Jimmy Quixote Part 23

But he tired of that, as he tired of everything else; and a chance visit to Jimmy, and the sight of Jimmy driving a pen furiously, while a printer's boy dangled his legs and strove not to whistle between his teeth, spurred Charlie to the knowledge that perhaps after all he had made another mistake, and that there was no reason why printers' boys should not wait on him. He went home, to fling easel and canvas and brushes aside, and to look for a pen that absolutely suited his hand.

He wrote something, and took it down to practical Jimmy; and practical Jimmy scanned it thoughtfully, and made suggestions--something on the lines of those given to himself some years back, by the young man in a certain office of a certain paper--the first for which Jimmy had worked.

Charlie was deeply grateful, and took the thing away; looked at it on reaching home, and decided that Jimmy was altogether wrong about it; and pitched it into a corner after the easel and the canvases.

Yet he tried again--and yet again; flinging into each effort a fierce energy that carried him on feverishly for an hour or so; and then dropping the work, and never going back to it with any energy at all.

Now and then he railed against his ill-luck; more often he laughed, and said it didn't matter. And slowly saw the fifty pounds dwindling, and told himself--or tried to tell himself--that that didn't matter. If only he had had the chance that Jimmy had had; if only he had had to fight his way as Jimmy had done; if only it had happened that he had not possessed a dear good father (much too good for him, he added sometimes in generous moments); he might really have done something. People had been a jolly sight too good to him--all the dear people he had met in the world had made the mistake of not treating him seriously. However, if once he did see the sort of work that would suit his temperament--well, he would astonish some people; and then they'd be sorry for some of the things they had said!

Weak himself, he carried with him a very pestilence of weakness; painted the world in grey and feeble colours for other people. Moira, seeing him apparently striving against dreadful odds, pitied him, and called the world hard for his sake; those who succeeded had been but lucky, she thought, and good-natured, laughing Charlie had been bruised by the world, and had not deserved his bruises. In a sense, setting the one man against the other, she wavered a little in her favour of Charlie; seemed to see in him one of those failures that yet are half-successes, because the failure is taken with a shrug, good-humouredly, and because he who fails is not strong enough to fight against it. Jimmy was all right; Jimmy had seemed to succeed from the very first, and his moments of poverty had been mere light accidents, to be set aside and forgotten.

She knew but little of Jimmy's fight; she had only touched his life, as it were, when first that life blossomed, however humbly, into print.

The starved heart of the girl longed and hoped always for love; hoped unconsciously, just as it had done in the old days, when she had struggled so fiercely to be first with Old Paul. Above all, it has to be remembered that Charlie had come into her life--full of gaiety and light-heartedness--at a moment when that life was dull and grey and commonplace; and he bore upon him always, either in failure or success, the stamp of youth, and hope and cheeriness. On the darkest mornings, when the streets outside were hideous, and the young spirit of the girl was fighting fiercely against the restraint of those few sombre rooms, it was Charlie who could always come up the stairs two at a time; Charlie who could burst into the room with a laugh and a joke; Charlie who could drag her out into the streets for a walk; Charlie whose cheery tongue was never still. It was what she needed; it was more than food and drink to her then.

Jimmy, in a sense, stood aloof; Jimmy was on quite another plane. Once or twice, when she had mustered courage to go round to his rooms, he had been either very busy or else not there at all; she had had the long tramp back to Locker Street, Chelsea, with the thought uppermost in her mind that Jimmy was slipping away from her. She had hoped so much at the first; she was to draw Jimmy into that magic circle again; to open up afresh the half-worked gold mines of their childhood. But Jimmy was in a sense inaccessible.

To be put to the account of Charlie Purdue was his poverty, and the disaster that had fallen upon him. Moira made no count of right or wrong in such a matter as this; her friend was in trouble, and that was sufficient. Charlie had only to point to all he had endeavoured to do--his medical knowledge, in the right use of which he had failed (or so he told her) on a mere technical quibble of the examiners; his easel and brushes, in the use of which again he had failed because he had not had a fair start; his ma.n.u.scripts--in which he had not been so lucky as a certain Jimmy Larrance. Only give him an opportunity, he a.s.serted pa.s.sionately again and again, and he'd soon show them.

