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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The Collected Works of Arnold Bennett is a comprehensive anthology that encapsulates the breadth of Bennett's literary genius, showcasing his deep engagement with themes of modernity, class struggle, and the intricacies of everyday life in the early 20th century. With a distinctive style that merges realism with a vivid sense of place, particularly in his portrayal of the potteries of Staffordshire, Bennett's prose is marked by a keen psychological insight and an acute social consciousness. This collection not only includes his acclaimed novels, such as "Clayhanger" and "The Old Wives' Tale," but also features his essays and plays, offering a holistic view of his contributions to the literary landscape of the Edwardian era and beyond. Arnold Bennett, an influential figure of the early modernist movement, was born in 1867 in the potteries region of England, which profoundly shaped his writing. His experiences as a working-class man aspiring for literary success are reflected in his nuanced characterizations and the socio-economic landscapes portrayed in his works. His acute observations on industrial life stemmed from his own background and his quest to elevate the everyday experiences of ordinary people to the level of high art. For readers seeking a rich exploration of the human experience, The Collected Works of Arnold Bennett is an essential resource. In its pages, you will encounter a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the complexities of life are examined with both compassion and critique. This collection invites readers to discover or rediscover the brilliance of a novelist whose insights resonate powerfully in our contemporary world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Collected Works of Arnold Bennett
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection presents the breadth of Arnold Bennett's career, gathering the novels, short-story collections, plays, and non-fiction assembled here into a coherent portrait of his art. From early experiments in fiction to late panoramas of modern life, the set is designed to show range and continuity: an author attentive to ordinary experience and the institutions that shape it. By placing narrative, dramatic, and reflective prose side by side, the collection invites readers to trace recurring concerns across forms and years, to see how Bennett refined his methods, and to approach each work within the larger conversation sustained by his long, industrious practice. It offers newcomers an accessible entry and returning readers a structured path through a distinctive, observant voice.
Within these volumes, readers will find social novels, comedies of manners, and excursions into romance and modern fantasy. The fiction ranges from provincial studies to metropolitan chronicles, from intimate domestic narratives to brisk adventures. The short-story collections focus notably on the Five Towns milieu, distilling the same acuity at a concentrated scale. The plays provide compact, stage-shaped arguments about public taste, identity, and responsibility. The non-fiction gathers criticism, guidance for writers and readers, reflections on work and time, travel writing, and war reportage, including titles such as Literary Taste, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Those United States, and Over There. Together, these forms illuminate complementary facets of Bennett's method and interests.
Bennett's work is characterized by plain yet exact prose, close observation of material circumstances, and a patient interest in how character is formed by habit, money, ambition, and place. Across genres, he returns to questions of self-management, social mobility, and the compromises that sustain domestic and civic life. His tone balances sympathy with irony; he notices the comic without neglecting the weight of duty and time. These books remain significant for their durable realism, their curiosity about the structures of modern society, and their respect for ordinary experience, showing how private hopes and public systems meet in factories, shops, offices, hotels, and homes, and how modest decisions accumulate into lasting consequence.
At the center of the fiction stands the imagined Five Towns, explored in novels and stories alike. In The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger, and in companion volumes such as Hilda Lessways, These Twain, Tales of the Five Towns, The Grim Smile of the Five Towns, and The Matador of the Five Towns, Bennett builds an industrial community with a historian's patience and a dramatist's timing. He traces work, courtship, enterprise, and reputation as they ripple through streets and workshops, showing how provincial life contains both constraint and possibility. The setting anchors his broader inquiries into class, character, and the slow revolutions of everyday change, rendered with steadiness and humane attention.
Beyond the potteries, Bennett surveys metropolitan modernity and the pleasures and absurdities of public life. The Grand Babylon Hotel looks to cosmopolitan spectacle; Buried Alive plays with identity and celebrity; The Regent, The Pretty Lady, Mr. Prohack, Riceyman Steps, and Imperial Palace consider money, administration, and the moral textures of London. He also experiments with mode and mood in works such as The Ghost- A Modern Fantasy and The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes, testing how romance, fantasy, and satire can illuminate contemporary anxieties. Together these novels broaden his canvas while retaining the clarity and humane discipline of his style, attentive to the machinery and manners of modern existence.
The plays distill his preoccupations into precise scenes and arguments. What the Public Wants scrutinizes media and appetite; The Honeymoon, The Great Adventure, The Title, and Judith test characters against social expectations and institutions. In non-fiction, Bennett writes as craftsman and citizen: Journalism For Women and The Author's Craft address professional practice; Literary Taste and Books and Persons survey reading and contemporary letters; How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Self and Self-Management, Mental Efficiency, and The Human Machine examine time, habit, and effort; Those United States, Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People, and Over There record travel and wartime observation. These strands clarify the principles that also animate the fiction.
Taken together, these works show an author committed to mapping the pressures and opportunities of modern life, from factory floors to hotel lobbies, from the privacy of marriage to the public stages of politics and commerce. Readers may approach the collection chronologically, by cycle, or by form, but any path will reveal a steady intelligence pursuing the same durable questions: how people make a living, make a home, and make sense of time. Because Bennett treats ordinary motives and institutions with seriousness and wit, his books retain their force as records of experience and as guides to attentive, practical reading and living, connecting individual endeavor to the broader rhythms of society.
Historical Context
Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) emerged from the Staffordshire Potteries, born in Hanley, among kilns, canals, and Nonconformist chapels. The industrial Midlands, anchored by Burslem, Tunstall, Hanley, Stoke, Longton, and Fenton, became his fictional Five Towns, a compressed civic geography for novels and tales. Late Victorian capitalism, the long cycles of the ceramics trade, and Methodist self-help shaped themes of thrift, ambition, and municipal pride that run from Anna of the Five Towns to Clayhanger and the short story volumes. The 1870 Education Act and expanding railway networks created a literate, mobile lower middle class, the clerks and shopkeepers who populate his early and regional fiction.
