Читать книгу My Star Predominant - Raymond Knister - Страница 3

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There was no time for waiting on a day in May; not on London Bridge, John Keats was sure; not on the day when he was at last to meet Leigh Hunt. The youth looked at the sky, but his face was almost as bright. Oh to be in the fields walking toward Hunt’s house! How the blandly sonorous words of Hunt’s poetry had been chiming in his head, how many times he had thrilled with the disinterested benevolence of the social criticism in Hunt’s paper, the Examiner! How malevolent and incomprehensible the world, to permit such a man to be sent to gaol! For the Prince Regent, a depraved wastrel not worthy to tie the shoes of peerless Libertas.

Yet this mad world was good. You had to put up with its ambiguities. Wasn’t it just natural that a friend like Cowden Clarke, having set a day and assigned a meeting-place, should waste everyone’s time through being late? And wasn’t it just excruciating? Keats started walking up and down, his short body with its good shoulders buoyant upon his lean, athletic legs. His face seemed to have the habitude of turning toward the sky with the dauntless expression of a seaman. Beneath the wide spread of his brows his eyes looked out glowing and deep, as though this world of London had been a curtained picture: and his mouth was an eager smile. He shouldered the larger passers-by without knowing that he did so.

One or two glowered at him, for the frequenters of the Bridge were not tender; but the look on his face was so apart from any concern of theirs that they slouched on their ways, calling him a drunken toff. A woman passed now and then, but he did not glance up until a lady leaned forward in her carriage as he turned smartly at the end of his promenade to walk beside it. The coachman clucked, the four beautiful horses clumped, and the carriage rolled away with the inquisitive fair. It was as handsome a turn-out as any he had seen as a little boy at his father’s livery, the “Swan and Hoop”. Keats chuckled. “There may be another like me. She seemed sensibly affected.” Or perhaps she thought him only some young buck preening himself. He stopped to pull at the points of his collar, which usually were turned down and loose after the manner of Lord Byron and Beau Brummel. With arms folded he looked upon the river.

His fellow students in St. Thomas’s Hospital sometimes called him Lord Byron because of his collar and his abstractions. He wrote verses and made drawings of flowers in his notebook for anatomy, pausing to smile at the jokes Astley Cooper, with his West-country accent, used to enliven the lecture; and he grew a moustache. A promising one; but he had shaved it off because of this visit to Hunt. Hunt was all of thirty, and might not find such affectations becoming in a young sprig of a poet. Still, every man had the right to his own choice, and perhaps it was a mistake to shave off the moustache.

Hunt, after all, had solemnly sponsored this young fellow’s verses by putting them into immortal print. That should have been enough for anyone! There it was; Keats saw with his mind’s eye the double-columned page of the Examiner, with its chaste double line across the top, and close black paragraphs anent international duplicity and domestic injustice, to three-quarters’ way down the right column, and then, TO SOLITUDE, the delightful irregularity of the lines of a sonnet, with bold capitals beneath it, J. K. Less than a month ago this unprecedented sight had gladdened his eyes, and now he thought about it and felt warm as he stood on London Bridge.

A dismal birth this poem had had, that carried him at one flight into his dreamed-of realm. How tired he had been those dreary November evenings, returning to his cold grate and shabby walls, with notes to learn, and another walk before him to supper at a chop-house. Without lighting the taper, he wrote: “O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings”; and he had gone on to picture fields, river and flowery slopes he had known on heavenly other afternoons.

Dissecting specimens, standing by at operations, returning to his lonely room to fill and learn his notebooks, he found these days dreary enough. Some of the sights of human pain and the torture human beings could inflict upon one another in the name of humanity would not leave him. Why should men waste away, why should women have cancers, and we be happy in spring over the expressing of our selfish melancholy in winter? Why, why?

“But, well, it was a goodish poem,” he mused sensibly, “or Mr. Hunt would not have printed it. And–if he has not been run over by a hackney coach, old Clarke shall give me fellowship with him and he shall inspire me to do some great–some three-master in place of that tiny shallop–albeit shipshape and well turned.” The great man, it seemed, had found potentialities in the offerings of verse Clarke had carried from Keats. He might find unguessed things in their author too. Surely they would take to one another. If they did not, Keats was sure, it would be some demerit in himself. “I’ll be gentle as a clergyman in a new vicarage, servile as a politician, but I’ll not offend that man,” the boy swore.

