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Updated: May 24, 2025
'He's layin' outside his door. I pulled him out, but I can't do no more for him. Smoke grew thick on the staircase. Burning was as yet confined to that front room on the second floor tenanted by Briggs the disastrous, but in all likelihood the ceiling was ablaze, and if so it would be all but impossible for Biffen to gain his own chamber, which was at the back on the floor above.
He read me some twenty pages, and I no longer wondered that he couldn't sell it. 'Oh, but it has considerable merit, put in Biffen. 'The talk is remarkably true. 'But what's the good of talk that leads to nothing? protested Jasper. 'It's a bit of real life. 'Yes, but it has no market value. You may write what you like, so long as people are willing to read you.
In a minute or two a heavy footstep descended the stairs, and Biffen re-entered the room. 'Now that's a good, honest fellow, he said, in an amused tone. 'It's my pay-night, but he didn't like to fork out money before you. A very unusual delicacy in a man of that standing. He pays me sixpence for an hour's lesson; that brings me two shillings a week.
'I have done the same myself before now. Do you ever buy pease-pudding? 'I should think so! I get magnificent pennyworths at a shop in Cleveland Street, of a very rich quality indeed. Excellent faggots they have there, too. I'll give you a supper of them some night before you go. Biffen rose to enthusiasm in the contemplation of these dainties.
'I thought it too good to be true when Edwin heard of it from Mr Biffen. All three laughed in subdued chorus. For the moment, Reardon became a new man in his exultation over the contradictory reviewers. 'Oh, Biffen told you, did he?
Repeating the demand again and again he succeeded in getting forward, and at length was near enough to see that people were dragging articles of furniture out on to the pavement. 'That you, Mr Biffen? cried someone to him. He recognised the face of a fellow-lodger. 'Is it possible to get up to my room? broke frantically from his lips. 'You'll never get up there.
'The year after next. Biffen smiled dubiously. 'I have demonstrated to you mathematically that it is possible. 'You have; but so are a great many other things that one does not dare to hope for. Someone knocked at the door, opened it, and said: 'Here's a telegram for you, Mr Reardon. The friends looked at each other, as if some fear had entered the minds of both. Reardon opened the despatch.
Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself. The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world.
The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain. It was very weak of Harold Biffen to come so near perishing of hunger as he did in the days when he was completing his novel. But he would have vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining food presented itself to him.
Biffen regarded this spectacle with resentful scorn; at another time it would have moved him merely to mirth, but not even the sound of the breakers when he had wandered as far as possible from human contact could help him to think with resignation of the injustice which triumphs so flagrantly in the destinies of men.
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