The Complete Five Towns Collections. Bennett Arnold

Did she say anything to you about me?" The youth smiled.

      "No. Why?"

      "Nothing. We had a talk, and I mashed her a bit,—that's all."

      "Ah, my boy, you won't get far with her."

      "Oh, sha'n't I? I could tell you a thing or two re Laura Roberts, if I liked."

      Although Jenkins' remark was characteristic, and Richard knew well enough that there was nothing behind his words, yet his mind reverted instantly to the stories connecting Miss Roberts with Mr. Aked.

      "Don't gas," he said curtly. "She looks on you as a boy."

      "Man enough for any woman," said Jenkins, twirling the rudiments of a moustache.

      The discussion might have gone further, had it not been interrupted by Mr. Smythe, who burst suddenly into the room, as his custom was.

      "Larch, come with me into Mr. Curpet's room." His tone was brusque. He had none of Mr. Curpet's natural politeness, though on rare occasions, of which the present was not one, he sought clumsily to imitate it. Richard felt a vague alarm.

      With a muffler round his throat, Mr. Curpet was seated before the fire, blowing his nose and breathing noisily. Mr. Smythe went to the window, and played with the tassel of the blind cord.

      "We are thinking of making some changes, Larch," Mr. Curpet began.

      "Yes, sir." His heart sank. Was he to be dismissed? The next sentence was reassuring.

      "In future all costs will be drawn and settled in the office, instead of being sent out. Do you feel equal to taking charge of that department?"

      Richard had many times helped in the preparation of bills of cost, and possessed a fair knowledge of this complicated and engaging subject. He answered very decidedly in the affirmative.

      "What we propose," Mr. Smythe broke in, "is that you should have an assistant, and that the two of you should attend to both the books and the costs."

      "Of course your salary will be increased," Mr. Curpet added.

      "Let me see, what do you get now?" This from Mr. Smythe, whose memory was imperfect.

      "Three pounds ten, sir."

      "Suppose we say four pounds ten," said Mr. Smythe to Mr. Curpet, and then turning to Larch: "That's very good indeed, you know, young man; you wouldn't get that everywhere. By Jove, no, you wouldn't!" Richard was fully aware of the fact. He could scarcely credit his own luck. "And we shall expect you to keep things up to the mark."

      Mr. Curpet smiled kindly over his handkerchief, as if to intimate that Mr. Smythe need not have insisted on that point.

      "And you may have to stay late sometimes," Mr. Smythe went on.

      "Yes, sir."

      When the interview was finished, he retraced his career at the office, marvelling that he should have done anything unusual enough to inspire his principals to such appreciation, and he soon made out that, compared with others of the staff, he had indeed been a model clerk. A delicious self-complacence enveloped him. Mr. Smythe had had the air of conferring a favour; but Mr. Curpet was at the head of affairs at No. 2 Serjeant's Court, and Mr. Curpet's attitude had been decidedly flattering. At first he had a difficulty in grasping his good fortune, thought it too good to be true; but he ended by believing in himself very heartily. In the matter of salary, he stood now second only to Mr. Alder, he a youth not three years out of the provinces. Three years ago an income of £234 per annum would have seemed almost fabulous. His notions as to what constituted opulence had changed since then, but nevertheless £234 was an excellent revenue, full of possibilities. A man could marry on that and live comfortably; many men ventured to marry on half as much. In clerkdom he had indubitably risen with ease to the upper ranks. There was good Northern stuff in Richard Larch, after all! As he walked home, his brain was busy with plans, beautiful plans for the New Year,—how he would save money, and how he would spend his nights in toil.

      Chapter XXVIII

       Table of Contents

      There happened to be a room to let on the same floor as Richard's own. The rent was only five shillings per week, and he arranged to take it and use it as a bedroom, transforming the other and larger room into a study. Mrs. Rowbotham was asked to remove all her tables, chairs, carpets, pictures, ornaments, and accessories from both rooms, as he proposed to furnish them entirely anew at his own cost. This did not indicate that a sudden increase of revenue had, as once on a previous occasion, engendered in him a propensity to squander. On the contrary, his determination to live economically was well established, and he hoped to save a hundred pounds per annum with ease. But the influence of an æsthetic environment upon his literary work would, he argued, probably be valuable enough to justify the moderate expenditure involved, and so all the leisure of the last days of the year was given to the realisation of certain theories in regard to the furnishing of a study and a bedroom. Unfortunately the time at his disposal was very limited—- was it not essential that the place should be set in order by the 31st of December, that work might commence on the 1st of January?—but he did not spare himself, and the result, when he contemplated it on New Year's Eve, filled him with pleasure and pride. He felt that he could write worthily in that study, with its four autotype reproductions of celebrated pictures on the self-coloured walls, its square of Indian carpet over Indian matting, its long, low bookshelves, its quaint table with the elm top, its plain rush-bottomed chairs, and its broad luxurious divan. He marvelled that he had contrived so long to exist in the room as it was before, and complacently attributed his ill-success as a writer to the lack of harmonious surroundings. By the last post arrived a New Year's card from Mrs. Clayton Vernon. Twelve months ago she had sent a similar kind token of remembrance, and he had ignored it; in the summer she had written inviting him to spend a few days at Bursley, and he had somewhat too briefly asked to be excused. To-night, however, he went out, bought a New Year's card, and despatched it to her at once. He flowed over with benevolence, viewing the world through the rosy spectacles of high resolve. Mrs. Clayton Vernon was an excellent woman, and he would prove to her and to Bursley that they had not estimated too highly the possibilities of Richard Larch. He was, in truth, prodigiously uplifted. The old sense of absolute power over himself for good or evil returned. A consciousness of exceptional ability possessed him. The future, splendid in dreams, was wholly his; and yet again—perhaps more thoroughly than ever before—the ineffectual past was effaced. To-morrow was the New Year, and to-morrow the new heaven and the new earth were to begin.

      He had decided to write a novel. Having failed in short stories and in essays, it seemed to him likely that the novel, a form which he had not so far seriously attempted, might suit his idiosyncrasy better. He had once sketched out the plot of a short novel, a tale of adventure in modern London, and on examination this struck him as ingenious and promising. Moreover, it would appeal—like Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," which in Richard's mind it distantly resembled—both to the general and to the literary public. He determined to write five hundred words of it a day, five days a week; at this rate of progress he calculated that the book would be finished in four months; allowing two months further for revision, it ought to be ready for a publisher at the end of June.

      He drew his chair up to the blazing fire, and looked down the vista of those long, lamplit evenings during which the novel was to grow under his hands. How different he from the average clerk, who with similar opportunities was content to fritter away those hours which would lead himself, perhaps, to fame! He thought of Adeline, and smiled. What, after all, did such as he want with women? He was in a position to marry, and if he met a clever girl of sympathetic temperament, he emphatically would marry (it did not occur to him to add the clause, "Provided she will have me"); but otherwise he would wait. He could afford to wait,—to wait till he had made a reputation, and half a score of women, elegant and refined, were only too willing to envelop him in an atmosphere of adoration.

      * * * * *

      It was part of his plan for economy to dine always at the Crabtree,