Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by George Gissing
Title Page
Introduction
VOLUME ONE
1 A Man of His Day
2 The House of Yule
3 Holiday
4 An Author and His Wife
5 The Way Hither
6 The Practical Friend
7 Marian’s Home
8 To the Winning Side
9 Invita Minerva
10 The Friends of the Family
11 Respite
12 Work Without Hope
VOLUME TWO
13 A Warning
14 Recruits
15 The Last Resource
16 Rejection
17 The Parting
18 The Old Home
19 The Past Revived
20 The End of Waiting
21 Mr Yule Leaves Town
22 The Legatees
23 A Proposed Investment
24 Jasper’s Magnanimity
VOLUME THREE
25 A Fruitless Meeting
26 Married Woman’s Property
27 The Lonely Man
28 Interim
29 Catastrophe
30 Waiting on Destiny
31 A Rescue and a Summons
32 Reardon Becomes Practical
33 The Sunny Way
34 A Check
35 Fever and Rest
36 Jasper’s Delicate Case
37 Rewards
The History of Vintage
Copyright
Fiction
Workers in the Dawn
The Unclassed
Demos: A Story of English Socialism
Isabel Clarendon
Thyrza
A Life’s Morning
The Nether World
The Emancipated
Denzil Quarrier
Born in Exile
The Odd Women
In the Year of Jubilee
Eve’s Ransom
Sleeping Fires
The Paying Guest
The Whirlpool
Human Odds and Ends
The Town Traveller
The Crown of Life
Our Friend the Charlatan
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
Veranilda
Will Warburton
The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories
Non-fiction
Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
By the Ionian Sea
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Introduction copyright © Anthony Quinn 2014
New Grub Street was first published by Smith, Elder and Co. in 1891
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ISBN 9780099589228
Pegging away
Three pages a day
Groaning and moaning
The Devil to pay.
George Gissing,
Diary, 8 September 1896
The allure of the writing life is powerful to non-writers, and no wonder. You can do the work from home or on the fly, you can choose the subject, and the hours are unbeatable. It is still just mysterious enough to retain a low-level sort of glamour: to say ‘I’m a writer …’ is at once to claim a privilege and to raise a smokescreen against the inquisitive, who would like to know what you do all day.
It’s a good life, writing. But is it a good living? In the present day that’s increasingly hard to judge. For a few, it still is; for many, it is barely sufficient to keep body and soul together. The writing life presupposes there to be an economic system to back it up, and the system’s current standing indicates that supply hugely exceeds demand. You could call it a crisis, but then to read George Gissing’s New Grub Street, first published in 1891, would assure you that it’s a crisis that has been going on since late Victorian times, and even earlier. ‘To write – was not that the joy and privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world?’ Indeed, but ‘to write’ is only one half of the equation: the other half is ‘to earn’. The tension between writing as a noble vocation and the cold necessity of making it pay lies at the heart of New Grub Street. It is a great novel about creativity and money and marriage, and its greatness lies in the subtlety with which these three subjects become co-dependent.
Like all great books, it deepens in the rereading. On first encounter the story traces a simultaneous rise and fall, set against the London of the 1880s – a city of choking fogs, obscure garrets and starvation suppers. Edwin Reardon is a novelist who once enjoyed a minor success but has since lost all confidence in his talent. He clings to the love of his wife Amy, an ambitious middle-class woman who urges him to be pragmatic. ‘Art must be practised as a trade,’ she tells him, a sentiment echoed by their friend Jasper Milvain, an enterprising young littérateur who sees his way to opportunity through self-promotion. In contrast to Reardon’s faltering integrity, Jasper is cheerfully cynical about the marketplace, maintaining a prodigious output of ‘rubbish’ for magazines and periodicals while ingratiating himself with editors and influential patrons. The difference in temperament between the two men is marked from the start, though it is their contrasting moral outlooks that will prove more significant to Gissing’s purpose.
Reardon is not alone, of course, in his struggle through ‘the valley of the shadow of books’. It is the fate of every writer, even the successful one, to feel solitary in his labour, if not actually lonely. The narrative works its way around an ensemble of types – novelists, journalists, editors, publishers, even a newfangled ‘agent’ – who strive to earn a living by the pen. Nearly all of them represent a kind of warning. Alfred Yule is an ageing literary journeyman embittered by his hasty marriage to a meek but uneducated wife; ashamed of her lowly origins (she has disreputable relatives in Holloway), he has refused to introduce her to polite society and now blames her for his exclusion from it. His daughter Marian works as drudge for him at the British Museum, all too aware that her father’s domestic tyranny is born of his disappointments as a bookman and his nursing of professional slights, imagined or otherwise. In consequence she has become soul-sickened by the dreary routines of literary manufacture and haunted by its insect-like toil. In a famous passage she sits in the Museum’s reading room, oppressed by a vision of the readers at the radiating lines of desks as ‘hapless flies caught in a huge web’.
