After all, there came a day when Edwin Reardon found himself regularly at work once more, ticking off his stipulated quantum of manuscript each four-and-twenty hours. He wrote a very small hand; sixty written slips of the kind of paper he habitually used would represent—thanks to the astonishing system which prevails in such matters: large type, wide spacing, frequency of blank pages—a passable three-hundred-page volume. On an average he could write four such slips a day; so here we have fifteen days for the volume, and forty-five for the completed book.
Forty-five days; an eternity in the looking forward. Yet the calculation gave him a faint-hearted encouragement. At that rate he might have his book sold by Christmas. It would certainly not bring him a hundred pounds; seventy-five perhaps. But even that small sum would enable him to pay the quarter’s rent, and then give him a short time, if only two or three weeks, of mental rest. If such rest could not be obtained all was at an end with him. He must either find some new means of supporting himself and his family, or—have done with life and its responsibilities altogether.
The latter alternative was often enough before him. He seldom slept for more than two or three consecutive hours in the night, and the time of wakefulness was often terrible. The various sounds which marked the stages from midnight to dawn had grown miserably familiar to him; worst torture to his mind was the chiming and striking of clocks. Two of these were in general audible, that of Marylebone parish church, and that of the adjoining workhouse; the latter always sounded several minutes after its ecclesiastical neighbour, and with a difference of note which seemed to Reardon very appropriate—a thin, querulous voice, reminding one of the community it represented. After lying awake for awhile he would hear quarters sounding; if they ceased before the fourth he was glad, for he feared to know what time it was. If the hour was complete, he waited anxiously for its number. Two, three, even four, were grateful; there was still a long time before he need rise and face the dreaded task, the horrible four blank slips of paper that had to be filled ere he might sleep again. But such restfulness was only for a moment; no sooner had the workhouse bell become silent than he began to toil in his weary imagination, or else, incapable of that, to vision fearful hazards of the future. The soft breathing of Amy at his side, the contact of her warm limbs, often filled him with intolerable dread. Even now he did not believe that Amy loved him with the old love, and the suspicion was like a cold weight at his heart that to retain even her wifely sympathy, her wedded tenderness, he must achieve the impossible.
The impossible; for he could no longer deceive himself with a hope of genuine success. If he earned a bare living, that would be the utmost. And with bare livelihood Amy would not, could not, be content.
If he were to die a natural death it would be well for all. His wife and the child would be looked after; they could live with Mrs Edmund Yule, and certainly it would not be long before Amy married again, this time a man of whose competency to maintain her there would be no doubt. His own behaviour had been cowardly selfishness. Oh yes, she had loved him, had been eager to believe in him. But there was always that voice of warning in his mind; he foresaw—he knew—
And if he killed himself? Not here; no lurid horrors for that poor girl and her relatives; but somewhere at a distance, under circumstances which would render the recovery of his body difficult, yet would leave no doubt of his death. Would that, again, be cowardly? The opposite, when once it was certain that to live meant poverty and wretchedness. Amy’s grief, however sincere, would be but a short trial compared with what else might lie before her. The burden of supporting her and Willie would be a very slight one if she went to live in her mother’s house. He considered the whole matter night after night, until perchance it happened that sleep had pity upon him for an hour before the time of rising.
Autumn was passing into winter. Dark days, which were always an oppression to his mind, began to be frequent, and would soon succeed each other remorselessly. Well, if only each of them represented four written slips.
Milvain’s advice to him had of course proved useless. The sensational title suggested nothing, or only ragged shapes of incomplete humanity that fluttered mockingly when he strove to fix them. But he had decided upon a story of the kind natural to him; a ‘thin’ story, and one which it would be difficult to spin into three volumes. His own, at all events. The title was always a matter for head-racking when the book was finished; he had never yet chosen it before beginning.
For a week he got on at the desired rate; then came once more the crisis he had anticipated.
A familiar symptom of the malady which falls upon outwearied imagination. There were floating in his mind five or six possible subjects for a book, all dating back to the time when he first began novel-writing, when ideas came freshly to him. If he grasped desperately at one of these, and did his best to develop it, for a day or two he could almost content himself; characters, situations, lines of motive, were laboriously schemed, and he felt ready to begin writing. But scarcely had he done a chapter or two when all the structure fell into flatness. He had made a mistake. Not this story, but that other one, was what he should have taken. The other one in question, left out of mind for a time, had come back with a face of new possibility; it invited him, tempted him to throw aside what he had already written. Good; now he was in more hopeful train. But a few days, and the experience repeated itself. No, not this story, but that third one, of which he had not thought for a long time. How could he have rejected so hopeful a subject?
For months he had been living in this way; endless circling, perpetual beginning, followed by frustration. A sign of exhaustion, it of course made exhaustion more complete. At times he was on the border-land of imbecility; his mind looked into a cloudy chaos, a shapeless whirl of nothings. He talked aloud to himself, not knowing that he did so. Little phrases which indicated dolorously the subject of his preoccupation often escaped him in the street: ‘What could I make of that, now?’ ‘Well, suppose I made him—?’ ‘But no, that wouldn’t do,’ and so on. It had happened that he caught the eye of some one passing fixed in surprise upon him; so young a man to be talking to himself in evident distress!
The expected crisis came, even now that he was savagely determined to go on at any cost, to write, let the result be what it would. His will prevailed. A day or two of anguish such as there is no describing to the inexperienced, and again he was dismissing slip after slip, a sigh of thankfulness at the completion of each one. It was a fraction of the whole, a fraction, a fraction.
The ordering of his day was thus. At nine, after breakfast, he sat down to his desk, and worked till one. Then came dinner, followed by a walk. As a rule he could not allow Amy to walk with him, for he had to think over the remainder of the day’s toil, and companionship would have been fatal. At about half-past three he again seated himself; and wrote until half-past six, when he had a meal. Then once more to work from half-past seven to ten. Numberless were the experiments he had tried for the day’s division. The slightest interruption of the order for the time being put him out of gear; Amy durst not open his door to ask however necessary a question.
