The Sacrificial Altar

He paused and his brow darkened. He raised his eyes and stared past his anxious host, far into some invisible plane of tormentingly elusive dreams. M. Dupont wisely remained silent, and Louis resumed, abruptly: “When I shall write as spontaneously as the spring bubbles or the ice melts, when my brain hardly knows what my pen is doing, when I experience that terrific uprush that would drown the more conscious parts of the intellect were it not for the perfect mastery of technique—that is it, monsieur! I am still an infant with my tools. Do not permit my style to cause you anxiety. It is merely in one stage of experiment. I shall not write a line for publication until I am four-and-twenty. I shall send forth my first professional novel on the third of October—my birthday—1900. Meanwhile, I enter the university this year, and take the course in literature. At twenty-two I shall graduate and take my Ph.D. Then I shall serve for a year as a reporter on a London newspaper. So shall I obtain perfect freedom with the English language and that first-hand contact with life which I realize is of a certain necessity. But after that no more of the world. I hate it—realities. I wish to live in my mind, my imagination; to spend every hour when I do not exercise for my nerves or sleep to refresh my faculty, in writing, writing—that one day shall be creating.”

Louis carried out his programme to the letter, and published, in 1900—some five years before the terrific episode which it is my melancholy privilege to chronicle—the first of those novels of crime that commanded the sedate attention of the intellectual world. Entombed as it were in the old house under the creaking eucalyptus-trees, with a padlock on his gate, he had rewritten it six times from the original draft—which, according to his method, contained nothing but the stark outline of the plot, every detail of which was thought out during long hours of exterior immobility. Three successive sets of servants, mistaking this accomplishment in petrifaction for a form of insanity which might at any moment express itself in violence, left abruptly. Finally, old Madame Dupont established in the kitchen wing an elderly Frenchman and his wife who had once presided over a hotel for artists, and thereafter Louis had peace and enforced nutrition.

It was during the long months of re-writing, of developing his characters by a subtle secondary method of his own, of profound analysis, and a phrasing which drew heavily on the adjectival vocabulary of the critics later on, that he really enjoyed himself. The last revision was devoted exclusively to the study and improvement of every sentence in the long book; and indeed there is no doubt that these months, from skeleton to trousseau, were, with one tremendous exception, the happiest period of this unhappy creator’s life.

This book in its cold intellectual remoteness appealed as little to Louis when he read it in print as it did to the public, and he set himself grimly to work to pour red blood into the veins of his characters and give his next book the rhythm of life as well as of style. Once more he was hailed by the intellectuals, but fell short of popular recognition, which, belonging himself to the intellectual democracy, he estimated far above the few who win their little fame by writing about the creators in art, or even above the artist himself. He was determined to enthrall, to create the perfect illusion. He scorned to be a cult, and when he saw himself alluded to as a “high-brow-lit” he wept. But above all he passionately wished for that intoxication in creation in which consciousness of self was obliterated, the power, as he expressed it, to write one book charged with the magnetism of a burning soul. He always felt, despite his love of his work, as cold and deliberate as a mathematician. And yet he spun his complicated plots with the utmost facility. There was no more doubt of his talent, in the minds of those who wrote essays of him in the reviews, than of his psychological insight and his impeccable style.