EXCEPT for one disquieting symptom, Annan had no reason to suppose that his budding affair with Eris was to develop and terminate differently from other agreeable interludes in his airy career.
That symptom was a new one—an odd disinclination to work because his mind was preoccupied with a girl.
No other tender episodes in this young man’s career had interfered with his creative ability. On the contrary, they had stimulated it.
Always he had taken such incidents gaily; always he remained receptive, not seeking; the onus of initiative equally shared; the normal end a mutual enlightenment, not too tragic, and with the germ of future laughter always latent, even quickening under tears.
There never had been any passion in these affairs—not on his part anyway—unless a passion for the analysis of reactions counted, and a passionate desire to comprehend beauty, physical and intellectual; its multiple motives, responsibilities, and penalties.
Partly experimental, partly sympathetically responsive, always tenderly curious, this young man drifted gratefully through the inevitable episodes to which all young men are heir.
And something in him always transmuted into ultimate friendship the sentimental chaos, where comedy and tragedy clashed at the crisis.
The result was professional knowledge. Which, however, he had employed rather ruthlessly in his work. For he resolutely cut out all that had been agreeable to the generations which had thriven on the various phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of the New World.
His were essays on the enormous meanness of mankind—mean conditions, mean minds, mean aspirations, and a little mean horizon to encompass all.
Out of his theme, patiently, deftly, ingeniously he extracted every atom of that beauty, sanity, inspired imagination which makes the imperfect more perfect, creates better than the materials permit, forces real life actually to assume and be what the passionate desire for sanity and beauty demands.
For we become, visibly, what the passionate purpose of the strongest among us demands. Bodies and minds alter in the irresistible demand for beauty and sanity.
It is the fixed, inexorable aspiration of the strong that has moved mankind out of its own natal ugliness—so far upon the long, long journey toward sanity, beauty, and the stars.
The old, old story: beauty is obvious and becomes trite: the corruption from whence it sprung is the only interest. Not the flower but the maggots in the manure which nourishes it; not symmetry, but the causes that deform it; not sanity but the microbes which undermine it.
Shadows everywhere framing a black abyss where, deep in obscurity, cause and effect writhe endlessly like two great worms....
And he became uneasy and uncomfortable and perplexed because he seemed to be disinclined to continue work.
Eris was interfering. The damp sweetness of her mouth, her cool fresh body, the still clarity of gray eyes, hands that lay in his lightly as dawn-chilled flowers....
Neither intention of mind and pen—nor even effort where, hitherto, inspiration and mechanics had so suavely co-ordinated—seemed to replace him and reassure him in that easy security from whence, hitherto, he had inspected mankind.
An indefinable subconsciousness was becoming a restlessness shared by mind and body. And it finally set him adrift from club to avenue—trivial resources of those who depend upon externals for occupation.
Never before had Annan been at loss to know how to entertain his mind. He had been an amusing host to himself. Now, for the first time he was aware of a sort of obscure impatience with the entertainment. Not that his was becoming the sordid state of mind of the time-killer—most contemptible of unconscious suicides and slowest of any to enter that meaningless void for which such human phantoms are fitted.
But it seemed that something was lacking to make self-entertainment worth while. Exactly what this was he did not know. There was effort now where none ever had been. And that effort was the initiative of a mind seeking, for the first time, its complement, vaguely, blindly irritated by its own incompleteness.
He went to see his aunt, but she wasn’t very glad to see him.
The reason he called on her was to talk about Eris, but Mrs. Grandcourt bluntly inquired what his interest might be in an actress, and suggested that he mind his business and try to foregather with women of his own caste.
“Isn’t she?” he asked rather rashly.
But she, old, wise, disillusioned, and with a sort of weary comprehension of men, made it plain that the granddaughter of Jeanne d’Espremont concerned herself alone.
“I can imagine,” she remarked, “nothing as contemptible as any philandering with this child by any man of my race.”
He went out with that in his ear.
It bored him all day. Finally it interested him. Because that is exactly what would have happened in one of his own stories——
Abruptly he was conscious that it was happening. That this had to do with his restlessness. That possibly it was desire to see this girl which was disturbing him.
He realised, now, that he wanted to see Eris; was impatient at delay. Well, that was interesting anyway. And, now that the possible cause of discomfort seemed clearer, he decided to examine and analyse it coolly, professionally....
Toward one o’clock in the morning, dead tired, he gave it up. The cause of restlessness still abided with him. He fell asleep, weary of visualisation—young eyes, crystal-grey, that told him nothing, answered nothing—eyes virginal, unaware, immaculate, incorruptible.