Dear Sir,—I have looked at the poems you were kind enough to send for my consideration, and I shall be happy to hand them to a reader for his opinion. The reader's fee is one guinea. Should his opinion be favorable, I shall be glad to discuss terms with you.
Dear Sir,—I have looked at the poems you were kind enough to send for my consideration, and I shall be happy to hand them to a reader for his opinion. The reader's fee is one guinea. Should his opinion be favorable, I shall be glad to discuss terms with you.
Yours faithfully,William Worrall.
Guy threw the letter down in a rage. He would almost have preferred a flat refusal to this request for money to enable some jaded hack to read his poems. The proposal appeared merely insolent, and he wrote curtly to Mr. William Worrall to demand the immediate return of his manuscript. But after all, if Worrall did not accept his work, who would? Money was an ulterior consideration when the great object was to receive such unanimous approval as would justify the apparent waste of time in which he had been indulging. The moment his father acknowledged the right he had to be confident, he in turn would try to show by following his father's advice that he was not the wrong-headed idler of his reputation. Perhaps he would send the guinea to Worrall. He tore up his first letter and wrote another in which a cheque was inclosed. Then he began to add up the counterfoils of his cheque-book, a depressing operation that displayed an imminent financial crisis. He had overdrawn £5 last quarter. That left £32 10s. of the money paid in on December 21st. The quarter's rent was £4 10s. That left £28. Miss Peasey's wages were in arrears, and he must pay her £4 10s. on the fifteenth of this month. That would leave £23 10s., and he must knock off 7s. 6d. for Bob's license. About £3 had gone at Christmas and there were the books still to pay. Twenty pounds was not much for current expenses until next Lady Day. However, he decided that he could manage in Wychford, if he didnot have to pay out money for Oxford debts, the creditors of which were pressing him harder each week.
£s.d.Lampard.Books.39150Harker.Furniture.17180Faucett.Books.22166Williamson.Books.13190Ambrose.Books.470Brough.Tobacco.9190Clary.Clothes.4440Miscellaneous.Books, Clothes,Stationery, Chemist,etc., etc. about £50
A total of £202 18s. 6d. Practically he might say that £200 would clear everything. Yet was £50 enough to allow for those miscellaneous accounts? Here, for instance, was a bill of £11 for boots and another of £14 for hats, apparently, though how the deuce he could have spent all that on hats he did not know. It would be wiser to say that £250 was required to free himself from debt. Guy read through the tradesmen's letters and detected an universal impatience, for they all reminded him that not merely for fifteen months had they received nothing on account of large outstanding bills, but also they made it clear that behind reiterated demands and politeness strained to breaking-point stood darkly the law. That brute Ambrose, to whom, after all, he owed only £4 7s., was the most threatening. In fact, he would obviously have to pay the ruffian in full. That left only £15 13s. for current expenses to Lady Day, or rather £14 12s., for, by the way, Worrall's guinea had been left out of the reckoning.
Guy wondered if he ought to get rid of Miss Peasey and manage for himself in future. Yet the housekeeper probably earned her wages by what she saved him, and if he relied on a woman who "came in" every morning, thatmeant feeding a family. It would be better to sell a few books. He might raise £50 that way. Ten pounds to both Lampard and Clary, and six fivers among the rest, would postpone any violent pressure for a while. Guy at once began to choose the books with which he could most easily part. It was difficult to put aside as many as might be expected to raise £50, for his collection did not contain rarities, and it would be a sheer quantity of volumes, the extraction of which would horribly deplete his shelves, upon which he must rely.
The January rain dripped monotonously on the window-sills while Guy dragged book after book from the shelves that for only fifteen months had known their company. They were a melancholy sight when he had stacked on the floor as many books as he could bear to lose, each shelf looking as disreputable as a row of teeth after a fight. A hundred volumes were gone, scarcely a dozen of which had he sacrificed without a pang. But a hundred volumes in order to raise £50 must sell at an average of ten shillings apiece, and in the light of such a test of value he regarded dismayfully the victims. Precious though they were to him, he could not fairly estimate the price they would fetch at more than five shillings each. That meant the loss of at least a hundred more books. Guy felt sick at the prospect and looked miserably along the rows for the further tribute of martyrs they must be forced to yield. With intense difficulty he gathered together another fifty, and then with a final effort came again for still another fifty. Here was the first edition of Swinburne'sEssays and Studies. That must go, for it might count as ten shillings and therefore save a weaker brother. Rossetti's Poems in this edition of 1871 must go in order to save the complete works, for he could copy out the sonnet which was not reprinted in the later edition. Here was Payne's translation of Villon, which could certainly go, for it would fetch at least fifteen shillings, and he still possessed that tattered little French editionat two francs. The collected Verlaine might as well go, and the Mallarmé with the Rops frontispiece: the six volumes would save others better loved. Besides, he was sick of French poetry, wretched stuff most of it. Yet, here was Hérédia and the Pleiad and de Vigny, all of whom were beloved exceptions. He must preserve, too, the Italians (what a solace Leopardi had been), though here were a couple of Infernos, one of which could surely be sacrificed. He opened the first:
Amor, chee a nullo amato amar perdona,Mi pres del costui piacer si forte,Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.
