Chapter 20

CHAPTER XX.

Ivor was gone. Lounging behind the wind-screen in his yellow
sedan he was whirling across rural England. Social and amorous
engagements of the most urgent character called him from hall to
baronial hall, from castle to castle, from Elizabethan manor-
house to Georgian mansion, over the whole expanse of the kingdom.
To-day in Somerset, to-morrow in Warwickshire, on Saturday in the
West riding, by Tuesday morning in Argyll--Ivor never rested.
The whole summer through, from the beginning of July till the end
of September, he devoted himself to his engagements; he was a
martyr to them. In the autumn he went back to London for a
holiday. Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent bubble
on the stream of his life; it belonged already to the past. By
tea-time he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia's
welcoming smile. And on Thursday morning--but that was a long,
long way ahead. He would think of Thursday morning when Thursday
morning arrived. Meanwhile there was Gobley, meanwhile Zenobia.

In the visitor's book at Crome Ivor had left, according to his
invariable custom in these cases, a poem. He had improvised it
magisterially in the ten minutes preceding his departure. Denis
and Mr. Scogan strolled back together from the gates of the
courtyard, whence they had bidden their last farewells; on the
writing-table in the hall they found the visitor's book, open,
and Ivor's composition scarcely dry. Mr. Scogan read it aloud:

"The magic of those immemorial kings,
Who webbed enchantment on the bowls of night.
Sleeps in the soul of all created things;
In the blue sea, th' Acroceraunian height,
In the eyed butterfly's auricular wings
And orgied visions of the anchorite;
In all that singing flies and flying sings,
In rain, in pain, in delicate delight.
But much more magic, much more cogent spells
Weave here their wizardries about my soul.
Crome calls me like the voice of vesperal bells,
Haunts like a ghostly-peopled necropole.
Fate tears me hence. Hard fate! since far from Crome
My soul must weep, remembering its Home."

"Very nice and tasteful and tactful," said Mr. Scogan, when he
had finished. "I am only troubled by the butterfly's auricular
wings. You have a first-hand knowledge of the workings of a
poet's mind, Denis; perhaps you can explain."

"What could be simpler," said Denis. "It's a beautiful word, and
Ivor wanted to say that the wings were golden."

"You make it luminously clear."

"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that
beautiful words don't always mean what they ought to mean.
Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because
the word 'carminative' didn't mean what it ought to