Antic Hay

hand, blow a kiss and away you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off. Poor Casimir! But he irritated her, he was a horrible bore. She ought to have stopped seeing him. “You can’t wholly dislike me, then?” “But of course not, my poor Casimir!” “If you knew how horribly I loved you!” He looked up at her despairingly. “But what’s the good?” said Mrs. Viveash. “Have you ever known what it’s like to love some one so much that you feel you could die of it? So that it hurts all the time. As though there were a wound. Have you ever known that?” Mrs. Viveash smiled her agonizing smile, nodded slowly and said, “Perhaps. And one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t die.” Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly up at her. The tears were dry on his face, his cheeks were flushed. “Do you know what it is,” he asked, “to love so much, that you begin to long for the anodyne of physical pain to quench the pain in the soul? You don’t know that.” And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he began to bang the wooden dais on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with all his strength. Mrs. Viveash leant forward and tried to arrest his hand. “You’re mad, Casimir,” she said. “You’re mad. Don’t do that.” She spoke with anger. Lypiatt laughed till his face was all broken up with the grimace, and proffered for her inspection his bleeding knuckles. The skin hung in little white tags and tatters, and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the surface. “Look,” he said, and laughed again. Then suddenly, with an extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dais and began once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door. “By God,” he kept repeating, “by God, by God. I feel it in me. I can face the whole lot of you; the whole damned lot. Yes, and I shall get the better of you yet. An Artist”—he called up that traditional ghost and it comforted him; he wrapped himself with a protective gesture within the ample folds of its bright mantle—“an Artist doesn’t fail under unhappiness. He gets new strength from it. The torture makes him sweat new masterpieces....” He began to talk about his books, his poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things he had already done. He talked about his exhibition—ah, by God, that would astonish them, that would bowl them over, this time. The blood mounted to his face; there was a flush over the high projecting cheek-bones. He could feel the warm blood behind his eyes. He laughed aloud; he was a laughing lion. He stretched out his arms; he was enormous, his arms reached out like the branches of a cedar. The Artist walked across the world and the mangy dogs ran yelping and snapping behind him. The great wind blew and blew, driving him on; it lifted him and he began to fly. Mrs. Viveash listened. It didn’t look as though he would get much further with the portrait.