XXII
A Village Iago
Edward Clare came back to his native village a few days later, looking somewhat dilapidated by his campaign in the great metropolis. He had found the gates of literature so beset with aspirants, many of them as richly endowed as himself, that the idea of pushing his way across the threshold seemed almost hopeless, indeed quite hopeless, for a young man who wanted to succeed in life without working very hard, or with at most a little spasmodic industry. His verses, when he was lucky, had earned him something like five pounds a month; when luck was against him he had earned nothing. A newspaper man, whose acquaintance he made at the Cheshire Cheese, had advised him to learn shorthand, and try his fortune as a reporter, working upwards from that platform to the editorial chair. This was an honest drudgery which might do very well for your dull plodders, but against which the fiery soul of Edward Clare revolted.
“I am a poet, or I am nothing,” he told his friend, “Aut Caesar aut nullus.”
“That was a first-rate motto—for Caesar,” said the journalist, “but I think it’s rather misleading for fellows of average talent. The result is so often nullus.”
Mr. Clare was on the point of asking his friend to take another brandy and soda, but at this remark he coiled up, as the Yankees say. Average talent, indeed. Imagine one of Mr. Swinburne’s most facile plagiarists hearing himself called a fellow of average talent.
Edward Clare would not yoke his noble mind to the newspaper plough, nor would he stoop even so low as to write prose. A wretched publisher had told him that if he would write children’s books there was a field open for him; but Edward left that publisher’s office bursting with offended pride.
“Children’s books, forsooth,” he muttered. “I suppose if Catnach had been alive he would have asked me to write halfpenny ballads.”
So having failed to carve his way to fame, or to make a regular income, and having wasted the money he had earned on kid gloves and stalls at fashionable theatres, Mr. Clare conceived an intense disgust for the metropolis, which had treated him so scurvily, and turned his thoughts homewards to woodland and moor, to trout stream and meadow. He found that the poetic temperament required rural scenery, blue skies, and pure air. Heine had contrived to live and write in Paris, and so had De Musset: but Paris is not London. Edward made up his mind that the streets and squares of Bloomsbury were antagonistic to poetry. No bird could sing in such a cage. True that Milton had composed Paradise Lost within close city lanes, under the clamorous bells of St. Bride’s, but then Milton was blind, and Edward Clare was like a popular lady novelist of the present day, who begged that she might not be compared with Dickens. He would have protested against being put on a level with such a passionless bard as Milton.
“I shall never achieve any great work in London,” he told himself. “For my magnum opus I must have the tranquillity of wood and moor.”
He had quite made up his mind that he was to write a great poem, though he had settled neither the subject nor the form. He was waiting for the divine breath to inspire him. The poem was to be as popular as the Idylls of the King, but as passionate as Chastelard. He was not going to write in a goody-goody strain to please anybody.
Edward Clare felt himself a little like the prodigal son, when he came home to the Vicarage after this abortive campaign in the field of literature. If he had not wasted his substance, it was only because he had little substance to waste. He had spent all that his father had sent him, and had received small additions to this allowance out of his mother’s scantily-supplied purse. He came home penniless and dispirited: and he felt rather offended that no fatted calf was slain to do him honour, and that his parents received him with an air of unmistakable despondency.
“Really, my dear Edward, you ought to begin to think of some definite course,” said the father. “It may be too late for a profession, but the Government offices—”
“Red tape and drudgery, with a salary that would scarcely afford dry bread and a garret,” interrupted Edward contemptuously. “No, my dear father, as a poet I will stand or fall.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” sighed the Vicar, “for at present it looks like falling.”
What Edward really meant was that he would depend upon his father until the public and the critics, or the critics and the public, could be brought to acknowledge him as one of the new lights in the starry world of imagination. Mr. Clare understood this, and felt that it was rather hard upon him as a man of limited means.
Edward arrived at Hazlehurst only the night before Mrs. Treverton’s dinner-party.
“Oh, yes, I’m going,” he told Celia, when she asked him if he had accepted Laura’s invitation. “I want to see how this Treverton fellow plays the country squire.”
“As if to the manner born,” answered Celia. “The part suits him admirably. I don’t want to wound your feelings, Ted, dear, but Mr. Treverton and Laura are the happiest couple I ever saw.”
“ ‘These violent delights have violent ends,
And in their triumph die,’ ”
quoted Edward, with a diabolical sneer. “I am not going to envy them their happiness, my dear. Whatever feeling I once entertained for Laura is dead and buried. A woman who could sell herself, as she has done—”
“Sell herself! Oh, Ted, how