In 1889 Bennett moved to London, then Europe’s fastest-growing metropolis, and by the mid‑1890s he was editing the magazine Woman amid the explosion of the New Journalism pioneered by W. T. Stead and magnified by Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe. Mass circulation papers, circulating libraries, and the Net Book Agreement of 1900 framed a new literary marketplace that his career both navigated and anatomized. The cosmopolitan luxury hotel and the amusement park—emblems of fin‑de‑siècle consumer culture—figure in The Grand Babylon Hotel and The City of Pleasure, while A Man from the North captures the clerkly migration feeding the West End’s theatres, restaurants, and publishers.
From 1903 to 1912 Bennett lived largely in Paris, absorbing French realism and naturalism from Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant while writing The Old Wives’ Tale and refining a method grounded in patient social observation. He also produced manuals for a burgeoning white‑collar readership: How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, The Human Machine, Literary Taste, and The Author’s Craft addressed time, habit, and professionalization in a rationalist key resonant with Edwardian efficiency culture. His Mediterranean cruise recorded in From the Log of the Velsa reflects the era’s affluent mobility, as Britain’s artistic bohemia mingled with new money in cafés, galleries, and grand hotels.
The turn‑of‑the‑century Midlands were remade by municipal reform and federation, culminating in the creation of the City of Stoke‑on‑Trent in 1910. Tramways, gasworks, school boards, and licensing committees—engines of civic modernity—structure the Clayhanger trilogy, Hilda Lessways, and the Five Towns stories and The Card. The 1870s–1900s opened careers for printers, auctioneers, agents, and especially capable young women entering offices and shops; Bennett’s heroines negotiate Nonconformist morality, property law, and the credit economy. At the same time, new mass entertainments—variety stages, then cinemas—entered provincial life, a shift he tracks in The Regent and in satirical accounts of theatrical and press entrepreneurship.
The First World War reconfigured British society and Bennett’s subject matter. In 1915 he visited the Western Front and published Over There, part of a wider propaganda and reportage effort coordinated from Wellington House and, later, the Ministry of Information. In 1917–1918 he served as Director of Propaganda for France, working under ministers such as Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Northcliffe. Wartime honours, censorship, air raids, and mobilization inflect plays like The Title and fictions such as The Pretty Lady and The Roll‑Call, which register class mobility, women’s paid work, and bereavement as permanent features of metropolitan and provincial experience.
Post‑1918 reconstruction brought inflation, unemployment, and housing shortages, culminating in the General Strike of May 1926 and continuing industrial unrest. Bennett’s London novels examine the moral economy of austerity, taxation, and bureaucracy: Mr. Prohack engages the new tax regime and the expanding civil service, Riceyman Steps maps parsimony and desire onto Clerkenwell and Islington, and Imperial Palace anatomizes late‑1920s luxury management in a Savoy‑like hotel amid unionized labor and international guests. These interwar settings, along with later works such as Lilian, The Strange Vanguard, and Accident, inhabit a culture poised between mass consumption, lingering war damage, and the approach of the Great Depression.
Across these decades Bennett stood at the center of debates over the novel’s future. Identified with Edwardian realism alongside H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, he was challenged by modernists epitomized by Virginia Woolf’s 1923 essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. His reply, Is the Novel Decaying?, defended craft, social breadth, and verifiable detail. As Books and Persons, his 1908–1911 column in A. R. Orage’s New Age, he dissected publishing economics, the Net Book Agreement, and the critic’s role. His West End plays—What the Public Wants, The Honeymoon, The Great Adventure, The Title, and Judith—extend this engagement with mass taste and cultural authority.
Bennett’s cosmopolitan circuits—London, Paris, the Mediterranean, and a 1911–1912 American tour that produced Those United States—nourished a worldly perspective applied equally to Five Towns parishes and Piccadilly salons. Diaries and essays on self‑management, friendship, and mental efficiency fuse with fiction about habit, time, and the negotiation of status. He died in London on 27 March 1931, of typhoid fever contracted in Paris, leaving a body of novels, stories, plays, and nonfiction that charts Britain’s passage from late‑Victorian industry through Edwardian leisure to interwar uncertainty. Read together, these works assemble a documentary of social mobility, gender tension, enterprise, and institutional change.
Synopsis (Selection)
A Man from the North
A provincial young man moves to London to become a writer, discovering the costs and illusions of ambition amid the metropolis’s temptations.
The Grand Babylon Hotel
A wealthy American and his daughter uncover a conspiracy within a luxurious London hotel, mixing high society intrigue with fast-paced adventure.
Anna of the Five Towns
A dutiful daughter in the Potteries inherits money and must balance piety, love, and the hard ethics of industry and Nonconformist respectability.
Leonora
A respectable middle-aged woman faces marital upheaval and financial crisis, testing her independence and the conventions that bind her.
A Great Man
A satirical portrait of a suddenly famous novelist negotiating vanity, publicity, and romance in the Edwardian literary marketplace.
Teresa of Watling Street
A light modern romance-adventure in London, where a spirited young woman is drawn into financial and social entanglements on the city’s great thoroughfare.
Sacred and Profane Love
A gifted pianist is torn between artistic vocation and passionate attachment, exploring the conflict between sacred duty and profane desire.
Hugo
A naive young man is thrust into London society and unexpected wealth, stumbling through romance and self-invention with comic missteps.
The Ghost- A Modern Fantasy
A whimsical modern fantasy in which a man slips out of his own body and confronts the absurdities of love, reputation, and modern life.
The City of Pleasure: A Fantasia on Modern Themes
A satiric fantasia set in a gargantuan pleasure-city, dissecting mass entertainment, desire, and the machinery of modern spectacle.
Buried Alive
A world-famous painter is mistaken for his valet and adopts the false identity, discovering obscure happiness while the public mourns the man they think he was.
The Old Wives' Tale
Across decades, two sisters from the Five Towns lead diverging lives—one at home, one in Paris—revealing the quiet dramas of ordinary existence.
Clayhanger
Edwin Clayhanger, a printer’s son, struggles for self-realization and love in the Five Towns, caught between family duty and modern aspirations.
The Card (Denry the Audacious)
The rise of Edward Henry “Denry” Machin, an enterprising chancer of the Five Towns, whose cheek and ingenuity carry him from clerkship to civic prominence.
Helen with the High Hand
An independent young woman locks horns—and hearts—with her shrewd, wealthy uncle in a comic battle over money, marriage, and control.
