New Grub Street. George Gissing
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.
CHAPTER VI. THE PRACTICAL FRIEND
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