t up
together in the same country place. We were both thrown upon the world
about the same time. That was one thing, I suppose, which made us kindly
disposed towards one another. We corresponded always. I commenced my
unsuccessful fight in London. I lived--I can't tell you how--week by
week, month by month. I ate coarse food, I was a hanger-on to the fringe
of everything in life which appealed to me, fed intellectually on the
crumbs of free libraries and picture galleries. I met no one of my own
station--I was at a public school and my people were gentlefolk--or
tastes. I had no friends in London before whom I dared present myself, no
money to join a club where I might have mixed with my fellows, no one to
talk to or exchange a single idea with--and I wasn't always the gloomy
sort of person I have become; in my younger days I loved companionship.
And the women--my landlady's daughter, with dyed hair, a loud voice,
slatternly in the morning, a flagrant imitation of her less honest
sisters at night! Who else? Where was I to meet women when I didn't even
know men? I spent my poor holidays at Detton Magna. Our very loneliness
brought Beatrice and me closer together. We used to walk in those ugly
fields around Detton Magna and exchanged the story of our woes. She was a
teacher at the national school. The children weren't pleasant, their
parents were worse. The drudgery was horrible, and there wasn't any
escape for her. Sometimes she would sob as we sat side by side. She, too,
wanted something out of life, as I did, and there seemed nothing but that
black wall always before us. I think that we clung together because we
shared a common misery. We talked endlessly of a way out. For me what was
there? There was no one to rob--I wasn't clever enough. There was no way
I could earn money, honestly or dishonestly. And for her, buried in that
Derbyshire village amongst the collieries, where there was scarcely a
person who hadn't the taint of the place upon them--what chance was there
for her? There was nothing she could do, either. I knew in my heart that
we were both ready for evil things, if by evil things we could make our
escape. And we couldn't. So we tried to lose ourselves in the only fields
left for such as we. We read poetry. We tried to live in that unnatural
world where the brains only are nourished and the body languishes. It was
a morbid, unhealthy existence, but I plodded along and so did she. Then
her weekly letters beca