New Grub Street (10 page)

Reardon found himself in a position of which the novelty was
embarrassing, but scarcely disagreeable. Here were five people
grouped around him, all of whom regarded him unaffectedly as a man
of importance; for though, strictly speaking, he had no 'fame' at
all, these persons had kept up with the progress of his small
repute, and were all distinctly glad to number among their
acquaintances an unmistakable author, one, too, who was fresh from
Italy and Greece. Mrs Yule, a lady rather too pretentious in her
tone to be attractive to a man of Reardon's refinement, hastened to
assure him how well his books were known in her house, 'though for
the run of ordinary novels we don't care much.' Miss Yule, not at
all pretentious in speech, and seemingly reserved of disposition,
was good enough to show frank interest in the author. As for the
poor author himself, well, he merely fell in love with Miss Yule at
first sight, and there was an end of the matter.

A day or two later he made a call at their house, in the region
of Westbourne Park. It was a small house, and rather showily than
handsomely furnished; no one after visiting it would be astonished
to hear that Mrs Edmund Yule had but a small income, and that she
was often put to desperate expedients to keep up the gloss of easy
circumstances. In the gauzy and fluffy and varnishy little
drawing-room Reardon found a youngish gentleman already in
conversation with the widow and her daughter. This proved to be one
Mr Jasper Milvain, also a man of letters. Mr Milvain was glad to
meet Reardon, whose books he had read with decided interest.

'Really,' exclaimed Mrs Yule, 'I don't know how it is that we
have had to wait so long for the pleasure of knowing you, Mr
Reardon. If John were not so selfish he would have allowed us a
share in your acquaintance long ago.'

Ten weeks thereafter, Miss Yule became Mrs Reardon.

It was a time of frantic exultation with the poor fellow. He had
always regarded the winning of a beautiful and intellectual wife as
the crown of a successful literary career, but he had not dared to
hope that such a triumph would be his. Life had been too hard with
him on the whole. He, who hungered for sympathy, who thought of a
woman's love as the prize of mortals supremely blessed, had spent
the fresh years of his youth in monkish solitude. Now of a sudden
came friends and flattery, ay, and love itself. He was rapt to the
seventh heaven.

Indeed, it seemed that the girl loved him. She knew that he had
but a hundred pounds or so left over from that little inheritance,
that his books sold for a trifle, that he had no wealthy relatives
from whom he could expect anything; yet she hesitated not a moment
when he asked her to marry him.

'I have loved you from the first.'

'How is that possible?' he urged. 'What is there lovable in me?
I am afraid of waking up and finding myself in my old garret, cold
and hungry.'

'You will be a great man.'

'I implore you not to count on that! In many ways I am
wretchedly weak. I have no such confidence in myself.'

'Then I will have confidence for both.'

'But can you love me for my own sake—love me as a man?'

'I love you!'

And the words sang about him, filled the air with a mad pulsing
of intolerable joy, made him desire to fling himself in passionate
humility at her feet, to weep hot tears, to cry to her in insane
worship. He thought her beautiful beyond anything his heart had
imagined; her warm gold hair was the rapture of his eyes and of his
reverent hand. Though slenderly fashioned, she was so gloriously
strong. 'Not a day of illness in her life,' said Mrs Yule, and one
could readily believe it.

She spoke with such a sweet decision. Her 'I love you!' was a
bond with eternity. In the simplest as in the greatest things she
saw his wish and acted frankly upon it. No pretty petulance, no
affectation of silly-sweet languishing, none of the weaknesses of
woman. And so exquisitely fresh in her twenty years of maidenhood,
with bright young eyes that seemed to bid defiance to all the years
to come.

He went about like one dazzled with excessive light. He talked
as he had never talked before, recklessly, exultantly,
insolently—in the nobler sense. He made friends on every hand; he
welcomed all the world to his bosom; he felt the benevolence of a
god.

'I love you!' It breathed like music at his ears when he fell
asleep in weariness of joy; it awakened him on the morrow as with a
glorious ringing summons to renewed life.

