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Vain Fortune

A Novel

George Moore

New Edition

Completely Revised

London: Walter Scott, Ltd. Paternoster Square

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty

Prefatory Note

She pointed out that, without the alteration of a sentence, the two versions could be combined. The idea had not occurred to me; I saw, however, that what she proposed was not only feasible but advantageous. I wrote, therefore, giving her the required permission, and thanking her for a suggestion which I should avail myself of when the time came for a new English edition.

G.M.

A sheet of foolscap paper, and upon it a long slender hand. The hand traced a few lines of fine, beautiful caligraphy, then it paused, correcting with extreme care what was already written, and in a hesitating, minute way, telling of a brain that delighted in the correction rather than in the creation of form.

The shirt-cuff was frayed and dirty. The coat was thin and shiny. A half-length figure of a man drew out of the massed shadows between the window and sideboard. The red beard caught the light, and the wavy brown hair brightened. Then a look of weariness, of distress, passed over the face, and the man laid down the pen, and, taking some tobacco from a paper, rolled a cigarette. Rising, and leaning forward, he lighted it over the lamp. He was a man of about thirty-six feet, broad-shouldered, well-built, healthy, almost handsome.

The time he spent in dreaming his play amounted to six times, if not ten times, as much as he devoted to trying to write it; and he now lit cigarette after cigarette, abandoning himself to every meditation,--the unpleasantness of life in lodgings, the charm of foreign travel, the beauty of the south, what he would do if his play succeeded. He plunged into calculation of the time it would take him to finish it if he were to sit at home all day, working from seven to ten hours every day. If he could but make up his mind concerning the beginning and the middle of the third act, and about the end, too,--the solution,--he felt sure that, with steady work, the play could be completed in a fortnight. In such reverie and such consideration he lay immersed, oblivious of the present moment, and did not stir from his chair until the postman shook the frail walls with a violent double knock. He hoped for a letter, for a newspaper--either would prove a welcome distraction. The servant's footsteps on the stairs told him the post had brought him something. His heart sank at the thought that it was probably only a bill, and he glanced at all the bills lying one above another on the table.

It was not a bill, nor yet an advertisement, but a copy of a weekly review. He tore it open. An article about himself!

At that moment his eye was caught by some letters written on blue paper. His face resumed a wearied and hunted expression. 'There's no doubt about it, money I must get somehow. I am running it altogether too fine. There isn't twenty pounds between me and the deep sea.'

He was the son of the Rev. James Price, a Shropshire clergyman. The family was of Welsh extraction, but in Hubert none of the physical characteristics of the Celt appeared. He might have been selected as a typical Anglo-Saxon. The face was long and pale, and he wore a short reddish beard; the eyes were light blue, verging on grey, and they seemed to speak a quiet, steadfast soul. Hubert had always been his mother's favourite, and the scorn of his elder brothers, two rough boys, addicted in early youth to robbing orchards, and later on to gambling and drinking. The elder, after having broken his father's heart with debts and disgraceful living, had gone out to the Cape. News of his death came to the Rectory soon after; but James's death did not turn Henry from his evil courses, and one day his father and mother had to go to London on his account, and they brought him back a hopeless invalid. Hubert was twelve years of age when he followed his brother to the grave.

It was at his brother's funeral that Hubert met for the first time his uncle, Mr. Burnett. Mr. Burnett had spent the greater part of his life in New Zealand, where he had made a large fortune by sheep-farming and investments in land. He had seemed to be greatly taken with his nephew, and for many years it was understood that he would leave him the greater part, if not the whole, of his fortune. But Mr. Burnett had come under the influence of some poor relations, some distant cousins, the Watsons, and had eventually decided to adopt their daughter Emily and leave her his fortune. He did not dare intimate his change of mind to his sister; but the news having reached Mrs. Price in various rumours, she wrote to her brother asking him to confirm or deny these rumours; and when he admitted their truth, Mrs. Price never spoke to him again. She was a determined woman, and the remembrance of the wrong done to her son never left her.

While the other children had been a torment and disgrace, Hubert had been to his parents a consolation and a blessing. They had feared that he too might turn to betting and drink, but he had never shown sign of low tastes. He played no games, nor did he care for terriers or horses; but for books and drawing, and long country walks. Immediately on hearing of his disinheritance he had spoken at once of entering a profession; and for many months this was the subject of consideration in the Rectory. Hubert joined in these discussions willingly, but he could not bring himself to accept the army or the bar. It was indeed only necessary to look at him to see that neither soldier's tunic nor lawyer's wig was intended for him; and it was nearly as clear that those earnest eyes, so intelligent and yet so undetermined in their gaze, were not those of a doctor.

