four hundred pounds a-piece to twenty nephews and nieces, of whom Fred
Pickering was one. The possession of this sum of money strengthened him
in his rebellion against his father. Had he had nothing on which to
begin, he might probably even yet have gone to the old house at home,
and have had something of a fatted calf killed for him, in spite of the
ungraciousness of his letter. As it was he was reliant on the resources
which Fortune had sent to him, thinking that they would suffice till he
had made his way to a beginning of earning money. He thought it all over
for full half an hour, and then came to a decision. He would go to
Mary,--his Mary,--to Mary who was about to enter the family of a very
vulgar tradesman as governess to six young children with a salary of
twenty-five pounds per annum, and ask her to join him in throwing all
prudence to the wind. He did go to Mary; and Mary at last consented to
be as imprudent as himself, and she consented without any of that
confidence which animated him. She consented simply because he asked her
to do so, knowing that she was doing a thing so rash that no father or
mother would have permitted it.
“Fred,” she had said, half laughing as she spoke, “I am afraid we shall
starve if we do.”
“Starving is bad,” said Fred; “I quite admit that; but there are worse
things than starving. For you to be a governess at Mrs. Boullem’s is
worse. For me to write lawyers’ letters all full of lies is worse. Of
course we may come to grief. I dare say we shall come to grief. Perhaps
we shall suffer awfully,--be very hungry and very cold. I am quite
willing to make the worst of it. Suppose that we die in the street! Even
that,--the chance of that with the chance of success on the other side,
is better than Mrs. Boullem’s. It always seems to me that people are too
much afraid of being starved.”
“Something to eat and drink is comfortable,” said Mary. “I don’t say
that it is essential.”
“If you will dare the consequences with me, I will gladly dare them with
you,” said Fred, with a whole rhapsody of love in his eyes. Mary had not
been proof against this. She had returned the rhapsody of his eyes with
a glance of her own, and then, within six weeks of that time, they were
married. There were some few things to be bought, some little bills to
be paid, and then there was the fortnight of honeymooning among the
lakes in June. “You shall have that, though there were not another shot
in the locker,” Fred had said, when his bride that was to be had urged
upon him the prudence of settling down into a small lodging the very day
after their marriage. The fortnight of honeymooning among the lakes was
thoroughly enjoyed, almost without one fearful look into the future.
Indeed Fred, as he would sit in the late evening on the side of a
mountain, looking down upon the lakes, and watching the fleeting
brightness of the clouds, with his arm round his loving wife’s waist and
her head upon his shoulder, would declare that he was glad that he had
nothing on which to depend except his own intellect and his own
industry. “To make the score off his own bat; that should be a man’s
ambition, and it is that which nature must have intended for a man. She
could never have meant that we should be bolstered up, one by another,
from generation to generation.” “You shall make the score off your own
bat,” Mary had said to him. Though her own heart might give way a little
as she thought, when alone, of the danger of the future, she was always
brave before him. So she enjoyed the fortnight of her honeymooning, and
when that was over set herself to her task with infinite courage. They
went up to London in a third-class carriage, and, on their arrival there
went at once to lodgings which had been taken for them by a friend in
Museum Street. Museum Street is not cheering by any special merits of
its own; but lodgings there were found to be cheap, and it was near to
the great library by means of which, and the treasures there to be
found, young Pickering meant to make himself a famous man.
He had had his literary successes at Manchester, as has been already
stated, but they had not been of a remunerative nature. He had never yet
been paid for what he had written. He reaped, however, this reward, that
the sub-editor of a Manchester newspaper gave him a letter to a
gentleman connected with a London periodical, which might probably be of
great service to him. It is at any rate a comfort to a man to know that
he can do something towards the commencement of the work that he has in
hand,--that there is a step forward which he can take. When Fred and
Mary sat down to their tea and broiled ham on the first night, the
letter of introduction was a great comfort to them, and much was said
about it. The letter was addressed to Roderick Billings, Esq., office of
the _Lady Bird_, 99, Catherine Street, Strand. By ten o’clock on the
following morning Fred Pickering was at the office of the _Lady Bird_,
and there learned that Mr. Billings never came to the office, or almost
never. He was on the staff of the paper, and the letter should be sent
to him. So Fred Pickering returned to his wife; and as he was resolved
that no time should be lost, he began a critical reading of Paradise
Lost, with a notebook and pencil beside him, on that very day.
