by R. W. Heilig
"Yes," she continued fiercely, "ruined it! Is not that enough?"
"I have never wilfully ruined any one's life."
"You have ruined mine."
"Wilfully?"
"How else shall I explain your conduct?"
"I warned you."
"Warning, indeed! The warning that the snake gives to the sparrow
helpless under its gaze."
"Ah, but who tells you that the snake is to blame? Is it not rather the
occult power that prescribes with blood on brazen scroll the law of our
being?"
"This is no solace to the sparrow. But whatever may be said, let us drop
the past. Let us consider the present. I beg of you, leave this boy--let
him develop without your attempting to stifle the life in him or
impressing upon it the stamp of your alien mind."
"Kelly," he protested, "you are unjust. If you knew--" Then an idea
seemed to take hold of him. He looked at her curiously.
"What if I knew?" she asked.
"You shall know," he said, simply. "Are you strong?"
"Strong to withstand anything at your hand. There is nothing that you
can give me, nothing that you can take away."
"No," he remarked, "nothing. Yes, you have changed. Still, when I look
upon you, the ghosts of the past seem to rise like live things."
"We both have changed. We meet now upon equal grounds. You are no
longer the idol I made of you."
"Don't you think that to the idol this might be a relief, not a
humiliation? It is a terrible torture to sit in state with lips
eternally shut. Sometimes there comes over the most reticent of us a
desire to break through the eternal loneliness that surrounds the soul.
It is this feeling that prompts madmen to tear off their clothes and
exhibit their nakedness in the market-place. It's madness on my part, or
a whim, or I don't know what; but it pleases me that you should know the
truth."
"You promised me long ago that I should."
"To-day I will redeem my promise, and I will tell you another thing that
you will find hard to believe."
"And that is?"
"That I loved you."
Kelly smiled a little sceptically. "You have loved often."
"No," he replied. "Loved, seriously loved, I have, only once."
XX
They were sitting in a little Italian restaurant where they had often,
in the old days, lingered late into the night over a glass of Lacrimæ
Christi. But no pale ghost of the past rose from the wine. Only a
wriggling something, with serpent eyes, that sent cold shivers down her
spine and held her speechless and entranced.
When their order had been filled and the waiter had posted himself at a
respectful distance, David began--at first leisurely, a man of the
world. But as he proceeded a strange exultation seemed to possess him
and from his eyes leaped the flame of the mystic.
"You must pardon me," he commenced, "if I monopolise the conversation,
but the revelations I have to make are of such a nature that I may well
claim your attention. I will start with my earliest childhood. You
remember the picture of me that was taken when I was five?"
She remembered, indeed. Each detail of his life was deeply engraven on
her mind.
"At that time," he continued, "I was not held to be particularly bright.
The reason was that my mind, being pre-eminently and extraordinarily
receptive, needed a stimulus from without. The moment I was sent to
school, however, a curious metamorphosis took place in me. I may say
that I became at once the most brilliant boy in my class. You know that
to this day I have always been the most striking figure in any circle in
which I have ever moved."
Kelly nodded assent. Silently watching the speaker, she saw a gleam of
the truth from afar, but still very distant and very dim.
David lifted the glass against the light and gulped its contents.
Then in a lower voice he recommenced: "Like the chameleon, I have the
power of absorbing the colour of my environment."
"Do you mean that you have the power of absorbing the special virtues
of other people?" she interjected.
"That is exactly what I mean."
"Oh!" she cried, for in a heart-beat many things had become clear to
her. For the first time she realised, still vaguely but with increasing
vividness, the hidden causes of her ruin and, still more plainly, the
horrible danger of Chance Gavin.
He noticed her agitation, and a look of psychological curiosity came
into his eyes.
"Ah, but that is not all," he observed, smilingly. "That is nothing. We
all possess that faculty in a degree. The secret of my strength is my
ability to reject every element that is harmful or inessential to the
completion of my self. This did not come to me easily, nor without a
struggle. But now, looking back upon my life, many things become
transparent that were obscure even to me at the time. I can now follow
the fine-spun threads in the intricate web of my fate, and discover in
the wilderness of meshes a design, awful and grandly planned."
