George Gissing - New Grub Street

‘Then take Mr Hinks’s new book back to him, and tell him that I have quite enough to do without reading tedious trash. He needn’t expect that I’m going to write a notice of it. The simpleton pesters me beyond endurance. I wish to know, if you please,’ he added with savage calm, ‘when dinner will be ready. If there’s time to write a few letters, just tell me at once, that I mayn’t waste half an hour.’

Marian resented this unreasonable anger, but she durst not reply.

At that moment the servant appeared with a smoking joint, and Mrs Yule followed carrying dishes of vegetables. The man of letters seated himself and carved angrily. He began his meal by drinking half a glass of ale; then he ate a few mouthfuls in a quick, hungry way, his head bent closely over the plate. It happened commonly enough that dinner passed without a word of conversation, and that seemed likely to be the case this evening.

To his wife Yule seldom addressed anything but a curt inquiry or caustic comment; if he spoke humanly at table it was to Marian.

Ten minutes passed; then Marian resolved to try any means of clearing the atmosphere.

‘Mr Quarmby gave me a message for you,’ she said. ‘A friend of his, Nathaniel Walker, has told him that Mr Rackett will very likely offer you the editorship of The Study.’

Yule stopped in the act of mastication. He fixed his eyes intently on the sirloin for half a minute; then, by way of the beer-jug and the salt-cellar, turned them upon Marian’s face.

‘Walker told him that? Pooh!’

‘It was a great secret. I wasn’t to breathe a word to any one but you.’

‘Walker’s a fool and Quarmby’s an ass,’ remarked her father.

But there was a tremulousness in his bushy eyebrows; his forehead half unwreathed itself; he continued to eat more slowly, and as if with appreciation of the viands.

‘What did he say? Repeat it to me in his words.’

Marian did so, as nearly as possible. He listened with a scoffing expression, but still his features relaxed.

‘I don’t credit Rackett with enough good sense for such a proposal,’ he said deliberately. ‘And I’m not very sure that I should accept it if it were made. That fellow Fadge has all but ruined the paper. It will amuse me to see how long it takes him to make Culpepper’s new magazine a distinct failure.’

A silence of five minutes ensued; then Yule said of a sudden.

‘Where is Hinks’s book?’

Marian reached it from a side table; under this roof, literature was regarded almost as a necessary part of table garnishing.

‘I thought it would be bigger than this,’ Yule muttered, as he opened the volume in a way peculiar to bookish men.

A page was turned down, as if to draw attention to some passage. Yule put on his eyeglasses, and soon made a discovery which had the effect of completing the transformation of his visage. His eyes glinted, his chin worked in pleasurable emotion. In a moment he handed the book to Marian, indicating the small type of a foot-note; it embodied an effusive eulogy—introduced a propos of some literary discussion—of ‘Mr Alfred Yule’s critical acumen, scholarly research, lucid style,’ and sundry other distinguished merits.

‘That is kind of him,’ said Marian.

‘Good old Hinks! I suppose I must try to get him half-a-dozen readers.’

‘May I see?’ asked Mrs Yule, under her breath, bending to Marian.

Her daughter passed on the volume, and Mrs Yule read the footnote with that look of slow apprehension which is so pathetic when it signifies the heart’s good-will thwarted by the mind’s defect.

‘That’ll be good for you, Alfred, won’t it?’ she said, glancing at her husband.

‘Certainly,’ he replied, with a smile of contemptuous irony. ‘If Hinks goes on, he’ll establish my reputation.’

And he took a draught of ale, like one who is reinvigorated for the battle of life. Marian, regarding him askance, mused on what seemed to her a strange anomaly in his character; it had often surprised her that a man of his temperament and powers should be so dependent upon the praise and blame of people whom he justly deemed his inferiors.

Yule was glancing over the pages of the work.

‘A pity the man can’t write English.’ What a vocabulary! Obstruent—reliable—particularization—fabulosity—different to—averse to—did one ever come across such a mixture of antique pedantry and modern vulgarism! Surely he has his name from the German hinken—eh, Marian?’

With a laugh he tossed the book away again. His mood was wholly changed. He gave various evidences of enjoying the meal, and began to talk freely with his daughter.

‘Finished the authoresses?’

‘Not quite.’

‘No hurry. When you have time I want you to read Ditchley’s new book, and jot down a selection of his worst sentences. I’ll use them for an article on contemporary style; it occurred to me this afternoon.’

He smiled grimly. Mrs Yule’s face exhibited much contentment, which became radiant joy when her husband remarked casually that the custard was very well made to-day. Dinner over, he rose without ceremony and went off to his study.

The man had suffered much and toiled stupendously. It was not inexplicable that dyspepsia, and many another ill that literary flesh is heir to, racked him sore.

Go back to the days when he was an assistant at a bookseller’s in Holborn. Already ambition devoured him, and the genuine love of knowledge goaded his brain. He allowed himself but three or four hours of sleep; he wrought doggedly at languages, ancient and modern; he tried his hand at metrical translations; he planned tragedies. Practically he was living in a past age; his literary ideals were formed on the study of Boswell.

The head assistant in the shop went away to pursue a business which had come into his hands on the death of a relative; it was a small publishing concern, housed in an alley off the Strand, and Mr Polo (a singular name, to become well known in the course of time) had his ideas about its possible extension. Among other instances of activity he started a penny weekly paper, called All Sorts, and in the pages of this periodical Alfred Yule first appeared as an author. Before long he became sub-editor of All Sorts, then actual director of the paper. He said good-bye to the bookseller, and his literary career fairly began.

Mr Polo used to say that he never knew a man who could work so many consecutive hours as Alfred Yule. A faithful account of all that the young man learnt and wrote from 1855 to 1860—that is, from his twenty-fifth to his thirtieth year—would have the look of burlesque exaggeration. He had set it before him to become a celebrated man, and he was not unaware that the attainment of that end would cost him quite exceptional labour, seeing that nature had not favoured him with brilliant parts. No matter; his name should be spoken among men unless he killed himself in the struggle for success.

In the meantime he married. Living in a garret, and supplying himself with the materials of his scanty meals, he was in the habit of making purchases at a little chandler’s shop, where he was waited upon by a young girl of no beauty, but, as it seemed to him, of amiable disposition. One holiday he met this girl as she was walking with a younger sister in the streets; he made her nearer acquaintance, and before long she consented to be his wife and share his garret. His brothers, John and Edmund, cried out that he had made an unpardonable fool of himself in marrying so much beneath him; that he might well have waited until his income improved. This was all very well, but they might just as reasonably have bidden him reject plain food because a few years hence he would be able to purchase luxuries; he could not do without nourishment of some sort, and the time had come when he could not do without a wife. Many a man with brains but no money has been compelled to the same step. Educated girls have a pronounced distaste for London garrets; not one in fifty thousand would share poverty with the brightest genius ever born. Seeing that marriage is so often indispensable to that very success which would enable a man of parts to mate equally, there is nothing for it but to look below one’s own level, and be grateful to the untaught woman who has pity on one’s loneliness.