Now there was no longer the bookshop to look after, he had more time for reading and writing, and for gaining general knowledge. Also Cora had the wisdom to trouble him little. She stayed in bed most of the morning, and as Royal Daylight had strict instructions to walk delicately in going about her household duties, Henry Harper with his habit of rising early was always able to count on a long and uninterrupted morning's work.
In the afternoon, Cora generally went forth to visit her friends. And as she showed no desire for Harry to accompany her, there were so many more precious hours in which he could do as he liked, in which his fancy could expand. In the evening, however, his trials began. After the first few days of matrimony, Cora developed a passion for restaurants, whither she expected him to accompany her. As a rule they dined at the Roc at the bottom of the Avenue, where there was music and company, and here they sometimes fell in with one or another of Cora's circle. Then about twice a week they would go on to a theater or a music hall, and have supper at another restaurant. The young man soon grew aware that if Cora's attention was not fully occupied, she became restless and irritable.
These evenings abroad gave Henry Harper a feeling of profound discomfort. But he did not complain. It would not have been fair to Cora, who, as she proudly said, gave him a free hand for the rest of the day. And even the publicity of restaurant life, against his deepest instinct as it was, had compensations quite apart from the performance of duty. There was much to be learned from these places. The Sailor had a remarkable faculty of minute observation. The genie within never slept. Other worlds were swimming into his ken. Golden hours were being stolen from his labors, but he was gaining first-hand knowledge of men and things.
These early days of married life were in some respects the most valuable the Sailor had yet known. He was no longer living entirely in his dreams. So much was coming into his purview which he could not grasp, to which he had hardly a clue, that he had an overmastering desire for more exact information.
For example, the talk of Cora's numerous friends was almost a foreign language, which left him as a rule with a sense of hopeless ignorance and inferiority. But this merely increased the wish to catch up. Just as a surprisingly brief four years ago he had been tormented with an almost insane desire to read and write and to learn geography and arithmetic, so now he had a terrible craving to enter a world in which Cora moved with such ease and assurance.
The chief difficulty now was the multiplicity of worlds around him. There was his own private world which none could enter but himself. That was a thing apart. It was made up of the awful memories of his youth: of Auntie, of the slushy streets of Blackhampton, of special editions, of the police, of a December night on the railway, of Mother, of Mr. Thompson, of the Old Man, of the half-deck of the Margaret Carey, of the Island of San Pedro, of the Chinaman, of Klondyke, of Ginger, of Auntie again, of Miss Foldal, of the final catastrophe; all these memories lay at he back of the world he inhabited—these memories and the wonderful books he was always studying. Yet enthroned above them all was the Aladdin's lamp that glowed like a star in the right-hand corner of his brain. But even that seemed to be related to other strange, ineluctable forces which lay deep down at the root of his being, in the center of which was the thing he called himself.
This private cosmos, however, wide as it was, was only an imperceptible speck of the whole. Yet it was all important, because he felt it was the only one he would ever really know. As for this world of Cora's, it was quite outside his experience. Even the simplest objects in it did not present themselves at the same angle of vision. They were man and wife and went about together, but the worlds they inhabited were so diverse that he soon felt it would never be possible to merge them in one another.
Then, too, there was the cosmogony of Mr. Rudge. That was a vastly different matter from his own and Cora's, and the great world of the Roc and the Domino where there was continual music and people drank things called liqueurs and wore evening clothes. Again, there was the world of his friend Mr. Ambrose, and beyond this again was the world of those wonderful people whom he used to watch with such solemn delight and curiosity when he paid his Sunday morning pilgrimages to Hyde Park.
XVII