The Complete Five Towns Collections. Bennett Arnold
where one shilling was the price of an elaborate repast, and he went there on New Year's Day. As he walked up Charing Cross Road, his thoughts turned naturally to Miss Roberts. Would she be as cordial as when he had met her on the omnibus, or would she wear the polite mask of the cashier, treating him merely as a frequenter of the establishment? She was engaged when he entered the dining-room, but she noticed him and nodded. He looked towards her several times during his meal, and once her eyes caught his and she smiled, not withdrawing them for a few moments; then she bent over her account book.
His fellow-diners seemed curiously to have degenerated, to have grown still narrower in their sympathies, still more careless in their eating, still more peculiar or shabbier in their dress. The young women of masculine aspect set their elbows on the table more uncompromisingly than ever, and the young men with soiled wristbands or no wristbands at all were more than ever tedious in their murmured conversations. It was, indeed, a bizarre company that surrounded him! Then he reflected that these people had not altered. The change was in himself. He had outgrown them; he surveyed them now as from a tower. He was a man with a future, using this restaurant because it suited him temporarily to do so, while they would use it till the end, never deviating, never leaving the rut.
"So you have come at last!" Miss Roberts said to him when he presented his check. "I was beginning to think you had deserted us."
"But it's barely a week since I saw you," he protested. "Let me wish you a happy New Year."
"The same to you." She flushed a little, and then: "What do you think of our new decorations? Aren't they pretty?"
He praised them perfunctorily, even without glancing round. His eyes were on her face. He remembered the reiterated insinuations of Jenkins, and wondered whether they had any ground of fact.
"By the way, has Jenkins been here to-day?" he inquired, by way of introducing the name.
"Is that the young man who used to come with you sometimes? No."
There was no trace of self-consciousness in her bearing, and Richard resolved to handle Jenkins with severity. Another customer approached the pay-desk.
"Well, good afternoon." He lingered.
"Good afternoon." Her gaze rested on him softly. "I suppose you'll be here again some time." She spoke low, so that the other customer should not hear.
"I'm coming every day now, I think," he answered in the same tone, with a smothered laugh. "Ta-ta."
That night at half-past seven he began his novel. The opening chapter was introductory, and the words came without much effort. This being only a draft, there was no need for polish; so that when a sentence refused to run smoothly at the first trial, he was content to make it grammatical and leave it. He seemed to have been working for hours when a desire took him to count up what was already written. Six hundred words! He sighed the sigh of satisfaction, and looked at his watch, to find that it was exactly half-past eight. The discovery somewhat damped his felicity. He began to doubt whether stuff composed at the rate of ten words a minute could have any real value. Pooh! Sometimes one wrote quickly, and sometimes slowly. The number of minutes occupied was no index of quality. Should he continue writing? Yes, he would.... No.... Why should he? He had performed the task self-allotted for the day, and more; and now he was entitled to rest. True, the actual time of labour had been very short; but then, another day the same amount of work might consume three or four hours. He put away his writing-things, and searched about for something to read, finally lighting on "Paradise Lost." But "Paradise Lost" wanted actuality. He laid it aside. Was there any valid reason why he should not conclude the evening at the theatre? None. The frost had returned with power, and the reverberation of the streets sounded invitingly through his curtained windows. He went out, and walked briskly up Park Side. At Hyde Park Corner he jumped on an omnibus.
It was the first night of a new ballet at the Ottoman. "Standing-room only," said the man at the ticket-office. "All right," said Richard, and, entering, was greeted with soft music, which came to him like a fitful zephyr over a sea of heads.
Chapter XXIX
One Saturday afternoon towards the end of February, he suddenly decided to read through so much of the draft novel as was written; hitherto he had avoided any sort of revision. The resolve to accomplish five hundred words a day had been kept indifferently well, and the total stood at about fourteen thousand. As he wrote a very bold hand, the sheets covered made quite a respectable pile. The mere bulk of them cajoled him, in spite of certain misgivings, into an optimistic surmise as to their literary quality. Never before had he written so much upon one theme, and were the writing good or bad, he was, for a few moments, proud of his achievement. The mischief lay in the fact that week by week he had exercised less and still less care over the work. The phrase, "Anything will do for a draft," had come to be uttered with increasing frequency as an excuse for laxities of style and construction. "I will make that right in the revision," he had reassured himself, and had gone negligently forward, leaving innumerable crudities in the wake of his hurrying pen. During the last few days he had written scarcely anything, and perhaps it was a hope of stimulating a drooping inspiration by the complacent survey of work actually done that tempted him to this hazardous perusal.
He whistled as he took up the manuscript, as a boy whistles when going into a dark cellar. The first three pages were read punctiliously, every word of them, but soon he grew hasty, rushing to the next paragraph ere the previous one was grasped; then he began shamelessly to skip; and then he stopped, and his heart seemed to stop also. The lack of homogeneity, of sequence, of dramatic quality, of human interest; the loose syntax; and the unrelieved mediocrity of it all, horrified him. The thing was dry bones, a fiasco. The certainty that he had once more failed swept over him like a cold, green wave of the sea, and he had a physical feeling of sickness in the stomach.... It was with much ado that he refrained from putting the whole manuscript upon the fire, and crushing it venomously into the flames with a poker. Then he steadied himself. His self-confidence was going, almost gone; he must contrive to recover it, and he sought for a way. (Where were now the rash exultations of the New Year?) It was impossible that his work should be irredeemably bad. He remembered having read somewhere that the difference between a fine and a worthless novel was often a difference of elaboration simply. A conscientious re-writing, therefore, might probably bring about a surprising amelioration. He must immediately make the experiment. But he had long since solemnly vowed not to commence the second writing till the draft was done; the moral value of finishing even the draft had then seemed to him priceless. No matter! Under stress of grievous necessity, that oath must be forsworn. No other course could save him from collapse.
* * * * *
He went out into the streets. The weather, fine and bright, suggested the earliest infancy of spring, and Piccadilly was full of all classes and all ages of women. There were regiments of men, too, but the gay and endless stream of women obsessed him. He saw them sitting in hansoms and private carriages and on the tops of omnibuses, niched in high windows, shining in obscurity of shops, treading the pavements with fairy step, either unattended or by the side of foolish, unappreciative males. Every man in London seemed to have the right to a share of some woman's companionship, except himself. As for those men who walked alone, they had sweethearts somewhere, or mothers and sisters, or they were married and even now on the way to wife and hearth. Only he was set apart.
A light descended upon him that afternoon. The average man and the average woman being constantly thrown into each other's society, custom has staled for them the exquisite privilege of such intercourse. The rustic cannot share the townsman's enthusiasm for rural scenery; he sees no matter for ecstasy in the view from his cottage door; and in the same way the average man and the average woman dine together, talk together, walk together, and know not how richly they are therein blessed. But with solitaries like Richard it is different. Debarred from fellowship with the opposite sex by circumstances and an innate diffidence which makes the control of circumstance impossible, their starved sensibilities acquire certain morbid tenderness. (Doubtless the rustic discerns morbidity in the attitude of