The words were stained with the blue anemone to which he had likened Pauline's eyes that first day of their love's declaration. He opened the other:
Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse,Quando leggemmo il disiato risoEsser baciato da cotanto amante,Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante:
And in this volume the words were stained with a ragged-robin which unnoticed had come back to Plashers Mead in his pocket that May eve, and which when it fell out later he had pressed between those burning pages. It was doubtless the worst kind of sentiment, but the two books must go back upon their shelves, and never must they be lost, even if everything but Shakespeare went.
Guy put his hand to his forehead and found that it was actually wet with the agony of what on this January afternoon he had been compelling himself to achieve. Each book before it was condemned he stroked fondly and smelled like incense the fragrant mustiness of the pages, since nearly every volume still commemorated either the pleasure of the moment when he had bought it or some occasion of reading equally good to recall. Then he coveredthe pile with a shroud of tattered stuff and wrote a letter offering them to the only bookseller in Oxford with whom he had never dealt. Two days later an assistant came over to inspect the booty.
"Well?" said Guy, painfully, when the assistant put away his note-book and shot his cuffs forward.
"Well, Mr. Hazlewood, we can offer you thirty-five pounds for that little lot."
Guy stammered a repetition of the disappointing sum.
"That's right, sir. And we don't really want them."
"But surely fifty pounds...."
The assistant smiled in a superior way.
"We musttryand make alittleprofit," he murmured.
"Oh, God, you'll do that! Why, I must have paid very nearly a hundred for them, and they were practically all second hand when I bought them."
The assistant shrugged his shoulders.
"I'm sorry, sir, but in offering you thirty-five pounds I'm offering too much as it is. We don't really want them, you see. They're not really any good to us."
"You're simply being damned charitable in fact," said Guy. "All right. Give me a cheque and take them away when you like ... the sooner the better."
He could have kicked that pile of books he had with such hardship chosen; already they seemed to belong to this smart young assistant with the satin tie; and he began to hate this agglomeration which had cost him such agony, and in the end had swindled him out of £15. The assistant sat down and wrote a cheque for Guy, took his receipt, and bowed himself out, saying that he would send for the books in the course of the week.
Through the rain Guy went for consolation to Pauline. He told her of his sacrifice, and she with all she could give of exquisite compassion listened to his tale.
"But, Guy, my darling, why don't you borrow the money from Father? I am sure he'd be delighted to lend it to you."
Guy shook his head.
"It's impossible. My debts must be paid by myself. I wouldn't even borrow from Michael Fane. Dearest, don't look so sad. I would sell my soul for you. Kiss me. Kiss me. I care for nothing but your kisses. You must promise not to say a word of this to any one. Besides, it's no sacrifice to do anything that brings our marriage nearer by an inch. These debts are weighting me down. They stifle me. I am miserable, too, about the poems. I haven't told you yet. It's really a joke in one way. Yes, it's really funny. Worrall wrote to ask for a guinea before he read them. Now, don't you think there is something very particularly humorous in being charged a guinea by a reader? However, don't worry about that."
"How could he be so stupid?" she cried. "I hope you took them away from him."
"Oh no. I sent the guinea. They must be published. Pauline, I must have done something soon or I shall go mad! Surely you see the funny side of his offer? I think the notion of my expecting to get five shillings apiece out of a lot of readers, and my only reader's getting a guinea out of me is funny. I think it's quite humorous."
"Nothing is funny to me that hurts you," Pauline murmured. "And I'm heartbroken about the books."
"Oh, when I'm rich I can buy plenty."
"But not the same books."
"That's mere sentiment," he laughed. "And the only sentiment I allow myself is in connection with things that you have sanctified."
Then he told her about the flowers pressed in the two volumes of Dante, both in that same fifth canto.
"And almost, you know," Guy whispered, "I value most the ragged-robin, because it commemorates the day you really began to love me."
"Ah no," she protested. "Guy, don't say that. Ialways loved you, but I was shy before. I could not tell you. Sometimes I wish I were shy now. It would make our love so much less of a strain."
"Is it a strain?"
"Oh, sometimes!" she cried, nearly in tears, her light-brown hair upon his shoulder. "Oh yes, yes, Guy! I can't bear to feel.... I'm frightened sometimes, and when Mother has been cross with me, I've not known what to do. Guy, you won't ever ask me to come out again at night?"
"Not if it worries you afterwards."
"Oh yes, it has, it has! Guy, when shall we be married?"
"This year. It shall be this year," he vowed. "Let us believe that, Pauline. You do believe that?"
"Oh, Guy, I adore you so wildly. It must be this year. My darling, my darling, this year ... let it be this year."