But if his eyes failed to predict his future, his hands told the story of his life distinctly enough--those long, white, languid hands, what could they mean but art? And very soon Hubert began to draw, evincing some natural aptitude. Then an artist came into the neighbourhood, the two became friends, and went together on a long sketching tour. Life in the open air, the shade of the hedge, the glare of the highway, the meditation of the field, the languor of the river-side, the contemplation of wooded horizons, was what Hubert's pastoral nature was most fitted to enjoy; and, for the sake of the life it afforded him, he pursued the calling of a landscape painter long after he had begun to feel his desire turning in another direction. When the landscape on the canvas seemed hopelessly inadequate, he laid aside the brush for the pencil, and strove to interpret the summer fields in verse. From verse he drifted into the article and the short story, and from the story into the play. And it was in this last form that he felt himself strongest, and various were the dramas and comedies that he dreamed from year's end to year's end.

While he was in the midst of his period of verse-writing his mother died, and in the following year, just as he was working at his stories, he received a telegram calling him to attend his father's death-bed. When the old man was laid in the shadow of the weather-beaten village church, Hubert gathered all his belongings and bade farewell for ever to the Shropshire rectory.

Ford looked at Hubert questioningly; then he said 'I have always noticed that when a fellow wants to finish a play, the only way to do it is to go away to the country and leave no address.'

But the country was always so full of pleasure for him, that he doubted his power to remain indoors with the temptation of fields and rivers before his eyes, and he thought that to escape from dunning creditors it would be sufficient to change his address. So he left Norfolk Street for the more remote quarter of Fitzroy Street, where he took a couple of rooms on the second floor. One of his fellow-lodgers, he soon found, was Rose Massey, an actress engaged for the performance of small parts at the Queen's Theatre. The first time he spoke to her was on the doorstep. She had forgotten her latch-key, and he said, 'Will you allow me to let you in?' She stepped aside, but did not answer him. Hubert thought her rude, but her strange eyes and absent-minded manner had piqued his curiosity, and, having nothing to do that night, he went to the theatre to see her act. She was playing a very small part, and one that was evidently unsuited to her--a part that was in contradiction to her nature; but there was something behind the outer envelope which led him to believe she had real talent, and would make a name for herself when she was given a part that would allow her to reveal what was in her.

'Oh, it was very silly of me,' she said to Annie. 'If I had only known!'

'Lor', he don't mind; he'll be glad enough to speak to you when you meets him again.'

And when they met again on the stairs, Rose nodded familiarly, and Hubert said--

'I went to the Queen's the other night.'

'Did you like the piece?'

'I did not care about the piece; but when you get a wild, passionate part to play, you'll make a hit. The sentimental parts they give you don't suit you.'

A sudden light came into the languid face. 'Yes, I shall do something if I can get a part like that.'

Hubert told her that he was writing a play containing just such a part.

Her eyes brightened again. 'Will you read me the play?' she said, fixing her dark, dreamy eyes on him.

'I shall be very glad.... Do you think it won't bore you?' And his wistful grey eyes were full of interrogation.

'No, I'm sure it won't.'

And a few days after she sent Annie with a note, reminding him of his promise to read her what he had written. As she had only a bedroom, the reading had to take place in his sitting-room. He read her the first and second acts. She was all enthusiasm, and begged hard to be allowed to study the part--just to see what she could do with it--just to let him see that he was not mistaken in her. Her interest in his work captivated him, and he couldn't refuse to lend her the manuscript.

'Were you ever in love?' she said suddenly. 'I don't suppose you could be; you are too occupied with your play. I don't know, though; you might be in love, but I don't think that many women would be in love with you.... You are too good a man, and women don't like good men.'

Hubert laughed, and without a trace of offended vanity in his voice he said, 'I don't profess to be much of a lady-killer.'

'You don't know what I mean,' she said, looking at him fixedly, a maze of half-childish, half-artistic curiosity in her handsome eyes.

Perplexed in his shy, straightford nature, Hubert inquired if she took sugar in her tea. She said she did; stretched her feet to the fire, and lapsed into dream. She was one of the enigmas of Stageland. She supported herself, and went about by herself, looking a poor, lost little thing. She spoke with considerable freedom of language on all subjects, but no one had been able to fix a lover upon her.

'What a part Lady Hayward is! But tell me,--I don't quite catch your meaning in the second act. Is this it?' and starting to her feet, she became in a moment another being. With a gesture, a look, an intonation, she was the woman of the play,--a woman taken by an instinct, long submerged, but which has floated to the surface, and is beginning to command her actions. In another moment she had slipped back into her weary lymphatic nature, at once prematurely old and extravagantly childish. She could not talk of indifferent things; and having asked some strange questions, and laughed loudly, she wished Hubert 'Good-afternoon' in her curious, irresponsible fashion, taking her leave abruptly.