Hilda Lessways
A companion to Clayhanger tracing Hilda’s perspective as she forges a precarious independence through work, romance, and hard choices.
The Plain Man and His Wife
Practical reflections on domestic life and marriage, offering commonsense counsel to ordinary couples on money, work, and mutual understanding.
The Regent: A Five Towns Story of Adventure in London
Denry Machin transplants his audacity to London’s theater world, steering a grand entertainment venture while navigating society and scandal.
The Price of Love
A young woman weighs marriage, money, and respectability in the Five Towns, probing what security truly costs.
From the log of the Velsa
A yachting travel diary that records a leisurely cruise through European waters, blending vivid observation with wry reflections.
These Twain
The married life of Edwin and Hilda Clayhanger unfolds in its everyday triumphs and failures, charting the strains of love, work, and change.
The Pretty Lady
In wartime London, a French beauty moves among soldiers and civilians, exposing the moral ambiguities of desire, survival, and sacrifice.
The Roll-Call
A talented young professional pursues success in pre- and postwar London, confronting duty, ambition, and the reckoning of a generation.
The Lion's Share
A woman entangled in inheritance, love, and social ambition learns how power and money alter loyalties and expectations.
Mr. Prohack
A frugal civil servant unexpectedly enriched finds that sudden wealth complicates family, taste, and self-respect in this comedy of money.
Lilian
A life story of a modern woman navigating love, independence, and shifting social codes from provincial beginnings to wider horizons.
Riceyman Steps
In postwar Clerkenwell, a miserly bookseller and a warm-hearted widow marry, their quiet street life revealing the corrosions of want and obsession.
Elsie and the Child
A brief, tender tale about a woman and a child whose presence reorders adult affections and responsibilities in a modest London world.
The Strange Vanguard
A suspenseful tale of disappearance and deceit on the Continent, where a resourceful heroine is drawn into a financial and romantic intrigue.
Accident
A compact drama tracing the chain of consequences after a sudden mishap, probing chance, culpability, and social façade.
Imperial Palace
Behind the scenes of a great London hotel, the exacting general manager orchestrates staff, guests, and crises, revealing a self-contained empire of modern luxury.
Tales of the Five Towns
Stories set in the Staffordshire Potteries, portraying ordinary people’s ambitions, follies, and quiet heroics with humor and sympathy.
The Grim Smile of the Five Towns
Further Five Towns tales with a sharper, more ironic edge, capturing pride, parsimony, and small scandals in industrial life.
The Matador of the Five Towns
Later Five Towns stories that widen the canvas and tone, mixing comedy and pathos in vignettes of work, romance, and reputation.
The Woman who Stole Everything and Other Stories
A varied collection of urban and domestic tales, often featuring determined women and moral twists.
The Loot of Cities
Linked adventure stories of high finance and crime, following audacious schemes across European capitals.
What the Public Wants
A satire of mass culture and newspaper power, in which a press baron manufactures taste and scandal to feed demand.
The Honeymoon
A light comedy about newlyweds discovering habits, expectations, and the need for compromise.
The Great Adventure
A stage version of the Buried Alive premise, where a celebrated artist lives incognito and discovers the costs of anonymity.
The Title
A social comedy about the scramble for honors, skewering snobbery, patronage, and the price of prestige.
Judith
A historical melodrama of courage and resolve, centering on a woman who challenges tyranny in a time of political peril.
Journalism For Women
A practical guide to entering and succeeding in journalism, with advice on markets, manners, and craft.
The Truth about an Author
A candid account of the working life and economics of a novelist, demystifying the profession.
How to Become an Author
Straightforward counsel on writing, revision, and the business side of publication.
The Reasonable Life
Essays advocating balance, self-discipline, and practical philosophy for everyday living.
Literary Taste: How to Form It
A primer on cultivating literary taste, including reading lists and methods for building a lifelong habit.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
A concise time-management classic urging readers to reclaim their non-working hours for self-improvement.
The Feast of St. Friend: A Christmas Book
A seasonal meditation on friendship, generosity, and the renewal of good will.
Mental Efficiency
Essays on attention, memory, and work habits aimed at improving everyday effectiveness.
Those United States
Travel sketches from Bennett’s American journeys, observing cities, people, and national character.
Friendship and Happiness
Reflections on sociability, kindness, and the pursuit of contentment in ordinary life.
Paris Nights and Other Impressions of Places and People
Vivid impressions of Parisian life and other locales, blending reportage with personal observation.
The Author's Craft
A manual on narrative technique and the practicalities of the writing trade.
Over There: War Scenes on the Western Front
Frontline reportage and impressions from the Western Front during World War I.
Books and Persons: Selections from The New Age 1908-1911
Selections from Bennett’s literary journalism, chronicling authors, books, and publishing trends.
Self and Self-Management
A self-help tract on building character and managing one’s energies and habits.
Things That Have Interested Me
A miscellany of short essays on subjects that caught Bennett’s eye, from everyday quirks to cultural trends.
The Human Machine
A compact philosophy of habit and willpower, viewing the individual as a machine to be understood and improved.
The Collected Works of Arnold Bennett
Novels
A Man from the North
Chapter I
There grows in the North Country a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him an imperious fascination. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station. He stands by the hot engine and envies the very stoker. Gazing curiously into the carriages, he wonders that men and women who in a few hours will be treading streets called Piccadilly and the Strand can contemplate the immediate future with so much apparent calmness; some of them even have the audacity to look bored. He finds it difficult to keep from throwing himself in the guard's van as it glides past him; and not until the last coach is a speck upon the distance does he turn away and, nodding absently to the ticket-clerk, who knows him well, go home to nurse a vague ambition and dream of Town.
London is the place where newspapers are issued, books written, and plays performed. And this youth, who now sits in an office, reads all the newspapers. He knows exactly when a new work by a famous author should appear, and awaits the reviews with impatience. He can tell you off-hand the names of the pieces in the bills of the twenty principal West-end theatres, what their quality is, and how long they may be expected to run; and on the production of a new play, the articles of the dramatic critics provide him with sensations almost as vivid as those of the most zealous first-nighter at the performance itself.
