New Grub Street Part 95

Marian sobbed.

'That's all I had to say,' concluded her father, his voice tremulous with self-compa.s.sion. 'I will only beg that there may be no further profitless discussion between us. This room is open to you, as always, and I see no reason why we should not converse on subjects disconnected with our personal differences.'

'Is there no remedy for cataract in its early stages?' asked Marian.

'None. You can read up the subject for yourself at the British Museum. I prefer not to speak of it.'

'Will you let me be what help to you I can?'

'For the present the best you can do is to establish a connection for yourself with editors. Your name will be an a.s.sistance to you. My advice is, that you send your "Harrington" article forthwith to Trenchard, writing him a note. If you desire my help in the suggestion of new subjects, I will do my best to be of use.'

Marian withdrew. She went to the sitting-room, where an ochreous daylight was beginning to diffuse itself and to render the lamp superfluous. With the dissipation of the fog rain had set in; its splashing upon the muddy pavement was audible.

Mrs Yule, still with a duster in her hand, sat on the sofa. Marian took a place beside her. They talked in low, broken tones, and wept together over their miseries.

CHAPTER x.x.xI. A RESCUE AND A SUMMONS

The chances are that you have neither understanding nor sympathy for men such as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen. They merely provoke you.

They seem to you inert, flabby, weakly envious, foolishly obstinate, impiously mutinous, and many other things. You are made angrily contemptuous by their failure to get on; why don't they bestir themselves, push and bustle, welcome kicks so long as halfpence follow, make place in the world's eye--in short, take a leaf from the book of Mr Jasper Milvain?

But try to imagine a personality wholly unfitted for the rough and tumble of the world's labour-market. From the familiar point of view these men were worthless; view them in possible relation to a humane order of Society, and they are admirable citizens. Nothing is easier than to condemn a type of character which is unequal to the coa.r.s.e demands of life as it suits the average man. These two were richly endowed with the kindly and the imaginative virtues; if fate threw them amid incongruous circ.u.mstances, is their endowment of less value? You scorn their pa.s.sivity; but it was their nature and their merit to be pa.s.sive.

Gifted with independent means, each of them would have taken quite a different aspect in your eyes. The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain.

It was very weak of Harold Biffen to come so near perishing of hunger as he did in the days when he was completing his novel. But he would have vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining food presented itself to him. He did not starve for the pleasure of the thing, I a.s.sure you. Pupils were difficult to get just now, and writing that he had sent to magazines had returned upon his hands. He p.a.w.ned such of his possessions as he could spare, and he reduced his meals to the minimum. Nor was he uncheerful in his cold garret and with his empty stomach, for 'Mr Bailey, Grocer,' drew steadily to an end.

He worked very slowly. The book would make perhaps two volumes of ordinary novel size, but he had laboured over it for many months, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set. Before sitting down to a chapter he planned it minutely in his mind; then he wrote a rough draft of it; then he elaborated the thing phrase by phrase. He had no thought of whether such toil would be recompensed in coin of the realm; nay, it was his conviction that, if with difficulty published, it could scarcely bring him money. The work must be significant, that was all he cared for. And he had no society of admiring friends to encourage him. Reardon understood the merit of the workmanship, but frankly owned that the book was repulsive to him.

To the public it would be worse than repulsive--tedious, utterly uninteresting. No matter; it drew to its end.

The day of its completion was made memorable by an event decidedly more exciting, even to the author.

At eight o'clock in the evening there remained half a page to be written. Biffen had already worked about nine hours, and on breaking off to appease his hunger he doubted whether to finish to-night or to postpone the last lines till tomorrow. The discovery that only a small crust of bread lay in the cupboard decided him to write no more; he would have to go out to purchase a loaf and that was disturbance.

But stay; had he enough money? He searched his pockets. Two pence and two farthings; no more.

You are probably not aware that at bakers' shops in the poor quarters the price of the half-quartern loaf varies sometimes from week to week.

At present, as Biffen knew, it was twopence three-farthings, a common figure. But Harold did not possess three farthings, only two.

Reflecting, he remembered to have pa.s.sed yesterday a shop where the bread was marked twopence halfpenny; it was a shop in a very obscure little street off Hampstead Road, some distance from Clipstone Street.

Thither he must repair. He had only his hat and a m.u.f.fler to put on, for again he was wearing his overcoat in default of the under one, and his ragged umbrella to take from the corner; so he went forth.

To his delight the twopence halfpenny announcement was still in the baker's window. He obtained a loaf wrapped it in the piece of paper he had brought--small bakers decline to supply paper for this purpose--and strode joyously homeward again.

Having eaten, he looked longingly at his ma.n.u.script. But half a page more. Should he not finish it to-night? The temptation was irresistible.

He sat down, wrought with unusual speed, and at half-past ten wrote with magnificent flourish 'The End.'

His fire was out and he had neither coals nor wood. But his feet were frozen into lifelessness. Impossible to go to bed like this; he must take another turn in the streets. It would suit his humour to ramble a while. Had it not been so late he would have gone to see Reardon, who expected the communication of this glorious news.

So again he locked his door. Half-way downstairs he stumbled over something or somebody in the dark.

'Who is that?' he cried.

The answer was a loud snore. Biffen went to the bottom of the house and called to the landlady.

