Plashers Mead Part 41

Guy had given a farewell glance at Max Beerbohm's caricature.

"Very clever," the poet fervently agreed.

Guy left Mr. William Worrall's office and wandered dismally across Covent Garden, wondering where on earth he was going to be able to raise 30. He had intended to spend the night in town and look up some old friends, but, foreseeing now the inevitable question, "What are you doing?" he felt he had not the heart to explain that at present he was debating the possibility of spending 30 in order to produce a book of poems. All the people whom he would have been glad to see had held such high hopes of him at Oxford, had prophesied for his career such prosperity; and now when after fifteen months he emerged from his retirement it was but to pay a man to include him in the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets. The rain came down faster, and a creeping fog made more inhospitable the dusk of London. He thought of a quick train somewhere about five o'clock, and in a sudden longing to be back in the country and to sleep, however dark and frore the January night that stretched between them, nearer to Pauline than here in this city of drizzled fog, he took a cab to Paddington.

During the railway journey Guy contemplated various plans to raise the money he wanted. He knew that his father at the cost of a long letter would probably have given him the sum; but supposing a triumph lay before him, all the sweets of it would have been robbed by paternal help. Moreover, if the book were paid for thus, there would be a consequent suspicion of all favorable criticism; it would never seem a genuine book to his father, and the reviews would give him the impression of being the work of well-disposed amateurs or of personal friends. There was the alternative of borrowing the money from Michael Fane; and then as the train went clanging through the night Guy made up his mind to be under an obligation to n.o.body and to sacrifice all the rest of his books if necessary that this new book might be born.

When he was back at Plashers Mead his resolution did not weaken; coldly and unsentimentally he began to eviscerate the already mutilated library. At the end of his task he had stacked upon the floor five hundred volumes to be offered as a bargain to the bookseller who had bought the others. All that was left, indeed, were the cheapest and most ordinary editions of poets, one or two volumes of the greatest of all like Rabelais and Cervantes, and the eternally read and most companionable like Boswell and Gilbert White and Sir Thomas Browne. In the determination that had seized him he rejoiced in his bare shelves, so much exalted by the glories of abnegation that he began to despise himself in his former att.i.tude as a trifler among books and to say to himself, as he looked at the volumes which had survived this heartless clearance, that now he was set on the great fairway of literature without any temptation to diverge up the narrow streams of personal taste. The bookseller's a.s.sistant was not at all eager for the proffered bargain, and in the end Guy could only manage to obtain the 30 and not, as he had hoped, another 10 towards his debts. Nevertheless, he locked the cheque up in his desk with the satisfaction of a man who for the first time in his life earns money, and later on went across to tell Pauline the result of the visit to London.

There was a smell of frost in the air that afternoon, and the sharpness of the weather consorted well with Guy's mood, taking away the heavy sense of disappointment and giving him a sparkling hopefulness. He and Pauline went for a walk on Wychford down, and in the wintry cheer he would not allow her to be cast down at the loss of his books or to resent Worrall's reception of the poems.

"Everything is all right," he a.s.sured her. "The more we have to deny ourselves now, the greater will be my success when it comes. The law of compensation never fails. You and I are Davidsbundler marching against the Philistines. So be brave, my Pauline."

"I will try to be brave," she promised. "But it's harder for me because I'm doing nothing."

"Oh, nothing," said Guy. "Nothing except endow me with pa.s.sion and ambition, with consolation ... oh, nothing, you foolish one."

"Am I really all that to you?"

"Forward," he shouted, hurling his stick in front of him and dragging Pauline at the heels of Bob across turf that was already beginning to crackle in the frost. Pauline could not resist his confidence, and when at last they had to turn round and leave a smoky orange sunset, they came home glowing to the Rectory, both in the highest spirits. Guy wrote to the publisher that night and announced his intention of accepting the "offer," a word which he could not resist framing with inverted commas in case the sarcastic shaft might pierce Mr. Worrall's hard and conical head.

Sitting back in his chair and thinking over his poems, all sorts of verbal improvements suggested themselves to Guy; and he added a note asking for the ma.n.u.script to be sent back for a few corrections. He looked at his work with new eyes when it arrived, and bent with all the enthusiasm that fruition gave his pen upon reviewing each line for the hundredth time. He had enjoyed few things so well in his life as going to bed tired with the intense consideration of a rhyme and falling asleep in the ambition to reconsider it early next morning.

About ten days had pa.s.sed since Guy sold the second lot of books, and the poems were now as good as he could make them until print should reveal numbers of fresh faults. He hoped that Worrall would hurry on with the printing in order to allow him plenty of time for an even more severe scrutiny; and he wrote to suggest April as the month of publication, so anxious was he to have one specially bound copy to offer Pauline on her birthday.