Sometimes the three hours’ labour of a morning resulted in half-a-dozen lines, corrected into illegibility. His brain would not work; he could not recall the simplest synonyms; intolerable faults of composition drove him mad. He would write a sentence beginning thus: ‘She took a book with a look of—;’ or thus: ‘A revision of this decision would have made him an object of derision.’ Or, if the period were otherwise inoffensive, it ran in a rhythmic gallop which was torment to the ear. All this, in spite of the fact that his former books had been noticeably good in style. He had an appreciation of shapely prose which made him scorn himself for the kind of stuff he was now turning out. ‘I can’t help it; it must go; the time is passing.’
Things were better, as a rule, in the evening. Occasionally he wrote a page with fluency which recalled his fortunate years; and then his heart gladdened, his hand trembled with joy.
Description of locality, deliberate analysis of character or motive, demanded far too great an effort for his present condition. He kept as much as possible to dialogue; the space is filled so much more quickly, and at a pinch one can make people talk about the paltriest incidents of life.
There came an evening when he opened the door and called to Amy.
‘What is it?’ she answered from the bedroom. ‘I’m busy with Willie.’
‘Come as soon as you are free.’
In ten minutes she appeared. There was apprehension on her face; she feared he was going to lament his inability to work. Instead of that, he told her joyfully that the first volume was finished.
‘Thank goodness!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you going to do any more to-night?’
‘I think not—if you will come and sit with me.’
‘Willie doesn’t seem very well. He can’t get to sleep.’
‘You would like to stay with him?’
‘A little while. I’ll come presently.’
She closed the door. Reardon brought a high-backed chair to the fireside, and allowed himself to forget the two volumes that had still to be struggled through, in a grateful sense of the portion that was achieved. In a few minutes it occurred to him that it would be delightful to read a scrap of the ‘Odyssey’; he went to the shelves on which were his classical books, took the desired volume, and opened it where Odysseus speaks to Nausicaa:
‘For never yet did I behold one of mortals like to thee, neither man nor woman; I am awed as I look upon thee. In Delos once, hard by the altar of Apollo, I saw a young palm-tree shooting up with even such a grace.’
Yes, yes; THAT was not written at so many pages a day, with a workhouse clock clanging its admonition at the poet’s ear. How it freshened the soul! How the eyes grew dim with a rare joy in the sounding of those nobly sweet hexameters!
Amy came into the room again.
‘Listen,’ said Reardon, looking up at her with a bright smile. ‘Do you remember the first time that I read you this?’
And he turned the speech into free prose. Amy laughed.
‘I remember it well enough. We were alone in the drawing-room; I had told the others that they must make shift with the dining-room for that evening. And you pulled the book out of your pocket unexpectedly. I laughed at your habit of always carrying little books about.’
The cheerful news had brightened her. If she had been summoned to hear lamentations her voice would not have rippled thus soothingly. Reardon thought of this, and it made him silent for a minute.
‘The habit was ominous,’ he said, looking at her with an uncertain smile. ‘A practical literary man doesn’t do such things.’
‘Milvain, for instance. No.’
With curious frequency she mentioned the name of Milvain. Her unconsciousness in doing so prevented Reardon from thinking about the fact; still, he had noted it.
‘Did you understand the phrase slightingly?’ he asked.
‘Slightingly? Yes, a little, of course. It always has that sense on your lips, I think.’
In the light of this answer he mused upon her readily-offered instance. True, he had occasionally spoken of Jasper with something less than respect, but Amy was not in the habit of doing so.
‘I hadn’t any such meaning just then,’ he said. ‘I meant quite simply that my bookish habits didn’t promise much for my success as a novelist.’
‘I see. But you didn’t think of it in that way at the time.’
He sighed.
‘No. At least—no.’
‘At least what?’
‘Well, no; on the whole I had good hope.’
Amy twisted her fingers together impatiently.
‘Edwin, let me tell you something. You are getting too fond of speaking in a discouraging way. Now, why should you do so? I don’t like it. It has one disagreeable effect on me, and that is, when people ask me about you, how you are getting on, I don’t quite know how to answer. They can’t help seeing that I am uneasy. I speak so differently from what I used to.’
‘Do you, really?’
‘Indeed I can’t help it. As I say, it’s very much your own fault.’
‘Well, but granted that I am not of a very sanguine nature, and that I easily fall into gloomy ways of talk, what is Amy here for?’
‘Yes, yes. But—’
‘But?’
‘I am not here only to try and keep you in good spirits, am I?’
She asked it prettily, with a smile like that of maidenhood.
‘Heaven forbid! I oughtn’t to have put it in that absolute way. I was half joking, you know. But unfortunately it’s true that I can’t be as light-spirited as I could wish. Does that make you impatient with me?’
‘A little. I can’t help the feeling, and I ought to try to overcome it. But you must try on your side as well. Why should you have said that thing just now?’
‘You’re quite right. It was needless.’
‘A few weeks ago I didn’t expect you to be cheerful. Things began to look about as bad as they could. But now that you’ve got a volume finished, there’s hope once more.’
Hope? Of what quality? Reardon durst not say what rose in his thoughts. ‘A very small, poor hope. Hope of money enough to struggle through another half year, if indeed enough for that.’ He had learnt that Amy was not to be told the whole truth about anything as he himself saw it. It was a pity. To the ideal wife a man speaks out all that is in him; she had infinitely rather share his full conviction than be treated as one from whom facts must be disguised. She says: ‘Let us face the worst and talk of it together, you and I.’ No, Amy was not the ideal wife from that point of view. But the moment after this half-reproach had traversed his consciousness he condemned himself; and looked with the joy of love into her clear eyes.
