New Grub Street · Chapter 3 (2/3)

“Quite. I see no reason why you shouldn’t do something in that way. But I tell you what; when I get back, I’ll inquire into the state of the market. I know a man who was once engaged at Jolly & Monk’s⁠—the chief publishers of that kind of thing, you know; I must look him up⁠—what a mistake it is to neglect any acquaintance!⁠—and get some information out of him. But it’s obvious what an immense field there is for anyone who can just hit the taste of the new generation of Board school children. Mustn’t be too goody-goody; that kind of thing is falling out of date. But you’d have to cultivate a particular kind of vulgarity. There’s an idea, by the by. I’ll write a paper on the characteristics of that new generation; it may bring me a few guineas, and it would be a help to you.”

“But what do you know about the subject?” asked Dora doubtfully.

“What a comical question! It is my business to know something about every subject⁠—or to know where to get the knowledge.”

“Well,” said Dora, after a pause, “there’s no doubt Maud and I ought to think very seriously about the future. You are aware, Jasper, that mother has not been able to save a penny of her income.”

“I don’t see how she could have done. Of course I know what you’re thinking; but for me, it would have been possible. I don’t mind confessing to you that the thought troubles me a little now and then; I shouldn’t like to see you two going off governessing in strangers’ houses. All I can say is, that I am very honestly working for the end which I am convinced will be most profitable. I shall not desert you; you needn’t fear that. But just put your heads together, and cultivate your writing faculty. Suppose you could both together earn about a hundred a year in Grub Street, it would be better than governessing; wouldn’t it?”

“You say you don’t know what Miss Yule writes?”

“Well, I know a little more about her than I did yesterday. I’ve had an hour’s talk with her this afternoon.”

“Indeed?”

“Met her down in the Leggatt fields. I find she doesn’t write independently; just helps her father. What the help amounts to I can’t say. There’s something very attractive about her. She quoted a line or two of Tennyson; the first time I ever heard a woman speak blank verse with any kind of decency.”

“She was walking alone?”

“Yes. On the way back we met old Yule; he seemed rather grumpy, I thought. I don’t think she’s the kind of girl to make a paying business of literature. Her qualities are personal. And it’s pretty clear to me that the valley of the shadow of books by no means agrees with her disposition. Possibly old Yule is something of a tyrant.”

“He doesn’t impress me very favourably. Do you think you will keep up their acquaintance in London?”

“Can’t say. I wonder what sort of a woman that mother really is? Can’t be so very gross, I should think.”

“Miss Harrow knows nothing about her, except that she was a quite uneducated girl.”

“But, dash it! by this time she must have got decent manners. Of course there may be other objections. Mrs. Reardon knows nothing against her.”

Midway in the following morning, as Jasper sat with a book in the garden, he was surprised to see Alfred Yule enter by the gate.

“I thought,” began the visitor, who seemed in high spirits, “that you might like to see something I received this morning.”

He unfolded a London evening paper, and indicated a long letter from a casual correspondent. It was written by the authoress of On the Boards, and drew attention, with much expenditure of witticism, to the conflicting notices of that book which had appeared in The Study. Jasper read the thing with laughing appreciation.

“Just what one expected!”

“And I have private letters on the subject,” added Mr. Yule.

“There has been something like a personal conflict between Fadge and the man who looks after the minor notices. Fadge, more so, charged the other man with a design to damage him and the paper. There’s talk of legal proceedings. An immense joke!”

He laughed in his peculiar croaking way.

“Do you feel disposed for a turn along the lanes, Mr. Milvain?”

“By all means.⁠—There’s my mother at the window; will you come in for a moment?”

With a step of quite unusual sprightliness Mr. Yule entered the house. He could talk of but one subject, and Mrs. Milvain had to listen to a laboured account of the blunder just committed by The Study. It was Alfred Yule’s characteristic that he could do nothing lighthandedly. He seemed always to converse with effort; he took a seat with stiff ungainliness; he walked with a stumbling or sprawling gait.

When he and Jasper set out for their ramble, his loquacity was in strong contrast with the taciturn mood he had exhibited yesterday and the day before. He fell upon the general aspects of contemporary literature.