'Mrs Willoughby! Who is asleep on the stairs?'

'Why, I 'spect it's Mr Briggs,' replied the woman, indulgently. 'Don't you mind him, Mr Biffen. There's no 'arm: he's only had a little too much. I'll go up an' make him go to bed as soon as I've got my 'ands clean.'

'The necessity for waiting till then isn't obvious,' remarked the realist with a chuckle, and went his way.

He walked at a sharp pace for more than an hour, and about midnight drew near to his own quarter again. He had just turned up by the Middles.e.x Hospital, and was at no great distance from Clipstone Street, when a yell and scamper caught his attention; a group of loafing blackguards on the opposite side of the way had suddenly broken up, and as they rushed off he heard the word 'Fire!' This was too common an occurrence to disturb his equanimity; he wondered absently in which street the fire might be, but trudged on without a thought of making investigation.

Repeated yells and rushes, however, a.s.sailed his apathy. Two women came tearing by him, and he shouted to them: 'Where is it?'

'In Clipstone Street, they say,' one screamed back.

He could no longer be unconcerned. If in his own street the conflagration might be in the very house he inhabited, and in that case---- He set off at a run. Ahead of him was a thickening throng, its position indicating the entrance to Clipstone Street. Soon he found his progress r.e.t.a.r.ded; he had to dodge this way and that, to force progress, to guard himself against overthrows by the torrent of ruffiandom which always breaks forth at the cry of fire. He could now smell the smoke, and all at once a black volume of it, bursting from upper windows, alarmed his sight. At once he was aware that, if not his own dwelling, it must be one of those on either side that was in flames. As yet no engine had arrived, and straggling policemen were only just beginning to make their way to the scene of uproar. By dint of violent effort Biffen moved forward yard by yard. A tongue of flame which suddenly illumined the fronts of the houses put an end to his doubt.

'Let me get past!' he shouted to the gaping and swaying ma.s.s of people in front of him. 'I live there! I must go upstairs to save something!'

His educated accent moved attention. Repeating the demand again and again he succeeded in getting forward, and at length was near enough to see that people were dragging articles of furniture out on to the pavement.

'That you, Mr Biffen?' cried someone to him.

He recognised the face of a fellow-lodger.

'Is it possible to get up to my room?' broke frantically from his lips.

'You'll never get up there. It's that--Briggs'--the epithet was alliterative--''as upset his lamp, and I 'ope he'll--well get roasted to death.'

Biffen leaped on to the threshold, and crashed against Mrs Willoughby, the landlady, who was carrying a huge bundle of household linen.

'I told you to look after that drunken brute;' he said to her. 'Can I get upstairs?'

'What do I care whether you can or not!' the woman shrieked. 'My G.o.d!

And all them new chairs as I bought--!'

He heard no more, but bounded over a confusion of obstacles, and in a moment was on the landing of the first storey. Here he encountered a man who had not lost his head, a stalwart mechanic engaged in slipping clothes on to two little children.

'If somebody don't drag that fellow Briggs down he'll be dead,' observed the man. 'He's layin' outside his door. I pulled him out, but I can't do no more for him.'

Smoke grew thick on the staircase. Burning was as yet confined to that front room on the second floor tenanted by Briggs the disastrous, but in all likelihood the ceiling was ablaze, and if so it would be all but impossible for Biffen to gain his own chamber, which was at the back on the floor above. No one was making an attempt to extinguish the fire; personal safety and the rescue of their possessions alone occupied the thoughts of such people as were still in the house. Desperate with the dread of losing his ma.n.u.script, his toil, his one hope, the realist scarcely stayed to listen to a warning that the fumes were impa.s.sable; with head bent he rushed up to the next landing. There lay Briggs, perchance already stifled, and through the open door Biffen had a horrible vision of furnace fury. To go yet higher would have been madness but for one encouragement: he knew that on his own storey was a ladder giving access to a trap-door, by which he might issue on to the roof, whence escape to the adjacent houses would be practicable. Again a leap forward!

In fact, not two minutes elapsed from his commencing the ascent of the stairs to the moment when, all but fainting, he thrust the key into his door and fell forward into purer air. Fell, for he was on his knees, and had begun to suffer from a sense of failing power, a sick whirling of the brain, a terror of hideous death. His ma.n.u.script was on the table, where he had left it after regarding and handling it with joyful self-congratulation; though it was pitch dark in the room, he could at once lay his hand on the heap of paper. Now he had it; now it was jammed tight under his left arm; now he was out again on the landing, in smoke more deadly than ever.

He said to himself: 'If I cannot instantly break out by the trap-door it's all over with me.' That the exit would open to a vigorous thrust he knew, having amused himself not long ago by going on to the roof. He touched the ladder, sprang upwards, and felt the trap above him. But he could not push it back. 'I'm a dead man,' flashed across his mind, 'and all for the sake of "Mr Bailey, Grocer."' A frenzied effort, the last of which his muscles were capable, and the door yielded. His head was now through the aperture, and though the smoke swept up about him, that gasp of cold air gave him strength to throw himself on the flat portion of the roof that he had reached.

So for a minute or two he lay. Then he was able to stand, to survey his position, and to walk along by the parapet. He looked down upon the surging and shouting crowd in Clipstone Street, but could see it only at intervals, owing to the smoke that rolled from the front windows below him.