Delay? Why should there be delay? Amy wished nothing but to
become his wife. Idle to think of his doing any more work until he
sat down in the home of which she was mistress. His brain burned
with visions of the books he would henceforth write, but his hand
was incapable of anything but a love-letter. And what letters!
Reardon never published anything equal to those. 'I have received
your poem,' Amy replied to one of them. And she was right; not a
letter, but a poem he had sent her, with every word on fire.

The hours of talk! It enraptured him to find how much she had
read, and with what clearness of understanding. Latin and Greek,
no. Ah! but she should learn them both, that there might be nothing
wanting in the communion between his thought and hers. For he loved
the old writers with all his heart; they had been such strength to
him in his days of misery.

They would go together to the charmed lands of the South. No,
not now for their marriage holiday—Amy said that would be an
imprudent expense; but as soon as he had got a good price for a
book. Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness
lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!

He woke of a sudden in the early hours of one morning, a week
before the wedding-day. You know that kind of awaking, so complete
in an instant, caused by the pressure of some troublesome thought
upon the dreaming brain. 'Suppose I should not succeed henceforth?
Suppose I could never get more than this poor hundred pounds for
one of the long books which cost me so much labour? I shall perhaps
have children to support; and Amy—how would Amy bear poverty?'

He knew what poverty means. The chilling of brain and heart, the
unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering about one of fear and
shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the
world's base indifference. Poverty! Poverty!

And for hours he could not sleep. His eyes kept filling with
tears, the beating of his heart was low; and in his solitude he
called upon Amy with pitiful entreaty: 'Do not forsake me! I love
you! I love you!'

But that went by. Six days, five days, four days—will one's
heart burst with happiness? The flat is taken, is furnished, up
there towards the sky, eight flights of stone steps.

'You're a confoundedly lucky fellow, Reardon,' remarked Milvain,
who had already become very intimate with his new friend. 'A good
fellow, too, and you deserve it.'

'But at first I had a horrible suspicion.'

'I guess what you mean. No; I wasn't even in love with her,
though I admired her. She would never have cared for me in any
case; I am not sentimental enough.'

'The deuce!'

'I mean it in an inoffensive sense. She and I are rather too
much alike, I fancy.'

'How do you mean?' asked Reardon, puzzled, and not very well
pleased.

'There's a great deal of pure intellect about Miss Yule, you
know. She was sure to choose a man of the passionate kind.'

'I think you are talking nonsense, my dear fellow.'

'Well, perhaps I am. To tell you the truth, I have by no means
completed my study of women yet. It is one of the things in which I
hope to be a specialist some day, though I don't think I shall ever
make use of it in novels—rather, perhaps, in life.'

Three days—two days—one day.

Now let every joyous sound which the great globe can utter ring
forth in one burst of harmony! Is it not well done to make the
village-bells chant merrily when a marriage is over? Here in London
we can have no such music; but for us, my dear one, all the roaring
life of the great city is wedding-hymn. Sweet, pure face under its
bridal-veil! The face which shall, if fate spare it, be as dear to
me many a long year hence as now at the culminating moment of my
life!

As he trudged on in the dark, his tortured memory was living
through that time again. The images forced themselves upon him,
however much he tried to think of quite other things—of some
fictitious story on which he might set to work. In the case of his
earlier books he had waited quietly until some suggestive
'situation,' some group of congenial characters, came with sudden
delightfulness before his mind and urged him to write; but nothing
so spontaneous could now be hoped for. His brain was too weary with
months of fruitless, harassing endeavour; moreover, he was trying
to devise a 'plot,' the kind of literary Jack-in-the-box which
might excite interest in the mass of readers, and this was alien to
the natural working of his imagination. He suffered the torments of
nightmare—an oppression of the brain and heart which must soon be
intolerable.

