Part 186

It was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of it.

LVII

They were right. Worse things were reserved for Prothero than had happened to him yet. Even Caro Bickersteth had turned. Caro had done her best to appreciate competently this creator adored by creators. Caro, nourished on her "Critique of Pure Reason," was trying hard to hold the balance of justice in the "Morning Telegraph"; and according to Caro there was a limit. She had edited Shelley and she knew. She was frankly, as she said, unable to follow Mr. Prothero in his latest flight. There was a limit even to the imagination of the mystic, and to the poet's vision of the Transcendent. There were, Caro said, regions of ether too subtle to sustain even so imponderable a poet as Mr. Prothero. So there wasn't much chance, Tanqueray remarked, of their sustaining Caro.

But the weight of Caro's utterances increased, as they circulated, formidably, among the right people. All the little men on papers declared that there was a limit, and that Prothero had passed it.

It was barely a year since the publication of his last volume, and they were annoyed with Prothero for daring to show his face again so soon in the absence of encouragement. It looked as if he didn't care whether they encouraged him or not. Such an attitude in a person standing on his trial amounted to contempt of court. When his case came up for judgment in the papers, the jury were reminded that the question before them was whether Mr. Prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with the title of "Transparences," and the sub-title of "Poems," was or was not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. And judgment in Prothero's case was given thus: Any writer who wilfully and deliberately takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. He stands condemned in the interests of Reality.

Laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last touch kindled her to flame. It even drew fire from Owen.

"If I gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if I brought them the dead body of God with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call that poetry. I bring them the living body of God rejoicing in life, and they howl at me. What their own poets, their Wordsworths and Tennysons and Brownings showed them in fits and flashes, I show them in one continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. They might complain, the beggars, if I'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. But when I've let them off, Laura, with a few songs!"

They were alone in his big room. Nina and Tanqueray and Jane had come and praised him, and Laura had been very entertaining over Prothero's reviews. But, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand. Prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with Laura, turned over the pages of his poems. He was counting them, to prove the slenderness of his offence.

"Listen to this," he said. "They can't say it's not a song."

He read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held him against the onslaught of the world.

Her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. She lay back, as it were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. It was the questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a net, to snare the wings of God. It was the song of her outcasting, of the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of her wantoning in the joy of the supernal, who forgot God in possessing him. It was the song of birth, of the soul's plunging into darkness and fire, of the weaving round her of the fleshy veils, the veils of separation, the veils of illusion; the song of her withdrawal into her dim house, of her binding and scourging, and of her ceaseless breaking on the wheel of time, till she renews her passion and the desire of her return. It was the song of the angels of mortal life, sounding its secrets; angels of terror and pain, carding the mortal stuff, spinning it out, finer and yet more fine, till every nerve becomes vibrant, a singing lyre of God; angels of the passions and the agonies, moving in the blood, ministers of the flame that subtilizes flesh to a transparent vehicle of God; strong angels of disease and dissolution, undermining, pulling down the house of pain.

He paused and she raised her head.

"Owen--that's what you once tried to make me see. Do you remember?"

"Yes, and you said that I was intoxicated and that it was all very dim and disagreeable and sad."

"I didn't understand it then," she said.

"You don't understand it now. You feel it."

"Why didn't I feel it then? When you said it?"

"I didn't say it. How could I? There's no other way of saying it but this. It isn't a theory or a creed; if it were it could be stated in a thousand different ways. It's the supreme personal experience, and this is the only form in which it could possibly be conveyed. These words were brought together from all eternity to say this thing."

"I'm not sure that I'm convinced of the truth of it, even now. I only feel the passion of it. It's the passion of it, Owen, that'll make it live."

"The truth and the passion of it are the same thing," he said.

He went on chanting. The music gathered and rose and broke over her in the last verse, in the song of consummation, of the soul's passion, jubilant, transcendent, where, of the veils of earth and heaven, the veils of separation and illusion, she weaves the veil of the last bridal, the fine veil of immortality.

In the silence Laura stirred at his side. She had possessed herself of his hand again and held it firmly, as if she were afraid that he might be taken from her in his ecstasy.

She was thinking: He used that theme before, in the first poem of his I ever heard. He was mistaken. There was more than one way of saying the same thing. She reminded him of this earlier poem. Surely, she said, it was the same thing, the same vision, the same ecstasy, or, if he liked, the same experience?

He did not answer all at once; he seemed to be considering her objection, as if he owned that it might have weight.

No, he said presently, it was not the same thing. Each experience was solitary, unique, it had its own incommunicable quality. He rose and found the earlier poem, and brought it to her that she might see the difference.

She shook her head; but she had to own that the difference was immense. It was the difference (so she made it out) between a vision that you were sure of, and a vision of which you were not so sure. And--yes--it was more than that; it was as if his genius had suffered incarnation, and its flame were intenser for having passed through flesh and blood. It was the incorruptible spirit that cried aloud; but there was no shrill tenuity in its cry. The thrill it gave her was unlike the shock that she remembered receiving from the poem of his youth, the shiver they had all felt, as at the passing by of the supersensual. Her husband's genius commanded all the splendours, all the tumultuous energies of sense. His verse rose, and its wings shed the colours of flame, blue, purple, red, and gold that kindled into white; it dropped and ran, striking earth with untiring, impetuous feet, it slackened; and still it throbbed with the heat of a heart driving vehement blood. But, she insisted, it was the same vision. How could she forget it? Did he suppose that she had forgotten the moment, four years ago, when Tanqueray had read the poem to them, and it had flashed on her----?

"Oh yes," he said; "it flashed all right. It flashed on me. But it did no more. There was always the fear of losing it. The difference is that--now--there isn't any fear."

She said, "Ah, I remember how afraid you were."