第58章

It is a remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!"One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone, Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to the possible mischances of one's genius.

"What if the watch should run down," he asked, "and you should lose the key? What if you should wake up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped?

Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have had to grin and bear it.The whole matter of genius is a mystery.

It bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism.

If it gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can't set it going again.We must let it choose its own pace, and hold our breath lest it should lose its balance.

It 's dealt out in different doses, in big cups and little, and when you have consumed your portion it 's as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask for more porridge.

Lucky for you if you 've got one of the big cups; we drink them down in the dark, and we can't tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last gurgle.Those of some men last for life; those of others for a couple of years.

Nay, what are you smiling at so damnably?" he went on.

"Nothing is more common than for an artist who has set out on his journey on a high-stepping horse to find himself all of a sudden dismounted and invited to go his way on foot.

You can number them by the thousand--the people of two or three successes; the poor fellows whose candle burnt out in a night.

Some of them groped their way along without it, some of them gave themselves up for blind and sat down by the wayside to beg.Who shall say that I 'm not one of these?

Who shall assure me that my credit is for an unlimited sum?

Nothing proves it, and I never claimed it; or if I did, I did so in the mere boyish joy of shaking off the dust of Northampton.

If you believed so, my dear fellow, you did so at your own risk!

What am I, what are the best of us, but an experiment? Do I succeed--do I fail? It does n't depend on me.I 'm prepared for failure.

It won't be a disappointment, simply because I shan't survive it.

The end of my work shall be the end of my life.When I have played my last card, I shall cease to care for the game.

I 'm not making vulgar threats of suicide; for destiny, I trust, won't add insult to injury by putting me to that abominable trouble.

But I have a conviction that if the hour strikes here,"and he tapped his forehead, "I shall disappear, dissolve, be carried off in a cloud! For the past ten days I have had the vision of some such fate perpetually swimming before my eyes.

My mind is like a dead calm in the tropics, and my imagination as motionless as the phantom ship in the Ancient Mariner!"Rowland listened to this outbreak, as he often had occasion to listen to Roderick's heated monologues, with a number of mental restrictions.

Both in gravity and in gayety he said more than he meant, and you did him simple justice if you privately concluded that neither the glow of purpose nor the chill of despair was of so intense a character as his florid diction implied.The moods of an artist, his exaltations and depressions, Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen-flourishes a writing-master makes in the air when he begins to set his copy.He may bespatter you with ink, he may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand.

It was nevertheless true that at present poor Roderick gave unprecedented tokens of moral stagnation, and as for genius being held by the precarious tenure he had sketched, Rowland was at a loss to see whence he could borrow the authority to contradict him.

He sighed to himself, and wished that his companion had a trifle more of little Sam Singleton's evenness of impulse.

But then, was Singleton a man of genius? He answered that such reflections seemed to him unprofitable, not to say morbid;that the proof of the pudding was in the eating; that he did n't know about bringing a genius that had palpably spent its last breath back to life again, but that he was satisfied that vigorous effort was a cure for a great many ills that seemed far gone.

"Don't heed your mood," he said, "and don't believe there is any calm so dead that your own lungs can't ruffle it with a breeze.

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.""Set to work and produce abortions!" cried Roderick with ire.

"Preach that to others.Production with me must be either pleasure or nothing.As I said just now, I must either stay in the saddle or not go at all.I won't do second-rate work;I can't if I would.I have no cleverness, apart from inspiration.

I am not a Gloriani! You are right," he added after a while;"this is unprofitable talk, and it makes my head ache.

I shall take a nap and see if I can dream of a bright idea or two."He turned his face upward to the parasol of the great pine, closed his eyes, and in a short time forgot his sombre fancies.

January though it was, the mild stillness seemed to vibrate with faint midsummer sounds.Rowland sat listening to them and wishing that, for the sake of his own felicity, Roderick's temper were graced with a certain absent ductility.He was brilliant, but was he, like many brilliant things, brittle? Suddenly, to his musing sense, the soft atmospheric hum was overscored with distincter sounds.

He heard voices beyond a mass of shrubbery, at the turn of a neighboring path.In a moment one of them began to seem familiar, and an instant later a large white poodle emerged into view.

He was slowly followed by his mistress.Miss Light paused a moment on seeing Rowland and his companion; but, though the former perceived that he was recognized, she made no bow.Presently she walked directly toward him.He rose and was on the point of waking Roderick, but she laid her finger on her lips and motioned him to forbear.

She stood a moment looking at Roderick's handsome slumber.