‘Yes, there’s hope once more, my dearest. No more gloomy talk to-night! I have read you something, now you shall read something to me; it is a long time since I delighted myself with listening to you. What shall it be?’
‘I feel rather too tired to-night.’
‘Do you?’
‘I have had to look after Willie so much. But read me some more Homer; I shall be very glad to listen.’
Reardon reached for the book again, but not readily. His face showed disappointment. Their evenings together had never been the same since the birth of the child; Willie was always an excuse—valid enough—for Amy’s feeling tired. The little boy had come between him and the mother, as must always be the case in poor homes, most of all where the poverty is relative. Reardon could not pass the subject without a remark, but he tried to speak humorously.
‘There ought to be a huge public creche in London. It’s monstrous that an educated mother should have to be nursemaid.’
‘But you know very well I think nothing of that. A creche, indeed! No child of mine should go to any such place.’
There it was. She grudged no trouble on behalf of the child. That was love; whereas—But then maternal love was a mere matter of course.
‘As soon as you get two or three hundred pounds for a book,’ she added, laughing, ‘there’ll be no need for me to give so much time.’
‘Two or three hundred pounds!’ He repeated it with a shake of the head. ‘Ah, if that were possible!’
‘But that’s really a paltry sum. What would fifty novelists you could name say if they were offered three hundred pounds for a book? How much do you suppose even Markland got for his last?’
‘Didn’t sell it at all, ten to one. Gets a royalty.’
‘Which will bring him five or six hundred pounds before the book ceases to be talked of.’
‘Never mind. I’m sick of the word “pounds.”’
‘So am I.’
She sighed, commenting thus on her acquiescence.
‘But look, Amy. If I try to be cheerful in spite of natural dumps, wouldn’t it be fair for you to put aside thoughts of money?’
‘Yes. Read some Homer, dear. Let us have Odysseus down in Hades, and Ajax stalking past him. Oh, I like that!’
So he read, rather coldly at first, but soon warming. Amy sat with folded arms, a smile on her lips, her brows knitted to the epic humour. In a few minutes it was as if no difficulties threatened their life. Every now and then Reardon looked up from his translating with a delighted laugh, in which Amy joined.
When he had returned the book to the shelf he stepped behind his wife’s chair, leaned upon it, and put his cheek against hers.
‘Amy!’
‘Yes, dear?’
‘Do you still love me a little?’
‘Much more than a little.’
‘Though I am sunk to writing a wretched pot-boiler?’
‘Is it so bad as all that?’
‘Confoundedly bad. I shall be ashamed to see it in print; the proofs will be a martyrdom.’
‘Oh, but why? why?’
‘It’s the best I can do, dearest. So you don’t love me enough to hear that calmly.’
‘If I didn’t love you, I might be calmer about it, Edwin. It’s dreadful to me to think of what they will say in the reviews.’
‘Curse the reviews!’
His mood had changed on the instant. He stood up with darkened face, trembling angrily.
‘I want you to promise me something, Amy. You won’t read a single one of the notices unless it is forced upon your attention. Now, promise me that. Neglect them absolutely, as I do. They’re not worth a glance of your eyes. And I shan’t be able to bear it if I know you read all the contempt that will be poured on me.’
‘I’m sure I shall be glad enough to avoid it; but other people, our friends, read it. That’s the worst.’
‘You know that their praise would be valueless, so have strength to disregard the blame. Let our friends read and talk as much as they like. Can’t you console yourself with the thought that I am not contemptible, though I may have been forced to do poor work?’
‘People don’t look at it in that way.’
‘But, darling,’ he took her hands strongly in his own, ‘I want you to disregard other people. You and I are surely everything to each other? Are you ashamed of me, of me myself?’
‘No, not ashamed of you. But I am sensitive to people’s talk and opinions.’
‘But that means they make you feel ashamed of me. What else?’
There was silence.
‘Edwin, if you find you are unable to do good work, you mustn’t do bad. We must think of some other way of making a living.’
‘Have you forgotten that you urged me to write a trashy sensational story?’
She coloured and looked annoyed.
‘You misunderstood me. A sensational story needn’t be trash. And then, you know, if you had tried something entirely unlike your usual work, that would have been excuse enough if people had called it a failure.’
‘People! People!’
‘We can’t live in solitude, Edwin, though really we are not far from it.’ He did not dare to make any reply to this. Amy was so exasperatingly womanlike in avoiding the important issue to which he tried to confine her; another moment, and his tone would be that of irritation. So he turned away and sat down to his desk, as if he had some thought of resuming work.
‘Will you come and have some supper?’ Amy asked, rising.
‘I have been forgetting that to-morrow morning’s chapter has still to be thought out.’
‘Edwin, I can’t think this book will really be so poor. You couldn’t possibly give all this toil for no result.’
‘No; not if I were in sound health. But I am far from it.’
‘Come and have supper with me, dear, and think afterwards.’
He turned and smiled at her.
‘I hope I shall never be able to resist an invitation from you, sweet.’
The result of all this was, of course, that he sat down in anything but the right mood to his work next morning. Amy’s anticipation of criticism had made it harder than ever for him to labour at what he knew to be bad. And, as ill-luck would have it, in a day or two he caught his first winter’s cold. For several years a succession of influenzas, sore-throats, lumbagoes, had tormented him from October to May; in planning his present work, and telling himself that it must be finished before Christmas, he had not lost sight of these possible interruptions. But he said to himself: ‘Other men have worked hard in seasons of illness; I must do the same.’ All very well, but Reardon did not belong to the heroic class. A feverish cold now put his powers and resolution to the test. Through one hideous day he nailed himself to the desk—and wrote a quarter of a page. The next day Amy would not let him rise from bed; he was wretchedly ill. In the night he had talked about his work deliriously, causing her no slight alarm.
