Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  “Well, what of that? I am sure I have heard of such sums being given for a short poem.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t give it for mine. Fifty shillings, more like.”

  “No, no. Say twenty pounds. They could never give you less.”

  Harry shook his head and smiled.

  “A five-pound note, at the very outside,” said he, oracularly. “But whatever it is, it’ll be one in the eye for the other uncle! Upon my word, I think we must go to his church to-morrow evening.”

  “It will mean going in to supper afterwards, and you know you didn’t like it last time.”

  “I can lump it for the sake of scoring off Uncle Spencer!”

  But that was more easily said than done, especially, so to speak, on the “home ground,” where a small but exclusively feminine and entirely spiritless family sang a chorus of meek approval to the reverend gentleman’s every utterance. When, therefore, Mr. Walthew added to his melancholy congratulations a solemn disparagement of all the lighter magazines (which he boasted were never to be seen in his house), the echo from those timid throats was more galling than the speech itself. But when poor Mrs. Ringrose ventured only to hint at her innocent expectations as to the honorarium, and her brother actually laughed outright, and his family made equally merry, then indeed was Harry punished for the ignoble motives with which he had attended his uncle’s church.

  “My good boy,” cried Uncle Spencer, with extraordinary geniality, “you will be lucky if you get a sixpence! I say again that I congratulate you on the prospect of getting into print at all. I say again that even that is not less a pleasure than a surprise to me. But I would not delude myself with pecuniary visions until I could write serious articles for the high-class magazines!”

  Between his mother’s presentiments and his uncle’s prognostications, the contributor himself endeavoured to strike a happy medium; but even he was disappointed when an afternoon post brought a proof of the verses, together with a postal order for ten-and-sixpence. Harry showed it to his mother without a word, and for the moment they both looked glum. Then the boy burst out laughing, and the lady followed suit.

  “And I had visions of a fiver,” said Harry.

  “Nay, but I was the worst,” said his mother, who was laughing and crying at the same time. “I said twenty!”

  “It only shows how much the public know about such things. Ten-and-six!”

  “Well, my boy, that’s better than what your uncle said. How long did it take you to write?”

  “Oh, not more than half an hour. If it comes to that, the money was quickly earned.”

  For a minute and more Mrs. Ringrose gazed steadily at an upper sash, which was one’s only chance of seeing the sky through the windows of the flat. Her lips were tightly pursed; they always were when she was in the toils of a calculation.

  “A thousand a year!” she exclaimed at length.

  “What do you mean, mother?”

  “Well, if this poem only took you half an hour, you might easily turn out half a dozen a day. That would be three guineas. Three guineas a day would come to over a thousand a year.”

  Harry laughed and kissed her.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said; “but I’m very much afraid half a dozen a week will be more than I can manage. Three guineas a week would be splendid. I shouldn’t have to go round begging for work any more; they would never give me half as much in an office. Heigho! Here are the verses for you to read.”

  He put on his hat, and went into the High Street to cash his order. It was the first money his pen had ever earned him in the open market, and, since the sum seemed to Harry too small to make much difference, he determined to lay out the whole of it in festive and appropriate, if unjustifiable fashion. The High Street shops met all his wants. At one he bought a ninepenny tin of mulligatawny, and a five-and-ninepenny bottle of Perrier Jouet; at another, some oyster patties and meringues and half a pound of pressed beef (cut in slices), which came to half-a-crown between them. The remaining shilling he spent on strawberries and the odd sixpence on cream. He would have nothing sent, so we may picture a triumphant, but rather laborious return to the flat.

  He found his mother in tears over the proofs of his first verses; she shed more when he showed her how he had spent his first honorarium. Yet she was delighted; there had been very little in the house, but now they would be able to do without the porter’s wife to cook, and would be all by themselves for their little treat. No one enjoyed what she loved to call a “treat” more than Mrs. Ringrose; and perhaps even in the best of days she had never had a greater one than that now given her by her extravagant son. It was unexpected, and, indeed, unpremeditated; it had all the elements of success; and for one short evening it made Harry’s mother almost forget that she was also the wife of a fraudulent and missing bankrupt.

