Guy, as soon as he had sent off the poems to a publisher, was much less violently driven by the stress of love, which latterly had urged him along so wayward a course. He began to acquire a perspective and to lose some of that desperately clinging reliance upon present joys. The need of battling against an uncertain future had brought him to the pitch of madness at the thought of the hours of Pauline's company that must be wasted; but now when to his sanguine hopes marriage presented itself as at last within sight, sometimes even seeming as close as the Fall of this new year, he was anxious to set Pauline upon more tranquil waters, lest she too should like himself be the prey of wild imaginations that might destroy utterly one untempered by any except the gentler emotions of a secluded life. Her mother and sisters, whom he had come to regard as hostile interpreters of convention, took on again their old features of kindliness and grace; and he was able to see without jealous torments how reasonable their attitude had been throughout; nay, more than reasonable, how unworldly and noble-hearted it had been in confiding Pauline to the care of one who had so few pretensions to deserve her. He upbraided himself for having by his selfishness involved Pauline in the complexities of regrets for having done something against her judgment; and in this dreary rain of January, free from Bills came in by every post, but their ability to vex him had vanished in the promise his manuscript gave of a speedy defeat of all material difficulties. The reaction from the strain of decking his poems with the final touches that were to precede the trial of public judgment gave place to dreams. A dozen times Guy followed the manuscript step by step of its journey from the moment the insentient mail-cart carried it away from Wychford to the moment when Mr. William Worrall threw a first casual glance to where it lay waiting for his perusal on the desk in the Covent Garden office. Guy saw the office-boy send off the formal post-card of acknowledgment that he had already received; and in his dream he rather pitied the youth for his unconsciousness of what a treasure he was acknowledging merely in the ordinary routine of a morning's work. Perhaps the packet would lie unopened for two or three days—in fact, probably Mr. Worrall might not yet have resumed work, as they say, after a short Christmas vacation. Moreover, when he came back to business, although at Guy's request for sponsors the poems had been vouched for by one or two reputed friends of the publisher with whom he was acquainted; he would no doubt still be inclined to postpone their examination. Then one morning he would almost inadvertently cut the string and glance idly at a page, and then.... At this point the author's mental visions varied. Sometimes Worrall would be so deeply transfixed by the revelation of a new planet swimming into ken that he would sit spellbound at his own good fortune, not emerging from a trance of delight until he sent a telegram inviting the poet to come post-haste to town and discuss terms. In other dreams the publisher would distrust his own judgment I wonder do you feel to-day They would drive out from the city along the Appian Way and turn aside to sit among the ghostliness of innumerable grasses in those primal fields, the air of which would be full of the feathery seeds and the dry scents of that onrushing Summer. There would be no thought of time and no need for words; there would merely be the two of them on a morn of Rome and May. And later in the warm afternoon they would drive home, coming back to the city's heart to eat their dinner within sound of the Roman fountains. Then all the night-time she would be his, not his in frightened gasps as when wintry England was forbidding all joy to their youth, but his endlessly, utterly, gloriously. They would travel farther south and perhaps come to that Parthenopean shore calling to him still now from the few days he had spent upon its silver heights and beside its azure waters. In his dream Pauline was leaning on his shoulder beneath an Aleppo pine, at the cliff's edge—Pauline, whose alien freshness would bring a thought of England to sigh through its boughs, and a cooler world to the aromatic drought. Theirs should be sirenian moons and dawns, and life would be this dream's perfect fulfilment. In what loggia, firefly-haunted, would he hold her? The desire with which the picture flamed upon his imagination was almost intolerable, and here he always brought her back to Plashers Mead on a June dusk. Then she could be conjured in this house, summoned in spirit here to this very room; and if they had loved Italy, how they would love England as they walked across their meadows, husband and wife! With such visions Guy set on fire each January night that floated frorely into his bedroom, until one morning a letter arrived from Mr. William Worrall that made his fingers tremble as he broke the envelope and read the news: 217 Covent Garden, W.C., Dear Sir,—I have looked at the poems you were kind enough to send for my consideration, and I shall be happy to hand them to a reader for his opinion. The reader's fee is one guinea. Should his