Part 1 (2/2)
”Then I may a.s.sume it still exists. Would it give you very much trouble to find it now?”
”I pride myself upon my system,” answered Ingram.
”Please put it to the test, then.”
”Your system is excellent,” admitted Morgan, as at the end of about five minutes Ingram held up the sheets in triumph. ”Now I wonder if you'd read it to me. I want to hear how it sounds.”
”Certainly, you amusing beggar,” said Ingram. ”You wrote it during your last crisis and you want to compare your feelings then with now.”
”I forget what I wrote,” said Morgan, with an attempt at gaiety. ”It must be very dramatic, so please put the proper expression into it, just as if it were a pa.s.sage in one of your plays.”
”Dear Mr. Ingram,” read out that gentleman. ”For nearly six years I have been trying to live by writing verse--ever since I was seventeen.
Six years of pa.s.sionate hope and longing, failure and failure, all years of wandering in the desert, of groping in the dark. I know no one--no one to criticise me--no one to encourage, to blame, or to praise; only the voice of purpose in my breast. Amid loneliness this pa.s.sion for fruitless labour has grown strong, frenzied, blind.
Perhaps one day I shall penetrate--if I live. But for life one must have food; for work one must have shelter. At twenty-three one does not want to die; not when one has lived always in the future, when one has striven and toiled for recognition that may yet come. Not mere recognition of genius or talent, of knack or gift, but recognition of Truth as opposed to Imposture, of my right to life, of my right to give free and full expression of the individuality that is mine.
”As matters are now--I am utterly friendless so far as my inner life is concerned--I can see no other end than fall. G.o.d knows what shape that fall is destined to take; into what mire my soul must plunge in the fight for life. I could bear anything if I were not so utterly alone and helpless. I would do hack-work if I but knew Grub Street. I would sell my soul to a publisher for fifty pounds a year. Anything to get my foot on the lowest rung of the ladder! Anything to help me on the way to freedom!
”If you could see me, speak to me, help me in any way! Believe me, I do not wish to force my personality on you. I do not want you to give me any material thing. I only beg of you to aid me in a.s.serting my claim on life by telling how I may win bread.
”I should be deeply grateful for a word from you. In any case, pardon this intrusion. Yours, etc., Morgan Druce.”
Ingram drew a long breath and threw the sheets on to the table.
”Have I read it nicely?” he asked.
”And I wrote that--to you, Robert Ingram!” exclaimed Morgan, brokenly.
”You did,” said Ingram, quietly. ”And you know what the sequel was.”
”You were moved by my appeal. You came to seek me out.”
”Well, your letter interested me. It was not the letter of a duffer or a swindler--the sort of thing you can tell by its ornate pompousness; and it just caught me when I was somewhat bored by things, so that I rather welcomed it as an excitement. I expected to find you lodging in some miserable cottage--a Chatterton in a garret. I came to bring food to the hungry. Instead----”
”You found me living in a palace standing in a fine park, with no lack of loaves and fishes, of milk and honey.”
”It was the greatest surprise of my life. When I could no longer doubt that the only people called Druce in the neighbourhood lived in the magnificent Elizabethan mansion, whose name was that of the supposed cottage from which you addressed your letter, I began to think the family kept a skeleton in one of the cupboards. In plain language----”
”You thought one of the members of the family must be a lunatic.”
”Anyway, the champagne was first-cla.s.s, the cigars were worth half-a-crown apiece,” said Ingram, laughing.
”And when you had gone into the matter you thought that if I wasn't quite a lunatic, I was not far short of one for disagreeing with my father.”
”Frankly, I did.”
”You never really sympathised.”
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