Hunt was as gentle as he was intrepid, incorruptible as free. Had he not suffered two years in prison for venturing to remonstrate against a contemporary’s abject servility to the vices of the Prince Regent? Keats knew the story of that imprisonment as he knew the siege of Troy; how Hunt’s cheerfulness had remained unshaken, though the gruesome noises of the prison chafed his nerves; how his old friends had rallied round him, and new ones had sought him out; how he had caused the ceiling of his cell to be painted in imitation of the sky. With his wife and children and his books and speculations he had been “as free as the sky-searching lark, and as elate”. So Keats had phrased it in a sonnet when, a year ago, Hunt had been set at liberty.

That day, with spring latent in the air, he had walked across the fields from Edmonton and Mr. Hammond’s surgery, to his old school at Enfield, and thence with Cowden Clarke on his way to greet Leigh Hunt’s release. At the last gate, where they parted, Keats pulled the sonnet from his pocket, and turned back to himself: only an apprentice lodged in a dreary surgeon’s dreary high-shouldered house in a suburb remote from the heart of things.

It had not been an easy time. Menial and tiresome duties, noisy days and lonely evenings wore him down. About the house and the shop and stable he would go, running errands, currying the horse, mixing medicines, pounding stuff with a pestle and mortar. He had to go with the doctor in the gig and hold the horse while Hammond treated the patients indoors. One day they had gone to his old school, and while he sat hunched in the cold one of the boys threw a snowball which hit him in the middle of the back. He dared not leave the horse to chase the renegade. It had made his heart turn over to have that happen at his old school, but the boy was not one he had known. The other boys had dared Dick Horne to throw the snowball, Tom told him. John laughed, feeling it was not such a bad thing to have a reputation as a battler.... A monotonous time, with day following day sullenly, unchanging in aspect. The fellow indentured with him under Hammond was not bright and thought it foolish to spend the free hours studying and reading, much less scribbling verses. The arbour at the end of the Enfield garden, where he and Clarke read Cymbeline, had saved him. That and his brothers, and his grandmother and sister Fanny, near by in Church Street.

“Heigho, ‘Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year’s pleasant king’,” he quoted to himself. How enjoy oneself better than in walking amid the pleasantries of the sad king? Keats could almost smell the freshness of growth here in the heart of London. The Thames felt different. He was different, Apollo’s son, possibly. He was walking the hospitals, at any rate no longer an apprentice, but ready in a few weeks to try his final examination, and find himself an articled surgeon, ready to carve and collect from anyone so desiring.... And then, he would be a poet, when he was his own man. He felt it within him. So did every man, perhaps–daunting thought. But surely, with summer coming, there would be joyous matter for better verses than “Solitude”. One could believe anything in this air and sunshine.

“It is time,” Keats told himself, turning about to watch the procession of people crossing the Bridge, “that Clarke was congealing from air to the largeness of a gnat and so to his proper self, else I may turn mine eye like Imogen and weep.”

His father would have been proud to know him associated with such a figure as Hunt. A sight of his father, young, gay, energetic, riding his fine horse to visit his boys at Enfield, returned to him. A little man, ruddy and restless, of firm principles and good business head. He must have been so, for he had been chief ostler and manager at the “Swan and Hoop” until he married the owner’s daughter.

“Yes,” muttered Keats, looking up from the bright ripples of the Thames, which made him dizzy by seeming to be still while the Bridge appeared to float toward them, “yes, I might have been in Oxford now. And Mother might not have died.”

She had been nearly his whole life while she lived, his mother. “She said I looked like her.” She had fondled him and made much of him even when, less than a year after his father had died, she took another husband. Later she had become a dear stranger, and after leaving Rawlings she spent years in bed, and finally died of the consumption. It was all a business a boy did not get over, even when he became a man. Father on his splendid horse, Mother in her finery ready for a ball: only a few bright pictures stayed with him to be enjoyed without a pang. And for those he was richer than George and Tom, much richer than little Fanny.

Then, once more the black curtain behind which his father had disappeared. His mother’s death! They could not have felt it as he had. That terrible time deepened his whole life. If only he could have died with her! Fourteen, he was; alone in the schoolroom he tried to hide himself and his grief under the master’s desk. Early and late he read, until, alarmed, the masters tried to drive him out to play with the other boys. He took the school prizes too. A different boy now from the dirty-handed little scallywag ready to fight all comers on any pretext, to make victims and pets of goldfishes, minnows, mice, sticklebacks, all of the tribes of the bushes and the brooks.

