Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/416

 He had seen his work, in his dreams, derided, flouted misunderstood. That was the way with most good work, but what he had never seen was its acceptance amongst the ranks of the “Pretty Good,” its place given it beside that rising and falling tide of fiction that covered every year the greedy rocks of the circulating libraries and ebbed out again leaving no trace behind it.

Now, after the failure of “Mortimer Stant” for the first time, this awful question—“What if, after all, you should be an Ordinary Creature? What if you are no better than that army who fights happily, contentedly, with mediocrity for its daily bread and butter? That army, upon whose serried ranks you have perhaps, unconsciously, but nevertheless with pity, looked down? What if you are never to write a word that will be remembered, never ever to cause a decent attention, amongst your own generation?”

What if after all this stir and fluster, this pain and agony and striving, there should be nothing exceptional about Peter? What rock to stand on then?

He had never, perhaps, analysed his feelings about it all. He had certainly never thought himself an exceptional person but always in his heart there had been that belief that, one day, he would write an exceptional book.

He was very young, not yet thirty, but he had had his chance. It seemed to him, in these weeks following the death of “Mortimer Stant,” that his career was already over. There was also the question of ways and means. Just enough to live on with the reviewing and a column for an American paper and Clare's income, but if the books were all of them to fail as this one had failed—why then it was a dreary future for them both.

In fact there were now, at his feet, pits of so dismal and impenetrable a blackness that he refused to look down, but clung rather to his determination to make all things right with Clare again, and then things would come round.

If that failed him—why then, old black-faced father in Scaw House with your drunken cook and your company of ghosts, you shall have your merry way!

Henry Galleon was dead. Mrs. Launce was,