One Saturday afternoon towards the end of February, he suddenly decided
to read through so much of the draft novel as was written; hitherto
he had avoided any sort of revision. The resolve to accomplish five
hundred words a day had been kept indifferently well, and the total
stood at about fourteen thousand. As he wrote a very bold hand, the
sheets covered made quite a respectable pile. The mere bulk of them
cajoled him, in spite of certain misgivings, into an optimistic
surmise as to their literary quality. Never before had he written so
much upon one theme, and were the writing good or bad, he was, for a
few moments, proud of his achievement. The mischief lay in the fact
that week by week he had exercised less and still less care over
the work. The phrase, "Anything will do for a draft," had come to
be uttered with increasing frequency as an excuse for laxities of
style and construction. "I will make that right in the revision,"
he had reassured himself, and had gone negligently forward, leaving
innumerable crudities in the wake of his hurrying pen. During the last
few days he had written scarcely anything, and perhaps it was a hope
of stimulating a drooping inspiration by the complacent survey of work
actually done that tempted him to this hazardous perusal.
He whistled as he took up the manuscript, as a boy whistles when going
into a dark cellar. The first three pages were read punctiliously,
every word of them, but soon he grew hasty, rushing to the next
paragraph ere the previous one was grasped; then he began shamelessly
to skip; and then he stopped, and his heart seemed to stop also.
The lack of homogeneity, of sequence, of dramatic quality, of human
interest; the loose syntax; and the unrelieved mediocrity of it all,
horrified him. The thing was dry bones, a fiasco. The certainty that
he had once more failed swept over him like a cold, green wave of the
sea, and he had a physical feeling of sickness in the stomach.... It
was with much ado that he refrained from putting the whole manuscript
upon the fire, and crushing it venomously into the flames with a
poker. Then he steadied himself. His self-confidence was going, almost
gone; he must contrive to recover it, and he sought for a way. (Where
were now the rash exultations of the New Year?) It was impossible
that his work should be irredeemably bad. He remembered having read
somewhere that the difference between a fine and a worthless novel was
often a difference of elaboration simply. A conscientious re-writing,
therefore, might probably bring about a surprising amelioration. He
must immediately make the experiment. But he had long since solemnly
vowed not to commence the second writing till the draft was done;
the moral value of finishing even the draft had then seemed to him
priceless. No matter! Under stress of grievous necessity, that oath
must be forsworn. No other course could save him from collapse.
* * * * *
He went out into the streets. The weather, fine and bright, suggested
the earliest infancy of spring, and Piccadilly was full of all classes
and all ages of women. There were regiments of men, too, but the gay
and endless stream of women obsessed him. He saw them sitting in
hansoms and private carriages and on the tops of omnibuses, niched in
high windows, shining in obscurity of shops, treading the pavements
with fairy step, either unattended or by the side of foolish,
unappreciative males. Every man in London seemed to have the right to
a share of some woman's companionship, except himself. As for those
men who walked alone, they had sweethearts somewhere, or mothers and
sisters, or they were married and even now on the way to wife and
hearth. Only he was set apart.
A light descended upon him that afternoon. The average man and the
average woman being constantly thrown into each other's society, custom
has staled for them the exquisite privilege of such intercourse. The
rustic cannot share the townsman's enthusiasm for rural scenery; he
sees no matter for ecstasy in the view from his cottage door; and in
the same way the average man and the average woman dine together, talk
together, walk together, and know not how richly they are therein
blessed. But with solitaries like Richard it is different. Debarred
from fellowship with the opposite sex by circumstances and an innate
diffidence which makes the control of circumstance impossible, their
starved sensibilities acquire certain morbid tenderness. (Doubtless the
rustic discerns morbidity in the attitude of the townsman towards the
view from his cottage door.) Richard grasped this. In a luminous moment
of self-revelation, he was able to trace the growth of the malady.
From its first vague and fugitive symptoms, it had so grown that now,
on seeing an attractive woman, he could not be content to say, "What
an attractive woman!" and have done with it, but he needs must build a
house, furnish a room in the house, light a fire in the room, place
a low chair by the fire, put the woman in the chair, with a welcoming
smile on her upturned lips--and imagine that she was his wife. And it
was not only attractive women that laid the spell upon him. The sight
of any living creature in petticoats was liable to set his hysterical
fancy in motion. Every woman he met was Woman.... Of the millions of
women in London, why was he not permitted to know a few? Why was he
entirely cut off? There they were: their silk skirts brushed him as
they passed; they thanked him for little services in public vehicles;
they ministered to him in restaurants; they sang to him at concerts,
danced for him at theatres; touched his existence at every side--and
yet they were remoter than the stars, unattainable as the moon.... He
rebelled. He sank in despair, and rose to frenzies of anger. Then he
was a pathetic figure, and extended to himself his own pity, smiling
sardonically at fate. Fate was the harder to bear because he was
convinced that, at the heart of him, he was essentially a woman's man.
None could enjoy the feminine atmosphere more keenly, more artistically
than he. Other men, who had those delicious rights for which he longed
in vain, assessed them meanly, or even scorned them.... He looked back
with profound regret to his friendship with Adeline. He dreamt that
she had returned, that he had fallen in love with her and married her,
that her ambitions were leading him forward to success. Ah! Under the
incentive of a woman's eyes, of what tremendous efforts is a clever man
not capable, and deprived of it to what deeps of stagnations will he
not descend! Then he awoke again to the fact that he knew no woman in
London.
Yes, he knew one, and his thoughts began to play round her caressingly,
idealising and ennobling her. She only gave him his change daily at
the Crabtree, but he knew her; there existed between them a kind of
intimacy. She was a plain girl, possessing few attractions, except the
supreme one of being a woman. She was below him in station; but had
she not her refinements? Though she could not enter into his mental
or emotional life, did she not exhale for him a certain gracious
influence? His heart went forth to her. Her flirtations with Mr. Aked,
her alleged dalliance with Jenkins? Trifles, nothings! She had told him
that she lived with her mother and father and a younger brother, and on
more than one occasion she had mentioned the Wesleyan chapel; he had
gathered that the whole family was religious. In theory he detested
religious women, and yet--religion in a woman ... what was it? He
answered the question with a man's easy laugh. And if her temperament
was somewhat lymphatic, he divined that, once roused, she was capable
of the most passionate feeling. He had always had a predilection for
the sleeping-volcano species of woman.