YOUNG INK.
So it was that Harry Ringrose took finally to his pen towards the close
of the most momentous year of his existence; for four years from that
date there was but one sort of dramatic interest in his life. There was
the dramatic interest of the electric bell; and that was all.
In the early days, when the roll of the little steel drum broke a
silence or cut short a speech, the eyes of mother and son would meet
involuntarily with the same look. Her needles would cease clicking. His
pen would spring from the unfinished word. Each had the other's
thought, and neither uttered it. Many a man had fled the country in his
panic, to pluck up courage and return in his cooler senses. Many a man
effaced himself for a time, but few for ever. The ironmaster's last
letter confessed flight and promised self-effacement. He might have
thought better of it--that might be he at the bell. One of the two
within got over this feeling in time; the other never did.
The dogged plodder at the desk endured other heartburnings of which the
little steel drum beat the signal. Knockers these flats had not, and
the postman usually rang a second before he thrust the letter through
the door. It was a breathless second for Harry Ringrose. He developed
an incredibly fine ear for what came through. He was never deceived in
the thud of a rejected manuscript. He used to vow that a proof fell
with peculiar softness, and, later, that a press-cutting was
unmistakable because you could not hear it fall. He had an essay on the
subject in his second book, published when he was twenty-five.
His first book had been one of the minor successes of its season. It
had made a small, a very small, name for Harry, but had developed his
character more than his fame. It is an ominous coincidence, however,
that in conception his first book was as barefaced and as cold-blooded
as his first verses in _Uncle Tom's Magazine_.
For nearly three years he had been writing up, for as many guineas as
possible, those African anecdotes which he had brought home with him
for conversational purposes. In this way he had wasted much excellent
material, to which, however, he was not too proud to return when he
knew better. Heaven knows how many times he used the lion in the
moonlight and his friend the Portuguese murderer of Zambesi blacks. One
would have thought--he thought himself--that he had squeezed the last
drop from his African orange, when one fine day he saw the way to make
the pulp pay better than the juice. It was not his own way. It was the
way of the greatest humorist then living. Harry took the whole of his
two years abroad, and eyed them afresh from that humorist's point of
view, as he apprehended it. He saw the things the great man would have
seized upon, and the way it seemed to Harry he would have treated them.
The result was a comic lion in the moonlight, and a more or less
amusing murderer. He had treated these things tragically hitherto.
The book purported to be fact, and was certainly not fiction, for
which, indeed, our young author had no definite aptitude. It earned him
an ambiguous compliment from various reviewers who insisted on dubbing
him the English So-and-so; but it was lucky for Harry that the new
humour was then an unmade phrase. His humour was not new, but that
would not have saved it from the category. It was keen enough, however,
in its way, and not too desperately subtle for the man on the
knifeboard. Yet Harry's first book, after "going" for a few weeks,
showed a want of staying power, and was but a very moderate success
after all. A few papers hailed Mr. Ringrose as the humorist for whom
England had been sighing since the death of Charles Dickens, and
predicted that his book would be the book of the season and of many
seasons to come. Such enthusiasm was inevitable from organs which let
loose at least one genius a week; but Harry did not realise the
inevitability all at once. For a week or two he could not give his name
in a shop without a wholly unnecessary blush; while he took his mother
to look at empty houses in West End squares, thanks to indiscriminate
praise from irresponsible quarters. On the whole, however, Harry had no
reason to complain of the treatment accorded to his first-born; and, to
descend to lower details, he sold the copyright for a small sum, which
was, nevertheless, quite as much as the publishers could possibly have
made out of it.
But it was in indirect ways that this book did most for Harry Ringrose.
It made new friends for him at a time when his acquaintance was badly
in need of some fresh blood. Years of immersion in solitary work must
narrow and may warp a man; and the almost exclusive companionship of
his dear mother, whose only interest he was in the present, and who
vastly overrated his merits, was a joy too great not to be purchased at
a price. It kept the lad's heart tender and his life of fair report,
but it tended to monopolise his sympathies, and it did not increase his
knowledge of the outside world. In the world of letters he had made but
one friend in those first three years. This was a youth of Harry's own
age, who, with a board-school education, was on the staff of an evening
paper, in a position which the public-school boy was certainly not
competent to fill. Harry stormed this fortress with a little article on
"Portuguese Africa"--which the Editor would label "By an
Afrikander"--and the acquaintance was struck up outside that
gentleman's door. It ripened in a bar to which the young fellows used
to repair whenever Harry was in the Strand. There, over a glass of
bitter--or two--or three--he used to hear at first hand of the great
novelists whom he longed to meet, but with whom his friend the
journalist seemed on enviable terms. It was merely that the latter was
in the heart of the big game, whereas Harry was playing a very little
game of his own, in an exceedingly remote corner of the field.
