Flames Part 12

"To me?"

"Yes, to you, Cresswell. You have been given a strangely perfect nature.

As you say, you seem to have nothing to do with the matter. You have even been inclined to rebel against your gift. But, take my advice. Cherish it. Don't play with it, as you have been playing. Remember, if you lose heaven, the s.p.a.ce once filled by heaven will not be left empty."

"Ah! now I see. You think that I--"

"Might swing from a great height to an equally great depth. That has been my experience--that the man who is once extreme is always extreme, but not always in the same way. The greatest libertines have made the greatest ascetics. But, within my own experience, I have known the reverse process to obtain. And you, if you changed, might carry Addison with you."

"But then, doctor, you do believe in these manifestations?"

"Not necessarily. But I believe that the minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly, poised, and that a little push can send them one way or the other. Have you ever balanced one billiard-ball on the top of another?"

"Yes."

"Then you know that a breath will upset it and send it rolling.

Be careful. Your mind, your very nature, may be poised like that billiard-ball. Addison's may be the same. Indeed, I feel sure Addison's is. That curious dread of you which overcame him at your last sitting is a sign of it. The whole thing is wrong--bad for body and for mind."

"Perhaps. Well, we have definitely agreed to give it up."

"That's well. Eleven o'clock! I must be going. Are you doing anything to-morrow night?"

"No."

"I have got a box for this new play at the Duke's Theatre. Will you come?"

"With pleasure."

"I will ask Addison also."

They put on their overcoats, and walked a little way along Pall Mall before they parted. Near the Atheneaum they pa.s.sed a tall, thin man, who was coming in the opposite direction. He turned round as they went by, and stood directly regarding them till they were out of sight.

CHAPTER VII

THE REGENT STREET EPISODE

The things we do apparently by chance often have a curious applicability to the things we have thought. John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way of the Lord. These thoughts are the John the Baptists of the mind, and prepare the way for facts that often startlingly ill.u.s.trate them.

It is as if our thoughts were gradually materialized by the action of the mind; as if, by the act of thinking, we projected them.

When Doctor Levillier got a box for the first night of the new play at the Duke's Theatre, and when he invited Valentine and Julian to make up his party, he had no idea what the subject of the piece was, no notion that it would have anything to do with the conversation which took place between him and Valentine at the club. But the plot applied with almost amazing fidelity to much that he had said upon that occasion. The play was a modern allegory of the struggle between good and evil, which has been ill.u.s.trated in so many different ways since the birth of the Faust legend. But the piece had a certain curious originality which sprang from the daring of the author. Instead of showing one result of the struggle, a good man drawn gradually down, or a bad man drawn gradually up, he set forth, with a great deal of detail, a great deal of vividness, a modern wobbler, a human pendulum, and simply noted down, as it were, his slow swinging backwards and forwards. His hero, an evil liver, a modern man of wrath in the first act, dominated by a particular vice, was drawn, by an outside personal influence, from the mire in which he was wallowing, to purity, to real elevation. But his author, having led him up to the pinnacle, had no intention of leaving him there, blessed by the proclaimed admiration of the G.o.ds in the gallery. In the succeeding acts he introduced a second personal influence, exerted this time on the side of evil, and permitted it to act upon his central figure successfully. The man fell again into the mire, and was left there at the conclusion of the piece, but hugging a different sin, not the sin he had been embracing when the curtain rose upon the first act. This dramatic scheme took away the breath of the house for a moment, but only for a moment. Then the lungs once more did their accustomed duty, and enabled a large number of excited persons to hiss with a wonderful penetration.

Their well-meant efforts did not have the effect of terrorizing the author. On the contrary, he quickly responded to the hostile uproar, and, coming forward in a very neat Jaeger suit, a flannel s.h.i.+rt, and a pair of admirably fitting doeskin gloves, bowed with great gravity and perfect self-possession. The hisses thereupon suddenly faded into piercing entreaties for a speech, in which a gallery lady with a powerful soprano voice became notorious as the leader. But the Jaeger author was not to be prevailed upon. He waved the doeskin gloves in token of adieu, and retreated once more into the excited obscurity of the wings, where his manager was trembling like an aspen, in the midst of a perspiring company. The lights were turned down. The orchestra burst into a tuneful jig, and the lingering audience at length began to disperse.

Dr. Levillier, Julian, and Valentine left their box in silence. It seemed that this odd play, which dared to be natural, had impressed them. They walked into the vestibule without a word, and, avoiding many voluble friends who were letting off the steam as they gathered their coats and hats from a weary lady in a white cap, they threaded their way through the crowd and emerged into the street. Just as they reached the portico, Julian suddenly started and laid his hand on Valentine's arm.

"What is it?" asked Valentine, looking round.

"Ah! you're just too late. He's gone!"

"He--who?"

"Marr."

"Oh," Valentine said, showing considerable interest; "I wish I had seen him. Where was he sitting?"

"I haven't an idea. Didn't know he was in the theatre."

