that the production was dismissed in ten curt lines as mere amiable drivel.
A few days afterwards Mr. Curpet offered him the position of cashier in the office, at a salary of three pounds a week. His income was exactly doubled, and the disappointments of unsuccessful authorship suddenly ceased to trouble him. He began to doubt the wisdom of making any further attempt towards literature. Was it not clear that his talents lay in the direction of business? Nevertheless a large part of his spare cash was devoted to the purchase of books, chiefly the productions of a few celebrated old continental presses, which he had recently learned to value. He prepared a scheme for educating himself in the classical tongues and in French, and the practice of writing was abandoned to make opportunity for the pursuit of culture. But culture proved to be shy and elusive. He adhered to no regular course of study, and though he read much, his progress towards knowledge was almost imperceptible.
Other distractions presented themselves in the shape of music and painting. He discovered that he was not without critical taste in both these arts, and he became a frequenter of concerts and picture-galleries. He bought a piano on the hire-purchase system, and took lessons thereon. In this and other ways his expenditure swelled till it more than swallowed up the income of three pounds a week which not long before he had regarded as something very like wealth. For many weeks he made no effort to adjust the balance, until his debts approached the sum of twenty pounds, nearly half of which was owing to his landlady. He had to go through more than one humiliating scene before an era of economy set in.
One afternoon he received a telegram to say that William Vernon had died very suddenly. It was signed "Alice Clayton Vernon." Mrs. Vernon was William's stately cousin-in-law, and Richard, to whom she had spoken only once,—soon after Mary's wedding,—regarded her with awe; he disliked her because he found it impossible to be at ease in her imposing presence. As he went into Mr. Curpet's room to ask for leave of absence, his one feeling was annoyance at the prospect of having to meet her again. William's death, to his own astonishment, scarcely affected him at all.
Mr. Curpet readily granted him two days' holiday, and he arranged to go down to Bursley the following night for the funeral.
Chapter VIII
Wearied of sitting, Richard folded his overcoat pillow-wise, put it under his head, and extended himself on the polished yellow wood. But in vain were his eyes shut tight. Sleep would not come, though he yawned incessantly. The monstrous beat of the engine, the quick rattle of windows, and the grinding of wheels were fused into a fantastic resonance which occupied every corner of the carriage and invaded his very skull. Then a light tapping on the roof, one of those mysterious sounds which make a compartment in a night-train like a haunted room, momentarily silenced everything else, and he wished that he had not been alone.
Suddenly jumping up, he put away all idea of sleep, and lowered the window. It was pitch dark; vague changing shapes, which might have been either trees or mere fancies of the groping eye, outlined themselves a short distance away; far in front was a dull glare from the engine, and behind twinkled the guard's lamp.... In a few seconds he closed the window again, chilled to the bone, though May was nearly at an end.
The thought occurred to him that he was now a solitary upon the face of the earth. It concerned no living person whether he did evil or good. If he chose to seek ruin, to abandon himself to the most ignoble impulses, there was none to restrain,—not even a brother-in-law. For several weeks past, he had been troubled about his future, afraid to face it. Certainly London satisfied him, and the charm of living there had not perceptibly grown less. He rejoiced in London, in its vistas, its shops, its unending crowds, its vastness, its wickedness; each dream dreamed about London in childhood had come true; and surer than ever before was the consciousness that in going to London he had fulfilled his destiny. Yet there was something to lack in himself. His confidence in his own abilities and his own character was being undermined. Nearly a year had gone, and he had made no progress, except at the office. Resolutions were constantly broken; it was three months since he had despatched an article to a newspaper. He had not even followed a definite course of study, and though his acquaintance with modern French fiction had widened, he could boast no exact scholarship even in that piquant field. Evening after evening—ah! those long, lamplit evenings which were to be given to strenuous effort!—was frittered away upon mean banalities, sometimes in the company of some casual acquaintance and sometimes alone. He had by no means grasped the full import and extent of this retrogression; it was merely beginning to disturb his self-complacence, and perhaps, ever so slightly, his sleep. But now, hurrying to the funeral of William Vernon, he lazily laughed at himself for having allowed his peace of mind to be ruffled. Why bother about "getting on"? What did it matter?
He still experienced but little sorrow at the death of Vernon. His affection for the man had strangely faded. During the nine months that he had lived in London they had scarcely written to one another, and Richard regarded the long journey to attend William's obsequies as a tiresome concession to propriety.
That was his real attitude, had he cared to examine it.
At about four o'clock it was quite light, and the risen sun woke Richard from a brief doze. The dew lay in the hollows of the fields but elsewhere there was a soft, fresh clearness which gave to the common incidents of the flying landscape a new and virginal beauty—as though that had been the morn of creation itself. The cattle were stirring, and turned to watch the train as it slipped by.
Richard opened the window again. His mood had changed, and he felt unreasonably joyous. Last night he had been too pessimistic. Life lay yet before him, and time enough to rectify any indiscretions of which he might have been guilty. The future was his, to use as he liked. Magnificent, consoling thought! Moved by some symbolic association of ideas, he put his head out of the window and peered in the direction of the train's motion. A cottage stood alone in the midst of innumerable meadows; as it crossed his vision, the door opened, and a young woman came out with an empty pail swinging in her left hand. Apparently she would be about twenty-seven, plump and sturdy and straight. Her hair was loose about her round, contented face, and with her disengaged hand she rubbed her eyes, still puffed and heavy with sleep. She wore a pink print gown, the bodice of which was unfastened, disclosing a white undergarment and the rich hemispheres of her bosom. In an instant the scene was hidden by a curve of the line, and the interminable succession of fields resumed, but Richard had time to guess from her figure that the woman was the mother of a small family. He pictured her husband still unconscious in the warm bed which she had just left; he even saw the impress of her head on the pillow, and a long nightdress thrown hastily across a chair.
He was deeply and indescribably affected by this suggestion of peaceful married love set in so great a solitude. The woman and her hypothetical husband and children were only peasants, their lives were probably narrow and their intellects dormant, yet they aroused in him a feeling of envy which surged about his brain and for the moment asphyxiated thought....
Later on the train slackened speed as it passed through a shunting-yard. The steam from the light shunting-engine rose with cloud-like delicacy in the clear air, and an occasional short whistle seemed to have something of the quality of a bird's note. The men with their long poles moved blithely among the medley of rails, signalling one another with motions of the arm. The coupling-chains rang with a merry, giant tinkle, and when the engine brought its load of waggons to a standstill, and a smart, metallic bump, bump, bump ran diminuendo from waggon to waggon, one might have fancied that some leviathan game was being played. Richard forgot the girl with the pail, and soon after went to sleep.
At six o'clock the train reached Knype, where he had to change. Two women with several children also alighted, and he noticed how white and fatigued were their faces; the children yawned pitifully. An icy, searching