Not all are so discouraged by the challenges of Grub Street. Ironically, Reardon’s friend and fellow classicist Harold Biffen is the character nearest of all to destitution and yet, until the very end, he presents the bravest face. A keen chronicler of the ‘ignobly decent’, he is writing a minutely realistic and magnificently hopeless novel entitled Mr Bailey, Grocer. Like Reardon, Biffen is a man unsuited to the ‘practical’ demands of living, but unlike him he works on irrepressibly. He may well be the inadvertent hero of the novel. In his reverent admiration of Amy Reardon one discerns in Biffen an essential innocence, and the almost certain prospect of failure: ‘A woman’s love was to him the unattainable ideal; already thirty-five years old, he had no prospect of ever being rich enough to assure himself a daily dinner; marriage was wildly out of the question.’
A knowledge of the author’s own life will lend an ominous perspective to a second reading of the novel. Born the eldest of five children in Wakefield on 22 November 1857, Gissing was raised in a modest but respectable lower-middle-class household, quite different from the slum conditions that his early novels would investigate. He was close to his erudite father, a pharmacist with interests in botany and poetry, and suffered the more on his early death (in 1870) for having little in common with his distant, ‘incurious’ mother. As a brilliant student of Latin and Greek the eighteen-year-old George seemed destined for an academic career until, in May 1876, his life changed dramatically and for ever. He was caught stealing money from the cloakroom of Owens College, Manchester, convicted and sentenced to a month in prison. The money (five shillings and twopence) was intended to help out an alcoholic prostitute, Nell Harrison, whom he later married in the hope of redeeming. It proved a terrible miscalculation, and after repeated salvage attempts on his part and much abusive behaviour on hers, he left her for good. The next time he saw Nell, in March 1888, she was lying dead from syphilis in a Lambeth boarding house.
To make one disastrous union is a misfortune; to make two looks like recklessness. For Gissing, the questions of marriage and money were intimately linked. He felt himself disqualified from marrying ‘well’, in the belief that no respectable middle-class woman would be willing to endure poverty. He dramatised the impossibility in the case of Amy Reardon, whose faith in her husband’s future success has proved illusory. After months of agonised recriminations, penury has them in a chokehold. When Reardon finally declares himself fit only to be a clerk, Amy refuses to be dragged down with him and leaves. It is pathetic but, in Gissing’s view, inevitable: ‘Man has a right to nothing in this world that he cannot pay for. Did you imagine that love was an exception? Foolish idealist! Love is one of the first things to be frightened away by poverty.’ Jasper has foreseen this problem from the start and has determined to attach himself to a woman of substance. He believes he has found such a one in Marian, who appears to have secured a small inheritance on the death of a relative. In a twist typical of the novel, the promised money fails and Jasper, true to his self-serving philosophy, wriggles free of their engagement.
Gissing the writer is quite clear-sighted about the dangers of marrying above (in Reardon’s case) or below (in Alfred Yule’s) one’s social or intellectual level. Yet Gissing the man could not heed his own warning. This much becomes sorrowfully apparent on considering his letters and diary entries during the summer of 1890 when he was trying (and failing) to start on New Grub Street. Always of a fragile temperament, he had suffered recent trials of loneliness that were acute even by his standard. Having made overtures to one or two women ‘of a better kind’ that came to nothing, he wrote to his friend Eduard Bertz in August 1890, ‘This solitude is killing me … In London I must resume my search for some decent work-girl who will come & live with me. I am too poor to marry an equal, & cannot live alone …’ Then, on 24 September, his ‘search’ paid off: at the Oxford Musical Hall he picked up a Camden work-girl named Edith Underwood, whom he described in a letter to his sister Ellen as ‘peculiarly gentle and pliable’, adding that she was ‘not unintelligent’. Not an enthusiastic assessment or, as it transpired, an accurate one.
In the short term, though, his creative blockage was resolved and the book on which he made a number of false starts began to flow. Throughout the autumn he wrote at a pace that poor Reardon could only envy. On Saturday 6 December Gissing recorded in his diary: ‘finished New Grub Street’. It had taken him just over ten weeks. Meanwhile life had been keeping a close distance to art. When Reardon muses that he ought to have married a ‘simple work-girl’, Biffen admonishes him: such a girl, once disappointed, would have grown spiteful and vicious, he says, misconstruing everything he said and did. ‘The effect upon your nature would have been degrading. In the end, you must have abandoned every effort to raise her to your own level, and either sunk to hers or made a rupture. Who doesn’t know the story of such attempts?’
