The Literary Sense

Then he sighed: it was quite a real sigh, and she wondered whether he could possibly not be good right through. Was it possible that he was wicked in some of those strange, mysterious ways peculiar to men: billiards – barmaids – opera-balls flashed into her mind. Perhaps she might help him to be good. She had heard the usual pretty romances about the influence of a good woman.

"Come," she said, "light up – and tell me all about everything."

So he told her many things. And now and then he spoke of Tom, just to give himself the pleasure-pain of that snow-veiled-rose aspect.

He kissed her hand when he left her – a kiss of studied brotherliness. Yet the kiss had in it a tiny heart of fire, fierce enough to make her wonder, when he had left her, whether, after all… But she put the thought away hastily. "I may be a vain fool," she said, "but I won't be fooled by my vanity twice over."

And she kissed Tom's portrait and went to bed.

Dick went home in a heavenly haze of happiness – so he told himself as he went. When he woke up at about three o'clock, and began to analyse his sensations, he had cooled enough to call it an intoxication of pleasurable emotion. At three in the morning, if ever, the gilt is off the ginger-bread.

Dick lay on his back, his hands clenched at his sides, and, gazing open-eyed into the darkness, he saw many things. He saw all the old friendship: the easy, jolly life in those rooms, the meeting with Harriet Harcourt – it was at a fancy-ball, and she wore the white-and-black dress of a Beardsley lady; he remembered the contrast of the dress with her eyes and mouth.

He saw the days when his thoughts turned more and more to every chance of meeting her, as though each had been his only chance of life. He saw the Essex Court sitting-room as it had looked on the night when Tom had announced that Harriet was the only girl in the world – adding, at almost a night's length, that impassioned statement of his hopeless, financial condition. He could hear Tom's voice as he said —

"And I know she cares!"

Dick felt again the thrill of pleasure that had come with the impulse to be, for once, really noble, to efface himself, to give up the pursuit that lighted his days, the dream that enchanted his nights. His own voice, too, he heard —

"Cheer up, old chap! We'll find a lucrative post for you in five minutes, and set the wedding bells a-ringing in half an hour, or less! Why on earth didn't you tell me before?"

The glow of conscious nobility had lasted a long while – nearly a week, if he recollected aright. Then had come the choice of two openings for Tom, one in London, and one, equally good, in Edinburgh. Dick had chosen to offer to his friend the one in Edinburgh. He had told himself then that both lovers would work better if they were not near enough to waste each other's time, and he had almost believed – he was almost sure, even now, that he had almost believed – that this was the real reason.

But when Tom had gone there had been frank tears in the lovers' parting, and Dick had walked up the platform to avoid the embarrassment of witnessing them.

"You beast, you brute, you hound!" said Dick to himself, lying rigid and wretched in the darkness. "You knew well enough that you wanted him out of the way. And you promised to look after her and keep her from being dull. And you've done all you can to keep your word, haven't you? She hasn't been dull, I swear. And you've been playing for your own hand – and that poor stupid honest chap down there slaving away and trusting you as he trusts God. And you've written him lying letters twice a week, and betrayed him, as far as you got the chance, every day, and seen what a cur you are, every night, as you see it now. Oh, yes – you're succeeding splendidly. She forgets to think of Tom when she's talking to you. How often did she mention him last night? It was you every time. You're not fit to speak to a decent man, you reptile!"

He relaxed the clenched hands.

"Can't you stop this infernal see-saw?" he asked, pounding at his pillow; "light and fire every day, and hell-black ice every night. Look at it straight, you coward! If you're game to face the music, why, face it! Marry her, and friendship and honesty be damned! Or perhaps you might screw yourself up to another noble act – not a shoddy one this time."

Still sneering, he got up and pottered about in slippers and pyjamas till he had stirred together the fire and made himself cocoa. He drank it and smoked two pipes. This is very unromantic, but so it was. He slept after that.

When he woke in the morning all things looked brighter. He almost succeeded in pretending that he did not despise himself.

But there was a letter from Tom, and the guardian angel took charge of the curtain again.

He was tired, brain and body. The prize seemed hardly worth the cost. The question of relative values, at any rate, seemed debatable. The day passed miserably.

