A CHANGE OF LUCK.
Quite apart from all that came of it, this visit to Guildford was
something of a psychological experience at the time. The devotion of
Harry Ringrose to his first school had been for years second only to
his love for his old home, and now that the old home was his no longer,
the old school was the place he loved best on earth. He knew it when he
saw the well-remembered building once more in the golden light of that
summer's evening. He knew it when he knelt in the school chapel and
heard the most winning of human voices reading the school prayers. The
chapel was new since Harry's day, but the prayers were not, and they
reminded him of his own worst acts since he had heard them last. Mr.
Innes sang tenor in the hymn, as he had always done, and Harry kept his
ear on the voice he so loved; but the hymn itself was one of his old
favourites, associated for ever with his first school, and it reminded
him too. He looked about him, among the broad white collars, the
innocent pink faces, and the open, singing mouths. He wondered which of
the boys were leaving this term, and if one of them would leave with
better resolutions than he had taken away with him seven years before
... and yet.... He had not been worse than others, but better perhaps
than many; and yet there seemed no measure to his vileness, there
certainly was none to his remorse, as he knelt again and prayed as he
seemed never to have prayed since he was himself a little boy there at
school. Then the organ pealed, and Mr. Innes went down the aisle with
his grave fine face and his swinging stride. Mrs. Innes and Harry went
next; the masters followed in their black gowns; and they all formed
line in the passage outside, and the boys filed past and shook hands
and said good-night on their way up to the dormitories.
Harry's visit extended over some days, and afterwards he used sometimes
to wish that he had cut it short after the first delightful night. He
was a creature of moods, and only a few minutes of each day were spent
in chapel. It was a novel satisfaction to him to smoke his pipe with
his old schoolmaster, to talk to him as man to man, and he knew too
late that he had talked too much. He did not mean to be bombastic about
his African adventures, but he was anxious that Mr. Innes should
realise how much he had seen. Harry was in fact a little self-conscious
with the man he had worn in his heart so many years, a little
disappointed at being treated as an old boy rather than as a young man,
and more eager to be entertaining than entertained. So when he came to
the end of his own repertoire he related with enthusiasm some of the
exploits of Gordon Lowndes. But the enthusiasm evaporated in the
process, for Mr. Innes did not disguise his disapproval of the type of
man described. And Harry himself saw Lowndes in a different light
henceforth; for this is what it is to be so young and impressionable,
and so keenly alive to the influence of others.
The best as well as the strongest influence Harry had ever known was
that of Mr. Innes himself. He felt it as much now as ever he had
done--and in old days it had been of Innes that he would think in his
remorse for wrongdoing, and how it would hurt Innes that a boy of his
should fall so far short of his teaching. It never occurred to him then
that his hero was probably a man of the world after all, capable of
human sympathy with human weakness, and even liable to human error on
his own account. Nor did this strike him now--for Harry Ringrose was as
yet too far from being a man of the world himself. The old idolatry was
as strong in him as ever. And the old taint of personal emulation still
took a little from its worth.
"If only I could be more like you!" he broke out when Mr. Innes had
spoken a kind, strong word or two as Harry was going. "I used to try so
hard--I will again!"
"What, to get like me?" said Innes with a laugh. "I hope you'll be a
much better man than I am, Harry. But it's time you gave up trying to
be like anybody."
"How do you mean?" asked Harry, his enthusiasm rather damped.
"Be yourself, old fellow."
"But myself is such a poor sort of thing!"
"Never mind. Try to make yourself strong; but don't think about
yourself. Don't you see the distinction? Only think about doing your
duty and helping others; the less you dwell upon yourself, the easier
that will be. Good-bye, old fellow. Let me know how you get on."
"Good-bye, sir," said Harry. "You don't know how you help me! You are
sending me away with a new thought altogether. I will do my best. I
will indeed."
"I know you will," said Mr. Innes.
So ended the visit.
* * * * *
The new thought made its mark on Harry's character, but it was not all
that he brought away with him from Guildford. The visit fired a train
of sufficiently important material results, though the fuse burnt
slowly, and for weeks did not seem to be burning at all. Harry came
away with the match in his pocket, in the shape of a letter of
introduction to a firm of scholastic agents.
Mr. Innes had by no means encouraged his old boy to try to become a
schoolmaster; he feared that the two years in Africa would tell against
Harry rather than in his favour, and then without a degree there was
absolutely no future. He thought better of Harry's chances in
literature. It was he who had encouraged the boy's very earliest
literary leanings and attempts, and he took the kindest view of the
accepted verses, of which he was shown a copy; but when he heard of the
many failures which had followed that one exceeding small success, and
of all the repulses which Harry had met with in the City, his old
master was silent for some minutes, after which he sat down at his desk
and wrote the introduction there and then.
"These fellows will get you something if anybody can," he had said;
and, indeed, the gentlemen in question, on whom Harry called on his way
back to Kensington, seemed confident of getting him something without
delay. He had come to them in the very nick of time for next term's
vacancies. They would send him immediately, and from day to day,
particulars of posts for which he could apply; they had the filling of
so many, there was little doubt but that he would obtain what he wanted
before long. Their charge would be simply five per cent. on the first
year's salary, which would probably be fifty pounds, or sixty if they
were lucky.
Harry went home jubilant. The agents had taken down his name and his
father's name without question or comment. They declined to regard the
years in Africa as a serious disqualification, much less since he had
been a tutor there; and Harry began to think that Mr. Innes had taken
an unnecessarily black view of his chances. He knew better in a few
weeks' time.
