For months he had been living in this way; endless circling, perpetual beginning, followed by frustration. A sign of exhaustion, it of course made exhaustion more complete. At times he was on the border-land of imbecility; his mind looked into a cloudy chaos, a shapeless whirl of nothings. He talked aloud to himself, not knowing that he did so. Little phrases which indicated dolorously the subject of his preoccupation often escaped him in the street: 'What could I make of that, now?'
'Well, suppose I made him--?' 'But no, that wouldn't do,' and so on. It had happened that he caught the eye of some one passing fixed in surprise upon him; so young a man to be talking to himself in evident distress!
The expected crisis came, even now that he was savagely determined to go on at any cost, to write, let the result be what it would. His will prevailed. A day or two of anguish such as there is no describing to the inexperienced, and again he was dismissing slip after slip, a sigh of thankfulness at the completion of each one. It was a fraction of the whole, a fraction, a fraction.
The ordering of his day was thus. At nine, after breakfast, he sat down to his desk, and worked till one. Then came dinner, followed by a walk. As a rule he could not allow Amy to walk with him, for he had to think over the remainder of the day's toil, and companionship would have been fatal. At about half-past three he again seated himself; and wrote until half-past six, when he had a meal. Then once more to work from half-past seven to ten.
Numberless were the experiments he had tried for the day's division. The slightest interruption of the order for the time being put him out of gear; Amy durst not open his door to ask however necessary a question.
Sometimes the three hours' labour of a morning resulted in half-a-dozen lines, corrected into illegibility. His brain would not work; he could not recall the simplest synonyms; intolerable faults of composition drove him mad. He would write a sentence beginning thus: 'She took a book with a look of--;' or thus: 'Arevision of this decision would have made him an object of derision.' Or, if the period were otherwise inoffensive, it ran in a rhythmic gallop which was torment to the ear. All this, in spite of the fact that his former books had been noticeably good in style. He had an appreciation of shapely prose which made him scorn himself for the kind of stuff he was now turning out. 'Ican't help it; it must go; the time is passing.'
Things were better, as a rule, in the evening. Occasionally he wrote a page with fluency which recalled his fortunate years; and then his heart gladdened, his hand trembled with joy.
Description of locality, deliberate analysis of character or motive, demanded far too great an effort for his present condition. He kept as much as possible to dialogue; the space is filled so much more quickly, and at a pinch one can make people talk about the paltriest incidents of life.
There came an evening when he opened the door and called to Amy.
'What is it?' she answered from the bedroom. 'I'm busy with Willie.'
'Come as soon as you are free.'
In ten minutes she appeared. There was apprehension on her face;she feared he was going to lament his inability to work. Instead of that, he told her joyfully that the first volume was finished.
'Thank goodness!' she exclaimed. 'Are you going to do any more to-night?'
'I think not--if you will come and sit with me.'
'Willie doesn't seem very well. He can't get to sleep.'
'You would like to stay with him?'
'A little while. I'll come presently.'
She closed the door. Reardon brought a high-backed chair to the fireside, and allowed himself to forget the two volumes that had still to be struggled through, in a grateful sense of the portion that was achieved. In a few minutes it occurred to him that it would be delightful to read a scrap of the 'Odyssey'; he went to the shelves on which were his classical books, took the desired volume, and opened it where Odysseus speaks to Nausicaa:
'For never yet did I behold one of mortals like to thee, neither man nor woman; I am awed as I look upon thee. In Delos once, hard by the altar of Apollo, I saw a young palm-tree shooting up with even such a grace.'
Yes, yes; THAT was not written at so many pages a day, with a workhouse clock clanging its admonition at the poet's ear. How it freshened the soul! How the eyes grew dim with a rare joy in the sounding of those nobly sweet hexameters!
Amy came into the room again.
'Listen,' said Reardon, looking up at her with a bright smile.
'Do you remember the first time that I read you this?'
And he turned the speech into free prose. Amy laughed.
'I remember it well enough. We were alone in the drawing-room; Ihad told the others that they must make shift with the dining-room for that evening. And you pulled the book out of your pocket unexpectedly. I laughed at your habit of always carrying little books about.'
The cheerful news had brightened her. If she had been summoned to hear lamentations her voice would not have rippled thus soothingly. Reardon thought of this, and it made him silent for a minute.
'The habit was ominous,' he said, looking at her with an uncertain smile. 'A practical literary man doesn't do such things.'
'Milvain, for instance. No.'
With curious frequency she mentioned the name of Milvain. Her unconsciousness in doing so prevented Reardon from thinking about the fact; still, he had noted it.
'Did you understand the phrase slightingly?' he asked.
'Slightingly? Yes, a little, of course. It always has that sense on your lips, I think.'
In the light of this answer he mused upon her readily-offered instance. True, he had occasionally spoken of Jasper with something less than respect, but Amy was not in the habit of doing so.
'I hadn't any such meaning just then,' he said. 'I meant quite simply that my bookish habits didn't promise much for my success as a novelist.'
'I see. But you didn't think of it in that way at the time.'
He sighed.
'No. At least--no.'
'At least what?'
'Well, no; on the whole I had good hope.'