Guy doled out very carefully the £35 he had accumulated by the sale of his books. Lampard and Clary had to be content with £7 apiece. Five more creditors received £4, or rather one of them only £3 19s., so that the guinea left over could be put back into the current account for poetic justice. There was, for the present nothing more to do but await the verdict of Worrall's reader, and in a fortnight Guy heard from the publisher to say this had been favorable enough to make Mr. Worrall wish to see him in order to discuss the matter of publication. Guy was much excited and rushed across to the Rectory in a festivity of hopefulness. He had wired to say he would be in London next day, and all that evening the name of Worrall was lauded until round his unknown personality shone the aureole of a wise and benevolent saint. There seemed no limit to what so discerning a publisher might not do for Guy, and he and Pauline became to themselves and to her family the hero and heroine of such an adventure as never had been. In thecourse of the evening Guy had an opportunity of talking to Margaret, and for the first time for a long while he availed himself of it.
"Are you really going to talk to me, then?" she asked in mock surprise.
"Margaret, I've been rather objectionable lately," said Guy, remembering with an access of penitence that it must be almost exactly a year ago that he and Margaret in that snowy weather had first talked about his love for Pauline.
"Well, I have thought that you were forgetting me," said Margaret. "I shall be sad if we are never going to be friends again."
"Oh, Margaret, we are friends now. I've been worried, and I thought that you had been rather unkind to Pauline."
"I haven't really."
"Of course not. It was absolutely my fault," Guy admitted. "Now that there seems a chance of our being married in less than ten years, I'm going to give up this continual exasperation in which I live nowadays. It's curious that my first impression of you all should have been as of a Mozart symphony, so tranquil and gay and self-contained and perfectly made did the Rectory seem. How clumsily I have plunged into that life," he sighed. "Really, Margaret, I feel sometimes like a wild beast that's escaped from a menagerie and got into a concert of chamber-music. Look here, you shall never have to grumble at me again. Now tell me, just to show that you've forgiven my detestable irruption ... when Richard comes back...."
Margaret gave him her hand for a moment, and looked down.
"And you're happy?" he asked, eagerly.
"I'm sure I shall be."
"Oh, you will be, you will be."
Pauline asked him afterwards what he had said to Margaretthat could have made her so particularly sweet, and when Guy whispered his discovery, Pauline declared that the one thing necessary to make this evening perfect had been just that knowledge.
"Guy, how clever of you to make her tell you what she will never tell us. You don't know how much it has worried me to feel that you were always angry with Margaret. How I've exaggerated everything! And what friends you really are, you dears!"
"I've never been angry with her except on your account."
"But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort of young Miss Verney."
They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London.
Guy was surprised to be kept waiting when he inquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily, that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian ante-chamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step.
It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently.
"Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.
Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a depressing accumulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy, and the raindrops seemed from inside to smear it as tears smudgethe face of a dirty child. The clerk pored over a ledger, and from the gray afternoon the cries of the porters in Covent Garden came drearily in. At last a bell sounded, and the clerk invited him "to step this way," lifting the counter and pointing up a narrow staircase beyond a glass door. Guy went up, and at last entered Mr. Worrall's private office.
The publisher was a short, fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon bore a hole in the festooned ceiling.
"Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher, referring as he spoke to Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of oblivion—"well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favorably on your poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them."
Guy bowed.
"No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a Gothic arch with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added:
"Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion was certainly favorable."
And so it ought to be, thought Guy, for a guinea.
"And I don't think," Mr. Worrall went on, "that in the circumstances we need be very much afraid. Have you any ideas about the price at which your sheaf, your little harvest is to be offered to the public?"
"Oh, I should leave that to you," said Guy, hastily.
"Precisely," said the publisher. "Yes, I think perhaps we might say five shillings or ... of course itmightbe done in paper in the Covent Garden Series of Modern English Poets. Yes, the reader speaks most highly of your work. You know the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets? In paper at half-a-crown net?"
"I should be very proud to appear in such a series," said Guy, pleasantly. The series, as a matter of fact, was one that could do him no discredit.
"It's a charming idea, isn't it?" said Mr. Worrall, fondling one of the set that lay on his desk. "Every five volumes has its own floral emblem. We've done The Rose, The Lily, The Violet. Let me see, your poems are mostly about London, aren't they?"
"No, there isn't one about London," Guy pointed out, rather sharply.
"No, precisely; then of course they wouldnotcome in The London Pride set which still has a vacancy. Perhaps The Cowslip? What does the reader say? Um, yes, pastoral! Precisely! Well, then why not let us decide that your poems shall be Number Three in The Cowslip set. Capital! I think you'd be wise to choose the Covent Garden series in paper. The cost of publication is really less in that series, and I have always chosen my poets so carefully that I can be sure the Press will pay attention to—er neophytes. That is a great advantage for a young writer, as you no doubt realize without my telling you?"
"The cost?" echoed Guy in a puzzled voice.
"It will run you in for about thirty pounds—as a guarantee of course. The terms I suggest are simply a written agreement that you will guarantee thirty pounds towards the cost. Your royalty to be ten per cent. on the first thousand, twelve and a half on the next thousand, and fifteen over two thousand. We might fairly say that in the event of selling a thousand you would have nothing to pay, but, of course, if you only sell twenty or thirty, you will have to—er—pay for your piping."
"And when should I have to produce this thirty pounds?" Guy asked.
"Well, I might ask for a cheque to be placed to my account on the day of publication; and then, of course, I should send in a written statement twice a year with the usual three months' margin for settlement."