Who indeed? Gissing was reading his publisher’s proofs of the novel when, on 25 February 1891, he married Edith at St Pancras Registry Office. She proved to be in every particular the harridan he feared: mean-tempered, quarrelsome, suspicious, violent towards servants and nurses. He followed the example of Alfred Yule in keeping her away from his own society. The birth of two sons exacerbated the tension in the household, and at times Gissing even feared for the children’s safety. A typical diary entry in mid May 1892 runs: ‘Uproar in the house, owing to breakage of plates and dishes. Misery.’ The tumult came to an end only on their separation in 1897. The second Mrs Gissing died twenty years later in a Dorset mental asylum.
His choice of wife was an act of self-sabotage unfathomable in the light of New Grub Street’s bleak observations. This aspect of Gissing has been a mystery to his biographers, but then it’s quite possible that he was a mystery to himself. The mind as evidenced in the fretful pages of his diary seems a stranger to the one that coolly unpicks the psychology of his characters. Few novels have been more subtle in plotting the course of a married couple’s agonised estrangement. In his presentation of Amy Reardon some commentators have likened her to Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, a woman who in pursuit of social elevation marries very much for better, not for worse. Yet Amy is no genteel parasite. She is beady and sometimes cold, but for the most part sympathetic; she is perhaps more tolerant than many a wife would be, faced with a husband as needy and despairing as Reardon. Their relationship unravels as a genuine tragedy – they are both innocent, and both equally to blame. Gissing’s psychological penetration is at its most incisive in a scene of attempted rapprochement following Reardon’s six-mile footslog from Islington to meet Amy at her mother’s house in Westbourne Park. The rain-lashed seediness of his appearance causes her to shrink from him in shame, while he is disgusted conversely by the ‘elegance’ of dress that she can now afford. Social form has driven another wedge between them. It’s with a sense of shock that we learn she was prepared to take him back, had he worn a presentable suit of clothes.
Jasper and Marian are also superbly drawn, both separately and as a couple. At the beginning of the novel Jasper cuts an attractively insolent figure, abounding in charm and energy. His sisters Maud and Dora deplore his opportunist tendencies and lack of conscience, but Jasper takes them in his stride. He thinks that by pre-empting criticism he can disarm it. The insistence on his own candour turns out in itself to be a form of scheming. It enables him to lie and dissemble beneath a mask of self-reproach. Marian is the gentlest of the story’s literary toilers, the most loving and the most grievously traduced. It is telling that when news of her inheritance comes out she blooms, and surprises Jasper with a new-found confidence. Money fortifies her self-esteem. (And here is another paradox of the novel, neatly expressed by Adrian Poole in Gissing in Context: ‘the pursuit of money must degrade, but the possession of it is necessary for the sustenance of all moral and personal good’.) As go-between to unhappy parents, Marian knows too well the grind of domestic union, yet she cannot help being a romantic in spirit. If Biffen can be called the hero of the book, she is its heroine. Her yearning for Jasper chafes poignantly against our suspicions of his unworthiness. Just as one wishes that Lydgate and Dorothea had chosen each other as partners in Middlemarch, so it is tempting to wonder how it might have been if Reardon had fallen for Marian instead of her cousin Amy. But they never meet, and imagining the compatibility of their temperaments is idle in any case – it might have made for a happier outcome, but it could never have been New Grub Street.
There is no getting around how deeply pessimistic a novel it is. Wilde’s droll definition in The Importance of Being Earnest – ‘The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means’ – is exactly reversed here. I have not read a more affecting account of a death than Reardon’s: the Calvary of his feverish journey to Brighton, the racking torment of his decline in a ‘hired chamber’, Amy’s tearful attendance, and the arrival at his deathbed of Harold Biffen, faithful unto the last. With a ruthless irony Gissing entitles the chapter ‘Reardon Becomes Practical’. (He dies of congestion of the lungs, the same thing that would kill the novelist some twelve years later, exiled in France.) Biffen’s own fate is handled in a chapter of hardly any less pathos. When the widowed Amy asks him to show her Reardon’s final lodgings in Islington, and later writes kindly to him about the egregious Mr Bailey, Grocer (published after all), Biffen conceives a wretched longing for her, which he knows will never be requited: ‘There was an end of all his peace, all his capacity for labour, his patient endurance of poverty.’ One can almost hear in that sentence Gissing’s own anguished feelings of solitude and hopelessness.
New Grub Street was published in April 1891 to mostly excellent reviews. Not that Gissing wished to read them: when his publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., sent him reviews of the novel from The Scotsman and Daily Graphic, he noted sternly in his diary: ‘Wrote to stop this horror’. The book sold well and was soon in a third edition, though it did not mark any improvement in Smith, Elder’s disgraceful treatment of him. They had been undervaluing his work since 1885, buying up the copyrights at a pittance while making a tidy profit of their own from reprints. They offered him £150 for the copyright of New Grub Street, the same amount they had paid for his previous two, The Emancipated (1890) and The Nether World (1889). ‘You see, I make no advance,’ Gissing mourned to Bertz. Their stinginess prompted him to sell his next book, Born in Exile, through the literary agent A. P. Watt, though it wasn’t until he was taken up by the new firm of Lawrence & Bullen that Gissing’s financial fortunes looked up.
