The Call of the Blood
Page 25"And he's good, too."
"Why not? He does not look evil. I thought of him as a Mercury."
"The messenger of the gods--yes, he is like that."
She laid her hand on his arm, as if her happiness and longing for
sympathy in it impelled her to draw very near to a human being.
"A bearer of good tidings--that is what he has been to me. I want you to
like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one
else."
The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand
to the Thames Embankment--a street that was obscure and that looked sad
and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he
did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a
gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and
them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.
"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good
to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."
"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."
"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me--you for
one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"
She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands
instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the
spreading night.
"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in
cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't
work, but I'm glad to say he does."
"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an
awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand
Maurice, and that's the important matter."
They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad
and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone
faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side;
on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which
people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine
artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the
hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger
atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto
dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more
and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide
when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in
leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his
business, Hermione, her understanding of him and happiness in him, Artois
himself in his sharply realized solitude of the third person, melted into
the crowd of beings who made up life, whose background was the vast and
infinitely various panorama of nature, and Hermione's last words, "the
important matter," seemed for the moment false to him. What was, what
could be, important in the immensity and the baffling complexity of
existence?