  Harry, too, was happier than he had been for many a day. In the course of the evening he stole innumerable glances at his proof, wondering what this friend or that would think of the verses when they came out in Uncle Tom. Once it was through Lowndes’s spectacles that he tried to look at them, more than once from Mr. Innes’s point of view, but most often with the sterling grey eyes of the girl on Richmond Hill, who had so earnestly begged him to write. He had heard nothing of her from that evening to this; her father had not mentioned her in the one letter Harry had received from him, and neither of them had been near the flat. But he believed that Fanny Lowndes would like the verses; he knew that she would encourage him to go on.

  And go on he did, with feverish energy, for the next few days. But the good luck did not repeat itself too soon; for though the first taste of printer’s ink gave the lad energy, so that within a week he had showered verses upon half the magazines in London, all those verses returned like the dove to the ark, because it did not also bring him good ideas, and his first success had spoilt him a little by costing no effort. Even Uncle Tom would have no more of him; and the unhappy Harry began to look upon his imitation of Shelley as the mere fluke it seemed to have been.

  CHAPTER XI.

  BEGGAR AND CHOOSER.

  The one communication which Harry Ringrose had received from Gordon Lowndes was little more than a humorous acknowledgment of the sum refunded to him after the sale of the trophies. The writer warmly protested against the payment of a debt which he himself had never regarded in that light. The worst of it was that he was not in a position to refuse such payment. The prospects of the Highland Crofters’ Salmon and Trout Supply Association, Limited, were if anything rosier than ever. But it was an axiom that the more gigantic the concern, the longer and more irritating the initial delay, and no news of the Company would be good news for some time to come.

  “Meanwhile I am here every day of my life,” concluded Lowndes, “and pretty nearly all day. Why the devil don’t you look me up?”

  Indeed, Harry might have done so on any or all of those dreadful days which took him a beggar to the City of London. His reason for not doing so was, however, a very simple one. He did not want Lowndes to think that he disbelieved in the H.C.S. & T.S.A., as he must if he knew that Harry was assiduously seeking work elsewhere. Harry was not altogether sure that he did utterly disbelieve in that colossal project. But it was difficult to put much confidence in it after the revelations at Richmond, and when it was obvious that the promoter’s own daughter lacked confidence in his schemes. Certainly it was impossible to feel faith enough in the Highland Crofters’ to leave lesser stones unturned. And yet to let Lowndes know what he was doing might be to throw away three hundred a year.

  So Harry had avoided Leadenhall Street on days when the company-promoter’s boisterous spirits and exuberant good-humour would have been particularly grateful to him. But this was before he became a successful literary man. He wanted Lowndes to hear of his success; he particularly wanted him to tell his daughter. He was not sure that he should avoid Leadenhall Street another time, nor did he when it came.

  This was after the successful effort
had realised only half-a-guinea, and when some subsequent attempt was coming back in disgrace by every post. Mrs. Ringrose had taken a leaf out of Harry’s book, and committed a letter to the post without even letting him know that she had written one. An answer came by return, and this she showed to Harry in considerable trepidation. It was from the solicitor whom she had mentioned on the day after Harry’s arrival. In it Mr. Wintour Phipps presented his compliments to Mrs. Ringrose, and stated that he would be pleased to see her son any afternoon between three and four o’clock.

  “I thought old friends were barred?” Harry said, reproachfully. “I thought we were agreed about that, mother?”

  “But this is not an old friend of yours or mine, my dear. I never knew him; I only know what your father did for him. He paid eighty pounds for his stamps, so I think he might do something for you! And so does he, you may depend, or he would not write that you are to go and see him.”

  “He doesn’t insist upon it,” said Harry, glancing again at the solicitor’s reply. “He puts it pretty formally, too!”