opinion be favorable, I shall be glad to discuss terms with you. Yours faithfully, Guy threw the letter down in a rage. He would almost have preferred a flat refusal to this request for money to enable some jaded hack to read his poems. The proposal appeared merely insolent, and he wrote curtly to Mr. William Worrall to demand the immediate return of his manuscript. But after all, if Worrall did not accept his work, who would? Money was an ulterior consideration when the great object was to receive such unanimous approval as would justify the apparent waste of time in which he had been indulging. The moment his father acknowledged the right he had to be confident, he in turn would try to show by following his father's advice that he was not the wrong-headed idler of his reputation. Perhaps he would send the guinea to Worrall. He tore up his first letter and wrote another in which a cheque was inclosed. Then he began to add up the counterfoils of his cheque-book, a depressing operation that displayed an imminent financial crisis. He had overdrawn £5 last quarter. That left £32 10s. of the money paid in on December 21st. The quarter's rent was £4 10s. That left £28. Miss Peasey's wages were in arrears, and he must pay her £4 10s. on the fifteenth of this month. That would leave £23 10s., and he must knock off 7s. 6d. for Bob's license. About £3 had gone at Christmas and there were the books still to pay. Twenty pounds was not much for current expenses until next Lady Day. However, he decided that he could manage in Wychford, if he did
A total of £202 18s. 6d. Practically he might say that £200 would clear everything. Yet was £50 enough to allow for those miscellaneous accounts? Here, for instance, was a bill of £11 for boots and another of £14 for hats, apparently, though how the deuce he could have spent all that on hats he did not know. It would be wiser to say that £250 was required to free himself from debt. Guy read through the tradesmen's letters and detected an universal impatience, for they all reminded him that not merely for fifteen months had they received nothing on account of large outstanding bills, but also they made it clear that behind reiterated demands and politeness strained to breaking-point stood darkly the law. That brute Ambrose, to whom, after all, he owed only £4 7s., was the most threatening. In fact, he would obviously have to pay the ruffian in full. That left only £15 13s. for current expenses to Lady Day, or rather £14 12s., for, by the way, Worrall's guinea had been left out of the reckoning. Guy wondered if he ought to get rid of Miss Peasey and manage for himself in future. Yet the housekeeper probably earned her wages by what she saved him, and if he relied on a woman who "came in" every morning, that The January rain dripped monotonously on the window-sills while Guy dragged book after book from the shelves that for only fifteen months had known their company. They were a melancholy sight when he had stacked on the floor as many books as he could bear to lose, each shelf looking as disreputable as a row of teeth after a fight. A hundred volumes were gone, scarcely a dozen of which had he sacrificed without a pang. But a hundred volumes in order to raise £50 must sell at an average of ten shillings apiece, and in the light of such a test of value he regarded dismayfully the victims. Precious though they were to him, he could not fairly estimate the price they would fetch at more than five shillings each. That meant the loss of at least a hundred more books. Guy felt sick at the prospect and looked miserably along the rows for the further tribute of martyrs they must be forced to yield. With intense difficulty he gathered together another fifty, and then with a final effort came again for still another fifty. Here was the first edition of Swinburne's Essays and Studies. That must go, for it might count as ten shillings and therefore save a weaker brother. Rossetti's Poems in this edition of 1871 must go in order to save the complete works, for he could copy out the sonnet which was not reprinted in the later edition. Here was Payne's translation of Villon, which could certainly go, for it would fetch at least fifteen shillings, and he still possessed that tattered little French edition Amor, chee a nullo amato amar perdona, The words were stained with the blue anemone to which he had likened Pauline's eyes that first day of their love's declaration. He opened the other: Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse, And in this volume the words were stained with a ragged-robin which unnoticed had come back to Plashers Mead in his pocket that May eve, and which when it fell out later he had pressed between those burning pages. It was doubtless the worst kind of sentiment, but the two books must go back upon their shelves, and never must they be lost, even if everything but Shakespeare went. Guy put his hand to his forehead and found that it was actually wet with the agony of what on this January afternoon he had been compelling himself to achieve. Each book before it was condemned he stroked fondly and smelled like incense the fragrant mustiness of the pages, since nearly every volume still commemorated