He sniffed, as much as to say, “Think you’re smart, don’t you?”
Up Southampton Row I chanced, and in a little street off Tavistock Square I found a temporary home. A cat sleeping on a window-sill suggested Peace, and a donkey-cart piled high with cabbages pointed to Plenty. But as cabbages do not find favour in the tyrannical laboratory of my digestion, I vetoed Mrs. Switcher’s proposal that I take dinner in the house. However, I ordered ham and eggs every morning, with an alternative of haddock or sausage and bacon.
These matters settled, I found myself the tenant of a fourth-floor front in a flat brick building of triumphant ugliness. I could see a melancholy angle of the square, some soot-smeared trees stretching in inky tentacles to a sullen sky, a soggy garden that seemed steeped in despairing contemplation of its own unworthiness.
For Mrs. Switcher, my landlady, I conceived an enthusiastic dislike. A sour, grinding woman who reminded me of a meat-axe, I christened her Rain-in-the-Face in further resemblance of a celebrated Indian Chief. But if I found in her no source of a sympathetic inspiration, in the near-by Reading-room of the British Museum there certainly was. In that studious calm, under battalions of books secure in their circles of immortality, I was profoundly happy. Often I would pause to study those about me, the spectacled men, the literary hack with the shiny coat-sleeve of the Reading-room habitué, the women whose bilious complexions and poky skirts suggested the league of desperate spinsterhood.
A thousand ghosts haunted that great dome. It was a mosaic of faces of dead and gone authors, wistfully watching to see if you would read their books. And if you did, how they hovered down from the greyness and smiled sweetly on you; other ghosts there were too, ghosts of the famous ones who had bent over these very benches, who had delved into that mine of thought just as I was delving. Here they had toiled and triumphed, even as I would toil and triumph. Spurred and exalted, under that great dome where the only sound seemed to be the whirr of busy brains, I spent hours of rarest rapture.
To the solitary the spirits whisper. Ideas came to me at this time in a bewildering swarm, and often I regretted some fancy lost, some subtlety unset to words. So by book-browsing, by curious roaming, by brooding thought, my mental life extended its horizons. Yet knowing no one, speaking to no one, living so much within myself, each day became more dreamlike and unreal. There were times when I almost doubted my own identity, times when, if you had assured me I was John Smith, I would have been inclined to agree with you.
With positive joy I watched my money filter away. “Good!” I reflected. “I shall soon be penniless, reduced to eating stale crusts and sleeping on the iron benches of the Embankment. Who can divine the dazzling possibilities of vicissitude? All my life I have battled with prosperity; now, at last, I shall achieve adversity. I will descend the ladder of success. I will rub shoulders with Destitution. I may even be introduced to Brother Despair.”
Enthusiasm glowed in me at the thought, and absorbed in those ambitious dreams I cried: “Thank God for life’s depths, that we may have the glory of outclimbing them.”
And here be it said, we make a mistake when we pity the poor. It is the rich we should pity, those who have never known the joy of poverty, the ecstasy of squeezing the dollar to the last cent. How good the plain fare looks to our hunger! How sweet the rest after toil! How exciting the uncertainty of the next day’s supper! How glorious the unexpected windfall of a few coppers! Was ever nectar so exquisite as that cup of coffee quaffed at the stall on the Embankment after a night spent on those excruciating benches? Never to have been desperately poor—ah! that is never to have lived.
My shibboleth at this time was a large bottle of ink which I bought and placed on my mantelpiece. Through a haze of cigarette smoke I would address it whimsically: