Occasionally he went to the gallery of a theatre; more often he saved the shilling and bought a book that he coveted. Because he realised that he was not eating enough to feel very strong, he pawned his watch and chain when he had been in Soho about six months. It was a severe pang to him to part with what had been his father's present, even to part with it temporarily, and only the knowledge that his father, if he could advise, would bid him "pop it for all he could get," enabled him to make the sacrifice. A week afterwards, however, his diet had dwindled to its original proportions, and his library had much increased.
Meanwhile his manuscripts came back just as often as he enclosed a stamped and directed envelope. The word "regrets" grew odious to him; in the work of David Lee the word was seldom to be found, and he never wrote it without reluctance. Nobody wanted his poetry, nobody thought it worth printing. The rose-colour gradually faded from, his reveries; at the end of a year the boastfulness of boyhood had passed. He began to realise how stupendous was the task that he had approached so confidently. To attack London with a pen! he felt as if he were throwing sea-shells at a fortress. By degrees, too, he came to understand that a poet must be either celebrated, or ridiculous; the pennies that he spent in a news-room showed him that the poet in adversity appealed to the national sense of humour every week.
He derived encouragement from reading the biographies of great writers of the past—and was depressed when he scanned the reminiscences of successful authors of the day, for these always seemed to have "arrived" so gracefully. It surprised him to note that poverty and disdain had been the portion of only those who were dead.
It happened on a morning in April, the event that he never forgot, a morning when the sky across the chimney-pots was blue, and the sparrows hopped in a strange, yellow light which the oldest bird on the slates told them was called "sunshine." David woke up to find—not that he was famous, but that his jug of hot water supported a communication by which an editor offered him a guinea for a sonnet. And his behaviour was less original than his verse. He burned to impart the news to the drudge in curling-pins who brought in his tea and haddock, he wanted to pat the heads of the children who were playing tip-cat in the roads. In Soho it is never too early nor too late for the children who fill the roads to play tip-cat. In Bloomsbury they incline to roller-skates; in Bayswater—-that happy hunting-ground of the organ-grinder and the street-arab—they "Follow my leader," yelling; but the passion of Soho is tip-cat. He bought a bunch of daffodils on his way to the office, and stuck them on his desk. He was still at Panzetta's—his salary had been raised ten shillings by this time—and the prospect of tendering his resignation shone out to his eager eyes again. The clouds had hidden it so long that he was dazzled. There was the gladness of summer in the sunlight that slanted through the dusty windows; all the temptations of the country lurked in the pennyworth of daffodils beside the ink-pot; he panted to be in the open, free to loose the extravagance of joy that swelled his heart.
"It's the sort of morning," he said in a burst to the accountant, who sat opposite, "that makes you think it's hot out-of-doors and want to go and pick poppies, and hear the rye rustle!"
The accountant lived at Ealing, and travelled by the same train as a distinguished counsel every day. He often mentioned vaingloriously that Sir Edward Jennings had nodded to him on the platform.
"Ah!" he rhapsodised. "With a carriage-and-pair to come and fetch you!"
David was a little less than nineteen when his first verses were accepted; he was a little less than twenty when they were paid for. Thus the thoughtfulness of the Editor provided him with two distinct occasions for rejoicing. He sent several other sonnets to the journal, and some of these were taken also, but a guinea is the professional Pons asinorum, and it was a long time before he cashed a cheque for any larger sum. The bright prospect of resigning the clerkship receded from him like a will-o'-the-wisp, and by-and-by he even smiled at his youthfulness, in remembering how happy that first acceptance of his work had made him feel.
And still he wrote. Sometimes he sat writing poetry, in front of the washhand-stand, until the lamp-flame waned and bobbed, and went out. So grew the manuscripts which were to be submitted to the publishers. Excepting the boarding-house, where Ownie reigned on in widowhood, he visited no one; excepting Vivian, who made his way to the attic at long intervals, no one visited him. Few among the millions in London were more utterly alone than this young man who alternately hoped and despaired, and, whether he was elated or despondent, had never an ear to heed him, heard never a voice that said "Cheer up." Vivian and Ownie were the only persons who ever inquired about his work, and to a dejected man the inquiries of the uncongenial are worse than none at all. No strangers could have been more foreign to each other than were the half-brothers, although they had a myriad memories in common. It is not time that enables people to understand one another, it is temperament. The world is heavy with couples who have sat opposite each other for forty years and are still tone deaf to each other's humour, and stone blind to each other's moods; and a recent acquaintance may say the right things to both. Vivian had encouraged poetry while he thought it might pay; since it didn't pay, he explained that the proper line of action was to deal in something else instead. There was nothing unpractical about the son of the late Mr. Harris; he was the kind of young fellow of whom it may be predicted, even while his pockets are empty, that he will rise somehow, and throw a few of his scruples overboard in the process. He was an occasional caller, but never a companion.
And slowly there crept into David's life a dull resentment of the solitude that had once been a relief, a longing for sympathy, for tenderness—a sense of bitter oppression as he looked in the glass and knew that he must never expect to find these things. And the face of every girl became a glass to him, and he winced before it. When his resources were low, he took his mid-day meal in a vegetarian restaurant, a place with a faint distinctive smell, and a three-course dinner for sixpence. One of the waitresses there was very pretty, and all had arch glances and undertones for the regular customers who cheated hunger with scones and "coffee," or some dish with an attractive name and a strangely nasty taste. Only with David none was ever arch. Once he summoned courage to say more to the pretty waitress than "Two poached eggs, please," and the haughtiness of her eyebrows slew him before she turned away. Often in the streets he saw a negro—black as Elisha had been—and across the crowd the gaze of the aliens would meet for a moment—drawn together by something deeper than curiosity. But neither could lift his silk hat and say to the other, "We are both damned, so let us be friends!" because the influence of civilisation prevented their acting like that, although their skins were the wrong colour.