Chapter 9

THE PRINCESS OF THE GOLDEN LOCKS SENDS PAUL A RING.

It took me three years to win that handshake. For the first six months I remained in Deptford. There was excellent material to be found there for humorous articles, essays, stories; likewise for stories tragic and pathetic. But I owed a hundred and fifty pounds—a little over two hundred it reached to, I found, when I came to add up the actual figures. So I paid strict attention to business, left the tears to be garnered by others—better fitted maybe for the task; kept to my own patch, reaped and took to market only the laughter.

At the beginning I sent each manuscript to Norah; she had it copied out, debited me with the cost received payment, and sent me the balance. At first my earnings were small; but Norah was an excellent agent; rapidly they increased. Dan grew quite cross with her, wrote in pained surprise at her greed. The “matter” was fair, but in no way remarkable. Any friend of hers, of course, he was anxious to assist; but business was business. In justice to his proprietors, he could not and would not pay more than the market value. Miss Deleglise, replying curtly in the third person, found herself in perfect accord with Mr. Brian as to business being business. If Mr. Brian could not afford to pay her price for material so excellent, other editors with whom Miss Deleglise was equally well acquainted could and would. Answer by return would greatly oblige, pending which the manuscript then in her hands she retained. Mr. Brian, understanding he had found his match, grumbled but paid. Whether he had any suspicion who “Jack Homer” might be, he never confessed; but he would have played the game, pulled his end of the rope, in either case. Nor was he allowed to decide the question for himself. Competition was introduced into the argument. Of purpose a certain proportion of my work my agent sent elsewhere. “Jack Homer” grew to be a commodity in demand. For, seated at my rickety table, I laughed as I wrote, the fourth wall of the dismal room fading before my eyes revealing vistas beyond.

Still, it was slow work. Humour is not an industrious maid; declines to be bustled, will work only when she feels inclined—does not often feel inclined; gives herself a good many unnecessary airs; if worried, packs up and goes off, Heaven knows where! comes back when she thinks she will: a somewhat unreliable young person. To my literary labours I found it necessary to add journalism. I lacked Dan’s magnificent assurance. Fate never befriends the nervous. Had I burst into the editorial sanctum, the editor most surely would have been out; if in, would have been a man of short ways, would have seen to it that I went out quickly. But the idea was not to be thought of; Robert Macaire himself in my one coat would have been diffident, apologetic. I joined the ranks of the penny-a-liners—to be literally exact, three halfpence a liners. In company with half a dozen other shabby outsiders—some of them young men like myself seeking to climb; others, older men who had sunk—I attended inquests, police courts; flew after fire engines; rejoiced in street accidents; yearned for murders. Somewhat vulture-like we lived precariously upon the misfortunes of others. We made occasional half crowns by providing the public with scandal, occasional crowns by keeping our information to ourselves.

“I think, gentlemen,” would explain our spokesman in a hoarse whisper, on returning to the table, “I think the corpse’s brother-in-law is anxious that the affair, if possible, should be kept out of the papers.”

The closeness and attention with which we would follow that particular case, the fulness and completeness of our notes, would be quite remarkable. Our spokesman would rise, drift carelessly away, to return five minutes later, wiping his mouth.

“Not a very interesting case, gentlemen, I don’t think. Shall we say five shillings apiece?” Sometimes a sense of the dignity of our calling would induce us to stand out for ten.

And here also my sense of humour came to my aid; gave me perhaps an undue advantage over my competitors. Twelve good men and true had been asked to say how a Lascar sailor had met his death. It was perfectly clear how he had met his death. A plumber, working on the roof of a small two-storeyed house, had slipped and fallen on him. The plumber had escaped with a few bruises; the unfortunate sailor had been picked up dead. Some blame attached to the plumber. His mate, an excellent witness, told us the whole story.

“I was fixing a gas-pipe on the first floor,” said the man. “The prisoner was on the roof.”

“We won’t call him ‘the prisoner,’” interrupted the coroner, “at least, not yet. Refer to him, if you please, as the ‘last witness.’”

“The last witness,” corrected himself the man. “He shouts down the chimney to know if I was ready for him.”

“‘Ready and waiting,’ I says.

“‘Right,’ he says; ‘I’m coming in through the window.’

“‘Wait a bit,’ I says; ‘I’ll go down and move the ladder for you.

“‘It’s all right,’ he says; ‘I can reach it.’

“‘No, you can’t,’ I says. ‘It’s the other side of the chimney.’

“‘I can get round,’ he says.

“Well, before I knew what had happened, I hears him go, smack! I rushes to the window and looks out: I see him on the pavement, sitting up like.

