Flames Part 33

"It is wallowing."

"And which is most human, the man who drives in a carriage, or the man who walks st.u.r.dily along the road, and gets the mud on his boots, and lets the rain fall on him and the wind be his friend? I suspect it is a fine thing to be out unsheltered in a storm, Julian."

Julian's dark eyes were glowing. Valentine spoke with an unusual, almost with an electric warmth, and Julian was conscious of drawing very near to him tonight. Always in their friends.h.i.+p, hitherto, he had thought of Valentine as of one apart, walking at a distance from all men, even from him. And he had believed most honestly that this very detachment had drawn him to Valentine more than to any other human being. But to-night he began suddenly to feel that to be actually side by side with his friend would be a very glorious thing. He could never hope to walk perpetually upon the vestal heights. If Valentine did really come down towards the valley, what then? Just at first the idea had shocked him.

Now he began almost to wish that it might be so, to feel that he was shaking hands with Valentine more brotherly than ever before.

"Extremes are wrong, desolate, abominable, I begin to think," Valentine went on. "Angel and devil, both should be scourged--the one to be purged of excessive good, the other of excessive evil, and between them, midway, is man, natural man. Julian, you are natural man, and you are more right than I, who, it seems, have been educating you by presenting to you for contemplation my own disease."

"Well, but is natural man worth much? That is the question! I don't know."

"He fights, and drinks, and loves, and, oftener than the renowned philosopher thinks, he knows how to die. And then he lives thoroughly, and that is probably what we were sent into the world to do."

"Can't we live thoroughly without, say, the fighting and the drinking, Val?"

Valentine got up, too, as if excited, and stood by the fire by Julian's side.

"Battle calls forth heroism," he said, "which else would sleep."

"And drinking?"

"Leads to good fellows.h.i.+p."

This last remark was so preposterously unlike Valentine that Julian could not for a moment accept it as uttered seriously. His mood changed, and he burst out suddenly into a laugh.

"You have been taking me in all the time," he exclaimed, "and I actually was fool enough to think you serious."

"And to agree with what I was saying?"

Valentine still spoke quite gravely and earnestly, and Julian began to be puzzled.

"You know I can never help agreeing with you when you really mean anything," he began. "I have proved so often that you are always right in the end. So your real theory of life must be the true one: but your real theory, I know, is to reject what most people run after."

"No longer that, I fancy, Julian."

"But, then, what has changed you?"

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

"I? How should I?"

"Perhaps this change has been growing within me for a long while. It is difficult to say; but to-night my nature culminates. I am at a point, Julian."

"Then you have climbed to it. Don't you want to stay there?"

"No mere man can face the weather on a mountain peak forever, and life lies rather in the plains."

Valentine went over to the window and touched the blind. It shot up, leaving the naked window, through which the gas-lamps of Victoria Street stared in the night.

"I wish," he said, "that we, in England, had the flat roofs of the East."

He thrust up the gla.s.s, and the night air pushed in.

"Come here, Julian," he said.

Julian obeyed, wondering rather. Valentine leaned a little out on the sill and made Julian lean beside him. It was early in the night and the hum of London was yet loud, for the bees did not sleep, but were still busy in their monstrous hive. There was already a gentleness of spring among the discoloured houses. Spring will not be denied, even among men who dwell in flats. The cabs hurried past, and pedestrians went by in twos and threes or solitary; soldiers walking vaguely, seeking cheap pleasures, or more gaily with adoring maidens; tired business men; journeying towards Victoria Station; a desolate shop-girl, in dreary virtue defiant of mankind, but still unblessed; the Noah's ark figure of a policeman, tramping emptily, standing wearily by turns, to keep public order. Lights starred here and there the long line of mansions opposite.

"I often look out here at night," Valentine said, "generally to wonder why people live as they do. When I see the soldiers going by, for instance, I have often marvelled that they could find any pleasure in the servants, so often ugly, who hang on their arms, and languish persistently at them under cheap hats and dyed feathers. And I gaze at the policeman on his beat and pity him for the dead routine in which he stalks, seldom varied by the sordid capture of a starving cracksman, or the triumphant seizure of an unmuzzled dog. The boys selling evening papers seem to me imps of desolation, screaming through life aimlessly for halfpence; and the cabmen, creatures driving for ever to stations, yet never able to get into the wide world. And yet they are all living, Julian; that is the thing: all having their experiences, all in strong touch with humanity. The newspaper-boy has got his flower-girl to give him grimy kisses; and the cabman is proud of the s.h.i.+ne on his harness; and the soldier glories in his military faculty of seduction, and in his quick capacity for getting drunk in the glittering gin-palace at the corner of the street; and the policeman hopes to take some one up, and to be praised by a magistrate; and in those houses opposite intrigues are going on, and jealousy is being born, and men and women are quarrelling over trifles and making it up again, and children--what matter if legitimate or illegitimate?--are cooing and crying, and boys are waking to the turmoil of manhood, and girls are dreaming of the things they dare not pretend to know. Why should I be like a bird hovering over it all?