His book was not a huge success, but it succeeded well enough to take
him out of his corner. His friend the journalist (who managed to review
the thing himself in his paper) wrote to tell Harry of a distinguished
lady who was so enchanted with it that she begged him to take the
author to see her. Harry had no means of knowing that the lady's
enchantment was as chronic as the enthusiasm of the paper which had
hailed him as a genius, and that the demand was not for himself, but
for the latest name. He was still a very simple-minded person, and he
waited on this lady with all alacrity, and under her wing made his bow
in the sort of society of which he had heard with envy in the Gaiety
bar. It cannot be said, however, that he did anybody much credit; he
had been too long in his corner, and had an awkward manner when not
perfectly at home. Yet a number of other ladies asked him to go and see
them, and one invited him to dinner at her smart house--where the
wretched Harry distinguished himself by freezing into a solid block of
self-consciousness and hardly opening his mouth.
But it was all very valuable experience, and, instead of two or three,
he knew a good many people by the end of that winter. He became a
member of a club, and got on intimate terms with men whose names and
work had become familiar to him in these years. They enlarged his
sympathies--they extended his boundaries on every side. And they made
him know himself as he had not known himself before. All at once he
realised that he had fewer interests than other men, that his nose had
been too close to his own grindstone, that the mind he had been slaving
to develop had grown narrow in the process. It was a rather bitter
discovery, until one day it struck him there was another side to
narrowness, and he sat down and began his "Plea for Narrow Minds" on
the spot. This article secured a better place in the periodicals than
anything Harry Ringrose had then written. It attracted some attention
during the month of its appearance, and even on republication in his
second book. But it was generally considered a frivolous adventure in
mere paradox (on a par with a companion paper "On Enjoying Bad
Health"), whereas it was really a reaction against the writer's own
self-criticism.
"Cant is not necessarily humbug," declared our scribe, "and there is
probably less hypocrisy in the cant of breadth than in any other kind
of cant. It may spring from a laudable ambition to be on the side of
the good angels in all things. But it is apt to crystallise in a pose.
For my part, when I meet a typically broad-minded man, who sees good in
everybody and merit in everything, either I suspect his sincerity or I
doubt his depth. I want to know if he is saying (_a_) what he thinks,
or (_b_) what he thinks he ought to think. Either he is insincere and a
prig, or he means what he says and is shallow. Those wonderfully wide
sympathies are too often sympathy spread thin. The odds are against
your being very deep as well as very broad."
There were those critics who remarked that the sapient essayist came
under both his own categories, whereupon Harry lay awake all night
wondering whether he did. And it was "A Plea for Narrow Minds" that
drew from Miss Lowndes the letter which she never posted, but which
came into Harry's hands long afterwards. She agreed with him in part,
but by no means on the whole; in fact, her letter was a remonstrance,
written impulsively in a dainty boudoir of Berkeley Square, and found
long afterwards in an escritoire. Harry often wondered whether the
woman he loved ever read what he wrote. She read everything he signed,
and would never have dropped _Tommy Tiddler_ had she dreamt he was
still a comic singer in its columns. But Harry saw nothing and heard
but little of his quondam friends. He knew they lived in Berkeley
Square--he knew they were very rich. He had heard of the dividend the
Crofter Fisheries were paying, and what he would have to give now for
the shares which he had committed to the flames. He had also read
_Truth's_ opinion of the concern, and wondered why the action for so
obvious a libel hung fire. He sometimes wondered, too, how it was that
he never met either the father or the daughter from whom he had severed
with such different emotions on the same thick November day. He did not
know that the daughter once fled from a party on hearing he was
expected--and was sorry afterwards.
Curiously enough, the very article which failed to gain the good
opinion he coveted most, was so fortunate as to secure that of Harry's
most severe and least respected critic. The Reverend Spencer Walthew
read religion between the lines, and, having written to thank his
nephew for his spirited though veiled attack on the Broad Church party,
concluded by begging him to have a go at the Ritualists.