Reading the novel today, one is likely to be struck by its freshness and pertinence. True, London is seldom shrouded in those impenetrable fogs; horse-drawn omnibuses no longer clop around the streets; and gentlemen have ceased (by and large) to sport chimney-pot hats on their social calls. Publishing and journalism have changed immeasurably too, of course, and are still changing against the wild frontier of the Internet. In Gissing’s day Amazon was still only a long river in South America. Blogs and social-networking websites and self-publishing have spawned legions of would-be writers. The idea of writing as a professional skill is losing its constituency and becoming something else – self-advertisement, confessional therapy, ‘feedback’. It’s becoming, in a word, free. An ink-stained tide is loosed; the centre cannot hold. Thus we return to the crisis outlined at the start: more and more people are writing, while fewer and fewer are being paid for it.
So much has changed – and yet so little. In its gripping psychological portraiture, in the wide gulfs between the social classes, in the struggle for survival and the search for love New Grub Street is absolutely timeless. Parts of it live on in a different medium. The names of its protagonists are honoured in the brilliant Radio 4 comedy series Ed Reardon’s Week, whose penurious title character scrapes a living as ghostwriter / freelance-dogsbody while keeping an envious eye on his hated friend and rival, ‘Jaz’ Milvain. Where Reardon once toiled over his three-volume novels in rooms off Regent’s Park, his twenty-first-century counterpart shares his Berkhamsted flat with a cat named Elgar and chases down royalties from the single episode he wrote of the BBC women’s-prison drama Tenko. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But the want of money remains the same. As Reardon himself might have quoted, non omnis moriar – I shall not altogether die. One hopes his immortality would afford George Gissing’s shade a wintry smile.
Anthony Quinn, 2014
As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning. Jasper, listening before he cracked an egg, remarked with cheerfulness:
‘There’s a man being hanged in London at this moment.’
‘Surely it isn’t necessary to let us know that,’ said his sister Maud, coldly.
‘And in such a tone, too!’ protested his sister Dora.
‘Who is it?’ inquired Mrs Milvain, looking at her son with pained forehead.
‘I don’t know. It happened to catch my eye in the paper yesterday that someone was to be hanged at Newgate this morning. There’s a certain satisfaction in reflecting that it is not oneself.’
‘That’s your selfish way of looking at things,’ said Maud.
‘Well,’ returned Jasper, ‘seeing that the fact came into my head, what better use could I make of it? I could curse the brutality of an age that sanctioned such things; or I could grow doleful over the misery of the poor – fellow. But those emotions would be as little profitable to others as to myself. It just happened that I saw the thing in a light of consolation. Things are bad with me, but not so bad as that. I might be going out between Jack Ketch and the Chaplain to be hanged; instead of that, I am eating a really fresh egg, and very excellent buttered toast, with coffee as good as can be reasonably expected in this part of the world. – (Do try boiling the milk, mother.) – The tone in which I spoke was spontaneous; being so, it needs no justification.’
He was a young man of five-and-twenty, well built, though a trifle meagre, and of pale complexion. He had hair that was very nearly black, and a clean-shaven face, best described, perhaps, as of bureaucratic type. The clothes he wore were of expensive material, but had seen a good deal of service. His stand-up collar curled over at the corners, and his necktie was lilac-sprigged.
Of the two sisters, Dora, aged twenty, was the more like him in visage, but she spoke with a gentleness which seemed to indicate a different character. Maud, who was twenty-two, had bold, handsome features, and very beautiful hair of russet tinge; hers was not a face that readily smiled. Their mother had the look and manners of an invalid, though she sat at table in the ordinary way. All were dressed as ladies, though very simply. The room, which looked upon a small patch of garden, was furnished with old-fashioned comfort, only one or two objects suggesting the decorative spirit of 1882.
‘A man who comes to be hanged,’ pursued Jasper, impartially, ‘has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.’
‘In a way,’ repeated Maud, scornfully.
‘Suppose we talk of something else,’ suggested Dora, who seemed to fear a conflict between her sister and Jasper.
Almost at the same moment a diversion was afforded by the arrival of the post. There was a letter for Mrs Milvain, a letter and newspaper for her son. Whilst the girls and their mother talked of unimportant news communicated by the one correspondent, Jasper read the missive addressed to himself.