Why should not I--and you--be in it? If I can only cease to be as I have always been, I can recreate London for myself, and make it a live city, fearing neither its vices nor its tears. I have made you fear them, Julian. I have done you an injury. Let us be quiet, and feel the rustle of spring over the gas-lamps, and hear the pulsing of the hearts around us."

He put his arm through Julian's as they leaned out on the sill of the window, and to Julian his arm was like a line of living fire, compelling that which touched it to a speechless fever of excitement. Was this man Valentine? Julian's pulses throbbed and hammered as he looked upon the street, and he seemed to see all the pa.s.sers-by with eyes from which scales had fallen. If to die should be nothing to the wise man, to live should be much. Underneath, two drunken men pa.s.sed, embracing each other by the shoulders. They sang in, s.n.a.t.c.hes and hiccoughed protestations of eternal friends.h.i.+p. Valentine watched their wavering course with no disgust. His blue eyes even seemed to praise them as they went.

"Those men are more human than I," he slowly said. "Why should I condemn them?"

And, as if under the influence of a spell, Julian found himself thinking of the wandering ruffians as fine fellows, full of warmth of heart and generous feeling. A boy and girl went by. Neither could have been more than sixteen years old. They paused by a lamp-post, and the girl openly kissed the boy. He st.u.r.dily endured the compliment, staring firmly at her pale cheeks and tired eyes. Then the girl walked away, and he stood alone till she was out of sight. Eventually he walked off slowly, singing a plantation song: "I want you, my honey; yes, I do!" Valentine and Julian had watched and listened, and now Valentine, moving round on the window-ledge till he faced Julian, said:

"That is it, Julian, put in the straightforward music-hall way. People are happy because they want things; yes, they do. It is a philosophy of life. That boy has a life because he wants that girl, and she wants him.

And you, Julian, you want a thousand things--"

"Not since I have known you," Julian said.

He felt curiously excited and troubled. His arm was still linked in Valentine's. Slowly he withdrew it. Valentine shut down the window and they came back to the fire.

"You know," Valentine said, "that it is possible for two influences to work one upon the other, and for each to convert the other. I begin to think that your nature has triumphed over mine."

"What?" Julian said, in frank amazement. The Philistines could not have been more astounded when Samson pulled down the pillars.

"I have taught you, as you say, to die to the ordinary man's life, Julian. But what if you have taught me to live to it?"

Julian did not answer for a moment. He was wondering whether Valentine could possibly be serious. But his face was serious, even eager. There was an unwonted stain of red on his smooth, usually pale cheeks. A certain wild boyishness had stolen over him, a reckless devil danced in his blue eyes. Julian caught the infection of his mood.

"And what's my lesson?" Julian said.

His voice sounded thick and harsh. There was a surge of blood through his brain and a p.r.i.c.kly heat behind his eyeb.a.l.l.s. Suddenly a notion took him that Valentine had never been so magnificent as now,--now when a new fierceness glittered in his expression, and a wild wave of humanity ran through him like a surging tide.

"What's my lesson, Valentine?"

"I will show you, this spring. But it is the lesson the spring teaches, the lesson of fulfilling your nature, of waking from your slumbers, of finding the air, of giving yourself to the rifling fingers of the sun, of yielding all your scent to others, and of taking all their scent to you.

That's the lesson of your strength, Julian, and of all the strength of the spring. Lie out in the showers, and let the clouds cover you with shadows, and listen to the song of every bird, and--and--ah!" he suddenly broke off in a burst of laughter, "I am rhapsodizing. The spring has got into my veins even among these chimneypots of London. The spring is in me, and, who knows? your soul, Julian. For don't you feel wild blood in your veins sometimes?"

"Yes, yes."

"And humming pa.s.sions that come to you and lift you from your feet?"

"You know I do."

"But I never knew before that they might lift you towards heaven.