New Grub Street (36 page)

The conversation was pursued, with brief intervals, all through
the day. In the afternoon two ladies paid a call, but Amy kept out
of sight. Between six and seven John Yule returned from his
gentlemanly occupations. As he was generally in a touchy temper
before dinner had soothed him, nothing was said to him of the
latest development of his sister's affairs until late in the
evening; he was allowed to suppose that Reardon's departure for the
seaside had taken place a day sooner than had been arranged.

Behind the dining-room was a comfortable little chamber set
apart as John's sanctum; here he smoked and entertained his male
friends, and contemplated the portraits of those female ones who
would not have been altogether at their ease in Mrs Yule's
drawing-room. Not long after dinner his mother and sister came to
talk with him in this retreat.

With some nervousness Mrs Yule made known to him what had taken
place. Amy, the while, stood by the table, and glanced over a
magazine that she had picked up.

'Well, I see nothing to be surprised at,' was John's first
remark. 'It was pretty certain he'd come to this. But what I want
to know is, how long are we to be at the expense of supporting Amy
and her youngster?'

This was practical, and just what Mrs Yule had expected from her
son.

'We can't consider such things as that,' she replied. 'You don't
wish, I suppose, that Amy should go and live in a back street at
Islington, and be hungry every other day, and soon have no decent
clothes?'

'I don't think Jack would be greatly distressed,' Amy put in
quietly.

'This is a woman's way of talking,' replied John. 'I want to
know what is to be the end of it all? I've no doubt it's uncommonly
pleasant for Reardon to shift his responsibilities on to our
shoulders. At this rate I think I shall get married, and live
beyond my means until I can hold out no longer, and then hand my
wife over to her relatives, with my compliments. It's about the
coolest business that ever came under my notice.'

'But what is to be done?' asked Mrs Yule. 'It's no use talking
sarcastically, John, or making yourself disagreeable.'

'We are not called upon to find a way out of the difficulty. The
fact of the matter is, Reardon must get a decent berth. Somebody or
other must pitch him into the kind of place that suits men who can
do nothing in particular. Carter ought to be able to help, I should
think.'

'You know very well,' said Amy, 'that places of that kind are
not to be had for the asking. It may be years before any such
opportunity offers.'

'Confound the fellow! Why the deuce doesn't he go on with his
novel-writing? There's plenty of money to be made out of
novels.'

'But he can't write, Jack. He has lost his talent.'

'That's all bosh, Amy. If a fellow has once got into the swing
of it he can keep it up if he likes. He might write his two novels
a year easily enough, just like twenty other men and women. Look
here, I could do it myself if I weren't too lazy. And that's what's
the matter with Reardon. He doesn't care to work.'

'I have thought that myself;' observed Mrs Yule. 'It really is
too ridiculous to say that he couldn't write some kind of novels if
he chose. Look at Miss Blunt's last book; why, anybody could have
written that. I'm sure there isn't a thing in it I couldn't have
imagined myself.'

'Well, all I want to know is, what's Amy going to do if things
don't alter?'

'She shall never want a home as long as I have one to share with
her.'

John's natural procedure, when beset by difficulties, was to
find fault with everyone all round, himself maintaining a position
of irresponsibility.

'It's all very well, mother, but when a girl gets married she
takes her husband, I have always understood, for better or worse,
just as a man takes his wife. To tell the truth, it seems to me Amy
has put herself in the wrong. It's deuced unpleasant to go and live
in back streets, and to go without dinner now and then, but girls
mustn't marry if they're afraid to face these things.'

'Don't talk so monstrously, John!' exclaimed his mother. 'How
could Amy possibly foresee such things? The case is quite an
extraordinary one.'

'Not so uncommon, I assure you. Some one was telling me the
other day of a married lady—well educated and blameless—who goes to
work at a shop somewhere or other because her husband can't support
her.'

'And you wish to see Amy working in a shop?'

