It was the morning of Boxing Day, frosty, with a sky of steel grey; the streets were resonant under the traffic.
Richard had long been anticipating the advent of the New Year, when new resolutions were to come into force. A phrase from a sermon heard at Bursley stuck in his memory: Every day begins a new year. But he could not summon the swift, courageous decision necessary to act upon that adage. For a whole year he had been slowly subsiding into a bog of lethargy, and to extricate himself would, he felt, need an amount of exertion which he could not put forth unless fortified by all the associations of the season for such feats, and by the knowledge that fellow-creatures were bracing themselves for a similar difficult wrench.
Now that he looked back upon them, the fourteen months which had elapsed since Adeline's departure seemed to have succeeded one another with marvellous rapidity. At first he had chafed under the loss of her, and then gradually and naturally he had grown used to her absence. She wrote to him, a rather long letter, full of details about the voyage and the train journey and her uncles' home; he had opened the envelope half expecting that the letter might affect him deeply; but it did not; it struck him as a distinctly mediocre communication. He sent a reply, and the correspondence ended. He did not love her, probably never had loved her. A little sentiment: that was all. The affair was quite over. If it had been perhaps unsatisfactory, the fault was not his. A man, he reflected, cannot by taking thought fall in love (and yet this was exactly what he had attempted to do!), and that in any case Adeline would not have suited him. Still, at moments when he recalled her face and gestures, her exquisite feminality, and especially her fine candour at their parting, he grew melancholy and luxuriously pitied himself.
At the commencement of the year which was now drawing to a close he had attacked the art of literature anew, and had compassed several articles; but as one by one they suffered rejection, his energy had dwindled, and in a short time he had again entirely ceased to write. Nor did he pursue any ordered course of study. He began upon a number of English classics, finishing few of them, and continued to consume French novels with eagerness. Sometimes the French work, by its neat, severe effectiveness, would stir in him a vague desire to do likewise, but no serious sustained effort was made.
In the spring, when loneliness is peculiarly wearisome, he had joined a literary and scientific institution, for young men only, upon whose premises it was forbidden either to drink intoxicants or to smoke tobacco. He paid a year's subscription, and in less than a fortnight loathed not only the institution but every separate member and official of it. Then he thought of transplanting himself to the suburbs, but the trouble of moving the library of books which by this time he had accumulated deterred him, as well as a lazy aversion for the discomforts which a change would certainly involve.
And so he had sunk into a sort of coma. His chief task was to kill time. Eight hours were due to the office and eight to sleep, and eight others remained to be disposed of daily. In the morning he rose late, retarding his breakfast hour, diligently read the newspaper, and took the Park on the way to business. In the evening, as six o'clock approached, he no longer hurried his work in order to be ready to leave the office immediately the clock struck. On the contrary, he often stayed after hours when there was no necessity to stay, either leisurely examining his accounts, or gossiping with Jenkins or one of the older clerks. He watched the firm's welfare with a jealous eye, offered suggestions to Mr. Curpet which not seldom were accepted, and grew to be regarded as exceptionally capable and trustworthy. He could divine now and then in the tone or the look of the principals (who were niggardly with praise) an implicit trust, mingled—at any rate, in the case of the senior partner—with a certain respect. He grew more sedate in manner, and to the office boys, over whom he had charge, he was even forbidding; they disliked him, finding him a martinet more strict and less suave than Mr. Curpet himself. He kept them late at night sometimes without quite sufficient cause, and if they showed dissatisfaction, told them sententiously that boys who were so desperately anxious to do as little as they could would never get on in the world.
Upon leaving the office he would stroll slowly through Booksellers' Row and up the Strand, with the gait of a man whose time is entirely his own. Once or twice a week he dined at one of the foreign restaurants in Soho, prolonging the meal to an unconscionable length, and repairing afterwards to some lounge for a cigar and a liqueur. He paid particular attention to his dress, enjoying the sensation of wearing good clothes, and fell into a habit of comparing his personal appearance with that of the men whom he rubbed shoulders with in fashionable cafés and bars. His salary sufficed for these petty extravagances, since he was still living inexpensively in one room at Raphael Street; but besides what he earned, his resources included the sum received from the estate of William Vernon. Seventy pounds of this had melted in festivities with Adeline, two hundred pounds was lent upon mortgage under Mr. Curpet's guidance, and the other fifty was kept in hand, being broken into as infrequent occasion demanded. The mortgage investment did much to heighten his status not only with the staff but with his principals.
Seated in a wine-room or lager-beer hall, meditatively sipping from glass or tankard, and savouring a fragrant cigar, he contrived to extract a certain pleasure from the contemplation of his equality with the men around him. Many of them, he guessed with satisfaction, were in a worse or a less secure position than his own. He studied faces and made a practice of entering into conversation with strangers, and these chance encounters almost invariably left him with the impression that he had met a mental inferior. Steeping himself, as it were, in all the frivolous, lusory activities of the West End, he began to acquire that indefinable, unmistakable air of savoir-faire characteristic of the prosperous clerk who spends his leisure in public places. People from the country frequently mistook him for the young man-about-town of the society papers, familiar with every form of metropolitan chicane, luxury, and vice.
After breakfast he went out into the Park with his skates. The Serpentine had been frozen hard for more than a week, and yesterday, a solitary unit in tens of thousands, he had celebrated Christmas on the ice, skating from noon till nearly midnight, with brief intervals for meals. The exercise and the fresh air had invigorated and enlivened him, and this morning, as he plunged once more into the loose throng of skaters, his spirits were buoyant. It had been his intention to pass yet another day on the Serpentine; but a sudden, surprising fancy entered his head, flitted away, and returned again and again with such an increasing allurement that he fell in love with it: Why not commence to write now? Why, after all, leave the new beginning till the New Year? Was it true—what he had mournfully taken for granted for a month past, and so lately as an hour ago—that he lacked the moral strength to carry a good resolution into effect at any time he chose?... In a moment, he had sworn to work four hours before he slept that night.