Sir Oliver looked at John, as only age, with awful wistfulness, can look at youth, and came and laid his hand upon the young man's broad shoulders.
“My lad,” said he, “you've had a bad time; but you 're young. You've the whole of your life before you. Time, my dear boy, is a marvellous solvent of human perplexity. Once in a new world, once in that astonishing continent of Australia—”
John threw a half-finished cigar angrily into the fire.
“I'm not going to the damned continent,” said he.
CHAPTER V
THUS it came to pass that, for the sake of Stellamaris, Risca remained in London and fought with beasts in Fenton Square. Sometimes he got the better of the beasts, and sometimes the beasts got the better of him. On the former occasions he celebrated the victory by doing an extra turn of work; on the latter he sat idly growling at defeat.
At this period of his career he was assistant-editor of a weekly review, in charge of the book-column of an evening newspaper, the contributor of a signed weekly article on general subjects to the “Daily Herald,” and of a weekly London letter to an American syndicate. From this it will be seen that for a man not yet thirty he had achieved a position in journalism envied by many who had grown gray-headed in the game. But as Risca had written three or four novels which had all been rejected by all the publishers in London, he chose to regard himself as a man foiled in his ambitions. He saw himself doomed to failure. For him was the eternal toil of ploughing the sand; the Garden of Delight cultivated by the happy Blest—such as Fawcus of the club, who boasted of making over a thousand pounds for every novel he wrote, and of being able to take as much holiday as he chose—had its gilded gates closed against him forever. That the man of nine-and-twenty should grow embittered because he was not accepted by the world as a brilliant novelist is a matter for the derision of the middle-aged and for the pitying smile of the hoary; but it is a matter of woeful concern to twenty-nine, especially if twenty-nine be a young man of a saturnine temperament whom fate has driven to take himself seriously. In Risca's life there were misfortunes the reality of the pain of which was independent of age; others which were relative, as inseparable from youth as the tears for a bumped head are inseparable from childhood. Yet to the man they were all equally absolute. It is only in after-years, when one looks back down the vista, that one can differentiate.
For all that he ought to have given himself another decade before crying himself a failure, yet a brilliant young journalist who has not found a publisher for one of four novels has reasonable excuse for serious cogitation. There are scores of brilliant young journalists who have published masterpieces of fiction before they are thirty, and at forty have gone on their knees and thanked kind, gentle Time for his effacing fingers; yet the novels have had some quality of the novel warranting their publication. At any rate, the brilliant young journalists have believed in them. They have looked upon their Creation and found that it was good. But Risca, looking on his Creation, found that it was wood. His people were as wooden as Mr. and Mrs. Ham in a Noah's Ark; his scenery was as wooden as the trees and mountain in a toy Swiss village; his dialogue as wooden as the conversation-blocks used by the philosophers of Laputa. He had said, in an outburst of wrathful resentment, that he found his one artistic outlet in aiding to create Stella's Land of Illusion; and he was right. He was despairingly aware of the lack of the quick fancy; the power of visualization; the sublimated faculty of the child's make-believe, creating out of trumpery bits and pieces a glowing world of romance; the keen, instinctive knowledge of the general motives of human action; the uncanny insight into the hearts and feelings of beings of a sex, class, or type different from his own; the gift of evolving from a tiny broken bone of fact a perfect creature indisputably real, colouring it with the hues of actuality and breathing into it the breath of life—the lack, indeed, of all the essential qualities, artistic and therefore usually instinctive, that go to the making of a novelist. Yet Risca was doggedly determined to be a novelist and a poet. It was pathetic. How can a man who cannot distinguish between “God Save the King” and “Yankee Doodle” hope to write a world-shaking sonata? Risca knew that he was crying for the moon, and it is only because he cried so hard for it that he deserved any serious commiseration.