“Stop! Confound you, stop! I tell you——”
“Come,” he said laughing. “I mustn’t force your confidence; but I can’t help feeling it’s odd——”
“When I came to London,” I said, firmly, “I was most desperately in love. I was to make a fortune, incidentally my name, marry, and live happily ever after. There seemed last year nothing complex about that programme. It seemed almost too simple. I even, like a fool, thought to add an extra touch of piquancy to it by endeavouring to be a Bohemian. I then discovered that what I was attempting was not so simple as I had imagined. To begin with, Bohemians diffuse their brains in every direction except that where bread-and-butter comes from. I found, too, that unless one earns bread-and-butter, one has to sprint very fast to the workhouse door to prevent oneself starving before one gets there; so I dropped Bohemia and I dropped many other pleasant fictions as well. I took to examining pavements, saw how hard they were, had a look at the gutters, and saw how broad they were. I noticed the accumulation of dirt on the house fronts, the actual proportions of industrial buildings. I observed closely the price of food, clothes, and roofs.”
“You became a realist.”
“Yes; I read a good deal of Gissing about then, and it scared me. I pitied myself. And after that came pity for the girl I loved. I swore that I would never let her come to my side in the ring where the monster Poverty and I were fighting. If you’ve been there you’ve been in hell. And if you come out with your soul alive you can’t tell other people what it felt like. They couldn’t understand.”
Julian nodded. “I understand, you know,” he said gravely.
“Yes, you’ve been there,” I said. “Well, you’ve seen that my little turn-up with the monster was short and sharp. It wasn’t one of the old-fashioned, forty-round, most-of-a-lifetime, feint-for-an-opening, in-and-out affairs. Our pace was too fast for that. We went at it both hands, fighting all the time. I was going for the knock-out in the first round. Not your method, Julian.”
“No,” said Julian; “it’s not my method. I treat the monster rather as a wild animal than as a hooligan; and hearing that wild animals won’t do more than sniff at you if you lie perfectly still, I adopted that ruse towards him to save myself the trouble of a conflict. But the effect of lying perfectly still was that I used to fall asleep; and that works satisfactorily.”
“Julian,” I said, “I detect a touch of envy in your voice. You try to keep it out, but you can’t. Wait a bit, though. I haven’t finished.
“As you know, I had the monster down in less than no time. I said to myself, ‘I’ve won. I’ll write to Margaret, and tell her so!’ Do you know I had actually begun to write the letter when another thought struck me. One that started me sweating and shaking. ‘The monster,’ I said again to myself, ‘the monster is devilish cunning. Perhaps he’s only shamming! It looks as if he were beaten. Suppose it’s only a feint to get me off my guard. Suppose he just wants me to take my eyes off him so that he may get at me again as soon as I’ve begun to look for a comfortable chair and a mantelpiece to rest my feet on!’ I told myself that I wouldn’t risk bringing Margaret over. I didn’t dare chance her being with me if ever I had to go back into the ring. So I kept jumping and stamping on the monster. The referee had given me the fight and had gone away; and, with no one to stop me, I kicked the life out of him.”