Books: The Light That Failed
R >>
Rudyard Kipling >> The Light That Failed
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16
'I know that fear. It's the most terrible of all. It wakes me up in the night
sometimes. You oughtn't to know anything about it.'
'How do you know?'
'Never mind. Is your three hundred a year safe?'
'It's in Consols.'
'Very well. If any one comes to you and recommends a better
investment,--even if I should come to you,--don't you listen. Never shift
the money for a minute, and never lend a penny of it,--even to the
red-haired girl.'
'Don't scold me so! I'm not likely to be foolish.'
'The earth is full of men who'd sell their souls for three hundred a year;
and women come and talk, and borrow a five-pound note here and a
ten-pound note there; and a woman has no conscience in a money debt.
Stick to your money, Maisie, for there's nothing more ghastly in the
world than poverty in London. It's scared me. By Jove, it put the fear
into me! And one oughtn't to be afraid of anything.'
To each man is appointed his particular dread,--the terror that, if he does
not fight against it, must cow him even to the loss of his manhood. Dick's
experience of the sordid misery of want had entered into the deeps of
him, and, lest he might find virtue too easy, that memory stood behind
him, tempting to shame, when dealers came to buy his wares. As the
Nilghai quaked against his will at the still green water of a lake or a
mill-dam, as Torpenhow flinched before any white arm that could cut or
stab and loathed himself for flinching, Dick feared the poverty he had
once tasted half in jest. His burden was heavier than the burdens of his
companions.
Maisie watched the face working in the moonlight.
'You've plenty of pennies now,' she said soothingly.
'I shall never have enough,' he began, with vicious emphasis. Then,
laughing, 'I shall always be three-pence short in my accounts.'
'Why threepence?'
'I carried a man's bag once from Liverpool Street Station to Blackfriar's
Bridge. It was a sixpenny job,--you needn't laugh; indeed it was,--and I
wanted the money desperately. He only gave me threepence; and he
hadn't even the decency to pay in silver. Whatever money I make, I shall
never get that odd threepence out of the world.'
This was not language befitting the man who had preached of the
sanctity of work. It jarred on Maisie, who preferred her payment in
applause, which, since all men desire it, must be of he right. She hunted
for her little purse and gravely took out a threepenny bit.
'There it is,' she said. 'I'll pay you, Dickie; and don't worry any more; it
isn't worth while. Are you paid?'
'I am,' said the very human apostle of fair craft, taking the coin. 'I'm
paid a thousand times, and we'll close that account. It shall live on my
watch-chain; and you're an angel, Maisie.'
'I'm very cramped, and I'm feeling a little cold. Good gracious! the cloak
is all white, and so is your moustache! I never knew it was so chilly.'
A light frost lay white on the shoulder of Dick's ulster. He, too, had
forgotten the state of the weather. They laughed together, and with that
laugh ended all serious discourse.
They ran inland across the waste to warm themselves, then turned to
look at the glory of the full tide under the moonlight and the intense
black shadows of the furze bushes. It was an additional joy to Dick that
Maisie could see colour even as he saw it,--could see the blue in the white
of the mist, the violet that is in gray palings, and all things else as they
are,--not of one hue, but a thousand. And the moonlight came into
Maisie's soul, so that she, usually reserved, chattered of herself and of
the things she took interest in,--of Kami, wisest of teachers, and of the
girls in the studio,--of the Poles, who will kill themselves with overwork if
they are not checked; of the French, who talk at great length of much
more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil
hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power;
of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon
strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to
indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell
the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to
learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and
copy pictures for evermore. Dick listened enraptured because it was
Maisie who spoke. He knew the old life.
'It hasn't changed much,' he said. 'Do they still steal colours at
lunch-time?'
'Not steal. Attract is the word. Of course they do. I'm good--I only attract
ultramarine; but there are students who'd attract flake-white.'
'I've done it myself. You can't help it when the palettes are hung up.
Every colour is common property once it runs down,--even though you
do start it with a drop of oil. It teaches people not to waste their tubes.'
'I should like to attract some of your colours, Dick. Perhaps I might catch
your success with them.'
'I mustn't say a bad word, but I should like to. What in the world, which
you've just missed a lovely chance of seeing, does success or want of
success, or a three-storied success, matter compared with---- No, I won't
open that question again. It's time to go back to town.'
'I'm sorry, Dick, but----'
'You're much more interested in that than you are in me.'
