New Grub Street

He spoke in a slow, meditative way, in a monotonous voice, and without raising his eyes from the ground.

‘I can understand,’ put in Jasper, ‘that there may be philosophical truth in all this. All the same, it’s a great pity that you should occupy your mind with such thoughts.’

‘A pity—no! I must remain a reasoning creature. Disaster may end by driving me out of my wits, but till then I won’t abandon my heritage of thought.’

‘Let us have it out, then. You think it was a mistake to spend those months abroad?’

‘A mistake from the practical point of view. That vast broadening of my horizon lost me the command of my literary resources. I lived in Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself. I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it’s only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. A man who can’t journalise, yet must earn his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the Elizabethan men turned to the drama. Well, but I should have got back, I think, into the old line of work. It was my marriage that completed what the time abroad had begun.’

He looked up suddenly, and added:

‘I am speaking as if to myself. You, of course, don’t misunderstand me, and think I am accusing my wife.’

‘No, I don’t take you to mean that, by any means.’

‘No, no; of course not. All that’s wrong is my accursed want of money. But that threatens to be such a fearful wrong, that I begin to wish I had died before my marriage-day. Then Amy would have been saved. The Philistines are right: a man has no business to marry unless he has a secured income equal to all natural demands. I behaved with the grossest selfishness. I might have known that such happiness was never meant for me.’

‘Do you mean by all this that you seriously doubt whether you will ever be able to write again?’

‘In awful seriousness, I doubt it,’ replied Reardon, with haggard face.

‘It strikes me as extraordinary. In your position I should work as I never had done before.’

‘Because you are the kind of man who is roused by necessity. I am overcome by it. My nature is feeble and luxurious. I never in my life encountered and overcame a practical difficulty.’

‘Yes; when you got the work at the hospital.’

‘All I did was to write a letter, and chance made it effective.’

‘My view of the case, Reardon, is that you are simply ill.’

‘Certainly I am; but the ailment is desperately complicated. Tell me: do you think I might possibly get any kind of stated work to do? Should I be fit for any place in a newspaper office, for instance?’

‘I fear not. You are the last man to have anything to do with journalism.’

‘If I appealed to my publishers, could they help me?’

‘I don’t see how. They would simply say: Write a book and we’ll buy it.’

‘Yes, there’s no help but that.’

‘If only you were able to write short stories, Fadge might be useful.’

‘But what’s the use? I suppose I might get ten guineas, at most, for such a story. I need a couple of hundred pounds at least. Even if I could finish a three-volume book, I doubt if they would give me a hundred again, after the failure of “The Optimist”; no, they wouldn’t.’

‘But to sit and look forward in this way is absolutely fatal, my dear fellow. Get to work at your two-volume story. Call it “The Weird Sisters,” or anything better that you can devise; but get it done, so many pages a day. If I go ahead as I begin to think I shall, I shall soon be able to assure you good notices in a lot of papers. Your misfortune has been that you had no influential friends. By-the-bye, how has The Study been in the habit of treating you?’

‘Scrubbily.’

‘I’ll make an opportunity of talking about your books to Fadge. I think Fadge and I shall get on pretty well together. Alfred Yule hates the man fiercely, for some reason or other. By the way, I may as well tell you that I broke short off with the Yules on purpose.’

‘Oh?’

‘I had begun to think far too much about the girl. Wouldn’t do, you know. I must marry someone with money, and a good deal of it. That’s a settled point with me.’

‘Then you are not at all likely to meet them in London?’

‘Not at all. And if I get allied with Fadge, no doubt Yule will involve me in his savage feeling. You see how wisely I acted. I have a scent for the prudent course.’

They talked for a long time, but again chiefly of Milvain’s affairs. Reardon, indeed, cared little to say anything more about his own. Talk was mere vanity and vexation of spirit, for the spring of his volition seemed to be broken, and, whatever resolve he might utter, he knew that everything depended on influences he could not even foresee.

