It would have been becoming for David to feel sentimental when he packed his books, and his clothes, and went to bed in his little room in The Woodlands for the last time; but he did not. He was vaguely surprised at the absence of appropriate emotions. A profound relief was in his heart, the relief with which the unwelcome embrace solitude. There is none deeper.
He had grown in fetters. The burden of knowledge had weighted his soul, hampered his speech, even cramped his gait; and he was to be free. His spirit stretched itself. The only love that had been given to him had passed away, and he expected life to yield no other, was resigned to know no other; he wasn't seventeen. To be alone, to be famous! as yet he asked no more. And he looked forward boldly. No suspicion of the disappointments, the disillusions that lay before him, no inkling of the difficulties that throng the path of the literary idealist, leavened his mood.
When he drew up the blind next morning, the sky was fair; the garden of his childhood glistened in the sunshine. Ownie was not an early riser, and when he had breakfasted, he went upstairs again to say good-bye to her. "Well!—don't forget to come on Sunday," she said, and he nodded assent. His trunk was to be called for and delivered at the lodging during the day, so he walked with Vivian to the station. Hampstead was alive with young men walking to the station, young men recently introduced into their fathers' businesses and proudly conscious of their first silk hats, and their gold watch-chains. No overcoats hid the watch-chains, though it was freezing. David marked the youths pityingly: to have no other prospect than an office all one's life!
He took his seat in Panzetta's with a new exhilaration. The hopes of glory that have faded on an office-stool might have provided him with another theme, but he did not think of that. Mentally he examined his manuscripts, and decided which of them to submit to an editor next. Nine-tenths of the journals published in London were unknown to him, his verse was as yet imitative, he believed that the best work was the easiest to sell. But the road was hidden from him, and he smiled.
A small fire was smoking in the attic when he reached it. His box had arrived. He lit the lamp, and produced from his pocket a purchase that he had just made—it was a penny bottle of ink. When he had had a cup of tea and some bread-and-butter, he put his clothes in the rickety chest of drawers, and arranged his books on the top of it. Then he took from the trunk pens and foolscap, drew the one chair to the table with infinite zest, and brushed the crumbs out of his way.
But he did not write. Memories flocked thick and fast. After awhile he got up and looked out over the chimney-pots. The view was very cold; under the moon the roofs shone white, and snow was falling. He thought of it falling on a grave. The poignancy of sorrow overcame him, and he sat huddled by the window, the tears dripping down his face.
[CHAPTER X]
Thus began the second book of David's life, where so many books of life have begun, and where so many are fated to end—in a garret of a lodging-house. Now, too, began his acquaintance with larger London, no longer the capital of concerts and cafés to him, but the London of grim, inhospitable streets, of dull-faced, tramping crowds, the London that the millions know, sordid and unsmiling—cheerful only for a consideration, a niggard even of its light. There were many evenings when he could not write—in the first months many evenings when he did not attempt to write—and, drifting from Soho, he would rove about the city till late, rove west and east, tempted to unfamiliar quarters by the promise of their names, storing impressions. He supped at coffee-stalls and heard the vagrants talk, and rose at dawn to breakfast among the workers and the wastrels in the five-o'clock public-houses near the markets. On Sundays when it did not rain, and he didn't go to see his mother, he explored the parks, or wandered beyond the stretching tentacles of London in woodland which the monster had not yet absorbed. He journeyed among holiday-makers who were boisterous, but never gay, who shouted, but who never laughed. The outskirts that he found were beautiful, and he yearned to read the hearts of these excursionists who, whether they covered the miles in dreary silence, or shrieked the burden of a cockney song, had always the same vacant gaze, the same sad, hopeless air. He saw that look on everyone, in varying degrees—the London look, bred of the dismal climate and the gloomy streets; he thought that he would recognise a Londoner anywhere, by his eyes. And when he returned, he noted how the fairness of England was disfigured where Englishmen began to build.
The love of London which some men have felt, was never born in David. He could not grow to love it though he tried. In time he came to wonder if he was blind—if something was lacking in him—when he read word-pictures of its "beauty," and knew that he found it execrable. True, there were many nights when the river mesmerised him and he hung rapt upon the bridges, but then the lamps shone only on the water, and the spell lay in the vast suggestiveness of a great city that he did not see.