United States or Belgium ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You'll turn up again, and let me know how you're getting on?" To Rickman there was something tragic and retrospective in Jewdwine's smile. It had no joy in it, but an appeal, rather, to the memory of what he had been. He found it irresistible. "Thanks. I shall get on all right; but I'll turn up again sometime." Jewdwine's smile parted with its pathos, its appeal.
Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty accurately. "Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow.
If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters. As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own damnation. Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amusement in discussing whether the great dramatist were Maddox's discovery or Jewdwine's.
Perhaps as he was reviewing the work of a "brother bard" it would be better to keep the article anonymous. There was nothing coarse about Jewdwine's methods. Through all his career he remained refined and fastidious, and his natural instincts forbade him to give a stronger hint. Unfortunately, in this instance, refinement had led him into a certain ambiguity of phrase!
The clumsy hand of Maddox had brushed the first bloom from his Rickman, that once delightful youth. He was no longer Jewdwine's Rickman, his disciple, his discovery. But though Jewdwine felt bitter, he was careful that no tinge of this personal feeling should appear in his review of Rickman's poems. It was exceedingly difficult for him to review them at all.
That afternoon she dragged herself there, that she might torture her eyes because they had not seen, and her heart because it had not felt. At Jewdwine's heart there was trouble and in his mind perfect peace. For he knew his own mind at last, though he was still a little indefinite as to the exact condition of his heart.
Fulcher," he said, "can no more return to Nature than he can enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born." He walked up and down the little office excitedly, while he drew for Jewdwine's benefit an unattractive picture of the poet as babe, drinking from the breasts of the bounteous mother. "You can't go for ever hanging on your mother's breasts; it isn't decent and it isn't manly.
And in that manner he passed Horace Jewdwine coming up the stair too late. And all that Jewdwine could do was to stand back and let him pass. It was Jewdwine's fear that made him uncover, as in the presence of the dead. When Rankin, Maddox and Jewdwine stood alone in the garret whence they had seen Rickman carried away from them, remorse drove all hope of his recovery from their hearts.
She weighs about as much as a feather." "Drop her, drop her, all the same." "I can't. She wouldn't drop. She'd float." "Don't float with her." As he rose he spoke slowly and impressively. "What you've got to do is to pull yourself together. You can't afford to be dissolute, or even dissipated." Rickman looked hard at Jewdwine's boots.
There was a point beyond which his honour refused to identify itself with Jewdwine's. He had never felt a moment's hesitation upon that point. For in his heart he condemned his friend far more severely than Maddox could have condemned anybody. He had a greater capacity for disgust than Maddox. He would draw up, writhing at trifles over which Maddox would merely shrug his shoulders and pass on.
Word Of The Day