either the pleasure of the moment when he had bought it or some occasion of reading equally good to recall. Then he covered "Well?" said Guy, painfully, when the assistant put away his note-book and shot his cuffs forward. "Well, Mr. Hazlewood, we can offer you thirty-five pounds for that little lot." Guy stammered a repetition of the disappointing sum. "That's right, sir. And we don't really want them." "But surely fifty pounds...." The assistant smiled in a superior way. "We must try and make a little profit," he murmured. "Oh, God, you'll do that! Why, I must have paid very nearly a hundred for them, and they were practically all second hand when I bought them." The assistant shrugged his shoulders. "I'm sorry, sir, but in offering you thirty-five pounds I'm offering too much as it is. We don't really want them, you see. They're not really any good to us." "You're simply being damned charitable in fact," said Guy. "All right. Give me a cheque and take them away when you like ... the sooner the better." He could have kicked that pile of books he had with such hardship chosen; already they seemed to belong to this smart young assistant with the satin tie; and he began to hate this agglomeration which had cost him such agony, and in the end had swindled him out of £15. The assistant sat down and wrote a cheque for Guy, took his receipt, and bowed himself out, saying that he would send for the books in the course of the week. Through the rain Guy went for consolation to Pauline. He told her of his sacrifice, and she with all she could give of exquisite compassion listened to his tale. "But, Guy, my darling, why don't you borrow the money from Father? I am sure he'd be delighted to lend it to you." Guy shook his head. "It's impossible. My debts must be paid by myself. I wouldn't even borrow from Michael Fane. Dearest, don't look so sad. I would sell my soul for you. Kiss me. Kiss me. I care for nothing but your kisses. You must promise not to say a word of this to any one. Besides, it's no sacrifice to do anything that brings our marriage nearer by an inch. These debts are weighting me down. They stifle me. I am miserable, too, about the poems. I haven't told you yet. It's really a joke in one way. Yes, it's really funny. Worrall wrote to ask for a guinea before he read them. Now, don't you think there is something very particularly humorous in being charged a guinea by a reader? However, don't worry about that." "How could he be so stupid?" she cried. "I hope you took them away from him." "Oh no. I sent the guinea. They must be published. Pauline, I must have done something soon or I shall go mad! Surely you see the funny side of his offer? I think the notion of my expecting to get five shillings apiece out of a lot of readers, and my only reader's getting a guinea out of me is funny. I think it's quite humorous." "Nothing is funny to me that hurts you," Pauline murmured. "And I'm heartbroken about the books." "Oh, when I'm rich I can buy plenty." "But not the same books." "That's mere sentiment," he laughed. "And the only sentiment I allow myself is in connection with things that you have sanctified." Then he told her about the flowers pressed in the two volumes of Dante, both in that same fifth canto. "And almost, you know," Guy whispered, "I value most the ragged-robin, because it commemorates the day you really began to love me." "Ah no," she protested. "Guy, don't say that. I "Is it a strain?" "Oh, sometimes!" she cried, nearly in tears, her light-brown hair upon his shoulder. "Oh yes, yes, Guy! I can't bear to feel.... I'm frightened sometimes, and when Mother has been cross with me, I've not known what to do. Guy, you won't ever ask me to come out again at night?" "Not if it worries you afterwards." "Oh yes, it has, it has! Guy, when shall we be married?" "This year. It shall be this year," he vowed. "Let us believe that, Pauline. You do believe that?" "Oh, Guy, I adore you so wildly. It must be this year. My darling, my darling, this year ... let it be this year." Guy doled out very carefully the £35 he had accumulated by the sale of his books. Lampard and Clary had to be content with £7 apiece. Five more creditors received £4, or rather one of them only £3 19s., so that the guinea left over could be put back into the current account for poetic justice. There was, for the present nothing more to do but await the verdict of Worrall's reader, and in a fortnight Guy heard from the publisher to say this had been favorable enough to make Mr. Worrall wish to see him in order to discuss the matter of publication. Guy was much excited and rushed across to the Rectory in a festivity of hopefulness. He had wired to say he would be in London next day, and all that evening the name of Worrall was lauded until round his unknown personality shone the aureole of a wise and benevolent saint. There seemed no limit to what so discerning a publisher might not do for Guy, and he and Pauline became to themselves and to her family the hero and heroine of such an adventure as never had been. In the "Are you really going to talk to me, then?" she asked in mock surprise. "Margaret, I've been rather objectionable lately," said Guy, remembering with