'No, I can't say I do. I'm only telling you that her bad luck
isn't unexampled. It's very fortunate for her that she has
good-natured relatives.'

Amy had taken a seat apart. She sat with her head leaning on her
hand.

'Why don't you go and see Reardon?' John asked of his
mother.

'What would be the use? Perhaps he would tell me to mind my own
business.'

'By jingo! precisely what you would be doing. I think you ought
to see him and give him to understand that he's behaving in a
confoundedly ungentlemanly way. Evidently he's the kind of fellow
that wants stirring up. I've half a mind to go and see him myself.
Where is this slum that he's gone to live in?'

'We don't know his address yet.'

'So long as it's not the kind of place where one would be afraid
of catching a fever, I think it wouldn't be amiss for me to look
him up.'

'You'll do no good by that,' said Amy, indifferently.

'Confound it! It's just because nobody does anything that things
have come to this pass!'

The conversation was, of course, profitless. John could only
return again and again to his assertion that Reardon must get 'a
decent berth.' At length Amy left the room in weariness and
disgust.

'I suppose they have quarrelled terrifically,' said her brother,
as soon as she was gone.

'I am afraid so.'

'Well, you must do as you please. But it's confounded hard lines
that you should have to keep her and the kid. You know I can't
afford to contribute.'

'My dear, I haven't asked you to.'

'No, but you'll have the devil's own job to make ends meet; I
know that well enough.'

'I shall manage somehow.'

'All right; you're a plucky woman, but it's too bad. Reardon's a
humbug, that's my opinion. I shall have a talk with Carter about
him. I suppose he has transferred all their furniture to the
slum?'

'He can't have removed yet. It was only this morning that he
went to search for lodgings.'

'Oh, then I tell you what it is: I shall look in there the first
thing to-morrow morning, and just talk to him in a fatherly way.
You needn't say anything to Amy. But I see he's just the kind of
fellow that, if everyone leaves him alone, he'll be content with
Carter's five-and-twenty shillings for the rest of his life, and
never trouble his head about how Amy is living.'

To this proposal Mrs Yule readily assented. On going upstairs
she found that Amy had all but fallen asleep upon a settee in the
drawing-room.

'You are quite worn out with your troubles,' she said. 'Go to
bed, and have a good long sleep.'

'Yes, I will.'

The neat, fresh bedchamber seemed to Amy a delightful haven of
rest. She turned the key in the door with an enjoyment of the
privacy thus secured such as she had never known in her life; for
in maidenhood safe solitude was a matter of course to her, and
since marriage she had not passed a night alone. Willie was fast
asleep in a little bed shadowed by her own. In an impulse of
maternal love and gladness she bent over the child and covered his
face with kisses too gentle to awaken him.

How clean and sweet everything was! It is often said, by people
who are exquisitely ignorant of the matter, that cleanliness is a
luxury within reach even of the poorest. Very far from that; only
with the utmost difficulty, with wearisome exertion, with harassing
sacrifice, can people who are pinched for money preserve a moderate
purity in their persons and their surroundings. By painful degrees
Amy had accustomed herself to compromises in this particular which
in the early days of her married life would have seemed intensely
disagreeable, if not revolting. A housewife who lives in the
country, and has but a patch of back garden, or even a good-sized
kitchen, can, if she thinks fit, take her place at the wash-tub and
relieve her mind on laundry matters; but to the inhabitant of a
miniature flat in the heart of London anything of that kind is out
of the question.

When Amy began to cut down her laundress's bill, she did it with
a sense of degradation. One grows accustomed, however, to such
unpleasant necessities, and already she had learnt what was the
minimum of expenditure for one who is troubled with a lady's
instincts.

