WEARIED of sitting, Richard folded his overcoat pillow-wise, put it under his head, and extended himself on the polished yellow wood. But in vain were his eyes shut tight. Sleep would not come, though he yawned incessantly. The monstrous beat of the engine, the quick rattle of windows, and the grinding of wheels were fused into a fantastic resonance which occupied every corner of the carriage and invaded his very skull. Then a light tapping on the roof, one of those mysterious sounds which make a compartment in a night-train like a haunted room, momentarily silenced everything else, and he wished that he had not been alone.
Suddenly jumping up, he put away all idea of sleep, and lowered the window. It was pitch dark; vague changing shapes, which might have been either trees or mere fancies of the groping eye, outlined themselves a short distance away; far in front was a dull glare from the engine, and behind twinkled the guard’s lamp.... In a few seconds he closed the window again, chilled to the bone, though May was nearly at an end.
The thought occurred to him that he was now a solitary upon the face of the earth. It concerned no living person whether he did evil or good. If he chose to seek ruin, to abandon himself to the most ignoble impulses, there was none to restrain, — not even a brother-in-law. For several weeks past, he had been troubled about his future, afraid to face it. Certainly London satisfied him, and the charm of living there had not perceptibly grown less. He rejoiced in London, in its vistas, its shops, its unending crowds, its vastness, its wickedness; each dream dreamed about London in childhood had come true; and surer than ever before was the consciousness that in going to London he had fulfilled his destiny. Yet there was something to lack in himself. His confidence in his own abilities and his own character was being undermined. Nearly a year had gone, and he had made no progress, except at the office. Resolutions were constantly broken; it was three months since he had despatched an article to a newspaper. He had not even followed a definite course of study, and though his acquaintance with modern French fiction had widened, he could boast no exact scholarship even in that piquant field. Evening after evening — ah! those long, lamplit evenings which were to be given to strenuous effort! — was frittered away upon mean banalities, sometimes in the company of some casual acquaintance and sometimes alone. He had by no means grasped the full import and extent of this retrogression; it was merely beginning to disturb his self-complacence, and perhaps, ever so slightly, his sleep. But now, hurrying to the funeral of William Vernon, he lazily laughed at himself for having allowed his peace of mind to be ruffled. Why bother about “getting on”? What did it matter?
He still experienced but little sorrow at the death of Vernon. His affection for the man had strangely faded. During the nine months that he had lived in London they had scarcely written to one another, and Richard regarded the long journey to attend William’s obsequies as a tiresome concession to propriety.
That was his real attitude, had he cared to examine it.
At about four o’clock it was quite light, and the risen sun woke Richard from a brief doze. The dew lay in the hollows of the fields but elsewhere there was a soft, fresh clearness which gave to the common incidents of the flying landscape a new and virginal beauty — as though that had been the morn of creation itself. The cattle were stirring, and turned to watch the train as it slipped by.
Richard opened the window again. His mood had changed, and he felt unreasonably joyous. Last night he had been too pessimistic. Life lay yet before him, and time enough to rectify any indiscretions of which he might have been guilty. The future was his, to use as he liked. Magnificent, consoling thought! Moved by some symbolic association of ideas, he put his head out of the window and peered in the direction of the train’s motion. A cottage stood alone in the midst of innumerable meadows; as it crossed his vision, the door opened, and a young woman came out with an empty pail swinging in her left hand. Apparently she would be about twenty-seven, plump and sturdy and straight. Her hair was loose about her round, contented face, and with her disengaged hand she rubbed her eyes, still puffed and heavy with sleep. She wore a pink print gown, the bodice of which was unfastened, disclosing a white undergarment and the rich hemispheres of her bosom. In an instant the scene was hidden by a curve of the line, and the interminable succession of fields resumed, but Richard had time to guess from her figure that the woman was the mother of a small family. He pictured her husband still unconscious in the warm bed which she had just left; he even saw the impress of her head on the pillow, and a long nightdress thrown hastily across a chair.
He was deeply and indescribably affected by this suggestion of peaceful married love set in so great a solitude. The woman and her hypothetical husband and children were only peasants, their lives were probably narrow and their intellects dormant, yet they aroused in him a feeling of envy which surged about his brain and for the moment asphyxiated thought....
Later on the train slackened speed as it passed through a shunting-yard. The steam from the light shunting-engine rose with cloud-like delicacy in the clear air, and an occasional short whistle seemed to have something of the quality of a bird’s note. The men with their long poles moved blithely among the medley of rails, signalling one another with motions of the arm. The coupling-chains rang with a merry, giant tinkle, and when the engine brought its load of waggons to a standstill, and a smart, metallic bump, bump, bump ran diminuendo from waggon to waggon, one might have fancied that some leviathan game was being played. Richard forgot the girl with the pail, and soon after went to sleep.
At six o’clock the train reached Knype, where he had to change. Two women with several children also alighted, and he noticed how white and fatigued were their faces; the children yawned pitifully. An icy, searching wind blew through the station; the exhilaration of the dawn was gone, and a spirit of utter woe and disaster brooded over everything. For the first time William’s death really touched him.
