thing that he could “show.” Stephen meanwhile had found work as a waiter in one of the small Soho restaurants; it was only a temporary engagement but he hoped to get something better within a week or two.
For the moment all was well. At the end of his fortnight, with four things written Peter meant to advance once more to the attack. Meanwhile he sat with a pen, a penny bottle of ink and an exercise book and did what he could. At the end of the fortnight he had written “The Sea Road,” an essay for which Robert Louis Stevenson was largely responsible, “The Redgate Mill,” a story of the fantastic, terrible kind, “Stones for Bread,” moralising on Bucket Lane, and the “Red-Haired Boy,” a somewhat bitter reminiscence of Dawson's. Of this the best was undoubtedly “The Sea Road,” but in his heart of hearts Peter knew that there was something the matter with all of them. “Reuben Hallard” he had written because he had to write it, these four things he had written because he ought to write them . . . difference sufficient. Nevertheless, he put them into halfpenny wrappers and sent them away.
In the struggle to produce these things he had not found that fortnight wearisome. Before him, every day, there was the evening when Stephen would return, to which he might look forward. Stephen was always very late—often it was two o'clock before he came in, but they had a talk before going to sleep. And here in these evenings Stephen developed in the most wonderful way, developed because Peter had really never known him before.
Stephen had never appeared to Peter as a character at all. In the early days Peter had been too young. Stephen had, at that time, been simply something to be worshipped, without any question or statement. Now that worshipping had gone and the space that it left had to be filled by some new relationship, something that could only come slowly, out of the close juxtaposition that living together in Bucket Lane had provided.
And it was Stephen who found, unconsciously and quite simply, the shape and colour of Peter's idea of him. Peter had in reality, nothing at all to do with it, and had Stephen been a whit more self-conscious the effect would have been spoiled.
