Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Mr. Innes!”

  “I had no idea you were in England, Harry.”

  “I have been back three weeks.”

  “Why didn’t you write?”

  He knew everything. Harry saw it in the kind, strong face, and heard it in a voice rich with sympathy and reproach.

  “I was too ashamed,” he murmured — and he hung his head.

  “You might have trusted me, old fellow,” said Mr. Innes. “Come and sit on top of the pavilion and tell me all about yourself.”

  At any other time it would have been a sufficient joy to Harry Ringrose to set foot in that classic temple of the sacred game; now he had eyes for nothing and nobody but the man who led him up the steps, through the cricketing throng, up the stairs. And when they sat together on top, and the ground was cleared, and play resumed, not another ball did Harry watch with intelligent eyes. He was sitting with the man to whom he had been too proud to write, but whose disciple he had been at heart for many a year. He was talking to the object of his early hero-worship, and he found him his hero still.

  Mr. Innes listened attentively, gravely, but said very little himself. He appreciated the difficulty of starting in life without money or influence, and was too true a friend to make light of it. He thought that business would be best if only an opening could be found. Schoolmastering led to nothing unless one had money or a degree. Still they must think and talk it over, and Harry must come down to Guildford and see the new chapel and the swimming-bath. Could he come for a day or two before the end of the term? Was he sure he could leave his mother? Harry was quite sure, but would write when he got home.

  Then it was time for Mr. Innes to go, but first he gave Harry tea in the members’ dining-room, and after that a lift in his hansom as far as Piccadilly. So that Harry reached home both earlier and in better case than he might have done; whereupon Mrs. Ringrose, hearing his key in the latch, came out to meet him with a face of mystery which contrasted oddly with his radiance.

  “Oh, mother,” he cried, “whom do you think I’ve seen! Innes! Innes! and he’s the same as ever, and wants me to go and stay with him, so you were right, and I was wrong! What is it then? Who’s here?” His voice sank in obedience to her gestures.

  “Your Uncle Spencer,” she whispered, tragically.

  “Delighted to see him,” cried Harry, who had been made much too happy by one man to be readily depressed by any other.

  “He has been waiting to see you since five o’clock, my boy.”

  “Has he? Very sorry to hear that, uncle,” said Harry, bursting into the sitting-room and greeting the clergyman with the heartiness he was feeling for all the world. Mr. Walthew looked at his watch.

  “Since a quarter before five, Mary,” said he, “and now it wants seven minutes to six. Not that I shall grudge the delay if it be attributable to the only cause I can imagine to account for it. The circumstances, Henry, are hardly those which warrant levity; if you have indeed been successful at last, as I hope to hear — —”

  “Successful, uncle?”

  “I understand that you have been to see the gentleman on the Stock Exchange, who was kind enough to say that he would see you, and of whom I wrote to you yesterday?”

  “So I have! I had quite forgotten that.”

  “Forgotten it?” cried Mr. Walthew.

  “I beg your pardon, Uncle Spencer,” said Harry, respectfully enough; “but since I saw your friend I have been with Mr. Innes my old schoolmaster, the best man in the whole world, and I am afraid it has put the other interview right out of my head.”

  “He did give you an interview, however?”

  “Yes, for about a minute.”

  “And nothing came of it, as usual?” sneered the clergyman.

  “And nothing came of it — as usual — I am very sorry to say, Uncle Spencer.”

  “And what time was this?”

  “Between two and three.”

  “You must excuse me, Henry, but I am doing my best to obtain employment for you — I cannot say I have much hope now — still, I am doing my best, and I am naturally interested in the use you make of your time. May I ask — as I think I have a right to ask — where you have spent the afternoon?”

  “Certainly, Uncle Spencer; at Lord’s Cricket-ground.”

  Harry was well aware that he had delivered a bombshell, and he quite expected to receive a broadside in return. But he had forgotten Uncle Spencer’s mode of expressing superlative displeasure. It has been said that Mr. Walthew never smiled, but there were occasions when a weird grin shed a sort of storm-light on his habitual gloom. That was when indignation baffled invective, and righteous anger fell back on holy scorn. The present was an occasion in point.

  Mr. Walthew stared at Harry without a word, but gradually this unlovely look broke out upon him, and at last he positively chuckled in his beard.

  “You are out of work, and too incompetent to obtain any,” said he, “and yet you can waste your own time and your mother’s money in watching a cricket-match!”

  “I went without my lunch in order to do so,” was Harry’s defence. “And besides, it was my money — I got it for my spears and things.”

  “And you call that your money?” cried Uncle Spencer. “I would not talk about my money until I was paying for my board and residence under this roof!”

  “Now, that will do!” cried Mrs. Ringrose. “That is my business, Spencer, and I will not allow you to speak so to my boy.”

  “Come, come, mother,” Harry interrupted, “my uncle is quite right from his point of view. I admit I had qualms about going to Lord’s myself. But I think I must have been meant to go — I know there was some meaning in my meeting Innes.”

