There were ways in which he might have satisfied it.  He could have obtained a square meal any day from Mrs. Downey or the Spinkses; but now that the value of a square meal had increased so monstrously in imagination, his delicacy shrank from approaching his friends with conscious designs upon their hospitality.  Spinks was always asking him to dine at his house in Camden Town; but he had refused because he would have had abominable suspicions of his own motives in accepting.  Trust Flossie to find him out too.  And latterly he had hidden himself from the eye of Spinks.  There were moments now when he might have been tempted to borrow fifty pounds from Spinks and end it; but he could not bring himself to borrow from Flossie’s husband.  The last time he had dined with them he thought she had looked at him as if she were afraid he was going to borrow money.  He knew it so well, that gleam of the black eyes, half subtle and half savage.  For Flossie had realized her dream, and her little hand clung passionately to the purse that provided for Muriel Maud.  He couldn’t borrow from Spinky.  From Jewdwine?  Never.  From Hanson?  Hardly.  From Vaughan?  Possibly.  Vaughan was considering the expediency of publishing his tragedy, and might be induced to advance him a little on account.  Such possibilities visited him in the watches of the night, but dawn revealed their obvious futility.  And yet he knew all the time he had only to go to Maddox for the money, and he would get it.  To Maddox or to Rankin, Rankin whose books stood open on every bookstall, whose face in its beautiful photogravure portrait smiled so impenetrably, guarding the secret of success.  But he could not go to them without giving them the explanation he was determined not to give.  He knew what they thought of him; therefore he would not go to them.  If they had known him better they would have come to him.

He was reminded of them now by seeing in The Planet an obituary notice of young Paterson.  Paterson had been dying slowly all the year, and December finished him.  Though Rickman had been expecting the news for months, the death accomplished affected him profoundly.  And at the thought of the young poet whom he had seemed to have so greatly wronged, at the touch of grief and pity and divine regret, his own genius, defied and resisted, descended on him again out of heaven.  It was as if the spirit of young Paterson, appeased and reconciled, had bequeathed to him its own immortal adolescence.  He finished the poem in four nights, sitting in his great coat, with his legs wrapped in his blankets, and for the last two nights drinking gin and water to keep the blood beating in his head.  In the morning he felt as if it were filled with some light and crackling and infinitely brittle substance, the ashes of a brain that had kindled, flamed, and burned itself away.  It was the last onslaught of the god, the last mad flaring of the divine fire.