“… The evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides. Hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of criticism, out of all proportion to the supply of even tolerable work. The men who have an aptitude for turning out this kind of thing in vast quantities are enlisted by every new periodical, with the result that their productions are ultimately watered down into worthlessness.⁠ ⁠… Well now, there’s Fadge. Years ago some of Fadge’s work was not without a certain⁠—a certain conditional promise of⁠—of comparative merit; but now his writing, in my opinion, is altogether beneath consideration; how Rackett could be so benighted as to give him The Study⁠—especially after a man like Henry Hawkridge⁠—passes my comprehension. Did you read a paper of his, a few months back, in The Wayside, a preposterous rehabilitation of Elkanah Settle? Ha! Ha! That’s what such men are driven to. Elkanah Settle! And he hadn’t even a competent acquaintance with his paltry subject. Will you credit that he twice or thrice referred to Settle’s reply to ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ by the title of ‘Absalom Transposed,’ when every schoolgirl knows that the thing was called ‘Achitophel Transposed’! This was monstrous enough, but there was something still more contemptible. He positively, I assure you, attributed the play of Epsom Wells to Crowne! I should have presumed that every student of even the most trivial primer of literature was aware that Epsom Wells was written by Shadwell.⁠ ⁠… Now, if one were to take Shadwell for the subject of a paper, one might very well show how unjustly his name has fallen into contempt. It has often occurred to me to do this. ‘But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’ The sneer, in my opinion, is entirely unmerited. For my own part, I put Shadwell very high among the dramatists of his time, and I think I could show that his absolute worth is by no means inconsiderable. Shadwell has distinct vigour of dramatic conception; his dialogue.⁠ ⁠…”

And as he talked the man kept describing imaginary geometrical figures with the end of his walking-stick; he very seldom raised his eyes from the ground, and the stoop in his shoulders grew more and more pronounced, until at a little distance one might have taken him for a hunchback. At one point Jasper made a pause to speak of the pleasant wooded prospect that lay before them; his companion regarded it absently, and in a moment or two asked:

“Did you ever come across Cottle’s poem on the Malvern Hills? No? It contains a couple of the richest lines ever put into print:

It needs the evidence of close deduction

To know that I shall ever reach the top.

Perfectly serious poetry, mind you!”

He barked in laughter. Impossible to interest him in anything apart from literature; yet one saw him to be a man of solid understanding, and not without perception of humour. He had read vastly; his memory was a literary cyclopaedia. His failings, obvious enough, were the results of a strong and somewhat pedantic individuality ceaselessly at conflict with unpropitious circumstances.

Towards the young man his demeanour varied between a shy cordiality and a dignified reserve which was in danger of seeming pretentious. On the homeward part of the walk he made a few discreet inquiries regarding Milvain’s literary achievements and prospects, and the frank self-confidence of the replies appeared to interest him. But he expressed no desire to number Jasper among his acquaintances in town, and of his own professional or private concerns he said not a word.

“Whether he could be any use to me or not, I don’t exactly know,” Jasper remarked to his mother and sisters at dinner. “I suspect it’s as much as he can do to keep a footing among the younger tradesmen. But I think he might have said he was willing to help me if he could.”

“Perhaps,” replied Maud, “your large way of talking made him think any such offer superfluous.”

“You have still to learn,” said Jasper, “that modesty helps a man in no department of modern life. People take you at your own valuation. It’s the men who declare boldly that they need no help to whom practical help comes from all sides. As likely as not Yule will mention my name to someone. ‘A young fellow who seems to see his way pretty clear before him.’ The other man will repeat it to somebody else, ‘A young fellow whose way is clear before him,’ and so I come to the ears of a man who thinks ‘Just the fellow I want; I must look him up and ask him if he’ll do such-and-such a thing.’ But I should like to see these Yules at home; I must fish for an invitation.”

In the afternoon, Miss Harrow and Marian came at the expected hour. Jasper purposely kept out of the way until he was summoned to the tea-table.

The Milvain girls were so far from effusive, even towards old acquaintances, that even the people who knew them best spoke of them as rather cold and perhaps a trifle condescending; there were people in Wattleborough who declared their airs of superiority ridiculous and insufferable. The truth was that nature had endowed them with a larger share of brains than was common in their circle, and had added that touch of pride which harmonised so ill with the restrictions of poverty. Their life had a tone of melancholy, the painful reserve which characterises a certain clearly defined class in the present day. Had they been born twenty years earlier, the children of that veterinary surgeon would have grown up to a very different, and in all probability a much happier, existence, for their education would have been limited to the strictly needful, and⁠—certainly in the case of the girls⁠—nothing would have encouraged them to look beyond the simple life possible to a poor man’s offspring. But whilst Maud and Dora were still with their homely schoolmistress, Wattleborough saw fit to establish a Girls’ High School, and the moderateness of the fees enabled these sisters to receive an intellectual training wholly incompatible with the material conditions of their life. To the relatively poor (who are so much worse off than the poor absolutely) education is in most cases a mocking cruelty. The burden of their brother’s support made it very difficult for Maud and Dora even to dress as became their intellectual station; amusements, holidays, the purchase of such simple luxuries as were all but indispensable to them, could not be thought of. It resulted that they held apart from the society which would have welcomed them, for they could not bear to receive without offering in turn. The necessity of giving lessons galled them; they felt⁠—and with every reason⁠—that it made their position ambiguous. So that, though they could not help knowing many people, they had no intimates; they encouraged no one to visit them, and visited other houses as little as might be.