an access of penitence that it must be almost exactly a year ago that he and Margaret in that snowy weather had first talked about his love for Pauline. "Well, I have thought that you were forgetting me," said Margaret. "I shall be sad if we are never going to be friends again." "Oh, Margaret, we are friends now. I've been worried, and I thought that you had been rather unkind to Pauline." "I haven't really." "Of course not. It was absolutely my fault," Guy admitted. "Now that there seems a chance of our being married in less than ten years, I'm going to give up this continual exasperation in which I live nowadays. It's curious that my first impression of you all should have been as of a Mozart symphony, so tranquil and gay and self-contained and perfectly made did the Rectory seem. How clumsily I have plunged into that life," he sighed. "Really, Margaret, I feel sometimes like a wild beast that's escaped from a menagerie and got into a concert of chamber-music. Look here, you shall never have to grumble at me again. Now tell me, just to show that you've forgiven my detestable irruption ... when Richard comes back...." Margaret gave him her hand for a moment, and looked down. "And you're happy?" he asked, eagerly. "I'm sure I shall be." "Oh, you will be, you will be." Pauline asked him afterwards what he had said to Margaret "Guy, how clever of you to make her tell you what she will never tell us. You don't know how much it has worried me to feel that you were always angry with Margaret. How I've exaggerated everything! And what friends you really are, you dears!" "I've never been angry with her except on your account." "But you won't ever be again, because I'm so foolish. I'm really a sort of young Miss Verney." They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London. Guy was surprised to be kept waiting when he inquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily, that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian ante-chamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step. It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently. "Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated. Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a depressing accumulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy, and the raindrops seemed from inside to smear it as tears smudge The publisher was a short, fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon bore a hole in the festooned ceiling. "Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher, referring as he spoke to Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of oblivion—"well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favorably on your poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them." Guy bowed. "No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a Gothic arch with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added: "Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion was certainly favorable." And so it ought to be, thought Guy, for a guinea. "And I don't think," Mr. Worrall went on, "that in the circumstances we need be very much afraid. Have you any ideas about the price at which your sheaf, your little harvest is to be offered to the public?" "Oh, I should leave that to you," said Guy, hastily. "Precisely," said the publisher. "Yes, I think perhaps we might say five shillings or ... of course it might "I should be very proud to appear in such a series," said Guy, pleasantly. The series, as a matter of fact, was one that could do him no discredit. "It's a charming idea, isn't it?" said Mr. Worrall, fondling one of the set that lay on his desk. "Every five volumes has its own floral emblem. We've done The Rose, The Lily, The Violet. Let me see, your poems are mostly about London, aren't they?" "No, there isn't one about London," Guy pointed out, rather sharply. "No, precisely; then of course they would not come in The London Pride set which still has a vacancy. Perhaps The Cowslip? What does the reader say? Um, yes, pastoral! Precisely! Well, then why not let us decide that your poems shall be Number Three in The Cowslip set. Capital! I think you'd be wise to choose the Covent Garden series in paper. The cost of publication is really less in that series, and I have always chosen my poets so carefully that I can be sure the Press will pay attention to—er neophytes. That is a great advantage for a young writer, as you no doubt realize without my telling you?" "The cost?" echoed Guy in a puzzled voice. "It will run you in for about thirty pounds—as a guarantee of course. The terms I suggest are simply a written agreement that you will guarantee thirty pounds towards the cost. Your royalty to be ten per cent. on the first thousand, twelve and a half on the next thousand, and fifteen over two thousand. We might fairly say that in the event of selling a thousand you would have nothing to pay, but, of course, if you only sell twenty or thirty, you will have to—er—pay for your piping." "And when should I have to produce this thirty pounds?" Guy asked. "Well, I might ask for a cheque to be placed to my account on the day of publication; and then, of course, I should send in a written statement twice