"I have seldom had a more unexpected pleasure," wrote the Evangelical
divine, "than you have given me by this shrewd blow against the vice of
tolerance and the ultra-charitable spirit which I regard as one of the
great dangers of the age. We want no charity for the heretic and the
ritualist--with whom I trust you will deal unmercifully without delay.
I cannot conclude, Henry, without telling you what a relief it is to me
to see you at last turning your attention to serious subjects. I feel
sure that they are the only ones worthy of a Christian's pen. I have
never concealed from you my pain and disgust at the levity of almost
all your writings hitherto, although I have tried to do justice to the
literary quality, which, on the whole, has been distinctly better than
might have been expected. It is the greater pleasure to me, therefore,
to recognise the serious purpose and the lofty aim of your latest
essay. May you never again descend to 'humorous' accounts of your
'adventures,' or to inferior versifying for papers which are not to be
seen in respectable houses!"
Harry, however, had never ceased his connection with the _Tiddler_,
although it was not one of the things he mentioned to the notorious
interviewer who came to patronise him in those days, and to whom he
caught his mother showing the parody on Gray's Elegy. _T.T._ had been a
good friend to Harry at the foot of the hill, and he was not going to
desert just yet, even if he could have afforded to do so. Of the £51
10s. 9d. which he managed to make in the first year, £34 4s. was from
the _Tiddler's_ coffers; of the third year's £223 14s. 6d. (a mighty
leap from the intermediate year), £55 12s. was from the same genial
source. And so we find him towards the end of the fourth year--not
quite such a good one as the last--fighting hard to touch the second
hundred for the second time, and writing verses in his pyjamas at
midnight at the close of a long day's work on an ungrateful book.
The flat is no longer that in which Harry Ringrose found his mother; it
is a slightly larger one in the same mansions on a higher floor; and
instead of Weber's Last Waltz, a lusty youth, who arrived there on the
same night as Harry, supplies the unsolicited accompaniment inseparable
from life in a flat.
Only one room has been gained by the change; but in it sleeps a
servant, an old retainer of the family; and the sitting-room is larger,
so that there is ample room in it for the rather luxurious desk which
Harry has bought himself, and at which we find him seated, his back to
the books and his nose in his rhyming dictionary, taking his most
trivial task seriously, as was ever his wont, on a warm night in the
middle of September.
He is a little altered--not much. He is thicker set; the legs in the
pyjamas are less lean. His face is older, but still extremely young. He
has tried to grow a moustache, but failed, and given it up; and the two
blots of whisker show that he has no candid girl friend now; and the
blue stubble on his chin means that his mother is away. His black hair
inclines to length, not altogether because he thinks it looks
interesting, but chiefly because he has been too busy to get it cut. He
has not yet affected the _pince-nez_ or the spectacles of the average
literary man. But he is smoking at his desk; he will be smoking
presently in his bed; and on a small table stand a bottle of whisky and
a syphon.
Suddenly a ring at the bell.
At half-past twelve at night a prolonged tattoo on the little steel
drum!
Harry was greatly startled, as a man may easily be who is working at
night after working all day. Yet he would have been much more startled
the September before.
Since then his books had come out, and he had made a number of friends.
Only the night before a play-actor had looked in after his "show," and
they had sat up reading Keats against Shelley, and capping Swinburne
with Rossetti, until the whisky was finished and daylight shamed them
in their cups. Harry thoroughly enjoyed a Bohemian life in his mother's
absence, though indeed she let him do exactly as he liked when she was
there. Was it the actor again, or was it....
Not for months had the old fancy seized him with the ringing of the
bell. It was only the lateness of the hour which brought it back
to-night. Yet the look with which the young fellow rose was one that he
wore often enough when there were none to see. It was a look of utter
misery barbed with shame unspeakable and undying. Sometimes the mother
had seen it--and taken the shame and the misery for his share of their
common hidden grief. She little knew!
The gas was burning in the passage, but lowered on the common landing
outside. Harry could see nothing through the ground glass which formed
the upper portion of the door. He flung it open. A tall man was
standing on the mat.
"Good evening, Mr. Ringrose," said he, and took a tremendous pinch of
snuff as Harry drew back in dismay.
It was Jeremiah Scrafton.