His father’s cousin, a prosperous man of business, desired to do well by him. He offered to obtain for him a clerkship in the city. Fletewode thanked him; then he pointed out that he was very unbusinesslike, that arithmetic was not his strong point, in fact he was in the habit, when necessity arose, of adding up on his fingers; also that he wrote a very unclerkly hand. Moreover, he said: “I want to write about the things of which I think, and I believe that is the only thing I can really do well.”
His relative regarded him as a fool, and did not take the trouble to hide the fact. Fletewode was quite unruffled by this, which annoyed his kinsman still more. There is nothing to be done with a person who does not mind what you think of, or say to, him, and it makes you appear as though you were of little account in his eyes. Fletewode’s relative was unpleasantly conscious of this, nevertheless he tried again to rouse the impracticable youth to a sense of realities; he asked him how he proposed to live. Fletewode replied that he possessed £100; he supposed he could live on that for some time; perhaps he should earn money by the things he wrote; he had not considered the matter deeply, and, after all, money was of secondary importance. To speak disrespectfully of other people’s Gods is unjustifiable; Fletewode’s relative, very properly, cursed him in the names of Worldly Wisdom, and Business and Commonsense; also he said he washed his hands of him, when he was starving in the gutter he would come to his senses. Fletewode smiled like one who is occupied with more important questions, but lends a kindly ear to childlike babblings; then he went out to sit under the Crimson Rambler, where his father died. The crimson petals lay thickly on the walk, and in a crook of the thorny boughs a flycatcher was feeding a youthful family.
A week later Fletewode left the vicarage, and the roses, the beech wood and the birds, and went to London with a sheaf of manuscripts and a few books. At the end of a year he had written a great deal, but no one heeded him. Who was to be expected to turn aside from the press of life to see whether this shabbily dressed young man, who couched all manner of wild, mystical thoughts of God and humanity and nature in melodious verse, that made one think of the murmur of the wind through a perfumed wood on a June night—who was to take much trouble, I say, to see whether there was any truth in the words, or genius in the soul, of such a country lad as this?
At the end of a year the £100 was nearly gone; not that Fletewode had recklessly spent the whole of this enormous sum on himself, but he found (it is not an unusual experience) many people in the not too magnificent street where he rented a room who were poorer than he; these people looked upon him as a man of fortune, and they explained to him the duty of the rich towards the poor.
On a day in spring Fletewode Garth sat in his room and shivered with nervousness and hunger, while he faced the fact that he had but three shillings left.
Soon he would not be able to buy ink and paper; his work was beginning to suffer a little by reason of lack of food, and anxiety. It was for that reason the sheet of paper on the table before him was angrily torn across, and stained, moreover, with tears. He could not think; the halting of his brain, the blunting of his perceptions were the keenest tortures life could bring a soul like Fletewode Garth. He had altered during his year of town life; the child-look, which had lingered in his eyes despite his twenty years, was gone. He was no longer semi-unconscious of his surroundings and steeped in dreams of the things beyond. He was nervously, irritably, bitterly conscious of his world. Life—the seamy side of it—had made him look on the things men call the realities of existence; the ugliest, most sordid, most evil side of life. He had looked to some purpose, looked till his heart was sickened, till his heart was weary with pain and hopelessness. Looked till the pressure of the sordid-seeming struggle without, and the strong constraining power of that mystic something within, a power which was laid on him despite himself, sometimes strained his nerves to breaking point.
Now, too, a dread seized him. The sight of the world’s sorrow had made him tremblingly anxious that his human comrades should hear him speak of the fairer things; of that which he felt to be true, which once had been the whole of life for him. For the first time he desired to comfort and to succour, and though he knew it not, this longing gave to his work the last touch it needed—the human touch, the power of speech from heart to heart.
Suppose, he thought, he died of poverty, and all he had written was swept away unread. Fletewode actually believed that it is possible to sweep out of existence, irrevocably and for all time, a thing which the world needs, or will need. Therefore he grieved; he had no personal ambitions, he did not mind obscurity or death, nor did he greatly mind suffering; but now, at last, he wished people to have the happiness that had vanished from his own life.
He got up with a sigh, took his hat, and went out. He was going to seek a possible patron. John Chalmers, a man whom he once helped with some of the vanished £100, told him “to go and see Scottie; Scottie might put something in his way.”
John Chalmers was a clever man, who would have been a successful artist, save for drink. He drew rather coarse cartoons for inferior comic papers.