"So that supposing my book came out in March?" Guy inquired.
"By the following November I should hope to have the pleasure of sending you back your thirty pounds and a cheque on account of royalties," said the publisher, briskly.
"They don't seem very good terms, somehow," said Guy.
Mr. Worrall shrugged his shoulders, and his conical head grew more conical.
"You forget the advantage of being in the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets. However, don't, pray do not, intrust your manuscript to my pilotage unless you are perfectly satisfied. I have a good many poems to consider, you know."
"May I write within a week or so and give you my decision?" Guy asked.
"Naturally."
"Well, good-by."
"Good-by, Mr. Hazlewood. Clever fellow, isn't he?"
Guy had given a farewell glance at Max Beerbohm's caricature.
"Very clever," the poet fervently agreed.
Guy left Mr. William Worrall's office and wandered dismally across Covent Garden, wondering where on earth he was going to be able to raise £30. He had intended to spend the night in town and look up some old friends, but, foreseeing now the inevitable question, "What are you doing?" he felt he had not the heart to explain that at present he was debating the possibility of spending £30 in order to produce a book of poems. All the peoplewhom he would have been glad to see had held such high hopes of him at Oxford, had prophesied for his career such prosperity; and now when after fifteen months he emerged from his retirement it was but to pay a man to include him in the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets. The rain came down faster, and a creeping fog made more inhospitable the dusk of London. He thought of a quick train somewhere about five o'clock, and in a sudden longing to be back in the country and to sleep, however dark and frore the January night that stretched between them, nearer to Pauline than here in this city of drizzled fog, he took a cab to Paddington.
During the railway journey Guy contemplated various plans to raise the money he wanted. He knew that his father at the cost of a long letter would probably have given him the sum; but supposing a triumph lay before him, all the sweets of it would have been robbed by paternal help. Moreover, if the book were paid for thus, there would be a consequent suspicion of all favorable criticism; it would never seem a genuine book to his father, and the reviews would give him the impression of being the work of well-disposed amateurs or of personal friends. There was the alternative of borrowing the money from Michael Fane; and then as the train went clanging through the night Guy made up his mind to be under an obligation to nobody and to sacrifice all the rest of his books if necessary that this new book might be born.
When he was back at Plashers Mead his resolution did not weaken; coldly and unsentimentally he began to eviscerate the already mutilated library. At the end of his task he had stacked upon the floor five hundred volumes to be offered as a bargain to the bookseller who had bought the others. All that was left, indeed, were the cheapest and most ordinary editions of poets, one or two volumes of the greatest of all like Rabelais and Cervantes, and the eternally read and most companionable like Boswelland Gilbert White and Sir Thomas Browne. In the determination that had seized him he rejoiced in his bare shelves, so much exalted by the glories of abnegation that he began to despise himself in his former attitude as a trifler among books and to say to himself, as he looked at the volumes which had survived this heartless clearance, that now he was set on the great fairway of literature without any temptation to diverge up the narrow streams of personal taste. The bookseller's assistant was not at all eager for the proffered bargain, and in the end Guy could only manage to obtain the £30 and not, as he had hoped, another £10 towards his debts. Nevertheless, he locked the cheque up in his desk with the satisfaction of a man who for the first time in his life earns money, and later on went across to tell Pauline the result of the visit to London.
There was a smell of frost in the air that afternoon, and the sharpness of the weather consorted well with Guy's mood, taking away the heavy sense of disappointment and giving him a sparkling hopefulness. He and Pauline went for a walk on Wychford down, and in the wintry cheer he would not allow her to be cast down at the loss of his books or to resent Worrall's reception of the poems.
"Everything is all right," he assured her. "The more we have to deny ourselves now, the greater will be my success when it comes. The law of compensation never fails. You and I are Davidsbündler marching against the Philistines. So be brave, my Pauline."
"I will try to be brave," she promised. "But it's harder for me because I'm doing nothing."
"Oh, nothing," said Guy. "Nothing except endow me with passion and ambition, with consolation ... oh, nothing, you foolish one."
"Am I really all that to you?"
"Forward," he shouted, hurling his stick in front of him and dragging Pauline at the heels of Bob across turfthat was already beginning to crackle in the frost. Pauline could not resist his confidence, and when at last they had to turn round and leave a smoky orange sunset, they came home glowing to the Rectory, both in the highest spirits. Guy wrote to the publisher that night and announced his intention of accepting the "offer," a word which he could not resist framing with inverted commas in case the sarcastic shaft might pierce Mr. Worrall's hard and conical head.
Sitting back in his chair and thinking over his poems, all sorts of verbal improvements suggested themselves to Guy; and he added a note asking for the manuscript to be sent back for a few corrections. He looked at his work with new eyes when it arrived, and bent with all the enthusiasm that fruition gave his pen upon reviewing each line for the hundredth time. He had enjoyed few things so well in his life as going to bed tired with the intense consideration of a rhyme and falling asleep in the ambition to reconsider it early next morning.
