Hypocritical reader, you draw your purity garments round you, you say,
"How very base"; but I say unto you remember how often you have longed,
if you are a soldier in Her Majesty's army, for war,--war that would
bring every form of sorrow to a million fellow-creatures, and you longed
for all this to happen, because it might bring your name into the
_Gazette_. Hypocritical reader, think not too hardly of me; hypocritical
reader, think what you like of me, your hypocrisy will alter nothing; in
telling you of my vices I am only telling you of your own; hypocritical
reader, in showing you my soul I am showing you your own; hypocritical
reader, exquisitely hypocritical reader, you are my brother, I salute
you.
Day passed over day, and my novel seemed an impossible task--defeat
glared at me from every corner of the room. My English was so bad, so
thin,--stupid colloquialisms out of joint with French idiom. I learnt
unusual words and stuck them up here and there; they did not mend the
style. Self-reliance had been lost in past failures; I was weighed down
on every side, but I struggled to bring the book somehow to a close.
Nothing mattered to me, but this one thing. To put an end to the
landlady's cheating, and to bind myself to remain at home, I entered
into an arrangement with her that she was to supply me with board and
lodgings for three pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon
Street temptations, I trudged home to eat a chop. I studied the servant
as one might an insect under a microscope. "What an admirable book she
would make, but what will the end be? if I only knew the end!"
I saw poor Miss L. nightly, on the stairs, and I never wearied of
talking to her of her hopes and ambitions, of the young man she admired,
and she used to ask me about my novel.
When my troubles lay too heavily upon me, I let her go up to her garret
without a word, and remained at the window wondering if I should ever
escape from Cecil Street, if I should ever be a light in that London,
long, low, misshapen, that dark monumented stream flowing through the
lean bridges. What if I were a light in this umber-coloured mass?
Happiness abides only in the natural affections--in a home and a sweet
wife. Would she whom I saw to-night marry me? How sweet she was in her
simple naturalness, the joys she has known have been slight and pure,
not violent and complex as mine. Ah, she is not for me, I am not fit for
her, I am too sullied for her lips. Were I to win her could I be
dutiful, true?...