CHAPTER VII. MARIAN’S HOME

Three weeks after her return from the country—which took place a week later than that of Jasper Milvain—Marian Yule was working one afternoon at her usual place in the Museum Reading-room. It was three o’clock, and with the interval of half an hour at midday, when she went away for a cup of tea and a sandwich, she had been closely occupied since half-past nine. Her task at present was to collect materials for a paper on ‘French Authoresses of the Seventeenth Century,’ the kind of thing which her father supplied on stipulated terms for anonymous publication. Marian was by this time almost able to complete such a piece of manufacture herself and her father’s share in it was limited to a few hints and corrections. The greater part of the work by which Yule earned his moderate income was anonymous: volumes and articles which bore his signature dealt with much the same subjects as his unsigned matter, but the writing was laboured with a conscientiousness unusual in men of his position. The result, unhappily, was not correspondent with the efforts. Alfred Yule had made a recognisable name among the critical writers of the day; seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical, most people knew what to expect, but not a few forbore the cutting open of the pages he occupied. He was learned, copious, occasionally mordant in style; but grace had been denied to him. He had of late begun to perceive the fact that those passages of Marian’s writing which were printed just as they came from her pen had merit of a kind quite distinct from anything of which he himself was capable, and it began to be a question with him whether it would not be advantageous to let the girl sign these compositions. A matter of business, to be sure—at all events in the first instance.

For a long time Marian had scarcely looked up from the desk, but at this moment she found it necessary to refer to the invaluable Larousse. As so often happened, the particular volume of which she had need was not upon the shelf she turned away, and looked about her with a gaze of weary disappointment. At a little distance were standing two young men, engaged, as their faces showed, in facetious colloquy; as soon as she observed them, Marian’s eyes fell, but the next moment she looked again in that direction. Her face had wholly changed; she wore a look of timid expectancy.

The men were moving towards her, still talking and laughing. She turned to the shelves, and affected to search for a book. The voices drew near, and one of them was well known to her; now she could hear every word; now the speakers were gone by. Was it possible that Mr Milvain had not recognised her? She followed him with her eyes, and saw him take a seat not far off he must have passed without even being aware of her.

She went back to her place and for some minutes sat trifling with a pen. When she made a show of resuming work, it was evident that she could no longer apply herself as before. Every now and then she glanced at people who were passing; there were intervals when she wholly lost herself in reverie. She was tired, and had even a slight headache. When the hand of the clock pointed to half-past three, she closed the volume from which she had been copying extracts, and began to collect her papers.

A voice spoke close behind her.

‘Where’s your father, Miss Yule?’

The speaker was a man of sixty, short, stout, tonsured by the hand of time. He had a broad, flabby face, the colour of an ancient turnip, save where one of the cheeks was marked with a mulberry stain; his eyes, grey-orbed in a yellow setting, glared with good-humoured inquisitiveness, and his mouth was that of the confirmed gossip. For eyebrows he had two little patches of reddish stubble; for moustache, what looked like a bit of discoloured tow, and scraps of similar material hanging beneath his creasy chin represented a beard. His garb must have seen a great deal of Museum service; it consisted of a jacket, something between brown and blue, hanging in capacious shapelessness, a waistcoat half open for lack of buttons and with one of the pockets coming unsewn, a pair of bronze-hued trousers which had all run to knee. Necktie he had none, and his linen made distinct appeal to the laundress.

Marian shook hands with him.

‘He went away at half-past two,’ was her reply to his question.

‘How annoying! I wanted particularly to see him. I have been running about all day, and couldn’t get here before. Something important—most important. At all events, I can tell you. But I entreat that you won’t breathe a word save to your father.’

Mr Quarmby—that was his name—had taken a vacant chair and drawn it close to Marian’s. He was in a state of joyous excitement, and talked in thick, rather pompous tones, with a pant at the end of a sentence. To emphasise the extremely confidential nature of his remarks, he brought his head almost in contact with the girl’s, and one of her thin, delicate hands was covered with his red, podgy fingers.

‘I’ve had a talk with Nathaniel Walker,’ he continued; ‘a long talk—a talk of vast importance. You know Walker? No, no; how should you? He’s a man of business; close friend of Rackett’s—Rackett, you know, the owner of The Study.’