No, no; cleanliness is a costly thing, and a troublesome thing
when appliances and means have to be improvised. It was, in part,
the understanding she had gained of this side of the life of
poverty that made Amy shrink in dread from the still narrower
lodgings to which Reardon invited her. She knew how subtly one's
self-respect can be undermined by sordid conditions. The difference
between the life of well-to-do educated people and that of the
uneducated poor is not greater in visible details than in the
minutiae of privacy, and Amy must have submitted to an
extraordinary change before it would have been possible for her to
live at ease in the circumstances which satisfy a decent
working-class woman. She was prepared for final parting from her
husband rather than try to effect that change in herself.

She undressed at leisure, and stretched her limbs in the cold,
soft, fragrant bed. A sigh of profound relief escaped her. How good
it was to be alone!

And in a quarter of an hour she was sleeping as peacefully as
the child who shared her room.

At breakfast in the morning she showed a bright, almost a happy
face. It was long, long since she had enjoyed such a night's rest,
so undisturbed with unwelcome thoughts on the threshold of sleep
and on awaking. Her life was perhaps wrecked, but the thought of
that did not press upon her; for the present she must enjoy her
freedom. It was like a recovery of girlhood. There are few married
women who would not, sooner or later, accept with joy the offer of
some months of a maidenly liberty. Amy would not allow herself to
think that her wedded life was at an end. With a woman's strange
faculty of closing her eyes against facts that do not immediately
concern her, she tasted the relief of the present and let the
future lie unregarded. Reardon would get out of his difficulties
sooner or later; somebody or other would help him; that was the dim
background of her agreeable sensations.

He suffered, no doubt. But then it was just as well that he
should. Suffering would perhaps impel him to effort. When he
communicated to her his new address—he could scarcely neglect to do
that—she would send a not unfriendly letter, and hint to him that
now was his opportunity for writing a book, as good a book as those
which formerly issued from his garret-solitude. If he found that
literature was in truth a thing of the past with him, then he must
exert himself to obtain a position worthy of an educated man. Yes,
in this way she would write to him, without a word that could hurt
or offend.

She ate an excellent breakfast, and made known her enjoyment of
it.

'I am so glad!' replied her mother. 'You have been getting quite
thin and pale.'

'Quite consumptive,' remarked John, looking up from his
newspaper. 'Shall I make arrangements for a daily landau at the
livery stables round here?'

'You can if you like,' replied his sister; 'it would do both
mother and me good, and I have no doubt you could afford it quite
well.'

'Oh, indeed! You're a remarkable young woman, let me tell you.
By-the-bye, I suppose your husband is breakfasting on bread and
water?'

'I hope not, and I don't think it very likely.'

'Jack, Jack!' interposed Mrs Yule, softly.

Her son resumed his paper, and at the end of the meal rose with
an unwonted briskness to make his preparations for departure.

Nor would it be true to represent Edwin Reardon as rising to the
new day wholly disconsolate. He too had slept unusually well, and
with returning consciousness the sense of a burden removed was more
instant than that of his loss and all the dreary circumstances
attaching to it. He had no longer to fear the effects upon Amy of
such a grievous change as from their homelike flat to the couple of
rooms he had taken in Islington; for the moment, this relief helped
him to bear the pain of all that had happened and the uneasiness
which troubled him when he reflected that his wife was henceforth a
charge to her mother.

Of course for the moment only. He had no sooner begun to move
about, to prepare his breakfast (amid the relics of last evening's
meal), to think of all the detestable work he had to do before
to-morrow night, than his heart sank again. His position was
well-nigh as dolorous as that of any man who awoke that morning to
the brutal realities of life. If only for the shame of it! How must
they be speaking of him, Amy's relatives, and her friends? A
novelist who couldn't write novels; a husband who couldn't support
his wife and child; a literate who made eager application for
illiterate work at paltry wages—how interesting it would all sound
in humorous gossip! And what hope had he that things would ever be
better with him?

Had he done well? Had he done wisely? Would it not have been
better to have made that one last effort? There came before him a
vision of quiet nooks beneath the Sussex cliffs, of the long lines
of green breakers bursting into foam; he heard the wave-music, and
tasted the briny freshness of the sea-breeze. Inspiration, after
all, would perchance have come to him.