'I don't know, I don't think I am.'
'What will you give me if I tell you a sure short-cut to everything you
want,--the trouble and the fuss and the tangle and all the rest? Will you
promise to obey me?'
'Of course.'
'In the first place, you must never forget a meal because you happen to
be at work. You forgot your lunch twice last week,' said Dick, at a
venture, for he knew with whom he was dealing.'
'No, no,--only once, really.'
'That's bad enough. And you mustn't take a cup of tea and a biscuit in
place of a regular dinner, because dinner happens to be a trouble.'
'You're making fun of me!'
'I never was more in earnest in my life. Oh, my love, my love, hasn't it
dawned on you yet what you are to me? Here's the whole earth in a
conspiracy to give you a chill, or run over you, or drench you to the skin,
or cheat you out of your money, or let you die of overwork and
underfeeding, and I haven't the mere right to look after you. Why, I
don't even know if you have sense enough to put on warm things when
the weather's cold.'
'Dick, you're the most awful boy to talk to--really! How do you suppose I
managed when you were away?'
'I wasn't here, and I didn't know. But now I'm back I'd give everything I
have for the right of telling you to come in out of the rain.'
'Your success too?'
This time it cost Dick a severe struggle to refrain from bad words.
'As Mrs. Jennett used to say, you're a trial, Maisie! You've been cooped
up in the schools too long, and you think every one is looking at you.
There aren't twelve hundred people in the world who understand
pictures. The others pretend and don't care. Remember, I've seen twelve
hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It's only the voice of the tiniest little
fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn't care a
tinker's--doesn't care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the
world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.'
'Poor Maisie!'
'Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he's fighting for what's dearer
than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did, and if all
the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and shouted hymns
to my honour and glory, would that make up to me for the knowledge
that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day without
an umbrella? Now we'll go to the station.'
'But you said on the beach----' persisted Maisie, with a certain fear.
Dick groaned aloud: 'Yes, I know what I said. My work is everything I
have, or am, or hope to be, to me, and I believe I've learnt the law that
governs it; but I've some lingering sense of fun left,--though you've
nearly knocked it out of me. I can just see that it isn't everything to all
the world. Do what I say, and not what I do.'
Maisie was careful not to reopen debatable matters, and they returned to
London joyously. The terminus stopped Dick in the midst of an eloquent
harangue on the beauties of exercise. He would buy Maisie a horse,--such
a horse as never yet bowed head to bit,--would stable it, with a
companion, some twenty miles from London, and Maisie, solely for her
health's sake should ride with him twice or thrice a week.
'That's absurd,' said she. 'It wouldn't be proper.'
'Now, who in all London to-night would have sufficient interest or
audacity to call us two to account for anything we chose to do?'
Maisie looked at the lamps, the fog, and the hideous turmoil. Dick was
right; but horseflesh did not make for Art as she understood it.
'You're very nice sometimes, but you're very foolish more times. I'm not
going to let you give me horses, or take you out of your way to-night. I'll
go home by myself. Only I want you to promise me something. You won't
think any more about that extra threepence, will you? Remember, you've
been paid; and I won't allow you to be spiteful and do bad work for a
little thing like that. You can be so big that you mustn't be tiny.'
This was turning the tables with a vengeance. There remained only to
put Maisie into her hansom.
'Good-bye,' she said simply. 'You'll come on Sunday. It has been a
beautiful day, Dick. Why can't it be like this always?'
'Because love's like line-work: you must go forward or backward; you
can't stand still. By the way, go on with your line-work. Good-night, and,
for my--for my sake, take care of yourself.'
He turned to walk home, meditating. The day had brought him nothing
that he hoped for, but--surely this was worth many days--it had brought
him nearer to Maisie. The end was only a question of time now, and the
prize well worth the waiting. By instinct, once more, he turned to the
river.
'And she understood at once,' he said, looking at the water. 'She found
out my pet besetting sin on the spot, and paid it off. My God, how she
understood! And she said I was better than she was! Better than she
was!' He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. 'I wonder if girls guess
at one-half a man's life. They can't, or--they wouldn't marry us.' He took
her gift out of his pocket, and considered it in the light of a miracle and a
pledge of the comprehension that, one day, would lead to perfect
happiness. Meantime, Maisie was alone in London, with none to save her
from danger. And the packed wilderness was very full of danger.
