And yet, bad as it was, they felt that he must be consoled, sustained by what he knew about himself, what it was inconceivable that he should not know.

He may, indeed, have reflected with some complacency that in spite of everything, his great classic drama, Helen in Leuce, was lying finished in the dressing-table drawer in his bedroom, and that for the last month those very modern poems that he called Saturnalia had been careering through the columns of The Planet.  But at the moment he was mainly supported by the coming of Easter.

CHAPTER III

The scene of the tragedy, that shop in the Strand, was well-lit and well-appointed.  But he, Savage Keith Rickman, had much preferred the dark little second-hand shop in the City where he had laboured as a boy.  There was something soothing in its very obscurity and retirement.  He could sit there for an hour at a time, peacefully reading his Homer.  In that agreeable dusty twilight, outward forms were dimmed with familiarity and dirt.  His dreams took shape before him, they came and went at will, undisturbed by any gross collision with reality.  There was hardly any part of it that was not consecrated by some divine visitation.  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.

Here, all that beautiful world of thought lay open to the terrific invasion of things.  His dreams refused to stand out with sufficient distinctness from a background of coloured bindings, plate glass and mahogany.  They were liable at any moment to be broken by the violent contours of customers.  A sight of Helen in Leuce could be obtained only by dint of much concentrated staring at the clock; and as often as not Mr. Rickman’s eye dropt its visionary freight on encountering the cashier’s eye in its passage from the clock to the paper.

But (as he reflected with some humour) though Mr. Rickman’s ideas so frequently miscarried, owing to that malignant influence, his genius, like Nature irresistible and indestructible, compelled him perpetually to bring forth.  Exposed on his little dais or platform, in hideous publicity, he suffered the divine labour and agony of creation.  He was the slave of his passion and his hour.

CHAPTER IV

A wave of heat broke from the pillar-stove and spread through the shop, strewing the heavier smells like a wrack behind it.  And through it all, with every swing of the great mahogany doors, there stole into his young senses a something delicious and disturbing, faintly discernible as the Spring.

He thrust his work from him, tilted back his chair at a dangerous angle, and began reviewing his engagements for the coming Bank Holiday.