The next two days Hubert devoted entirely to his play. There were things in it which he knew were good, but it was incomplete. Montague Ford would not produce it in its present form. He must put his shoulder to the wheel and get it right; one more push, that was all that was wanted. And he could be heard walking to and fro, up and down, along and across his tiny sitting-room, stopping suddenly to take a note of an idea that had occurred to him.

One day he went to Hampstead Heath. A long walk, he thought, would clear his mind, and he returned home thinking of his play. The sunset still glittering in the skies; the bare trees were beautifully distinct on the blue background of the suburban street, and at the end of the long perspective, a 'bus and a hansom could be seen coming towards him. As they grew larger, his thoughts defined themselves, and the distressing problem of his fourth act seemed to solve itself. That very evening he would sketch out a new dramatic movement around which all the other movements of the act would cluster. But at the corner of Fitzroy Square, within a few yards of No. 17, he was accosted by a shabbily-dressed man, who inquired if he were Mr. Price. On being answered in the affirmative, the shabbily-dressed man said, 'Then I have something for ye; I have been a-watching for ye for the last three days, but ye didn't come out; missed yer this morning: 'ere it is;' and he thrust a folded paper into Hubert's hand.

'What is this?'

'Don't yer know?' he said with a grin; 'Messrs. Tomkins & Co., Tailors, writ--twenty-two pound odd.'

Hubert made no answer; he put the paper in his pocket, opened the door quietly, stole up to his room, and sat down to think. The first thing to do was to examine into his finances. It was alarming to find that he was breaking into his last five-pound note. True that he was close on the end of his play, and when it was finished he would be able to draw on Ford. But a summons to appear in the county court could not fail to do him immense injury. He had heard of avoiding service, but he knew little of the law, and wondered what power the service of the writ gave his creditor over him. His instinct was to escape--hide himself where they would not be able to find him, and so obtain time to finish his play. But he owed his landlady money, and his departure would have to be clandestine. As he reflected on how many necessaries he might carry away in a newspaper, he began to feel strangely like a criminal, and while rolling up a couple of shirts, a few pairs of socks, and some collars, he paused, his hands resting on the parcel. He did not seem to know himself, and it was difficult to believe that he really intended to leave the house in this disreputable fashion. Mechanically he continued to add to his parcel, thinking all the while that he must go, otherwise his play would never be written.

He had been working very well for the last few days, and now he saw his way quite clearly; the inspiration he had been so long waiting for had come at last, and he felt sure of his fourth act. At the same time he wished to conduct himself honestly, even in this distressing situation. Should he tell his landlady the truth? But the desire to realise his idea was intolerable, and, yielding as if before an irresistible force, he tied the parcel and prepared to go. At that moment he remembered that he must leave a note for his landlady, and he was more than ever surprised at the naturalness with which lying phrases came into his head. But when it came to committing them to paper, he found he could not tell an absolute lie, and he wrote a simple little note to the effect that he had been called away on urgent business, and hoped to return in about a week.

He descended the stairs softly. Mrs. Wilson's sitting-room opened on to the passage; she might step out at any moment, and intercept his exit. He had nearly reached the last flight when he remembered that he had forgotten his manuscripts. His flesh turned cold, his heart stood still. There was nothing for it but to ascend those creaking stairs again. His already heavily encumbered pockets could not be persuaded to receive more than a small portion of the manuscripts. He gathered them in his hand, and prepared to redescend the perilous stairs. He walked as lightly as possible, dreading that every creak would bring Mrs. Wilson from her parlour. A few more steps, and he would be in the passage. A smell of dust, sounds of children crying, children talking in the kitchen! A few more steps, and, with his eyes on the parlour door, Hubert had reached the rug at the foot of the stairs. He hastened along, the passage. Mrs. Wilson was a moment too late. His hand was on the street-door when she appeared at the door of her parlour.

'I can't wait--running to catch a train. You'll find a letter on my table. It will explain.'

Hubert slipped out, closed the door, and ran down the street, and it was not until he had put two or three streets between him and Fitzroy Street that he relaxed his pace, and could look behind him without dreading to feel the hand of the 'writter' upon his shoulder.

Then he wandered, not knowing where he was going, still in the sensation of his escape, a little amused, and yet with a shadow of fear upon his soul, for he grew more and more conscious of the fact that he was homeless, if not quite penniless. Suddenly he stopped walking. Night was thickening in the street, and he had to decide where he would sleep. He could not afford to pay more than five or six shillings a week for a room, and he thought of Holloway, as being a neighbourhood where creditors would not be able to find him. So he retraced his steps, and, tired and footsore, entered the Tottenham Court Road by the Oxford Street end.

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