Flames

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Flames

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Title: Flames
Author: Robert Smythe Hichens
Release Date: December 4, 2004 [EBook #14253]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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FLAMES
BY ROBERT HICHENS

AUTHOR OF THE GARDEN OF ALLAH, ETC.

COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY HERBERT S. STONE & CO.
This edition published July, 1906, by Duffield & Company

BOOK I--VALENTINE
CHAPTER I
THE SAINT OF VICTORIA STREET
Refinement had more power over the soul of Valentine Cresswell than
religion. It governed him with a curious ease of supremacy, and held
him back without effort from most of the young man's sins. Each age
has its special sins. Each age passes them, like troops in review, before
it decides what regiment it will join. Valentine had never decided to
join any regiment. The trumpets of vice rang in his ears in vain,
mingled with the more classical music of his life as the retreat from the
barracks of Seville mingled with the click of Carmen's castanets. But he
heeded them not. If he listened to them sometimes, it was only to
wonder at the harsh and blatant nature of their voices, only to pity the
poor creatures who hastened to the prison, which youth thinks freedom
and old age protection, at their shrieking summons. He preferred to be
master of his soul, and had no desire to set it drilling at the command of
painted women, or to drown it in wine, or to suffocate it in the smoke at
which the voluptuary tries to warm his hands, mistaking it for fire.
Intellectuality is to some men what religion is to many women, a trellis
of roses that bars out the larger world. Valentine loved to watch the
roses bud and bloom as he sat in his flower-walled cell, a deliberate and
rejoicing prisoner. For a long time he loved to watch them. And he
thought that it must always be so, for he was not greatly given to
moods, and therefore scarcely appreciated the thrilling meaning of the
word change, that is the key-word of so many a life cipher. He loved
the pleasures of the intellect so much that he made the mistake of

opposing them, as enemies, to the pleasures of the body. The reverse
mistake is made by the generality of men; and those who deem it wise
to mingle the sharply contrasted ingredients that form a good recipe for
happiness are often dubbed incomprehensible, or worse. But there were
moments at a period of Valentine's life when he felt discontented at his
strange inability to long for sin; when he wondered, rather wearily, why
he was rapt from the follies that other men enjoyed; why he could
refuse, without effort, the things that they clamoured after year by year
with an unceasing gluttony of appetite. The saint quarrelled mutely
with his holiness of intellectuality, and argued, almost fiercely, with his
cold and delicate purity.
"Why am I like some ivory statue?" he thought sometimes, "instead of
like a human being, with drumming pulses, and dancing longings, and
voices calling forever in my ears, like voices of sirens, 'Come, come,
rest in our arms, sleep on our bosoms, for we are they who have given
joy to all men from the beginning of time. We are they who have drawn
good men from their sad goodness, and they have blessed us. We are
they who have been the allegory of the sage and the story of the world.
In our soft arms the world has learned the glory of embracing. On our
melodious hearts the hearts of men have learned the sweet religion of
singing.' Why cannot I be as other men are, instead of the Saint--the
saint of Victoria Street--that I am?"
For, absurdly enough, that was the name his world gave to Valentine.
This is not an age of romance, and he did not dwell, like the saints of
old centuries, in the clear solitudes of the great desert, but in what the
advertisement writer calls a "commodious flat" in Victoria Street. No
little jackals thronged about him in sinful circle by night. No school of
picturesque disciples surrounded him by day. If he peeped above his
blinds he could see the radiant procession of omnibuses on their halting
way towards Westminster.