that the really evil people that one meets—the people who are filled with hatred, fear, envy, rancour against life—who wish to destroy the artist and his work—are not figures of satanic darkness, who have been born with a malignant hatred against life, but rather people who have had the seeds of life within themselves and been destroyed by them? They are the people who have been given just enough to get a vision of the promised land—however brief and broken it may be—”
“But not enough to get there? Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly,” Starwick answered. “They are left there in the desert, maddened by the sight of water they can never reach, and all the juices of their life then turn to gall and bitterness—to envy and malignant hate. They are the old women in the little towns and villages with the sour eyes and the envenomed flesh who have so poisoned the air with their envenomed taint that everything young and beautiful and full of joy that lives there will sicken and go dead and vicious and malignant as the air it breathes. They are the lecherous and impotent old men of the world, those foul, palsied creatures with small rheumy eyes who hate the lover and his mistress with the hate of hell and eunuchry—who try to destroy love with their hatred and the slanderous rumour of their poisoned tongues. And, finally, they are the eunuchs of the arts—the men who have the lust, without the power, for creation, and whose life goes dead and rotten with its hatred of the living artist and the living man.”
“And you think that Horton will be one of these?”
Again Starwick was silent for a moment, staring out across the river. When he spoke again, he did not answer his companion’s question directly, but in a quiet and inert tone in which the cutting edge of irony was barely evident, he said:
“My God! Eugene”—his voice was so low and wearily passionate with revulsion that it was almost inaudible—“if ever you may come to know, as I have known all my life, the falseness in a hearty laugh, the envy and the malice in a jesting word, the naked hatred in a jeering eye, and all the damned, warped, poisonous constrictions of the heart—the horrible fear and cowardice and cruelty, the naked shame, the hypocrisy, and the pretence, that are masked there behind the full hearty tones, the robust manliness of the Hortons of this earth…” He was silent a moment longer, and then went on in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone—“I was the youngest in a family of nine children—the same kind of family that you will find everywhere. I was the only delicate flower among them,” he
