Love's Usuries Part 19

She heard the conservatory door bang behind him, and lost the sound of his footsteps in the howl of the storm.

They took him over the soaking lawn, along the orchard, out by the wicket, into the avenue of copper-beech and acacia where last night they had stood together. There he beat his head against the senseless bark of the dripping trees and wept aloud. And the burst of his sobs mingled with the roaring of the wind as it swept over him and expended its wild tumult against the closed windows of her house.

Twin Souls (Dialogue).

_Characters._

ARDILAUN VYSE, _a popular poet; and_ CYNICUS NEERE, _an old bachelor._

SCENE--A SMOKING-ROOM.

ARDILAUN. I can't think why we discuss it. It's as useless to expect sentiment from you as----

CYNICUS. To import coals to Newcastle. Who hawks goods in a stocked market?

ARDILAUN. One likes sympathy.

CYNICUS. I sympathise profoundly; but talking about a leak doesn't stop it.

ARDILAUN. This can't be stopped. It means the wreck of two lives--Let.i.tia's and mine.

CYNICUS. Together?

ARDILAUN. Together! Why, the universe would be re-created! It is severment that ruins. There is she, brilliant, beautiful, famous, tied for life to a money-grubber on 'Change: a wretch who cuts the leaves of her books with his thumb, and snores over them like an apoplectic pug.

CYNICUS. He earns his dose.

ARDILAUN. Money again! That's all you think of--it's all my wife thinks about. Petty parsimonies, cramping retrenchments, harrowing details of household economy----

CYNICUS. Very necessary, even in the _menage_ of a popular poet.

ARDILAUN. They needn't be flaunted. To come in and read your most brilliant stanzas to a woman who never looks up from darning----

CYNICUS. Your socks?

ARDILAUN. When you know of another who would listen to every word and criticise----

CYNICUS. Pick holes, not mend them!

ARDILAUN. Who would share your highest exaltations and lift you----

CYNICUS. Off your feet, till you bashed your crown against the hard fact of orthodox opinion.

ARDILAUN. What is opinion to souls the law of the higher intelligence has made twin?

CYNICUS. A th.o.r.n.y briar, with twenty p.r.i.c.kles to the rose.

ARDILAUN. What were a thousand p.r.i.c.kles to one such rose?

CYNICUS. I concede, Let.i.tia is too fine a prize to be lost for a scratch--a thousand scratches.

ARDILAUN. Well said--now you speak like a man.

CYNICUS. She must be grasped and all the little spikes allowed to probe their way through the skin. You can rise at c.o.c.k-crow and salve your wounds with morning dew--you rival the lark sometimes, don't you?--you----

ARDILAUN. Nothing to laugh at. I find my best inspirations at sunrise, when the first glow of day blushes through the trees.

CYNICUS (_scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling_). Let.i.tia sleeps till nine. Her inspirations blaze best in moonlight. At dawn her rest commences and is never broken--no, not even by the "apoplectic pug." He slinks off on tip-toe to his money-grubbing in the city.

ARDILAUN. Does she work so hard?

CYNICUS. Books like Let.i.tia's are not written without mental strain.

Poets may weave, like spiders, from their innermost, but authors grind.

ARDILAUN. n.o.ble woman! Yet she shows no signs of fatigue.

CYNICUS. The "pug" again. Snacks before she goes out, snacks when she comes home; oysters and stout at eleven, by his orders. Saves the digestion and helps to recuperate, he thinks.

ARDILAUN. But eating in the usual way----

CYNICUS. Couldn't be done by genius; nothing so conventional.

ARDILAUN. Me you put outside the pale?

CYNICUS. Oh no; you've your vagaries, though not as to time. How about the vegetarian diet and distilled water?

ARDILAUN. The simplicity of the philosophers.

CYNICUS. Troublesome to keep going?

ARDILAUN. Not so; my meals are perfect--fit for a king.

CYNICUS. Your wife's recipes, I suppose? Our English cooks are dolts at vegetable dressing.

ARDILAUN. They are. She superintends--she prefers cookpots to poetry.

That is the hard part of it. Were it Let.i.tia----

CYNICUS. The vegetables might go to the----

ARDILAUN. Nothing of the kind. A clever woman could master such trivial details in a trice.

CYNICUS. And pen her books with a squint eye on the saucepan?