Dick made his prayer to Fate disjointedly after the manner of the
heathen as he threw the piece of silver into the river. If any evil were to
befal, let him bear the burden and let Maisie go unscathed, since the
threepenny piece was dearest to him of all his possessions. It was a small
coin in itself, but Maisie had given it, and the Thames held it, and surely
the Fates would be bribed for this once.
The drowning of the coin seemed to cut him free from thought of Maisie
for the moment. He took himself off the bridge and went whistling to his
chambers with a strong yearning for some man-talk and tobacco after his
first experience of an entire day spent in the society of a woman. There
was a stronger desire at his heart when there rose before him an
unsolicited vision of the Barralong dipping deep and sailing free for the
Southern Cross.
CHAPTER VIII
And these two, as I have told you,
Were the friends of Hiawatha,
Chibiabos, the musician,
And the very strong man, Kwasind.
--Hiawatha.?
TORPENHOW was paging the last sheets of some manuscript, while the
Nilghai, who had come for chess and remained to talk tactics, was
reading through the first part, commenting scornfully the while.
'It's picturesque enough and it's sketchy,' said he; 'but as a serious
consideration of affairs in Eastern Europe, it's not worth much.'
'It's off my hands at any rate. . . . Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine
slips altogether, aren't there? That should make between eleven and
twelve pages of valuable misinformation. Heigho!' Torpenhow shuffled
the writing together and hummed--
Young lambs to sell, young lambs to sell,
If I'd as much money as I could tell,
I never would cry, Young lambs to sell!
?
Dick entered, self-conscious and a little defiant, but in the best of tempers
with all the world.
'Back at last?' said Torpenhow.
'More or less. What have you been doing?'
'Work. Dickie, you behave as though the Bank of England were behind
you. Here's Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday gone and you haven't done a
line. It's scandalous.'
'The notions come and go, my children--they come and go like our
'baccy,' he answered, filling his pipe. 'Moreover,' he stooped to thrust a
spill into the grate, 'Apollo does not always stretch his---- Oh, confound
your clumsy jests, Nilghai!'
'This is not the place to preach the theory of direct inspiration,' said the
Nilghai, returning Torpenhow's large and workmanlike bellows to their
nail on the wall. 'We believe in cobblers' wax. La!--where you sit down.'
'If you weren't so big and fat,' said Dick, looking round for a weapon,
'I'd----'
'No skylarking in my rooms. You two smashed half my furniture last
time you threw the cushions about. You might have the decency to say
How d'you do? to Binkie. Look at him.'
Binkie had jumped down from the sofa and was fawning round Dick's
knee, and scratching at his boots.
'Dear man!' said Dick, snatching him up, and kissing him on the black
patch above his right eye. 'Did ums was, Binks? Did that ugly Nilghai
turn you off the sofa? Bite him, Mr. Binkie.' He pitched him on the
Nilghai's stomach, as the big man lay at ease, and Binkie pretended to
destroy the Nilghai inch by inch, till a sofa cushion extinguished him, and
panting he stuck out his tongue at the company.
'The Binkie-boy went for a walk this morning before you were up, Torp.
I saw him making love to the butcher at the corner when the shutters
were being taken down--just as if he hadn't enough to eat in his own
proper house,' said Dick.
'Binks, is that a true bill?' said Torpenhow, severely. The little dog
retreated under the sofa cushion, and showed by the fat white back of
him that he really had no further interest in the discussion.
'Strikes me that another disreputable dog went for a walk, too,' said the
Nilghai. 'What made you get up so early? Torp said you might be buying
a horse.'
'He knows it would need three of us for a serious business like that. No, I
felt lonesome and unhappy, so I went out to look at the sea, and watch the
pretty ships go by.'
'Where did you go?'
'Somewhere on the Channel. Progly or Snigly, or some watering-place
was its name; I've forgotten; but it was only two hours' run from London
and the ships went by.'
'Did you see anything you knew?'
'Only the Barralong outwards to Australia, and an Odessa grain-boat
loaded down by the head. It was a thick day, but the sea smelt good.'
'Wherefore put on one's best trousers to see the Barralong?' said
Torpenhow, pointing.
'Because I've nothing except these things and my painting duds. Besides,
I wanted to do honour to the sea.'
'Did She make you feel restless?' asked the Nilghai, keenly.
'Crazy. Don't speak of it. I'm sorry I went.'
Torpenhow and the Nilghai exchanged a look as Dick, stooping, busied
himself among the former's boots and trees.
