Guy, as soon as he had sent off the poems to a publisher, was much less
violently driven by the stress of love, which latterly had urged him
along so wayward a course. He began to acquire a perspective and to lose
some of that desperately clinging reliance upon present joys. The need
of battling against an uncertain future had brought him to the pitch of
madness at the thought of the hours of Pauline's company that must be
wasted; but now when to his sanguine hopes marriage presented itself as
at last within sight, sometimes even seeming as close as the Fall of
this new year, he was anxious to set Pauline upon more tranquil waters,
lest she too should like himself be the prey of wild imaginations that
might destroy utterly one untempered by any except the gentler emotions
of a secluded life. Her mother and sisters, whom he had come to regard
as hostile interpreters of convention, took on again their old features
of kindliness and grace; and he was able to see without jealous torments
how reasonable their attitude had been throughout; nay, more than
reasonable, how unworldly and noble-hearted it had been in confiding
Pauline to the care of one who had so few pretensions to deserve her. He
upbraided himself for having by his selfishness involved Pauline in the
complexities of regrets for having done something against her judgment;
and in this dreary rain of January, free from the burden of uncompleted
labor, he now felt a more light-hearted assurance than he had known
since the beginning of their love.
Bills came in by every post, but their ability to vex him had vanished
in the promise his manuscript gave of a speedy defeat of all material
difficulties. The reaction from the strain of decking his poems with the
final touches that were to precede the trial of public judgment gave
place to dreams. A dozen times Guy followed the manuscript step by step
of its journey from the moment the insentient mail-cart carried it away
from Wychford to the moment when Mr. William Worrall threw a first
casual glance to where it lay waiting for his perusal on the desk in the
Covent Garden office. Guy saw the office-boy send off the formal
post-card of acknowledgment that he had already received; and in his
dream he rather pitied the youth for his unconsciousness of what a
treasure he was acknowledging merely in the ordinary routine of a
morning's work. Perhaps the packet would lie unopened for two or three
days--in fact, probably Mr. Worrall might not yet have resumed work, as
they say, after a short Christmas vacation. Moreover, when he came back
to business, although at Guy's request for sponsors the poems had been
vouched for by one or two reputed friends of the publisher with whom he
was acquainted; he would no doubt still be inclined to postpone their
examination. Then one morning he would almost inadvertently cut the
string and glance idly at a page, and then....
At this point the author's mental visions varied. Sometimes Worrall
would be so deeply transfixed by the revelation of a new planet swimming
into ken that he would sit spellbound at his own good fortune, not
emerging from a trance of delight until he sent a telegram inviting the
poet to come post-haste to town and discuss terms. In other dreams the
publisher would distrust his own judgment and take the manuscript under
his arm to a critic of taste, anxiously watching his face and, as an
expression of admiration gradually diffused itself, knowing that his own
wild surmise had been true. There were many other variations of the
first reception of the poems, but they all ended in the expenditure of
sixpence on a telegram. Here the dream would amplify itself; and proofs,
binding, paper, danced before Guy's vision; while soon afterwards the
first reviews were coming in. At this stage the poet's triumph assumed a
hundred shapes and diversities, and ultimately he could never decide
between a leader on his work in _The Times_ headed A NEW GENIUS or an
eulogy on the principal page of _The Daily Mail_ that galloped neck and
neck for a column alongside one of The Letters of an Englishman. The
former would bestow the greater honor; the latter would be more
profitable; therefore in moments of unbridled optimism he was apt to
allot both proclamations to his fortune. With such an inauguration of
fame the rest was easy dreaming. His father would take a train to
Shipcot on the same morning; if he read _The Times_ at breakfast he
would catch the eleven o'clock from Galton and, traveling by way of
Basingstoke, reach Shipcot by half past two. Practically one might dream
that before tea he would have settled L300 a year on his son, so that
the pleasant news could be announced to the Rectory that very afternoon.
In that case he and Pauline could be married in April; and actually on
her twenty-first birthday she would be his wife. They would not go to
the Campagna this year, because these bills must be paid, unless his
father, in an access of pride due to his having bought several more
eulogies at bookstalls along the line, offered to pay all debts up to
the day of his wedding; in which case they could go to the Campagna:
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?
They would drive out from the city along the Appian Way and turn aside
to sit among the ghostliness of innumerable grasses in those primal
fields, the air of which would be full of the feathery seeds and the dry
scents of that onrushing Summer. There would be no thought of time and
no need for words; there would merely be the two of them on a morn of
Rome and May. And later in the warm afternoon they would drive home,
coming back to the city's heart to eat their dinner within sound of the
Roman fountains. Then all the night-time she would be his, not his in
frightened gasps as when wintry England was forbidding all joy to their
youth, but his endlessly, utterly, gloriously. They would travel farther
south and perhaps come to that Parthenopean shore calling to him still
now from the few days he had spent upon its silver heights and beside
its azure waters. In his dream Pauline was leaning on his shoulder
beneath an Aleppo pine, at the cliff's edge--Pauline, whose alien
freshness would bring a thought of England to sigh through its boughs,
and a cooler world to the aromatic drought. Theirs should be sirenian
moons and dawns, and life would be this dream's perfect fulfilment. In
what loggia, firefly-haunted, would he hold her? The desire with which
the picture flamed upon his imagination was almost intolerable, and here
he always brought her back to Plashers Mead on a June dusk. Then she
could be conjured in this house, summoned in spirit here to this very
room; and if they had loved Italy, how they would love England as they
walked across their meadows, husband and wife! With such visions Guy set
on fire each January night that floated frorely into his bedroom, until
one morning a letter arrived from Mr. William Worrall that made his
fingers tremble as he broke the envelope and read the news:
217 COVENT GARDEN, W.C.,
_January 6th_.
DEAR SIR,--I have looked at the poems you were kind enough to send
for my consideration, and I shall be happy to hand them to a
reader for his opinion. The reader's fee is one guinea. Should his
opinion be favorable, I shall be glad to discuss terms with you.
Yours faithfully,
WILLIAM WORRALL.
Guy threw the letter down in a rage. He would almost have preferred a
flat refusal to this request for money to enable some jaded hack to read
his poems. The proposal appeared merely insolent, and he wrote curtly to
Mr. William Worrall to demand the immediate return of his manuscript.
But after all, if Worrall did not accept his work, who would? Money was
an ulterior consideration when the great object was to receive such
unanimous approval as would justify the apparent waste of time in which
he had been indulging. The moment his father acknowledged the right he
had to be confident, he in turn would try to show by following his
father's advice that he was not the wrong-headed idler of his
reputation. Perhaps he would send the guinea to Worrall. He tore up his
first letter and wrote another in which a cheque was inclosed. Then he
began to add up the counterfoils of his cheque-book, a depressing
operation that displayed an imminent financial crisis. He had overdrawn
L5 last quarter. That left L32 10_s_. of the money paid in on December
21st. The quarter's rent was L4 10_s_. That left L28. Miss Peasey's
wages were in arrears, and he must pay her L4 10_s_. on the fifteenth of
this month. That would leave L23 10_s_., and he must knock off 7_s_.
6_d_. for Bob's license. About L3 had gone at Christmas and there were
the books still to pay. Twenty pounds was not much for current expenses
until next Lady Day. However, he decided that he could manage in
Wychford, if he did not have to pay out money for Oxford debts, the
creditors of which were pressing him harder each week.