Wessex Tales | Page 6

the title-page. 'Dear me!' she continued; 'I know his name
very well--Robert Trewe--of course I do; and his writings! And it is
HIS rooms we have taken, and HIM we have turned out of his home?'
Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own latter history will best
explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of

letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in an
endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her painfully
embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed
departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical
household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.
These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in
various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones.
In the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the
bottom, in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on
the same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe. Both of them had, in
fact, been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and
had used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a
note upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems
prompted him to give them together.
After that event Ella, otherwise 'John Ivy,' had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the
signature of Robert Trewe, who, with a man's unsusceptibility on the
question of sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a
woman. To be sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of
reason for doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might believe in
her inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing
tradesman's wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of-fact
small-arms manufacturer.
Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor
poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than
finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far
as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies
as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by
excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes,
when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the
loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded
reviewer said he ought not to have done.
With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often
scanned the rival poet's work, so much stronger as it always was than
her own feeble lines. She had imitated him, and her inability to touch
his level would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away
thus, till she observed from the publishers' list that Trewe had collected

his fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much
or little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient to
pay for the printing.
This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her
pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding
many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been
able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for
costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but
nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a fortnight--if
it had ever been alive.
The author's thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the
discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of
her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might
have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband had
paid the publisher's bill with the doctor's, and there it all had ended for
the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more
than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel the
old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she found
herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.
She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with
the interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse
was among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it
here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the
landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young
man.
'Well, I'm sure you'd be interested in him, ma'am, if you could see him,
only he's so shy that I don't suppose