CHAPTER XXXI. A RESCUE AND A SUMMONS
The chances are that you have neither understanding nor sympathy
for men such as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen. They merely
provoke you. They seem to you inert, flabby, weakly envious, foolishly obstinate, impiously mutinous, and many other things. You are made angrily contemptuous by their failure to get on; why don't they bestir themselves, push and bustle, welcome kicks so long as halfpence follow, make place in the world's eye—in short, take a leaf from the book of Mr Jasper Milvain?
But try to imagine a personality wholly unfitted for the rough
and tumble of the world's labour-market. From the familiar point
of view these men were worthless; view them in possible relation
to a humane order of Society, and they are admirable citizens. Nothing is easier than to condemn a type of character which is unequal to the coarse demands of life as it suits the average man. These two were richly endowed with the kindly and the imaginative virtues; if fate threw them amid incongruous circumstances, is their endowment of less value? You scorn their passivity; but it was their nature and their merit to be passive.
Gifted with independent means, each of them would have taken
quite a different aspect in your eyes. The sum of their faults
was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability
does not call for unmingled disdain.
It was very weak of Harold Biffen to come so near perishing of
hunger as he did in the days when he was completing his novel. But he would have vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining food presented itself to him. He did not starve for the pleasure of the thing, I assure you. Pupils were difficult to get just now, and writing that he had sent to magazines had returned upon his hands. He pawned such of his possessions as he could spare, and he reduced his meals to the minimum. Nor was he uncheerful in his cold garret and with his empty stomach, for 'Mr Bailey, Grocer,' drew steadily to an end.
He worked very slowly. The book would make perhaps two volumes of
ordinary novel size, but he had laboured over it for many months, patiently, affectionately, scrupulously. Each sentence was as good as he could make it, harmonious to the ear, with words of precious meaning skilfully set. Before sitting down to a chapter he planned it minutely in his mind; then he wrote a rough draft of it; then he elaborated the thing phrase by phrase. He had no thought of whether such toil would be recompensed in coin of the realm; nay, it was his conviction that, if with difficulty published, it could scarcely bring him money. The work must be significant, that was all he cared for. And he had no society of admiring friends to encourage him. Reardon understood the merit of the workmanship, but frankly owned that the book was repulsive to him. To the public it would be worse than repulsive—tedious, utterly uninteresting. No matter; it drew to its end.
The day of its completion was made memorable by an event
decidedly more exciting, even to the author.
At eight o'clock in the evening there remained half a page to be
written. Biffen had already worked about nine hours, and on
breaking off to appease his hunger he doubted whether to finish
to-night or to postpone the last lines till tomorrow. The
discovery that only a small crust of bread lay in the cupboard
decided him to write no more; he would have to go out to purchase
a loaf and that was disturbance.
But stay; had he enough money? He searched his pockets. Two pence
and two farthings; no more.
You are probably not aware that at bakers' shops in the poor
quarters the price of the half-quartern loaf varies sometimes
from week to week. At present, as Biffen knew, it was twopence
three-farthings, a common figure. But Harold did not possess
three farthings, only two. Reflecting, he remembered to have
passed yesterday a shop where the bread was marked twopence
halfpenny; it was a shop in a very obscure little street off
Hampstead Road, some distance from Clipstone Street. Thither he
must repair. He had only his hat and a muffler to put on, for
again he was wearing his overcoat in default of the under one, and his ragged umbrella to take from the corner; so he went forth.