He was not to forget the black curtain; while he was at Dr. Hammond’s, Grandmother died. His father, his mother.... But now the earlier, dumb, uncomprehending grief and loss was loaned a sense of the futility of a life that led to this nothingness. Bitter to see that people could know this end of all things and still treat one another in the ways they did. Edmonton and surgery were intolerable; the world paid no attention to his griefs, what should he say to its overweening authority? One day he raised his fist to strike Hammond; afterward, astonished at himself, he wept. Finding a bitter-sweet solace in Byron’s romances, he set about writing poems in earnest. And he had to see George and Tom more frequently. Fanny was living with the lumpish family of the guardian Grandmother had put over them, Mr. Abbey. Incredibly, strangely bitter was change.

Tom and George went to Abbey’s too, when the gentleman withdrew them from school. There was plenty of money, but Abbey was its custodian. It would be grand if a fellow could write a book and make a fortune out of it as Lord Byron had done; then you could send your brothers to school. But they would all have their own money when Fanny became one-and-twenty; and, money or no, they would each become his own man at majority.

A pair of strapping fishwives came striding across the Bridge with woven baskets under their arms.

“See the little dandy! Not asleep, is he?”

“Not ‘im. Tight tidy little feller he is, too,” added the other Amazon, looking at Keats without troubling to conceal her admiration.

He abruptly turned his back, and looked again down the river with the long, long hedge of masts that bordered each bank, the glittering crowded way between. Such beings were strange to high poesy.

His heart quickened. What quaffings there had been and would be, what wanderings in the leafy mazes of Spenser’s Faerie Queen! “Fierce warres, and faithful loves, shall moralize my song.” Loves and wars woven upon a tapestry of summer delights of eye and ear, and not least the delight of rolling syllables. Could he ever love poetry as he had loved Mrs. Tighe’s Psyche? The quarto volume in his London lodgings had been a fairy in an old shoe, conjuring the country air, the age of the romaunt.

And all its banks inwreathed with flowery bands,

Ambrosial fragrance shed in grateful dew:

There young desire enchanted ever stands,

Breathing delight and fragrance ever new.

“But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?” Keats quoted under his breath. How often, how deeply and freshly each time, he had been touched by the sad plight of Psyche, pursued by the Blatant Beast, and no sooner rescued by her knight than losing him. Then, tried in the Bower of Loose Delight, she saw the form of her lover transformed into that of a snake. As the enchanting tale wound along through bowers and halls and lutes and feasts of cates, Psyche was overcome (almost) by misfortunes. Her heart ached, and a drowsy dullness benumbed each torpid sense. She had tasted an opiate of the bitter cup of disappointment. But, going to the casement at midnight, she listened to the voice of the nightbird, while magic was in the air and in the plaintive notes of Innocence. But after all, the real lover returned to her, and in the Temple of Love they were reunited....

So well had Keats the story by heart that lines and phrases from it were constantly coming to him. Yet Mrs. Tighe was not for immortality, he and Clarke had agreed; she was not sealed of the tribe of Spenser, much less of Shakespeare. But how delicious, how cloying, how cool, or warm, as you wished, were her lines to muse upon while one lay half dreaming beneath the trees of a summer day, and watched the branches swaying and nodding against the dazzling blue which finally put you to sleep. The angel’s faces of fair ladies made a sunshine in the shady place of one’s dreams.

“So you’re not content with running the gauntlet over London Bridge, you must stand it too,” said a genial voice at Keats’s elbow. A young man of twenty-eight or nine, spare and somewhat studious-looking, but animated, took his hand. He was taller than Keats but no match for his vigour.

“Well, Clarke! Well, my dainty Davie! But a gauntlet has a stall, or to be sure several stalls in it, has it not? And what is a stall for but to rest in! Ask any horse.”

“Ah. You should know! I’m sorry if you have been resting longer than suited you. Shall we go?” They turned and swung into stride together.

“Any rest is too long for me,” said Keats.

