There is no suffering so severe as that which we perceive to be the
outcome of our own mistaken decision. Suffering caused by our own sin is
another matter; we feel in some measure that we deserve it. But to have
decided hastily, or too hopefully, or while some false view of the case
was presented to us, and then to find that the decision brings grievous
pain and sorrow, this is cruelly hard.
It was this consciousness of his own mistake which preyed upon
Frithiof’s mind as he tossed through those long solitary hours. Had he
only insisted on speaking to Blanche’s uncle at Balholm, or on at once
writing to her father, all might have been well—his father yet alive,
the bankruptcy averted, Blanche his own. Over and over in his mind he
revolved the things that might have happened but for that fatal
hopefulness which had proved his ruin. He could not conceive now why he
had not insisted on returning to England with Blanche. It seemed to him
incredible that he had stayed in Norway merely to celebrate his
twenty-first birthday, or that he had been persuaded not to return with
the Morgans because Mr. Morgan would be out of town till October. His
sanguine nature had betrayed him, just as his father had been betrayed
by his too great hopefulness as to the Iceland expedition. Certainly it
is true that sanguine people in particular have to buy their experience
by bitter pain and loss.
By the Saturday morning he was almost himself again as far as physical
strength was concerned, and his mind was healthy enough to turn
resolutely away from these useless broodings over the past, and to ask
with a certain amount of interest. “What is to be done next?” All is not
lost when we are able to ask ourselves that question; the mere asking
stimulates us to rise and be going, even though the direction we shall
take be utterly undecided.
When Miss Charlotte came to inquire after her patient, she found to her
surprise that he was up and dressed.
“What!” she exclaimed. “You are really well then?”
“Quite well, thank you,” he replied, in the rather cold tone of voice
which had lately become habitual to him. “Have you a newspaper in the
house that you would be so good as to lend me?”
“Certainly,” said Miss Charlotte, her face lighting up as she hastened
out of the room, returning in a minute with the special organ of the
religious party to which she belonged. “I think this might interest
you,” she began timidly.
“I don’t want to be interested,” said Frithiof dryly. “All I want is to
look through the advertisements. A thousand thanks; but I see this paper
is not quite what I need.”
“Are you sure that you know what you really need?” she said earnestly,
and with evident reference to a deeper subject.
Had she not been such a genuine little woman, he would have spoken the
dry retort, “Madame, I need money,” which trembled on his lips; but
there was no suspicion of cant about her, and he in spite of his
bitterness still retained much of his Norwegian courtesy.
“You see,” he said, smiling a little, “if I do not find work I can not
pay my rent, so I must lose no time in getting some situation.”
The word “rent” recalled her eldest sister to Miss Charlotte’s mind, and
she resolved to say no more just at present as to the other matters. She
brought him one of the daily papers, and with a little sigh of
disappointment removed the religious “weekly,” leaving Frithiof to his
depressing study of the column headed “Situations Vacant.”
Alas! how short it was compared to the one dedicated to “Situations
Wanted.”
There was an editor-reporter needed, who must be a “first-class
all-round man”; but Frithiof could not feel that he was deserving of
such epithets, and he could not even write shorthand. There was a
“gentleman needed for the canvassing and publishing department of a
weekly,” but he must be possessed not only of energy but of experience.
Agents were needed for steel pens, toilet soap, and boys’ clothes, but
no novices need apply. Even the advertisement for billiard hands was
qualified by the two crushing words, “experienced only.”
“A correspondence clerk wanted” made him look hopefully at the lines
which followed, but unluckily a knowledge of Portuguese was demanded as
well as of French and German; while the corn merchant who would receive
a gentleman’s son in an office of good position was prudent enough to
add the words, “No one need apply who is unable to pay substantial
premium.”
Out of the whole list there were only two situations for which he could
even inquire, and he soon found that for each of these there were
hundreds of applicants. At first his natural hopefulness reasserted
itself, and each morning he would set out briskly, resolving to leave no
stone unturned, but when days and weeks had passed by in the monotonous
search, his heart began to fail him; he used to start from the little
back street in Vauxhall doggedly, dull despair eating at his heart, and
a sickening, ever-present consciousness that he was only an
insignificant unit struggling to find standing room in a world where
selfishness and money-grubbing reigned supreme.
Each week brought him of course letters from Norway, his uncle sent him
letters of introduction to various London firms, but each letter brought
him only fresh disappointment. As the consul had told him, the market
was already overcrowded, and though very possibly he might have met with
work in the previous summer when all was well with him, no one seemed
inclined to befriend this son of a bankrupt, with his bitter tone and
proud bearing; the impression he gave every one was that he was an
Ishmaelite with his hand against every man, and it certainly did seem
that at present every man’s hand was against him.
People write so much about the dangers of success and prosperity, and
the hardening effects of wealth, that they sometimes forget the other
side of the picture. Failure is always supposed to make a man patient
and humble and good; it rarely does so, unless to begin with his spirit
has been wakened from sleep. The man whose faith has been a mere
conventionality, or the man who like Frithiof has professed to believe
in life, becomes inevitably bitter and hard when all things are against
him. It is just then when a man is hard and bitter, just then when
everything else has failed him, that the devil comes to the fore
offering pleasures which in happier times would have had no attraction.
