New Grub Street (9 page)

At his father's death he came into possession (practically it
was put at his disposal at once, though he was little more than
nineteen) of about two hundred pounds—a life-insurance for five
hundred had been sacrificed to exigencies not very long before. He
had no difficulty in deciding how to use this money. His mother's
desire to live in London had in him the force of an inherited
motive; as soon as possible he released himself from his
uncongenial occupations, converted into money all the possessions
of which he had not immediate need, and betook himself to the
metropolis.

To become a literary man, of course.

His capital lasted him nearly four years, for, notwithstanding
his age, he lived with painful economy. The strangest life, of
almost absolute loneliness. From a certain point of Tottenham Court
Road there is visible a certain garret window in a certain street
which runs parallel with that thoroughfare; for the greater part of
these four years the garret in question was Reardon's home. He paid
only three-and-sixpence a week for the privilege of living there;
his food cost him about a shilling a day; on clothing and other
unavoidable expenses he laid out some five pounds yearly. Then he
bought books—volumes which cost anything between twopence and two
shillings; further than that he durst not go. A strange time, I
assure you.

When he had completed his twenty-first year, he desired to
procure a reader's ticket for the British Museum. Now this was not
such a simple matter as you may suppose; it was necessary to obtain
the signature of some respectable householder, and Reardon was
acquainted with no such person. His landlady was a decent woman
enough, and a payer of rates and taxes, but it would look odd, to
say the least of it, to present oneself in Great Russell Street
armed with this person's recommendation. There was nothing for it
but to take a bold step, to force himself upon the attention of a
stranger—the thing from which his pride had always shrunk. He wrote
to a well-known novelist—a man with whose works he had some
sympathy. 'I am trying to prepare myself for a literary career. I
wish to study in the Reading-room of the British Museum, but have
no acquaintance to whom I can refer in the ordinary way. Will you
help me—I mean, in this particular only?' That was the substance of
his letter. For reply came an invitation to a house in the
West-end. With fear and trembling Reardon answered the summons. He
was so shabbily attired; he was so diffident from the habit of
living quite alone; he was horribly afraid lest it should be
supposed that he looked for other assistance than he had requested.
Well, the novelist was a rotund and jovial man; his dwelling and
his person smelt of money; he was so happy himself that he could
afford to be kind to others.

'Have you published anything?' he inquired, for the young man's
letter had left this uncertain.

'Nothing. I have tried the magazines, but as yet without
success.'

'But what do you write?'

'Chiefly essays on literary subjects.'

'I can understand that you would find a difficulty in disposing
of them. That kind of thing is supplied either by men of
established reputation, or by anonymous writers who have a regular
engagement on papers and magazines. Give me an example of your
topics.'

'I have written something lately about Tibullus.'

'Oh, dear! Oh, dear!—Forgive me, Mr Reardon; my feelings were
too much for me; those names have been my horror ever since I was a
schoolboy. Far be it from me to discourage you, if your line is to
be solid literary criticism; I will only mention, as a matter of
fact, that such work is indifferently paid and in very small
demand. It hasn't occurred to you to try your hand at fiction?'

In uttering the word he beamed; to him it meant a thousand or so
a year.

'I am afraid I have no talent for that.'

The novelist could do no more than grant his genial signature
for the specified purpose, and add good wishes in abundance.
Reardon went home with his brain in a whirl. He had had his first
glimpse of what was meant by literary success. That luxurious
study, with its shelves of handsomely-bound books, its beautiful
pictures, its warm, fragrant air—great heavens! what might not a
man do who sat at his ease amid such surroundings!

He began to work at the Reading-room, but at the same time he
thought often of the novelist's suggestion, and before long had
written two or three short stories. No editor would accept them;
but he continued to practise himself in that art, and by degrees
came to fancy that, after all, perhaps he had some talent for
fiction. It was significant, however, that no native impulse had
directed him to novel-writing. His intellectual temper was that of
the student, the scholar, but strongly blended with a love of
independence which had always made him think with distaste of a
teacher's life. The stories he wrote were scraps of immature
psychology—the last thing a magazine would accept from an unknown
man.

His money dwindled, and there came a winter during which he
suffered much from cold and hunger. What a blessed refuge it was,
there under the great dome, when he must else have sat in his windy
garret with the mere pretence of a fire! The Reading-room was his
true home; its warmth enwrapped him kindly; the peculiar odour of
its atmosphere—at first a cause of headache—grew dear and
delightful to him. But he could not sit here until his last penny
should be spent. Something practical must be done, and practicality
was not his strong point.

Friends in London he had none; but for an occasional
conversation with his landlady he would scarcely have spoken a
dozen words in a week. His disposition was the reverse of
democratic, and he could not make acquaintances below his own
intellectual level. Solitude fostered a sensitiveness which to
begin with was extreme; the lack of stated occupation encouraged
his natural tendency to dream and procrastinate and hope for the
improbable. He was a recluse in the midst of millions, and viewed
with dread the necessity of going forth to fight for daily
food.

Little by little he had ceased to hold any correspondence with
his former friends at Hereford. The only person to whom he still
wrote and from whom he still heard was his mother's father—an old
man who lived at Derby, retired from the business of a draper, and
spending his last years pleasantly enough with a daughter who had
remained single. Edwin had always been a favourite with his
grandfather, though they had met only once or twice during the past
eight years. But in writing he did not allow it to be understood
that he was in actual want, and he felt that he must come to dire
extremities before he could bring himself to beg assistance.

He had begun to answer advertisements, but the state of his
wardrobe forbade his applying for any but humble positions. Once or
twice he presented himself personally at offices, but his reception
was so mortifying that death by hunger seemed preferable to a
continuance of such experiences. The injury to his pride made him
savagely arrogant; for days after the last rejection he hid himself
in his garret, hating the world.

He sold his little collection of books, and of course they
brought only a trifling sum. That exhausted, he must begin to sell
his clothes. And then—?

But help was at hand. One day he saw it advertised in a
newspaper that the secretary of a hospital in the north of London
was in need of a clerk; application was to be made by letter. He
wrote, and two days later, to his astonishment, received a reply
asking him to wait upon the secretary at a certain hour. In a fever
of agitation he kept the appointment, and found that his business
was with a young man in the very highest spirits, who walked up and
down a little office (the hospital was of the 'special' order, a
house of no great size), and treated the matter in hand as an
excellent joke.

'I thought, you know, of engaging someone much younger—quite a
lad, in fact. But look there! Those are the replies to my
advertisement.'

He pointed to a heap of five or six hundred letters, and laughed
consumedly.

'Impossible to read them all, you know. It seemed to me that the
fairest thing would be to shake them together, stick my hand in,
and take out one by chance. If it didn't seem very promising, I
would try a second time. But the first letter was yours, and I
thought the fair thing to do was at all events to see you, you
know. The fact is, I am only able to offer a pound a week.'

'I shall be very glad indeed to take that,' said Reardon, who
was bathed in perspiration.

'Then what about references, and so on?' proceeded the young
man, chuckling and rubbing his hands together.

The applicant was engaged. He had barely strength to walk home;
the sudden relief from his miseries made him, for the first time,
sensible of the extreme physical weakness into which he had sunk.
For the next week he was very ill, but he did not allow this to
interfere with his new work, which was easily learnt and not
burdensome.

He held this position for three years, and during that time
important things happened. When he had recovered from his state of
semi-starvation, and was living in comfort (a pound a week is a
very large sum if you have previously had to live on ten
shillings), Reardon found that the impulse to literary production
awoke in him more strongly than ever. He generally got home from
the hospital about six o'clock, and the evening was his own. In
this leisure time he wrote a novel in two volumes; one publisher
refused it, but a second offered to bring it out on the terms of
half profits to the author. The book appeared, and was well spoken
of in one or two papers; but profits there were none to divide. In
the third year of his clerkship he wrote a novel in three volumes;
for this his publishers gave him twenty-five pounds, with again a
promise of half the profits after deduction of the sum advanced.
Again there was no pecuniary success. He had just got to work upon
a third book, when his grandfather at Derby died and left him four
hundred pounds.

He could not resist the temptation to recover his freedom. Four
hundred pounds, at the rate of eighty pounds a year, meant five
years of literary endeavour. In that period he could certainly
determine whether or not it was his destiny to live by the pen.

In the meantime his relations with the secretary of the
hospital, Carter by name, had grown very friendly. When Reardon
began to publish books, the high-spirited Mr Carter looked upon him
with something of awe; and when the literary man ceased to be a
clerk, there was nothing to prevent association on equal terms
between him and his former employer. They continued to see a good
deal of each other, and Carter made Reardon acquainted with certain
of his friends, among whom was one John Yule, an easy-going,
selfish, semi-intellectual young man who had a place in a
Government office. The time of solitude had gone by for Reardon. He
began to develop the power that was in him.

Those two books of his were not of a kind to win popularity.
They dealt with no particular class of society (unless one makes a
distinct class of people who have brains), and they lacked local
colour. Their interest was almost purely psychological. It was
clear that the author had no faculty for constructing a story, and
that pictures of active life were not to be expected of him; he
could never appeal to the multitude. But strong characterisation
was within his scope, and an intellectual fervour, appetising to a
small section of refined readers, marked all his best pages.

He was the kind of man who cannot struggle against adverse
conditions, but whom prosperity warms to the exercise of his
powers. Anything like the cares of responsibility would sooner or
later harass him into unproductiveness. That he should produce much
was in any case out of the question; possibly a book every two or
three years might not prove too great a strain upon his delicate
mental organism, but for him to attempt more than that would
certainly be fatal to the peculiar merit of his work. Of this he
was dimly conscious, and, on receiving his legacy, he put aside for
nearly twelve months the new novel he had begun. To give his mind a
rest he wrote several essays, much maturer than those which had
formerly failed to find acceptance, and two of these appeared in
magazines.

The money thus earned he spent—at a tailor's. His friend Carter
ventured to suggest this mode of outlay.

His third book sold for fifty pounds. It was a great improvement
on its predecessors, and the reviews were generally favourable. For
the story which followed, 'On Neutral Ground,' he received a
hundred pounds. On the strength of that he spent six months
travelling in the South of Europe.

He returned to London at mid-June, and on the second day after
his arrival befell an incident which was to control the rest of his
life. Busy with the pictures in the Grosvenor Gallery, he heard
himself addressed in a familiar voice, and on turning he was aware
of Mr Carter, resplendent in fashionable summer attire, and
accompanied by a young lady of some charms. Reardon had formerly
feared encounters of this kind, too conscious of the defects of his
attire; but at present there was no reason why he should shirk
social intercourse. He was passably dressed, and the half-year of
travel had benefited his appearance in no slight degree. Carter
presented him to the young lady, of whom the novelist had already
heard as affianced to his friend.

Whilst they stood conversing, there approached two ladies,
evidently mother and daughter, whose attendant was another of
Reardon's acquaintances, Mr John Yule. This gentleman stepped
briskly forward and welcomed the returned wanderer.

'Let me introduce you,' he said, 'to my mother and sister. Your
fame has made them anxious to know you.'