What a good fellow and sound scholar old Clarke was! There was a tinder in him which needed only the divine spark of poetry to fire it, then he had a glow of his own! It seemed a long time back that Clarke had appeared nothing more than the grown son of the headmaster at the Enfield school, while he had been Keats Major, or perhaps to the Clarkes little Johnnie, oldest of the Keats boys. Perhaps they would not have become friends if Clarke had not boxed brother Tom’s ears. John smiled now to see himself charging upon the usher, who could have put him into his pocket. When Clarke saw the diminutive form in the attitude of a pugilist, he had begun to laugh, and that laugh was the beginning of their comradeship. As heir to the school and the headmastership, Clarke might have remained outside his ken, for everyone hated a toady. But it was after Keats had left school and been apprenticed to Hammond that the real era of friendship had begun. In that arbour of the school garden they had talked of the majesty of the old bards, the sky-covering winsome human pity and joy of Shakespeare, the sweet luxury of Spenser, and that fair-fated sayer of true English words, young dead Chatterton. Through Clarke he had been confirmed in his sense of the greatest human glory, which put its possessor above the calumny, above the gratitude, and almost above the praise of men. To be a poet, Apollo’s son!

The two found it natural to continue their walk in silence broken only occasionally by a word. Before long they were coming out of the city, Pall Mall left behind, and St. Giles-in-the-Fields past on their right. Clarke felt, rather than watched, with an elder brother’s amusement, the heightened animation of Keats’s expression, the kindling eye. Passers-by turned to look after the fair youth with the red-gold hair who seemed to be treading clouds.

“Wonderful, wonderful day!” Keats released a sigh.

“You’ll be able to outwalk an old theatre addict like myself if you have many of these long tramps.”

“Please God!” breathed Keats cryptically.

“You’ll find Hunt just as genuine-hearted as you or I. He wishes to help everybody. And his judgment is as good as his heart.”

“That is what one would expect from his writings,” remarked Keats complacently. “Where are we to find the warmth of the affections and mutual regard, if not in a poet? ... But it just seems too much of a luxury for me to enjoy.”

“You don’t know what you’ll be doing yet, in years to come.”

“Years to come! I am so absorbed in poetry now that I do not sleep nights. Tell me whether that is a good thing for a young surgeon?”

“Will you be able to muster enough interest to pass your examinations?”

“I heartily dislike the study of anatomy as a main occupation, and surgery I am sure I would like worse, where it means the suffering or death of a fellow-being. I dare say I may do. But don’t let us talk about it, my dear Clarke. These spring days I cannot keep my thoughts to it. The other day, during the lecture, there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland. But yes, I shall pass my examinations.”

They had gone about four miles, and were coming to Hampstead Heath. All talk was abandoned, and their steps became light and accelerated. At last the very house stood before them in the Vale of Health. Keats saw through a mist of incredulous anticipation that it was square-built with a row of windows in the top story, and a door framed by Doric columns in the first. Flowers and shrubs. A woman sewing, with children about her knee, at a curtainless window.

A long face, olive-complexioned, with dark eyes and a billow of black hair, was at the door, laughing. Hunt, holding out a hand to each of them, seemed very tall. Keats knew that he himself was half sitting, half kneeling upon a low sofa, that Clarke faced a window, that Hunt was talking in a smooth, mellifluous voice, about poetry, about the poems of his Clarke had brought him, about a little club called the Elders, because its members finished its evenings with goblets of hot elder wine.

“Ah,” said Keats, “that is what the Ancients must have symbolized under the mystery of the Bearded Bacchus, ‘Brother of Bacchus, elder born’!”

Hunt and Clarke were talking of Shelley and Byron, and the tragedy they represented of the social and educational system. Chills ran up and down the spine of Keats. This was the “wronged Libertas” speaking in his own accents and person. This was the voice and authority behind the Examiner which Keats, the schoolboy, had read on winter afternoons years ago. And Hunt knew how to make him talk–about Spenser. Then a walk was proposed. Hunt went to tell his wife that they would return for tea.

“Well?” Clarke turned to him.

“Wonderful man!” whispered Keats. “Dazzling conversation; and so just in all his judgments.” He noted now that the study was rightly named, for it contained a medley of materials related to half the arts and sciences.

In a moment or two Hunt returned, leading a woman considerably younger than himself, with magnificent eyes, though she was not handsome; a housewifely body she seemed, and not too pleased at being called to greet her husband’s literary friends; though she begged them with polite warmth to return to tea at the conclusion of their walk.

Clarke went head, and left Keats to follow with the master down the broad and flower-bordered path. Keats sniffed the air like a young colt.

“I always feel as though I could take to wings when I get out of doors. The air must be my natural element.”

“An aerial character!” Hunt mused, half teasingly. “Yet you strike me as a solid young fellow, albeit a spirited.”