It is true that at first he had a thick letter every day, containing
the promised particulars of several posts. How used he grew to the
clerk's mauve round hand, to the thin sheets of paper damp from the
gelatine that laid each opening before Heaven knew how many
applicants--to the unvarying formula employed! The Reverend So-and-So,
of Dashton, Blankshire, would require in September the services of a
junior master, possessing qualifications thereupon stated with the
salary offered. The vacant posts were in all parts of the country, and
the sanguine Harry pictured himself in almost every county in England
while awaiting his fate in one quarter after another. In few cases were
the qualifications more than he actually possessed, for he was at least
capable of taking the lowest form in a preparatory school, while he
could truthfully describe himself as being "fond of games." But the
agents' clients would have none of him, and as time went on the agents'
envelopes grew thin with single enclosures, and came to hand only once
in a way.
And yet several head-masters wrote kindly answers to Harry's
application, and two or three seemed on the verge of engaging him. Some
interviewed him at the agents' offices, and one had him down to
luncheon at his school, paying Harry's fare all the way into
Hertfordshire and back. Another only rejected him because Harry was not
a fast round-hand bowler, and a fast round-hand bowler was
essential--not for the school matches, in which the masters took no
part, but for the town, for which they played regularly every Saturday:
the music-master bowled slow left, and fast right was indispensable at
the other end. But the failures that were all but successes were only
the harder to bear, and the bitter fact remained that the lad was no
more wanted in the schoolroom than in the office. It struck him
sometimes as a grim commentary on the education he had himself
received. A thousand or two had been spent upon it, and he had not left
school a dunce. He knew as much, perhaps, as the average boy on going
up to the university from a public school, and of what use was it to
him? It did not enable him to earn his bread. He felt some bitterness
against the system which had taught him to swim only with the life-belt
of influence and money. It had been his fate to be pitched overboard
without one.
Not that he was idle all this time. In the dreadful dog-days, when none
but the poor were left in London, and the heat in the little flat
became well-nigh insupportable, so that poor Mrs. Ringrose was quite
prostrate from its effects, her son sat in his shirt and trousers and
plied his pen again in sheer desperation. He wrote out the true
incident which he had been advised would make a capital magazine
article if written down just as he told it. So he tried to do so; and
sent the result to _Uncle Tom_. It came back almost by return of post,
with a civil note from the Editor, saying that he could not use the
story as the end was so unsatisfactory. It was unsatisfactory because
the story happened to be true, and the author never thought of meddling
with the facts, though he weighted his work with several immaterial
points which he had forgotten when telling the tale verbally. He now
flew to the opposite extreme, and dashed off a brief romance
unadulterated by a solitary fact or a single instance of original
observation. This was begun with ambitious ideas of a match with some
shilling monthly, but it was only offered to the penny weeklies, and
was burnt unprinted some few months later.
One day, however, the day on which Harry went down to Hertfordshire at
a pedagogue's expense, and was coming back heavy with the knowledge
that he would not do, the spirit moved him to invest a penny in a comic
paper with a considerable vogue. He needed something to cheer him up,
and for all he knew this sheet might be good or bad enough to make him
smile; it was neither, but it proved to be the best investment he had
ever made. It contained a conspicuous notice to contributors, and a
number of sets of intentionally droll verses on topics of the week.
Before Harry got out at King's Cross he had the rough draft of such a
production on his shirtcuff; he wrote it out and sent it off that
night; and it appeared in the very next issue of that comic pennyworth.
And this time Harry felt that he had done something that he could do
again; but days passed without a word from the Editor, and it looked
very much as though the one thing he could do would prove to be unpaid
work. At length he determined to find out. The paper's strange name was
_Tommy Tiddler_ ("St. Thomas must be your patron saint," said Mrs.
Ringrose), and its funereal offices were in a court off the Strand.
Harry blundered into the counting-house and asked to see the Editor, at
which an elderly gentleman turned round on a high stool and viewed him
with suspicion. What did he want with the Editor?
"I had a contribution in the last issue," said Harry, nervously,
"and--and I wanted to know if there would be any payment."
"But that has nothing to do with the Editor," said the old gentleman.
"That is my business."
He got down from his stool and produced a file of the paper, in which
the price of every contribution was marked across it, with the writer's
name in red ink. Harry was asked to point out his verses, and with a
thrill he saw that they were priced at half-a-sovereign. In another
minute the coin was in his purse and he was signing the receipt with a
hand that shook.
"Monday is our day for paying contributors," the old gentleman said.
"In future you must make it convenient to call or apply in writing on
that day."
In future!
On his way out he had to pass through the publishing department, where
stacks of the new issue were being carried in warm from the machines.
It was not on sale until the following day, but Harry could not resist
asking to look at a copy, for he had sent in a second set of verses on
the appearance of the first. And there they were! He found them
instantly and could have cried for joy.
The Inner Circle was never a slower or more stifling route than on that
August afternoon; neither was Harry Ringrose ever happier in his life
than when he alighted before the train stopped at High Street,
Kensington. He had done it two weeks running. He knew that he could go
on doing it. He was earning twenty-six pounds a year, and earning it in
an hour a week! He almost ran along the hot street, and he took the
stairs three at a time. As he fumbled with his latch-key in his
excitement, he heard talking within and had momentary misgivings; but
his lucky day had dawned at last: the visitor was Fanny Lowndes.