Read Online Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton - Free Book Online

the world. His eighty pounds resided at the Midland Bank in the Tottenham Court Road. It had once been only forty-seven pounds, which had come to him on his mother’s death seven years ago. It had only been within the last two years or so that he had begun properly to save. He could still remember the calm satisfaction with which he had brought it up to fifty: the self-applause caused by its reaching sixty: the elation and sheer priggish conceit of seventy – and now it was eighty – eighty exactly. Having, like most of us, a congenitally decimal mind, he always enjoyed his money most when the sum wasexactly divisible by ten. Eighty-three, for instance, would be quite a bore – just a depressingly distant halting-place on the road to ninety.
    Not that Bob had any greed for money itself, or had any formulated intentions towards his own. It merely stood between him and the dire need to toil, and made a man of him. And he needed this fortification more than others. For he knew now that he was a dreamer. Dreams were his life, were becoming more and more his life, and he worshipped at the shrine of dreams. Furthermore, he proposed to go on dreaming, and the solidity and mathematically appraisable achievement represented by those eighty pounds gave him exactly the reassurance he required.
    Bob believed that one day his dreams would come true. This was an enormous assumption for one such as Bob, for his dreams amounted to little less than this – to govern his own life, to subdue the terrific disadvantages to which he had been born, and to become eminent amongst men. Nothing less. This was Bob’s secret – his inner life – the derivation of all those queer reticences and mysteries which so puzzled Ella when she saw volumes of Gibbon, or copies of John O ’ London ’ s Weekly , lying on his bedroom table.
    It was Bob’s naïve ambition, in fact, to become a great writer. He was the first to apprehend his own naïveté. Hence his secrecy – a secrecy which arose not from pride but from fear of ridicule. Ella, as a matter of fact, if he had told her, would not have thought the ambition naïve, but rather fine and plausible. But Bob was wiser than Ella, and knew it to be naïve. But he knew also how dear it was to him: and because it was a secret, and his own, he took it to his bosom like a lover, and walked with it on his walks.
    Bob had not at present essayed much in the way of writing. He was in his twenty-sixth year, but still very young in spirit. He had, in abundance, that quality which perhaps most clearly characterizes youth – namely, a marvellous, unreasoning conviction that the highest and noblest things in life must, of some hidden but automatic necessity, come its way – a perfect assurance of good about to befall. And this feeling stillspread a pleasant mist around the actual exigencies and spade-work of ambition.
    Nor was it certain that Bob’s love of literature was absolutely pure. It had begun, many years ago, with an admiration for the works of Conan Doyle. The simplicity, skill, and intelligence of this lovable and rather childish writer had captured his heart. He thought at one time, indeed, that this was the only author that he cared to read; but later he took to Scott. Quentin Durward and The Fair Maid of Perth were books he could read again and again. And then came Dumas, and The Cloister and the Hearth – and then, strangely enough, Washington Irving, who, with his Mahomet and Columbus and Conquest of Granada , was still perhaps Bob’s favourite author. He was, to Bob, so lucid, learned, clever, sincere, and serene – a sort of sublimated Conan Doyle.
    And then came Wells, whose Outline of History supplied his most poignant requirements, and then there was a great deal of miscellaneous and modern reading; and then came John O ’ London ’ s Weekly .
    Until this time Bob’s devotion had been natural, personal and unaffected. But with John O ’ London ’ s Weekly he fell a victim, in some