‘This is from Reardon,’ he remarked to the younger girl. ‘Things are going badly with him. He is just the kind of fellow to end by poisoning or shooting himself.’
‘But why?’
‘Can’t get anything done; and begins to be sore troubled on his wife’s account.’
‘Is he ill?’
‘Overworked, I suppose. But it’s just what I foresaw. He isn’t the kind of man to keep up literary production as a paying business. In favourable circumstances he might write a fairly good book once every two or three years. The failure of his last depressed him, and now he is struggling hopelessly to get another done before the winter season. Those people will come to grief.’
‘The enjoyment with which he anticipates it!’ murmured Maud, looking at her mother.
‘Not at all,’ said Jasper. ‘It’s true I envied the fellow, because he persuaded a handsome girl to believe in him and share his risks, but I shall be very sorry if he goes to the – to the dogs. He’s my one serious friend. But it irritates me to see a man making such large demands upon fortune. One must be more modest – as I am. Because one book had a sort of success he imagined his struggles were over. He got a hundred pounds for “On Neutral Ground”, and at once counted on a continuance of payments in geometrical proportion. I hinted to him that he couldn’t keep it up, and he smiled with tolerance, no doubt thinking “He judges me by himself.” But I didn’t do anything of the kind. – (Toast, please, Dora.) – I’m a stronger man than Reardon; I can keep my eyes open, and wait.’
‘Is his wife the kind of person to grumble?’ asked Mrs Milvain.
‘Well, yes, I suspect that she is. The girl wasn’t content to go into modest rooms – they must furnish a flat. I rather wonder he didn’t start a carriage for her. Well, his next book brought only another hundred, and now, even if he finishes this one, it’s very doubtful if he’ll get as much. “The Optimist” was practically a failure.’
‘Mr Yule may leave them some money,’ said Dora.
‘Yes. But he may live another ten years, and he would see them both in Marylebone Workhouse before he advanced sixpence, or I’m much mistaken in him. Her mother has only just enough to live upon; can’t possibly help them. Her brother wouldn’t give or lend two-pence halfpenny.’
‘Has Mr Reardon no relatives?’ asked Maud.
‘I never heard him make mention of a single one. No, he has done the fatal thing. A man in his position, if he marry at all, must take either a work-girl or an heiress, and in many ways the work-girl is preferable.’
‘How can you say that?’ asked Dora. ‘You never cease talking about the advantages of money.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean that for me the work-girl would be preferable; by no means; but for a man like Reardon. He is absurd enough to be conscientious, likes to be called an ‘artist’, and so on. He might possibly earn a hundred and fifty a year if his mind were at rest, and that would be enough if he had married a decent little dressmaker. He wouldn’t desire superfluities, and the quality of his work would be its own reward. As it is, he’s ruined.’
‘And I repeat,’ said Maud, ‘that you enjoy the prospect.’
‘Nothing of the kind. If I seem to speak exultantly it’s only because my intellect enjoys the clear perception of a fact. – A little marmalade, Dora; the home-made, please.’
‘But this is very sad, Jasper,’ said Mrs Milvain, in her half-absent way. ‘I suppose they can’t even go for a holiday?’
‘Quite out of the question.’
‘Not even if you invited them to come here for a week?’
‘Now, mother,’ urged Maud, ‘that’s impossible, you know very well.’
‘I thought we might make an effort, dear. A holiday might mean everything to him.’
‘No, no,’ fell from Jasper, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t think you’d get along very well with Mrs Reardon; and then, if her uncle is coming to Mr Yule’s, you know, that would be awkward.’
‘I suppose it would; though those people would only stay a day or two, Miss Harrow said.’
‘Why can’t Mr Yule make them friends, those two lots of people?’ asked Dora. ‘You say he’s on good terms with both.’
‘I suppose he thinks it’s no business of his.’
Jasper mused over the letter from his friend.
‘Ten years hence,’ he said, ‘if Reardon is still alive, I shall be lending him five-pound notes.’
A smile of irony rose to Maud’s lips. Dora laughed.
‘To be sure! To be sure!’ exclaimed their brother. ‘You have no faith. But just understand the difference between a man like Reardon and a man like me. He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market. I – well, you may say that at present I do nothing; but that’s a great mistake, I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising. He knows perfectly all the possible sources of income. Whatever he has to sell he’ll get payment for it from all sorts of various quarters; none of your unpractical selling for a lump sum to a middleman who will make six distinct profits. Now, look you: if I had been in Reardon’s place, I’d have made four hundred at least out of “The Optimist”; I should have gone shrewdly to work with magazines and newspapers and foreign publishers, and – all sorts of people. Reardon can’t do that kind of thing, he’s behind his age; he sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson’s Grub Street. But our Grub Street of today is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy.’
‘It sounds ignoble,’ said Maud.