But the opportunity did not come, and the money steadily dwindled.

Charlie became for the first time in his life a little careless in regard to his dress, and a little shabby; took to sitting in his room the greater part of the day, staring into the fire, and smoking much.

Moira would creep down to see him; opening the door a little way, and looking in, and calling to him softly; on which he would look round, and make a valiant effort to call up something resembling the old genial smile; and tell her with a nod that "it was all right; he was thinking about things." And she would go away heavy-hearted.

She went down one night, to find him sitting in the light of the fire, with his chin c.o.c.ked in his hands; he did not look round as she entered.

She crossed the room softly, and stood near him; put out a hand nervously, and touched him on the shoulder. He looked round at her with a whimsical smile; then stared again into the flames.

"Charlie--Charlie!" she whispered. "What are you going to do?"

"The Lord He knows best--and I don't!" said Charlie, without looking up at her. "I've thought of everything; I don't seem to have any energy left--or any hope. It doesn't seem fair somehow that I should fight like this--or try to fight--with no result."

"You've tried a great many things," a.s.sented Moira.

"Haven't I?" He looked round at her gratefully. "That's where it is; my worst enemy can't say I haven't tried. I'm a fellow of energy really; no sooner does an idea enter my head than I'm off after it like a shot.

It's a matter of luck, my dear. I haven't got the luck. A fellow like Jimmy simply drops into the thing at once."

"Jimmy works very hard," suggested Moira.

"And I don't, I suppose?" he broke in quickly. "Oh, you may as well say it; I don't mind. Yet if Jimmy had failed, the boot might have been on the other leg. I thought you believed in me a little," he added bitterly.

"Of course I do," she said quietly. "I only wish I could help you."

"Why, so you do," he replied, with a sudden change of tone. "You put heart into me, many and many a time; you've been a sort of good angel to me." He got up suddenly, and dropped his hands on her shoulders, and looked into her eyes. "If I'd known you earlier, Moira, I might have done big things; I wanted guiding."

It was, of course, the cry of the coward--the despairing cry of the man who, having failed, s.h.i.+fts the blame on Fate, and cries out what might have been, had everything been different! But of course she did not know that; her young heart warmed to him at that blessed thought that she might have helped him--that she might even help him now. She was lonely--as he was; her life seemed to have gone down into the shadows--as his had done. She looked at him with s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"Oh, it isn't too late, Charlie; you're young, and you can fight the world easily enough. All your energy will come back. You must fight."

"Not alone, dear." He said it then, as he said most things, on the impulse of the moment; perhaps because her eyes were s.h.i.+ning as they looked into his; perhaps because her mouth was soft and tender as it pleaded with him. He dropped the hands upon her shoulders to her elbows, and drew her towards him. "Not alone, Moira; I haven't the strength."

"But how could I help you?" she whispered.

"As only a woman can help a man," he went on more eagerly, pleased with the sudden idea that had come to him, and almost feeling that it had been in his mind for a long time. "I love you, Moira; with you beside me I can fight such a battle as never man fought yet. You shall help me; we'll fight together."

"But, Charlie"--her hands were on his breast, and she was holding him away for a moment--"we are so poor, both of us--so young. After all, although I want to help you--why should I add to your burden? How should we live?"

"Oh, the old parrot cry of living!" he exclaimed, getting his arms about her, and drawing her towards him. "Look here, my dear; the world has behaved pretty roughly to both of us; to me most of all. I've been a bit wild, I know; but no one has properly understood me yet. I can do big things; I can do anything; but I want steadying. Besides--I've always loved you, you know; didn't I hunt for you in London, directly I knew you were here? Say you love me, dear."

"Of course--of course I love you, Charlie," she faltered. "At least, I think----"

"Oh, never mind what you think," he exclaimed impetuously. "The words are enough--you've said you love me. Kiss me; I'll be awfully good to you--and you'll find you've made a new man of me. Don't look so frightened; I've been meaning to say this to you for a long time."

