For Rickman no agony
could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul. He could see
nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it
before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk. His
ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive
them. But this time, though he had not been drinking, he felt that
they had gone for ever, and that all his songs were sung. And over his
head high up in the sky, a lark, a little fiend of a lark, had chosen
that moment for bursting into music. With diabolical ease and
maddening ecstasy, he flung out his perfect and incommunicable song. A
song of joy and mockery and triumph.
He did not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage
Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty. Was it, he wondered,
the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of
the soul? Was he a precocious genius? Had he taken to the immortal
drink too early and too hard? Or was it, as Jewdwine had suggested,
that there were too many Rickmans, and that this poor seventh part of
him had been crushed by the competition of the other six? The horrible
thing was that they would live on for years, eating and getting drunk
and falling in love and buying suits of clothes, while the poet in him
was dead, like Keats, at three and twenty.
Then suddenly, for no reason whatever, a vision of Lucia Harden rose
before him like a light and refused to leave him.
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