Widdershins | Page 7

... well, each of us
knows that point beyond which we stand alone. Elsie Bengough
sometimes said that had she had one-tenth part of Oleron's genius there
were few things she could not have done--thus making that genius a

quantitatively divisible thing, a sort of ingredient, to be added to or
subtracted from in the admixture of his work. That it was a qualitative
thing, essential, indivisible, informing, passed her comprehension.
Their spirits parted company at that point. Oleron knew it. She did not
appear to know it.
"Yes, yes, yes," he said a little wearily, by-and-by, "practically you're
quite right, entirely right, and I haven't a word to say. If I could only
turn Romilly over to you you'd make an enormous success of her. But
that can't be, and I, for my part, am seriously doubting whether she's
worth my while. You know what that means."
"What does it mean?" she demanded bluntly.
"Well," he said, smiling wanly, "what does it mean when you're
convinced a thing isn't worth doing? You simply don't do it."
Miss Bengough's eyes swept the ceiling for assistance against this
impossible man.
"What utter rubbish!" she broke out at last. "Why, when I saw you last
you were simply oozing Romilly; you were turning her off at the rate of
four chapters a week; if you hadn't moved you'd have had her
three-parts done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in
the middle of your most important work?"
Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she
wouldn't have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason.
He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life.
He had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and
roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of
dinginess and shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever--or if it
was not, he no longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his
hand and take it. It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of
exhaustion that only another effort is required of him; if he cannot
make it he is as far off as ever....
"Anyway," Oleron summed up, "I'm happier here than I've been for a

long time. That's some sort of a justification."
"And doing no work," said Miss Bengough pointedly.
At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a
head.
"And why should I do nothing but work?" he demanded. "How much
happier am I for it? I don't say I don't love my work--when it's done;
but I hate doing it. Sometimes it's an intolerable burden that I simply
long to be rid of. Once in many weeks it has a moment, one moment, of
glow and thrill for me; I remember the days when it was all glow and
thrill; and now I'm forty-four, and it's becoming drudgery. Nobody
wants it; I'm ceasing to want it myself; and if any ordinary sensible
man were to ask me whether I didn't think I was a fool to go on, I think
I should agree that I was."
Miss Bengough's comely pink face was serious.
"But you knew all that, many, many years ago, Paul--and still you
chose it," she said in a low voice.
"Well, and how should I have known?" he demanded. "I didn't know. I
was told so. My heart, if you like, told me so, and I thought I knew.
Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers that it is nearly
fifty--"
"Forty-four, Paul--"
"--forty-four, then--and it finds that the glamour isn't in front, but
behind. Yes, I knew and chose, if that's knowing and choosing ... but
it's a costly choice we're called on to make when we're young!"
Miss Bengough's eyes were on the floor. Without moving them she said,
"You're not regretting it, Paul?"
"Am I not?" he took her up. "Upon my word, I've lately thought I am!
What do I get in return for it all?"

"You know what you get," she replied.
He might have known from her tone what else he could have had for
the holding up of a finger--herself. She knew, but could not tell him,
that he could have done no better thing for himself. Had he, any time
these ten years, asked her to marry him, she would have replied quietly,
"Very well; when?" He had never thought of it....
"Yours is the real work," she continued quietly. "Without you we
jackals couldn't exist. You and a few like you hold everything upon
your shoulders."
For a minute there was a silence. Then it occurred to Oleron that this
was common vulgar grumbling. It