To-morrow? Part 11

"By-and-by"--but then life seemed all by-and-bys for me.

I shortened my walk. Everything seemed to jar upon my nerves. I went back to the hotel by a quiet way, and then up to the empty room to work.

Howard did not return for a couple of days. On the third I was sitting after dinner at one of the tables outside the hotel cafe, smoking, under the line of trees that edge the Paris kerb, when a fiacre drew up at my very elbow, and Howard got out. He did not see me for a minute, engaged with paying the cocher and hunting for a pourboire, and then he was just going straight across the lighted trottoir into the hotel when I called to him.

"Hullo, Vic! there you are!" he said, turning back. "I didn't see you under the tree."

He came back and drew up a chair, with a sc.r.a.ping sound, to the opposite side of my table, leant his elbows upon it, and pushed his hat back. There was a blaze of light, all across the pavement to where we were sitting, from the windows and open gla.s.s doors of the cafe. He looked well and uncommonly jolly; a man who lives his life, such as it is, without thought, without reflection, and without philosophy--who views the pa.s.sing hour without grudging, the past without regret.

"You look awfully seedy," he said. "Anything up?"

"No," I answered. "Well? 'How have we sped in this contest?' How went the dinner?"

"I'll tell you," he said, turning round to secure a pa.s.sing garcon.

"Let's get hold of a drink first. Oh, she's got a jolly place!" he said, when the garcon, and eventually the drink, had been captured.

"Nice house and all that. She's married, as you said, and of very good family. Received everywhere, you know."

"Husband at the dinner?" I asked laconically.

"No; husband gone to Tunis on business."

"Expected back to-day, I suppose?"

"No, to-morrow."

"Pity."

"Yes. You should have gone, Vic! She'd have satisfied you! Lovely figure! I never knew a lovelier!"

I said nothing.

"What did you think of her stopping us like that?" he went on after a minute.

"I thought it consummate cheek," I said. "I should not have believed it if it hadn't actually happened before my eyes."

"Yes, it was cheeky; but do you know, she is not very cheeky, really.

An awfully nice woman, and very clever. But aren't these Parisiennes queer? You can't imagine any woman doing such a thing in England, can you?"

"Hardly."

"It seems she had seen us once before. It was you she wanted, not me.

Why didn't you go, you duffer? I only came in a bad second!"

I laughed.

"She had read my things and likes them. Do you know, I think it is rather a good thing I have met her, it will urge me to do more--don't look at me 'in that tone of voice,' I am sure it will, really, Victor!"

"Are you going to see her again, then?" I asked.

"Yes, oh yes!"

"When the husband next visits Tunis, I suppose?"

"Yes, and before that, even when he's here. She is going to patronise my talent--see?"

"I see."

"I must write my next thing to her, of course. It's a nuisance being hampered with this beastly French language!"

And then the conversation went on. We sat there and talked and argued from the particular to the general, and back again, until the waiters came and cleared the chairs off the pavement and began to turn out the lights in the cafe--and it was a conversation after which I slept badly.

After this incident I saw less of Howard, and our lives ran farther and farther apart. I grew more and more absorbed in the developing ma.n.u.script. He grew more and more taken up in the stream of amus.e.m.e.nt he had entered. He wrote very little. A couple of lines that had occurred to him perhaps at the theatre, and were jotted hastily on the edge of a programme, was all that a whole week produced. And even these would have been lost through his carelessness but for me.

The days were generally divided between headache and sleep; the nights between the theatre and drink. I regretted it; and this life that was being wasted, poured out in uselessness, within my sight oppressed me.

I should hardly have noticed it with another man, but I knew that this one had been planned for higher things.

I used to try and rouse in him his pride and love for himself, or, at any rate, for his talent. I used to insist on his hearing me read sometimes those disconnected lines that his own brain, dulled by drink, had almost forgotten.

"Are they not splendid?" I would say; "and you are the author! You are their parent, Howard! Think! Any man could lead the life you are leading! not one in a thousand could produce these lines!"

Howard would look at me suspiciously with heavy eyes.

"Are you sure I wrote that? I don't think I remember it!"

What a crime!

"I know you did," I would answer, and then urge him to give every day and night in the week, if he liked, to pleasure except one--"let one be sacred to work!"

"And just think," he would answer, lazily, "if I were dying, how those days and nights wasted would come and stare me in the face!"

"Wasted! in the building of such lines as these?"

"But what's the good of them when they are built? They don't make me enjoy life!"

And he pursued his own path and I could not stop him. I hoped and thought he would get tired after a time of the Paris halls and drunken nights and sick headaches, but I waited in vain. He had gradually got intimate with the back as well as the front of the scenes, and this I liked less than anything. The state of Howard's finances, too, threw an extra weight of responsibility on me, for he must have trodden a straighter road, and perhaps he would have worked more if he had had less money. And the money--his superfluous cash--came generally from me. His own allowance was small; just enough to keep him and no more.

Gifts, under the name of loans, from me supplied all extras, and filled all deficiencies and gaps. What could I answer when he used to say, "Dear old boy! let me have another twenty!" And yet I knew it was handing him the razor to cut his throat. I hoped the sight of another fellow working as persistently as I did would have been an encouragement to him to make some sort of effort himself, but he looked upon me as a misguided creature, and took pains not to follow my example.

"How do you know that you will ever marry Lucia? or make a success of your books or anything?" he asked me one evening as we went upstairs after dinner, he to dress before going to La Scarletta, I to work on the MS.

"You are working for an uncertainty, a dream. It may never come off, and then where will you be. Now, at least, I know what I am going to have this evening. Such enjoyment as there is I get it, and there's an end of it, and no worry about it. As for you, you are all worry; and even granted that you get, in the end, something superlatively satisfactory, why, it will hardly make up to you for all you have gone through to get it!"

I said nothing. We had got up to our rooms by this time, and I flung myself into the easy chair.

Howard went into his room and brought back his dress shoes to put them on in mine, that he might follow up his argument.

"Now, look here, Vic, which of us two fellows is the most ready to go out of the world? In the Bible or prayer-book or somewhere we are told to live so that we may be willing and prepared to die any minute. Well, that's just what I do. I haven't a sc.r.a.p of a tie to life. I don't think there will be anything better in it than what I have had already.

I'd go to-morrow. But you, you would not like it a bit, and you can't deny it. You have got all the ties of your unsatisfied desires. You want to get Lucia--you want to make your name. You would be awfully cut up now if you were told you were going to be bundled out of life in ten minutes; and I--I shouldn't care!"

Howard had finished fastening his patent shoes, and now sat back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, and his hands behind his head.