“‘Hullo, Jim,’ I says. ‘Have you hurt yourself?’

“‘I think I’m all right,’ he says, ‘as far as I can tell. But I wish you’d come down. This bloke I’ve fallen on looks a bit sick.’”

The others headed their flimsy “Sad Accident,” a title truthful but not alluring. I altered mine to “Plumber in a Hurry—Fatal Result.” Saying as little as possible about the unfortunate sailor, I called the attention of plumbers generally to the coroner’s very just remarks upon the folly of undue haste; pointed out to them, as a body, the trouble that would arise if somehow they could not cure themselves of this tendency to rush through their work without a moment’s loss of time.

It established for me a useful reputation. The sub-editor of one evening paper condescended so far as to come out in his shirt-sleeves and shake hands with me.

“That’s the sort of thing we want,” he told me; “a light touch, a bit of humour.”

I snatched fun from fires (I sincerely trust the insurance premiums were not overdue); culled quaintness from street rows; extracted merriment from catastrophes the most painful, and prospered.

Though often within a stone’s throw of the street, I unremittingly avoided the old house at Poplar. I was suffering inconvenience at this period by reason of finding myself two distinct individuals, contending with each other. My object was to encourage the new Paul—the sensible, practical, pushful Paul, whose career began to look promising; to drive away from interfering with me his strangely unlike twin—the old childish Paul of the sad, far-seeing eyes. Sometimes out of the cracked looking-glass his wistful, yearning face would plead to me; but I would sternly shake my head. I knew well his cunning. Had I let him have his way, he would have led me through the maze of streets he knew so well, past the broken railings (outside which he would have left my body standing), along the weedy pathway, through the cracked and dented door, up the creaking staircase to the dismal little chamber where we once—he and I together—had sat dreaming foolish dreams.

“Come,” he would whisper; “it is so near. Let us push aside the chest of drawers very quietly, softly raise the broken sash, prop it open with the Latin dictionary, lean our elbows on the sill, listen to the voices of the weary city, voices calling to us from the darkness.”

But I was too wary to be caught. “Later on,” I would reply to him; “when I have made my way, when I am stronger to withstand your wheedling. Then I will go with you, if you are still in existence, my sentimental little friend. We will dream again the old impractical, foolish dreams—and laugh at them.”

So he would fade away, and in his place would nod to me approvingly a businesslike-looking, wide-awake young fellow.

But to one sentimental temptation I succumbed. My position was by now assured; there was no longer any reason for my hiding myself. I determined to move westward. I had not intended to soar so high, but passing through Guildford Street one day, the creeper-covered corner house that my father had once thought of taking recalled itself to me. A card was in the fanlight. I knocked and made enquiries. A bed-sitting-room upon the third floor was vacant. I remembered it well the moment the loquacious landlady opened its door.

“This shall be your room, Paul,” said my father. So clearly his voice sounded behind me that I turned, forgetting for the moment it was but a memory. “You will be quiet here, and we can shut out the bed and washstand with a screen.”

So my father had his way. It was a pleasant, sunny little room, overlooking the gardens of the hospital. I followed my father’s suggestion, shut out the bed and washstand with a screen. And sometimes of an evening it would amuse me to hear my father turn the handle of the door.

“How are you getting on—all right?”

“Famously.”

Often there came back to me the words he had once used. “You must be the practical man, Paul, and get on. Myself, I have always been somewhat of a dreamer. I meant to do such great things in the world, and somehow I suppose I aimed too high. I wasn’t—practical.”

“But ought not one to aim high?” I had asked.

My father had fidgeted in his chair. “It is very difficult to say. It is all so—so very ununderstandable. You aim high and you don’t hit anything—at least, it seems as if you didn’t. Perhaps, after all, it is better to aim at something low, and—and hit it. Yet it seems a pity—one’s ideals, all the best part of one—I don’t know why it is. Perhaps we do not understand.”

For some months I had been writing over my own name. One day a letter was forwarded to me by an editor to whose care it had been addressed. It was a short, formal note from the maternal Sellars, inviting me to the wedding of her daughter with a Mr. Reginald Clapper. I had almost forgotten the incident of the Lady ‘Ortensia, but it was not unsatisfactory to learn that it had terminated pleasantly. Also, I judged from an invitation having been sent me, that the lady wished me to be witness of the fact that my desertion had not left her disconsolate. So much gratification I felt I owed her, and accordingly, purchasing a present as expensive as my means would permit, I made my way on the following Thursday, clad in frock coat and light grey trousers, to Kennington Church.