Part 31 (2/2)
The solitude of his rooms chilled him in the roots of his mind; he looked around like a hunted animal. He threw himself into an arm-chair. Like a pure fire ennui burned in his heart.
”Oh, for rest! I'm weary of life. Oh, to slip back into the unconscious, whence we came, and pa.s.s for ever from the fitful buzzing of the midges. To feel that sharp, cruel, implacable externality of things melt, vanish, and dissolve!
”The utter stupidity of life! There never was anything so stupid; I mean the whole thing--our ideas of right and wrong, love and duty, etc. Great Scott! what folly. The strange part of it all is man's inability to understand the folly of living. When I said to that woman to-night that I believed that the only evil is to bring children into the world, she said, 'But then the world would come to an end.' I said, 'Do you not think it would be a good thing if it did?' Her look of astonishment proved how unsuspicious she is of the truth. The ordinary run of mortals do not see into the heart of things, nor do we, except in terribly lucid moments; then, seeing life truly, seeing it in its monstrous deformity, we cry out like children in the night.
”Then why do we go to Death with terror-stricken faces and reluctant feet? We should go to Death in perfect confidence, like a bride to her husband, and with eager and smiling eyes. But he who seeks Death goes with wild eyes--upbraiding Life for having deceived him; as if Life ever did anything else! He goes to Death as a last refuge. None go to Death in deep calm and resignation, as a child goes to the kind and thoughtful nurse in whose arms he will find beautiful rest.
”It was in this very room I spoke to Lady Helen for the last time.
She understood very well indeed the utter worthlessness of life. How beautiful was her death! That white still face, with darkness stealing from the closed lids, a film of light shadow, symbol of deeper shadow. The unseen but easily imagined hand grasping the pistol, the unseen but imagined red stain upon the soft texture of the chemise! I might have loved her. She saw into the heart of things, and like a reasonable being, which she was, resolved to rid herself of the burden. We discussed the whole question in the next room; and I remember I was surprised to find that she was in no wise deceived by the casual fallacy of the fools who say that the good times compensate for the bad. Ah! how little they understand!
Pleasure! what is it but the correlative of pain? Nothing short of man's incomparable stupidity could enable him to distinguish between success and failure.
”But now I remember she did not die for any profound belief in the worthlessness of life, but merely on account of a vulgar love affair.
That letter was quite conclusive. It was written from the Alexandra Hotel. It was a letter breaking it off (strange that any one should care to break off with Lady Helen!); she stopped to see him, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation. Quite a Bank Holiday sort of incident! She did not deny life; but only that particular form in which life had come to her. Under such circ.u.mstances suicide is unjustifiable.
”There! I'm breaking into what John Norton would call my irrepressible levity. But there is little gladness in me. Ennui hunts me like a hound, loosing me for a time, but finding the scent again it follows--I struggle--escape--but the hour will come when I shall escape no more. If Lily had not died, if I had married her, I might have lived. In truth, I'm not alive, I'm really dead, for I live without hope, without belief, without desire. Ridiculous as a wife and children are when you look at them from the philosophical side, they are necessary if man is to live; if man dispenses with the family, he must embrace the cloister; John has done that; but now I know that man may not live without wife, without child, without G.o.d!”
Next day, after breakfast, he lay in his arm-chair, thinking of the few hours that lay between him and the fall of night. He sought to tempt his jaded appet.i.te with many a.s.sorted dissipations, but he turned from all in disgust, and gambling became his sole distraction.
Every evening about eleven he was seen in Piccadilly, going towards Arlington Street, and every morning about four the street-sweepers saw him returning home along the Strand. Then, afraid to go to bed, he sometimes took pen and paper and attempted to write some lines of his long-projected poem. But he found that all he had to say he had said in the sketch which he found among his papers. The idea did not seem to him to want any further amplification, and he sat wondering if he could ever have written three or four thousand lines on the subject.
The casual eye and ear still recognized no difference in him. There were days when he was as good-looking as ever, and much of the old fascination remained: but to one who knew him well, as Harding did, there was no doubt that his life had pa.s.sed its meridian. The day was no longer at poise, but was quietly sinking; and though the skies were full of light, the buoyancy and blitheness that the hours bear in their ascension were missing; la.s.situde and moodiness were aboard.