When her husband had set forth, Amy seated herself in the study
and took up a new library volume as if to read. But she had no real
intention of doing so; it was always disagreeable to her to sit in
the manner of one totally unoccupied, with hands on lap, and even
when she consciously gave herself up to musing an open book was
generally before her. She did not, in truth, read much nowadays;
since the birth of her child she had seemed to care less than
before for disinterested study. If a new novel that had succeeded
came into her hands she perused it in a very practical spirit,
commenting to Reardon on the features of the work which had made it
popular; formerly, she would have thought much more of its purely
literary merits, for which her eye was very keen. How often she had
given her husband a thrill of exquisite pleasure by pointing to
some merit or defect of which the common reader would be totally
insensible! Now she spoke less frequently on such subjects. Her
interests were becoming more personal; she liked to hear details of
the success of popular authors—about their wives or husbands, as
the case might be, their arrangements with publishers, their
methods of work. The gossip columns of literary papers—and of some
that were not literary—had an attraction for her. She talked of
questions such as international copyright, was anxious to get an
insight into the practical conduct of journals and magazines, liked
to know who 'read' for the publishing-houses. To an impartial
observer it might have appeared that her intellect was growing more
active and mature.

More than half an hour passed. It was not a pleasant train of
thought that now occupied her. Her lips were drawn together, her
brows were slightly wrinkled; the self-control which at other times
was agreeably expressed upon her features had become rather too
cold and decided. At one moment it seemed to her that she heard a
sound in the bedroom—the doors were purposely left ajar—and her
head turned quickly to listen, the look in her eyes instantaneously
softening; but all remained quiet. The street would have been
silent but for a cab that now and then passed—the swing of a hansom
or the roll of a four-wheeler—and within the buildings nothing
whatever was audible.

Yes, a footstep, briskly mounting the stone stairs. Not like
that of the postman. A visitor, perhaps, to the other flat on the
topmost landing. But the final pause was in this direction, and
then came a sharp rat-tat at the door. Amy rose immediately and
went to open.

Jasper Milvain raised his urban silk hat, then held out his hand
with the greeting of frank friendship. His inquiries were in so
loud a voice that Amy checked him with a forbidding gesture.

'You'll wake Willie!'

'By Jove! I always forget,' he exclaimed in subdued tones. 'Does
the infant flourish?'

'Oh, yes!'

'Reardon out? I got back on Saturday evening, but couldn't come
round before this.' It was Monday. 'How close it is in here! I
suppose the roof gets so heated during the day. Glorious weather in
the country! And I've no end of things to tell you. He won't be
long, I suppose?'

'I think not.'

He left his hat and stick in the passage, came into the study,
and glanced about as if he expected to see some change since he was
last here, three weeks ago.

'So you have been enjoying yourself?' said Amy as, after
listening for a moment at the door, she took a seat.

'Oh, a little freshening of the faculties. But whose
acquaintance do you think I have made?'

'Down there?'

'Yes. Your uncle Alfred and his daughter were staying at John
Yule's, and I saw something of them. I was invited to the
house.'

'Did you speak of us?'

'To Miss Yule only. I happened to meet her on a walk, and in a
blundering way I mentioned Reardon's name. But of course it didn't
matter in the least. She inquired about you with a good deal of
interest—asked if you were as beautiful as you promised to be years
ago.'

Amy laughed.

'Doesn't that proceed from your fertile invention, Mr
Milvain?'

'Not a bit of it! By-the-bye, what would be your natural
question concerning her? Do you think she gave promise of good
looks?'

'I'm afraid I can't say that she did. She had a good face,
but—rather plain.'

'I see.' Jasper threw back his head and seemed to contemplate an
object in memory. 'Well, I shouldn't wonder if most people called
her a trifle plain even now; and yet—no, that's hardly possible,
after all. She has no colour. Wears her hair short.'

'Short?'

'Oh, I don't mean the smooth, boyish hair with a parting—not the
kind of hair that would be lank if it grew long. Curly all over.
Looks uncommonly well, I assure you. She has a capital head. Odd
girl; very odd girl! Quiet, thoughtful—not very happy, I'm afraid.
Seems to think with dread of a return to books.'