"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in shirt and trousers.
"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every room.... And I loathe strangers as much as you do."
Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his apprenticeship to the London News, he had won the friendship of Martin Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is—and dialogue—and technique—and characterization. You could write a successful play to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two. You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want to kill theatricality—which is what I've tried to do all my life—you must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of a lot, if I had time.... When I'm gone, fire in your application for my berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels. Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a sketch-book with society smatterers alone."
Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation. They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own. So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists—and all who came humbly to her for a chance of meeting them—she shut her eyes to her husband's excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers" wanted him to write up a charity matinée or the amateur performance of a Restoration comedy.
Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van, Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.
"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't speak to a woman from one year's end to another——"
"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.
"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.
"Some people don't know when they're well off. I can't dance and I've nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an answer I can never make out. I suppose you like women, Eric. Every time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or pearls or eyes—honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two, with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day.... However, they're all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"