happened to be passing, and I heard him say, 'He's a nice lad--what a
pity he scribbles!' Scribbles! the word burnt itself into my brain, it
seared my heart, it brought the hot blood to my cheeks, and the
indignant tears to my eyes. Was I not ready to write an acrostic at a
moment's notice on the name of the sweetheart of any fellow who asked me
to do it? Had I not written a poem on the fall of Napoleon, which my
eldest sister had read aloud to her schoolfellows, and made them all mad
with jealousy to think there wasn't a brother among the lot of them who
could even rhyme decently? Had I not had stories rejected by the _Family
Herald_, _All the Year Round_, and _Chambers's Journal_, and a letter on
the subject of the crossing opposite St. Mark's Church, Hamilton
Terrace, printed in the _Marylebone Mercury_? And was I to be dubbed a
scribbler, and pitied for my weakness? It is nearly twenty years since
those words were uttered, and my dear old doctor rests beyond the reach
of all human ills, but I can hear them now. They have never ceased to
ring in my ears as they rang that day.
[Illustration: 'FAUST UP TO DATE']
My pride was wounded, my vanity was hurt, I was put upon my mettle. I
registered a silent vow there and then that some day I would have a
noble revenge on my friendly detractor, and make him confess that he was
wrong when he said that it was a pity I scribbled.
From that hour I set myself steadily to be an author. I wrote poetry by
the mile, prose by the acre, and I sent it to every kind of periodical
that I could find in the 'Post Office Directory.'
I had to pass through years of rejection, but still I wrote on, and
still I spent all my pocket-money on books, and postage-stamps, and
paper.
And at last the chance came. I was allowed to write paragraphs in the
_Weekly Dispatch_ by a friend who was a real journalist, and had a
column at his disposal to fill with gossip.
After doing the work for a month for nothing, I had the whole column
given to me, and one day I received my first guinea earned by
scribbling.
[Illustration: MR. SIMS'S DINNER PARTY]
I was a proud man when I went out of the _Dispatch_ office that day with
a sovereign and a shilling in my hand. I had forced the gates of the
citadel at last. I had marched in with the honours of war, and I was
marching out with the price of victory in my hand.
Soon afterwards there came another chance. The editor of the _Dispatch_
wanted a series of short complete stories. I asked to be allowed to try
if I could do them. Under the title of 'The Social Kaleidoscope,' I
wrote a series of short stories or sketches, and from that day no week
has passed that I have not contributed something to the columns of a
weekly journal.
When the sketches were complete, the publisher of the _Dispatch_ offered
to bring them out in book form for me and publish them in the office.
'The Social Kaleidoscope' was my first book, and that is how it came
into the world.
Years afterwards, my chance came with the dear old fellow who had said
that it was a pity I scribbled so. Fortune had smiled upon me in one way
then, and I was earning an excellent income with my pen. But my health
had broken down, and it was thought necessary that I should place myself
in the hands of a celebrated surgeon. I had not seen my old doctor for
some years, but my people wished that he should be consulted, because he
had known me so well in the days of my youth.
So I submitted, and he came, and he shook his head and agreed that
so-and-so was the man to take me in hand.
'I think he'll cure you, my dear fellow,' said the doctor; 'he's the
most skilful surgeon we have for cases like yours, but his fee is a
heavy one. Still, you can afford it.'
'Yes, doctor,' I replied, 'thanks to my _scribbling_, I can.'
That was the hour of my triumph. I had waited for it for fifteen years,
but it had come at last.
The dear old boy gripped my hand. 'I was wrong,' he said, with a quiet
smile, 'and I confess it; but we'll get you well, and you shall scribble
for many a year to come.'
And I am scribbling still.
'_DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES_'
BY RUDYARD KIPLING
[Illustration: THE NEWSPAPER FILES]
As there is only one man in charge of a steamer, so there is but one man
in charge of a newspaper, and he is the editor. My chief taught me this
on an Indian journal, and he further explained that an order was an
order, to be obeyed at a run, not a walk, and that any notion or notions
as to the fitness or unfitness of any particular kind of work for the
young had better be held over till the last page was locked up to press.