They were four months in London, during which they never saw Mr.
Billings or any one else connected with the publishing world, and these
four months were very trying to Mrs. Pickering. The study of Milton did
not go on with unremitting ardour. Fred was not exactly idle, but he
changed from one pursuit to another, and did nothing worthy of note
except a little account of his honeymooning tour in verse. In this poem
the early loves of a young married couple were handled with much
delicacy and some pathos of expression, so that Mary thought that her
husband would assuredly drive Tennyson out of the field. But no real
good had come from the poem by the end of the four months, and Fred
Pickering had sometimes been very cross. Then he had insisted more than
once or twice, more than four or five times, on going to the theatre;
and now at last his wife had felt compelled to say that she would not go
there with him again. They had not means, she said, for such pleasures.
He did not go without her, but sometimes of an evening he was very
cross. The poem had been sent to Mr. Billings, with a letter, and had
not as yet been sent back. Three or four letters had been written to Mr.
Billings, and one or two very short answers had been received. Mr.
Billings had been out of town. “Of course all the world is out of town
in September,” said Fred; “what fools we were to think of beginning just
at this time of the year!” Nevertheless he had urged plenty of reasons
why the marriage should not be postponed till after June. On the first
of November, however, they found that they had still a hundred and
eighty pounds left. They looked their affairs in the face cheerfully,
and Fred, taking upon his own shoulders all the blame of their
discomfiture up to the present moment, swore that he would never be
cross with his darling Molly again. After that he went out with a letter
of introduction from Mr. Billings to the sub-editor of a penny
newspaper. He had never seen Mr. Billings; but Mr. Billings thus passed
him on to another literary personage. Mr. Billings in his final very
short note communicated to Fred his opinion that he would find “work on
the penny daily press easier got.”
For months Fred Pickering hung about the office of the _Morning Comet_.
November went, and December, and January, and he was still hanging about
the office of the _Morning Comet_. He did make his way to some
acquaintance with certain persons on the staff of the _Comet_, who
earned their bread, if not absolutely by literature, at least by some
work cognate to literature. And when he was asked to sup with one Tom
Wood on a night in January, he thought that he had really got his foot
upon the threshold. When he returned home that night, or I should more
properly say on the following morning, his wife hoped that many more
such preliminary suppers might not be necessary for his success.
At last he did get employment at the office of the _Morning Comet_. He
attended there six nights a week, from ten at night till three in the
morning, and for this he received twenty shillings a week. His work was
almost altogether mechanical, and after three nights disgusted him
greatly. But he stuck to it, telling himself that as the day was still
left to him for work he might put up with drudgery during the night.
That idea, however, of working day and night soon found itself to be a
false one. Twelve o’clock usually found him still in bed. After his late
breakfast he walked out with his wife, and then;--well, then he would
either write a few verses or read a volume of an old novel.
“I must learn shorthand-writing,” he said to his wife, one morning when
he came home.
“Well, dear, I have no doubt you would learn it very quickly.”
“I don’t know that; I should have begun younger. It’s a thousand pities
that we are not taught anything useful when we are at school. Of what
use is Latin and Greek to me?”
“I heard you say once that it would be of great use to you some day.”
“Ah, that was when I was dreaming of what will never come to pass; when
I was thinking of literature as a high vocation.” It had already come to
him to make such acknowledgments as this. “I must think about mere bread
now. If I could report I might, at any rate, gain a living. And there
have been reporters who have risen high in the profession. Dickens was a
reporter. I must learn, though I suppose it will cost me twenty pounds.”