The streets of Bursley were nearly empty as he walked through the town from the railway station, for the industrial population was already at work in the manufactories, and the shops not yet open. Yet Richard avoided the main thoroughfares, choosing a circuitous route lest he might by chance encounter an acquaintance. He foresaw the inevitable banal dialogue: —
“Well, how do you like London?”
“Oh, it’s fine!”
“Getting on all right?”
“Yes, thanks.”
And then the effort of two secretly bored persons to continue a perfunctory conversation unaided by a single mutual interest.
A carriage was driving away from the Red House just as Richard got within sight of it; he nodded to the venerable coachman, who gravely touched his hat. The owner of the carriage was Mr. Clayton Vernon, William’s cousin and an alderman of Bursley, and Richard surmised that Mrs. Clayton Vernon had put herself in charge of the place until the funeral should be over. He trembled at the prospect of a whole day to be spent in the company of these excellent people, whom William had always referred to with a smile, and yet not without a great deal of respect. The Clayton Vernons were the chief buttress of respectability in the town; rich, strictly religious, philanthropic, and above all dignified. Everyone looked up to them instinctively, and had they possessed but one vice between them, they would have been loved.
Mrs. Clayton Vernon herself opened the door. She was a stately woman of advanced middle age, with a sauve, imperious manner.
“I left Clayton to have breakfast by himself,” she said, as she led Richard into the sitting-room; “I thought you would like someone here to welcome you after your long night journey. Breakfast will be ready almost directly. How tired you must be! Clayton said it was a pity you should come by the night train, but of course it is quite right that you should inconvenience your employers as little as possible, quite right. And we admire you for it. Now will you run upstairs and wash? You’ve not forgotten the way?..”
The details of the funeral had been settled by Mr. Clayton Vernon, who was the chief mourner, and Richard had nothing to do but fall in with preconcerted plans and answer decorously when spoken to. The arrangement was satisfactory in that it relieved him from duties which would have been irksome, but scarcely gratifying to his pride. He had lived nearly all his life in that house, and had known the dead man perhaps more intimately than anyone else present. However, he found it convenient to efface himself.
In the evening there was an elaborate tea at which were present the Clayton Vernons and the minister who had conducted the funeral service. The minister and the alderman left immediately afterwards to attend a meeting, and when they were gone Mrs. Clayton Vernon said, —
“Now we are all alone, Richard. Go into the drawing-room and I will follow. I do want to have a chat with you.”
She came in with needle and thread and scissors. “If you will take off your coat, I will stitch on that button that is hanging by one thread. I noticed it this morning, and then it went quite out of my mind. I am so sorry!”
“Oh, thanks!” he blushed hotly. “But I can stitch myself, you know—”
“Come, you needn’t be shy of an old woman seeing you in your shirt-sleeves. Do as I ask.”
He doffed the coat.
“I always like young men to be immaculately neat,” she said, cutting off a piece of cotton. “One’s personal character is an index to one’s character, don’t you think? Of course you do. Here, thread the needle for me. I am afraid since your dear sister died you have grown a little careless, eh? She was most particular. Ah, what a mother she was to you!”
“Yes,” said Richard.
“I was very grieved to see you go to the funeral in a soft hat — Richard, really I was. It wasn’t respectful to your brother-in-law’s memory.”
“I never thought. You see, I started in rather a hurry.” The fact was that he had no silk hat, nor could he easily afford to buy one.
“But you should think, my dear boy. Even Clayton was shocked. Are those your best clothes?” Richard answered that they were. He sheepishly protested that he never bothered about clothes.
There was a silence, broken by her regular stitching. At last she handed him the coat and helped him to put it on. He went to the old green sofa, and somewhat to his dismay she sat down by his side.
“Richard,” she began, in a changed, soft voice, and not without emotion, “do you know we are expecting great things from you?”
“But you shouldn’t. I’m a very ordinary sort of person.”
“No, no. That you are not. God has given you great talents, and you must use them. Poor William always used to say that you were highly gifted and might do great things.”
“Might!”
“Yes — if you tried.”
“But how am I gifted? And what ‘great things’ are expected?” he asked, perhaps angling for further flattering disclosures.
“I cannot answer that,” said Mrs. Clayton Vernon; “it is for you to answer. You have given all your friends the impression that you would do something worth doing. You have raised hopes, and you must not disappoint them. We believe in you, Richard. That is all I can say.”
“That’s all very well; but—” He stopped and played with the seal on his watch-chain. “The fact is, I am working, you know. I want to be an author —— at least a journalist.”
“Ah!”
“It’s a slow business — at first—” Suddenly moved to be confidential, he went on to give her some account, incomplete and judiciously edited, of his life during the past year.
“You have relieved my mind greatly, and Clayton will be so glad. We were beginning to think—”
“Why were you ‘beginning to think’?”
“Well, never mind now.”
“But why?”
“Never mind. I have full confidence in you, and I am sure you will get on. Poor boy, you have no near connections or relatives now?”
“No, none.”
“You must look on Clayton and myself as very near relatives. We have no children, but our hearts are large. I shall expect you to write to me sometimes and to come and stay with us now and then.”