He was breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude,
which I did not discharge at the time. The path of virtue was very
steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed a certain play to the mind,
and, unlike the filling in of reading matter, could be done as the
spirit served. Now, a sub-editor is not hired to write verses: he is
paid to sub-edit. At the time, this discovery shocked me greatly; but,
some years later, when I came to be a sort of an editor in charge,
Providence dealt me for my subordinate one saturated with Elia. He
wrote very pretty, Lamblike essays, but he wrote them when he should
have been sub-editing. Then I saw a little of what my chief must have
suffered on my account. There is a moral here for the ambitious and
aspiring who are oppressed by their superiors.
[Illustration: 'YOUR POTERY VERY GOOD, SIR; JUST COMING PROPER LENGTH
TO-DAY']
This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from office
work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly, in the nature of
things; but they had to come, and the writing out of them kept me
healthy and amused. To the best of my remembrance, no one then
discovered their grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I
was far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things.
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
signed: Sincerely,
Rudyard Kipling]
So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about me, and they
were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing them was payment a thousand
times their worth. Some, of course, came and ran away again, and the
dear sorrow of going in search of these (out of office hours, and
catching them) was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as they
were, I burned twice as many as were published, and of the survivors at
least two-thirds were cut down at the last moment. Nothing can be wholly
beautiful that is not useful, and therefore my verses were made to ease
off the perpetual strife between the manager extending his
advertisements and my chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were
born to be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved of
them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He would say: 'Your
potery very good, sir; just coming proper length to-day. You giving more
soon? One-third column just proper. Always can take on third page.'
Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of referring to a new
lyric as '_Ek aur chiz_'--one more thing--which I never liked. The job
side, too, were unsympathetic, because I used to raid into their type
for private proofs with old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindoo
does not like to find the serifs of his f's cut away to make long s's.
And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be printed in the
paper. I was in very good company, for there is always an undercurrent
of song, a little bitter for the most part, running through the Indian
papers. The bulk of it is much better than mine, being more graceful,
and is done by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall--to whom I would
apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery--'Pekin,' 'Latakia,'
'Cigarette,' 'O.,' 'T. W.,' 'Foresight,' and others, whose names come up
with the stars out of the Indian Ocean going eastward.
Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song, and a man on the
Bombay side would answer him, and a man in Bengal would echo back, till
at last we would all be crowing together like cocks before daybreak,
when it is too dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy
Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice among the
tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers of the Far East brought
us his sorrows. The newspaper files showed that, forty years ago, the
men sang of just the same subjects as we did--of heat, loneliness, love,
lack of promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the
end of the eighteenth century, Hickey's _Bengal Gazette_, a very wicked
little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of the young factors,
ensigns, and writers to the East India Company. They, too, wrote of the
same things, but in those days men were strong enough to buy a bullock's
heart for dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not
afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor and poverty.
Lives were not worth two monsoons' purchase, and perhaps the knowledge
of this a little coloured the rhymes when they sang:
In a very short time you're released from all cares--
If the Padri's asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers!
The note of physical discomfort that runs through so much Anglo-Indian
poetry had been struck then. You will find it most fully suggested in
'The Long, Long Indian Day,' a comparatively modern affair; but there is
a set of verses called 'Scanty Ninety-five,' dated about Warren
Hastings's time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the
Service had to put up with. One of the most interesting poems I ever
found was written at Meerut, three or four days before the Mutiny broke
out there. The author complained that he could not get his clothes
washed nicely that week, and was very facetious over his worries.
[Illustration: SUNG TO THE BANJOES ROUND CAMP FIRES]
My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than some others,
which were more true to facts and certainly better workmanship. Men in
the Army, and the Civil Service, and the Railway, wrote to me saying
that the rhymes might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung to
the banjoes round camp fires, and some had run as far down coast as
Rangoon and Moulmein, and up to Mandalay. A real book was out of the
question, but I knew that Rukn-Din and the office plant were at my
disposal at a price, if I did not use the office time. Also, I had
handled in the previous year a couple of small books, of which I was
part owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of a book, a
lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D.O. Government
envelope, printed on one side only, bound in brown paper, and secured
with red tape. It was addressed to all heads of departments and all
Government officials, and among a pile of papers would have deceived a
clerk of twenty years' service. Of these 'books' we made some hundreds,
and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being to my
hand, I took reply-postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book
on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and
down the Empire from Aden to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo.