‘I have nothing to do with that, my dear girl. Now, as I tell you, I am slowly, but surely, learning the business. My line won’t be novels; I have failed in that direction, I’m not cut out for the work. It’s a pity, of course; there’s a great deal of money in it. But I have plenty of scope. In ten years, I repeat, I shall be making my thousand a year.’
‘I don’t remember that you stated the exact sum before,’ Maud observed.
‘Let it pass. And to those who have shall be given. When I have a decent income of my own, I shall marry a woman with an income somewhat larger, so that casualties may be provided for.’
Dora exclaimed, laughing:
‘It would amuse me very much if the Reardons got a lot of money at Mr Yule’s death – and that can’t be ten years off, I’m sure.’
‘I don’t see that there’s any chance of their getting much,’ replied Jasper, meditatively. ‘Mrs Reardon is only his niece. The man’s brother and sister will have the first helping, I suppose. And then, if it comes to the second generation, the literary Yule has a daughter, and by her being invited here I should think she’s the favourite niece. No, no; depend upon it they won’t get anything at all.’
Having finished his breakfast, he leaned back and began to unfold the London paper that had come by post.
‘Had Mr Reardon any hopes of that kind at the time of his marriage, do you think?’ inquired Mrs Milvain.
‘Reardon? Good heavens, no! Would he were capable of such forethought!’
In a few minutes Jasper was left alone in the room. When the servant came to clear the table he strolled slowly away, humming a tune.
The house was pleasantly situated by the roadside in a little village named Finden. Opposite stood the church, a plain, low, square-towered building. As it was cattle market today in the town of Wattleborough, droves of beasts and sheep occasionally went by, or the rattle of a grazier’s cart sounded for a moment. On ordinary days the road saw few vehicles, and pedestrians were rare.
Mrs Milvain and her daughters had lived here for the last seven years, since the death of the father, who was a veterinary surgeon. The widow enjoyed an annuity of two hundred and forty pounds, terminable with her life; the children had nothing of their own. Maud acted irregularly as a teacher of music; Dora had an engagement as visiting governess in a Wattleborough family. Twice a year, as a rule, Jasper came down from London to spend a fortnight with them; today marked the middle of his autumn visit, and the strained relations between him and his sisters which invariably made the second week rather trying for all in the house had already become noticeable.
In the course of the morning Jasper had half an hour’s private talk with his mother, after which he set off to roam in the sunshine. Shortly after he had left the house, Maud, her domestic duties dismissed for the time, came into the parlour where Mrs Milvain was reclining on the sofa.
‘Jasper wants more money,’ said the mother, when Maud had sat in meditation for a few minutes.
‘Of course. I knew that. I hope you told him he couldn’t have it.’
‘I really didn’t know what to say,’ returned Mrs Milvain, in a feeble tone of worry.
‘Then you must leave the matter to me, that’s all. There’s no money for him, and there’s an end of it.’
Maud set her features in sullen determination. There was a brief silence.
‘What’s he to do, Maud?’
‘To do? How do other people do? What do Dora and I do?’
‘You don’t earn enough for your support, my dear.’
‘Oh, well!’ broke from the girl. ‘Of course if you grudge us our food and lodging—’
‘Don’t be so quick-tempered. You know very well I am far from grudging you anything, dear. But I only meant to say that Jasper does earn something, you know.’
‘It’s a disgraceful thing that he doesn’t earn as much as he needs. We are sacrificed to him, as we always have been. Why should we be pinching and stinting to keep him in idleness?’
‘But you really can’t call it idleness, Maud. He is studying his profession.’
‘Pray call it trade; he prefers it. How do I know that he’s studying anything? What does he mean by “studying”? And to hear him speak scornfully of his friend Mr Reardon, who seems to work hard all through the year! It’s disgusting, mother. At this rate, he will never earn his own living. Who hasn’t seen or heard of such men? If we had another hundred a year, I would say nothing. But we can’t live on what he leaves us, and I’m not going to let you try. I shall tell Jasper plainly that he’s got to work for his own support.’
Another silence, and a longer one. Mrs Milvain furtively wiped a tear from her cheek.
‘It seems very cruel to refuse,’ she said at length, ‘when another year may give him the opportunity he’s waiting for.’
‘Opportunity? What does he mean by his opportunity?’
‘He says that it always comes, if a man knows how to wait.’
‘And the people who support him may starve meanwhile! Now just think a bit, mother. Suppose anything were to happen to you, what becomes of Dora and me? And what becomes of Jasper, too? It’s the truest kindness to him to compel him to earn a living. He gets more and more incapable of it.’
‘You can’t say that, Maud. He earns a little more each year. But for that, I should have my doubts. He has made thirty pounds already this year, and he only made about twenty-five the whole of last. We must be fair to him, you know. I can’t help feeling that he knows what he’s about. And if he does succeed, he’ll pay us all back.’