About ten days had passed since Guy sold the second lot of books, and the poems were now as good as he could make them until print should reveal numbers of fresh faults. He hoped that Worrall would hurry on with the printing in order to allow him plenty of time for an even more severe scrutiny; and he wrote to suggest April as the month of publication, so anxious was he to have one specially bound copy to offer Pauline on her birthday.
On the very morning when the manuscript had been wrapped up and was ready to be sent off a disturbing letter arrived from Lampard, his favorite Oxford bookseller, to say that, having made a purchase of books two or three days ago, he had been surprised to find among them a large number of volumes with Mr. Hazlewood's name inscribed on the fly-leaves, for which Mr. Hazlewood had not yet paid him. He ventured to think it was only by an oversight that Mr. Hazlewood had not paid his long outstanding account before disposing of the books, andin short he was anxious to know what Mr. Hazlewood intended to do about it. His bill, £32 15s., was inclosed. Guy wrote back to say that it was indeed a most unaccountable oversight on his part, but that he hoped, in order to mark his sympathy with Mr. Lampard's point of view, to send him another cheque very shortly, reminding the bookseller at the same time that he had scarcely three weeks ago sent him £7 on account. Mr. Lampard, in his reply, observed very plainly that Guy's letter was no reply at all and threatened politely to make matters rather unpleasant if the bill were not paid in full instantly. Guy tried once more a letter full of bland promises, and received in response a letter from Mr. Lampard's solicitor. The £30 intended for Mr. Worrall had to be sacrificed, and even £2 15s. had to be taken from his current account. Savagely he tore the paper from the manuscript, wrapped it up again, and despatched it to another publisher. The bad luck of the Lampard business made him only the more resolute not to invoke aid from his father or any one else. He was a prey to a perverse determination to do everything himself; but it was gloomy news that he had to tell Pauline that afternoon, and she broke down and cried in her disappointment.
Pauline had been looking forward to the entrance of February with joyful remembrance of what last February had brought her; and that the anniversary of Guy's declaration of his love should be heralded by such a discomfiture of their plans was a shock. The renewal of his uncertainty about the fate of the poems destroyed the progress of a love that seemed to have come back to its old calm course, and brought back with all the added sharpness of absence the heartache and the apprehension. Pauline sat in the nursery window-seat and pondered dolefully the obstacles to happiness from which her mind, however hard it tried, could not escape. Most insistently of these obstacles Guy's debts haunted her, harassing and material responsibilities that in great uncouth battalions swept endlessly past. Even in the middle of the night she would wake gasping in an effort to escape from being stifled by their vastness pressing down upon her brain. The small presents Guy had given her burned through the darkness to reproach her: even the two rings goaded her for the extravagance they represented. It was useless for Guy to explain that his debts were a trifle, because the statement of a sum so large as £200 appalled her as much as if he had said £2,000. She longed for a confidante whose sympathy she could exact for the incubus that possessed her lover; and fancying a disloyalty to him if she discussed his money affairs with her family, she could think of no one but Miss Verney to whom the burdensome secret might be intrusted.
"William had the same difficulty," sighed the old maid. "Really it seems as if moneyisthe root of all evil. Two hundred pounds, you say? Oh, dear, how uncomfortable he must feel, poor young man!"
"If only I could make some money, dear Miss Verney. But how could I?"
"I used to ask myself that very question," said the old maid. "I used to ask myself just that very identical question. But there was never any satisfactory answer."
"It seems so dreadful that he should have sold nearly all his books and still have debts," moaned Pauline. "It seems so cruel. Ought I to give him up?"
"Give him up?" repeated Miss Verney, her cheeks becoming dead white at the question. "Oh, my dear, I don't think it could be right for you to give him up on account of debts. Patience seems to me the only remedy for your troubles, patience and constancy."
"No, you've misunderstood me," cried Pauline. "I'm afraid that I hamper him, that I spoil his work. If I gave him up he would go away from Wychford and be free. Besides, perhaps then his father would pay his debts. Miss Verney, Mr. Hazlewood didn't like me, and I think Guy has quarreled with him over me. Oh, I'm the most miserable girl in England, and such a little time ago I was the happiest."
"Money," said Miss Verney, slowly and seeming to address her cats rather than Pauline. "The root of all evil! Yes, yes, it is. It's the root of all evil."
Pauline was a little heartened by Miss Verney's readiness to consider so seriously the monster that oppressed her thoughts; yet it was disquieting to regard the old maid, whose life had been ruined by money, and who all alone with cats stayed here in this small house at the top of Wychford town, the very image of unhappy love. It was disquieting to hear her reflections on the calamity of gold uttered like this to cats, and in a sudden dread of the future Pauline beheld herself talking in the same waya long time hence. She shivered and bade Miss Verney farewell; and now to all the other woes that stood behind her in the shadows was added the vision of herself mumbling to cats in February dusks of the dim years ahead.
The idea of herself as the figure of an unhappy tale of love grew continuously more definite, and once she spoke of her dread to Guy, who was very angry.
"How can you encourage such morbid notions?" he protested. "You really must cultivate the power to resist them. People go mad by indulging their depression as you're doing."