There was no trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no
commission, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came back in
poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, the
left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-hand pocket. Every
copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio of expenses to profits, as I
remember it, has since prevented my injuring my health by sympathising
with publishers who talk of their risks and advertisements. The
down-country papers complained of the form of the thing. The wire
binding cut the pages, and the red tape tore the covers. This was not
intentional, but Heaven helps those who help themselves. Consequently,
there arose a demand for a new edition, and this time I exchanged the
pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real
publisher's imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and
put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong-Kong on the
map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and, at last, the book came
to London with a gilt top and a stiff back, and was advertised in the
publishers' poetry department.
[Illustration]
But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a pink string
round its stomach; a child's child, ignorant that it was afflicted with
all the most modern ailments; and before people had learned, beyond
doubt, how its author lay awake of nights in India, plotting and
scheming to write something that should 'take' with the English public.
[Illustration: portrait by Geo. Hutchinson. Signed: Yours very truly A
Conan Doyle]
JUVENILIA
BY A. CONAN DOYLE
It is very well for the master craftsman with twenty triumphs behind him
to look down the vista of his successes, and to recall how he picked out
the path which has led him to fame, but for the tiro whose first book is
perilously near to his last one it becomes a more invidious matter. His
past presses too closely upon his present, and his reminiscences,
unmellowed by the flight of years, are apt to be rawly and crudely
personal. And yet even time helps me when I speak of my first work, for
it was written seven-and-twenty years ago.
[Illustration: I WAS SIX]
I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection of the
achievement It was written, I remember, upon foolscap paper, in what
might be called a fine bold hand--four words to the line, and was
illustrated by marginal pen-and-ink sketches by the author. There was a
man in it, and there was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it
didn't matter much, for they became blended into one about the time when
the tiger met the man. I was a realist in the age of the Romanticists. I
described at some length, both verbally and pictorially, the untimely
end of that wayfarer. But when the tiger had absorbed him, I found
myself slightly embarrassed as to how my story was to go on. 'It is very
easy to get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again,' I
remarked, and I have often had cause to repeat the precocious aphorism
of my childhood. On this occasion the situation was beyond me, and my
book, like my man, was engulfed in my tiger. There is an old family
bureau with secret drawers, in which lie little locks of hair tied up in
circles, and black silhouettes and dim daguerreotypes, and letters which
seem to have been written in the lightest of straw-coloured inks.
Somewhere there lies my primitive manuscript, where my tiger, like a
many-hooped barrel with a tail to it, still envelops the hapless
stranger whom he has taken in.
[Illustration: ON THE PRAIRIES AND THE OCEANS]
Then came my second book, which was told and not written, but which was
a much more ambitious effort than the first. Between the two, four years
had elapsed, which were mainly spent in reading. It is rumoured that a
special meeting of a library committee was held in my honour, at which a
bye-law was passed that no subscriber should be permitted to change his
book more than three times a day. Yet, even with these limitations, by
the aid of a well-stocked bookcase at home, I managed to enter my tenth
year with a good deal in my head that I could never have learned in the
class-rooms.
[Illustration: MY DÉBUT AS A STORY-TELLER]
I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so
soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare
time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his
book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh
it all is! Your very heart and soul are out on the prairies and the
oceans with your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry
the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious things are
done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and get jerked by the flap
of the sail into the Pacific, where you cling on to the leg of an
albatross, and so keep afloat until the comic boatswain turns up with
his crew of volunteers to handspike you into safety. What a magic it is,
this stirring of the boyish heart and mind! Long ere I came to my teens
I had traversed every sea and knew the Rockies like my own back garden.
How often had I sprung upon the back of the charging buffalo and so
escaped him! It was an everyday emergency to have to set the prairie on
fire in front of me in order to escape from the fire behind, or to run a
mile down a brook to throw the bloodhounds off my trail. I had creased
horses, I had shot down rapids, I had strapped on my mocassins
hind-foremost to conceal my tracks, I had lain under water with a reed
in my mouth, and I had feigned madness to escape the torture. As to the
Indian braves whom I slew in single combats, I could have stocked a
large graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal
chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it, and I was
always nursed back into health by a very fascinating young squaw. It was
all more real than the reality. Since those days I have in very truth
both shot bears and harpooned whales, but the performance was flat
compared with the first time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or
Captain Mayne Reid at my elbow.