  “Have I not told you that I never met him? It was your father and his father who were such old friends.”

  “So he writes to you through a clerk!”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s the very hand they all tell me I ought to cultivate.”

  “I have no doubt he is a very busy man. I have often heard your father say so. Yet he can spare time to see you! You will go to him, my boy — to please your mother?”

  “I will think about it, dear.”

  The mid-day post brought back another set of rejected verses. Harry swallowed his pride.

  “It’s all right, mother; I’ll go and see that fellow this afternoon.”

  And there followed the last of the begging interviews, which in character and result had little to differentiate it from all the rest. Harry did indeed feel less compunction in bearding his father’s god-son than in asking favours of complete strangers. He also fancied that he was better fitted for the law than for business, and, when he came to Bedford Row, he could picture himself going there quite happily every day. The knowledge, too, that this Wintour Phipps was under obligations to his father, sent the young fellow up a pair of dingy stairs with a confidence which had not attended him on any former errand of the kind. And yet in less than ten minutes he was coming down again, with his beating heart turned to lead, but with a livelier contempt for his own innocence than for the hardness of the world as most lately exemplified by Wintour Phipps. Nor would the last of these interviews be worth mentioning but for what followed; for it was on this occasion that Harry went on to Leadenhall Street to get what comfort he could from the one kind heart he knew of in the City of London.

  But there an unexpected difficulty awaited him. He remembered the number, but he looked in vain for the name of Gordon Lowndes among the others that were painted on the passage wall as you went in. So he doubted his memory and tried other numbers; but results brought him back to the first, and he climbed upstairs in quest of the name that was not in the hall. He never found it; but as he reached the fourth landing a peal of unmistakable laughter came through a half-open door. And Harry took breath, for he had found his friend.

  “Very well,” he heard a thin voice saying quietly, “since you refuse me the slightest satisfaction, Mr. Lowndes, I shall at once take steps.”

  “Steps — steps, do you say?” roared Lowndes himself. “All right, take steps to the devil!”

  And a small dark man came flying through the door, which was instantly banged behind him. Harry caught him in his arms, and then handed him his hat, which was rolling along the stone landing. The poor man thanked him in an agitated voice, and was tottering down the stairs, when he turned, and with sudden fury shook his umbrella at the shut door.

  “The dirty scamp!” he cried. “The bankrupt blackguard!”

  Harry never forgot the words, nor the working, whiskered face of the man who uttered them. He stood where he was until the trembling footfalls came up to him no more. Then he knocked at the door. Lowndes himself flung it open, and the frown of a bully changed like lightning to the most benevolent and genial smile.

  “You!” he cried. “Come in, Ringrose — come in; I’m delighted to see you.”

  “Yes, it’s me,” said Harry, letting drop the hearty hand which he felt to be a savage fist unclenched to greet him. “Who did you think it was?”

  “Why, the man you must have met upon the stairs! A little rat of a creditor I’ve chucked out this time, but will throw over the banisters if he dares to show his nose up here again.”

  Harry was forcibly reminded of the butcher at Richmond.

  “So this is the other way of treating them?” said he.

  “This is the other way. Ha! ha! I recollect what you mean. Well, I have some sympathy with a small tradesman whom the fortune of war has kept out of his money for weeks and months; not a particle for a little Jew who has the insolence to come up here and browbeat and threaten me in my own office for a few paltry pounds! If he had written me a civil note, reminding me of the debt, which was really so small that I’d forgotten all about it, he should have had his money in time. Now he may whistle for it till he’s black in the face!”

  Lowndes’s indignation was so much more impressive than that of the little dark man on the stairs, that Harry’s sympathies changed sides without his knowledge. He merely felt his heart warm to Lowndes as the latter took him by the arm and led him through the outer office (in which an undersized urchin was mastheaded on an abnormally high stool) into an inner one, where a red-nosed man sat at the far side of a large double desk.

