I was sitting one day looking disconsolately out of window at a
landscape almost blotted out by rain and mist, a landscape almost
hatefully familiar to me. My mind was as cheerless as the prospect,
as blank as the sheet of paper stretched before me to receive its
impressions. I looked on that sheet of paper with disgust, with
loathing. There was no idea in my head, and I felt that anything I
might attempt to write would turn out meaningless verbiage. But my
invisible task-masters were behind me—I heard the crack of their
many-thonged whips—I saw Messrs Butcher and Baker sitting joyfully on
the car which was destined to crush me if I once slackened the rope.
Yes, I was a writer; neither a successful one nor the reverse. I
made a living by it, but it was an irregular living. Sometimes I was
comparatively rich, at others I was superlatively poor. At the date of
which I write I was decidedly in the latter condition. In purse and in
health I was at the lowest of low-water; one reacted on the other; my
poverty increased my physical weakness, which in its turn prevented
any effective effort to fill the exchequer. Everything I wrote somehow
missed fire. A rest and a change might have set me up. I had no means
of taking either. Nor was I the only sufferer in the house. My wife was
ill and depressed; the children were out of health. Everything was out
of gear.
Under these doleful conditions I was sitting in a sort of comatose
state, brooding over all the uncomfortable possibilities of existence
or non-existence—without a friend to take counsel with, or even an
acquaintance who might help to move the stagnant waters of life—when
I was aroused by the unwonted sound of wheels. A fly drove up to the
gate, horse and driver shivering and dripping with wet. The man jumped
down and rang the bell. The servant brought up a card; ‘Mrs Collingwood
Dawson.’
I knew the name well enough. Dawson was a successful writer of fiction,
a man whose novels were in demand at all the circulating libraries.
But what could his better-half want with me? Time would shew. The lady
entered.
Mrs Collingwood Dawson was a pleasant-looking woman of uncertain age,
not much over thirty probably, and certainly under forty, with dark
luminous eyes and an expressive face.
‘It is rather bold of me,’ she said, ‘to come here and take you
by storm, without introduction or anything. I can only plead the
fellowship of the craft.’
I replied in an embarrassed way with some meaningless commonplace; and
after a few preliminary civilities, she came to the real purpose of her
visit.
‘My husband is,’ she said, ‘a very ill-used man. Everybody is worrying
him to write this and that and the other. If he had a dozen pairs of
hands he could keep them going. Unfortunately, he is a sad invalid, and
is really incapable of undertaking more than the little he has in hand.’