The Complete Five Towns Collections. Bennett Arnold

answered sincerely that nothing would suit him better.

      "I should make you joint author, of course. 'Psychology of the Suburbs,' by Richard Aked and Richard Larch. It sounds rather catchy, and I think it ought to sell. About four hundred octavo pages, say a hundred thousand words. Six shillings—must be popular in price. We might get a royalty of ninepence a copy if we went to the right publisher. Sixpence for me and threepence for you. Would that do?"

      "Oh, perfectly!" But was not Mr. Aked running on rather fast?

      "Perhaps we'd better say fivepence halfpenny for me and threepence halfpenny for you; that would be fairer. Because you'll have to furnish ideas, you know. 'Psychology of the Suburbs, Psychology of the Suburbs'! Fine title! We ought to do it in six months."

      "I hope you'll be quite well again soon. Then we—"

      "Quite well!" he repeated sharply. "I shall be as right as a trivet to-morrow. You don't suppose that I can't take care of myself! We'll start at once."

      "You're not forgetting, Mr. Aked, that you've never seen any of my stuff yet? Are you sure I shall be able to do what you want?"

      "Oh, you'll do. I've not seen your stuff, but I guess you've got the literary habit. The literary habit, that's the thing! I'll soon put you up to the wrinkles, the trade secrets."

      "What is your general plan of the book?" Richard asked with some timidity, fearing to be deemed either stupid or inquisitive at the wrong moment. He had tried to say something meet for a great occasion, and failed.

      "Oh, I'll go into that at our first formal conference, say next Friday night. Speaking roughly, each of the great suburban divisions has, for me at any rate, its own characteristics, its peculiar moral physiognomy." Richard nodded appreciatively. "Take me blindfold to any street in London, and I'll discover instantly, from a thousand hints, where I am. Well, each of these divisions must be described in turn, not topographically of course, but the inner spirit, the soul of it. See? People have got into a way of sneering at the suburbs. Why, the suburbs are London! It is alone the—the concussion of meeting suburbs in the centre of London that makes the city and West End interesting. We could show how the special characteristics of the different suburbs exert a subtle influence on the great central spots. Take Fulham; no one thinks anything of Fulham, but suppose it were swept off the face of the earth the effect would be to alter, for the seeing eye, the character of Piccadilly and the Strand and Cheapside. The play of one suburb on another and on the central haunts is as regular, as orderly, as calculable, as the law of gravity itself."

      They continued the discussion until Adeline came in again with a tray in her hands, followed by the little red-armed servant. The two began to lay the cloth, and the cheerful rattle of crockery filled the room....

      "Sugar, Mr. Larch?" Adeline was saying, when Mr. Aked, looking meaningly at Richard, ejaculated,—

      "Friday then?"

      Richard nodded. Adeline eyed her uncle distrustfully.

      For some reason, unguessed by Richard, Adeline left them alone during most of the evening, and in her absence Mr. Aked continued to discourse, in vague generalities not without a specious poetical charm, on the subject upon which they were to collaborate, until Richard was wholly intoxicated with its fascinating possibilities. When he left, Adeline would not allow Mr. Aked to go to the door, and went herself.

      "If I hadn't been very firm," she laughed as they were shaking hands in the passage, "uncle would have stood talking to you in the street for goodness knows how long, and forgotten all about his bronchitis. Oh, you authors, I believe you are every one like babies." Richard smiled his gratification.

      "Mr. Larch, Mr. Larch!" The roguish summons came after him when he was half-way up the street. He ran back and found her at the gate with her hands behind her.

      "What have you forgotten?" she questioned. He could see her face but dimly in the twilight of the gas-lamps.

      "I know—my umbrella," he answered.

      "Didn't I say you were all like—little children!" she said, as she whipped out the umbrella and gave it to him over the gate.

      * * * * *

      Anxious at once to add something original to the sum of Mr. Aked's observations, he purposely chose a round-about route home, through the western parts of Fulham and past the Salisbury hotel. It seemed to him that the latent poetry of the suburbs arose like a beautiful vapour and filled these monotonous and squalid vistas with the scent and the colour of violets, leaving nothing common, nothing ignoble. In the upturned eyes of a shop-girl who went by on the arm of her lover he divined a passion as pure as that of Eugénie Grandet; on the wrinkled countenance of an older woman he beheld only the nobility of suffering; a youth who walked alone, smoking a cigarette, was a pathetic figure perhaps condemned to years of solitude in London. When there was no one else to see, he saw Adeline,—Adeline with her finger on her lips, Adeline angry with her uncle, Adeline pouring out tea, Adeline reaching down his hat from the peg, Adeline laughing at the gate. There was something about Adeline that.... How the name suited her!... Her past life, judging from the hints she had given, must have been interesting. Perhaps that accounted for the charm which....

      Then he returned to the book. He half regretted that Mr. Aked should have a hand in it at all. He could do it himself. Just as plainly as if the idea had been his own, he saw the volume complete, felt the texture of the paper, admired the disposition of the titlepage, and the blue buckram binding; he scanned the table of contents, and carelessly eyed the brief introduction, which was, however, pregnant with meaning; chapter followed chapter in orderly, scientific fashion, and the last summoned up the whole business in a few masterly and dignified sentences. Already, before a single idea had been reduced to words, "The Psychology of the Suburbs" was finished! A unique work! Other authors had taken an isolated spot here or there in the suburbs and dissected it, but none had viewed them in their complex entirety; none had attempted to extract from their incoherence a coherent philosophy, to deal with them sympathetically as Mr. Aked and himself had done—or rather were to do. None had suspected that the suburbs were a riddle, the answer to which was not undiscoverable. Ah, that secret, that key to the cipher! He saw it as it might be behind a succession of veils, flimsy obstructions which just then baffled his straining sight, but which he would rip and rend when the moment for effort came.

      The same lofty sentiments occupied his brain the next morning. He paused in the knotting of his necktie, to look out of the window, seeking even in Raphael Street some fragment of that psychology of environment invented by Mr. Aked. Nor did he search quite in vain. All the phenomena of humble life, hitherto witnessed daily without a second thought, now appeared to carry some mysterious meaning which was on the point of declaring itself. Friday, when the first formal conference was to occur, seemed distressingly distant. But he remembered that a very hard day's work, the casting and completing of a gigantic bill of costs, awaited him at the office, and he decided to throw himself into it without reserve; the time would pass more quickly.

      Chapter XIII

       Table of Contents

      Every solicitor's office has its great client, whose affairs, watchfully managed by the senior partner in person, take precedence of all else, and whom every member of the staff regards with a particular respect caught from the principals themselves. Messrs. Curpet and Smythe were London agents to the tremendous legal firm of Pontifex, of Manchester, said to enjoy the largest practice in the midlands; and they were excusably proud of the fact. One of the first lessons that a new clerk learnt in the establishment at New Serjeant's Court was that, at no matter what expenditure of time and trouble, Pontifex business, comprising some scores of separate causes, must be transacted so irreproachably that old Mr. Pontifex, by repute a terrible fellow, might never have cause of complaint. On those mornings, happily rare, when a querulous letter did by chance arrive from Manchester, the whole office trembled apprehensively, and any clerk likely to be charged with negligence began at once to consider the advisability of seeking a new situation.

      The