‘If this goes on,’ she said to him in the morning, ‘you’ll have brain fever. You must rest for two or three days.’
‘Teach me how to. I wish I could.’
Rest had indeed become out of the question. For two days he could not write, but the result upon his mind was far worse than if he had been at the desk. He looked a haggard creature when he again sat down with the accustomed blank slip before him.
The second volume ought to have been much easier work than the first; it proved far harder. Messieurs and mesdames the critics are wont to point out the weakness of second volumes; they are generally right, simply because a story which would have made a tolerable book (the common run of stories) refuses to fill three books. Reardon’s story was in itself weak, and this second volume had to consist almost entirely of laborious padding. If he wrote three slips a day he did well.
And the money was melting, melting, despite Amy’s efforts at economy. She spent as little as she could; not a luxury came into their home; articles of clothing all but indispensable were left unpurchased. But to what purpose was all this? Impossible, now, that the book should be finished and sold before the money had all run out.
At the end of November, Reardon said to his wife one morning:
‘To-morrow I finish the second volume.’
‘And in a week,’ she replied, ‘we shan’t have a shilling left.’
He had refrained from making inquiries, and Amy had forborne to tell him the state of things, lest it should bring him to a dead stop in his writing. But now they must needs discuss their position.
‘In three weeks I can get to the end,’ said Reardon, with unnatural calmness. ‘Then I will go personally to the publishers, and beg them to advance me something on the manuscript before they have read it.’
‘Couldn’t you do that with the first two volumes?’
‘No, I can’t; indeed I can’t. The other thing will be bad enough; but to beg on an incomplete book, and such a book—I can’t!’
There were drops on his forehead.
‘They would help you if they knew,’ said Amy in a low voice.
‘Perhaps; I can’t say. They can’t help every poor devil. No; I will sell some books. I can pick out fifty or sixty that I shan’t much miss.’
Amy knew what a wrench this would be. The imminence of distress seemed to have softened her.
‘Edwin, let me take those two volumes to the publishers, and ask—’
‘Heavens! no. That’s impossible. Ten to one you will be told that my work is of such doubtful value that they can’t offer even a guinea till the whole book has been considered. I can’t allow you to go, dearest. This morning I’ll choose some books that I can spare, and after dinner I’ll ask a man to come and look at them. Don’t worry yourself; I can finish in three weeks, I’m sure I can. If I can get you three or four pounds you could make it do, couldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
She averted her face as she spoke.
‘You shall have that.’ He still spoke very quietly. ‘If the books won’t bring enough, there’s my watch—oh, lots of things.’
He turned abruptly away, and Amy went on with her household work.
It was natural that Amy should hint dissatisfaction with the loneliness in which her days were mostly spent. She had never lived in a large circle of acquaintances; the narrowness of her mother’s means restricted the family to intercourse with a few old friends and such new ones as were content with teacup entertainment; but her tastes were social, and the maturing process which followed upon her marriage made her more conscious of this than she had been before. Already she had allowed her husband to understand that one of her strongest motives in marrying him was the belief that he would achieve distinction. At the time she doubtless thought of his coming fame only—or principally—as it concerned their relations to each other; her pride in him was to be one phase of her love. Now she was well aware that no degree of distinction in her husband would be of much value to her unless she had the pleasure of witnessing its effect upon others; she must shine with reflected light before an admiring assembly.
The more conscious she became of this requirement of her nature, the more clearly did she perceive that her hopes had been founded on an error. Reardon would never be a great man; he would never even occupy a prominent place in the estimation of the public. The two things, Amy knew, might be as different as light and darkness; but in the grief of her disappointment she would rather have had him flare into a worthless popularity than flicker down into total extinction, which it almost seemed was to be his fate.
She knew so well how ‘people’ were talking of him and her. Even her unliterary acquaintances understood that Reardon’s last novel had been anything but successful, and they must of course ask each other how the Reardons were going to live if the business of novel-writing proved unremunerative. Her pride took offence at the mere thought of such conversations. Presently she would become an object of pity; there would be talk of ‘poor Mrs Reardon.’ It was intolerable.
So during the last half year she had withheld as much as possible from the intercourse which might have been one of her chief pleasures. And to disguise the true cause she made pretences which were a satire upon her state of mind—alleging that she had devoted herself to a serious course of studies, that the care of house and child occupied all the time she could spare from her intellectual pursuits. The worst of it was, she had little faith in the efficacy of these fictions; in uttering them she felt an unpleasant warmth upon her cheeks, and it was not difficult to detect a look of doubt in the eyes of the listener. She grew angry with herself for being dishonest, and with her husband for making such dishonesty needful.
The female friend with whom she had most trouble was Mrs Carter. You remember that on the occasion of Reardon’s first meeting with his future wife, at the Grosvenor Gallery, there were present his friend Carter and a young lady who was shortly to bear the name of that spirited young man. The Carters had now been married about a year; they lived in Bayswater, and saw much of a certain world which imitates on a lower plane the amusements and affectations of society proper. Mr Carter was still secretary to the hospital where Reardon had once earned his twenty shillings a week, but by voyaging in the seas of charitable enterprise he had come upon supplementary sources of income; for instance, he held the post of secretary to the Barclay Trust, a charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentlemen engaged in administering it. This young man, with his air of pleasing vivacity, had early ingratiated himself with the kind of people who were likely to be of use to him; he had his reward in the shape of offices which are only procured through private influence. His wife was a good-natured, lively, and rather clever girl; she had a genuine regard for Amy, and much respect for Reardon. Her ambition was to form a circle of distinctly intellectual acquaintances, and she was constantly inviting the Reardons to her house; a real live novelist is not easily drawn into the world where Mrs Carter had her being, and it annoyed her that all attempts to secure Amy and her husband for five-o’clock teas and small parties had of late failed.
