United States or Kazakhstan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The face, triumphantly crowned with its dark coil, looked grave. "He is a gentleman. At least, he lied like one." By this time Lucia was in bed, and there was no face in the glass to dispute or corroborate that statement. The next morning he gave into her hands the manuscript of Helen in Leuce. It had arrived two or three days ago, packed by Spinks between his new shirts.
Her vision of him would be free and undisturbed by any suggestion of his bodily presence. Meanwhile, Rickman's poem, or rather the first two Acts of his neo-classic drama, Helen in Leuce, lay on Lucia's lap. Jewdwine had obtained it under protest and with much secrecy. He had promised Rickman, solemnly, not to show it to a soul; but he had shown it to Lucia.
His masterpiece is said to have been a group representing Achilles conducted to the island of Leuce by the divinities of the sea, which ornamented the shrine of Domitius in the Flaminian Circus. In this, tender grace, heroic grandeur, daring power, and luxurious fulness of life were combined with wonderful harmony.
The poet lay face downwards across the body of his friend, and was crooning into his ear the great chorus from the third act of Helen in Leuce. He said that nobody but Spinky understood it. And Spinky couldn't understand it if he wasn't drunk. Whereupon Spinks was most curiously uplifted and consoled.
Stooping to recover it, she came upon a long slip of paper printed on one side. It was signed S.K.R., and Savage Keith Rickman was the name she had seen on Mr. Rickman's card. The headline, Helen in Leuce, drew her up with a little shock of recognition. The title was familiar, so was the motto from Euripides, and she read,
It was in the corner by the window, standing on a step-ladder and fumbling in the darkness for a copy of Demosthenes, De Corona, that he lit on his first Idea. From his seat behind the counter, staring, as was his custom, into the recess where the coal-scuttle was, he first saw the immortal face of Helen in Leuce.
She's the marriage-breaker, the destroyer of men. She brings war and pestilence and death. She is the supreme illusion. But Helen in Leuce is the true Helen. In Leuce, you know, she appears as she is, in her divine form, freed from the tyranny of perpetual incarnation. I can't explain it, but that's the idea.
Under the Euripides was the piled up manuscript of Rickman's great neo-classic drama, Helen in Leuce. He implored Spinks to read it. "There," he said, "rea' that. Tha's the sor' o' thing I write when I'm drunk. Couldn' do it now t' save my life. Temp'rance been my ruin." He threw himself on his bed.
But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny cab, he would save one and tenpence. "And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote Helen in Leuce was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."
"That means that you know you've written a beautiful thing and you only think you'll never write another." "Perhaps it does." "Well, I don't suppose you will write another Helen in Leuce." "I'm afraid not." He went on to tell her that the wonder was how he wrote the thing at all. "How did you feel about it?" he inquired. "I can hardly tell you.