The Collaborators | Page 4

was,
somewhere, somehow. In her horrible degradation, in her dense despair,
she fascinated him. He could only see the fire bursting out of the
swamp. He could only feel on his cheek the breath of the spring in the
darkness of the charnel-house. He knew that she gave to him his great
lifework. Her monstrous habit he simply could not comprehend. It was
altogether as fantastic to him as absolute virtue sometimes seems to
absolute vice. He looked upon it, and felt as little kinship with it as a
saint might feel with a vampire. To him it was merely a hideous and
extraordinary growth, which had fastened like a cancer upon a beautiful
and wonderful body, and which must be cut out. He was profoundly
interested.
He loved the woman. Seeing her governed entirely by a vice, he made
the very common mistake of believing her to have a weak personality,
easily falling, perhaps for that very reason as easily lifted to her feet.
He resolved to save her, to devote all his powers, all his subtlety, all his
intellect, all his strong force of will, to weaning this woman from her

fatal habit. She was a married woman, long ago left, to kill herself if
she would, by the husband whose happiness she had wrecked. He took
her to live with him. For her sake he defied the world, and set himself
to do angel's work when people believed him at the devil's. He resolved
to wrap her, to envelop her in his influence, to enclose her in his strong
personality. Here, at last, was a grand, a noble opportunity for the
legitimate exercise of his master passion. He was confident of victory.
But his faith in himself was misplaced. This woman, whom he thought
so weak, was yet stronger than he. Although he could not influence her,
he began to find that she could influence him. At first he struggled with
her vice, which he could not understand. He thought himself merely
horrified at it; then he began to lose the horror in wonder at its power.
Its virility, as it were, fascinated him just a little. A vice so
overwhelmingly strong seemed to him at length almost glorious, almost
God-like. There was a sort of humanity about it. Yes, it was like a
being who lived and who conquered.
The woman loved him, and he tried to win her from it; but her passion
for it was greater than her passion for him, greater than had been her
original passion for purity, for health, for success, for homage, for all
lovely and happiness-making things. Her passion for it was so great
that it roused the man's curiosity at last; it made him hold his breath,
and stand in awe, and desire furtively to try just once for himself what
its dominion was like, to test its power as one may test the power of an
electric battery. He dared not do this openly, for fear the fact of his
doing so might drive the woman still farther on the downward path. So
in secret he tasted the fascinations of her vice, once--and again--and yet
again. But still he struggled for her while he was ceasing to struggle for
himself. Still he combated for her the foe who was conquering him.
Very strange, very terrible was his position in that London house with
her, isolated from the world. For his friends had dropped him. Even
those who were not scandalized at his relations with this woman had
ceased to come near him. They found him blind and deaf to the
ordinary interests of life. He never went out anywhere, unless
occasionally with her to some theatre. He never invited anyone to come
and see him. At first the woman absorbed all his interest, all his powers

of love--and then at last the woman and her vice, which was becoming
his too. By degrees he sank lower and lower, but he never told the
woman the truth, and he still urged her to give up her horrible habit,
which now he loved. And she laughed in his face, and asked him if a
human creature who had discovered a new life would be likely to give
it up. "A new death," he murmured, and then, looking in a mirror near
to him, saw his lips curved in the thin, pale smile of the hypocrite.
*****
So far the two young men had written. They worked hard, but their
industry was occasionally interrupted by the unaccountable laziness of
Andrew, who, after toiling with unremitting fury for some days, and
scarcely getting up from his desk, would disappear, and perhaps not
return for several nights. Henley remonstrated with him, but in vain.
"But what do you do, my dear fellow?" he asked.