“Why, no,” said Keats in slight confusion. “I mean only that these weeks since spring seem to have made me aware of a liveliness in the air. I never come out of a house into the open without feeling like skipping and gambolling like a silly lamb.”

They arrived at open country, and, on climbing over a stile into a field, walked abreast with Clarke. The day was perfect, life matchless in its teeming possibilities, beauties, promises of enjoyment. The very existence of two such friends as Hunt and Clarke guaranteed it. He was thinking that the sky was brighter, the grass greener, the trees more gently majestic, flowers lovelier, than they ever had been before. It was a world of bliss, the poet’s heritage, and, it might be, his.

They walked on Hampstead Heath toward the Battery. Leafy lanes stretched before them, never ending. Keats was about to point out a bush of may flowers full of bees, when Clarke spoke:

“By Jove, you fellows must compose upon this.”

Keats hesitated. Hunt was waiting with Spartan deference of attention. “Compose! I feel the most sumptuous poem I have yet written arise in me. And the longest,” he added boldly.

A quietness came over him, for he had a doubt of his declaration, once it had been made. But in another moment, listening again, he was back in a present sense of the scene. A filbert hedge overtwined with wild brier enchanted him, and the chequered light and shade shifting beneath a tree. Though the air was warm, it was not enervating, and he felt as though they might walk on for ever. At the gate leading from the Battery into the last field before Caen Wood, however, they stopped and looked back. They must enjoy these scenes many times again, Hunt said.

Oh, Poesy! Nothing could be too grand in its sweep for thee, nothing too fine and gossamer-delicate. And as for the souls into which thy seed was dropped to burgeon into Soul again, such became the chosen ones of God’s universe, to hand on to wondering men a beauty and a name greater than themselves. Over such beauties, earthly or sublime, lovers in far-off years would muse and catch a nobleness to match their love. What fate could be higher than the burden of such a gift, what joy completer than the forming of majestic thoughts and exquisite fancies? Perhaps now it would be his. At least he had touched the garments of Poesy, he had seen the hand that had created great poetry.

Talking rapturously, Keats accompanied Clarke back to the entrance of London Bridge. With a handshake they parted and agreed to enjoy the same walk and visit again. As he was crossing the Bridge, not only the people, but the spires lucently reflected in Thames were an abstraction; and he was pensive in the Borough: a beastly place, with its dirt, turnings and narrow ways. Here his hospital was situate, and here it was most convenient to live. At least he was not so badly off now, rooming with three other students in comfortable quarters, as he had been when alone in his miserable lodgings in Dean Street opposite a meeting with its wailful choir, of Sundays. Still, his loneliness there had not been an unmixed curse, he sometimes felt. Though he liked company, he liked time for reading and thought alone; but between the lecture-rooms in St. Thomas’s Hospital, and the lively youth-filled rooms in the house in St. Thomas’s Street, there was not much to choose in point of quiet contemplation. It would be hard to write another “Solitude”.

Standing before the tallow-chandler’s shop above which his home was, he sighed wearily at the accustomedness of it all, and climbed the stairs to his shared sitting-room. The tallow-chandler lived on the same story; Mrs. Mitchell, his wife, was landlady to the quartette of medical students. Beside the table in the middle of the room, with its piles of books and its whale-oil lamp, sat Henry Stephens in an armchair. On a straight chair near the door was Tom Keats, his hat upon his knees.

“Why, Tom! Did you come to see me?”

“Yes,” returned Tom, springing up with an adoring look. “I–I did not know you would be out to-day.”

He was a slender youth of sixteen, scarcely taller than John. His eyes were wide apart under high-arched brows, his nose and mouth were more irregular, but there was his brother’s vividness about him.

Stephens looked up from his book, a merry-looking youth of lively glance. “I thought you were off on some excursion in search of poetical fancy,” he said with tolerance.

“Fellows,” said Keats, glowing, “where do you suppose I went? No, you can’t guess in a fortnight. I went to see Leigh Hunt.”

“Not Hunt of the Examiner, we have talked about?” asked Stephens.

“Oh, John!” said Tom. “You didn’t!”

“The same. It was wonderful. The country is luscious these days. It seems almost impossible to breathe in these dirty streets when one thinks of the country. And Hunt is a marvellous mind. And I’ve got the inspiration for the most marvellous poem I’ve yet dreamt of or attempted.”