At about five o'clock he was startled to feel the genuine throb of an honest impulse. Such an impulse in him at that hour of the day, when usually the devil was arranging the curtain for the evening's tragi-comedy, was so unusual as to rouse in him a psychologic interest strong enough to come near to destroying its object. But the flame of pleasure lighted by the impulse fought successfully against the cold wind of cynical analysis, and he stood up.

"Upon my word," said he, "the copy-books are right – 'Be virtuous and you will be happy.' At least if you aren't, you won't. And if you are… One could but try!"

He packed a bag. He went out and sent telegrams to his people at King's Lynn, and to all the folk in town with whom he ought in these next weeks to have danced and dined, and he wrote a telegram to her. But that went no further than the floor of the Fleet Street Post Office, where it lay in trampled, scattered rhomboids.

Then he dined in Hall – he could not spare from his great renunciation even such a thread of a thought as should have decided his choice of a restaurant; and he went back to the gloomy little rooms and wrote a letter to Tom.

It seemed, until his scientific curiosity was aroused by the seeming, that he wrote with his heart's blood. After the curiosity awoke, the heart's blood was only highly-coloured water.

"Look here. I can't stand it any longer. I'm a brute and I know it, and I know you'll think so. The fact is I've fallen in love with your Harry, and I simply can't bear it seeing her every day almost and knowing she's yours and not mine" (there the analytic demon pricked up its ears and the scratching of the pen ceased). "I have fought against this," the letter went on after a long pause. "You don't know how I've fought, but it's stronger than I am. I love her – impossibly, unbearably – the only right and honourable thing to do is to go away, and I'm going. My only hope is that she'll never know.

    "Your old friend."

As he scrawled the signatory hieroglyphic, his only hope was that she would know it, and that the knowledge would leaven, with tenderly pitying thoughts of him, the heroic figure, her happiness with Tom, the commonplace.

He addressed and stamped the envelope; but he did not close it.

"I might want to put in another word or two," he said to himself. And even then in his inmost heart he hardly knew that he was going to her. He knew it when he was driving towards Chenies Street, and then he told himself that he was going to bid her good-bye – for ever.

Angel and devil were so busy shifting the curtain to and fro that he could not see any scene clearly.

He came into her presence pale with his resolution to be noble, to leave her for ever to happiness – and Tom. It was difficult though, even at that supreme moment, to look at her and to couple those two ideas.

"I've come to say good-bye," he said.

"Good-bye?" the dismay in her eyes seemed to make that unsealed letter leap in his side pocket.

"Yes – I'm going – circumstances I can't help – I'm going away for a long time."

"Is it bad news? Oh – I am sorry. When are you going?"

"To-morrow," he said, even as he decided to say, "to-night."

"But you can stay a little now, can't you? Don't go like this. It's dreadful. I shall miss you so – "

He fingered the letter.

"I must go and post a letter; then I'll come back, if I may. Where did I put that hat of mine?"

As she turned to pick up the hat from the table, he dropped the letter – the heart's blood written letter – on the floor behind him.

"I'll be back in a minute or two," he said, and went out to walk up and down the far end of Chenies Street and to picture her – alone with his letter.

She saw it at the instant when the latch of her flat clicked behind him. She picked it up, and mechanically turned it over to look at the address.

He, in the street outside, knew just how she would do it. Then she saw that the letter was unfastened.

How often had Tom said that there were to be no secrets between them! This was his letter. But it might hold Dick's secrets. But then, if she knew Dick's secrets she might be able to help him. He was in trouble – anyone could see that – awful trouble. She turned the letter over and over in her hands.

He, without, walking with half-closed eyes, felt that she was so turning it.

Suddenly she pulled the letter out and read it. He, out in the gas-lit night, knew how it would strike at her pity, her tenderness, her strong love of all that was generous and noble. He pictured the scene that must be when he should re-enter her room, and his heart beat wildly. He held himself in; he was playing the game now in deadly earnest. He would give her time to think of him, to pity him – time even to wonder whether, after all, duty and honour had not risen up in their might to forbid him to dare to try his faith by another sight of her. He waited, keenly aware that long as the waiting was to him, who knew what the ending was to be, it must be far, far longer for her, who did not know.

At last he went back to her. And the scene that he had pictured in the night where the east wind swept the street was acted out now, exactly as he had foreseen it.

She held in her hand the open letter. She came towards him, still holding it.

"I've read your letter," she said.