Sooner or later, perhaps by painful roads, he reaches the goal of his desire. London accepts him—on probation; and as his strength is, so she demeans herself. Let him be bold and resolute, and she will make an obeisance, but her heel is all too ready to crush the coward and hesitant; and her victims, once underfoot, do not often rise again.
Chapter II
The antique four-wheeler, top-heavy with luggage, swung unsteadily round by Tattersall's and into Raphael Street. Richard thrust down the window with a sharp bang, indicative of a strange new sense of power; but before the cab came to a standstill he had collected himself, and managed to alight with considerable decorum. When the door opened in answer to his second ring, a faint, sour odour escaped from the house, and he remembered the friendly feminine warnings which he had received at Bursley on the subject of London lodgings. The aspect of the landlady, however, reassured him; she was a diminutive old woman in ridiculously short skirts, with a yellow, crinkled face, grey eyes, and a warm, benevolent smile that conquered. As she greeted Richard she blushed like a girl, and made a little old-fashioned curtsey. Richard offered his hand, and, after wiping hers on a clean apron, she took it timidly.
"I hope we shall get on well together, sir," she said, looking straight up into her new lodger's eyes.
"I'm sure we shall," answered Richard, sincerely.
She preceded him up the narrow, frowsy staircase, which was full of surprising turns.
"You'll find these stairs a bit awkward at first," she apologised. "I've often thought of getting a bit of nice carpet on them, but what's the use? It would be done for in a week. Now, here's your room, sir, first floor front, with two nice French windows, you see, and a nice balcony. Now, about tidying it of a morning, sir. If you'll step out for a walk as soon as you get up, my daughter shall make the bed, and dust, and you'll come in and find it all nice and straight for breakfast."
"Very well," assented Richard.
"That's how I generally arrange with my young men. I like them to have their breakfast in a nice tidy room, you see, sir. Now, what will you have for tea, sir? A little nice bread and butter...."
When she was gone Richard formally surveyed his quarters: a long, rather low room, its length cut by the two windows which were Mrs. Rowbotham's particular pride; between the windows a table with a faded green cloth, and a small bed opposite; behind the door an artfully concealed washstand; the mantelpiece, painted mustard yellow, bore divers squat earthenware figures, and was surmounted by an oblong mirror framed in rosewood; over the mirror an illuminated text, "Trust in Jesus," and over the text an oleograph, in collision with the ceiling, entitled, "After the Battle of Culloden." The walls were decorated with a pattern of giant pink roses; and here and there, hiding the roses, were hung photographs of persons in their Sunday clothes, and landscapes hand-painted in oil, depicting bridges, trees, water, and white sails in the distance. But the furnishing of the room caused Richard no uneasiness; in a few moments he had mentally arranged how to make the place habitable, and thenceforth he only saw what should and would be.
Tea was brought in by a girl whose face proclaimed her to be Mrs. Rowbotham's daughter. At the sight of her Richard privately winked; he had read in books about landladies' daughters, but this one gave the lie to books; she was young, she was beautiful, and Richard would have sworn to her innocence. With an accession of boldness which surprised himself, he inquired her name.
"Lily, sir," she said, blushing like her mother.
He cut the new, heavy bread, and poured out a cup of tea with the awkwardness of one unaccustomed to such work, and, having made space on the tray, set the evening paper against the sugar basin, and began to eat and read. Outside were two piano organs, children shouting, and a man uttering some monotonous unintelligible cry. It grew dark; Mrs. Rowbotham came in with a lamp and cleared the table; Richard was looking through the window, and neither spoke. Presently he sat down. That being his first night in London, he had determined to spend it quietly at home. The piano organs and the children were still strident. A peculiar feeling of isolation momentarily overcame him, and the noises of the street seemed to recede. Then he went to the window again, and noticed that the children were dancing quite gracefully; it occurred to him that they might be ballet children. He picked up the paper and examined the theatrical advertisements, at first idly, but afterwards in detail.
With a long sigh, he took his hat and stick, and went very slowly downstairs. Mrs. Rowbotham heard him fumbling with the catch of the front door.
"Are you going out, sir?"
"Only just for a walk," said Richard, nonchalantly.
"Perhaps I'd better give you a latch-key?"
"Thanks."
Another moment and he was in the delicious streets, going east.
Chapter III
Although he had visited London but once before, and then only for a few hours, he was not unfamiliar with the topography of the town, having frequently studied it in maps and an old copy of Kelly's directory.
He walked slowly up Park Side and through Piccadilly, picking out as he passed them the French Embassy, Hyde Park Corner, Apsley House, Park Lane, and Devonshire House. As he drank in the mingled glare and glamour of Piccadilly by night,—the remote stars, the high sombre trees, the vast, dazzling interiors of clubs, the sinuous, flickering lines of traffic, the radiant faces of women framed in hansoms,—he laughed the laugh of luxurious contemplation, acutely happy. At last, at last, he had come into his inheritance. London accepted him. He was hers; she his; and nothing should part them. Starvation in London would itself be bliss. But he had no intention of starving! Filled with great purposes, he straightened his back, and just then a morsel of mud thrown up from a bus-wheel splashed warm and gritty on his cheek. He wiped it off caressingly, with a smile.
Although it was Saturday night, and most of the shops were closed, an establishment where watches and trinkets of "Anglo-Spanish" gold, superb in appearance and pillowed on green plush, were retailed at alluring prices, still threw a brilliant light on the pavement, and Richard crossed the road to inspect its wares. He turned away, but retraced his steps and entered the shop. An assistant politely inquired his wishes.
"I want one of those hunters you have in the window at 29/6," said Richard, with a gruffness which must have been involuntary.
"Yes, sir. Here is one. We guarantee that the works are equal to the finest English lever."
"I'll take it." He put down the money.
"Thank you. Can I show you anything else?"
"Nothing, thanks," still more gruffly.
"We have some excellent chains...."
"Nothing else, thanks." And he walked out, putting his purchase in his pocket. A perfectly reliable gold watch, which he had worn for years, already lay there.