'These will do,' he said at last; 'I can't say I think much of your taste in
slippers, but the fit's the thing.' He slipped his feet into a pair of sock-like
sambhur-skin foot coverings, found a long chair, and lay at length.
'They're my own pet pair,' Torpenhow said. 'I was just going to put them
on myself.'
'All your reprehensible selfishness. Just because you see me happy for a
minute, you want to worry me and stir me up. Find another pair.'
'Good for you that Dick can't wear your clothes, Torp. You two live
communistically,' said the Nilghai.
'Dick never has anything that I can wear. He's only useful to sponge
upon.'
'Confound you, have you been rummaging round among my clothes,
then?' said Dick. 'I put a sovereign in the tobacco-jar yesterday. How do
you expect a man to keep his accounts properly if you----'
Here the Nilghai began to laugh, and Torpenhow joined him.
'Hid a sovereign yesterday! You're no sort of financier. You lent me a
fiver about a month back. Do you remember?' Torpenhow said.
'Yes, of course.'
'Do you remember that I paid it you ten days later, and you put it at the
bottom of the tobacco?'
'By Jove, did I? I thought it was in one of my colour-boxes.'
'You thought! About a week ago I went into your studio to get some
'baccy and found it.'
'What did you do with it?'
'Took the Nilghai to a theatre and fed him.'
'You couldn't feed the Nilghai under twice the money--not though you
gave him Army beef. Well, I suppose I should have found it out sooner or
later. What is there to laugh at?'
'You're a most amazing cuckoo in many directions,' said the Nilghai, still
chuckling over the thought of the dinner. 'Never mind. We had both been
working very hard, and it was your unearned increment we spent, and as
you're only a loafer it didn't matter.'
'That's pleasant--from the man who is bursting with my meat, too. I'll get
that dinner back one of these days. Suppose we go to a theatre now.'
'Put our boots on,--and dress,--and wash?' The Nilghai spoke very lazily.
'I withdraw the motion.'
'Suppose, just for a change--as a startling variety, you know--we, that is
to say we, get our charcoal and our canvas and go on with our work.'
Torpenhow spoke pointedly, but Dick only wriggled his toes inside the
soft leather moccasins.
'What a one-ideaed clucker that is! If I had any unfinished figures on
hand, I haven't any model; if I had my model, I haven't any spray, and I
never leave charcoal unfixed overnight; and if I had my spray and
twenty photographs of backgrounds, I couldn't do anything to-night. I
don't feel that way.'
'Binkie-dog, he's a lazy hog, isn't he?' said the Nilghai.
'Very good, I will do some work,' said Dick, rising swiftly. 'I'll fetch the
Nungapunga Book, and we'll add another picture to the Nilghai Saga.'
'Aren't you worrying him a little too much?' asked the Nilghai, when
Dick had left the room.
'Perhaps, but I know what he can turn out if he likes. It makes me savage
to hear him praised for past work when I know what he ought to do. You
and I are arranged for----'
'By Kismet and our own powers, more's the pity. I have dreamed of a
good deal.'
'So have I, but we know our limitations now. I'm dashed if I know what
Dick's may be when he gives himself to his work. That's what makes me
so keen about him.'
'And when all's said and done, you will be put aside--quite rightly--for a
female girl.'
'I wonder . . . Where do you think he has been to-day?'
'To the sea. Didn't you see the look in his eyes when he talked about her?
He's as restless as a swallow in autumn.'
'Yes; but did he go alone?'
'I don't know, and I don't care, but he has the beginnings of the go-fever
upon him. He wants to up-stakes and move out. There's no mistaking the
signs. Whatever he may have said before, he has the call upon him now.'
'It might be his salvation,' Torpenhow said.
'Perhaps--if you care to take the responsibility of being a saviour.'
Dick returned with the big clasped sketch-book that the Nilghai knew
well and did not love too much. In it Dick had drawn all manner of
moving incidents, experienced by himself or related to him by the others,
of all the four corners of the earth. But the wider range of the Nilghai's
body and life attracted him most. When truth failed he fell back on
fiction of the wildest, and represented incidents in the Nilghai's career
that were unseemly,--his marriages with many African princesses, his
shameless betrayal, for Arab wives, of an army corps to the Mahdi, his
tattooment by skilled operators in Burmah, his interview (and his fears)
with the yellow headsman in the blood-stained execution-ground of
Canton, and finally, the passings of his spirit into the bodies of whales,
elephants, and toucans. Torpenhow from time to time had added rhymed
descriptions, and the whole was a curious piece of art, because Dick
decided, having regard to the name of the book which being interpreted
means 'naked,' that it would be wrong to draw the Nilghai with any
clothes on, under any circumstances. Consequently the last sketch,
representing that much-enduring man calling on the War Office to press
his claims to the Egyptian medal, was hardly delicate. He settled himself
comfortably on Torpenhow's table and turned over the pages.