On the afternoon when Reardon had visited a second-hand bookseller with a view of raising money—he was again shut up in his study, dolorously at work—Amy was disturbed by the sound of a visitor’s rat-tat; the little servant went to the door, and returned followed by Mrs Carter.
Under the best of circumstances it was awkward to receive any but intimate friends during the hours when Reardon sat at his desk. The little dining-room (with its screen to conceal the kitchen range) offered nothing more than homely comfort; and then the servant had to be disposed of by sending her into the bedroom to take care of Willie. Privacy, in the strict sense, was impossible, for the servant might listen at the door (one room led out of the other) to all the conversation that went on; yet Amy could not request her visitors to speak in a low tone. For the first year these difficulties had not been felt; Reardon made a point of leaving the front room at his wife’s disposal from three to six; it was only when dread of the future began to press upon him that he sat in the study all day long. You see how complicated were the miseries of the situation; one torment involved another, and in every quarter subjects of discontent were multiplied.
Mrs Carter would have taken it ill had she known that Amy did not regard her as strictly an intimate. They addressed each other by their Christian names, and conversed without ceremony; but Amy was always dissatisfied when the well-dressed young woman burst with laughter and animated talk into this abode of concealed poverty. Edith was not the kind of person with whom one can quarrel; she had a kind heart, and was never disagreeably pretentious. Had circumstances allowed it, Amy would have given frank welcome to such friendship; she would have been glad to accept as many invitations as Edith chose to offer. But at present it did her harm to come in contact with Mrs Carter; it made her envious, cold to her husband, resentful against fate.
‘Why can’t she leave me alone?’ was the thought that rose in her mind as Edith entered. ‘I shall let her see that I don’t want her here.’
‘Your husband at work?’ Edith asked, with a glance in the direction of the study, as soon as they had exchanged kisses and greetings.
‘Yes, he is busy.’
‘And you are sitting alone, as usual. I feared you might be out; an afternoon of sunshine isn’t to be neglected at this time of year.’
‘Is there sunshine?’ Amy inquired coldly.
‘Why, look! Do you mean to say you haven’t noticed it? What a comical person you are sometimes! I suppose you have been over head and ears in books all day. How is Willie?’
‘Very well, thank you.’
‘Mayn’t I see him?’
‘If you like.’
Amy stepped to the bedroom door and bade the servant bring Willie for exhibition. Edith, who as yet had no child of her own, always showed the most flattering admiration of this infant; it was so manifestly sincere that the mother could not but be moved to a grateful friendliness whenever she listened to its expression. Even this afternoon the usual effect followed when Edith had made a pretty and tender fool of herself for several minutes. Amy bade the servant make tea.
At this moment the door from the passage opened, and Reardon looked in.
‘Well, if this isn’t marvellous!’ cried Edith. ‘I should as soon have expected the heavens to fall!’
‘As what?’ asked Reardon, with a pale smile.
‘As you to show yourself when I am here.’
‘I should like to say that I came on purpose to see you, Mrs Carter, but it wouldn’t be true. I’m going out for an hour, so that you can take possession of the other room if you like, Amy.’
‘Going out?’ said Amy, with a look of surprise.
‘Nothing—nothing. I mustn’t stay.’
He just inquired of Mrs Carter how her husband was, and withdrew. The door of the flat was heard to close after him.
‘Let us go into the study, then,’ said Amy, again in rather a cold voice.
On Reardon’s desk were lying slips of blank paper. Edith, approaching on tiptoe with what was partly make believe, partly genuine, awe, looked at the literary apparatus, then turned with a laugh to her friend.
‘How delightful it must be to sit down and write about people one has invented! Ever since I have known you and Mr Reardon I have been tempted to try if I couldn’t write a story.’
‘Have you?’
‘And I’m sure I don’t know how you can resist the temptation. I feel sure you could write books almost as clever as your husband’s.’
‘I have no intention of trying.’
‘You don’t seem very well to-day, Amy.’
‘Oh, I think I am as well as usual.’
She guessed that her husband was once more brought to a standstill, and this darkened her humour again.
‘One of my reasons for coming,’ said Edith, ‘was to beg and entreat and implore you and Mr Reardon to dine with us next Wednesday. Now, don’t put on such a severe face! Are you engaged that evening?’
‘Yes; in the ordinary way. Edwin can’t possibly leave his work.’
‘But for one poor evening! It’s such ages since we saw you.’
‘I’m very sorry. I don’t think we shall ever be able to accept invitations in future.’
Amy spoke thus at the prompting of a sudden impulse. A minute ago, no such definite declaration was in her mind.
‘Never?’ exclaimed Edith. ‘But why? Whatever do you mean?’
‘We find that social engagements consume too much time,’ Amy replied, her explanation just as much of an impromptu as the announcement had been. ‘You see, one must either belong to society or not. Married people can’t accept an occasional invitation from friends and never do their social duty in return.
We have decided to withdraw altogether—at all events for the present. I shall see no one except my relatives.’
Edith listened with a face of astonishment.
‘You won’t even see ME?’ she exclaimed.
‘Indeed, I have no wish to lose your friendship. Yet I am ashamed to ask you to come here when I can never return your visits.’
‘Oh, please don’t put it in that way! But it seems so very strange.’
Edith could not help conjecturing the true significance of this resolve. But, as is commonly the case with people in easy circumstances, she found it hard to believe that her friends were so straitened as to have a difficulty in supporting the ordinary obligations of a civilised state.
‘I know how precious your husband’s time is,’ she added, as if to remove the effect of her last remark. ‘Surely, there’s no harm in my saying—we know each other well enough—you wouldn’t think it necessary to devote an evening to entertaining us just because you had given us the pleasure of your company. I put it very stupidly, but I’m sure you understand me, Amy. Don’t refuse just to come to our house now and then.’
‘I’m afraid we shall have to be consistent, Edith.’
‘But do you think this is a WISE thing to do?’
‘Wise?’
‘You know what you once told me, about how necessary it was for a novelist to study all sorts of people. How can Mr Reardon do this if he shuts himself up in the house? I should have thought he would find it necessary to make new acquaintances.’
‘As I said,’ returned Amy, ‘it won’t be always like this. For the present, Edwin has quite enough “material.”’
She spoke distantly; it irritated her to have to invent excuses for the sacrifice she had just imposed on herself. Edith sipped the tea which had been offered her, and for a minute kept silence.
‘When will Mr Reardon’s next book be published?’ she asked at length.
‘I’m sure I don’t know. Not before the spring.’
‘I shall look so anxiously for it. Whenever I meet new people I always turn the conversation to novels, just for the sake of asking them if they know your husband’s books.’
She laughed merrily.
‘Which is seldom the case, I should think,’ said Amy, with a smile of indifference.
‘Well, my dear, you don’t expect ordinary novel-readers to know about Mr Reardon. I wish my acquaintances were a better kind of people; then, of course, I should hear of his books more often. But one has to make the best of such society as offers. If you and your husband forsake me, I shall feel it a sad loss; I shall indeed.’
Amy gave a quick glance at the speaker’s face.
‘Oh, we must be friends just the same,’ she said, more naturally than she had spoken hitherto. ‘But don’t ask us to come and dine just now. All through this winter we shall be very busy, both of us. Indeed, we have decided not to accept any invitations at all.’
‘Then, so long as you let me come here now and then, I must give in. I promise not to trouble you with any more complaining. But how you can live such a life I don’t know. I consider myself more of a reader than women generally are, and I should be mortally offended if anyone called me frivolous; but I must have a good deal of society. Really and truly, I can’t live without it.’
‘No?’ said Amy, with a smile which meant more than Edith could interpret. It seemed slightly condescending.
‘There’s no knowing; perhaps if I had married a literary man—-’ She paused, smiling and musing. ‘But then I haven’t, you see.’ She laughed. ‘Albert is anything but a bookworm, as you know.’
‘You wouldn’t wish him to be.’
‘Oh no! Not a bookworm. To be sure, we suit each other very well indeed. He likes society just as much as I do. It would be the death of him if he didn’t spend three-quarters of every day with lively people.’
‘That’s rather a large portion. But then you count yourself among the lively ones.’
They exchanged looks, and laughed together.
‘Of course you think me rather silly to want to talk so much with silly people,’ Edith went on. ‘But then there’s generally some amusement to be got, you know. I don’t take life quite so seriously as you do. People are people, after all; it’s good fun to see how they live and hear how they talk.’
Amy felt that she was playing a sorry part. She thought of sour grapes, and of the fox who had lost his tail. Worst of all, perhaps Edith suspected the truth. She began to make inquiries about common acquaintances, and fell into an easier current of gossip.
A quarter of an hour after the visitor’s departure Reardon came back. Amy had guessed aright; the necessity of selling his books weighed upon him so that for the present he could do nothing. The evening was spent gloomily, with very little conversation.
Next day came the bookseller to make his inspection. Reardon had chosen out and ranged upon a table nearly a hundred volumes. With a few exceptions, they had been purchased second-hand. The tradesman examined them rapidly.
‘What do you ask?’ he inquired, putting his head aside.
‘I prefer that you should make an offer,’ Reardon replied, with the helplessness of one who lives remote from traffic.
‘I can’t say more than two pounds ten.’
‘That is at the rate of sixpence a volume—-?’
‘To me that’s about the average value of books like these.’
Perhaps the offer was a fair one; perhaps it was not. Reardon had neither time nor spirit to test the possibilities of the market; he was ashamed to betray his need by higgling.
‘I’ll take it,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact voice.
A messenger was sent for the books that afternoon. He stowed them skilfully in two bags, and carried them downstairs to a cart that was waiting.
Reardon looked at the gaps left on his shelves. Many of those vanished volumes were dear old friends to him; he could have told you where he had picked them up and when; to open them recalled a past moment of intellectual growth, a mood of hope or despondency, a stage of struggle. In most of them his name was written, and there were often pencilled notes in the margin. Of course he had chosen from among the most valuable he possessed; such a multitude must else have been sold to make this sum of two pounds ten. Books are cheap, you know. At need, one can buy a Homer for fourpence, a Sophocles for sixpence. It was not rubbish that he had accumulated at so small expenditure, but the library of a poor student—battered bindings, stained pages, supplanted editions. He loved his books, but there was something he loved more, and when Amy glanced at him with eyes of sympathy he broke into a cheerful laugh.
‘I’m only sorry they have gone for so little. Tell me when the money is nearly at an end again, and you shall have more. It’s all right; the novel will be done soon.’
And that night he worked until twelve o’clock, doggedly, fiercely.
The next day was Sunday. As a rule he made it a day of rest, and almost perforce, for the depressing influence of Sunday in London made work too difficult. Then, it was the day on which he either went to see his own particular friends or was visited by them.
‘Do you expect anyone this evening?’ Amy inquired.
‘Biffen will look in, I dare say. Perhaps Milvain.’
‘I think I shall take Willie to mother’s. I shall be back before eight.’
‘Amy, don’t say anything about the books.’
‘No, no.’
‘I suppose they always ask you when we think of removing over the way?’
He pointed in a direction that suggested Marylebone Workhouse. Amy tried to laugh, but a woman with a child in her arms has no keen relish for such jokes.
‘I don’t talk to them about our affairs,’ she said.
‘That’s best.’
She left home about three o’clock, the servant going with her to carry the child.
At five a familiar knock sounded through the flat; it was a heavy rap followed by half-a-dozen light ones, like a reverberating echo, the last stroke scarcely audible. Reardon laid down his book, but kept his pipe in his mouth, and went to the door. A tall, thin man stood there, with a slouch hat and long grey overcoat. He shook hands silently, hung his hat in the passage, and came forward into the study.