  “My friend Mr. Backhouse,” said Lowndes, introducing the red-nosed man. “We’re not partners; not even in the same line of business; but we share the office between us, and the clerks, too — don’t we, Bacchus?”

  The red-nosed man grinned at his blotting-pad, and Harry perceived that the “clerks” consisted of the small child in the outer office.

  “I noticed your name down below in the passage,” said Harry to Mr. Backhouse, “but I couldn’t see yours, Mr. Lowndes. I nearly went away again.”

  “Ah! it’s in Backhouse’s name we have the office; it suits my hand to keep mine out of it. I’m playing a deep game, Ringrose — one of the deepest that ever was played in the City of London. I stand to win a million of money!”

  Lowndes had assumed an air of suitable subtlety and mystery; his eyes were half-closed behind their gold-rimmed lenses, and he nodded his head slowly and impressively as he stood with his back to the fireplace. Harry noticed that he still wore the shabby frock-coat, and that his trousers were as baggy as ever at the knees. He could not help asking how the deep game was progressing.

  “Slowly, Ringrose, slowly, but as surely as the stride of time itself. My noble Earl is up in the Highlands with his yacht. Insisted on looking into the thing with his own eyes. That’s what’s keeping us all, but I expect him back in another week, and then, Ringrose, you may throw up your hat; for I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt as to the result of the old chap’s investigations.”

  Here the clock struck four, and the red-nosed man, who had also a stiff leg, put on his hat, and stumped out of the office.

  “Now we can talk,” said Lowndes, shutting the door, giving Harry a chair, and sitting down himself. “He’ll be gone ten minutes. It’s his whisky-time; he has a Scotch whisky every hour as regularly as the clock strikes. Wonderful man, Bacchus, for I never saw him a penn’orth the worse. Some day he’ll go pop. But never mind him, Ringrose, and never mind the Company; tell us how the world’s been using you, my boy; that’s more to the point.”

  So Harry told him about the accepted verses, and Gordon Lowndes not only promised to tell his daughter, but was himself most emphatic in encouraging Harry to go on as he had begun. It might be his true vocation after all. If he wrote a book and made a hit it would be a better thing even than the Secretaryship of the H.C.S. & T.S.A. The delay th
ere was particularly hard lines on Harry. Lowndes only hoped he was letting no chances slip meanwhile.

  “It is always conceivable,” said he, “that my aristocratic directors may each have a loafing younger son whom they may want to shove into the billet. You may depend upon me, Ringrose, to resist such jobbery tooth-and-nail; but, if I were you, I wouldn’t refuse the substance for the shadow; you could always chuck it up, you know, and join us just the same.”

  “Then you won’t be offended,” said Harry, greatly relieved, “if I tell you that I have had one or two other irons in the fire?”

  “Offended, my boy? I should think you a duffer if you had not.”

  In another minute Harry had made a clean breast of his other journeys to the City, and was recounting the latest of those miserable experiences when Lowndes cut him short.

  “What!” cried he, “your father paid for the fellow’s stamps, and he refused to pay for yours?”

  “We never got so far as that,” said Harry bitterly. “He wanted a premium with me, and that settled it. He said three hundred guineas was the usual thing, but in consideration of certain obligations he had once been under to my father (he wasn’t such a fool as to go into particulars), he would take me for a hundred and fifty. And he made a tremendous favour of that. He expected me to go down on my knees with gratitude, I daresay, but I just told him that a hundred and fifty was as far beyond me as three hundred, and said good afternoon and came away. Mind you, I don’t blame him. Why should I expect so much for so little? He’s no worse than any of the rest; they’re all the same, and I don’t blame any of them. Who am I that I should go asking favours of any one of them? My God, I’ve asked my last!”

  “You’re your father’s son, that’s who you are,” said Gordon Lowndes. “What your father did for this skunk of a solicitor, he should be the first man to do for you. What’s his name, by the way?”

  “Phipps.”

  “Not Wintour Phipps?”