The Divine Fire | Page 7

it was to propitiate the grim grizzled fellow,
so like a Methodist parson, who glared at them from the counter.
They kept their discovery to themselves, as if it had been something too
precious to be handled, as if its charm, the poetry, the pathos of it must
escape under discussion. But any of them who did compare notes
agreed that their first idea had been that the shop was absurdly too big
for the young man; their next that the young man was too big for the
shop, miles, oh miles too big for it; their final impression being the
tragedy of the disproportion, the misfit. Then, sadly, with lowered
voices, they admitted that he had one flaw; when the poor fellow got

excited, don't you know, he sometimes dropt--no--no, he skipped--his
aitches. It didn't happen often, but they felt it terrible that it should
happen at all--to him. They touched it tenderly; if it was not exactly
part of his poetry it was part of his pathos. The shop was responsible
for it. He ought never, never to have been there.
And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained by
what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he should
not know.
He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of
everything, his great classic drama, Helen in Leuce, was lying finished
in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the last month
those very modern poems that he called Saturnalia had been careering
through the columns of The Planet. But at the moment he was mainly
supported by the coming of Easter.
CHAPTER III
The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and
well-appointed. But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the
dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a boy.
There was something soothing in its very obscurity and retirement. He
could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully reading his Homer. In
that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms were dimmed with
familiarity and dirt. His dreams took shape before him, they came and
went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision with reality. There was
hardly any part of it that was not consecrated by some divine visitation.
It was in the corner by the window, standing on a step-ladder and
fumbling in the darkness for a copy of Demosthenes, De Corona, that
he lit on his first Idea. From his seat behind the counter, staring, as was
his custom, into the recess where the coal-scuttle was, he first saw the
immortal face of Helen in Leuce.
Here, all that beautiful world of thought lay open to the terrific invasion
of things. His dreams refused to stand out with sufficient distinctness
from a background of coloured bindings, plate glass and mahogany.

They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent contours of
customers. A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained only by dint of
much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often as not Mr.
Rickman's eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering the cashier's
eye in its passage from the clock to the paper.
But (as he reflected with some humour) though Mr. Rickman's ideas so
frequently miscarried, owing to that malignant influence, his genius,
like Nature irresistible and indestructible, compelled him perpetually to
bring forth. Exposed on his little daïs or platform, in hideous publicity,
he suffered the divine labour and agony of creation. He was the slave of
his passion and his hour.
CHAPTER IV
A wave of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the shop,
strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it. And through it all,
with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into his
young senses a something delicious and disturbing, faintly discernible
as the Spring.
He thrust his work from him, tilted back his chair at a dangerous angle,
and began reviewing his engagements for the coming Bank Holiday.
He was only three and twenty, and at three and twenty an infinite
measure of life can be pressed into the great three days. He saw in
fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all the
gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of
Saturnalia. For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet
about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama, but
of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and of
a great many things besides. He had made his plans long beforehand,
and was prepared to consign to instant perdition the person or thing that
should interfere with them. Good Friday morning, an hour's cycling
before breakfast in Regent's