Lore of Proserpine | Page 4

spectacles in London. The mere
information--to say nothing of the amusement--which I have derived
from it would fill a volume; but if it did, I may add, I myself should
undoubtedly fill a cell in Holloway. I will therefore spare you what I
know about the Doctor's wife, and what happens to Lieutenant-Colonel
Storter when I see him through these windows--I could never have
believed it unless I had seen it. These things are not done, I know; but
observed in this medium they seem quite ordinary. Lastly--for I can't go
through the catalogue--I will speak of the air as I see it from here. My
dear sir, the air is alive, thronged with life. Spirits, forms, lovely
immaterial diaphanous shapes, are weaving endless patterns over the
face of the day. They shine like salmon at a weir, or they darken the sky
as redwings in the autumn fields; they circle, shrieking as they flash,
like swallows at evening; they battle and wrangle together; or they join
hands and whirl about the square in an endless chain. Of their beauty,
their grace of form and movement, of the shifting filmy colour, hue
blending in hue, of their swiftness, their glancing eyes, their exuberant
joy or grief I cannot now speak. Beside them one man may well seem
rat, and another goat. Beside them, indeed, you look for nothing else.
And if I go on to hint that the owner of these windows is of them,
though imprisoned in my house; that he does at times join them in their

streaming flights beyond the housetops, and does at times carry with
him his half-bewildered, half-shocked and wholly delighted fellow
lodgers, I have come to the end of my tether and your credulity, and,
for the time at least, have flowered myself to death. The figure is as
good as Plato's though my Pegasus will never stable in his stall.
* * * * *
We may believe ourselves to be two persons, at least, in one, and I
fancy that one at least of them is a constant. So far as my own pair is
concerned, either one of them has never grown up at all, or he was born
whole and in a flash, as the fairies are. Such as he was, at any rate,
when I was ten years old, such he is now when I am heavily more than
ten; and the other of us, very conscious of the flight of time and of
other things with it, is free to confess that he has little more hold of his
fellow with all this authority behind him than he had when we
commenced partnership. He has some, and thinks himself lucky, since
the bond between the pair is of such a nature as to involve a real
partnership--a partnership full of perplexity to the working member of
it, the ordinary forensic creature of senses, passions, ambitions, and
self-indulgences, the eating, sleeping, vainglorious, assertive male of
common experience--and it is not to be denied that it has been fruitful,
nor again that by some freak of fate or fortune the house has kept a
decent front to the world at large. It is still solvent, still favourably
regarded by the police. It is not, it never will be, a mere cage of demons;
its walls have not been fretted to transparency; no passing eye can
detect revelry behind its decent stucco; no passing ear thrill to cries out
of the dark. No, no. Troubles we may have; but we keep up
appearances. The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and if it be a wise
one, keepeth it to itself. I am not going to be so foolish as to deny
divergences of opinion, even of practice, between the pair in me; but I
flatter myself that I have not allowed them to become a common
nuisance, a cause of scandal, a stumbling-block, a rock of offence, or
anything of that kind. Uneasy tenant, wayward partner as my recondite
may be, he has had a relationship with my forensic which at times has
touched cordiality. Influential he has not been, for his colleague has
always had the upper hand and been in the public eye. He may have

instigated to mischief, but has not often been allowed to complete his
purpose. If I am a respectable person it is not his fault. He seeks no
man's respect. If he has occasionally lent himself to moral ends, it has
been without enthusiasm, for he has no morals of his own, and never
did have any. On the other hand, he is by nature too indifferent to
temporal circumstances to go about to corrupt his partner. His main
desire has ever been to be let alone. Anything which tended to tighten
the bonds which