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Page 3
II
As far as the chief business of his life--his writing--was concerned,
Paul Oleron treated the world a good deal better than he was treated by
it; but he seldom took the trouble to strike a balance, or to compute how
far, at forty-four years of age, he was behind his points on the
handicap. To have done so wouldn't have altered matters, and it might
have depressed Oleron. He had chosen his path, and was committed to it
beyond possibility of withdrawal. Perhaps he had chosen it in the days
when he had been easily swayed by something a little disinterested, a
little generous, a little noble; and had he ever thought of questioning
himself he would still have held to it that a life without nobility and
generosity and disinterestedness was no life for him. Only quite
recently, and rarely, had he even vaguely suspected that there was more
in it than this; but it was no good anticipating the day when, he
supposed, he would reach that maximum point of his powers beyond which he
must inevitably decline, and be left face to face with the question
whether it would not have profited him better to have ruled his life
by less exigent ideals.
In the meantime, his removal into the old house with the insurance marks
built into its brick merely interrupted _Romilly Bishop_ at the fifteenth
chapter.
As this tall man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode,
arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again,
he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For
twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms
furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed to do many things for
himself, and he had discovered that it saves time and temper to be
methodical. He had arranged with the wife of the long-nosed Barrett, a
stout Welsh woman with a falsetto voice, the Merionethshire accent of
which long residence in London had not perceptibly modified, to come
across the square each morning to prepare his breakfast, and also to
"turn the place out" on Saturday mornings; and for the rest, he even
welcomed a little housework as a relaxation from the strain of writing.
His kitchen, together with the adjoining strip of an apartment into
which a modern bath had been fitted, overlooked the alley at the side of
the house; and at one end of it was a large closet with a door, and a
square sliding hatch in the upper part of the door. This had been a
powder-closet, and through the hatch the elaborately dressed head had
been thrust to receive the click and puff of the powder-pistol. Oleron
puzzled a little over this closet; then, as its use occurred to him, he
smiled faintly, a little moved, he knew not by what.... He would have to
put it to a very different purpose from its original one; it would
probably have to serve as his larder.... It was in this closet that
he made a discovery. The back of it was shelved, and, rummaging on an
upper shelf that ran deeply into the wall, Oleron found a couple of
mushroom-shaped old wooden wig-stands. He did not know how they had come
to be there. Doubtless the painters had turned them up somewhere or
other, and had put them there. But his five rooms, as a whole, were
short of cupboard and closet-room; and it was only by the exercise of
some ingenuity that he was able to find places for the bestowal of his
household linen, his boxes, and his seldom-used but not-to-be-destroyed
accumulations of papers.
It was in early spring that Oleron entered on his tenancy, and he was
anxious to have _Romilly_ ready for publication in the coming autumn.
Nevertheless, he did not intend to force its production. Should it demand
longer in the doing, so much the worse; he realised its importance, its
crucial importance, in his artistic development, and it must have its own
length and time. In the workroom he had recently left he had been making
excellent progress; _Romilly_ had begun, as the saying is, to speak and
act of herself; and he did not doubt she would continue to do so the
moment the distraction of his removal was over. This distraction was
almost over; he told himself it was time he pulled himself together
again; and on a March morning he went out, returned again with two great
bunches of yellow daffodils, placed one bunch on his mantelpiece between
the Sheffield sticks and the other on the table before him, and took out
the half-completed manuscript of _Romilly Bishop_.
But before beginning work he went to a small rosewood cabinet and took
from a drawer his cheque-book and pass-book. He totted them up, and his
monk-like face grew thoughtful. His installation had cost him more than
he had intended it should, and his balance was rather less than fifty
pounds, with no immediate prospect of more.
"Hm! I'd forgotten rugs and chintz curtains and so forth mounted up so,"
said Oleron. "But it would have been a pity to spoil the place for the
want of ten pounds or so.... Well, _Romilly_ simply _must_ be out for the
autumn, that's all. So here goes--"
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