[Illustration: 'WITH THE EDITOR'S COMPLIMENTS']
In the fulness of time I was packed off to a public school, and in some
way it was discovered by my playmates that I had more than my share of
the lore after which they hankered. There was my _début_ as a
story-teller. On a wet half-holiday I have been elevated on to a desk,
and with an audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with
their chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the
misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out those unhappy men have
battled and striven and groaned for the amusement of that little circle.
I was bribed with pastry to continue these efforts, and I remember that
I always stipulated for tarts down and strict business, which shows that
I was born to be a member of the Authors' Society. Sometimes, too, I
would stop dead in the very thrill of a crisis, and could only be set
agoing again by apples. When I had got as far as 'With his left hand in
her glossy locks, he was waving the blood-stained knife above her head,
when---- ' or 'Slowly, slowly, the door turned upon its hinges, and with
eyes which were dilated with horror, the wicked Marquis saw---- ' I knew
that I had my audience in my power. And thus my second book was evolved.
[Illustration: 'HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT YOU?']
It may be that my literary experiences would have ended there had there
not come a time in my early manhood when that good old harsh-faced
schoolmistress, Hard Times, took me by the hand. I wrote, and with
amazement I found that my writing was accepted. _Chambers's Journal_ it
was which rose to the occasion, and I have had a kindly feeling for its
mustard-coloured back ever since. Fifty little cylinders of manuscript
did I send out during eight years, which described irregular orbits
among publishers, and usually came back like paper boomerangs to the
place that they had started from. Yet in time they all lodged somewhere
or other. Mr. Hogg, of _London Society_, was one of the most constant of
my patrons, and Mr. James Payn wasted hours of his valuable time in
encouraging me to persevere. Knowing as I did that he was one of the
busiest men in London, I never received one of his shrewd and kindly and
most illegible letters without a feeling of gratitude and wonder.
I have heard folk talk as though there were some hidden back door by
which one may creep into literature, but I can say myself that I never
had an introduction to any editor or publisher before doing business
with them, and that I do not think that I suffered on that account. Yet
my apprenticeship was a long and trying one. During ten years of hard
work, I averaged less than fifty pounds a year from my pen. I won my way
into the best journals, _Cornhill_, _Temple Bar_, and so on; but what is
the use of that when the contributions to those journals must be
anonymous? It is a system which tells very hardly against young authors.
I saw with astonishment and pride that 'Habakuk Jephson's Statement' in
the _Cornhill_ was attributed by critic after critic to Stevenson, but,
overwhelmed as I was by the compliment, a word of the most lukewarm
praise sent straight to my own address would have been of greater use to
me. After ten years of such work I was as unknown as if I had never
dipped a pen into an ink-bottle. Sometimes, of course, the anonymous
system may screen you from blame as well as rob you of praise. How well
I can see a dear old friend running after me in the street, waving a
London evening paper in his hand! 'Have you seen what they say about
your _Cornhill_ story?' he shouted. 'No, no. What is it?' 'Here it is!
Here it is!' Eagerly he turned over the column, while I, trembling with
excitement, but determined to bear my honours meekly, peeped over his
shoulder. 'The _Cornhill_ this month,' said the critic, 'has a story in
it which would have made Thackeray turn in his grave.' There were
several witnesses about, and the Portsmouth bench are severe upon
assaults, so my friend escaped unscathed. Then first I realised that
British criticism had fallen into a shocking state of decay, though when
some one has a pat on the back for you you understand that, after all,
there are some very smart people upon the literary Press.
[Illustration: 'MRS. THURSTON'S LITTLE BOY WANTS TO SEE YOU, DOCTOR']
And so at last it was brought home to me that a man may put the very
best that is in him into magazine work for years and years and reap no
benefit from it, save, of course, the inherent benefits of literary
practice. So I wrote another of my first books and sent it off to the
publishers. Alas for the dreadful thing that happened! The publishers
never received it, the Post Office sent countless blue forms to say
that they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word has
ever been heard of it. Of course it was the best thing I ever wrote. Who
ever lost a manuscript that wasn't? But I must in all honesty confess
that my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if
it were suddenly to appear again--in print. If one or two other of my
earlier efforts had also been lost in the post, my conscience would have
been the lighter. This one was called 'The Narrative of John Smith,' and
it was of a personal-social-political complexion. Had it appeared I
should have probably awakened to find myself infamous, for it steered,
as I remember it, perilously near to the libellous. However, it was
safely lost, and that was the end of another of my first books.