  “If anything could surprise me in you, Henry,” resumed Mr. Walthew, “it would be the Pagan sentiments which you have just pained me by uttering. May you live to pray forgiveness for your heresy, as also for your extravagance! But of the latter I will say no more, though I certainly think, Mary, that where my assistance has been invoked I have a right to speak my mind. The waste of money is, however, even less flagrant, in my opinion, than the waste of time. It is now several days, Henry, since I sent you a guide to shorthand. An energetic and conscientious fellow, as anxious as you say you are to work for his daily bread, could have mastered at least the rudiments in the time. Have you?”

  “I told you he had not!” cried Mrs. Ringrose. “How can you expect it, when every day he has been seeking work in the City? And he comes in so tired!”

  “Not too tired to go to Lord’s Cricket-ground, however,” was the not unjust rejoinder. “But perhaps his energy has found another outlet? Last time I was here he was going to write articles and poems for the magazines — so I understood. How many have you written, Henry?”

  Harry scorned to point out that it was his mother’s words which were being quoted against him, not his own; yet ever since his evening at Richmond he had been meaning to try his hand at something, and he felt guilty as he now confessed that he had not written a line.

  “I was sure of it!” cried the clergyman. “You talk of getting employment, but you will not take the trouble to qualify yourself for the humblest post; you talk of writing, but you will not take the trouble even to write! Not that I suppose for a moment anything would come of it if you did! The magazines, Henry, do not open their columns to young fellows without literary training, any more than houses of business engage clerks without commercial education or knowledge. Yet it would be something even if you tried to write! It would be something if you wrote — as probably you would write — for the waste-paper basket and the dust-bin. But no, you seem to have no application, no energy, no sense of duty; and what more I can do for you I fail to see. I have written several letters on your account; I have risked offending several friends. Nothing has come of it, and nothing is likely to come of it until you put your own shoulder to the wheel. I have put mine. I have done my best. My conscience is an easy one, at any rate.”

  Mr. Walthew caugh
t up his hat and brought these painful proceedings to a close by rising abruptly, as though his feelings were too much for him. Mrs. Ringrose took his hand without a word, and without a word Harry showed him out.

  “So his conscience is easy!” cried the boy, bitterly. “He talks as if that had been his object — to ease his conscience — not to get me work. He has sent me round the City like a beggar, and he calls that doing his best! I had a good mind to tell him what I call it.”

  “I almost wish you had,” said Mrs. Ringrose, shedding tears.

  “No, mother, there was too much truth in what he says. I have been indolent. Nevertheless, I believe Innes will get me something to do. And meanwhile I intend to have my revenge on Uncle Spencer.”

  “How, my boy?”

  Harry had never looked so dogged.

  “By getting something into a magazine within a week.”

  CHAPTER X.

  A FIRST OFFENCE.

  When Harry Ringrose vowed that he would get something into a magazine within a week, he simply meant that he would write something and get it taken by some editor. But even so he had no conception of the odds against him. Few beginners can turn out acceptable matter at a day’s notice, and fewer editors accept within the week. Fortune, however, often favours the fool who rushes in.

  Harry began wisely by deciding to make his first offering poetical, for verses of kinds he had written for years, and besides, they would come quicker if they came at all. Undoubted indolence is also discernible in this choice, but on the whole it was the sound one, and that very evening saw Harry set to work in a spirit worthy of a much older literary hand.

  He found among the books the selected poems of Shelley which he had brought home some mid-summers before as a prize for his English examination. His own language was indeed the only one for which poor Harry had shown much aptitude, though for a youth who had scribbled for his school magazine, and formed the habit of shedding verses in his thirteenth year, he was wofully ill-read even in that. Let it be confessed that he took down his Shelley with the cynical and shameless intention of seeking what he might imitate in those immortal pages. The redeeming fact remains that he read in them for hours without once recalling his impious and immoral scheme.

  It was years since he had dipped into the book, and its contents caused him naive astonishment. He had read a little poetry in his desultory way. Tennyson he loved, and Byron he had imitated at school But in all his adventurings on the Ægean seas of song, he had never chanced upon such a cluster of golden islets as the lyrics in this selection. The epic mainland had always less attraction for him. He found it demand a concentrative effort, and Harry was very sorry and even ashamed, but he loved least to read that way. So he left “Alastor” and “The Witch of Atlas” untouched and untried, and spent half the night in ecstasies over such discoveries as the “Indian Serenade” and “Love’s Philosophy.” These were the things for him; the things that could be written out on half a sheet of notepaper or learnt in five minutes; the things he loved to read, and would have died to write.

  He forgot his proposed revenge; he forgot his uttered vow. He forgot the sinister design with which he had taken up his Shelley, and it was pure love of the lines that left him, when he had blown out his candle, saying his last-learnt over to himself:

  “Rarely, rarely, comest thou,

  Spirit of Delight!

  Wherefore hast thou left me now

  Many a day and night?

  Many a weary night and day

  ’Tis since thou art fled away.

  How shall ever one like me

  Win thee back again?

  With the joyous and the free

  Thou wilt scoff at pain.

  Spirit false! thou hast forgot

  All but those who need thee not.