His name was Harold Biffen, and, to judge from his appearance, he did not belong to the race of common mortals. His excessive meagreness would all but have qualified him to enter an exhibition in the capacity of living skeleton, and the garments which hung upon this framework would perhaps have sold for three-and-sixpence at an old-clothes dealer’s. But the man was superior to these accidents of flesh and raiment. He had a fine face: large, gentle eyes, nose slightly aquiline, small and delicate mouth. Thick black hair fell to his coat-collar; he wore a heavy moustache and a full beard. In his gait there was a singular dignity; only a man of cultivated mind and graceful character could move and stand as he did.
His first act on entering the room was to take from his pocket a pipe, a pouch, a little tobacco-stopper, and a box of matches, all of which he arranged carefully on a corner of the central table. Then he drew forward a chair and seated himself.
‘Take your top-coat off;’ said Reardon.
‘Thanks, not this evening.’
‘Why the deuce not?’
‘Not this evening, thanks.’
The reason, as soon as Reardon sought for it, was obvious. Biffen had no ordinary coat beneath the other. To have referred to this fact would have been indelicate; the novelist of course understood it, and smiled, but with no mirth.
‘Let me have your Sophocles,’ were the visitor’s next words.
Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket Classics.
‘I prefer the Wunder, please.’
‘It’s gone, my boy.’
‘Gone?’
‘Wanted a little cash.’
Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and sympathy were blended.
‘I’m sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must do. Now, I want to know how you scan this chorus in the “Oedipus Rex.”’
Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to read aloud with metric emphasis.
‘Choriambics, eh?’ cried the other. ‘Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics a minore with an anacrusis, and see if they don’t go better.’
He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with such delight that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a technical lecture, he began to read in illustration, producing quite a different effect from that of the rhythm as given by his friend. And the reading was by no means that of a pedant, rather of a poet.
For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied by grand or sweet cadences.
They had first met in an amusing way. Not long after the publication of his book ‘On Neutral Ground’ Reardon was spending a week at Hastings. A rainy day drove him to the circulating library, and as he was looking along the shelves for something readable a voice near at hand asked the attendant if he had anything ‘by Edwin Reardon.’ The novelist turned in astonishment; that any casual mortal should inquire for his books seemed incredible. Of course there was nothing by that author in the library, and he who had asked the question walked out again. On the morrow Reardon encountered this same man at a lonely part of the shore; he looked at him, and spoke a word or two of common civility; they got into conversation, with the result that Edwin told the story of yesterday. The stranger introduced himself as Harold Biffen, an author in a small way, and a teacher whenever he could get pupils; an abusive review had interested him in Reardon’s novels, but as yet he knew nothing of them but the names.
Their tastes were found to be in many respects sympathetic, and after returning to London they saw each other frequently. Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself. The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world. In these days of examinations, numbers of men in a poor position—clerks chiefly—conceive a hope that by ‘passing’ this, that, or the other formal test they may open for themselves a new career. Not a few such persons nourish preposterous ambitions; there are warehouse clerks privately preparing (without any means or prospect of them) for a call to the Bar, drapers’ assistants who ‘go in’ for the preliminary examination of the College of Surgeons, and untaught men innumerable who desire to procure enough show of education to be eligible for a curacy. Candidates of this stamp frequently advertise in the newspapers for cheap tuition, or answer advertisements which are intended to appeal to them; they pay from sixpence to half-a-crown an hour—rarely as much as the latter sum. Occasionally it happened that Harold Biffen had three or four such pupils in hand, and extraordinary stories he could draw from his large experience in this sphere.
Then as to his authorship.—But shortly after the discussion of Greek metres he fell upon the subject of his literary projects, and, by no means for the first time, developed the theory on which he worked.
‘I have thought of a new way of putting it. What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. The field, as I understand it, is a new one; I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. Zola writes deliberate tragedies; his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. I want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. Dickens understood the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. An instance, now. As I came along by Regent’s Park half an hour ago a man and a girl were walking close in front of me, love-making; I passed them slowly and heard a good deal of their talk—it was part of the situation that they should pay no heed to a stranger’s proximity. Now, such a love-scene as that has absolutely never been written down; it was entirely decent, yet vulgar to the nth power. Dickens would have made it ludicrous—a gross injustice. Other men who deal with low-class life would perhaps have preferred idealising it—an absurdity. For my own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting. The result will be something unutterably tedious. Precisely. That is the stamp of the ignobly decent life. If it were anything but tedious it would be untrue. I speak, of course, of its effect upon the ordinary reader.’
‘I couldn’t do it,’ said Reardon.
‘Certainly you couldn’t. You—well, you are a psychological realist in the sphere of culture. You are impatient of vulgar circumstances.’
‘In a great measure because my life has been martyred by them.’
‘And for that very same reason I delight in them,’ cried Biffen. ‘You are repelled by what has injured you; I am attracted by it. This divergence is very interesting; but for that, we should have resembled each other so closely. You know that by temper we are rabid idealists, both of us.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘But let me go on. I want, among other things, to insist upon the fateful power of trivial incidents. No one has yet dared to do this seriously. It has often been done in farce, and that’s why farcical writing so often makes one melancholy. You know my stock instances of the kind of thing I mean. There was poor Allen, who lost the most valuable opportunity of his life because he hadn’t a clean shirt to put on; and Williamson, who would probably have married that rich girl but for the grain of dust that got into his eye, and made him unable to say or do anything at the critical moment.’
Reardon burst into a roar of laughter.
‘There you are!’ cried Biffen, with friendly annoyance. ‘You take the conventional view. If you wrote of these things you would represent them as laughable.’
