"That can be arranged." He loaded his revolver in all its chambers; wrote a letter to his closest friend—who happened to be that same youth with the charming elfish ways—explaining that unable to face financial ruin, he intended to shoot himself that night. And with his revolver in his pocket, he went out.
... They found him the next day, drowned in the canal of a town some miles distant. The revolver was in his hand—loaded in all its chambers.
The canal flowed wearily into a river, and the river to the sea. And no one could tell how water had eventually claimed the man who carried in his soul the fear of water....
So Gareth came by the end of his book: "The Round Adventure."
CHAPTER VI
Holidays were brief at the firm of Leslie Campbell; September meant strenuous preparation for the rush of autumn publications. "Piccadilly" had just gone into its shilling edition; and Ran Wyman had written a novel which was hastily, and quite rightly, banned by the libraries; this involved a tremendous amount of heated correspondence with the papers; the first number of the "White Review" would be issued the following month. And though the fortunate of the earth were still dallying by sea or mountain, the staff of Leslie Campbell could afford to do without ordinary people's relaxations—so argued Guy Burnett in his enthusiasm, and sadly the Heart-breaker assented.
But the turmoil and clatter at the office, the brilliant never-ending jargon of intellect, the exaggerated importance these Pioneers of the Future attached to their own and one another's brain-products, all this no longer affected Gareth in the same melancholy sense of being forever a mere looker-on. His book, till the present loved for itself and the treasures he put into it, now that he was back in London, twinkled into being as the key which was by and by to admit him to the fellowship of "Campbell's Young Men."
One of Them!—did ever a youthful squire yearning to sit at Arthur's Round Table of Knights, regard his hard-won spurs with half the reverent incredulity, as Gareth the book which was to procure him a place at the literary round table. There lurked no pain now in watching their impatience of outsiders, their splendid overwhelming swank. They did not lord it on false pretences; not one but had by some intellectual achievement earned a seat at the board; by some achievement.... Gareth fumbled for the consciousness of his half-finished book. He felt swelling up within him vast possibilities of swank, delicious new sensation which had hitherto been entirely foreign to his nature. How patronizingly he would encourage Guy Burnett: "Finished your 'Episode of a Navvy' yet, my lad? O you young pessimists...." With what a careless air would he accept Campbell's invitations to dine, and (seated at his host's right hand) how eloquently hold forth on his lately discovered philosophy of Attainment in Denial. Then the ease with which he would slip into his niche at gatherings in Mona Gurney's delightful Sussex cottage, Ran Wyman's eccentric suite of apartments in the Adelphi; Gareth had heard these spoken of; knew too that Graham Carr had a cherished abode in Devon, where the elect could at any time walk in with their portmanteaux: "I've run down to hammer out my new theme with you, Carr." "You're welcome, Temple, old man"—and the long intimate talks lasting far into the night. The insolence of the Heart-breaker would naturally have dissolved by then into the profoundest respect. And a suppressed dislike for the junior partner could at last find vent in speech: "I don't agree with you at all on that point, Alexander," swinging his legs from the desk in the inner room.
Mere childishness, perhaps, all this. Toys of fancy not fit for a grown man, for a man of forty years. The main miracle of the future was to be possessor of the creative gift; to walk on the shoulders of the rest of the world, pealing your message from the silver trumpet at your lips. Ah! but Gareth wanted the little human things as well—he had done without for so long; so long been overlooked and shoved aside; despised or pitied; a cipher, a negative quantity wherever he chanced to be; a failure—he desired the trivial tangible circumstances of success, or he could never believe it had really and actually come to him, to him, Gareth Temple, reader of other people's books. Whenever, late evenings and Sundays, he slackened at his labour of writing, and glancing round the ugly little dining-room, would think despondently of the sea and the attic window, then he had only to murmur the magic catch-phrase "One of Them" to be spurred to fresh bouts of toil. Of the success of the book finished, he had not the slightest doubt; this was not conceit, but rather judgment made fine and discriminating through long years of practice; not blind conceit, but a marvelling humility at the strange good fortune which had at length befallen him, permitting him to stumble on an idea above all things new, new and arresting. His style had always been faultless; slightly over-ornate, perhaps; something quaint and scholarly in the formal phrases that grouped themselves around an incident, like the rich blue and red and gold decorations on medieval parchment margins. But that would contrast well with the vigorous stripped sentences of the realistic school. No doubts then, as to ultimate triumph. Where Gareth did experience a few uncertain twinges was as to his moral capacities for the leg-swinging act, even when the right to swing was his own. Suppose—suppose after all he decided not to place his work with Leslie Campbell for publication, but send it rather to the Booke-Shoppe, an old-fashioned firm existing since the declining years of the nineteenth century; which continued to publish for the most part essays and belles-lettres, slender volumes of poetry and costly illustrated folios; a firm of book epicures, somewhat précieux in their handlings as delicately contemptuous of Campbell's strong red meat, as were "Campbell's Young Men" superior on the score of caviare and hors d'œuvres contributed by the Booke-Shoppe to the general feast of literature.