.

　　Lucian was not especially interested in this hatred of the barbarian forthe maker, except from this point, that it confirmed him in his beliefthat the love of art dissociated the man from the race. One touch of artmade the whole world alien, but surely miseries of the civilized man castamongst savages were not so much caused by dread of their ferocity as bythe terror of his own thoughts; he would perhaps in his last despairleave his retreat and go forth to perish at their hands, so that he mightat least die in company, and hear the sound of speech before death. AndLucian felt most keenly that in his case there was a double curse; he wasas isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as his reviewers. Theconsolation of the work had failed him, and he was suspended in the voidbetween two worlds.

　　It was no doubt the composite effect of his failures, his loneliness ofsoul, and solitude of life, that had made him invest those common streetswith such grim and persistent terrors. He had perhaps yielded to atemptation without knowing that he had been tempted, and, in the mannerof De Quincey, had chosen the subtle in exchange for the more tangiblepains. Unconsciously, but still of free will, he had preferred thesplendor and the gloom of a malignant vision before his corporal pains,before the hard reality of his own impotence. It was better to dwell invague melancholy, to stray in the forsaken streets of a city doomed fromages, to wander amidst forlorn and desperate rocks than to awake to agnawing and ignoble torment, to confess that a house of business wouldhave been more suitable and more practical, that he had promised what hecould never perform. Even as he struggled to beat back the phantasmagoriaof the mist, and resolved that he would no longer make all the streets astage of apparitions, he hardly realized what he had done, or that theghosts he had called might depart and return again.

　　He continued his long walks, always with the object of producing aphysical weariness and exhaustion that would enable him to sleep ofnights. But even when he saw the foggy and deserted avenues in theirproper shape, and allowed his eyes to catch the pale glimmer of thelamps, and the dancing flame of the firelight, he could not rid himselfof the impression that he stood afar off, that between those hearths andhimself there was a great gulf fixed. As he paced down the footpath hecould often see plainly across the frozen shrubs into the homely andcheerful rooms. Sometimes, late in the evening, he caught a passingglimpse of the family at tea, father, mother, and children laughing andtalking together, well pleased with each other's company. Sometimes awife or a child was standing by the garden gate peering anxiously throughthe fog, and the sight of it all, all the little details, the hideous butcomfortable armchairs turned ready to the fire, maroon-red curtains beingdrawn close to shut out the ugly night, the sudden blaze and illuminationas the fire was poked up so that it might be cheerful for father; thesetrivial and common things were acutely significant. They brought back tohim the image of a dead boy—himself. They recalled the shabby old"parlor" in the country, with its shabby old furniture and fading carpet,and renewed a whole atmosphere of affection and homely comfort. Hismother would walk to the end of the drive and look out for him when hewas late (wandering then about the dark woodlands); on winter eveningsshe would make the fire blaze, and have his slippers warming by thehearth, and there was probably buttered toast "as a treat." He dwelt onall these insignificant petty circumstances, on the genial glow and lightafter the muddy winter lanes, on the relish of the buttered toast and thesmell of the hot tea, on the two old cats curled fast asleep before thefender, and made them instruments of exquisite pain and regret. Each ofthese strange houses that he passed was identified in his mind with hisown vanished home; all was prepared and ready as in the old days, but hewas shut out, judged and condemned to wander in the frozen mist, withweary feet, anguished and forlorn, and they that would pass from withinto help him could not, neither could he pass to them. Again, for thehundredth time, he came back to the sentence: he could not gain the artof letters and he had lost the art of humanity. He saw the vanity of allhis thoughts; he was an ascetic caring nothing for warmth andcheerfulness and the small comforts of life, and yet he allowed his mindto dwell on such things. If one of those passers-by, who walked briskly,eager for home, should have pitied him by some miracle and asked himto come in, it would have been worse than useless, yet he longed forpleasures that he could not have enjoyed. It was as if he were come to aplace of torment, where they who could not drink longed for water, wherethey who could feel no warmth shuddered in the eternal cold. He wasoppressed by the grim conceit that he himself still slept within thematted thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort. Hehad never come out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and nowstirred about the earth.