More than ever did he seek women, urged by a nervous erethism which he could not explain or control. Married women and young girls came to him from drawing-rooms, actresses from theatres, shop-girls from the streets, and though seemingly all were as unimportant and accidental as the cigarettes he smoked, each was a drop in the ocean of the immense ennui acc.u.mulating in his soul. The months pa.s.sed, disappearing in a sheer and measureless void, leaving no faintest reflection or even memory, and his life flowed in unbroken weariness and despair. There was no taste in him for anything; he had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and with the evil rind in his teeth, wandered an exile beyond the garden. Dark and desolate beyond speech was his world; dark and empty of all save the eyes of the hound Ennui; and by day and night it watched him, fixing him with dull and unrelenting eyes. Sometimes these acute strainings of his consciousness lasted only between entering his chambers late at night and going to bed; and fearful of the sleepless hours, every sensation exaggerated by the effect of the insomnia, he sat in dreadful commune with the spectre of his life, waiting for the apparition to leave him.
”And to think,” he cried, turning his face to the wall, ”that it is this _ego_ that gives existence to it all!”
One of the most terrible of these a.s.saults of consciousness came upon him on the winter immediately on his return from London. He had gone to London to see Miss Dudley, whom he had not seen since his return from Africa--therefore for more than two years. Only to her had he written from the desert; his last letters, however, had remained unanswered, and for some time misgivings had been astir in his heart.
And it was with the view of ridding himself of these that he had been to London. The familiar air of the house seemed to him altered, the servant was a new one; she did not know the name, and after some inquiries, she informed him that the lady had died some six months past. All that was human in him had expressed itself in this affection; among women Lily Young and Miss Dudley had alone touched his heart; there were friends scattered through his life whom he had wors.h.i.+pped; but his friends.h.i.+ps had nearly all been, though intense, ephemeral and circ.u.mstantial; nor had he thought constantly and deeply of any but these two women. So long as either lived, there was a haven of quiet happiness and natural peace in which his shattered spirit might rock at rest; but now he was alone.
Others he saw with homes and family ties; all seemed to have hopes and love to look to but he--”I alone am alone! The whole world is in love with me, and I'm utterly alone.” Alone as a wreck upon a desert ocean, terrible in its calm as in its tempest. Broken was the helm and sailless was the mast, and he must drift till borne upon some s.h.i.+p-wrecking reef! Had fate designed him to float over every rock?
must he wait till the years let through the waters of disease, and he foundered obscurely in the immense loneliness he had so elaborately prepared?
Wisdom! dost thou turn in the end, and devour thyself? dost thou vomit folly? or is folly born of thee?
Overhead was cloud of storm, the ocean heaved, quick lightnings flashed; but no waves gathered, and in heavy sulk a sense of doom lay upon him. Wealth and health and talent were his; he had all, and in all he found he had nothing;--yes, one thing was his for evermore,--Ennui.
Thoughts and visions rose into consciousness like monsters coming through a gulf of dim sea-water; all delusion had fallen, and he saw the truth in all its fearsome deformity. On awakening, the implacable externality of things pressed upon his sight until he felt he knew what the mad feel, and then it seemed impossible to begin another day. With long rides, with physical fatigue, he strove to keep at bay the despair-fiend which now had not left him hardly for weeks. For long weeks the disease continued, almost without an intermission; he felt sure that death was the only solution, and he considered the means for encompa.s.sing the end with a calm that startled him.
Nor was it until the spring months that he found any subjects that might take him out of his melancholy, and darken the too acute consciousness of the truth of things which was forcing him on to madness or suicide. One day it was suggested that he should stand for Parliament. He eagerly seized the idea, and his brain thronged immediately with visions of political successes, of the parliamentary triumphs he would achieve. Bah! he was an actor at heart, and required the contagion of the mult.i.tude, and again he looked out upon life with visionary eyes. Harsh hours fell behind him, gay hours awaited him, held hands to him.
Men wander far from the parent plot of earth; but a strange fatality leads them back, they know not how. None had desired to separate from all a.s.sociations of early life more than Mike, and he was at once glad and sorry to find that the door through which he was to enter Parliament was Cashel. He would have liked better to represent an English town or county, but he could taste in Cashel a triumph which he could nowhere else in the world. To return triumphant to his native village is the secret of every wanderer's desire, for there he can claim not only their applause but their grat.i.tude.
The politics he would have to adopt made him wince, for he knew the plat.i.tudes they entailed; and in preference he thought of the paradoxes with which he would stupefy the House, the daring and originality he would show in introducing subjects that, till then, no one had dared to touch upon. With the politics of his party he had little intention of concerning himself, for his projects were to make for himself a reputation as an orator, and having confirmed it to seek another const.i.tuency at the close of the present Parliament.
Such intention lay dormant in the background of his mind, but he had not seen many Irish Nationalists before he was effervescing with rhetoric suitable for the need of the election, and he was sometimes puzzled to determine whether he was false or true.
Driving through Dublin from the steamer, he met Frank Escott. They shouted simultaneously to their carmen to stop.
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