Thus began the second book of David's life, where so many books of
life have begun, and where so many are fated to end--in a garret of a
lodging-house. Now, too, began his acquaintance with larger London,
no longer the capital of concerts and cafés to him, but the London of
grim, inhospitable streets, of dull-faced, tramping crowds, the London
that the millions know, sordid and unsmiling--cheerful only for a
consideration, a niggard even of its light. There were many evenings
when he could not write--in the first months many evenings when he did
not attempt to write--and, drifting from Soho, he would rove about the
city till late, rove west and east, tempted to unfamiliar quarters
by the promise of their names, storing impressions. He supped at
coffee-stalls and heard the vagrants talk, and rose at dawn to breakfast
among the workers and the wastrels in the five-o'clock public-houses
near the markets. On Sundays when it did not rain, and he didn't go
to see his mother, he explored the parks, or wandered beyond the
stretching tentacles of London in woodland which the monster had not
yet absorbed. He journeyed among holiday-makers who were boisterous,
but never gay, who shouted, but who never laughed. The outskirts that
he found were beautiful, and he yearned to read the hearts of these
excursionists who, whether they covered the miles in dreary silence, or
shrieked the burden of a cockney song, had always the same vacant gaze,
the same sad, hopeless air. He saw that look on everyone, in varying
degrees--the London look, bred of the dismal climate and the gloomy
streets; he thought that he would recognise a Londoner anywhere, by his
eyes. And when he returned, he noted how the fairness of England was
disfigured where Englishmen began to build.
The love of London which some men have felt, was never born in David.
He could not grow to love it though he tried. In time he came to
wonder if he was blind--if something was lacking in him--when he read
word-pictures of its "beauty," and knew that he found it execrable.
True, there were many nights when the river mesmerised him and he hung
rapt upon the bridges, but then the lamps shone only on the water, and
the spell lay in the vast suggestiveness of a great city that he did not
see.
Occasionally he went to the gallery of a theatre; more often he saved
the shilling and bought a book that he coveted. Because he realised that
he was not eating enough to feel very strong, he pawned his watch and
chain when he had been in Soho about six months. It was a severe pang
to him to part with what had been his father's present, even to part
with it temporarily, and only the knowledge that his father, if he could
advise, would bid him "pop it for all he could get," enabled him to make
the sacrifice. A week afterwards, however, his diet had dwindled to its
original proportions, and his library had much increased.
Meanwhile his manuscripts came back just as often as he enclosed a
stamped and directed envelope. The word "regrets" grew odious to him;
in the work of David Lee the word was seldom to be found, and he never
wrote it without reluctance. Nobody wanted his poetry, nobody thought
it worth printing. The rose-colour gradually faded from, his reveries;
at the end of a year the boastfulness of boyhood had passed. He began
to realise how stupendous was the task that he had approached so
confidently. To attack London with a pen! he felt as if he were throwing
sea-shells at a fortress. By degrees, too, he came to understand that
a poet must be either celebrated, or ridiculous; the pennies that he
spent in a news-room showed him that the poet in adversity appealed to
the national sense of humour every week.
He derived encouragement from reading the biographies of great writers
of the past--and was depressed when he scanned the reminiscences of
successful authors of the day, for these always seemed to have "arrived"
so gracefully. It surprised him to note that poverty and disdain had
been the portion of only those who were dead.
It happened on a morning in April, the event that he never forgot, a
morning when the sky across the chimney-pots was blue, and the sparrows
hopped in a strange, yellow light which the oldest bird on the slates
told them was called "sunshine." David woke up to find--not that he
was famous, but that his jug of hot water supported a communication by
which an editor offered him a guinea for a sonnet. And his behaviour
was less original than his verse. He burned to impart the news to the
drudge in curling-pins who brought in his tea and haddock, he wanted to
pat the heads of the children who were playing tip-cat in the roads.
In Soho it is never too early nor too late for the children who fill
the roads to play tip-cat. In Bloomsbury they incline to roller-skates;
in Bayswater---that happy hunting-ground of the organ-grinder and the
street-arab--they "Follow my leader," yelling; but the passion of Soho
is tip-cat. He bought a bunch of daffodils on his way to the office,
and stuck them on his desk. He was still at Panzetta's--his salary had
been raised ten shillings by this time--and the prospect of tendering
his resignation shone out to his eager eyes again. The clouds had hidden
it so long that he was dazzled. There was the gladness of summer in the
sunlight that slanted through the dusty windows; all the temptations of
the country lurked in the pennyworth of daffodils beside the ink-pot;
he panted to be in the open, free to loose the extravagance of joy that
swelled his heart.
"It's the sort of morning," he said in a burst to the accountant, who
sat opposite, "that makes you think it's hot out-of-doors and want to go
and pick poppies, and hear the rye rustle!"