Maud began to gnaw her fingers, a disagreeable habit she had in privacy.
‘Then why doesn’t he live more economically?’
‘I really don’t see how he can live on less than a hundred and fifty a year. London, you know—’
‘The cheapest place in the world.’
‘Nonsense, Maud!’
‘But I know what I’m saying. I’ve read quite enough about such things. He might live very well indeed on thirty shillings a week, even buying his clothes out of it.’
‘But he has told us so often that it’s no use to him to live like that. He is obliged to go to places where he must spend a little, or he makes no progress.’
‘Well, all I can say is,’ exclaimed the girl impatiently, ‘it’s very lucky for him that he’s got a mother who willingly sacrifices her daughters to him.’
‘That’s how you always break out. You don’t care what unkindness you say!’
‘It’s a simple truth.’
‘Dora never speaks like that.’
‘Because she’s afraid to be honest.’
‘No, because she has too much love for her mother. I can’t bear to talk to you, Maud. The older I get, and the weaker I get, the more unfeeling you are to me.’
Scenes of this kind were no uncommon thing. The clash of tempers lasted for several minutes, then Maud flung out of the room. An hour later, at dinner-time, she was rather more caustic in her remarks than usual, but this was the only sign that remained of the stormy mood.
Jasper renewed the breakfast-table conversation.
‘Look here,’ he began, ‘why don’t you girls write something? I’m convinced you could make money if you tried. There’s a tremendous sale for religious stories; why not patch one together? I am quite serious.’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ retorted Maud.
‘I can’t manage stories, as I have told you; but I think you could. In your place, I’d make a speciality of Sunday school prize-books; you know the kind of thing I mean. They sell like hot cakes. And there’s so deuced little enterprise in the business. If you’d give your mind to it, you might make hundreds a year.’
‘Better say “abandon your mind to it”.’
‘Why, there you are! You’re a sharp enough girl. You can quote as well as anyone I know.’
‘And please, why am I to take up an inferior kind of work?’
‘Inferior? Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity. I merely suggested what seemed practicable. But I don’t think you have genius, Maud. People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads – that one mustn’t write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half a dozen fair specimens of the Sunday school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There’s no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. If I could only get that into poor Reardon’s head. He thinks me a gross beast, often enough. What the devil – I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred? I don’t advocate the propagation of vicious literature; I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world’s vulgar. You just give it a thought Maud; talk it over with Dora.’
He resumed presently:
‘I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity. For my own part, I shan’t be able to address the bulkiest multitude; my talent doesn’t lend itself to that form. I shall write for the upper middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can’t distinguish between stones and paste. That’s why I’m so slow in warming to the work. Every month I feel surer of myself, however. That last thing of mine in The West End distinctly hit the mark; it wasn’t too flashy, it wasn’t too solid. I heard fellows speak of it in the train.’
Mrs Milvain kept glancing at Maud, with eyes which desired her attention to these utterances. Nonetheless, half an hour after dinner, Jasper found himself encountered by his sister in the garden, on her face a look which warned him of what was coming.
‘I want you to tell me something, Jasper. How much longer shall you look to mother for support? I mean it literally; let me have an idea of how much longer it will be.’
He looked away, and reflected.
‘To leave a margin,’ was his reply, ‘let us say twelve months.’
‘Better say your favourite “ten years” at once.’
‘No. I speak by the card. In twelve months’ time, if not before, I shall begin to pay my debts. My dear girl, I have the honour to be a tolerably long-headed individual. I know what I’m about.’
‘And let us suppose mother were to die within half a year?’
‘I should make shift to do very well.’
‘You? And please – what of Dora and me?’
‘You would write Sunday school prizes.’
Maud turned away and left him.
He knocked the dust out of the pipe he had been smoking, and again set off for a stroll along the lanes. On his countenance was just a trace of solicitude, but for the most part he wore a thoughtful smile. Now and then he stroked his smoothly-shaven jaws with thumb and fingers. Occasionally he became observant of wayside details – of the colour of a maple leaf, the shape of a tall thistle, the consistency of a fungus. At the few people who passed he looked keenly, surveying them from head to foot.
On turning, at the limit of his walk, he found himself almost face to face with two persons, who were coming along in silent companionship; their appearance interested him. The one was a man of fifty, grizzled, hard featured, slightly bowed in the shoulders; he wore a grey felt hat with a broad brim, and a decent suit of broadcloth. With him was a girl of perhaps two-and-twenty, in a slate-coloured dress with very little ornament, and a yellow straw hat of the shape originally appropriated to males; her dark hair was cut short, and lay in innumerable crisp curls. Father and daughter, obviously. The girl, to a casual eye, was neither pretty nor beautiful, but she had a grave and impressive face, with a complexion of ivory tone; her walk was gracefully modest, and she seemed to be enjoying the country air.
