There happened to be a room to let on the same floor as Richard's
own. The rent was only five shillings per week, and he arranged to
take it and use it as a bedroom, transforming the other and larger
room into a study. Mrs. Rowbotham was asked to remove all her tables,
chairs, carpets, pictures, ornaments, and accessories from both
rooms, as he proposed to furnish them entirely anew at his own cost.
This did not indicate that a sudden increase of revenue had, as once
on a previous occasion, engendered in him a propensity to squander.
On the contrary, his determination to live economically was well
established, and he hoped to save a hundred pounds per annum with
ease. But the influence of an æsthetic environment upon his literary
work would, he argued, probably be valuable enough to justify the
moderate expenditure involved, and so all the leisure of the last
days of the year was given to the realisation of certain theories in
regard to the furnishing of a study and a bedroom. Unfortunately the
time at his disposal was very limited--- was it not essential that
the place should be set in order by the 31st of December, that work
might commence on the 1st of January?--but he did not spare himself,
and the result, when he contemplated it on New Year's Eve, filled him
with pleasure and pride. He felt that he could write worthily in that
study, with its four autotype reproductions of celebrated pictures
on the self-coloured walls, its square of Indian carpet over Indian
matting, its long, low bookshelves, its quaint table with the elm
top, its plain rush-bottomed chairs, and its broad luxurious divan.
He marvelled that he had contrived so long to exist in the room as it
was before, and complacently attributed his ill-success as a writer to
the lack of harmonious surroundings. By the last post arrived a New
Year's card from Mrs. Clayton Vernon. Twelve months ago she had sent a
similar kind token of remembrance, and he had ignored it; in the summer
she had written inviting him to spend a few days at Bursley, and he
had somewhat too briefly asked to be excused. To-night, however, he
went out, bought a New Year's card, and despatched it to her at once.
He flowed over with benevolence, viewing the world through the rosy
spectacles of high resolve. Mrs. Clayton Vernon was an excellent woman,
and he would prove to her and to Bursley that they had not estimated
too highly the possibilities of Richard Larch. He was, in truth,
prodigiously uplifted. The old sense of absolute power over himself
for good or evil returned. A consciousness of exceptional ability
possessed him. The future, splendid in dreams, was wholly his; and yet
again--perhaps more thoroughly than ever before--the ineffectual past
was effaced. To-morrow was the New Year, and to-morrow the new heaven
and the new earth were to begin.
He had decided to write a novel. Having failed in short stories and in
essays, it seemed to him likely that the novel, a form which he had
not so far seriously attempted, might suit his idiosyncrasy better. He
had once sketched out the plot of a short novel, a tale of adventure
in modern London, and on examination this struck him as ingenious and
promising. Moreover, it would appeal--like Stevenson's "New Arabian
Nights," which in Richard's mind it distantly resembled--both to the
general and to the literary public. He determined to write five hundred
words of it a day, five days a week; at this rate of progress he
calculated that the book would be finished in four months; allowing two
months further for revision, it ought to be ready for a publisher at
the end of June.
He drew his chair up to the blazing fire, and looked down the vista of
those long, lamplit evenings during which the novel was to grow under
his hands. How different he from the average clerk, who with similar
opportunities was content to fritter away those hours which would
lead himself, perhaps, to fame! He thought of Adeline, and smiled.
What, after all, did such as he want with women? He was in a position
to marry, and if he met a clever girl of sympathetic temperament, he
emphatically would marry (it did not occur to him to add the clause,
"Provided she will have me"); but otherwise he would wait. He could
afford to wait,--to wait till he had made a reputation, and half a
score of women, elegant and refined, were only too willing to envelop
him in an atmosphere of adoration.
* * * * *
It was part of his plan for economy to dine always at the Crabtree,
where one shilling was the price of an elaborate repast, and he went
there on New Year's Day. As he walked up Charing Cross Road, his
thoughts turned naturally to Miss Roberts. Would she be as cordial
as when he had met her on the omnibus, or would she wear the polite
mask of the cashier, treating him merely as a frequenter of the
establishment? She was engaged when he entered the dining-room, but she
noticed him and nodded. He looked towards her several times during his
meal, and once her eyes caught his and she smiled, not withdrawing
them for a few moments; then she bent over her account book.
His fellow-diners seemed curiously to have degenerated, to have grown
still narrower in their sympathies, still more careless in their
eating, still more peculiar or shabbier in their dress. The young women
of masculine aspect set their elbows on the table more uncompromisingly
than ever, and the young men with soiled wristbands or no wristbands
at all were more than ever tedious in their murmured conversations. It
was, indeed, a bizarre company that surrounded him! Then he reflected
that these people had not altered. The change was in himself. He had
outgrown them; he surveyed them now as from a tower. He was a man with
a future, using this restaurant because it suited him temporarily to
do so, while they would use it till the end, never deviating, never
leaving the rut.
"So you have come at last!" Miss Roberts said to him when he presented
his check. "I was beginning to think you had deserted us."
"But it's barely a week since I saw you," he protested. "Let me wish
you a happy New Year."
"The same to you." She flushed a little, and then: "What do you think
of our new decorations? Aren't they pretty?"
He praised them perfunctorily, even without glancing round. His eyes
were on her face. He remembered the reiterated insinuations of Jenkins,
and wondered whether they had any ground of fact.
"By the way, has Jenkins been here to-day?" he inquired, by way of
introducing the name.
"Is that the young man who used to come with you sometimes? No."
There was no trace of self-consciousness in her bearing, and Richard
resolved to handle Jenkins with severity. Another customer approached
the pay-desk.
"Well, good afternoon." He lingered.
"Good afternoon." Her gaze rested on him softly. "I suppose you'll be
here again _some_ time." She spoke low, so that the other customer
should not hear.
"I'm coming every day now, I think," he answered in the same tone, with
a smothered laugh. "Ta-ta."
That night at half-past seven he began his novel. The opening chapter
was introductory, and the words came without much effort. This being
only a draft, there was no need for polish; so that when a sentence
refused to run smoothly at the first trial, he was content to make it
grammatical and leave it. He seemed to have been working for hours when
a desire took him to count up what was already written. Six hundred
words! He sighed the sigh of satisfaction, and looked at his watch,
to find that it was exactly half-past eight. The discovery somewhat
damped his felicity. He began to doubt whether stuff composed at the
rate of ten words a minute could have any real value. Pooh! Sometimes
one wrote quickly, and sometimes slowly. The number of minutes occupied
was no index of quality. Should he continue writing? Yes, he would....
No.... Why should he? He had performed the task self-allotted for the
day, and more; and now he was entitled to rest. True, the actual time
of labour had been very short; but then, another day the same amount of
work might consume three or four hours. He put away his writing-things,
and searched about for something to read, finally lighting on "Paradise
Lost." But "Paradise Lost" wanted actuality. He laid it aside. Was
there any valid reason why he should not conclude the evening at the
theatre? None. The frost had returned with power, and the reverberation
of the streets sounded invitingly through his curtained windows. He
went out, and walked briskly up Park Side. At Hyde Park Corner he
jumped on an omnibus.
It was the first night of a new ballet at the Ottoman. "Standing-room
only," said the man at the ticket-office. "All right," said Richard,
and, entering, was greeted with soft music, which came to him like a
fitful zephyr over a sea of heads.