He paid his twenty pounds and did learn shorthand-writing. And while he
was so doing he found he might have learned just as well by teaching
himself out of a book. During the period of his tuition in this art he
quarrelled with his employers at the _Morning Comet_, who, as he
declared, treated him with an indignity which he could not bear. “They
want me to fetch and carry, and be a menial,” he said to his wife. He
thereupon threw up his employment at the _Comet_ office. “But now you
will get an engagement as a reporter,” his wife said. He hoped that he
might get an engagement as a reporter; but, as he himself acknowledged,
the world was all to begin again. He was at last employed, and made his
first appearance at a meeting of discontented tidewaiters, who were
anxious to petition parliament for some improvement in their position.
He worked very hard in his efforts to take down the words of the
eloquent leading tidewaiter; whereas he could see that two other
reporters near him did not work at all. And yet he failed. He struggled
at this work for a month, and failed at last. “My hand is not made for
it,” he said to his wife, almost in an agony of despair. “It seems to me
as though nothing would come within my reach.” “My dear,” she said, “a
man who can write the Braes of Birken”--the Braes of Birken was the name
of his poem on the joys of honeymooning--“must not be ashamed of himself
because he cannot acquire a small mechanical skill.” “I am ashamed of
myself all the same,” said Fred.
Early in April they looked their affairs in the face again, and found
that they had still in hand something just over a hundred pounds. They
had been in London nine months, and when they had first come up they had
expressed to each other their joint conviction that they could live
very comfortably on forty shillings a week. They had spent nearly double
that over and beyond what he had earned, and after all they had not
lived comfortably. They had a hundred pounds left on which they might
exist for a year, putting aside all idea of comfort; and then--and then
would come that starving of which Fred had once spoken so gallantly,
unless some employment could in the meantime be found for him. And, by
the end of the year, the starving would have to be done by three,--a
development of events on which he had not seemed to calculate when he
told his dearest Mary that after all there were worse things in the
world than starving.
But before the end of the month there came upon them a gleam of comfort,
which might be cherished and fostered till it should become a whole
midday sun of nourishing heat. His friend of the _Manchester Free
Trader_ had become the editor of the _Salford Reformer_, a new weekly
paper which had been established with the view of satisfying certain
literary and political wants which the public of Salford had long
experienced, and among these wants was an adequate knowledge of what was
going on in London. Fred Pickering was asked whether he would write the
London letter, once a week, at twenty shillings a week, Write it! Ay,
that he would. There was a whole heaven of joy in the idea. This was
literary work. This was the sort of thing that he could do with absolute
delight. To guide the public by his own wit and discernment, as it were
from behind a mask,--to be the motive power and yet unseen,--this had
ever been his ambition. For three days he was in an ecstasy, and Mary
was ecstatic with him. For the first time it was a joy to him that the
baby was coming. A pound a week earned would of itself prolong their
means of support for two years, and a pound a week so earned would
surely bring other pounds. “I knew it was to be done,” he said in
triumph, to his wife, “if one only had the courage to make the attempt.”
The morning of the fourth day somewhat damped his joy, for there came a
long letter of instruction from the Salford editor, in which there were
hints of certain difficulties. He was told in this letter that it would
be well that he should belong to a London club. Such work as was now
expected from him could hardly be done under favourable circumstances
unless he did belong to a club. “But as everybody now-a-days does belong
to a club, you will soon get over that difficulty.” So said the editor.
