He with the torso and those shoulders
was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in
those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his Own in that
crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy by the window yonder!... Her fingers clutched at the tawdry mercerised silk of her blouse. There
was a rip, and her arms and throat were free. She panted as she tugged
at something that gave with a short "click-click," as of steel
fastenings; something fell against the fender.... These also.... She tore
at them, and kicked them as they lay about her feet as leaves lie about
the trunk of a tree in autumn.... "Ah!" And as she stood there, as if within the screen of a spectrum that
deepened to the band of red, her eyes fell on the leopard-skin at her
feet. She caught it up, and in doing so saw purple grapes--purple
grapes that issued from the mouth of a paper bag on the table. With the
dappled pelt about her she sprang forward. The juice spurted through them
into the mass of her loosened hair. Down her body there was a spilth of
seeds and pulp. She cried hoarsely aloud. "Once more--oh, answer me! Tell me my name!" Ed's steps were heard on the oilclothed portion of the staircase. "My name--oh, my name!" she cried in an agony of suspense.... "Oh, they
will not wait for me! They have lighted the torches--they run up and down
the shore with torches--oh, cannot you see me?..." Suddenly she dashed to the chair on which the litter of linings and
tissue-paper lay. She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the
fire. They caught and flared. There was a call upon the stairs, and the
sound of somebody mounting in haste. "Once--once only--my name!" The soul of the Bacchante rioted, struggled to escape from her eyes. Then
as the door was flung open, she heard, and gave a terrifying shout of
recognition. "I hear--I almost hear--but once more.... IO! _Io, Io, Io!_"

Ed, in the doorway, stood for one moment agape; the next, ignorant of the
full purport of his own words--ignorant that though man may come
westwards he may yet bring his worship with him--ignorant that to make
the Dream the Reality and the Reality the Dream is Heaven's dreadfullest
favour--and ignorant that, that Edge once crossed, there is no return to
the sanity and sweetness and light that are only seen clearly in the
moment when they are lost for ever--he had dashed down the stairs crying
in a voice hoarse and high with terror:

"She's mad! She's mad!" THE ACCIDENT


I

The street had not changed so much but that, little by little, its
influence had come over Romarin again; and as the clock a street or two
away had struck seven he had stood, his hands folded on his stick, first
curious, then expectant, and finally, as the sound had died away, oddly
satisfied in his memory. The clock had a peculiar chime, a rather
elaborate one, ending inconclusively on the dominant and followed after
an unusually long interval by the stroke of the hour itself. Not until
its last vibration had become too subtle for his ear had Romarin resumed
the occupation that the pealing of the hour had interrupted. It was an occupation that especially tended to abstraction of mind--the
noting in detail of the little things of the street that he had forgotten
with such completeness that they awakened only tardy responses in his
memory now that his eyes rested on them again. The shape of a
doorknocker, the grouping of an old chimney-stack, the crack, still
there, in a flagstone--somewhere deep in the past these things had
associations; but they lay very deep, and the disturbing of them gave
Romarin a curious, desolate feeling, as of returning to things he had
long out-grown. But, as he continued to stare at the objects, the sluggish memories
roused more and more; and for each bit of the old that reasserted itself
scores of yards of the new seemed to disappear. New shop-frontages went;
a wall, brought up flush where formerly a recess had been, became the
recess once more; the intermittent electric sign at the street's end,
that wrote in green and crimson the name of a whiskey across a lamp-lit
façade, ceased to worry his eyes; and the unfamiliar new front of the
little restaurant he was passing and repassing took on its old and
well-known aspect again. Seven o'clock. He had thought, in dismissing his hansom, that it had been
later. His appointment was not until a quarter past. But he decided
against entering the restaurant and waiting inside; seeing who his guest
was, it would be better to wait at the door. By the light of the
restaurant window he corrected his watch, and then sauntered a few yards
along the street, to where men were moving flats of scenery from a back
door of the new theatre into a sort of tumbril. The theatre was twenty
years old, but to Romarin it was "the new theatre." There had been no
theatre there in his day. In his day!... His day had been twice twenty years before. Forty years
before, that street, that quarter, had been bound up in his life. He had
not, forty years ago, been the famous painter, honoured, decorated, taken
by the arm by monarchs; he had been a student, wild and raw as any, with
that tranquil and urbane philosophy that had made his success still in
abeyance within him. As his eyes had rested on the doorknocker next to
the restaurant a smile had crossed his face. How had _that_ door-knocker
come to be left by the old crowd that had wrenched off so many others? By
what accident had _that_ survived, to bring back all the old life now so
oddly? He stood, again smiling, his hands folded on his stick. A Crown
Prince had given him that stick, and had had it engraved, "To my Friend,
Romarin." "You oughtn't to be here, you know," he said to the door-knocker. "If I
didn't get you, Marsden ought to have done so...."

It was Marsden whom Romarin had come to meet--Marsden, of whom he had
thought with such odd persistency lately. Marsden was the only man in the
world between whom and himself lay as much as the shadow of an enmity;
and even that faint shadow was now passing. One does not guard, for forty
years, animosities that take their rise in quick outbreaks of the young
blood; and, now that Romarin came to think of it, he hadn't really hated
Marsden for more than a few months. It had been within those very doors
(Romarin was passing the restaurant again) that there had been that quick
blow, about a girl, and the tables had been pushed hastily back, and he
and Marsden had fought, while the other fellows had kept the waiters
away.... And Romarin was now sixty-four, and Marsden must be a year
older, and the girl--who knew?--probably dead long ago ... Yes, time
heals these things, thank God; and Romarin had felt a genuine flush of
pleasure when Marsden had accepted his invitation to dinner. But--Romarin looked at his watch again--it was rather like Marsden to be
late. Marsden had always been like that--had come and gone pretty much as
he had pleased, regardless of inconvenience to others.