"Good-bye, 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 whom he would have been glad to see had held such high hopes of him at Oxford, had prophesied for his career such prosperity; and now when after fifteen months he emerged from his retirement it was but to pay a man to include him in the Covent Garden series of modern poets. The rain came down faster, and a creeping fog made more inhospitable the dusk of London. He thought of a quick train somewhere about five o'clock, and in a sudden longing to be back in the country and to sleep, however dark and frore the January night that stretched between them, nearer to Pauline than here in this city of drizzled fog, he took a cab to Paddington.
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 favourable 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 and Gilbert White and Sir Thomas Browne. In the determination that had seized him he rejoiced in his bare shelves, so much exalted by the glories of abnegation that he began to despise himself in his former attitude as a trifler among books and to say to himself, as he looked at the volumes which had survived this heartless clearance, that now he was set on the great fairway of literature without any temptation to diverge up the narrow streams of personal taste. The bookseller's assistant was not at all eager for the proferred bargain, and in the end Guy could only manage to obtain the £30 and not, as he had hoped, another £10 towards his debts. Nevertheless he locked the cheque up in his desk with the satisfaction of a man who for the first time in his life earns money, and later on went across to tell Pauline the result of the visit to London.
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."