“Sleep over it—it is the best plan—and write tomorrow. Meantime, go there to that window and sit down, and look at my Humanity Show. I am going to dine out this evening, and have to dress here out of my portmanteau. I bring up my things like this to save the trouble of going down to my place at Richmond and back again.”
Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of sunlight had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept: a dusky gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of light shone over the window.
“There!” said Knight, “where is there in England a spectacle to equal that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go home. Softly open the sash.”
Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence turning sideways and passing under an arch, so that Knight’s back window was immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the alley lengthwise. Crowds—mostly of women—were surging, bustling, and pacing up and down. Gaslights glared from butchers’ stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild colouring of Turner’s later pictures, whilst the purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and mood was to this human wild-wood what the ripple of a brook is to the natural forest.
Nearly ten minutes passed. Then Knight also came to the window.
“Well, now, I call a cab and vanish down the street in the direction of Berkeley Square,” he said, buttoning his waistcoat and kicking his morning suit into a corner. Stephen rose to leave.
“What a heap of literature!” remarked the young man, taking a final longing survey round the room, as if to abide there forever would be the great pleasure of his life, yet feeling that he had almost outstayed his welcome-while. His eyes rested upon an armchair piled full of newspapers, magazines, and bright new volumes in green and red.
“Yes,” said Knight, also looking at them and breathing a sigh of weariness; “something must be done with several of them soon, I suppose. Stephen, you needn’t hurry away for a few minutes, you know, if you want to stay; I am not quite ready. Overhaul those volumes whilst I put on my coat, and I’ll walk a little way with you.”
Stephen sat down beside the armchair and began to tumble the books about. Among the rest he found a novelette in one volume, The Court of Kellyon Castle. By Ernest Field.
“Are you going to review this?” inquired Stephen with apparent unconcern, and holding up Elfride’s effusion.
“Which? Oh, that! I may—though I don’t do much light reviewing now. But it is reviewable.”
“How do you mean?”
Knight never liked to be asked what he meant. “Mean! I mean that the majority of books published are neither good enough nor bad enough to provoke criticism, and that that book does provoke it.”
“By its goodness or its badness?” Stephen said with some anxiety on poor little Elfride’s score.
“Its badness. It seems to be written by some girl in her teens.”
Stephen said not another word. He did not care to speak plainly of Elfride after that unfortunate slip his tongue had made in respect of her having committed herself; and, apart from that, Knight’s severe—almost dogged and self-willed—honesty in criticizing was unassailable by the humble wish of a youthful friend like Stephen.
Knight was now ready. Turning off the gas, and slamming together the door, they went downstairs and into the street.
XIV
“We frolic while ’tis May.”
It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have passed away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to the previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms of summer in the year following.
Stephen is in India, slaving away at an office in Bombay; occasionally going up the country on professional errands, and wondering why people who had been there longer than he complained so much of the effect of the climate upon their constitutions. Never had a young man a finer start than seemed now to present itself to Stephen. It was just in that exceptional heyday of prosperity which shone over Bombay some few years ago, that he arrived on the scene. Building and engineering partook of the general impetus. Speculation moved with an accelerated velocity every successive day, the only disagreeable contingency connected with it being the possibility of a collapse.
Elfride had never told her father of the four-and-twenty-hours’ escapade with Stephen, nor had it, to her knowledge, come to his ears by any other route. It was a secret trouble and grief to the girl for a short time, and Stephen’s departure was another ingredient in her sorrow. But Elfride possessed special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a diseased limb.
And two such excellent distractions had presented themselves. One was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which, though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert her thoughts. The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more commodious old house of Mrs. Swancourt’s, overlooking the same valley. Mr. Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to feminine soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled him to the change. So there was a radical “move;” the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to and fro.
Mrs. Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride’s ideas in an aristocratic direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage. Certainly, in a