On the very morning when the ma.n.u.script had been wrapped up and was ready to be sent off a disturbing letter arrived from Lampard, his favorite Oxford bookseller, to say that, having made a purchase of books two or three days ago, he had been surprised to find among them a large number of volumes with Mr. Hazlewood's name inscribed on the fly-leaves, for which Mr. Hazlewood had not yet paid him. He ventured to think it was only by an oversight that Mr. Hazlewood had not paid his long outstanding account before disposing of the books, and in short he was anxious to know what Mr. Hazlewood intended to do about it. His bill, 32 15_s_., was inclosed. Guy wrote back to say that it was indeed a most unaccountable oversight on his part, but that he hoped, in order to mark his sympathy with Mr. Lampard's point of view, to send him another cheque very shortly, reminding the bookseller at the same time that he had scarcely three weeks ago sent him 7 on account. Mr. Lampard, in his reply, observed very plainly that Guy's letter was no reply at all and threatened politely to make matters rather unpleasant if the bill were not paid in full instantly. Guy tried once more a letter full of bland promises, and received in response a letter from Mr. Lampard's solicitor. The 30 intended for Mr. Worrall had to be sacrificed, and even 2 15_s_. had to be taken from his current account. Savagely he tore the paper from the ma.n.u.script, wrapped it up again, and despatched it to another publisher. The bad luck of the Lampard business made him only the more resolute not to invoke aid from his father or any one else. He was a prey to a perverse determination to do everything himself; but it was gloomy news that he had to tell Pauline that afternoon, and she broke down and cried in her disappointment.

FEBRUARY

Pauline had been looking forward to the entrance of February with joyful remembrance of what last February had brought her; and that the anniversary of Guy's declaration of his love should be heralded by such a discomfiture of their plans was a shock. The renewal of his uncertainty about the fate of the poems destroyed the progress of a love that seemed to have come back to its old calm course, and brought back with all the added sharpness of absence the heartache and the apprehension. Pauline sat in the nursery window-seat and pondered dolefully the obstacles to happiness from which her mind, however hard it tried, could not escape. Most insistently of these obstacles Guy's debts haunted her, hara.s.sing and material responsibilities that in great uncouth battalions swept endlessly past. Even in the middle of the night she would wake gasping in an effort to escape from being stifled by their vastness pressing down upon her brain. The small presents Guy had given her burned through the darkness to reproach her: even the two rings goaded her for the extravagance they represented. It was useless for Guy to explain that his debts were a trifle, because the statement of a sum so large as 200 appalled her as much as if he had said 2,000.

She longed for a confidante whose sympathy she could exact for the incubus that possessed her lover; and fancying a disloyalty to him if she discussed his money affairs with her family, she could think of no one but Miss Verney to whom the burdensome secret might be intrusted.

"William had the same difficulty," sighed the old maid. "Really it seems as if money _is_ the root of all evil. Two hundred pounds, you say? Oh, dear, how uncomfortable he must feel, poor young man!"

"If only I could make some money, dear Miss Verney. But how could I?"

"I used to ask myself that very question," said the old maid. "I used to ask myself just that very identical question. But there was never any satisfactory answer."

"It seems so dreadful that he should have sold nearly all his books and still have debts," moaned Pauline. "It seems so cruel. Ought I to give him up?"

"Give him up?" repeated Miss Verney, her cheeks becoming dead white at the question. "Oh, my dear, I don't think it could be right for you to give him up on account of debts. Patience seems to me the only remedy for your troubles, patience and constancy."

"No, you've misunderstood me," cried Pauline. "I'm afraid that I hamper him, that I spoil his work. If I gave him up he would go away from Wychford and be free. Besides, perhaps then his father would pay his debts. Miss Verney, Mr. Hazlewood didn't like me, and I think Guy has quarreled with him over me. Oh, I'm the most miserable girl in England, and such a little time ago I was the happiest."

"Money," said Miss Verney, slowly and seeming to address her cats rather than Pauline. "The root of all evil! Yes, yes, it is. It's the root of all evil."

Pauline was a little heartened by Miss Verney's readiness to consider so seriously the monster that oppressed her thoughts; yet it was disquieting to regard the old maid, whose life had been ruined by money, and who all alone with cats stayed here in this small house at the top of Wychford town, the very image of unhappy love. It was disquieting to hear her reflections on the calamity of gold uttered like this to cats, and in a sudden dread of the future Pauline beheld herself talking in the same way a long time hence. She shivered and bade Miss Verney farewell; and now to all the other woes that stood behind her in the shadows was added the vision of herself mumbling to cats in February dusks of the dim years ahead.

