Louis Zangwill

“ But it's all really lovely, isn't it, Morgan? What suffering must be here! You can't imagine how I'm enjoying everything. Of course I sympathise as well. But mine is a sort of artistic sympathy. I'm not noble enough to feel the real thing. Isn't it all interesting?"
"There's a policeman staring at us suspiciously."
"Then we'd better move on. The good policeman's dream of paradise must be a place in which he is the one static soul and in which the blest keep passing on to all eternity." ”

“ In the world outside there beat a life that was strenuous, entrancing, dramatic—the struggle of the realm of affairs, the pomp and colour of courts and society, the important events of politics, the field of view that opened in the novels, or lay spread behind the footlights of the theatres. Wyndham belonged to all this brilliant universe, had walked with firm tread amid it all, breathing its airs with an assurance born of right and nature. No poverty could destroy his inalienable privileges, could render him less by a hair's breadth ”

“ Life, to be true, must involve all the functions of the soul—thought, emotion and will; must be lived with a healthy fulness. He had not so lived it. His error had lain in detachment, which had well-nigh brought him to the verge of destruction. And now it was with him a time of reconstruction.
He desired to face that full actuality of things from which he had always shrunk as from a terrifying chaos, wilfully shutting out from his vision all but its superficial forms and tones. He wished to open his spirit to the feeling and throb of the living world. ”

“ He knew now that he was face to face with the actuality that lay before him in all its horror. An engagement of convenience! He would have given the world to recall it. His eyes saw clear again—the enthusiasm that swirled and whirled around him had thus far sustained him: vibrations of romance had arisen within him, had resounded with a certain music. But these letters of Alice, this crescendo series, each soaring beyond the other, had illumined the horrible poverty of his own emotion. The freshness of her note was a revelation and yet an agony to him. ”

“ He denied any further love, though hating to tell the lie. But Miss Brooke persisted, entreating, provoking, urging, coaxing, pouting; subtly transforming herself into the child with its lovable moods and movements; enslaving him, rendering him powerless at her will, with this one strange exception—he could be strong enough to withhold from her the episode he was ashamed of.
"Paul, Paul," she said sternly. "Tell the truth. Are you not in love now?" ”

“ Why, so-and-so had told her her acting had never been surpassed on the English stage; and he had seen every piece played in London during the last thirty years. She repeated the flattery and fawning that had been bestowed upon her by the men who had been fluttering around her, accepting all as the natural outpour of their sincerity; she quoted with unction the lying notices she had shown him the day before.
Morgan knew better than to expect her to have one thought of sympathy for him, to utter one word of sorrow for the plight into which her stage-madness had brought him. ”

“ We must make things contribute to our happiness while we may. All these crowds of people have no idea that they are there for our entertainment; they do not know, poor things, that we have willed they should be masquerading to please us. They have the delusion they are going about their own affairs, and they see only an ordinary omnibus, full on the roof—that is, if they cared to look at us. To them what more commonplace than a journey on an omnibus from Hyde Park Corner to Aldgate Pump? Yet, to us, what a whimsical universe it is! ”

“ The lightly-parted lips intensified the babyishness, so that she ceased to be the independent, self-willed girl, fitting in rather [99] with that other conception he had lingered on as the ideal she might develop into as his wife—a woman clinging to her husband and glad of his strength.
He was sure he saw her now as she really was. The conditions of her life were alone to blame for forcing on her the necessity of a career. Woman's true sphere was the home. An outside existence subjected to hardening influences a delicate soul whose very nature was to thirst for tender nurture and love. ”

“ And his temperament prevailed over his will. He allowed the full flow of love to flood his spirit. Great poems were summed up in one quick flash; in a second he lived through a century of fine words.
And, as if divining his thought, she turned to him and spoke. Her words seemed softly to ring through the din, and he gave himself up to the full delight of the moment.
"Do you know, Morgan"—for he was always "Morgan" to everybody there—"a great change has occurred in my dignity the last few days?"
"You are to marry a peer," he hazarded. ”

“ I don't believe that anybody will be allowed to keep such happiness on this earth. So come to me quickly, dearest; you seem so far, far away from me. I kiss your dear letters, I wear them near my heart, at night they are under my pillow. I love you, I love you."
And this heart-cry broke down all the strong fibre of the man. Poor Alice! He must take care of such a child; he must cherish her life and make it perfect! Not in the least detail must he fail in his duty. Never for a moment must she think that this was—he flinched now before the words—an engagement of convenience! ”