　　Beset by such ingenious terrors, it was not wonderful that outward eventsand common incidents should abet his fancies. He had succeeded one day inescaping from the mesh of the streets, and fell on a rough and narrowlane that stole into a little valley. For the moment he was in a somewhathappier mood; the afternoon sun glowed through the rolling mist, andthe air grew clearer. He saw quiet and peaceful fields, and a wooddescending in a gentle slope from an old farmstead of warm red brick. Thefarmer was driving the slow cattle home from the hill, and his loudhalloo to his dog came across the land a cheerful mellow note. Fromanother side a cart was approaching the clustered barns, hesitating,pausing while the great horses rested, and then starting again into lazymotion. In the well of the valley a wandering line of bushes showed wherea brook crept in and out amongst the meadows, and, as Lucian stood,lingering, on the bridge, a soft and idle breath ruffled through theboughs of a great elm. He felt soothed, as by calm music, and wonderedwhether it would not be better for him to live in some such quiet place,within reach of the streets and yet remote from them. It seemed a refugefor still thoughts; he could imagine himself sitting at rest beneath theblack yew tree in the farm garden, at the close of a summer day. He hadalmost determined that he would knock at the door and ask if they wouldtake him as a lodger, when he saw a child running towards him down thelane. It was a little girl, with bright curls tossing about her head,and, as she came on, the sunlight glowed upon her, illuminating herbrick-red frock and the yellow king-cups in her hat. She had run with hereyes on the ground, chirping and laughing to herself, and did not seeLucian till she was quite near him. She started and glanced into his eyesfor a moment, and began to cry; he stretched out his hand, and she ranfrom him screaming, frightened no doubt by what was to her a sudden andstrange apparition. He turned back towards London, and the mist foldedhim in its thick darkness, for on that evening it was tinged with black.It was only by the intensest strain of resolution that he did not yieldutterly to the poisonous anodyne which was always at hand. It had been adifficult struggle to escape from the mesh of the hills, from the musicof the fauns, and even now he was drawn by the memory of these oldallurements. But he felt that here, in his loneliness, he was in greaterdanger, and beset by a blacker magic. Horrible fancies rushed wantonlyinto his mind; he was not only ready to believe that something in hissoul sent a shudder through all that was simple and innocent, but he cametrembling home one Saturday night, believing, or half-believing, thathe was in communion with evil. He had passed through the clamorous andblatant crowd of the "high street," where, as one climbed the hill, theshops seemed all aflame, and the black night air glowed with the flaringgas-jets and the naphtha-lamps, hissing and wavering before the Februarywind. Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of theblazing public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above thesedoors were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blastof air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing thepeople. Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriekthat never stopped or paused, and, as a respond, a deeper, louder voiceroared to him from across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of hispiano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps danced mad figures around him,danced and flung up their legs till the rags dropped from some of them,and they still danced on. A flare of naphtha, burning with a rushingnoise, threw a light on one point of the circle, and Lucian watched alank girl of fifteen as she came round and round to the flash. She wasquite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away, and the crowd howledlaughter and applause at her. Her black hair poured down and leapt on herscarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt round the ring, laughing in Bacchicfrenzy, and led the orgy to triumph. People were crossing to and fro,jostling against each other, swarming about certain shops and stalls in adense dark mass that quivered and sent out feelers as if it were onewrithing organism. A little farther a group of young men, arm in arm,were marching down the roadway chanting some music-hall verse in fullchorus, so that it sounded like plainsong. An impossible hubbub, a hum ofvoices angry as swarming bees, the squeals of five or six girls who ranin and out, and dived up dark passages and darted back into the crowd;all these mingled together till his ears quivered. A young fellow wasplaying the concertina, and he touched the keys with such slow fingersthat the tune wailed solemn into a dirge; but there was nothing sostrange as the burst of sound that swelled out when the public-housedoors were opened.