'What a fortune you would have been to Blake, Nilghai!' he said. 'There's
a succulent pinkness about some of these sketches that's more than
life-like. "The Nilghai surrounded while bathing by the Mahdieh"--that
was founded on fact, eh?'
'It was very nearly my last bath, you irreverent dauber. Has Binkie come
into the Saga yet?'
'No; the Binkie-boy hasn't done anything except eat and kill cats. Let's
see. Here you are as a stained-glass saint in a church. Deuced decorative
lines about your anatomy; you ought to be grateful for being handed
down to posterity in this way. Fifty years hence you'll exist in rare and
curious facsimiles at ten guineas each. What shall I try this time? The
domestic life of the Nilghai?'
'Hasn't got any.'
'The undomestic life of the Nilghai, then. Of course. Mass-meeting of his
wives in Trafalgar Square. That's it. They came from the ends of the
earth to attend Nilghai's wedding to an English bride. This shall be an
epic. It's a sweet material to work with.'
'It's a scandalous waste of time,' said Torpenhow.
'Don't worry; it keeps one's hand in--specially when you begin without
the pencil.' He set to work rapidly. 'That's Nelson's Column. Presently
the Nilghai will appear shinning up it.'
'Give him some clothes this time.'
'Certainly--a veil and an orange-wreath, because he's been married.'
'Gad, that's clever enough!' said Torpenhow over his shoulder, as Dick
brought out of the paper with three twirls of the brush a very fat back
and labouring shoulder pressed against stone.
'Just imagine,' Dick continued, 'if we could publish a few of these dear
little things every time the Nilghai subsidises a man who can write, to
give the public an honest opinion of my pictures.'
'Well, you'll admit I always tell you when I have done anything of that
kind. I know I can't hammer you as you ought to be hammered, so I give
the job to another. Young Maclagan, for instance----'
'No-o--one half-minute, old man; stick your hand out against the dark of
the wall-paper--you only burble and call me names. That left shoulder's
out of drawing. I must literally throw a veil over that. Where's my
pen-knife? Well, what about Maclagan?'
'I only gave him his riding-orders to--to lambast you on general
principles for not producing work that will last.'
'Whereupon that young fool,'--Dick threw back his head and shut one
eye as he shifted the page under his hand,--'being left alone with an
ink-pot and what he conceived were his own notions, went and spilt them
both over me in the papers. You might have engaged a grown man for
the business, Nilghai. How do you think the bridal veil looks now, Torp?'
'How the deuce do three dabs and two scratches make the stuff stand
away from the body as it does?' said Torpenhow, to whom Dick's
methods were always new.
'It just depends on where you put 'em. If Maclagan had know that much
about his business he might have done better.'
'Why don't you put the damned dabs into something that will stay, then?'
insisted the Nilghai, who had really taken considerable trouble in hiring
for Dick's benefit the pen of a young gentleman who devoted most of his
waking hours to an anxious consideration of the aims and ends of Art,
which, he wrote, was one and indivisible.
'Wait a minute till I see how I am going to manage my procession of
wives. You seem to have married extensively, and I must rough 'em in
with the pencil--Medes, Parthians, Edomites. . . . Now, setting aside the
weakness and the wickedness and--and the fat-headedness of deliberately
trying to do work that will live, as they call it, I'm content with the
knowledge that I've done my best up to date, and I shan't do anything
like it again for some hours at least--probably years. Most probably
never.'
'What! any stuff you have in stock your best work?' said Torpenhow.
'Anything you've sold?' said the Nilghai.
'Oh no. It isn't here and it isn't sold. Better than that, it can't be sold, and
I don't think any one knows where it is. I'm sure I don't. . . . And yet
more and more wives, on the north side of the square. Observe the
virtuous horror of the lions!'
'You may as well explain,' said Torpenhow, and Dick lifted his head from
the paper.
'The sea reminded me of it,' he said slowly. 'I wish it hadn't. It weighs
some few thousand tons--unless you cut it out with a cold chisel.'
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16