“Grand!” said Stephens. “Let’s hear it. I won’t laugh at it, the way you laugh at my attempts.”

Tom looked uncomfortable, and John admitted with a lowering of tone: “It’s not written yet.”

“Newmarsh doesn’t seem to think much of poetry,” said Tom diffidently.

“Was Newmarsh talking to you?” demanded John, turning to his brother.

“Newmarsh came and went out with Cooper and Mackereth,” explained Stephens hastily. “He’s a great tease, you know, It’s not that he doesn’t like poetry. He likes arguing better. I like to hear you fellows have a go about the poets of Greece and Rome. Not that I uphold his taste.”

“Newmarsh knows absolutely nothing about poetry, and never will. What did he say to you?”

Tom hesitated.

“He, oh, he asked me how I came to be apart from the other two wise men, and teased me about the regard George and I have for your talents. Of course, he thought he was being very waggish.”

Keats’s stature seemed to increase in contrast with his seated companions. His eyes blazed, and he brought his fist down upon the table. “Newmarsh said that to you! Let him come here and talk that way to me! I’ll throw him down the stairs! What kind of being superior to human ties does he consider he is, that he can make sport to the affections of brothers? He’ll never come to this house again with my consent.”

Stephens was taken aback at the vehemence of his manner and the iron determination in its intentness. Keats sat erectly upon a chair.

Tom had a strained, quiet look. “Are you very tired, John? Perhaps you would go out and have supper with me. I have some important news.”

John was on his feet again. “Poor lad, waiting for me, eh? Let’s go.”

Tom lifted his tall black hat from his knees, and the two took leave of Stephens and went downstairs.

“New hat?” asked John. “Good boy!”

The shadows beginning to gather among the buildings did not add to the attractiveness of the locality.

“Oh, John, where do we sup? I’ve got such a piece of news to tell!”

“Are you very hungry? Would you mind going much farther so as to get out of this drab old Borough before we stop at a chop-house?”

“Oh, I’m not hungry; not very. Whatever you think best is agreeable to me, for I do not know the city as you do. You’ll not believe it,” he had to add, “but Mr. Abbey has consented to advance me enough money to go abroad.”

Keats’s jaw dropped. “Abroad–Abbey? What–where?”

Tom was well pleased with the effect he had made. “He sees that the work indoors does not agree with me; and one day a doctor came to see Fanny and examined me, and he told Mr. Abbey that I would be better in France, at Lyons. He says it is a good, healthy place, being so far south of here. You wouldn’t come with me, would you, John? George must stop and work!”

“Speaking as a doctor, and diagnosing you impersonally, I would say that you showed signs of biosis, and bionergy.”

“What–what kind of ailment is that?”

“Signs of life, vim, and general haleness! Well, here we are!”

They entered a clean-looking chop-house, Tom laughed uncontrollably; sat down at a table, and ordered chops and tankards of ale. It was late, and the cloth and cruet were put on again.

“I say, it’s very good medicine, ante cibum. You should eat like a bullock. I never should have believed it of our sanctimonious friend.”

“Who? Oh, Mr. Abbey! He talked very kindly about a trip abroad building me up. Of course, Fanny is wild with envy.”

“Poor Fanny, if she has to live in that family until she is one and twenty.” Tom smiled faintly, and a look of pain came over his face as he listened to John’s tale of Abbey’s delinquencies as a brother-man. “Does he want you to come back to his house, or to work in his shop, afterward?”

“He didn’t say, that I remember.”

“No. Well, then, what do you say to living with me? Now mind you, if he wants you back, I can do nothing about it. But if he does not, I dare say he will be satisfied to have you live with me.”

“Oh, John, that’s just what I’ve been thinking too. Only I hated ...” Tears glistened in the boy’s eyes. “I wish you could come to Lyons with me.”

“Don’t I!” ejaculated Keats warmly. “Brother, it would do us both good. Whether it is the proximity of the hospital, or whether the Borough depresses my spirits, I do not know. But I have been feeling partial to a change of scene. At least I can enjoy yours. You mustn’t get homesick, but have a good time.”

“I won’t get homesick, not if I can help it. Do you think we might have a pudding now? I’ll pay my share; I have some money with me.”

Keats beckoned to the tall and saturnine waiter, who stood with arms folded as though to prevent the escape of a napkin that protruded between his wrists. He had been eyeing with composed disfavour their leisureliness. Tom looked about as though realizing his surroundings for the first time.