a year with the usual three months' margin for settlement." "So that supposing my book came out in March?" Guy inquired. "By the following November I should hope to have the pleasure of sending you back your thirty pounds and a cheque on account of royalties," said the publisher, briskly. "They don't seem very good terms, somehow," said Guy. Mr. Worrall shrugged his shoulders, and his conical head grew more conical. "You forget the advantage of being in the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets. However, don't, pray do not, intrust your manuscript to my pilotage unless you are perfectly satisfied. I have a good many poems to consider, you know." "May I write within a week or so and give you my decision?" Guy asked. "Naturally." "Well, good-by." "Good-by, Mr. Hazlewood. Clever fellow, isn't he?" Guy had given a farewell glance at Max Beerbohm's caricature. "Very clever," the poet fervently agreed. Guy left Mr. William Worrall's office and wandered dismally across Covent Garden, wondering where on earth he was going to be able to raise £30. He had intended to spend the night in town and look up some old friends, but, foreseeing now the inevitable question, "What are you doing?" he felt he had not the heart to explain that at present he was debating the possibility of spending £30 in order to produce a book of poems. All the people During the railway journey Guy contemplated various plans to raise the money he wanted. He knew that his father at the cost of a long letter would probably have given him the sum; but supposing a triumph lay before him, all the sweets of it would have been robbed by paternal help. Moreover, if the book were paid for thus, there would be a consequent suspicion of all favorable criticism; it would never seem a genuine book to his father, and the reviews would give him the impression of being the work of well-disposed amateurs or of personal friends. There was the alternative of borrowing the money from Michael Fane; and then as the train went clanging through the night Guy made up his mind to be under an obligation to nobody and to sacrifice all the rest of his books if necessary that this new book might be born. When he was back at Plashers Mead his resolution did not weaken; coldly and unsentimentally he began to eviscerate the already mutilated library. At the end of his task he had stacked upon the floor five hundred volumes to be offered as a bargain to the bookseller who had bought the others. All that was left, indeed, were the cheapest and most ordinary editions of poets, one or two volumes of the greatest of all like Rabelais and Cervantes, and the eternally read and most companionable like Boswell There was a smell of frost in the air that afternoon, and the sharpness of the weather consorted well with Guy's mood, taking away the heavy sense of disappointment and giving him a sparkling hopefulness. He and Pauline went for a walk on Wychford down, and in the wintry cheer he would not allow her to be cast down at the loss of his books or to resent Worrall's reception of the poems. "Everything is all right," he assured her. "The more we have to deny ourselves now, the greater will be my success when it comes. The law of compensation never fails. You and I are DavidsbÜndler marching against the Philistines. So be brave, my Pauline." "I will try to be brave," she promised. "But it's harder for me because I'm doing nothing." "Oh, nothing," said Guy. "Nothing except endow me with passion and ambition, with consolation ... oh, nothing, you foolish one." "Am I really all that to you?" "Forward," he shouted, hurling his stick in front of him and dragging Pauline at the heels of Bob across turf Sitting back in his chair and thinking over his poems, all sorts of verbal improvements suggested themselves to Guy; and he added a note asking for the manuscript to be sent back for a few corrections. He looked at his work with new eyes when it arrived, and bent with all the enthusiasm that fruition gave his pen upon reviewing each line for the hundredth time. He had enjoyed few things so well in his life as going to bed tired with the intense consideration of a rhyme and falling asleep in the ambition to reconsider it early next morning. About ten days had passed since Guy sold the second lot of books, and the poems were now as good as he could make them until print should reveal numbers of fresh faults. He hoped that Worrall would hurry on with the printing in order to allow him plenty of time for an even more severe scrutiny; and he wrote to suggest April as the month of publication, so anxious was he to have one specially bound copy to offer Pauline on her birthday. On the very morning when the manuscript had been wrapped up and was ready to be sent off a disturbing letter arrived from Lampard, his favorite Oxford bookseller, to say that, having made a purchase of books two or three days ago, he had been surprised to find among them a large number of volumes with Mr. Hazlewood's name inscribed on the fly-leaves, for which Mr. Hazlewood had not yet paid him. He ventured to think it was only by an oversight that Mr. Hazlewood had not paid his long outstanding account before disposing of the books, and |