“ The next evening Morgan sat pretending to be reading a book, his feet sedulously planted on a new Turkey rug, which struck a startling note of colour and decoration amid the bleakness of the attic. At last he closed the volume and let it fall wearily on his knee. The visit of his father had tried him severely. He had been shaken by a storm of emotion, and it had left him somewhat shattered. And now that Archibald had departed, an aching sense of loneliness had come to him such as only comes to the man who lives thus isolated. ”

“ And the mother was as fluttered as her daughter at this sudden appeal. "Alice looks lovely," she broke out. "You know so well how to make the best of people. I've never seen her so beautiful."
"It's the beautiful accessories that produce the effect," stammered Alice.
"They certainly produce some effect," conceded Wyndham. "That is why they are there. But it's you I'm painting, Miss Robinson. You are the picture, and the picture will be you—and not the surroundings."
He had arranged his palette, and fell to with the brush in earnest, bidding her speak the moment she felt fatigued. ”

“ Where is old London?"
"I don't know," said Morgan. "But I do know where Whitechapel is. We have to pass through Houndsditch. I looked it up on the map to refresh my memory. I have always found Houndsditch a disappointment."
"So have I," said Lady Thiselton. "It is every bit as uninspiring as a West End street. Some of the side alleys look interesting though, but then such strange people seem to be in absolute possession, and you feel you have no right to set foot within their territory. I am really a fearful coward." ”

“ And then followed Wyndham's awakening; taking him with the force of cataclysm, and dashing him out of his drowsy mood of contentment. Evidently the poor child was not living in this world. If her feet touched earth, her head at any rate was in a heaven of its own. She poured herself out with a lyric fervour that was like the song of a lark for rapture. All the years of her life she had saved herself for this, not frittered her emotions away in flirtations or frivolous love-affairs—as the soberer Wyndham now reflected. Her ideals were as unsullied as in her childhood. ”

“ In no wise could he have betrayed himself to his affianced wife. No, she could not possibly have any suspicion of the truth: he was satisfied that her preoccupation with the Grosvenor Place household all arose out of womanly sympathy on her part; that Lady Lakeden's tragic widowhood had touched the depths of her imagination.
Poor Alice! How simple and trusting her surface reading of the facts! How ignorant of the brutal complications, as grotesque as incredible, in which Nature often wrapped up human unhappiness!
What a terrible tangle it was for them all! ”

“ How strangely did their moods contrast with his—his father's playful good-humour, Lady Thiselton's sprightly camaraderie and Mrs. Medhurst's cheerful domesticity!
But the last letter made him wince. It was only a simple invitation, but it hurt him as though a finger had been put on a raw wound. For he, who had made a failure of his existence, whose one remaining link with life was a mere grotesque possibility of an adventure with an unknown serpent-woman, loved Margaret Medhurst with a poet's despairing love. ”

“ Wyndham hesitated. "There is smoking below. You may not like it."
"There are other women going down," she insisted. "I can't resist the temptation."
It was an average type of City lunching place, but Lady Betty had never before tried the sort of thing, so Wyndham fell in with her whim. Down the stairs they went into a spacious cellar, lighted with jets of gas, though the sun was still shining outside. Wreaths and clouds of smoke floated in the atmosphere, and a clatter of dominoes and crockery dominated the buzz of voices that rose from the chaos of people at the marble tables. ”

“ That surely would have been sufficient indication of their disapproval. "I am not beaten yet!" cried Cleo, with frenzy. "The day will come when these people will fight and trample over one another's bodies to catch the least glimpse of me. To-day they have rejected me with scorn, as they have always rejected the greatest. Read the early careers of the actresses the world now worships! But I am a hundred times more determined than before. The public shall treasure the dust my feet have trod on. They shall look back on to-night as a blot on their lives. My genius shall triumph! ”

“ Alice Robinson, the granddaughter of a carpenter, seriously beloved by an aristocrat with all the graces and culture, an artist, moreover, for whom beauty was always the primal appeal! She—Alice Robinson—had been under this wondrous delusion! Was there anything more ridiculous since men and women were? Her laughter could not be repressed, but it rang out through the studio weirdly, with a strange note of hardness and bitterness, and somehow it echoed and re-echoed through all the house, coming back to her mockingly from the empty rooms beneath her. ”

“ I shall wait till I see your happiness completed, Morgan, even though this may be our last meeting. Till then I dare not go; you are not to be trusted to take the happiness that is within your grasp. You know I claim to be a connoisseur of women, and I am perfectly satisfied that you shall marry your Margaret. That is the highest compliment I could pay her. There is that indefinable, unseizable something in her face which reveals the whole personality, and it won me immediately. ”