　　He walked amongst these people, looked at their faces, and looked at thechildren amongst them. He had come out thinking that he would see theEnglish working class, "the best-behaved and the best-tempered crowd inthe world," enjoying the simple pleasure of the Saturday night'sshopping. Mother bought the joint for Sunday's dinner, and perhaps a pairof boots for father; father had an honest glass of beer, and the childrenwere given bags of sweets, and then all these worthy people went decentlyhome to their well-earned rest. De Quincey had enjoyed the sight in hisday, and had studied the rise and fall of onions and potatoes. Lucian,indeed, had desired to take these simple emotions as an opiate, to forgetthe fine fret and fantastic trouble of his own existence in plain thingsand the palpable joy of rest after labor. He was only afraid lest heshould be too sharply reproached by the sight of these men who foughtbravely year after year against starvation, who knew nothing of intricateand imagined grief, but only the weariness of relentless labor, of thelong battle for their wives and children. It would be pathetic, hethought, to see them content with so little, brightened by theexpectation of a day's rest and a good dinner, forced, even then, toreckon every penny, and to make their children laugh with halfpence.Either he would be ashamed before so much content, or else he would beagain touched by the sense of his inhumanity which could take no interestin the common things of life. But still he went to be at least taken outof himself, to be forced to look at another side of the world, so that hemight perhaps forget a little while his own sorrows.

　　He was fascinated by what he saw and heard. He wondered whether DeQuincey also had seen the same spectacle, and had concealed hisimpressions out of reverence for the average reader. Here there were nosimple joys of honest toilers, but wonderful orgies, that drew out hisheart to horrible music. At first the violence of sound and sight hadoverwhelmed him; the lights flaring in the night wind, the array ofnaphtha lamps, the black shadows, the roar of voices. The dance about thepiano-organ had been the first sign of an inner meaning, and the face ofthe dark girl as she came round and round to the flame had been amazingin its utter furious abandon. And what songs they were singing all aroundhim, and what terrible words rang out, only to excite peals of laughter.In the public-houses the workmen's wives, the wives of small tradesmen,decently dressed in black, were drinking their faces to a flaming red,and urging their husbands to drink more. Beautiful young women, flushedand laughing, put their arms round the men's necks and kissed them,and then held up the glass to their lips. In the dark corners, at theopenings of side streets, the children were talking together, instructingeach other, whispering what they had seen; a boy of fifteen was plying agirl of twelve with whisky, and presently they crept away. Lucian passedthem as they turned to go, and both looked at him. The boy laughed, andthe girl smiled quietly. It was above all in the faces around him that hesaw the most astounding things, the Bacchic fury unveiled and unashamed.To his eyes it seemed as if these revelers recognized him as a fellow,and smiled up in his face, aware that he was in the secret. Everyinstinct of religion, of civilization even, was swept away; they gazed atone another and at him, absolved of all scruples, children of the earthand nothing more. Now and then a couple detached themselves from theswarm, and went away into the darkness, answering the jeers and laughterof their friends as they vanished.

　　On the edge of the pavement, not far from where he was standing, Luciannoticed a tall and lovely young woman who seemed to be alone. She was inthe full light of a naphtha flame, and her bronze hair and flushed cheeksshone illuminate as she viewed the orgy. She had dark brown eyes, and astrange look as of an old picture in her face; and her eyes brightenedwith an urgent gleam. He saw the revelers nudging each other and glancingat her, and two or three young men went up and asked her to come for awalk. She shook her head and said "No thank you" again and again, andseemed as if she were looking for somebody in the crowd.

　　"I'm expecting a friend," she said at last to a man who proposed a drinkand a walk afterwards; and Lucian wondered what kind of friend wouldultimately appear. Suddenly she turned to him as he was about to pass on,and said in a low voice:

　　"I'll go for a walk with you if you like; you just go on, and I'll followin a minute."

　　For a moment he looked steadily at her. He saw that the first glance hasmisled him; her face was not flushed with drink as he had supposed, butit was radiant with the most exquisite color, a red flame glowed and diedon her cheek, and seemed to palpitate as she spoke. The head was set onthe neck nobly, as in a statue, and about the ears the bronze hairstrayed into little curls. She was smiling and waiting for his answer.

