‘And what may that be?’ asked Richard sarcastically.
‘Ah! my dear,’ murmured the dancer with a sigh, ‘if you don’t know what that is, if you don’t care to know what that is, you’ll never be a great poet.’
‘Well, at any rate,’ said Richard, ‘I’ve only done in my poetry what English poets have always done; that’s to say, tried to get the magic of the earth soul into words that are not too vague or mystical.’
‘My dear, my dear!’ cried the dancer, laughing at him quite frankly now. ‘You don’t mean to say you think you have rivalled Shelley and Keats in these verses? They are very beautiful and right, those old poets, but you can’t do that sort of thing twice. You’ve got to go further. You’ve got to start where they left off. You’ve got to say something new.’
Richard came and stood in front of her, glaring and lowering. She had stirred the very depths of his self-love. She had entered a chamber of his mind deeper than all his indolent acquiescences. She had given him the sensations of someone poking with a hayfork into the most sacred recesses of his soul.
‘New!’ he threw out at her with infinite disgust. ‘You’re the victim of your confounded country, whatever you like to say! Everything has to be new, always new! My poetry deals with those elemental feelings that the race has always had. My earth soul is not a bit different from Wordsworth’s earth soul or Virgil’s either, or Plato’s for the matter of that!’
She looked at him with a queer deep enigmatical look that puzzled and irritated him.
What was she after? Did she want to rake into his very inmost being? Had she raked into it, and found rank weeds where she hoped to find delicate and rare plants?
He felt angry and humiliated. A vague feeling of misgiving mingled with a raging sense of injustice. Was he destined never to love a woman who responded to every movement of his mind? Of course it was her cosmopolitan life, without roots in any soil, that made her so difficult! Naturally she could not understand the subtle and exquisite pleasure that he derived from every stick and stone in England. Where could he get in touch with anything deep if he didn’t go back to those old delicious sensations connected with lanes and fields, with gardens and hedges?
He solaced himself hurriedly with these thoughts, but was not reassured. He was bitterly hurt and startled. After all, in her own work she was a great artist. She had done what he certainly had never done: she had put her whole life into her work. Why couldn’t he, too, do that? Was she right in her attacks upon his mystical sensationalism? Did that kind of thing really act as a sort of drug, numbing the finer and rarer energies?
Troubled through and through by what she had said, his self-love obscurely conscious of a deep wound, letting in air and light from very alien spaces, he hovered in front of her, with his hands behind his back, like an erring soul before some tutelary spirit.
‘It’s like this, my dear,’ she went on. ‘Though I don’t want to annoy you. I think you have great powers. But I cannot say I think this poetry of yours has done justice to them. I believe you inject into it, as you read it to yourself, a great many vague feelings that are not conveyed to anyone else. Your poetry is a kind of self-indulgence. It is the expression of a good deal in you that is merely personal. It is too self-satisfied, too unruffled. It’s as if you had never really wrestled with life!’
He looked so completely miserable under her words that she took him by both his hands and pulled him towards her.
He responded to her caress almost savagely, seeking to recover his ascendency over her and to regain his self-respect in the oldest of primitive ways.
As he made love to her he withdrew his soul from her, letting it escape down some long corridor of reservation. His pride found a way to recover itself in this manner. Without actually formulating the malicious thought, what he felt in his mind was a derisive sense that she did not know at that moment how far his soul was wandering from her.
When the hour arrived for her to return to the theatre she was called for by Pat Ryan in his green Studebaker. They separated therefore at the door, Richard’s vanity completely reinstated upon its secret throne. ‘She is only a woman,’ he said to himself as he walked towards the elevated station. ‘Her art is instinctive, not intellectual. She does not understand the quieter, cooler, more magical kinds of poetry. She wants everything to be emotional and dramatic. In some ways Nelly has a truer feeling for beauty than she has. But Nelly’s childish impishness spoils her insight. Nelly laughs at her own soul.’
As he ascended the crowded steps to the little platform, Richard felt in better spirits than he had felt for many a long week. It was a relief that Nelly knew of his affair with Elise and apparently had no intention of doing anything about it. It was sad that it made her unhappy. It was sad that she insisted that all lover-like play between them should cease. But she clearly had made up her mind not to sulk; and they had had — even since her discovery of his unfaithfulness — some not uncheerful hours.
There was thus a base unction, a shallow satisfaction, a sleek slurring over of all deeper issues, in Richard’s mind as the elevated railway carried him down Sixth Avenue, the car in which he sat moving parallel to the third-storey windows of the larger shops.
It seemed as though the malicious revenge he had taken upon Elise had punished him by removing from his nature, in that hour, all nobler, all subtler feelings.
He had never caught himself in a mood quite so cynical, quite so brutal and crude, as he caught himself in then. It was a mood that seemed to fall into odious reciprocity with the external aspect of the New York thoroughfares at that evening rush hour.
Those pale-jowled rigid-faced men, those handsome self-assertive metallic-voiced women, pushing, jostling, scrambling, hurrying, driven by that elemental necessity of which Karmakoff had discoursed to him, seemed to fall in with this mood of his, to blend with it, to hearten it, to justify it. It was with a kind of prolonged snarl of predatory exultation that he — one of their number, one of the male animals of this wrestling tribe — chuckled to himself as he thought of the desperate struggle of life and how he was playing, in his dunghill isolation, his own little game against all these! Two women were ‘interested’ in him, two exceptional women, a great artist and a sweet-souled girl. How easily it might have happened, in this evil vortex, that no feminine creature worth a moment’s thought might have cared one jot what became of him! But two of the most exquisite did care, and in this alone he had surely attained something! One after another the little stations passed, each numbered by the number of a street, crossing Sixth Avenue. When the train stopped at Twenty-third Street two young businessmen got in, in company with an older person, an elderly woman. The three were quarrelling about something, and continued quarrelling as the train moved out. The woman’s face was gentle and very sad. The two young men were causing her some peculiar shame by the vulgarity and crudity of their discussion. Richard caught her eye, the eye of a hunted thing, looking desperately out of the train window, and then he caught her reverting her gaze into the interior of the car as though driven back by the menacing heartlessness of those glaring lights, gaudy advertisements and obtrusive store windows.
There swept over him a drowning wave of sudden remorse. Had he, in this eternal division between the sensitive and insensitive, slipped over to the wrong side? Had he ranged himself with the glaring advertisements and brutal sounds, with the lights and the iron and the paint and the roar, against the deeper voices that alone gave life any beauty or meaning?