Chapter 3

How had he dared? Never in all his life had he spoken to a stranger so.
How often had he envied and admired those who could be rude and
indifferent to people's feelings. It seemed to him that this was a
crisis with him, something that he would never forget, something that
might alter all his life. Perhaps already the charm of which Maradick
had spoken was working. He looked out of his window and always,
afterwards, he was to remember a stream that, now bright silver, now
ebony dark, ran straight to him from the heart of an emerald green field
like a greeting spirit. It laughed up to his window and was gone.

He had asserted himself. The old man with the beard was reading the
_Hibbert Journal._ Strange old man--but defeated! Harkness felt a
triumph. Could he but henceforward assert himself in this fashion, all
might be easy for him. Instead of retreating he might advance, stretch
out his hand and take the things and the people that he wanted as he had
seen others do. He almost wished that the old man might speak to him
again, that he might once more be rude.

He had had, ever since he could remember, the belief that one day,
suddenly, some magic door would open, some one step before him, some
magic carpet unroll at his feet, and all life would be changed. For many
years he had had no doubt of this. He would call it, perhaps, the coming
of romance, but as he had grown older he had come to distrust both
himself and life. He had always been interested in contemporary
literature. Every new book that he opened now seemed to tell him that he
was extremely foolish to expect anything of life at all. He was
swallowed by the modern realistic movement as a fly is swallowed by an
indifferent spider. These men, he said to himself, are very clever. They
know so much more about everything than I do that they must be right.
They are telling the truth at last about life as no one has ever done it
before. But when he had read a great many of these books (and every word
of Mr. Joyce's _Ulysses_), he found that he cared much less about truth
than he had supposed. He even doubted whether these writers were telling
the truth any more than the naïve and sentimental Victorians; and when
at last he heard a story all about an American manufacturer of washing
machines whose habit it was to strip himself naked on every possible
occasion before his nearest and dearest relations and friends, and when
the author told him that this was a typical American citizen, he,
knowing his own country people very well, frankly disbelieved it. These
realists, he exclaimed, are telling fairy stories quite as thoroughly as
Grimm, Fouqué, and De la Mare; the difference is that the realistic
fairy stories are depressing and discouraging, the others are not. He
determined to desert the realists and wait until something pleasanter
came along. Since it was impossible to have the truth about life anyway
let us have only the pleasant hallucinations. They are quite as likely
to be as true as the others.

But he was lonely and desolate. The women whom he loved never loved him,
and indeed he never came sufficiently close to them to give them any
encouragement. He dreamt about them and painted them as they certainly
were not. He had his passions and his desires, but his Puritan descent
kept him always at one remove from experience. He never, in fact, seemed
to have contact with anything at all--except Baker in Oregon, his two
sisters, and his forty etchings. He was so shy that he was thought to be
conceited, so idealistic that he was considered cynical, so chaste that
he was considered a most immoral fellow with a secret double life. Like
the hero of "Flegeljahre," he "loved every dog and wanted every dog to
love him," but the dogs did not know enough about him to be interested;
he was so like so many other immaculately-dressed, pleasant-mannered,
and wandering American cosmopolitans that nobody had any permanent
feeling for him--fathered by Henry James, uncled by Howells, aunted
(severely) by Edith Wharton--one of a million cultured, kindly
impersonal Americans seen as shadows by the matter-of-fact unimaginative
British. Who knew or cared that he was lonely, longing for love, for
home, for some one to whom he might give his romantic devotion? He was
all these things, but no one minded.

And then he met James Maradick.