Beckenhampton itself is not picturesque, though the outskirts are pretty enough. The visitor finds nothing to admire in the town save the factory-girls, some of whom are beautiful—excepting on Sunday when they wear their best clothes and mock pearl necklaces. She was tired to death of the long, dull, stuccoed roads that offered nothing to the imagination. She crossed the market-place and passed a post-office and made her way towards London Street. In London Street the Misses Simpson nodded to her without stopping. They agreed that she was "beginning to look old, poor girl," as they went on. In her hand were the letter, and the cheesemonger's bill, which she was about to pay. The fancy did not strike her, but the two things that she held were typical of her existence.
She paid the bill and turned homeward. Now she walked more slowly, and when she reached the post-office again, she paused. She moved a step closer to it—and wavered. The thought came, to embarrass her, that she was making herself more ridiculous still by so much hesitation. At the worst the man would throw the thing aside and forget it. She wished that it had been sent at once, or that she had never written it at all. The whole incident seemed to her intolerably stupid. She pushed the letter hastily into the box.
[CHAPTER XIII]
Yes, David's success had come. It had not been won so easily as was imagined by the readers who had never heard of him till now, for he had written for many papers—verse and articles too—before A Celibate's Love Songs appeared. It had not come so soon that success intoxicated him; but it had come a decade earlier than it comes as a rule even to the fortunate.
It was the pity of it, that the recognition he had wooed so ardently found his embrace at last a little passionless. "A humbug" his friends, if he had had any, would have called him when he hinted as much, but some of Fame's fairness had faded in the courtship, or the wooer had lost some of his capacity for rapture.
The "interviews" and the introductions that might have been his were not forthcoming because nobody had met him yet, but he was conscious of no sacrifice in waiving them; on the contrary, he shrank distressed from the thought of thrusting his negro face? between the public and their appreciation of his verse. Mr. Norton, his publisher, might have intimated suavely that his personality had a distinct commercial value, but David had even excused himself from calling on his publisher.
Few things are more circumscribed than "widespread literary fame"; and David's was only spreading. Though A Celibate's Love Songs was in brisk demand, and a second edition, the author's mother in her boarding-house at Regent's Park had not heard of it yet; Vivian was travelling, as business-manager of a dramatic company; and at present the poet's parentage had not transpired. At Panzetta's somebody might have given the kick-off to a ball of personal gossip, remembering the whisper of the ex-clerk's tendencies, but before a volume of poems penetrated to Panzetta's it would have to see, not two, but twenty editions.
In solitude as complete as when he saw his first sonnet printed, or when—as an unattached journalist—he bade the clerkship good-bye, David lived to-day. The residence of the "new poet whom Mr. Norton had discovered"—there are always paragraphists who talk naively of the publisher or manager "discovering" a writer who has been pealing at the bell for years—was a philistine and even shabby first-floor in an undesirable street shadowed by Gray's Inn Road. On his notepaper he ignored Gray's Inn Road, and flaunted Mecklenburgh Square. When he worked, his eyes rested now on an oleograph of Romeo and Juliet in a gilt frame, instead of on a washhand-stand, and his meals were laid by a domestic who removed her curling-pins by noon, and was clean by tea-time. One does not attain distinction as a poet without acquiring certain luxuries.
He was not writing this morning; he seldom did much good until the gas was lighted—until the bawl of hawkers, and the riot of children, and the clatter and crash of milk-cans had ceased. In the evening there were only piano-organs to prevent his earning a living, and by ten or eleven o'clock even these finished. He was not writing; when the second post was delivered, he had his overcoat spread on the table, and was trying to expunge a grease-spot with a rag soaked in turpentine. There was a letter for him. Though the servant was slow in coming upstairs, the grease spot was still slower in yielding to his treatment, and when she thudded across the room, he was still rubbing vigorously.