Widdershins | Page 9

there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of
her was a little obvious; her melting humidity was the result of
analysable processes; and behind her there had seemed to lurk some
dim shape emblematic of mortality. He had never, during the ten years
of their intimacy, dreamed for a moment of asking her to marry him;

none the less, he now felt for the first time a thankfulness that he had
not done so....
Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking
thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent
weeks and weeks of afternoons--she, the good chum, on whose help he
would have counted had all the rest of the world failed him--she, whose
loyalty to him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath
in her--Elsie to be even in thought dissected thus! He was an ingrate
and a cad....
Had she been there in that moment he would have abased himself
before her.
For ten minutes and more he sat, still gazing into the fire, with that
humiliating red fading slowly from his cheeks. All was still within and
without, save for a tiny musical tinkling that came from his kitchen--the
dripping of water from an imperfectly turned-off tap into the vessel
beneath it. Mechanically he began to beat with his finger to the faintly
heard falling of the drops; the tiny regular movement seemed to hasten
that shameful withdrawal from his face. He grew cool once more; and
when he resumed his meditation he was all unconscious that he took it
up again at the same point....
It was not only her florid superfluity of build that he had approached in
the attitude of criticism; he was conscious also of the wide differences
between her mind and his own. He felt no thankfulness that up to a
certain point their natures had ever run companionably side by side; he
was now full of questions beyond that point. Their intellects diverged;
there was no denying it; and, looking back, he was inclined to doubt
whether there had been any real coincidence. True, he had read his
writings to her and she had appeared to speak comprehendingly and to
the point; but what can a man do who, having assumed that another
sees as he does, is suddenly brought up sharp by something that
falsifies and discredits all that has gone before? He doubted all now....
It did for a moment occur to him that the man who demands of a friend
more than can be given to him is in danger of losing that friend, but he
put the thought aside.

Again he ceased to think, and again moved his finger to the distant
dripping of the tap....
And now (he resumed by-and-by), if these things were true of Elsie
Bengough, they were also true of the creation of which she was the
prototype--Romilly Bishop. And since he could say of Romilly what
for very shame he could not say of Elsie, he gave his thoughts rein. He
did so in that smiling, fire-lighted room, to the accompaniment of the
faintly heard tap.
There was no longer any doubt about it; he hated the central character
of his novel. Even as he had described her physically she overpowered
the senses; she was coarse-fibred, over-coloured, rank. It became true
the moment he formulated his thought; Gulliver had described the
Brobdingnagian maids-of-honour thus: and mentally and spiritually she
corresponded--was unsensitive, limited, common. The model (he
closed his eyes for a moment)--the model stuck out through fifteen
vulgar and blatant chapters to such a pitch that, without seeing the
reason, he had been unable to begin the sixteenth. He marvelled that it
had only just dawned upon him.
And this was to have been his Beatrice, his vision! As Elsie she was to
have gone into the furnace of his art, and she was to have come out the
Woman all men desire! Her thoughts were to have been culled from his
own finest, her form from his dearest dreams, and her setting wherever
he could find one fit for her worth. He had brooded long before making
the attempt; then one day he had felt her stir within him as a mother
feels a quickening, and he had begun to write; and so he had added
chapter to chapter....
And those fifteen sodden chapters were what he had produced!
Again he sat, softly moving his finger....
Then he bestirred himself.
She must go, all fifteen chapters of her. That was settled. For what was
to take her place his mind was a blank; but one thing at a time; a man is

not excused from taking the wrong course because the right one is not
immediately revealed to him. Better