Doctor Levillier made an exception to his rule of being in bed by twelve o'clock that night, and accepted Valentine's invitation to sup in Victoria Street. He had always been greatly drawn to Valentine, attracted by the latter's exceptional clarity of character, and he was scarcely less interested in Julian. Nor did the considerable difference between his age and the ages of the two youths in any way interfere with their pleasant intercourse. For Levillier had a heart that was ageless. The corroding years did not act as acid upon it. All his sympathies were as keen, all his power of enjoyment was as great, as when he had been a delightfully gay and delightfully pleasant boy at school. Youth always loved him, and age always respected him. He possessed the great secret of a beautiful life. He was absolutely genuine, and he meant nothing but good to all with whom he was brought into contact.

The three friends spoke but little as they went back to the flat, but when they had sat down to supper, and Dr. Levillier had expressed his complete satisfaction with the champagne that Valentine's butler had politely insinuated into his gla.s.s, the silence took to itself wings and lightly departed. They talked of the play, and it appeared that they were all impressed by it, but in slightly different ways, and for different reasons. Valentine, who was intensely, but sometimes almost coldly, artistic, appreciated it, he said, because it did not obviously endeavour to work out a problem or to teach a lesson. It simply, with a great deal of literary finish and dramatic force, stated a curiously human character, showed the nature of a man at work, and left him, after some scenes of his life, still at work upon his own salvation or destruction, not telling the audience what his end would be, scarcely even trying to imply his innate tendency one way or the other. This satisfied Valentine. This had made him feel as if he had seen a block cut out of life.

"I do not want to learn what becomes of that man," he said. "I have known him, good and bad. That is enough. That satisfies me more than the sight of a thousand bombastic heroes, a thousand equally bombastic villains. Life is neither ebony nor ivory. That man is something to my mind forever, as Ibsen's 'Master Builder' is something. I can never forget the one or the other."

"Your life is ivory, Val," Julian said.

He had liked the play because the violent struggle between good and evil woke up many responsive memories in his mind. The hero of the play had been shown feeling precisely as Julian had often felt. That was enough.

He did not very much care for the brilliant artifice, which Valentine had remarked with so much pleasure. He did not specially note the peculiar effect of nature produced by the simplicity and thoughtful directness of the dialogue. He only knew that he had seen somebody whose nature was akin to his own nature, although placed in different, perhaps more dramatic, circ.u.mstances.

Dr. Levillier combined, to some appreciable extent, the different joys of his two companions, and obtained another that was quite his own. He had seen two horses running in double harness that night, the body and mind of the hero, and had taken delight in observing what had practically escaped the definite notice of his companions, the ingenuity and subtlety with which the author, without being obtrusive or insistent, had displayed their _liaison_; the effect of each upon the other, their answering excursions and alarums, their attempts at separate _amours_, _amours_ that always had an inevitable effect upon the one which the other had, for the moment, endeavoured to exclude from its life. The doctor in him and the priest in him had both enjoyed a glorious evening of bracing activity. As they discussed the piece, and each advanced his reason of pleasure, the doctor expanded into a sort of saintly geniality, which was peculiarly attractive even to sinners. And when supper was over, and they strolled into the drawing-room to smoke and to make music, he sank into a chair, stretched out his polished boots with a sigh, and said:

"And people say there is so little joy in life!"

Julian laughed at the satisfied whimsicality of his exclamation and of the expression which shadowed it.

"Light up, doctor," he cried. "You are a boon to this modern world. For you see all the sorrows of life, I suppose, and yet you always manage to convey the impression that the joys win the battle after all."

Valentine had gone over to the piano and was dreamily opening it. He did not seem to hear what they were saying. The doctor obeyed the injunction to light up. He was one of the hardest and most a.s.siduous toilers in all London, and he appreciated a good cigar and a comfortable arm-chair more than some men could appreciate Paradise, or some women appreciate love.

"And I believe that joy will win the battle in the end," he said, with a puff that proved successful.

"Why?"

"I see evidences of it, or think I do. The colour will fade out of bad acts, Addison, but the colour of a good act is eternal. A n.o.ble deed will never emulate a Sir Joshua Reynolds--never. Play to us, Cresswell."

"Yes, but I wish you to talk. I want to improvise to-night. The murmur of your conversation will help me."

Julian sat down by the doctor. He, too, looked very happy. It was a pleasant hour. Sympathy was in that pretty room, complete human sympathy, and a sympathy that sprang from their vitality, avoiding the dusky dumbness of the phlegmatic. Valentine sat down at the piano and began gently to play. The smoke from the cigars curled away towards the watching pictures; the room was full of soft music.

"Yes, Addison," Doctor Levillier continued, in a low voice, "I am perpetually sitting with sorrow, communing with disease. That consulting-room of mine is as a pool of Bethesda, only not all who come to it, alas! can be healed. I sit day by day in my confessional--I like to call it that; perhaps I was meant to be a priest--and I read the stories of the lives of men and of women, most of them necessarily, from the circ.u.mstances which bring them to me, sad. And yet I have a belief in joy and its triumph which nothing can ever shake, a belief in the final glory of good which nothing can ever conquer."

"That's fine, doctor. But do you know why you have it?"

"I daresay that question is difficult to answer. I often seek for my reasons, Addison, and I find many, though I can hardly say which is the best, or whether any quite explains the faith that is always in me.

_Apropos_ of this evening, by the bye, I long ago found one of my reasons in the theatre, the theatre which some really good men hate and condemn."

"What was that?"