　　He muttered something about being very sorry, and fled down the hill outof the orgy, from the noise of roaring voices and the glitter of thegreat lamps very slowly swinging in the blast of wind. He knew that hehad touched the brink of utter desolation; there was death in the woman'sface, and she had indeed summoned him to the Sabbath. Somehow he had beenable to refuse on the instant, but if he had delayed he knew he wouldhave abandoned himself to her, body and soul. He locked himself in hisroom and lay trembling on the bed, wondering if some subtle sympathy hadshown the woman her perfect companion. He looked in the glass, notexpecting now to see certain visible and outward signs, but searching forthe meaning of that strange glance that lit up his eyes. He had growneven thinner than before in the last few months, and his cheeks werewasted with hunger and sorrow, but there were still about his featuresthe suggestion of a curious classic grace, and the look as of a faun whohas strayed from the vineyards and olive gardens. He had broken away, butnow he felt the mesh of her net about him, a desire for her that was amadness, as if she held every nerve in his body and drew him to her, toher mystic world, to the rosebush where every flower was a flame.

　　He dreamed all night of the perilous things he had refused, and it wasloss to awake in the morning, pain to return to the world. The frost hadbroken and the fog had rolled away, and the grey street was filled witha clear grey light. Again he looked out on the long dull sweep of themonotonous houses, hidden for the past weeks by a curtain of mist. Heavyrain had fallen in the night, and the garden rails were still dripping,the roofs still dark with wet, all down the line the dingy white blindswere drawn in the upper windows. Not a soul walked the street; every onewas asleep after the exertions of the night before; even on the main roadit was only at intervals that some straggler paddled by. Presently awoman in a brown Ulster shuffled off on some errand, then a man inshirt-sleeves poked out his head, holding the door half-open, and staredup at a window opposite. After a few minutes he slunk in again, and threeloafers came slouching down the street, eager for mischief or beastlinessof some sort. They chose a house that seemed rather smarter than therest, and, irritated by the neat curtains, the little grass plot with itsdwarf shrub, one of the ruffians drew out a piece of chalk and wrote somewords on the front door. His friends kept watch for him, and theadventure achieved, all three bolted, bellowing yahoo laughter. Then abell began, tang, tang, tang, and here and there children appeared ontheir way to Sunday-school, and the chapel "teachers" went by withverjuice eyes and lips, scowling at the little boy who cried "Piper,piper!" On the main road many respectable people, the men shining andill-fitted, the women hideously bedizened, passed in the direction of theIndependent nightmare, the stuccoed thing with Doric columns, but on thewhole life was stagnant. Presently Lucian smelt the horrid fumes of roastbeef and cabbage; the early risers were preparing the one-o'clock meal,but many lay in bed and put off dinner till three, with the effect ofprolonging the cabbage atmosphere into the late afternoon. A drizzly rainbegan as the people were coming out of church, and the mothers of littleboys in velvet and little girls in foolishness of every kind wereimpelled to slap their offspring, and to threaten them with father. Thenthe torpor of beef and beer and cabbage settled down on the street; insome houses they snorted and read the Parish Magazine, in some theysnored and read the murders and collected filth of the week; but the onlymovement of the afternoon was a second procession of children, nowbloated and distended with food, again answering the summons oftang, tang, tang. On the main road the trams, laden with impossiblepeople, went humming to and fro, and young men who wore bright blue tiescheerfully haw-hawed and smoked penny cigars. They annoyed the shiny andrespectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful stench of thecigars, but because they were cheerful on Sunday. By and by the children,having heard about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in the Lion's Den,came straggling home in an evil humor. And all the day it was as if on agrey sheet grey shadows flickered, passing by.

　　And in the rose-garden every flower was a flame! He thought in symbols,using the Persian imagery of a dusky court, surrounded by whitecloisters, gilded by gates of bronze. The stars came out, the sky gloweda darker violet, but the cloistered wall, the fantastic trellises instone, shone whiter. It was like a hedge of may-blossom, like a lilywithin a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam tossed on the heaving sea atdawn. Always those white cloisters trembled with the lute music, alwaysthe garden sang with the clear fountain, rising and falling in themysterious dusk. And there was a singing voice stealing through the whitelattices and the bronze gates, a soft voice chanting of the Lover andthe Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and the Way. Oh! the languagewas unknown; but the music of the refrain returned again and again,swelling and trembling through the white nets of the latticed cloisters.And every rose in the dusky air was a flame.