"Perhaps I shall go mad," she whispered.
"Oh, for God's sake don't talk like that!" he ejaculated in angry alarm; and Pauline, realizing how she had frightened him, was sorry and went to the other extreme of high spirits.
"I thought we had agreed to wait ten years or twenty years, if necessary," said Guy. "And now after one year you are finding the strain too much. Why won't you have confidence in me? It's unfortunate about Worrall, I admit. But there are plenty of other publishers."
He mentioned names one after another, but to Pauline they were the names of stone idols that stared unresponsively at her lover's poems.
"If we had only done what Mother wanted and not seen so much of each other," she lamented.
Guy's disposal of her vain fears was without effect, for his eloquence could not contend with these deepening regrets; and as fast as he threw down the material obstacles to their happiness Pauline saw them maddeningly rise again in the path before them, visible shapes of ill omen, grotesquely irrepressible. Guy used to asseverate that when Spring was really come she would lose all these morbid fancies, and with his perpetual ascription to wintry gloom of all the presentiments of woe that flocked round their intercourse, Pauline did begin to fancy that when the trees were green he and she would rejoice as of oldin their love. The knowledge that Spring could not linger always was the only consoling certainty she now possessed, and from the window-seat she greeted with a passionate welcome each dusky azure minute that on these lengthening eves was robbed from night. The blackbirds sang to her now more personally, these somber-suited heralds who had never before seemed to proclaim so audaciously masterful Spring; and when the young moon cowered among the ragged clouds of a rainy golden sky and the last bird slipped like a shadow into the rhododendrons, such airs and whispers of April would steal through the open window. Every day, too, there were flowery tokens of hope and in sheltered corners of the garden the primroses came out one by one, an imperceptible assemblage like the birth of stars in the luminous green west. This gray-eyed virginal month had now such memories of the last progress it made through her life that Pauline could not help imputing to the season a sentimental participation in her life; there was a poignancy in the reopening of those blue Greek anemones which Guy, a year ago, had likened to her eyes, a poignancy that might have been present if the flowers had been consciously reminding her of vanished delights. Yet it was unreasonable to encourage such an emotion; or did she indeed, as sometimes was half-whispered to her inmost soul, regret the slightest bit everything since that day of the anemones?
It was one evening toward the end of the months that Monica joined her and walked up and down the edge of the lawn where in the grass a drift of purple crocuses had lately been flaming for her solitary adoration.
"In a way," said Pauline, "they are my favorite flowers of all. I don't think there is any thrill quite like the first crocus bud. It seems to me that as far as I can look back, oh, Monica, ever so far, that always the moment I've seen my crocuses budding Winter seems to fly away."
"I remember your looking for them when you weretiny," Monica agreed. "I can see you now kneeling down, and the mud on your knees, and your eyes screwed up when you told me about your discovery."
They talked for a while of childish days, each capping the other's evocation of those hours that now in retrospect appeared like the gay pictures of an old book long ago lost, and found again on an idle afternoon. They talked, too, of Margaret and whether she would marry Richard; and presently, without the obvious transition that would have made her silent, Pauline found that they were discussing Guy and herself.
"I notice he doesn't come to church now so much as he did," said Monica.
Pauline was startled by an abrupt statement of something which among all the other worries she had never defined to herself, but which, now that Monica revealed its shape, she knew had occupied a dark corner at the back of her mind more threatening than any of the rest. Of course she began at once to make excuses for Guy, but her sister, who brought to religion the same scrupulous temperament she gave to her music, would not admit their validity.
"Don't you ever ask him why he hasn't been?" she persisted.
"Oh, of course not. Why, I couldn't, Monica! I should never feel.... Oh no, Monica, it would really be impossible for me to talk to Guy about his faith."
"His faith seems rather to have frozen lately," said Monica.
"He's been upset and disappointed."
"All the more reason for going to church," Monica urged.
"Yes, for you, darling, or for me; but Guy may be different."
"There's no room for moods in one's religious duties. The artistic temperament is not provided for."
That serene and nunlike conviction of tone made Paulinefeel a little rebellious, and yet in its corroboration of her own uneasiness she could not laugh it aside.
"Well, even if there's no excuse for him and even supposing it made me dreadfully anxious," she affirmed, "I still wouldn't say a word to him."
"Does he know you go to Confession?"
Pauline blushed. Monica was like a Roman Catholic in the matter-of-fact way in which she alluded to something that for Pauline pierced such sanctities as could scarcely even be mentioned by herself to her own soul.
"Monica, you don't really think that I ought to speak of that," she stammered. Not even to her sister could she bring herself to utter the sacramental word.
"I certainly think you should," said Monica. "When you and Guy are married it would be terrible if your duties were to be the cause of a disagreement. Why, he might even persuade you to give up going to Confession."
"Darling Monica," said Pauline, nervously, "I'd rather you didn't talk about this any more. You see, you're so much better than I, and you've thought so much more deeply than I have about religion. I don't think I shall ever be able to make my faith so narrow a ... so strict a rule as yours is. No, please, Monica, don't let us talk about this subject any more."
"I only mentioned it because I'm afraid that with your beautiful nature you will be too merciful to that Guy of yours."