“I shall learn the ways of travelling when I am abroad.”

“You must come back a man of the world, Tom, and as brown and strong as an Indian. Those Italian senoritas, or donnas, are a winsome crowd, I hear,” he added, wagging his head. “But be sure and don’t get married!”

They were laughing together when the waiter came back. “Will you have something to drink?” he asked.

“Tom–would you like a glass of claret? Claret’s good stuff.”

With smiling tolerance, the waiter let the boy decide.

“Yes, I will. It is a good thing to celebrate a time like this.”

John started one of his rants, on claret, to which Tom listened admiringly. “Really ’tis so fine, to drink on summer evenings in an arbour–it fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness–then goes down cool and feverless–then you do not feel it quarrelling with your liver–no, it is rather a peacemaker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. It is as fragrant as the queen bee, and the more ethereal part of it mounts into the brain walking like Aladdin about his own enchanted palace so gently that you do not feel his step.”

But outside, away from the glittering cut-glass chandelier lamp whose light they missed, for all the corner oil-lamp atop a post, it was of Hunt that he talked again, until he bade Tom good-bye and watched him mount to an outside seat on the coach to Walthamstow. Tom was flushed with the meal and the walk, but it was a mild evening.

“Don’t catch cold, now. And give my love to Fanny.”

Back in St. Thomas’s Street, Keats leaped up the stairs. Stephens was still at his Materia Medica. He depended upon Keats’s Latin scholarship; but this was only paying for the interest Stephens took in poetry. While the four young men got on amicably enough, Cooper and Mackereth seemed to find a good deal in common, which threw the other two together.

Heavy steps an hour later heralded George Cooper, a sharp-faced long-nosed fellow, namesake of their brilliant lecturer, Astley Cooper, and George Mackereth, a burly youth of benevolently enigmatic and taciturn cast. Keats looked up sharply until they had closed the door after them.

“You fellows missed a good show,” Cooper remarked with shrewd satisfaction. “Couple of wenches there Mackereth couldn’t keep his eyes off.”

“Might have been worse,” agreed the massy Mackereth.

Keats laid down his book. “Where is Newmarsh?”

“How should I know? He went to the theatre with us,” said Cooper, and the coldness of his tone seemed conspiratorial.

“Is it true that he insulted my brother in your presence?” Keats rose and stood before Cooper and the gaping, gigantic Mackereth.

“Well, you know Newmarsh; he has a good opinion of his abilities, but he doesn’t mean any harm.”

Keats was becoming more and more angry. “He has a very good opinion indeed of his abilities if he thinks he can bullyrag my brothers. If he comes here again we shall see whether he has any right to such a good opinion of himself.” His fists clenched and unclenched. Mackereth twisted on his feet, paralysed with astonishment. Cooper was disposed to argue the matter.

“Why, he is our friend as well as yours, and if we choose to see him––”

“Friend!” shrilled Keats. Then he spoke as coolly as Cooper. “No one will dispute your rights in your own rooms. For that reason I intend to move and to take rooms with my brother Tom.”

As if a thunderclap had burst in the room, it was silent. Finally Stephens cleared his throat and peered at his friend from beyond the lamp.

“Oh, come now, Keats, you mustn’t let a thing like that break up the house. We get on very well together, I think, and any little tiff we have now and then will blow over if we don’t mind it.”

Cooper was muttering to himself. “No cause to let the bile like that. Newmarsh is nothing to me, but if I choose to go out with him I will.”

Mackereth rose and stuck out a hand like a shoulder of beef. “Come, Keats, shake hands and forget about it. We’re more for you than for Newmarsh.”

Keats stared at him. “I’m not angry at you fellows. Newmarsh insulted the regard and relation between brothers, which to me is sacred.”

“Why, it’s absurd,” said Cooper, “changing lodgings before the end of the term. Astley Cooper himself told me as his dresser to keep an eye on you. He takes an interest in fellows he thinks are keen–whether they appreciate it––”

Keats had half suspected this. “Many thanks to Mr. Astley Cooper. I hope he survives my move. But in any case, capiat bolus!”

“Your place at the window will miss you,” said Mackereth clumsily, joking. “I was saying as we came up, likely little Keats would be at his post in the window, dreaming about Shakespeare. Better change your mind, old fellow.”

“I don’t change my mind,” said Keats. “But we’ve had good times, and I shall be sorry to leave.”