Upon this he made a grave pause, and glared more excitedly than ever.

‘I have heard of Mr Rackett,’ said Marian.

‘Of course, of course. And you must also have heard that Fadge leaves The Study at the end of this year, eh?’

‘Father told me it was probable.’

‘Rackett and he have done nothing but quarrel for months; the paper is falling off seriously. Well, now, when I came across Nat Walker this afternoon, the first thing he said to me was, “You know Alfred Yule pretty well, I think?” “Pretty well,” I answered; “why?” “I’ll tell you,” he said, “but it’s between you and me, you understand. Rackett is thinking about him in connection with The Study.” “I’m delighted to hear it.” “To tell you the truth,” went on Nat, “I shouldn’t wonder if Yule gets the editorship; but you understand that it would be altogether premature to talk about it.” Now what do you think of this, eh?’

‘It’s very good news,’ answered Marian.

‘I should think so! Ho, ho!’

Mr Quarmby laughed in a peculiar way, which was the result of long years of mirth-subdual in the Reading-room.

‘But not a breath to anyone but your father. He’ll be here to-morrow? Break it gently to him, you know; he’s an excitable man; can’t take things quietly, like I do. Ho, ho!’

His suppressed laugh ended in a fit of coughing—the Reading-room cough. When he had recovered from it, he pressed Marian’s hand with paternal fervour, and waddled off to chatter with someone else.

Marian replaced several books on the reference-shelves, returned others to the central desk, and was just leaving the room, when again a voice made demand upon her attention.

‘Miss Yule! One moment, if you please!’

It was a tall, meagre, dry-featured man, dressed with the painful neatness of self-respecting poverty: the edges of his coat-sleeves were carefully darned; his black necktie and a skull-cap which covered his baldness were evidently of home manufacture. He smiled softly and timidly with blue, rheumy eyes. Two or three recent cuts on his chin and neck were the result of conscientious shaving with an unsteady hand.

‘I have been looking for your father,’ he said, as Marian turned. ‘Isn’t he here?’

‘He has gone, Mr Hinks.’

‘Ah, then would you do me the kindness to take a book for him? In fact, it’s my little “Essay on the Historical Drama,” just out.’

He spoke with nervous hesitation, and in a tone which seemed to make apology for his existence.

‘Oh, father will be very glad to have it.’

‘If you will kindly wait one minute, Miss Yule. It’s at my place over there.’

He went off with long strides, and speedily came back panting, in his hand a thin new volume.

‘My kind regards to him, Miss Yule. You are quite well, I hope? I won’t detain you.’

And he backed into a man who was coming inobservantly this way.

Marian went to the ladies’ cloak-room, put on her hat and jacket, and left the Museum. Some one passed out through the swing-door a moment before her, and as soon as she had issued beneath the portico, she saw that it was Jasper Milvain; she must have followed him through the hall, but her eyes had been cast down. The young man was now alone; as he descended the steps he looked to left and right, but not behind him. Marian followed at a distance of two or three yards. Nearing the gateway, she quickened her pace a little, so as to pass out into the street almost at the same moment as Milvain. But he did not turn his head.

He took to the right. Marian had fallen back again, but she still followed at a very little distance. His walk was slow, and she might easily have passed him in quite a natural way; in that case he could not help seeing her. But there was an uneasy suspicion in her mind that he really must have noticed her in the Reading-room. This was the first time she had seen him since their parting at Finden. Had he any reason for avoiding her? Did he take it ill that her father had shown no desire to keep up his acquaintance?

She allowed the interval between them to become greater. In a minute or two Milvain turned up Charlotte Street, and so she lost sight of him.

In Tottenham Court Road she waited for an omnibus that would take her to the remoter part of Camden Town; obtaining a corner seat, she drew as far back as possible, and paid no attention to her fellow-passengers. At a point in Camden Road she at length alighted, and after ten minutes’ walk reached her destination in a quiet by-way called St Paul’s Crescent, consisting of small, decent houses. That at which she paused had an exterior promising comfort within; the windows were clean and neatly curtained, and the polishable appurtenances of the door gleamed to perfection. She admitted herself with a latch-key, and went straight upstairs without encountering anyone.