His voice shook with conviction, as he uttered these words. There was
something strangely gruesome in this man. It was thus that she had
pictured to herself the high-priest of some terrible and mysterious
religion, demanding a human sacrifice to appease the hunger of his god.
She was fascinated by the spell of his personality, and listened with a
feeling not far removed from awe. But David suddenly changed his tone
and proceeded in a more conversational manner.
"The first friend I ever cared for was a boy marvellously endowed for
the study of mathematics. At the time of our first meeting at school, I
was unable to solve even the simplest algebraical problem. But we had
been together only for half a month, when we exchanged parts. It was I
who was the mathematical genius now, whereas he became hopelessly dull
and stuttered through his recitations only with a struggle that brought
the tears to his eyes. Then I discarded him. Heartless, you say? I have
come to know better. Have you ever tasted a bottle of wine that had been
uncorked for a long time? If you have, you have probably found it
flat--the essence was gone, evaporated. Thus it is when we care for
people. Probably--no, assuredly--there is some principle prisoned in
their souls, or in the windings of their brains, which, when escaped,
leaves them insipid, unprofitable and devoid of interest to us.
Sometimes this essence--not necessarily the finest element in a man's or
a woman's nature, but soul-stuff that we lack--disappears. In fact, it
invariably disappears. It may be that it has been transformed in the
processes of their growth; it may also be that it has utterly vanished
by some inadvertence, or that we ourselves have absorbed it."
"Then we throw them away?" Kelly asked, pale, but dry-eyed. A shudder
passed through her body and she clinched her glass nervously. At that
moment David resembled a veritable Prince of Darkness, sinister and
beautiful, painted by the hand of a modern master. Then, for a space, he
again became the man of the world.
Smiling and self-possessed, he filled
the glasses, took a long sip of the wine and resumed his narrative.
"That boy was followed by others. I absorbed many useless things and
some that were evil. I realised that I must direct my absorptive
propensities. This I did. I selected, selected well. And all the time
the terrible power of which I was only half conscious grew within me."
"It is indeed a terrible power," she cried; "all the more terrible for
its subtlety. Had I not myself been its victim, I should not now find it
possible to believe in it."
"The invisible hand that smites in the dark is certainly more fearful
than a visible foe. It is also more merciful. Think how much you would
have suffered had you been conscious of your loss."
"Still it seems even now to me that it cannot have been an utter,
irreparable loss. There is no action without reaction. Even I--even
we--must have received from you some compensation for what you have
taken away."
"In the ordinary processes of life the law of action and reaction is
indeed potent. But no law is without exception. Think of radium, for
instance, with its constant and seemingly inexhaustible outflow of
energy. It is a difficult thing to imagine, but our scientific men have
accepted it as a fact. Why should we find it more difficult to conceive
of a tremendous and infinite absorptive element? I feel sure that it
must somewhere exist. But every phenomenon in the physical world finds
its counterpart in the psychical universe. There are radium-souls that
radiate without loss of energy, but also without increase. And there are
souls, the reverse of radium, with unlimited absorptive capacities."
"Vampire-souls," she observed, with a shudder, and her face blanched.
"No," he said, "don't say that." And then he suddenly seemed to grow in
stature. His face was ablaze, like the face of a god.
"In every age," he replied, with solemnity, "there are giants who attain
to a greatness which by natural growth no men could ever have reached.
But in their youth a vision came to them, which they set out to seek.
They take the stones of fancy to build them a palace in the kingdom of
truth, projecting into reality dreams, monstrous and impossible. Often
they fail and, tumbling from their airy heights, end a quixotic career.
Some succeed. They are the chosen. Carpenter's sons they are, who have
laid down the Law of a World for milleniums to come; or simple
Corsicans, before whose eagle eye have quaked the kingdoms of the earth.