‘They are laughable,’ asserted the other, ‘however serious to the persons concerned. The mere fact of grave issues in life depending on such paltry things is monstrously ludicrous. Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.’
‘That’s all very well, but it isn’t an original view. I am not lacking in sense of humour, but I prefer to treat these aspects of life from an impartial standpoint. The man who laughs takes the side of a cruel omnipotence, if one can imagine such a thing.
I want to take no side at all; simply to say, Look, this is the kind of thing that happens.’
‘I admire your honesty, Biffen,’ said Reardon, sighing. ‘You will never sell work of this kind, yet you have the courage to go on with it because you believe in it.’
‘I don’t know; I may perhaps sell it some day.’
‘In the meantime,’ said Reardon, laying down his pipe, ‘suppose we eat a morsel of something. I’m rather hungry.’
In the early days of his marriage Reardon was wont to offer the friends who looked in on Sunday evening a substantial supper; by degrees the meal had grown simpler, until now, in the depth of his poverty, he made no pretence of hospitable entertainment. It was only because he knew that Biffen as often as not had nothing whatever to eat that he did not hesitate to offer him a slice of bread and butter and a cup of tea. They went into the back room, and over the Spartan fare continued to discuss aspects of fiction.
‘I shall never,’ said Biffen, ‘write anything like a dramatic scene. Such things do happen in life, but so very rarely that they are nothing to my purpose. Even when they happen, by-the-bye, it is in a shape that would be useless to the ordinary novelist; he would have to cut away this circumstance, and add that. Why? I should like to know. Such conventionalism results from stage necessities. Fiction hasn’t yet outgrown the influence of the stage on which it originated. Whatever a man writes FOR EFFECT is wrong and bad.’
‘Only in your view. There may surely exist such a thing as the ART of fiction.’
‘It is worked out. We must have a rest from it. You, now—the best things you have done are altogether in conflict with novelistic conventionalities. It was because that blackguard review of “On Neutral Ground” clumsily hinted this that I first thought of you with interest. No, no; let us copy life. When the man and woman are to meet for a great scene of passion, let it all be frustrated by one or other of them having a bad cold in the head, and so on. Let the pretty girl get a disfiguring pimple on her nose just before the ball at which she is going to shine. Show the numberless repulsive features of common decent life. Seriously, coldly; not a hint of facetiousness, or the thing becomes different.’
About eight o’clock Reardon heard his wife’s knock at the door. On opening he saw not only Amy and the servant, the latter holding Willie in her arms, but with them Jasper Milvain.
‘I have been at Mrs Yule’s,’ Jasper explained as he came in. ‘Have you anyone here?’
‘Biffen.’
‘Ah, then we’ll discuss realism.’
‘That’s over for the evening. Greek metres also.’
‘Thank Heaven!’
The three men seated themselves with joking and laughter, and the smoke of their pipes gathered thickly in the little room. It was half an hour before Amy joined them. Tobacco was no disturbance to her, and she enjoyed the kind of talk that was held on these occasions; but it annoyed her that she could no longer play the hostess at a merry supper-table.
‘Why ever are you sitting in your overcoat, Mr Biffen?’ were her first words when she entered.
‘Please excuse me, Mrs Reardon. It happens to be more convenient this evening.’
She was puzzled, but a glance from her husband warned her not to pursue the subject.
Biffen always behaved to Amy with a sincerity of respect which had made him a favourite with her. To him, poor fellow, Reardon seemed supremely blessed. That a struggling man of letters should have been able to marry, and such a wife, was miraculous in Biffen’s eyes. A woman’s love was to him the unattainable ideal; already thirty-five years old, he had no prospect of ever being rich enough to assure himself a daily dinner; marriage was wildly out of the question. Sitting here, he found it very difficult not to gaze at Amy with uncivil persistency. Seldom in his life had he conversed with educated women, and the sound of this clear voice was always more delightful to him than any music.
Amy took a place near to him, and talked in her most charming way of such things as she knew interested him. Biffen’s deferential attitude as he listened and replied was in strong contrast with the careless ease which marked Jasper Milvain. The realist would never smoke in Amy’s presence, but Jasper puffed jovial clouds even whilst she was conversing with him.
‘Whelpdale came to see me last night,’ remarked Milvain, presently. ‘His novel is refused on all hands. He talks of earning a living as a commission agent for some sewing-machine people.’
‘I can’t understand how his book should be positively refused,’ said Reardon. ‘The last wasn’t altogether a failure.’
‘Very nearly. And this one consists of nothing but a series of conversations between two people. It is really a dialogue, not a novel at all. He read me some twenty pages, and I no longer wondered that he couldn’t sell it.’
‘Oh, but it has considerable merit,’ put in Biffen. ‘The talk is remarkably true.’
‘But what’s the good of talk that leads to nothing?’ protested Jasper.
‘It’s a bit of real life.’
‘Yes, but it has no market value. You may write what you like, so long as people are willing to read you. Whelpdale’s a clever fellow, but he can’t hit a practical line.’
‘Like some other people I have heard of;’ said Reardon, laughing.
‘But the odd thing is, that he always strikes one as practical-minded. Don’t you feel that, Mrs Reardon?’
He and Amy talked for a few minutes, and Reardon, seemingly lost in meditation, now and then observed them from the corner of his eye.
At eleven o’clock husband and wife were alone again.
‘You don’t mean to say,’ exclaimed Amy, ‘that Biffen has sold his coat?’
‘Or pawned it.’
‘But why not the overcoat?’
‘Partly, I should think, because it’s the warmer of the two; partly, perhaps, because the other would fetch more.’
‘That poor man will die of starvation, some day, Edwin.’
‘I think it not impossible.’
‘I hope you gave him something to eat?’
‘Oh yes. But I could see he didn’t like to take as much as he wanted. I don’t think of him with so much pity as I used to; that’s a result of suffering oneself.’
Amy set her lips and sighed.