Descending again in a few moments, she entered the front room on the ground-floor. This served both as parlour and dining-room; it was comfortably furnished, without much attempt at adornment. On the walls were a few autotypes and old engravings. A recess between fireplace and window was fitted with shelves, which supported hundreds of volumes, the overflow of Yule’s library. The table was laid for a meal. It best suited the convenience of the family to dine at five o’clock; a long evening, so necessary to most literary people, was thus assured. Marian, as always when she had spent a day at the Museum, was faint with weariness and hunger; she cut a small piece of bread from a loaf on the table, and sat down in an easy chair.

Presently appeared a short, slight woman of middle age, plainly dressed in serviceable grey. Her face could never have been very comely, and it expressed but moderate intelligence; its lines, however, were those of gentleness and good feeling. She had the look of one who is making a painful effort to understand something; this was fixed upon her features, and probably resulted from the peculiar conditions of her life.

‘Rather early, aren’t you, Marian?’ she said, as she closed the door and came forward to take a seat.

‘Yes; I have a little headache.’

‘Oh, dear! Is that beginning again?’

Mrs Yule’s speech was seldom ungrammatical, and her intonation was not flagrantly vulgar, but the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people. In the same degree did her bearing fall short of that which distinguishes a lady. The London work-girl is rarely capable of raising herself or being raised, to a place in life above that to which she was born; she cannot learn how to stand and sit and move like a woman bred to refinement, any more than she can fashion her tongue to graceful speech. Mrs Yule’s behaviour to Marian was marked with a singular diffidence; she looked and spoke affectionately, but not with a mother’s freedom; one might have taken her for a trusted servant waiting upon her mistress. Whenever opportunity offered, she watched the girl in a curiously furtive way, that puzzled look on her face becoming very noticeable. Her consciousness was never able to accept as a familiar and unimportant fact the vast difference between herself and her daughter. Marian’s superiority in native powers, in delicacy of feeling, in the results of education, could never be lost sight of. Under ordinary circumstances she addressed the girl as if tentatively; however sure of anything from her own point of view, she knew that Marian, as often as not, had quite a different criterion. She understood that the girl frequently expressed an opinion by mere reticence, and hence the carefulness with which, when conversing, she tried to discover the real effect of her words in Marian’s features.

‘Hungry, too,’ she said, seeing the crust Marian was nibbling. ‘You really must have more lunch, dear. It isn’t right to go so long; you’ll make yourself ill.’

‘Have you been out?’ Marian asked.

‘Yes; I went to Holloway.’

Mrs Yule sighed and looked very unhappy. By ‘going to Holloway’ was always meant a visit to her own relatives—a married sister with three children, and a brother who inhabited the same house. To her husband she scarcely ever ventured to speak of these persons; Yule had no intercourse with them. But Marian was always willing to listen sympathetically, and her mother often exhibited a touching gratitude for this condescension—as she deemed it.

‘Are things no better?’ the girl inquired.

‘Worse, as far as I can see. John has begun his drinking again, and him and Tom quarrel every night; there’s no peace in the ‘ouse.’

If ever Mrs Yule lapsed into gross errors of pronunciation or phrase, it was when she spoke of her kinsfolk. The subject seemed to throw her back into a former condition.

‘He ought to go and live by himself’ said Marian, referring to her mother’s brother, the thirsty John.

‘So he ought, to be sure. I’m always telling them so. But there! you don’t seem to be able to persuade them, they’re that silly and obstinate. And Susan, she only gets angry with me, and tells me not to talk in a stuck-up way. I’m sure I never say a word that could offend her; I’m too careful for that. And there’s Annie; no doing anything with her! She’s about the streets at all hours, and what’ll be the end of it no one can say. They’re getting that ragged, all of them. It isn’t Susan’s fault; indeed it isn’t. She does all that woman can. But Tom hasn’t brought home ten shillings the last month, and it seems to me as if he was getting careless. I gave her half-a-crown; it was all I could do. And the worst of it is, they think I could do so much more if I liked. They’re always hinting that we are rich people, and it’s no good my trying to persuade them. They think I’m telling falsehoods, and it’s very hard to be looked at in that way; it is, indeed, Marian.’