  As a lizard with the shade

  Of a trembling leaf,

  Thou with sorrow art dismayed — —”

  Here he stuck fast and presently fell asleep, to think no more of it till he was getting up next morning. He was invaded with a dim recollection of this poem while the water was running into his bath. As he took his plunge, the lines sprang out clear as sunshine after rain, and the man in the bath made a discovery.

  They were not Shelley’s lines at all. They were his own.

  At breakfast he was distraught. Mrs. Ringrose complained. Harry pulled out an envelope, made a note first, and then his apology. Mrs. Ringrose returned as usual to her room, but Harry did not follow her with his pipe. He went to his own room instead, and sat down on the unmade bed, with a pencil, a bit of paper, and a frightful furrow between his downcast eyes. In less than half-an-hour, however, the thing was done: a highly imitative effort in the manner of those verses which he had been saying to himself last thing the night before.

  The matter was slightly different: the subject was dreams, not delight, and instead of “Spirit of Delight,” the dreams were apostrophised as “Spirits of the Night.” Then the form of the stanza was freshened up a little: the new poet added a seventh line, rhyming with the second and fourth, while the last word of the fifth was common to all the stanzas, and necessitated a new and original double-rhyme in the sixth line of each verse. Harry found a rhyming dictionary (purchased in his school-days for the benefit of the school magazine) very handy in this connection. It was thus he made such short work of his rough draft. But the fair copy was turned out (in the sitting-room) in even quicker time, and a somewhat indiscreet note written to the Editor of Uncle Tom’s Magazine, though not on the lines which Mrs. Ringrose had once suggested. A “stamped directed envelope” was also prepared, and enclosed in compliance with Uncle Tom’s very explicit “Notice to Contributors.” Then Harry stole down and out, and posted his missive with a kind of guilty pride: after all, the deed itself had been a good deal less cold-blooded than the original intention.

  Mrs. Ringrose knew nothing. She had seen Harry scribble on an envelope, and that was all. She knew how the boy blew hot and cold, and she did him the injustice of concluding he had renounced his vow, but the kindness of never voicing her conclusion. Yet his restless idleness, and a something secretive in his manner, troubled her greatly during the next few days, and never more than on the Saturday morning, when Harry came in late for breakfast and there was a letter lying on his plate.

  “You seem to have been writing to yourself,” said Mrs. Ringrose, as she looked suspiciously from Harry to the letter.

  “To myself?” he echoed, and without kissing her he squeezed round the table to his place.

  “Yes; that’s your writing, isn’t it? And it looks like one of my envelopes!”

  It was both. Harry stood gazing at his own superscription, and weighing the envelope with his eye. He was afraid to feel it. It looked too thin to contain his verses. It was too thin! Between finger and thumb it felt absolutely empty. He tore it open, and read on a printed slip the sweetest words his eyes had ever seen.

  “The Editor of Uncle Tom’s Magazine has great pleasure in accepting for publication — —”

  The title of the verses (a very bad one) was filled in below, the date below that, and that was all.

  “Oh, mother, they’ve accepted my verses!”

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Tom’s Magazine.”

  “Did you actually send some verses to Uncle Tom?”

  “Yes, on Tuesday, the day after Uncle Spencer was here. I’ve done what I said I’d do. He’ll see I’m not such an utter waster after all.”

  “And you — never — told — me!”

  His mother’s eyes were swimming. He kissed them dry, and began to make light of his achievement.

  “Mother, I couldn’t. I didn’t know what you would think of them. I didn’t think much of them myself, nor do I now. The verses in Uncle Tom are not much. And then — I thought it would be a surprise.”

  “Well, it wouldn’t have been one if I had known you had sent them,” said Mrs. Ringrose; and now she was herself again. “I only hope, my boy,” she a
dded, “that they will pay you something.”

  “Of course they will. Uncle Tom must have an excellent circulation.”

  “Then I hope they’ll pay you something handsome. Did you tell the Editor how long we have taken him in?”

  “Mother!”

  “Then I’ve a great mind to write and tell him myself. I am sure it would make a difference.”

  “Yes; it would make the difference of my getting the verses back by return of post,” said Harry, grimly.

  Mrs. Ringrose looked hurt, but gave way on the point, and bade him go on with his breakfast. Harry did so with the Uncle Tom acceptance spread out and stuck up against the marmalade dish, and one eye was on it all the time. Afterwards he went to his room and read over the rough draft of his verses, which he had not looked at since he sent them away. He could not help thinking a little more of them than he had thought then. He wondered how they would look in print, and referred to one of the bound Uncle Toms to see.

  “Well, have you brought them?” said Mrs. Ringrose when he could keep away from her no longer.

  “The verses? No, dear, I have only a very rough draft of them, which you couldn’t possibly read; and I could never read them to you — I really couldn’t.”

  “Not to your own mother?”

  He shook his head. He was also blushing; and his diffidence in the matter was not the less genuine because he was swelling all the time with private pride. Mrs. Ringrose did not press the point. The pecuniary side of the affair continued to interest her very much.

  “Do you think fifty?” she said at length, with considerable obscurity; but her son knew what she was talking about.

  “Fifty what?”

  “Pounds!”

  “For my poor little verses? You little know their length! They are only forty-two lines in all.”