Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/101

 "Oh, that is certain, that is certain," I exclaimed, as he paused again.

"Well, anyhow, it didn't sell, and at last I couldn't even get it published. So then I tried to find other work. I tried everything. I tried to teach—harmony and the theory of composition. I couldn't get pupils. So few people want to study that sort of thing, and there were good masters already in the place. If I had known how to play, indeed! But I was never better than a fifth-rate executant; I had never gone in for that; my 'lay' was composition. I couldn't give piano lessons, I couldn't play in public—unless in a gargotte like the hole we have just left. Oh, I tried everything. I tried to get musical criticism to do for the newspapers. Surely I was competent to do musical criticism. But no—they wouldn't employ me. I had ill luck, ill luck, ill luck—nothing but ill luck, defeat, disappointment. Was it the will of Heaven? I wondered what unforgiveable sin I had committed to be punished so. Do you know what it is like to work and pray and wait, day after day, and watch day after day come and go and bring you nothing? Oh, I tasted the whole heart-sickness of hope deferred; Giant Despair was my constant bed-fellow."

"But—with your connections" I began.

"Oh, my connections!" he cried. "There was the rub, London is the cruellest town in Europe. For sheer cold blood and heartlessness give Londoners the palm. I had connections enough for the first month or so, and then people found out things that didn't concern them. They found out some things that were true, and they imagined other things that were false. They wouldn't have my wife; they told the most infamous lies about her; and I wouldn't have them. Could I be civil to people who insulted and slandered her? I had no connections in London, except with the underworld. I got down to copying parts for