Spinks sat down and stared at the object of his devotion.  “Poor old chappie,” he murmured tenderly.  He was helpless before that slow melancholy shaking of the head, that mysterious and steadfast smile.  He approached tip-toe on deprecating feet.  But Rickman would none of him; his whole attitude was eloquent of rebuke.  He waved Spinks away with one pathetic hand; with the other he clutched and gathered round him the last remnants of his personal majesty.  And thus, in his own time and in his own fashion, he wandered to his bed.  Even then he conveyed reproach and reproof by his manner of entering it; he seemed to vanish subtly, to withdraw himself, as into some sacred and inviolable retreat.

Spinks crept away, saddened by the rebuff.  After all, he was no nearer to Rickman drunk than to Rickman sober.  Half an hour later, he was asleep in the adjoining room, dreaming a lightsome dream of ladies and mousselines de laine, when suddenly the dream turned to a nightmare.  It seemed to him that there descended upon him a heavy rolling weight, as of a bale of woollens.  He awoke and found that it was Rickman.

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.

CHAPTER XIII

He woke tired out, as well he might be, after spending half the night in the pursuit of young Joy personified in Miss Poppy Grace, young Joy, who, like that little dancer, is the swiftest of all swift things.

Rickman carried into this adventure a sort of innocence that renewed itself, as by a miracle, every evening.  His youth remained virgin because of its incorruptible hope.  He almost disarmed criticism by the gaiety, the naivete of the pursuit.  She was always in front of him, that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on her feet and the dawn on her forehead.  He was convinced that it was that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the secret of the world.  And long before the morning she would pick up her skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night.  She was in no hurry to leave him.  It seemed to him that she sat beside him, formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves.