‘Oh no. But it’s an improvement on some of them, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? I suppose it is; I don’t know. I liked the last place, in spite of the black ceiling and no water-tap. How’s Romilly?’
Oleron thumbed his chin.
‘Hm! I’m rather ashamed to tell you. The fact is, I’ve not got on very well with it. But it will be all right on the night, as you used to say.’
‘Stuck?’
‘Rather stuck.’
‘Got any of it you care to read to me? …’
Oleron had long been in the habit of reading portions of his work to Miss Bengough occasionally. Her comments were always quick and practical, sometimes directly useful, sometimes indirectly suggestive. She, in return for his confidence, always kept all mention of her own work sedulously from him. His, she said, was ‘real work’; hers merely filled space, not always even grammatically.
‘I’m afraid there isn’t,’ Oleron replied, still meditatively dry-shaving his chin. Then he added, with a little burst of candour, ‘The fact is, Elsie, I’ve not written – not actually written – very much more of it – any more of it, in fact. But, of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t progressed. I’ve progressed, in one sense, rather alarmingly. I’m now thinking of reconstructing the whole thing.’
Miss Bengough gave a gasp. ‘Reconstructing!’
‘Making Romilly herself a different type of woman. Somehow, I’ve begun to feel that I’m not getting the most out of her. As she stands, I’ve certainly lost interest in her to some extent.’
‘But – but –’ Miss Bengough protested, ‘you had her so real, so living, Paul!’
Oleron smiled faintly. He had been quite prepared for Miss Bengough’s disapproval. He wasn’t surprised that she liked Romilly as she at present existed; she would. Whether she realised it or not, there was much of herself in his fictitious creation. Naturally Romilly would seem ‘real’, ‘living’, to her …
‘But are you really serious, Paul?’ Miss Bengough asked presently, with a round-eyed stare.
‘Quite serious.’
‘You’re really going to scrap those fifteen chapters?’
‘I didn’t exactly say that.’
‘That fine, rich love-scene?’
‘I should only do it reluctantly, and for the sake of something I thought better.’
‘And that beautiful, beautiful description of Romilly on the shore?’
‘It wouldn’t necessarily be wasted,’ he said a little uneasily.
But Miss Bengough made a large and windy gesture, and then let him have it.
‘Really, you are too trying!’ she broke out. ‘I do wish sometimes you’d remember you’re human, and live in a world! You know I’d be the last to wish you to lower your standard one inch, but it wouldn’t be lowering it to bring it within human comprehension. Oh, you’re sometimes altogether too godlike! … Why, it would be a wicked, criminal waste of your powers to destroy those fifteen chapters! Look at it reasonably, now. You’ve been working for nearly twenty years; you’ve now got what you’ve been working for almost within your grasp; your affairs are at a most critical stage (oh, don’t tell me; I know you’re about at the end of your money); and here you are, deliberately proposing to withdraw a thing that will probably make your name, and to substitute for it something that ten to one nobody on earth will ever want to read – and small blame to them! Really, you try my patience!’
Oleron had shaken his head slowly as she had talked. It was an old story between them. The noisy, able, practical journalist was an admirable friend – up to a certain point; beyond that … well, each of us knows that point beyond which we stand alone. Elsie Bengough sometimes said that had she had one-tenth part of Oleron’s genius there were few things she could not have done – thus making that genius a quantitatively divisible thing, a sort of ingredient, to be added to or subtracted from in the admixture of his work. That it was a qualitative thing, essential, indivisible, informing, passed her comprehension. Their spirits parted company at that point. Oleron knew it. She did not appear to know it.
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he said a little wearily, by and by, ‘practically you’re quite right, entirely right, and I haven’t a word to say. If I could only turn Romilly over to you you’d make an enormous success of her. But that can’t be, and I, for my part, am seriously doubting whether she’s worth my while. You know what that means.’
‘What does it mean?’ she demanded bluntly.
‘Well,’ he said, smiling wanly, ‘what does it mean when you’re convinced a thing isn’t worth doing? You simply don’t do it.’
Miss Bengough’s eyes swept the ceiling for assistance against this impossible man.
‘What utter rubbish!’ she broke out at last. ‘Why, when I saw you last you were simply oozing Romilly, you were turning her off at the rate of four chapters a week; if you hadn’t moved you’d have had her three-parts done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in the middle of your most important work?’
Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she wouldn’t have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason. He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He had had twenty years of it – twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever – or if it was not, he no longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it. It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of exhaustion that only another effort is required of him; if he cannot make it he is as far off as ever …
‘Anyway,’ Oleron summed up, ‘I’m happier here than I’ve been for a long time. That’s some sort of a justification.’
‘And doing no work,’ said Miss Bengough pointedly.
At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a head.
‘And why should I do nothing but work?’ he demanded. ‘How much happier am I for it? I don’t say I don’t love my work – when it’s done; but I hate doing it. Sometimes it’s an intolerable burden that I simply long to be rid of. Once in many weeks it has a moment, one moment, of glow and thrill for me; I remember the days when it was all glow and thrill; and now I’m forty-four, and it’s becoming drudgery. Nobody wants it; I’m ceasing to want it myself; and if any ordinary sensible man were to ask me whether I didn’t think I was a fool to go on, I think I should agree that I was.’
Miss Bengough’s comely pink face was serious.
‘But you knew all that, many, many years ago, Paul – and still you chose it,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Well, and how should I have known?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t know. I was told so. My heart, if you like, told me so, and I thought I knew. Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers that it is nearly fifty –’
‘Forty-four, Paul –’
‘– forty-four, then – and it finds that the glamour isn’t in front, but behind. Yes, I knew and chose, if that’s knowing and choosing … but it’s a costly choice we’re called on to make when we’re young!’
Miss Bengough’s eyes were on the floor. Without moving them she said, ‘You’re not regretting it, Paul?’
Am I not?’ he took her up. ‘Upon my word, I’ve lately thought I am! What do I get in return for it all?’
‘You know what you get,’ she replied.
He might have known from her tone what else he could have had for the holding up of a finger – herself. She knew, but could not tell him, that he could have done no better thing for himself. Had he, any time these ten years, asked her to marry him, she would have replied quietly, ‘Very well; when?’ He had never thought of it …
‘Yours is the real work,’ she continued quietly. ‘Without you we jackals couldn’t exist. You and a few like you hold everything upon your shoulders.’
For a minute there was a silence. Then it occurred to Oleron that this was common vulgar grumbling. It was not hi
s habit. Suddenly he rose and began to stack cups and plates on the tray.
‘Sorry you catch me like this, Elsie,’ he said, with a little laugh … ‘No, I’ll take them out; then we’ll go for a walk, if you like …’
He carried out the tray, and then began to show Miss Bengough round his flat. She made few comments. In the kitchen she asked what an old faded square of reddish frieze was, that Mrs Barrett used as a cushion for her wooden chair.
‘That? I should be glad if you could tell me what it is,’ Oleron replied as he unfolded the bag and related the story of its finding in the window-seat.
‘I think I know what it is,’ said Miss Bengough. ‘It’s been used to wrap up a harp before putting it into its case.’
‘By Jove, that’s probably just what it was,’ said Oleron. ‘I could make neither head nor tail of it …’
They finished the tour of the flat, and returned to the sitting-room.
‘And who lives in the rest of the house?’ Miss Bengough asked.
‘I dare say a tramp sleeps in the cellar occasionally. Nobody else.’
‘Hm! … Well, I’ll tell you what I think about it, if you like.’
‘I should like.’
‘You’ll never work here.’
‘Oh?’ said Oleron quickly. ‘Why not?’
‘You’ll never finish Romilly here. Why, I don’t know, but you won’t. I know it. You’ll have to leave before you get on with that book.’
He mused for a moment, and then said:
‘Isn’t that a little – prejudiced, Elsie?’
‘Perfectly ridiculous. As an argument it hasn’t a leg to stand on. But there it is,’ she replied, her mouth once more full of the large-headed hat pins.
Oleron was reaching down his hat and coat. He laughed.
‘I can only hope you’re entirely wrong,’ he said, ‘for I shall be in a serious mess if Romilly isn’t out in the autumn.’
4
As Oleron sat by his fire that evening, pondering Miss Bengough’s prognostication that difficulties awaited him in his work, he came to the conclusion that it would have been far better had she kept her beliefs to herself. No man does a thing better for having his confidence damped at the outset, and to speak of difficulties is in a sense to make them. Speech itself becomes a deterrent act, to which other discouragements accrete until the very event of which warning is given is as likely as not to come to pass. He heartily confounded her. An influence hostile to the completion of Romilly had been born.
And in some illogical, dogmatic way women seem to have, she had attached this antagonistic influence to his new abode. Was ever anything so absurd! ‘You’ll never finish Romilly here.’ … Why not? Was this her idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down to indolence and dropping out of the race? The place was well enough – it was entirely charming, for that matter – but it was not so demoralising as all that! No; Elsie had missed the mark that time …
He moved his chair to look round the room that smiled, positively smiled, in the firelight. He too smiled, as if pity was to be entertained for a maligned apartment. Even that slight lack of robust colour he had remarked was not noticeable in the soft glow. The drawn chintz curtains – they had a flowered and trellised pattern, with baskets and oaten pipes – fell in long quiet folds to the window-seats; the rows of bindings in old bookcases took the light richly; the last trace of sallowness had gone with the daylight; and, if the truth must be told, it had been Elsie herself who had seemed a little out of the picture.
That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it. Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her, marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat was characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron inclined to the austere in taste …
Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared that afternoon – large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at the time, and that unconsciously his attitude, even while she had been there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so …
Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent weeks and weeks of afternoons – she, the good chum, on whose help he would have counted had all the rest of the world failed him – she, whose loyalty to him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath in her – Elsie to be even in thought dissected thus! He was an ingrate and a cad …
Had she been there in that moment he would have abased himself before her.
For ten minutes and more he sat, still gazing into the fire, with that humiliating red fading slowly from his cheeks. All was still within and without, save for a tiny musical tinkling that came from his kitchen – the dripping of water from an imperfectly turned-off tap into the vessel beneath it. Mechanically he began to beat with his finger to the faintly heard falling of the drops; the tiny regular movement seemed to hasten that shameful withdrawal from his face. He grew cool once more; and when he resumed his meditation he was all unconscious that he took it up again at the same point …
It was not only her florid superfluity of build that he had approached in the attitude of criticism; he was conscious also of the wide differences between her mind and his own. He felt no thankfulness that up to a certain point their natures had ever run companionably side by side; he was now full of questions beyond that point. Their intellects diverged; there was no denying it; and, looking back, he was inclined to doubt whether there had been any real coincidence. True, he had read his writings to her and she had appeared to speak comprehendingly and to the point; but what can a man do who, having assumed that another sees as he does, is suddenly brought up sharp by something that falsifies and discredits all that has gone before? He doubted all now … It did for a moment occur to him that the man who demands of a friend more than can be given to him is in danger of losing that friend, but he put the thought aside.
Again he ceased to think, and again moved his finger to the distant dripping of the tap …
And now (he resumed by and by), if these things were true of Elsie Bengough, they were also true of the creation of which she was the prototype – Romilly Bishop. And since he could say of Romilly what for very shame he could not say of Elsie, he gave his thoughts rein. He did so in that smiling, fire-lighted room, to the accompaniment of the faintly heard tap.
There was no longer any doubt about it; he hated the central character of his novel. Even as he had described her physically she overpowered the senses; she was coarse-fibred, over-coloured, rank. It became true the moment he formulated his thought; Gulliver had described the Brobdingnagian maids-of-honour thus: and mentally and spiritually she corresponded – was unsensitive, limited, common. The model (he closed his eyes for a moment) – the model stuck out through fifteen vulgar and blatant chapters to such a pitch that, without seeing the reason, he had been unable to begin the sixteenth. He marvelled that it had only just dawned upon him.
And this was to have been his Beatrice, his vision! As Elsie she was to have gone into the furnace of his art, and she was to have come out the Woman all men desire! Her thoughts were to have been culled from his own finest, her
form from his dearest dreams, and her setting wherever he could find one fit for her worth. He had brooded long before making the attempt; then one day he had felt her stir within him as a mother feels a quickening, and he had begun to write; and so he had added chapter to chapter …
And those fifteen sodden chapters were what he had produced!
Again he sat, softly moving his finger …
Then he bestirred himself.
She must go, all fifteen chapters of her. That was settled. For what was to take her place his mind was a blank; but one thing at a time; a man is not excused from taking the wrong course because the right one is not immediately revealed to him. Better would come if it was to come; in the meantime –
He rose, fetched the fifteen chapters, and read them over before he should drop them into the fire.
But instead of putting them into the fire he let them fall from his hand. He became conscious of the dripping of the tap again. It had a tinkling gamut of four or five notes, on which it rang irregular changes, and it was foolishly sweet and dulcimer-like. In his mind Oleron could see the gathering of each drop, its little tremble on the lip of the tap, and the tiny percussion of its fall, ‘Plink – plunk’, minimised almost to inaudibility. Following the lowest note there seemed to be a brief phrase, irregularly repeated; and presently Oleron found himself waiting for the recurrence of this phrase. It was quite pretty …
But it did not conduce to wakefulness, and Oleron dozed over his fire.
When he awoke again the fire had burned low and the flames of the candles were licking the rims of the Sheffield sticks. Sluggishly he rose, yawned, went his nightly round of door-locks and window-fastenings, and passed into his bedroom. Soon he slept soundly.
But a curious little sequel followed on the morrow. Mrs Barrett usually tapped, not at his door, but at the wooden wall beyond which lay Oleron’s bed; and then Oleron rose, put on his dressing-gown, and admitted her. He was not conscious that as he did so that morning he hummed an air; but Mrs Barrett lingered with her hand on the door-knob and her face a little averted and smiling.