In Marian Yule they divined a sympathetic nature. She was unlike any girl with whom they had hitherto associated, and it was the impulse of both to receive her with unusual friendliness. The habit of reticence could not be at once overcome, and Marian’s own timidity was an obstacle in the way of free intercourse, but Jasper’s conversation at tea helped to smooth the course of things.

“I wish you lived anywhere near us,” Dora said to their visitor, as the three girls walked in the garden afterwards, and Maud echoed the wish.

“It would be very nice,” was Marian’s reply. “I have no friends of my own age in London.”

“None?”

“Not one!”

She was about to add something, but in the end kept silence.

“You seem to get along with Miss Yule pretty well, after all,” said Jasper, when the family were alone again.

“Did you anticipate anything else?” Maud asked.

“It seemed doubtful, up at Yule’s house. Well, get her to come here again before I go. But it’s a pity she doesn’t play the piano,” he added, musingly.

For two days nothing was seen of the Yules. Jasper went each afternoon to the stream in the valley, but did not again meet Marian. In the meanwhile he was growing restless. A fortnight always exhausted his capacity for enjoying the companionship of his mother and sisters, and this time he seemed anxious to get to the end of his holiday. For all that, there was no continuance of the domestic bickering which had begun. Whatever the reason, Maud behaved with unusual mildness to her brother, and Jasper in turn was gently disposed to both the girls.

On the morning of the third day⁠—it was Saturday⁠—he kept silence through breakfast, and just as all were about to rise from the table, he made a sudden announcement:

“I shall go to London this afternoon.”

“This afternoon?” all exclaimed. “But Monday is your day.”

“No, I shall go this afternoon, by the 2:45.”

And he left the room. Mrs. Milvain and the girls exchanged looks.

“I suppose he thinks the Sunday will be too wearisome,” said the mother.

“Perhaps so,” Maud agreed, carelessly.

Half an hour later, just as Dora was ready to leave the house for her engagements in Wattleborough, her brother came into the hall and took his hat, saying:

“I’ll walk a little way with you, if you don’t mind.”

When they were in the road, he asked her in an offhand manner:

“Do you think I ought to say goodbye to the Yules? Or won’t it signify?”

“I should have thought you would wish to.”

“I don’t care about it. And, you see, there’s been no hint of a wish on their part that I should see them in London. No, I’ll just leave you to say goodbye for me.”

“But they expect to see us today or tomorrow. You told them you were not going till Monday, and you don’t know but Mr. Yule might mean to say something yet.”

“Well, I had rather he didn’t,” replied Jasper, with a laugh.

“Oh, indeed?”

“I don’t mind telling you,” he laughed again. “I’m afraid of that girl. No, it won’t do! You understand that I’m a practical man, and I shall keep clear of dangers. These days of holiday idleness put all sorts of nonsense into one’s head.”

Dora kept her eyes down, and smiled ambiguously.

“You must act as you think fit,” she remarked at length.

“Exactly. Now I’ll turn back. You’ll be with us at dinner?”

They parted. But Jasper did not keep to the straight way home. First of all, he loitered to watch a reaping-machine at work; then he turned into a lane which led up the hill on which was John Yule’s house. Even if he had purposed making a farewell call, it was still far too early; all he wanted to do was to pass an hour of the morning, which threatened to lie heavy on his hands. So he rambled on, and went past the house, and took the field-path which would lead him circuitously home again.

His mother desired to speak to him. She was in the dining-room; in the parlour Maud was practising music.

“I think I ought to tell you of something I did yesterday, Jasper,” Mrs. Milvain began. “You see, my dear, we have been rather straitened lately, and my health, you know, grows so uncertain, and, all things considered, I have been feeling very anxious about the girls. So I wrote to your uncle William, and told him that I must positively have that money. I must think of my own children before his.”