CHAPTER VII

THE REGENT STREET EPISODE


The things we do apparently by chance often have a curious applicability
to the things we have thought. John the Baptist was sent to prepare the
way of the Lord. These thoughts are the John the Baptists of the mind,
and prepare the way for facts that often startlingly illustrate them.
It is as if our thoughts were gradually materialized by the action of the
mind; as if, by the act of thinking, we projected them.

When Doctor Levillier got a box for the first night of the new play at
the Duke's Theatre, and when he invited Valentine and Julian to make up
his party, he had no idea what the subject of the piece was, no notion
that it would have anything to do with the conversation which took place
between him and Valentine at the club. But the plot applied with almost
amazing fidelity to much that he had said upon that occasion. The play
was a modern allegory of the struggle between good and evil, which has
been illustrated in so many different ways since the birth of the Faust
legend. But the piece had a certain curious originality which sprang
from the daring of the author. Instead of showing one result of the
struggle, a good man drawn gradually down, or a bad man drawn gradually
up, he set forth, with a great deal of detail, a great deal of vividness,
a modern wobbler, a human pendulum, and simply noted down, as it were,
his slow swinging backwards and forwards. His hero, an evil liver, a
modern man of wrath in the first act, dominated by a particular vice,
was drawn, by an outside personal influence, from the mire in which
he was wallowing, to purity, to real elevation. But his author, having
led him up to the pinnacle, had no intention of leaving him there,