The accountant lived at Ealing, and travelled by the same train as a
distinguished counsel every day. He often mentioned vaingloriously that
Sir Edward Jennings had nodded to him on the platform.
"Ah!" he rhapsodised. "With a carriage-and-pair to come and fetch you!"
David was a little less than nineteen when his first verses were
accepted; he was a little less than twenty when they were paid for.
Thus the thoughtfulness of the Editor provided him with two distinct
occasions for rejoicing. He sent several other sonnets to the journal,
and some of these were taken also, but a guinea is the professional
_Pons asinorum_, and it was a long time before he cashed a cheque for
any larger sum. The bright prospect of resigning the clerkship receded
from him like a will-o'-the-wisp, and by-and-by he even smiled at his
youthfulness, in remembering how happy that first acceptance of his work
had made him feel.
And still he wrote. Sometimes he sat writing poetry, in front of the
washhand-stand, until the lamp-flame waned and bobbed, and went out.
So grew the manuscripts which were to be submitted to the publishers.
Excepting the boarding-house, where Ownie reigned on in widowhood, he
visited no one; excepting Vivian, who made his way to the attic at
long intervals, no one visited him. Few among the millions in London
were more utterly alone than this young man who alternately hoped and
despaired, and, whether he was elated or despondent, had never an ear
to heed him, heard never a voice that said "Cheer up." Vivian and
Ownie were the only persons who ever inquired about his work, and to
a dejected man the inquiries of the uncongenial are worse than none
at all. No strangers could have been more foreign to each other than
were the half-brothers, although they had a myriad memories in common.
It is not time that enables people to understand one another, it is
temperament. The world is heavy with couples who have sat opposite each
other for forty years and are still tone deaf to each other's humour,
and stone blind to each other's moods; and a recent acquaintance may
say the right things to both. Vivian had encouraged poetry while he
thought it might pay; since it didn't pay, he explained that the proper
line of action was to deal in something else instead. There was nothing
unpractical about the son of the late Mr. Harris; he was the kind of
young fellow of whom it may be predicted, even while his pockets are
empty, that he will rise somehow, and throw a few of his scruples
overboard in the process. He was an occasional caller, but never a
companion.
And slowly there crept into David's life a dull resentment of the
solitude that had once been a relief, a longing for sympathy, for
tenderness--a sense of bitter oppression as he looked in the glass
and knew that he must never expect to find these things. And the face
of every girl became a glass to him, and he winced before it. When
his resources were low, he took his mid-day meal in a vegetarian
restaurant, a place with a faint distinctive smell, and a three-course
dinner for sixpence. One of the waitresses there was very pretty, and
all had arch glances and undertones for the regular customers who
cheated hunger with scones and "coffee," or some dish with an attractive
name and a strangely nasty taste. Only with David none was ever arch.
Once he summoned courage to say more to the pretty waitress than "Two
poached eggs, please," and the haughtiness of her eyebrows slew him
before she turned away. Often in the streets he saw a negro--black as
Elisha had been--and across the crowd the gaze of the aliens would
meet for a moment--drawn together by something deeper than curiosity.
But neither could lift his silk hat and say to the other, "We are both
damned, so let us be friends!" because the influence of civilisation
prevented their acting like that, although their skins were the wrong
colour.
Woman, impalpable, insistent, shared the garret with David now. And
sometimes she was fair, and sometimes she was dark, but always she
was beautiful; for at twenty the gift that man counts best in woman
is loveliness; and at thirty it is wit; and at forty it is a keen
appreciation of his own. From the dream-women who let him woo them,
David heard many odes. At first his visitors were cold--mere Beauties
from a hair-dresser's window--and he could only watch them timidly.
But by degrees he found his voice, and told them how empty the attic
had been before they came; and while he talked, the forms took flesh
and blood, the lips whispered love words back to him; they made him
confidences, and uttered sweet conceits, and then--Why then, the drudge
in curling-pins banged, with a rejected poem, and the room was bare
again.
The slim volume for the publishers grew slowly; some evil power of
daylight seemed to freeze the verse that he had left aglow, so often was
a night of exultation followed by an evening of dismay. A manuscript of
sad surprises. Yet at last it was finished, for even he could find no
more to alter.
Then its journeys began, and eventually it found a home; but it was
not treated kindly there, and it brought him little recognition, and
no money. He had scarcely realised the intensity of his prayers for it
till it failed; nor had he known what strength he derived from the hope
of fame until the hope sank. With the loss of faith in his work, the
feeling of desolation deepened. A passion of revolt possessed him as he
looked from the mirror to the future and saw himself perpetually alone.
Because his misery cried for expression, he picked up his pen again; but
though his interest in his art revived as time went by, the bitterness
was always in his soul. Even as the years passed, there grew within him
a hatred of his own person--a jealousy of every shop-boy who was kissed
by a servant-girl for love.