At Piccadilly Circus he loitered, and then crossed over and went along Coventry Street to Leicester Square. The immense façade of the Ottoman Theatre of Varieties, with its rows of illuminated windows and crescent moons set against the sky, rose before him, and the glory of it was intoxicating. It is not too much to say that the Ottoman held a stronger fascination for Richard than any other place in London. The British Museum, Fleet Street, and the Lyceum were magic names, but more magical than either was the name of the Ottoman. The Ottoman, on the rare occasions when it happened to be mentioned in Bursley, was a synonym for all the glittering vices of the metropolis. It stank in the nostrils of the London delegates who came down to speak at the annual meetings of the local Society for the Suppression of Vice. But how often had Richard, somnolent in chapel, mitigated the rigours of a long sermon by dreaming of an Ottoman ballet,—one of those voluptuous spectacles, all legs and white arms, which from time to time were described so ornately in the London daily papers.
The brass-barred swinging doors of the Grand Circle entrance were simultaneously opened for him by two human automata dressed exactly alike in long semi-military coats, a very tall man and a stunted boy. He advanced with what air of custom he could command, and after taking a ticket and traversing a heavily decorated corridor encountered another pair of swinging doors; they opened, and a girl passed out, followed by a man who was talking to her vehemently in French. At the same moment a gust of distant music struck Richard's ear. As he climbed a broad, thick-piled flight of steps, the music became louder, and a clapping of hands could be heard. At the top of the steps hung a curtain of blue velvet; he pushed aside its stiff, heavy folds with difficulty, and entered the auditorium.
The smoke of a thousand cigarettes enveloped the furthest parts of the great interior in a thin bluish haze, which was dissipated as it reached the domed ceiling in the rays of a crystal chandelier. Far in front and a little below the level of the circle lay a line of footlights broken by the silhouette of the conductor's head. A diminutive, solitary figure in red and yellow stood in the centre of the huge stage; it was kissing its hands to the audience with a mincing, operatic gesture; presently it tripped off backwards, stopping at every third step to bow; the applause ceased, and the curtain fell slowly.
The broad, semicircular promenade which flanked the seats of the grand circle was filled with a well-dressed, well-fed crowd. The men talked and laughed, for the most part, in little knots, while in and out, steering their way easily and rapidly among these groups, moved the women: some with rouged cheeks, greasy vermilion lips, and enormous liquid eyes; others whose faces were innocent of cosmetics and showed pale under the electric light; but all with a peculiar, exaggerated swing of the body from the hips, and all surreptitiously regarding themselves in the mirrors which abounded on every glowing wall.
Richard stood aloof against a pillar. Near him were two men in evening dress conversing in tones which just rose above the general murmur of talk and the high, penetrating tinkle of glass from the bar behind the promenade.
"And what did she say then?" one of the pair asked smilingly. Richard strained his ear to listen.
"Well, she told me," the other said, speaking with a dreamy drawl, while fingering his watch-chain absently and gazing down at the large diamond in his shirt,—"she told me that she said she'd do for him if he didn't fork out. But I don't believe her. You know, of course.... There's Lottie...."
The band suddenly began to play, and after a few crashing bars the curtain went up for the ballet. The rich coup d'oeil which presented itself provoked a burst of clapping from the floor of the house and the upper tiers, but to Richard's surprise no one in his proximity seemed to exhibit any interest in the entertainment. The two men still talked with their backs to the stage, the women continued to find a pathway between the groups, and from within the bar came the unabated murmur of voices and tinkle of glass.
Richard never took his dazed eyes from the stage. The moving pageant unrolled itself before him like a vision, rousing new sensations, tremors of strange desires. He was under a spell, and when at last the curtain descended to the monotonous roll of drums, he awoke to the fact that several people were watching him curiously. Blushing slightly, he went to a far corner of the promenade. At one of the little tables a woman sat alone. She held her head at an angle, and her laughing, lustrous eyes gleamed invitingly at Richard. Without quite intending to do so he hesitated in front of her, and she twittered a phrase ending in chéri.
He abruptly turned away. He would have been very glad to remain and say something clever, but his tongue refused its office, and his legs moved of themselves.
At midnight he found himself in Piccadilly Circus, unwilling to go home. He strolled leisurely back to Leicester Square. The front of the Ottoman was in darkness, and the square almost deserted.
Chapter IV
He walked home to Raphael Street. The house was dead, except for a pale light in his own room. At the top of the bare, creaking stairs he fumbled a moment for the handle of his door, and the regular sound of two distinct snores descended from an upper storey. He closed the door softly, locked it, and glanced round the room with some eagerness. The smell of the expiring lamp compelled him to unlatch both windows. He extinguished the lamp, and after lighting a couple of candles on the mantelpiece drew a chair to the fireplace and sat down to munch an apple. The thought occurred to him: "This is my home—for how long?"
And then:
"Why the dickens didn't I say something to that girl?"
Between the candles on the mantelpiece was a photograph of his sister, which he had placed there before going out. He looked at it with a half smile, and murmured audibly several times:
"Why the dickens didn't I say something to that girl, with her chéri?"
The woman of the photograph seemed to be between thirty and forty years of age. She was fair, with a mild, serious face, and much wavy hair. The forehead was broad and smooth and white, the cheek-bones prominent, and the mouth somewhat large. The eyes were a very light grey; they met the gaze of the spectator with a curious timid defiance, as if to say, "I am weak, but I can at least fight till I fall." Underneath the eyes—the portrait was the work of an amateur, and consequently had not been robbed of all texture by retouching—a few crowsfeet could be seen.
As far back as Richard's memory went, he and Mary had lived together and alone in the small Red House which lay half a mile out of Bursley, towards Turnhill, on the Manchester road. At one time it had been rurally situated, creeping plants had clothed its red walls, and the bare patch behind it had been a garden; but the gradual development of a coal-producing district had covered the fields with smooth, mountainous heaps of grey refuse, and stunted or killed every tree in the neighbourhood. The house was undermined, and in spite of iron clamps had lost most of its rectangles, while the rent had dropped to fifteen pounds a year.
Mary was very much older than her brother, and she had always appeared to him exactly the mature woman of the photograph. Of his parents he knew nothing except what Mary had told him, which was little and vague, for she watchfully kept the subject at a distance.