"Oh, and I'd really rather you didn't say my nature was beautiful," Pauline protested. "Truthfully, Monica darling, it's a very ugly nature indeed, and I'm afraid it's getting uglier every day."
Her sister's cloistral smile flickered upon the scene like the wan February sunlight.
"I do hope Guy really appreciates you," was what she said.
"See how the sparrows have pulled the crocuses intoribbons," Pauline exclaimed. And so that Monica could not talk to her any more, she hailed her father, who was wandering along towards the house on the other side of the lawn. When he sauntered across to them she pointed out the destructiveness of the sparrows.
"Ah, well, my dear," he chuckled, "most florists are worse."
"PerhapsI'ma florist," Monica whispered, "and Guy may be only a mischievous sparrow."
Pauline smiled at Monica and took her arm gratefully and affectionately.
"We shall have all the daffs gone before we know where we are," said the Rector. "Maximus is out under the oaks. And King Alfred is just going to turn down his buds."
"Dear King Alfred," said Pauline. "How glad I shall be to say good morning to him again!"
Yes, all the daffodils would soon be here and then gone; and beyond this austere afternoon already she could fancy a smell of March winds.
After Monica's question it was no longer possible for Pauline when she was alone to avoid facing the problem of Guy's attitude towards religion. The repression of her anxiety on this point had only increased the force of it when it was set free like this to compete with, and, in fact, overshadow all other cares. Looking back to her earliest thoughts of the world as it would one day affect herself, she remembered how, if she had ever imagined some one in love with her, she had always created a figure whose faith would be an eternal and joyful contemplation. She had never invented for herself a marriage with some one merely good-looking or rich or endowed with any of the romantic attributes that young girls were supposed to award their ideals, as her cousins would say, of men. When Guy entered her life, the only gift he brought her for which she was at all prepared was the conviction of his faith. This indeed was his spiritual and mental realityfor her; the rest of him was a figment, a dream that might pass suddenly away. The visit of his father had given her a more clearly defined assurance of his existence on earth, but his faith had been the heart of the immortal substance of her love for Guy. The endlessness of their union was always present in her thoughts, the ultimate consolation of whatever delays they might be called upon to endure. Very often, even at the beginning of the engagement, Guy had frightened her sometimes by his indifference to immortality—sometimes by his harping upon the swift flight of youth, sometimes by his manifest indulgence of her creed. All these doubts, however, of his sympathy were allayed by his apparently deliberate pleasure in worship. She was angry with herself then for her mistrust of him, and her contentment had been perfect when in church he knelt beside her on that birthday of his, that day of their avowed betrothal, and on all those other occasions when he had given an outward proof of his faith. Now as she looked back on his absence from church lately, she could not but wonder whether all his attendance had not been a kind of fair-weather spoiling of her that could not withstand the least stress of worldly circumstance. She began to torment herself over every light remark that might have been a sneer and to look forward dreadfully to Guy's abrupt declaration of a profound disbelief in everything she held most sacred. His cleverness, as he hated her to call it, intervened and seemed to wrench them asunder; and the more she pondered his behavior, the more she became convinced that all the time Guy's religion had merely been Guy's kindness. This discovery was not to make her love him less; but it did throw upon her the responsibility of the knowledge that he had nothing within himself to fortify his soul, should mishap destroy his worldly confidence.
For a long time Pauline lay awake in the darkness, fretting herself on account of Guy's resourcelessness of spirit, and to her imagination concentrated on this regardof him every hour seemed to make his solitude more terrible. Of her own religion she did not think, and Monica's anxiety about their agreement after marriage was without the least hint of danger. The possibility of any one's, even Guy's, influencing her own faith was inconceivable; nor was she at all occupied with her own disappointment at not finding Guy constant to her belief in him. Pauline's one grief was for him, that now when things were going badly he should be without spiritual hope. Suddenly her warm bed seemed to her wrong and luxurious in comparison with the chill darkness she imagined about Guy's soul at this moment. Impulsively she threw back the sheets and knelt down beside the bed to pray for his peace. So vividly was she conscious of the need for prayer that she was carried to undreamed-of heights of supplication, to strange summits whereon it seemed that if she could not pray she would never know how to pray again. Ordinarily her devotions had been but a beautiful and simple end or beginning of the day; they were associated with the early warmth of the sunlight or with the gentle flutters of roosting birds; they were the comforting and tangible pledges of a childhood not yet utterly departed. Now the fires and ecstasies of a more searching faith had seized Pauline. No longer did there pass before her eyes a procession of gay-habited saints, glad celestial creatures that smiled down upon her from a paradise not much farther away than the Rectory garden; no longer did she find herself surrounded by the well-loved figures who when death took her to them would hold out their arms in actual welcome and whom she would recognize one by one. To-night these visions were uncapturable, and beyond the darkness they had forsaken stretched a terrifying void and beyond the void was nothing but light that seemed to have the power of thinking, "I am Truth!" A speck in that void she saw Guy spinning away from her, and it seemed that unless she prayed he would be spun irremediably out of her consciousness.It seemed that the fierceness of her prayer was like the fierceness of a flame that was granted the power to sustain him, for when sometimes the tongues of fire languished Guy would sink so far that only by summoning fresh force from the light beyond could she bring him back. Gradually, however, her power was waning, and with whatever desperate force she prayed he could never be brought back to the point from which he had last slipped. He was spinning away into a horror of blackness....
