I didn’t feel called upon to back out of it on that account, yet I very decidedly wished that the thing could have been otherwise. For myself, I came into the matter with clean hands—and I was going to keep my hands clean; otherwise, I was at Fox’s disposal.
“I understand,” I said, the speech marking my decision, “I shall have dealings with a good many of the proprietors—I am the scratcher, in fact, and you don’t want me to make a fool of myself.”
“Well,” he answered, gauging me with his blue, gimlet eyes, “it’s just as well to know.”
“It’s just as well to know,” I echoed. It was just as well to know.
V
I had gone out into the blackness of the night with a firmer step, with a new assurance. I had had my interview, the thing was definitely settled; the first thing in my life that had ever been definitely settled; and I felt I must tell Lea before I slept. Lea had helped me a good deal in the old days—he had helped everybody, for that matter. You would probably find traces of Lea’s influence in the beginnings of every writer of about my decade; of everybody who ever did anything decent, and of some who never got beyond the stage of burgeoning decently. He had given me the material help that a publisher’s reader could give, until his professional reputation was endangered, and he had given me the more valuable help that so few can give. I had grown ashamed of this one-sided friendship. It was, indeed, partly because of that that I had taken to the wilds—to a hut near a wood, and all the rest of what now seemed youthful foolishness. I had desired to live alone, not to be helped any more, until I could make some return. As a natural result I had lost nearly all my friends and found myself standing there as naked as on the day I was born.
All around me stretched an immense town—an immense blackness. People—thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had others to talk to, to trifle with. But I had nobody. This immense city, this immense blackness, had no interiors for me. There were house fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no hollow places. The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the solid earth. Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.
He lived just anywhere. Being a publisher’s reader, he had to report upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at apparently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals. It seemed to be no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a little room in one of the byways of Bloomsbury. He was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper. He peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.
“Hullo!” he said, “what’s brought you here? Have a manuscript?” He waved an abstracted hand round him. “You’ll find a chair somewhere.” A claret bottle stood on the floor beside him. He took it by the neck and passed it to me.
He bent his head again and continued his reading. I displaced three bulky folio sheaves of typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself behind him. He continued to read.
“I hadn’t seen these rooms before,” I said, for want of something to say.
The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble mantelshelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts.
He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.
“Well, and how’s Sussex?” he asked.
I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that—that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out. But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.
“Oh, I congratulate you,” he said.
“You see,” I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, “even for my work it will be a good thing—I wasn’t seeing enough of life to be able to. …”
“Oh, of course not,” he answered—“it’ll be a good thing. You must have been having a pretty bad time.”
It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn’t taken up with the Hour because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because I had felt my soul being crushed within me.
“You’re mistaken,” I said. And I explained. He answered, “Yes, yes,” but I fancied that he was adding to himself—“They all say that.” I grew more angry. Lea’s opinion formed, to some extent, the