　　He had seen the life which he expressed by these symbols offered to him,and he had refused it; and he was alone in the grey street, with itslamps just twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast of a ribaldchorus sounding from the main road, a doggerel hymn whining from someparlor, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered why he hadturned away from that woman who knew all secrets, in whose eyes were allthe mysteries. He opened the desk of his bureau, and was confronted bythe heap and litter of papers, lying in confusion as he had left them. Heknew that there was the motive of his refusal; he had been unwilling toabandon all hope of the work. The glory and the torment of his ambitionglowed upon him as he looked at the manuscript; it seemed so pitifulthat such a single desire should be thwarted. He was aware that if hechose to sit down now before the desk he could, in a manner, write easilyenough—he could produce a tale which would be formally well constructedand certain of favorable reception. And it would not be the utterlycommonplace, entirely hopeless favorite of the circulating library; itwould stand in those ranks where the real thing is skillfullycounterfeited, amongst the books which give the reader his orgy ofemotions, and yet contrive to be superior, and "art," in his opinion.Lucian had often observed this species of triumph, and had noted theacclamation that never failed the clever sham. Romola, for example,had made the great host of the serious, the portentous, shout for joy,while the real book, The Cloister and the Hearth, was a comparativefailure.

　　He knew that he could write a Romola; but he thought the art ofcounterfeiting half-crowns less detestable than this shabby trick ofimitating literature. He had refused definitely to enter the atelier ofthe gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the grainof walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked outcontemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hensor pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. Hepaced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, andwondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could neverdo, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuinepages.

　　He was stirred again to this fury for the work by the event of theevening before, by all that had passed through his mind since themelancholy dawn. The lurid picture of that fiery street, the flamingshops and flaming glances, all its wonders and horrors, lit by thenaphtha flares and by the burning souls, had possessed him; and thenoises, the shriek and the whisper, the jangling rattle of thepiano-organ, the long-continued scream of the butcher as he dabbled inthe blood, the lewd litany of the singers, these seemed to be resolvedinto an infernal overture, loud with the expectation of lust and death.And how the spectacle was set in the cloud of dark night, a phantom playacted on that fiery stage, beneath those hideous brassy lamps, veryslowly swinging in a violent blast. As all the medley of outrageoussights and sounds now fused themselves within his brain into one clearimpression, it seemed that he had indeed witnessed and acted in a drama,that all the scene had been prepared and vested for him, and thatthe choric songs he had heard were but preludes to a greater act. For inthat woman was the consummation and catastrophe of it all, and the wholestage waited for their meeting. He fancied that after this the voices andthe lights died away, that the crowd sank swiftly into the darkness, andthat the street was at once denuded of the great lamps and of all itsawful scenic apparatus.

　　Again, he thought, the same mystery would be represented before him;suddenly on some dark and gloomy night, as he wandered lonely on adeserted road, the wind hurrying before him, suddenly a turn wouldbring him again upon the fiery stage, and the antique drama would bere-enacted. He would be drawn to the same place, to find that woman stillstanding there; again he would watch the rose radiant and palpitatingupon her cheek, the argent gleam in her brown eyes, the bronze curlsgilding the white splendor of her neck. And for the second time shewould freely offer herself. He could hear the wail of the singersswelling to a shriek, and see the dusky dancers whirling round in afaster frenzy, and the naphtha flares tinged with red, as the woman andhe went away into the dark, into the cloistered court where every flowerwas a flame, whence he would never come out.

　　His only escape was in the desk; he might find salvation if he couldagain hide his heart in the heap and litter of papers, and again be raptby the cadence of a phrase. He threw open his window and looked out onthe dim world and the glimmering amber lights. He resolved that he wouldrise early in the morning, and seek once more for his true life in thework.

　　But there was a strange thing. There was a little bottle on themantelpiece, a bottle of dark blue glass, and he trembled and shudderedbefore it, as if it were a fetish.