She had supported herself and Richard in comfort by a medley of vocations, teaching the piano, collecting rents, and practising the art of millinery. They had few friends. The social circles of Bursley were centred in its churches and chapels; and though Mary attended the Wesleyan sanctuary with some regularity, she took small interest in prayer-meetings, class-meetings, bazaars, and all the other minor religious activities, thus neglecting opportunities for intercourse which might have proved agreeable. She had sent Richard to the Sunday-school; but when, at the age of fourteen, he protested that Sunday-school was "awful rot," she answered calmly, "Don't go, then;" and from that day his place in class was empty. Soon afterwards the boy cautiously insinuated that chapel belonged to the same category as Sunday-school, but the hint failed of its effect.
The ladies of the town called sometimes, generally upon business, and took afternoon tea. Once the vicar's wife, who wished to obtain musical tuition for her three youngest daughters at a nominal fee, came in and found Richard at a book on the hearthrug.
"Ah!" said she. "Just like his father, is he not, Miss Larch?" Mary made no reply.
The house was full of books. Richard knew them all well by sight, but until he was sixteen he read only a select handful of volumes which had stood the test of years. Often he idly speculated as to the contents of some of the others,—"Horatii Opera," for instance: had that anything to do with theatres?—yet for some curious reason, which when he grew older he sought for in vain, he never troubled himself to look into them. Mary read a good deal, chiefly books and magazines fetched for her by Richard from the Free Library.
When he was about seventeen, a change came. He was aware dimly, and as if by instinct, that his sister's life in the early days had not been without its romance. Certainly there was something hidden between her and William Vernon, the science master at the Institute, for they were invariably at great pains to avoid each other. He sometimes wondered whether Mr. Vernon was connected in any way with the melancholy which was never, even in her brightest moments, wholly absent from Mary's demeanour. One Sunday night—Richard had been keeping house—Mary, coming in late from chapel, threw his arms round his neck as he opened the door, and, dragging down his face to hers, kissed him hysterically again and again.
"Dicky, Dick," she whispered, laughing and crying at the same time, "something's happened. I'm almost an old woman, but something's happened!"
"I know," said Richard, retreating hurriedly from her embrace. "You're going to marry Mr. Vernon."
"But how could you tell?"
"Oh! I just guessed."
"You don't mind, Dick, do you?"
"I! Mind!" Afraid lest his feelings should appear too plainly, he asked abruptly for supper.
Mary gave up her various callings, the wedding took place, and William Vernon came to live with them. It was then that Richard began to read more widely, and to form a definite project of going to London.
He could not fail to respect and like William. The life of the married pair seemed to him idyllic; the tender, furtive manifestations of affection which were constantly passing between Mary and her sedate, middle-aged husband touched him deeply, and at the thought of the fifteen irretrievable years during which some ridiculous misunderstanding had separated this loving couple, his eyes were not quite as dry as a youth could wish. But with it all he was uncomfortable. He felt himself an intruder upon holy privacies; if at meal-times husband and wife clasped hands round the corner of the table, he looked at his plate; if they smiled happily upon no discoverable provocation, he pretended not to notice the fact. They did not need him. Their hearts were full of kindness for every living thing, but unconsciously they stood aloof. He was driven in upon himself, and spent much of his time either in solitary walking or hidden in an apartment called the study.
He ordered magazines whose very names Mr. Holt, the principal bookseller in Bursley, was unfamiliar with, and after the magazines came books of verse and novels enclosed in covers of mystic design, and printed in a style which Mr. Holt, though secretly impressed, set down as eccentric. Mr. Holt's shop performed the functions of a club for the dignitaries of the town; and since he took care that this esoteric literature was well displayed on the counter until called for, the young man's fame as a great reader soon spread, and Richard began to see that he was regarded as a curiosity of which Bursley need not be ashamed. His self-esteem, already fostered into lustiness by a number of facile school successes, became more marked, although he was wise enough to keep a great deal of it to himself.
One evening, after Mary and her husband had been talking quietly some while, Richard came into the sitting-room.
"I don't want any supper," he said, "I'm going for a bit of a walk."
"Shall we tell him?" Mary asked, smiling, after he had left the room.
"Please yourself," said William, also smiling.
"He talks a great deal about going to London. I hope he won't go till—after April; I think it would upset me."
"You need not trouble, I think, my dear," William answered. "He talks about it, but he isn't gone yet."
Mr. Vernon was not quite pleased with Richard. He had obtained for him—being connected with the best people in the town—a position as shorthand and general clerk in a solicitor's office, and had learnt privately that though the youth was smart enough, he was scarcely making that progress which might have been expected. He lacked "application." William attributed this shortcoming to the excessive reading of verse and obscure novels.
April came, and, as Mr. Vernon had foretold, Richard still remained in Bursley. But the older man was now too deeply absorbed in another matter to interest himself at all in Richard's movements,—a matter in which Richard himself exhibited a shy concern. Hour followed anxious hour, and at last was heard the faint, fretful cry of a child in the night. Then stillness. All that Richard ever saw was a coffin, and in it a dead child at a dead woman's feet.
Fifteen months later he was in London.
Chapter V
Mr. Curpet, of the firm of Curpet and Smythe, whose name was painted in black and white on the dark green door, had told him that the office hours were from nine-thirty to six. The clock of the Law Courts was striking a quarter to ten. He hesitated a moment, and then seized the handle; but the door was fast, and he descended the two double flights of iron stairs into the quadrangle.
New Serjeant's Court was a large modern building of very red brick with terra-cotta facings, eight storeys high; but in spite of its faults of colour and its excessive height, ample wall spaces and temperate ornamentation gave it a dignity and comeliness sufficient to distinguish it from other buildings in the locality. In the centre of the court was an oval patch of brown earth, with a few trees whose pale-leaved tops, struggling towards sunlight, reached to the middle of the third storey. Round this plantation ran an immaculate roadway of wooden blocks, flanked by an equally immaculate asphalt footpath. The court possessed its own private lamp-posts, and these were wrought of iron in an antique design.