Jasper mused concerning them. When he had walked a few yards, he looked back; at the same moment the unknown man also turned his head.
‘Where the deuce have I seen them – him and the girl too?’ Milvain asked himself.
And before he reached home the recollection he sought flashed upon his mind.
‘The Museum Reading-room, of course!’
‘I think,’ said Jasper, as he entered the room where his mother and Maud were busy with plain needlework, ‘I must have met Alfred Yule and his daughter.’
‘How did you recognise them?’ Mrs Milvain inquired.
‘I passed an old buffer and a pale-faced girl whom I know by sight at the British Museum. It wasn’t near Yule’s house, but they were taking a walk.’
‘They may have come already. When Miss Harrow was here last, she said “in about a fortnight”.’
‘No mistaking them for people of these parts, even if I hadn’t remembered their faces. Both of them are obvious dwellers in the valley of the shadow of books.’
‘Is Miss Yule such a fright then?’ asked Maud.
‘A fright! Not at all. A good example of the modern literary girl. I suppose you have the oddest old-fashioned ideas of such people No, I rather liked the look of her. Simpatica, I should think, as that ass Whelpdale would say. A very delicate, pure complexion, though morbid; nice eyes; figure not spoilt yet. But of course I may be wrong about their identity.’
Later in the afternoon Jasper’s conjecture was rendered a certainty. Maud had walked to Wattleborough, where she would meet Dora on the latter’s return from her teaching, and Mrs Milvain sat alone, in a mood of depression; there was a ring at the doorbell, and the servant admitted Miss Harrow.
This lady acted as housekeeper to Mr John Yule, a wealthy resident in this neighbourhood; she was the sister of his deceased wife – a thin, soft-speaking, kindly woman of forty-five. The greater part of her life she had spent as a governess; her position now was more agreeable and the removal of her anxiety about the future had developed qualities of cheerfulness which formerly no one would have suspected her to possess. The acquaintance between Mrs Milvain and her was only of twelve months’ standing; prior to that, Mr Yule had inhabited a house at the end of Wattleborough remote from Finden.
‘Our London visitors came yesterday,’ she began by saying.
Mrs Milvain mentioned her son’s encounter an hour or two ago.
‘No doubt it was they,’ said the visitor. ‘Mrs Yule hasn’t come; I hardly expected she would, you know. So very unfortunate when there are difficulties of that kind, isn’t it?’
She smiled confidentially.
‘The poor girl must feel it,’ said Mrs Milvain.
‘I’m afraid she does. Of course it narrows the circle of her friends at home. She’s a sweet girl, and I should so like you to meet her. Do come and have tea with us tomorrow afternoon, will you? Or would it be too much for you just now?’
‘Will you let the girls call? And then perhaps Miss Yule will be so good as to come and see me?’
‘I wonder whether Mr Milvain would like to meet her father? I have thought that perhaps it might be some advantage to him. Alfred is so closely connected with literary people, you know.’
‘I feel sure he would be glad,’ replied Mrs Milvain. ‘But – what of Jasper’s friendship with Mrs Edmund Yule and the Reardons? Mightn’t it be a little awkward?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, unless he himself felt it so. There would be no need to mention that, I should say. And, really, it would be so much better if those estrangements came to an end. John makes no scruple of speaking freely about everyone, and I don’t think Alfred regards Mrs Edmund with any serious unkindness. If Mr Milvain would walk over with the young ladies tomorrow, it would be very pleasant.’
‘Then I think I may promise that he will. I’m sure I don’t know where he is at this moment. We don’t see very much of him, except at meals.’
‘He won’t be with you much longer, I suppose?’
‘Perhaps a week.’
Before Miss Harrow’s departure Maud and Dora reached home. They were curious to see the young lady from the valley of the shadow of books, and gladly accepted the invitation offered them.
They set out on the following afternoon in their brother’s company. It was only a quarter of an hour’s walk to Mr Yule’s habitation, a small house in a large garden. Jasper was coming hither for the first time; his sisters now and then visited Miss Harrow, but very rarely saw Mr Yule himself, who made no secret of the fact that he cared little for female society. In Wattleborough and the neighbourhood opinions varied greatly as to this gentleman’s character, but women seldom spoke very favourably of him. Miss Harrow was reticent concerning her brother-in-law; no one, however, had any reason to believe that she found life under his roof disagreeable. That she lived with him at all was of course occasionally matter for comment, certain Wattleborough ladies having their doubts regarding the position of a deceased wife’s sister under such circumstances; but no one was seriously exercised about the relations between this sober lady of forty-five and a man of sixty-three in broken health.
A word of the family history.