The idea of herself as the figure of an unhappy tale of love grew continuously more definite, and once she spoke of her dread to Guy, who was very angry.

"How can you encourage such morbid notions?" he protested. "You really must cultivate the power to resist them. People go mad by indulging their depression as you're doing."

"Perhaps I shall go mad," she whispered.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake don't talk like that!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in angry alarm; and Pauline, realizing how she had frightened him, was sorry and went to the other extreme of high spirits.

"I thought we had agreed to wait ten years or twenty years, if necessary," said Guy. "And now after one year you are finding the strain too much. Why won't you have confidence in me? It's unfortunate about Worrall, I admit. But there are plenty of other publishers."

He mentioned names one after another, but to Pauline they were the names of stone idols that stared unresponsively at her lover's poems.

"If we had only done what Mother wanted and not seen so much of each other," she lamented.

Guy's disposal of her vain fears was without effect, for his eloquence could not contend with these deepening regrets; and as fast as he threw down the material obstacles to their happiness Pauline saw them maddeningly rise again in the path before them, visible shapes of ill omen, grotesquely irrepressible. Guy used to a.s.severate that when Spring was really come she would lose all these morbid fancies, and with his perpetual ascription to wintry gloom of all the presentiments of woe that flocked round their intercourse, Pauline did begin to fancy that when the trees were green he and she would rejoice as of old in their love. The knowledge that Spring could not linger always was the only consoling certainty she now possessed, and from the window-seat she greeted with a pa.s.sionate welcome each dusky azure minute that on these lengthening eves was robbed from night. The blackbirds sang to her now more personally, these somber-suited heralds who had never before seemed to proclaim so audaciously masterful Spring; and when the young moon cowered among the ragged clouds of a rainy golden sky and the last bird slipped like a shadow into the rhododendrons, such airs and whispers of April would steal through the open window. Every day, too, there were flowery tokens of hope and in sheltered corners of the garden the primroses came out one by one, an imperceptible a.s.semblage like the birth of stars in the luminous green west. This gray-eyed virginal month had now such memories of the last progress it made through her life that Pauline could not help imputing to the season a sentimental partic.i.p.ation in her life; there was a poignancy in the reopening of those blue Greek anemones which Guy, a year ago, had likened to her eyes, a poignancy that might have been present if the flowers had been consciously reminding her of vanished delights. Yet it was unreasonable to encourage such an emotion; or did she indeed, as sometimes was half-whispered to her inmost soul, regret the slightest bit everything since that day of the anemones?

It was one evening toward the end of the months that Monica joined her and walked up and down the edge of the lawn where in the gra.s.s a drift of purple crocuses had lately been flaming for her solitary adoration.

"In a way," said Pauline, "they are my favorite flowers of all. I don't think there is any thrill quite like the first crocus bud. It seems to me that as far as I can look back, oh, Monica, ever so far, that always the moment I've seen my crocuses budding Winter seems to fly away."

"I remember your looking for them when you were tiny," Monica agreed.

"I can see you now kneeling down, and the mud on your knees, and your eyes screwed up when you told me about your discovery."

They talked for a while of childish days, each capping the other's evocation of those hours that now in retrospect appeared like the gay pictures of an old book long ago lost, and found again on an idle afternoon. They talked, too, of Margaret and whether she would marry Richard; and presently, without the obvious transition that would have made her silent, Pauline found that they were discussing Guy and herself.

"I notice he doesn't come to church now so much as he did," said Monica.

Pauline was startled by an abrupt statement of something which among all the other worries she had never defined to herself, but which, now that Monica revealed its shape, she knew had occupied a dark corner at the back of her mind more threatening than any of the rest. Of course she began at once to make excuses for Guy, but her sister, who brought to religion the same scrupulous temperament she gave to her music, would not admit their validity.

"Don't you ever ask him why he hasn't been?" she persisted.

"Oh, of course not. Why, I couldn't, Monica! I should never feel.... Oh no, Monica, it would really be impossible for me to talk to Guy about his faith."

"His faith seems rather to have frozen lately," said Monica.

"He's been upset and disappointed."

"All the more reason for going to church," Monica urged.

"Yes, for you, darling, or for me; but Guy may be different."

"There's no room for moods in one's religious duties. The artistic temperament is not provided for."

That serene and nunlike conviction of tone made Pauline feel a little rebellious, and yet in its corroboration of her own uneasiness she could not laugh it aside.

"Well, even if there's no excuse for him and even supposing it made me dreadfully anxious," she affirmed, "I still wouldn't say a word to him."