"O Holy Ghost, save him!" she cried. Then Pauline fainted, and wondered to find herself lying upon the cold floor when she woke as from a dream. Yet it was not like the gasping rescue of oneself from a nightmare, for she lay awake a long while afterwards in peace, and she slept as if upon a victory and very early in the morning went to church.
The days when the thrushes sang matins were come, and all the way she heard freshets of holy song pouring down through the air. She and her family always knelt apart from one another, and this morning Pauline chose a place hidden from the others, a place where she could lean her cheek against a pillar and be soothed by the cool touch of the stone like the assurance of unfathomable and maternal love. Now to her calm spirit returned the vision of those happy heavenly creatures, the bright-suited and intimate companions of her childhood. They welcomed her this morning and thronged about her downcast eyes with many angels, too, that like Tobit's angel, walked by her side. Only her father's mellow voice spoke from the chancel of earth, and even he in his violet chasuble took his place among the saints, and when she went up to the altar Heaven was once again very near to her.
In the morning coolness it was almost impossible to believe that last night she had fainted, and she began to believe the whole experience had been a dream's agony.However, whether it were or not, she had made up her mind to ask Guy a direct question this afternoon. If, as she feared, he was feeling hostile to religion, she would accept the warning of the night and give all her determination to prayer for his faith to return.
When they were together, it was for a long time impossible to begin the subject, and it was not until Guy asked what was making her so abstracted that Pauline could ask why he never came to church any more.
In the pause before he answered she suffered anew the torment of that struggle in the darkness.
"Does it worry you when I don't come?" he asked.
"Well, yes, it does rather."
"Then, of course, I will come," said Guy, at once.
Now this was exactly the reason for which least of all she wanted him to come, and a trace of her mortification may have been visible, because he asked immediately if that did not please her.
"Guy, don't you want to come to church? You used to come happily, didn't you?"
"I think I came chiefly to be near you," he said.
"That does make me so unhappy. I'd almost rather you came out of politeness to Father."
"Well, that was another reason," Guy admitted.
"And you never came because you wanted to?" she asked, miserably.
"Of course I wanted to."
"But because you believed?"
"In what?"
"Oh, Guy, don't be so cruel. Don't you believe in anything?"
"I believe in you," he said. "Pauline, I believe in you so passionately that when I am with you I believe in what you believe."
"Then you haven't any faith?"
"I want to have it," said Guy. "If God won't condescend to give it to me ..." he broke off with a shrug.
"But religion is either true or it isn't true, and if it isn't true why do you encourage me in lies?" she demanded, with desperate entreaty.
"I'm ready to believe," he said.
"How can you expect to have faith if your reason for it is merely to sit next me in church?" she asked, bitterly.
"Now, I think it's you who are being cruel," said Guy.
"I don't care. I don't care if I am cruel. You'll break my heart."
"Good God!" Guy exclaimed. "Haven't I enough to torment me without religion appearing upon the scene? If you want me to hate it.... No, Pauline, I'm sorry ... you mustn't think that I don't long to have your faith. If I only could.... Oh, Pauline, Pauline!"
She yielded to his consolation, and when he told her of the poems sent back almost by return of post from the second publisher she must open wide her compassionate arms. Nevertheless, he had somehow maltreated their love; and Pauline was aware of a wild effort to prepare for sorrow, whether near at hand or still far off she did not know, but she seemed to hear it like a wind rising at sunset.
When the poems were returned by three publishers within the first fortnight of March, Guy was inclined to surrender his vocation and to think about such regular work as would banish the reproach he began to fancy was now perceptible at the back of everybody's eyes. The weather was abominably cold, and even Plashers Mead itself was no longer the embodiment of the old enthusiasm. Already in order to pay current expenses he was drawing upon the next quarter, and the combination of tradesmen's books with icy draughts curling through the house produced an atmosphere of perpetual exasperation. It always seemed to be coldest on Monday morning, and Miss Peaseywouldbreathe over his shoulder while he was adding up the bills.
"We apparently live on butter," he grumbled.
"Oh no, it was really lamb you had yesterday," the housekeeper maintained, irrelevantly.
"I said we apparently live on butter," Guy shouted.
Then, of course Miss Peaseywouldpoke her veiny nose right down into the book, while the draught blew her hair about and unpleasantly tickled his cheek.
"It's the best butter," she said, sorrowfully, at last.
"But my watch is quite all right."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I made an allusion toAlice in Wonderland," he shouted.
Miss Peasey retired from the room in dudgeon, and Guy wasted ten minutes in examining various theorieson what his housekeeper could have thought he meant by his last remark. Finally he wrote off to a friend of his, an ardent young Radical peer with whom he had shared rooms at Oxford.
Plashers Mead, Wychford, Oxon,March 15th.