‘You can’t help it, mother. I suppose their suffering makes them unkind and unjust.’

‘That’s just what it does, my dear; you never said anything truer. Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough. Why there’s so much of it in the world, I’m sure I can’t see.’

‘I suppose father will be back soon?’

‘He said dinner-time.’

‘Mr Quarmby has been telling me something which is wonderfully good news if it’s really true; but I can’t help feeling doubtful.

He says that father may perhaps be made editor of The Study at the end of this year.’

Mrs Yule, of course, understood, in outline, these affairs of the literary world; she thought of them only from the pecuniary point of view, but that made no essential distinction between her and the mass of literary people.

‘My word!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a thing that would be for us!’

Marian had begun to explain her reluctance to base any hopes on Mr Quarmby’s prediction, when the sound of a postman’s knock at the house-door caused her mother to disappear for a moment.

‘It’s for you,’ said Mrs Yule, returning. ‘From the country.’

Marian took the letter and examined its address with interest.

‘It must be one of the Miss Milvains. Yes; Dora Milvain.’

After Jasper’s departure from Finden his sisters had seen Marian several times, and the mutual liking between her and them had been confirmed by opportunity of conversation. The promise of correspondence had hitherto waited for fulfilment. It seemed natural to Marian that the younger of the two girls should write; Maud was attractive and agreeable, and probably clever, but Dora had more spontaneity in friendship.

‘It will amuse you to hear,’ wrote Dora, ‘that the literary project our brother mentioned in a letter whilst you were still here is really to come to something. He has sent us a specimen chapter, written by himself of the “Child’s History of Parliament,” and Maud thinks she could carry it on in that style, if there’s no hurry. She and I have both set to work on English histories, and we shall be authorities before long. Jolly and Monk offer thirty pounds for the little book, if it suits them when finished, with certain possible profits in the future. Trust Jasper for making a bargain! So perhaps our literary career will be something more than a joke, after all. I hope it may; anything rather than a life of teaching. We shall be so glad to hear from you, if you still care to trouble about country girls.’

And so on. Marian read with a pleased smile, then acquainted her mother with the contents.

‘I am very glad,’ said Mrs Yule; ‘it’s so seldom you get a letter.’

‘Yes.’

Marian seemed desirous of saying something more, and her mother had a thoughtful look, suggestive of sympathetic curiosity.

‘Is their brother likely to call here?’ Mrs Yule asked, with misgiving.

‘No one has invited him to,’ was the girl’s quiet reply.

‘He wouldn’t come without that?’

‘It’s not likely that he even knows the address.’

‘Your father won’t be seeing him, I suppose?’

‘By chance, perhaps. I don’t know.’

It was very rare indeed for these two to touch upon any subject save those of everyday interest. In spite of the affection between them, their exchange of confidence did not go very far; Mrs Yule, who had never exercised maternal authority since Marian’s earliest childhood, claimed no maternal privileges, and Marian’s natural reserve had been strengthened by her mother’s respectful aloofness. The English fault of domestic reticence could scarcely go further than it did in their case; its exaggeration is, of course, one of the characteristics of those unhappy families severed by differences of education between the old and young.

‘I think,’ said Marian, in a forced tone, ‘that father hasn’t much liking for Mr Milvain.’

She wished to know if her mother had heard any private remarks on this subject, but she could not bring herself to ask directly.

‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ replied Mrs Yule, smoothing her dress. ‘He hasn’t said anything to me, Marian.’

An awkward silence. The mother had fixed her eyes on the mantelpiece, and was thinking hard.

‘Otherwise,’ said Marian, ‘he would have said something, I should think, about meeting in London.’

‘But is there anything in—this gentleman that he wouldn’t like?’

‘I don’t know of anything.’

Impossible to pursue the dialogue; Marian moved uneasily, then rose, said something about putting the letter away, and left the room.