New Grub Street by George Gissing (best mobile ebook reader .txt) 📕

At times he was not far from that state of sheer distraction which Mrs. Edmund Yule preferred to suppose that he had reached. An extraordinary arrogance now and then possessed him; he stood amid his poor surroundings with the sensations of an outraged exile, and laughed aloud in furious contempt of all who censured or pitied him.

On hearing from Jasper Milvain that Amy had fallen ill, or at all events was suffering in health from what she had gone through, he felt a momentary pang which all but determined him to hasten to her side. The reaction was a feeling of distinct pleasure that she had her share of pain, and even a hope that her illness might become grave; he pictured himself summoned to her sick chamber, imagined her begging his forgiveness. But it was not merely, nor in great part, a malicious satisfaction; he succeeded in believing that Amy suffered because she still had a remnant of love for him. As the days went by and he heard nothing, disappointment and resentment occupied him. At length he ceased to haunt the neighbourhood. His desires grew sullen; he became fixed in the resolve to hold entirely apart and doggedly await the issue.

At the end of each month he sent half the money he had received from Carter, simply enclosing postal orders in an envelope addressed to his wife. The first two remittances were in no way acknowledged; the third brought a short note from Amy:

“As you continue to send these sums of money, I had perhaps better let you know that I cannot use them for any purposes of my own. Perhaps a sense of duty leads you to make this sacrifice, but I am afraid it is more likely that you wish to remind me every month that you are undergoing privations, and to pain me in this way. What you have sent I have deposited in the Post Office Savings’ Bank in Willie’s name, and I shall continue to do so. —A. R.”

For a day or two Reardon persevered in an intention of not replying, but the desire to utter his turbid feelings became in the end too strong. He wrote:

“I regard it as quite natural that you should put the worst interpretation on whatever I do. As for my privations, I think very little of them; they are a trifle in comparison with the thought that I am forsaken just because my pocket is empty. And I am far indeed from thinking that you can be pained by whatever I may undergo; that would suppose some generosity in your nature.”

This was no sooner posted than he would gladly have recalled it. He knew that it was undignified, that it contained as many falsehoods as lines, and he was ashamed of himself for having written so. But he could not pen a letter of retractation, and there remained with him a new cause of exasperated wretchedness.

Excepting the people with whom he came in contact at the hospital, he had no society but that of Biffen. The realist visited him once a week, and this friendship grew closer than it had been in the time of Reardon’s prosperity. Biffen was a man of so much natural delicacy, that there was a pleasure in imparting to him the details of private sorrow; though profoundly sympathetic, he did his best to oppose Reardon’s harsher judgments of Amy, and herein he gave his friend a satisfaction which might not be avowed.

“I really do not see,” he exclaimed, as they sat in the garret one night of midsummer, “how your wife could have acted otherwise. Of course I am quite unable to judge the attitude of her mind, but I think, I can’t help thinking, from what I knew of her, that there has been strictly a misunderstanding between you. It was a hard and miserable thing that she should have to leave you for a time, and you couldn’t face the necessity in a just spirit. Don’t you think there’s some truth in this way of looking at it?”

“As a woman, it was her part to soften the hateful necessity; she made it worse.”

“I’m not sure that you don’t demand too much of her. Unhappily, I know little or nothing of delicately-bred women, but I have a suspicion that one oughtn’t to expect heroism in them, any more than in the women of the lower classes. I think of women as creatures to be protected. Is a man justified in asking them to be stronger than himself?”

“Of course,” replied Reardon, “there’s no use in demanding more than a character is capable of. But I believed her of finer stuff. My bitterness comes of the disappointment.”

“I suppose there were faults of temper on both sides, and you saw at last only each other’s weaknesses.”

“I saw the truth, which had always been disguised from me.” Biffen persisted in looking doubtful, and in secret Reardon thanked him for it.

As the realist progressed with his novel, Mr. Bailey, Grocer, he read the chapters to Reardon, not only for his own satisfaction, but in great part because he hoped that this example of productivity might in the end encourage the listener to resume his own literary tasks. Reardon found much to criticise in his friend’s work; it was noteworthy that he objected and condemned with much less hesitation than in his better days, for sensitive reticence is one of the virtues wont to be assailed by suffering, at all events in the weaker natures. Biffen purposely urged these discussions as far as possible, and doubtless they benefited Reardon for the time; but the defeated novelist could not be induced to undertake another practical illustration of his own views. Occasionally he had an impulse to plan a story, but an hour’s turning it over in his mind sufficed to disgust him. His ideas seemed barren, vapid; it would have been impossible for him to write half a dozen pages, and the mere thought