So he kissed her, and she said nothing. She could say nothing. She could only let him fondle her, as though they still were sweethearts. For she loved him, and he loved her. But though she loved him, in her heart there was a hot remonstrance, which she allowed to remain unspoken, because she loved him. It was easy to say that there was no necessity to prick her with a spur. But there were the tradesmen's bills unpaid, the rent in arrear, and the children wanted things—not to speak of herself and of him. And there was a drawer full of his unaccepted manuscripts. They went hither and thither, from editor to editor, and then for the most part they seemed to settle in the drawer.
She understood well enough what he meant when he asked if she thought that she had in herself the making of a woman of letters. She had been a nothing and a nobody. She had not even been very pretty. Certainly no superfluity of money had been thrown away upon her education. It was not at all as it is in the story books, but, quite by chance, he met her. Before he knew it, he was wooing her. And, when things came to the worst at home, he married her—she having nothing which she could call her own except the things which she was wearing. And he had very little more. It was not strange that he should doubt if in her there was the making of a woman of letters—she, who, save in the way of love letters, had scarcely ever written a line.
Geoffrey Ford was a genius. He had given her to understand that from the very first—in the days when, in her ignorance, she scarcely understood what a genius was. He gave her to understand it still, almost every day. With him, to write was to live. To be a great writer was the dream of his life. He strove to realise his dream with that dogged pertinacity which is only to be seen in the case of a master passion. When they first were married, he was struggling to be a dramatist. He was quite conscious that, in the trade of the writer, wealth was only to be achieved by the successful playwright. He believed that his was essentially the playwright's instinct. Although his plays met with abundance of good words, they did not attain production. It seemed as if they never would. When they began to be actually starving, she suggested that he should put aside playwriting for a time, and try to earn money by other products of his pen. He had acted on her suggestion. He had become that curiosity of modern civilisation—a writer for the magazines. And, in a way, he had been successful. He was earning, perhaps, an irregular hundred and fifty pounds a year. But what are an irregular, a very irregular, hundred and fifty pounds a year, when there are three babies? And yet he said that there was no spur of necessity to urge her on.
The worst of it was, she was beginning to be a doubter. She would not own it, even to herself, but she was beginning to fear that he might be mistaking the desire to be, for the power to be. What he considered his best work invariably came back. He said that this was because editors were unable to appreciate strikingly original ideas when they were presented to them by a wholly unknown man. What they desired was a commonplace, and when he said this, she—well, she said nothing. From the first she had insisted on his reading aloud to her everything he wrote. Unconsciously to herself she had become a critic. She was beginning to fear that he was only at home in the lower levels. When he soared, he floundered. It was only among the hacks that he held his own. Even then, at times, he lagged behind. So far from hinting to him her fears, she would almost rather have died than have allowed him to know she had them. Their love for each other had never faltered, even when their cupboard was emptiest. It had seemed to grow stronger with the coming of each child. And, what is more, it appeared to her that, but for him, she would have dropped into a ditch.
Lately there had been growing up within her a desire to add to the family income. And, oddly enough, it had seemed to her that the best way to do this would be by writing. She had hinted something of this desire to Geoffrey. She had suggested, playfully, that she should join her pen to his—that they should collaborate. He had received her playful suggestion in such a way that she had not ventured to repeat it in earnest. She knew him, through and through. She knew that he desired to succeed, not only for himself, but, first of all, for her. He loved his work for the work's sake. He cared nothing for fame in the sense of popularity, or its equivalent, notoriety. In that respect he was a clear-sighted man—he knew what the thing was worth. For himself he cared nothing for the material products of success. His own tastes were of the simplest kind. He desired to achieve success simply that he might pour the fruits of success into her lap. He wished her to owe nothing to anyone but to himself, to owe nothing even to her own self. He wanted to be all in all to her, to have his love her beginning, and her end.
She knew this. Yet—the rent was overdue. Of late his manuscripts seemed coming back worse than ever. He seemed to be out of the vein. And the children wanted things so badly. And so——
Well, one day he came to her with an expression of countenance which she knew so well. It meant that a new idea, some fresh project, either was germinating, or else had germinated, in his mind. In his hand he held a newspaper.
"'I AM GOING IN FOR A PRIZE COMPETITION.'"
"Philippa, I am going to do what I have told you I thought that I should never do—I am going in for a prize competition. See here." He opened the paper out in front of her. "The North British Telegraph is offering £500 for the best story, £250 for the second best, and £100 for the third best. I am going to win one of those prizes—mark my words, and see if I don't."