Men and boys, grave and unconsciously oppressed by the burden of the coming day, were continually appearing out of the gloom of the long tunnelled entrance and vanishing into one or other of the twelve doorways. Presently a carriage and pair drove in, and stopped opposite Richard. A big man of about fifty, with a sagacious red and blue face, jumped alertly out, followed by an attentive clerk carrying a blue sack. It seemed to Richard that he knew the features of the big man from portraits, and, following the pair up the staircase of No. 2, he discovered from the legend on the door through which they disappeared that he had been in the presence of Her Majesty's Attorney-General. Simultaneously with a misgiving as to his ability to reach the standard of clerical ability doubtless required by Messrs. Curpet and Smythe, who did business cheek by jowl with an attorney-general and probably employed him, came an elevation of spirit as he darkly guessed what none can realise completely, that a man's future lies on his own knees, and on the knees of no gods whatsoever.
He continued his way upstairs, but Messrs. Curpet and Smythe's portal was still locked. Looking down the well, he espied a boy crawling reluctantly and laboriously upward, with a key in his hand which he dragged across the bannisters. In course of time the boy reached Messrs. Curpet and Smythe's door, and opening it stepped neatly over a pile of letters which lay immediately within. Richard followed him.
"Oh! My name's Larch," said Richard, as if it had just occurred to him that the boy might be interested in the fact. "Do you know which is my room?"
The boy conducted him along a dark passage with green doors on either side, to a room at the end. It was furnished mainly with two writing-tables and two armchairs; in one corner was a disused copying-press, in another an immense pile of reporters' note-books; on the mantelpiece, a tumbler, a duster, and a broken desk lamp.
"That's your seat," said the boy, pointing to the larger table, and disappeared. Richard disposed of his coat and hat and sat down, trying to feel at ease and not succeeding.
At five minutes past ten a youth entered with the "Times" under his arm. Richard waited for him to speak, but he merely stared and took off his overcoat. Then he said,—
"You've got my hook. If you don't mind I'll put your things on this other one."
"Certainly," assented Richard.
The youth spread his back luxuriously to the empty fireplace and opened the "Times," when another and smaller boy put his head in at the door.
"Jenkins, Mr. Alder wants the 'Times.'"
The youth silently handed over the advertisement pages which were lying on the table. In a minute the boy returned.
"Mr. Alder says he wants the inside of the 'Times.'"
"Tell Mr. Alder to go to hell, with my compliments." The boy hesitated.
"Go on, now," Jenkins insisted. The boy hung on the door-handle, smiling dubiously, and then went out.
"Here, wait a minute!" Jenkins called him back. "Perhaps you'd better give it him. Take the damn thing away."
A sound of hurried footsteps in the next room was succeeded by an imperious call for Jenkins, at which Jenkins slipped nimbly into his chair and untied a bundle of papers.
"Jenkins!" the call came again, with a touch of irritation in it, but Jenkins did not move. The door was thrust open.
"Oh! You are there, Jenkins. Just come in and take a letter down." The tones were quite placid.
"Yes, Mr. Smythe."
"I never take any notice of Smythe's calls," said Jenkins, when he returned. "If he wants me, he must either ring or fetch me. If I once began it, I should be running in and out of his room all day, and I've quite enough to do without that."
"Fidgety, eh?" Richard suggested.
"Fidgety's no word for it, I tell you. Alder—that's the manager, you know—said only yesterday that he has less trouble with forty Chancery actions of Curpet's than with one county-court case of Smythe's. I know I'd a jolly sight sooner write forty of Curpet's letters than ten of Smythe's. I wish I'd got your place, and you'd got mine. I suppose you can write shorthand rather fast."
"Middling," said Richard. "About 120."
"Oh! We had a man once who could do 150, but he'd been a newspaper reporter. I do a bit over a hundred, if I've not had much to drink overnight. Let's see, they're giving you twenty-five bob, aren't they?"
Richard nodded.
"The man before you had thirty-five, and he couldn't spell worth a brass button. I only get fifteen, although I've been here seven years. A damn shame I call it! But Curpet's beastly near. If he'd give some other people less, and me a bit more...."
"Who are 'some other people'?" asked Richard, smiling.
"Well, there's old Aked. He sits in the outer office—you won't have seen him because he doesn't generally come till eleven. They give him a pound a week, just for doing a bit of engrossing when he feels inclined to engross, and for being idle when he feels inclined to be idle. He's a broken-down something or other,—used to be clerk to Curpet's father. He has some dibs of his own, and this just finds him amusement. I bet he doesn't do fifty folios a week. And he's got the devil's own temper."
Jenkins was proceeding to describe other members of the staff when the entry of Mr. Curpet himself put an end to the recital. Mr. Curpet was a small man, with a round face and a neatly trimmed beard.
"Good morning, Larch. If you'll kindly come into my room, I'll dictate my letters. Good morning, Jenkins." He smiled and withdrew, leaving Richard excessively surprised at his suave courtesy.
In his own room Mr. Curpet sat before a pile of letters, and motioned Richard to a side table.
"You will tell me if I go too fast," he said, and began to dictate regularly, with scarcely a pause. The pile of letters gradually disappeared into a basket. Before half a dozen letters were done Richard comprehended that he had become part of a business machine of far greater magnitude than anything to which he had been accustomed in Bursley. This little man with the round face dealt impassively with tens of thousands of pounds; he mortgaged whole streets, bullied railway companies, and wrote familiarly to lords. In the middle of one long letter, a man came panting in, whom Richard at once took for Mr. Alder, the Chancery manager. His rather battered silk hat was at the back of his head, and he looked distressed.
"I'm sorry to say we've lost that summons in Rice v. The L. R. Railway."
"Really!" said Mr. Curpet. "Better appeal, and brief a leader, eh?"
"Can't appeal, Mr. Curpet."
"Well, we must make the best of it. Telegraph to the country. I'll write and keep them calm. It's a pity they were so sure. Rice will have to economise for a year or two. What was my last word, Larch?" The dictation proceeded.
One hour was allowed for lunch, and Richard spent the first moiety of it in viewing the ambrosial exteriors of Strand restaurants. With the exception of the coffee-house at Bursley, he had never been in a restaurant in his life, and he was timid of entering any of those sumptuous establishments whose swinging doors gave glimpses of richly decorated ceilings, gleaming tablecloths, and men in silk hats greedily consuming dishes placed before them by obsequious waiters.
At last, without quite knowing how he got there, he sat in a long, low apartment, papered like an attic bedroom, and odorous of tea and cake. The place was crowded with young men and women indifferently well-dressed, who bent over uncomfortably small oblong marble-topped tables. An increasing clatter of crockery filled the air. Waitresses, with pale, vacant faces, dressed in dingy black with white aprons, moved about with difficulty at varying rates of speed, but none of them seemed to betray an interest in Richard. Behind the counter, on which stood great polished urns emitting clouds of steam, were several women whose superior rank in the restaurant was denoted by a black apron, and after five minutes had elapsed Richard observed one of these damsels pointing out himself to a waitress, who approached and listened condescendingly to his order.
A thin man, rather more than middle-aged, with a grey beard and slightly red nose, entered and sat down opposite to Richard. Without preface he began, speaking rather fast and with an expressive vivacity rarely met with in the ageing,—
"Well, my young friend, how do you like your new place?"
Richard stared at him.
"Are you Mr. Aked?"
"The same. I suppose Master Jenkins has made you acquainted with all my peculiarities of temper and temperament.—Glass of milk, roll, and two pats of butter—and, I say, my girl, try not to keep me waiting as long as you did yesterday." There was a bright smile on his face, which the waitress unwillingly returned.
"Don't you know," he went on, looking at Richard's plate,—"don't you know that tea and ham together are frightfully indigestible?"
"I never have indigestion."
"No matter. You soon will have if you eat tea and ham together. A young man should guard his digestion like his honour. Sounds funny, doesn't it? But it's right. An impaired digestive apparatus has ruined many a career. It ruined mine. You see before you, sir, what might have been an author of repute, but for a wayward stomach."
"You write?" Richard asked, interested at once, but afraid lest Mr. Aked might be cumbrously joking.
"I used to." The old man spoke with proud self-consciousness.
"Have you written a book?"
"Not a book. But I've contributed to all manner of magazines and newspapers."
"What magazines?"
"Well, let me see—it's so long ago. I've written for 'Cornhill.' I wrote for 'Cornhill' when Thackeray edited it. I spoke to Carlyle once."
"You did?"
"Yes. Carlyle said to me—Carlyle said to me—Carlyle said—" Mr. Aked's voice dwindled to an inarticulate murmur, and, suddenly ignoring Richard's presence, he pulled a book from his pocket and began to finger the leaves. It was a French novel, "La Vie de Bohème." His face had lost all its mobile expressiveness.
A little alarmed by such eccentricity, and not quite sure that this associate of Carlyle was perfectly sane, Richard sat silent, waiting for events. Mr. Aked was clearly accustomed to reading while he ate; he could even drink with his eyes on the book. At length he pushed his plates away from him, and closed the novel with a snap.
"I see you're from the country, Larch," he said, as if there had been no lapse in the conversation. "Now, why in God's name did you leave the country? Aren't there enough people in London?"
"Because I wanted to be an author," answered Richard, with more assurance than veracity, though he spoke in good faith. The fact was that his aspirations, hitherto so vague as to elude analysis, seemed within the last few minutes mysteriously to have assumed definite form.
"You're a young fool, then."
"But I've an excellent digestion."
"You won't have it if you begin to write. Take my word, you're a young fool. You don't know what you're going in for, my little friend."
"Was Murger a fool?" Richard said clumsily, determined to exhibit an acquaintance with "La Vie de Bohème."
"Ha! We read French, do we?"
Richard blushed. The old man got up.
"Come along," he said peevishly. "Let's get out of this hole."
At the pay-desk, waiting for change, he spoke to the cashier, a thin girl with reddish-brown hair, who coughed,—
"Did you try those lozenges?"
"Oh! yes, thanks. They taste nice."
"Beautiful day."
"Yes; my word, isn't it!"
They walked back to the office in absolute silence; but just as they were going in, Mr. Aked stopped, and took Richard by the coat.
"Have you anything special to do next Thursday night?"
"No," said Richard.
"Well, I'll take you to a little French restaurant in Soho, and we'll have dinner. Half a crown. Can you afford?"
Richard nodded.
"And, I say, bring along some of your manuscripts, and I'll flay them alive for you."
Chapter VI
An inconstant, unrefreshing breeze, sluggish with accumulated impurity, stirred the curtains, and every urban sound—high-pitched voices of children playing, roll of wheels and rhythmic trot of horses, shouts of newsboys and querulous barking of dogs—came through the open windows touched with a certain languorous quality that suggested a city fatigued, a city yearning for the moist recesses of woods, the disinfectant breath of mountain tops, and the cleansing sea.
On the little table between the windows lay pen, ink, and paper. Richard sat down to be an author. Since his conversation with Mr. Aked of the day before he had lived in the full glow of an impulse to write. He discerned, or thought he discerned, in the fact that he possessed the literary gift, a key to his recent life. It explained, to be particular, the passion for reading which had overtaken him at seventeen, and his desire to come to London, the natural home of the author. Certainly it was strange that hitherto he had devoted very little serious thought to the subject of writing, but happily there were in existence sundry stray verses and prose fragments written at Bursley, and it contented him to recognise in these the first tremulous stirrings of a late-born ambition.
During the previous evening he had busied himself in deciding upon a topic. In a morning paper he had read an article entitled "An Island of Sleep," descriptive of Sark; it occurred to him that a similar essay upon Lichfield, the comatose cathedral city which lay about thirty miles from Bursley, might suit a monthly magazine. He knew Lichfield well; he had been accustomed to visit it from childhood; he loved it. As a theme full of picturesque opportunities it had quickened his imagination, until his brain seemed to surge with vague but beautiful fancies. In the night his sleep had been broken, and several new ideas had suggested themselves. And now, after a day of excited anticipation, the moment for composition had arrived.
As he dipped his pen in the ink a sudden apprehension of failure surprised him. He dismissed it, and wrote in a bold hand, rather carefully,—
MEMORIES OF A CITY OF SLEEP.
That was surely an excellent title. He proceeded:—
On the old stone bridge, beneath which the clear, smooth waters of the river have crept at the same pace for centuries, stands a little child, alone. It is early morning, and the clock of the time-stained cathedral which lifts its noble gothic towers scarce a hundred yards away, strikes five, to the accompaniment of an unseen lark overhead.