Her lips met his, but with no ardour in the touch; she seemed to be thinking. He kissed her again, and strove to look into her eyes; and asked a little roughly what was the matter. She looked up into his face; perhaps she strove to read there some fulfilment of the dreams that had been hers during these past few years; perhaps she remembered, in that hour, certain words of Old Paul's--spoken a long, long time ago; they seemed to rise like an echo in her heart now. "What will love do to you in the big world, Moira?"

"There is nothing the matter, Charlie; I--I was only trying to think how happy I ought to be," she whispered, with a faint laugh. "Because I thought once--dreamed it, I think--that when love came to me it would be something like the angels one thinks about in childhood--something great and marvellous."

"And isn't it?" he asked, quite simply.

"I don't know--yet," she replied, disengaging herself from his arms.

"Perhaps it's because I haven't had time to think about it."

"_I_ didn't need to think about it," he exclaimed. "I knew in a moment."

"Yes--but then you're different," she replied. "Let me go now; we'll talk about this--some other time."

"But you've said you loved me," he cried, striving to detain her.

"I--I think so," she breathed. "Oh--won't you let me get a little used to it?" she asked whimsically, and ran out of the room.

Charlie thoughtfully filled a pipe, and lit it, and threw himself back in his easy chair. "Now," he said, as he puffed thoughtfully--"now I shall really have something to work for, when I've made up my mind what's the best work to tackle. Why didn't I think of this before?"

CHAPTER VII

DREAMS

It is highly necessary, having regard to the fact that we have a hero--albeit a doubtful one--that we should not lose sight of him. Jimmy in a sense had almost lost sight of himself for a time, if the expression may be pardoned; lost sight, in fact, of that large personage, James Larrance, who had blossomed forth so well in print at one time.

For Jimmy had grown ambitious; and Jimmy had left behind him something of the old safe hack work, and had launched out a little. Fortune had smiled upon him a little to begin with; but he had soon discovered that in this more ambitious work editors were not so reasonable as that young man in the s.h.i.+rt-sleeves had once been, nor so ready to give advice and a.s.sistance. When the money did come in, it came in, as Jimmy would have expressed it, "in lumps"; but then the lumps were few and far between, and a man might well starve while he was waiting for the next lump to come to him. Jimmy almost starved, with some amount of cheerfulness; but he went on. For Jimmy had a way of setting his teeth, and going at the work in a bullet-headed fas.h.i.+on--and coming up whenever he was knocked down, and going at it again. Which was highly serviceable in the long run.

Also--wonder of wonders!--Jimmy had contrived, in the interval of work of a smaller order, to write a novel; a novel that always reminded him in after days of a cold room, and a lamp that smoked, and the collar of an overcoat sc.r.a.ping his ears; because those were the conditions under which it was produced. It was a blessed relaxation that Jimmy promised himself during each long day; a something to be tenderly brought forth at night, and gone over lovingly; something that was in an indefinite fas.h.i.+on to make his fortune, in a surprising way, immediately on its publication.

And the thing was finished--absolutely staring at him, from its first page to its last; and he told himself in his soul that it was good; that into it he had put something of himself--something of the vital essence of life, as he had known it, and lived it, and suffered it. The only question now in his mind was which particular publisher should have the privilege of making a fortune over it, alike for himself and for Jimmy.

For that it would be a huge success Jimmy never doubted for a moment; there was in it that mysterious thing commended originally by the young man in the s.h.i.+rt-sleeves--an Idea!

The first publisher failed to find the Idea; in fact, he refused to see it when it was carefully pointed out to him. He suggested that if anyone had sixty pounds to throw away, this seemed to be a n.o.ble way of losing that sum, or perhaps more; but he was not rash by nature himself. Jimmy carried it to another--and yet another; it became a little worn in the process, and the first and last sheets had to be rewritten. Then it went to a fourth man, and lost itself in some unaccountable way among other wandering ma.n.u.scripts; until Jimmy in despair ventured at last, after months, to write a letter that should recall it. And had a letter in reply, asking him to call personally.

He went, and was received after some delay by a big-bearded man in a great wilderness of an office; there were books lying all about--books that the great one had published, and others that he had acquired, in order to study questions of binding and paper; and there were many photographs framed upon the walls. The big man was courteous to a fault; actually apologised for having kept Jimmy waiting!