第53章 XV(2)

That's where the musicians have the pull, for music has wings, and when she says 'Tristan' and he says 'Isolde,' you are on the heights at once. What do people mean when they call love music artificial?""I know what they mean, though I can't exactly explain. Or couldn't you make your stories more obvious? I don't see any harm in that. Uncle Willie floundered hopelessly. He doesn't read much, and he got muddled. I had to explain, and then he was delighted. Of course, to write down to the public would be quite another thing and horrible. You have certain ideas, and you must express them. But couldn't you express them more clearly?""You see--" He got no further than "you see.""The soul and the body. The soul's what matters," said Agnes, and tapped for the waiter again. He looked at her admiringly, but felt that she was not a perfect critic. Perhaps she was too perfect to be a critic. Actual life might seem to her so real that she could not detect the union of shadow and adamant that men call poetry. He would even go further and acknowledge that she was not as clever as himself--and he was stupid enough! She did not like discussing anything or reading solid books, and she was a little angry with such women as did. It pleased him to make these concessions, for they touched nothing in her that he valued. He looked round the restaurant, which was in Soho and decided that she was incomparable.

"At half-past two I call on the editor of the 'Holborn.' He's got a stray story to look at, and he's written about it.""Oh, Rickie! Rickie! Why didn't you put on a boiled shirt!"He laughed, and teased her. "'The soul's what matters. We literary people don't care about dress.""Well, you ought to care. And I believe you do. Can't you change?""Too far." He had rooms in South Kensington. "And I've forgot my card-case. There's for you!"She shook her head. "Naughty, naughty boy! Whatever will you do?""Send in my name, or ask for a bit of paper and write it. Hullo! that's Tilliard!"

Tilliard blushed, partly on account of the faux pas he had made last June, partly on account of the restaurant. He explained how he came to be pigging in Soho: it was so frightfully convenient and so frightfully cheap.

"Just why Rickie brings me," said Miss Pembroke.

"And I suppose you're here to study life?" said Tilliard, sitting down.

"I don't know," said Rickie, gazing round at the waiters and the guests.

"Doesn't one want to see a good deal of life for writing? There's life of a sort in Soho,--Un peu de faisan, s'il vows plait."Agnes also grabbed at the waiter, and paid. She always did the paying, Rickie muddled with his purse.

"I'm cramming," pursued Tilliard, "and so naturally I come into contact with very little at present. But later on I hope to see things." He blushed a little, for he was talking for Rickie's edification. "It is most frightfully important not to get a narrow or academic outlook, don't you think? A person like Ansell, who goes from Cambridge, home--home, Cambridge--it must tell on him in time.""But Mr. Ansell is a philosopher."

"A very kinky one," said Tilliard abruptly. "Not my idea of a philosopher. How goes his dissertation?""He never answers my letters," replied Rickie. "He never would.

I've heard nothing since June."

"It's a pity he sends in this year. There are so many good people in. He'd have afar better chance if he waited.""So I said, but he wouldn't wait. He's so keen about this particular subject.""What is it?" asked Agnes.

"About things being real, wasn't it, Tilliard?""That's near enough."

"Well, good luck to him!" said the girl. "And good luck to you, Mr. Tilliard! Later on, I hope, we'll meet again."They parted. Tilliard liked her, though he did not feel that she was quite in his couche sociale. His sister, for instance, would never have been lured into a Soho restaurant--except for the experience of the thing. Tilliard's couche sociale permitted experiences. Provided his heart did not go out to the poor and the unorthodox, he might stare at them as much as he liked. It was seeing life.

Agnes put her lover safely into an omnibus at Cambridge Circus.

She shouted after him that his tie was rising over his collar, but he did not hear her. For a moment she felt depressed, and pictured quite accurately the effect that his appearance would have on the editor. The editor was a tall neat man of forty, slow of speech, slow of soul, and extraordinarily kind. He and Rickie sat over a fire, with an enormous table behind them whereon stood many books waiting to be reviewed.

"I'm sorry," he said, and paused.

Rickie smiled feebly.

"Your story does not convince." He tapped it. "I have read it with very great pleasure. It convinces in parts, but it does not convince as a whole; and stories, don't you think, ought to convince as a whole?""They ought indeed," said Rickie, and plunged into self-depreciation. But the editor checked him.

"No--no. Please don't talk like that. I can't bear to hear any one talk against imagination. There are countless openings for imagination,--for the mysterious, for the supernatural, for all the things you are trying to do, and which, I hope, you will succeed in doing. I'm not OBJECTING to imagination; on the contrary, I'd advise you to cultivate it, to accent it. Write a really good ghost story and we'd take it at once. Or"--he suggested it as an alternative to imagination--"or you might get inside life. It's worth doing.""Life?" echoed Rickie anxiously.

He looked round the pleasant room, as if life might be fluttering there like an imprisoned bird. Then he looked at the editor: perhaps he was sitting inside life at this very moment.

"See life, Mr. Elliot, and then send us another story." He held out his hand. "I am sorry I have to say 'No, thank you'; it's so much nicer to say, 'Yes, please.'" He laid his hand on the young man's sleeve, and added, "Well, the interview's not been so alarming after all, has it?""I don't think that either of us is a very alarming person," was not Rickie's reply. It was what he thought out afterwards in the omnibus. His reply was "Ow," delivered with a slight giggle.

As he rumbled westward, his face was drawn, and his eyes moved quickly to the right and left, as if he would discover something in the squalid fashionable streets some bird on the wing, some radiant archway, the face of some god beneath a beaver hat. He loved, he was loved, he had seen death and other things; but the heart of all things was hidden. There was a password and he could not learn it, nor could the kind editor of the "Holborn" teach him. He sighed, and then sighed more piteously. For had he not known the password once--known it and forgotten it already?

But at this point his fortunes become intimately connected with those of Mr. Pembroke.