At first certain aspects of London life had startled Frithiof; but he
speedily became accustomed to them; if he thought of them at all it was
with indifference rather than disgust. One day however, he passed with
seeming abruptness into a new state of mind. Sick with disappointment
after the failure of a rather promising scheme suggested to him by one
of the men to whom his uncle had written, he walked through the crowded
streets too hopeless and wretched even to notice the direction he had
taken, and with a miserable perception that his last good card was
played, and that all hope of success was over. His future was an
absolute blank, his present a keen distress, his past too bright in
contrast to bear thinking of.
After all, had he not been a fool to struggle so long against his fate?
Clearly every one was against him. He would fight no longer; he would
give up that notion—that high-flown, unpractical notion of paying off
his father’s debts. To gain an honest living was apparently impossible,
the world afforded him no facilities for that, but it afforded him
countless opportunities of leading another sort of life. Why should he
not take what he could get? Life was miserable and worthless enough, but
at least he might put an end to the hideous monotony of the search after
work, at least he might plunge into a phase of life which would have at
any rate the charm of novelty.
It was one of those autumn days when shadow and sun alternate quickly; a
gleam of sunshine now flooded the street with brightness. It seemed to
him that a gleam of light had also broken the dreariness of his life.
Possibly it might be a fleeting pleasure, but why should he not seize
upon it? His nature, however, was not one to be hurried thoughtlessly
into vice. If he sinned he would do so deliberately. He looked the two
lives fairly in the face now, and in his heart he knew which attracted
him most. The discovery startled him. “The pleasing veil which serves to
hide self from itself” was suddenly torn down, and he was seized with
the sort of terror which we most of us have experienced:
“As that bright moment’s unexpected glare
Shows us the best and worst of what we are.”
“Why not? why not?” urged the tempter. And the vague shrinking seemed to
grow less; nothing in heaven or earth seemed real to him; he felt that
nothing mattered a straw. As well that way as any other. Why not?
It was the critical moment of his life; just as in old pictures one sees
an angel and a devil struggling hard to turn the balance, so now it
seemed that his fate rested with the first influence he happened to come
across.
Why should he not say, “Evil, be thou my good,” once and for all, and
have done with a fruitless struggle? That was the thought which seethed
in his mind as he slowly made his way along the Strand, surely the least
likely street in London where one might expect that the good angel would
find a chance of turning the scale. The pushing crowd annoyed him; he
paused for a minute, adding another unit to the little cluster of men
which may always be seen before the window of a London picture-dealer.
He stopped less to look at the picture than for the sake of being still
and out of the hurrying tide. His eye wandered from landscape to
landscape with very faint interest until suddenly he caught sight of a
familiar view, which stirred his heart strangely. It was a picture of
the Romsdalshorn; he knew it in an instant, with its strange and
beautiful outline, rising straight and sheer up into a wintry blue sky.
A thousand recollections came thronging back upon him, all the details
of a holiday month spent in that very neighborhood with his father and
Sigrid and Swanhild. He tried to drag himself away, but he could not.
Sigrid’s face kept rising before him as if in protest against that “Why
not?” which still claimed a hearing within him.
“If she were here,” he thought to himself, “I might keep straight. But
that’s all over now, and I can’t bear this life any longer. I have tried
everything and have failed. And, after all, who cares? It’s the way of
the world. I shant be worse than thousand of others.”
Still the thought of Sigrid held him in check, the remembrance of her
clear blue eyes seemed to force him to go deeper down beneath the
surface of the sullen anger and disappointment which were goading him on
to an evil life. Was it after all quite true? Had he really tried
everything?
Two or three times during his wanderings he had thought of Roy Boniface,
and had wondered whether he should seek him out again; but in his
trouble he had shrunk from going to comparative strangers, and, as far
as business went, it was scarcely likely that Roy could help him.
Besides, of the rest of the family he knew nothing; for aught he knew
the father might be a vulgar, purse-proud tradesman—the last sort of man
to whom he could allow himself to be under any obligation.
Again came the horrible temptation, again that sort of terror of his own
nature. He turned once more to the picture of the Romsdalshorn; it
seemed to be the one thing which could witness to him of truth and
beauty and a life above the level of the beasts.
Very slowly and gradually he began to see things as they really were; he
saw that if he yielded to this temptation he could never again face
Sigrid with a clear conscience. He saw, too, that his only safeguard lay
in something which would take him out of himself. “I _will_ get work,”
he said, almost fiercely. “For Sigrid’s sake I’ll have one more try.”
And then all at once the evil imaginings faded, and there rose up
instead of them a picture of what might be in the future, of a home he
might make for Sigrid and Swanhild here in London, where he now roamed
about so wretchedly, of a life which should in every way be a contrast
to his present misery. But he felt, as thousands have felt before him,
that he was handicapped in the struggle by his loneliness, and perhaps
it was this consciousness more than any expectation of finding work
which made him swallow his pride and turn his steps toward Brixton.