Flames. Robert Hichens
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and I wasting our lives, do you think? Since you have been away I have thought again over our conversation before we had our first sitting. Do you remember it?"
"Yes, Valentine."
"You said then I had held you back from so much."
"Yes."
"And I have been asking myself whether I have not, perhaps, held you back, held myself back, from all that is worth having in life."
Julian looked troubled.
"From all that is not worth having, old boy," he said.
But he looked troubled. When Valentine spoke like this he felt as a man who stands at a garden gate and gazes out into the world, and is stirred with a thrill of anticipation and of desire to leap out from the green and shadowy close, where trees are and flowers, into the dust and heat where passion hides as in a nest, and unspoken things lie warm. Julian was vaguely afraid of himself. It is dangerous to lean on any one, however strong. Having met Valentine on the threshold of life, Julian had never learned to walk alone. He trusted another, instead of trusting himself. He had never forged his own sword. When Siegfried sang at his anvil he sang a song of all the greatness of life. Julian was notably strong as to his muscles. He had arms of iron, and the blood raced in his veins, but he had never forged his sword. Mistrust of himself was as a phantom that walked with him unless Valentine drove it away.
"I thought you had got over that absurd feeling, Val," he said. "I thought you were content with your soul."
"I think I have ceased to be content," said Valentine. "Perhaps I have stolen a fragment of your nature, Julian, in those dark nights in the tentroom. Since you have been away I have wondered. An extraordinary sensation of bodily strength, of enormous vigour, has come to me. And I want to test the sensation, to see if it is founded upon fact."
He was sitting in a low chair, and as he spoke he slowly stretched his limbs. It was as if all his body yawned, waking from sleep.
"But how?" Julian asked.
Already he looked rather interested than troubled. At Valentine's words he too became violently conscious of his own strength, and stirred by the wonder of youth dwelling in him.
"How? That is what I wish to find out by going into the world with different eyes. I have been living in the arts, Julian. But is that living at all?"
Julian got up and stood by the fire. Valentine excited him. He leaned one arm on the mantelpiece. His right hand kept closing and unclosing as he talked.
"Such a life is natural to you," he said. "And you have made me love it."
"I sometimes wonder," responded Valentine, "whether I have not trained my head to slay my heart. Men of intellect are often strangely inhuman. Besides, what you call my purity and my refinement are due perhaps to my cowardice. I am called the Saint of Victoria Street because I live in a sort of London cloister with you for my companion, and in the cloister I read or I give myself up to music, and I hang my walls with pictures, and I wonder at the sins of men, and I believe I am that deadly thing, a Pharisee."
"But you are perfectly tolerant."
"Am I? I often find myself sneering at the follies of others, at what I call their coarsenesses, their wallowing in the mire."
"It is wallowing."
"And which is most human, the man who drives in a carriage, or the man who walks sturdily 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 friendship, 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 fellowship."
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 glass, 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