But to accomplish their mission they need a will of iron and the wit of
a hundred men. And from the iron they take the strength, and from a
hundred men's brains they absorb their wisdom. Divine missionaries, they
appear in all departments of life. In their hand is gathered to-day the
gold of the world. Mighty potentates of peace and war, they unlock new
seas and from distant continents lift the bars. Single-handed, they
accomplish what nations dared not hope; with Titan strides they scale
the stars and succeed where millions fail. In art they live, the makers
of new periods, the dreamers of new styles. They make themselves the
vocal sun-glasses of God. Homer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Balzac--they
concentrate the dispersed rays of a thousand lesser luminaries in one
singing flame that, like a giant torch, lights up humanity's path."
She gazed at him, open-mouthed. The light had gone from his visage. He
paused, exhausted, but even then he looked the incarnation of a force no
less terrible, no less grand. She grasped the immensity of his
conception, but her woman's soul rebelled at the horrible injustice to
those whose light is extinguished, as hers had been, to feed an alien
flame. And then, for a moment, she saw the pale face of Chance staring
at her out of the wine.
"Cruel," she sobbed, "how cruel!"
"What matter?" he asked. "Their strength is taken from them, but the
spirit of humanity, as embodied in us, triumphantly marches on."
XXI
David's revelations were followed by a long silence, interrupted only
by the officiousness of the waiter. The spell once broken, they
exchanged a number of more or less irrelevant observations. Kelly's mind
returned, again and again, to the word he had not spoken. He had said
nothing of the immediate bearing of his monstrous power upon her own
life and that of Chance Gavin.
At last, somewhat timidly, she approached the subject.
"You said you loved me," she remarked.
"I did."
"But why, then--"
"I could not help it."
"Did you ever make the slightest attempt?"
"In the horrible night hours I struggled against it. I even implored you
to leave me."
"Ah, but I loved you!"
"You would not be warned, you would not listen. You stayed with me, and
slowly, surely, the creative urge went out of your life."
"But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you? What
were my pictures to you?"
"I needed them, I needed you. It was a certain something, a rich colour
effect, perhaps. And then, under your very eyes, the colour that
vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose. My style became more
luxurious than it had been, while you tortured your soul in the vain
attempt of calling back to your brush what was irretrievably lost."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"You would have laughed in my face, and I could not have endured your
laugh. Besides, I always hoped, until it was too late, that I might yet
check the mysterious power within me. Soon, however, I became aware that
it was beyond my control. The unknown god, whose instrument I am, had
wisely made it stronger than me."
"But why," retorted Kelly, "was it necessary to discard me, like a
cast-off garment, like a wanton who has lost the power to please?"
Her frame shook with the remembered emotion of that moment, when years
ago he had politely told her that she was nothing to him.
"The law of being," David replied, almost sadly, "the law of my
being. I should have pitied you, but the eternal reproach of your
suffering only provoked my anger. I cared less for you every day, and
when I had absorbed all of you that my growth required, you were to me
as one dead, as a stranger you were. There was between us no further
community of interest; henceforth, I knew, our lives must move in
totally different spheres. You remember that day when we said good-bye?"
"You mean that day when I lay before you on my knees," she corrected
him.
"That day I buried my last dream of personal happiness. I would have
gladly raised you from the floor, but love was utterly gone. If I am
tenderer to-day than I am wont to be, it is because you mean so much to
me as the symbol of my renunciation. When I realised that I could not
even save the thing I loved from myself, I became hardened and cruel to
others. Not that I know no kindly feeling, but no qualms of conscience
lay their prostrate forms across my path. There is nothing in life for
me but my mission."
&n
bsp; His face was bathed in ecstasy. The pupils were luminous, large and
threatening. He had the look of a madman or a prophet.
After a while Kelly remarked: "But you have grown into one of the
master-figures of the age. Why not be content with that? Is there no
limit to your ambition?"
David smiled: "Ambition! Shakespeare stopped when he had reached his
full growth, when he had exhausted the capacity of his contemporaries. I
am not yet ready to lay down my pen and rest."