And then the editor in his instructions greatly curtailed that liberty
of the pen which Fred specially wished to enjoy. He had anticipated that
in his London letter he might give free reins to his own political
convictions, which were of a very Liberal nature, and therefore suitable
to the _Salford Reformer_. And he had a theological bias of his own, by
the putting forward of which, in strong language, among the youth of
Salford, he had intended to do much towards the clearing away of
prejudice and the emancipation of truth. But the editor told him that he
should hardly touch politics at all in his London letter, and never lay
a finger on religion. He was to tell the people of Salford what was
coming out at the different theatres, how the prince and princess looked
on horseback, whether the Thames Embankment made proper progress, and he
was to keep his ears especially open for matters of social interest,
private or general. His style was to be easy and colloquial, and above
all things he was to avoid being heavy, didactic, and profound. Then
there was sent to him, as a model, a column and a half cut out from a
certain well-known newspaper, in which the names of people were
mentioned very freely. “If you can do that sort of thing,” said the
editor, “we shall get on together like a house on fire.”
“It is a farrago of ill-natured gossip,” he said, as he chucked the
fragment over to his wife.
“But you are so clever, Fred,” said his wife. “You can do it without the
ill-nature.”
“I will do my best,” he said; “but as for telling them about this woman
and that, I cannot do it. In the first place, where am I to learn it
all?” Nevertheless, the London letter to the _Salford Reformer_ was not
abandoned. Four or five such letters were written, and four or five
sovereigns were paid into his little exchequer in return for so much
work. Alas! after the four or five there came a kindly-worded message
from the editor to say that the articles did not suit. Nothing could be
better than Pickering’s language, and his ideas were manly and for the
most part good. But the _Salford Reformer_ did not want that sort of
thing. The _Salford Reformer_ felt that Fred Pickering was too good for
the work required. Fred for twenty-four hours was broken-hearted. After
that he was able to resolve that he would take the thing up in the right
spirit. He wrote to the editor, saying that he thought that the editor
was right. The London letter required was not exactly within the compass
of his ability. Then he enclosed a copy of the Braes of Birken, and
expressed an opinion that perhaps that might suit a column in the
_Salford Reformer_,--one of those columns which were furthest removed
from the corner devoted to the London letter. The editor replied that he
would publish the Braes of Birken if Pickering wished; but that they
never paid for poetry. Anything being better than silence, Pickering
permitted the editor to publish the Braes of Birken in the gratuitous
manner suggested.
At the end of June, when they had just been twelve months in London,
Fred was altogether idle as far as any employment was concerned. There
was no going to the theatre now; and it had come to that with him, in
fear of his approaching privations, that he would discuss within his own
heart the expediency of taking this or that walk with reference to the
effect it would have upon his shoes. In those days he strove to work
hard, going on with his Milton and his notebook, and sitting for two or
three hours a day over heavy volumes in the reading-room at the Museum.
When he first resolved upon doing this there had come a difficulty as to
the entrance. It was necessary that he should have permission to use the
library, and for a while he had not known how to obtain it. Then he had
written a letter to a certain gentleman well known in the literary
world, an absolute stranger to him, but of whom he had heard a word or
two among his newspaper acquaintances, and had asked this gentleman to
give him, or to get for him, the permission needed. The gentleman having
made certain enquiry, having sent for Pickering and seen him, had done
as he was asked, and Fred was free of the library.
“What sort of a man is Mr. Wickham Webb?” Mary asked him, when he
returned from the club at which, by Mr. Webb’s appointment, the meeting
had taken place.
“According to my ideas he is the only gentleman whom I have met since I
have been in London,” said Fred, who in these days was very bitter.
“Was he civil to you?”
“Very civil. He asked me what I was doing up in London, and I told him.
He said that literature is the hardest profession in the world. I told
him that I thought it was, but at the same time the most noble.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He said that the nobler the task it was always the more difficult; and
that, as a rule, it was not well that men should attempt work too
difficult for their hands because of its nobility.”
“What did he mean by that, Fred?”
“I knew what he meant very well. He meant to tell me that I had better
go and measure ribbons behind a counter; and I don’t know but what he
was right.”
“But yet you liked him?”
“Why should I have disliked him for giving me good advice? I liked him
because his manner was kind, and because he strove hard to say an
unpleasant thing in the pleasantest words that he could use. Besides, it
did me good to speak to a gentleman once again.”
Throughout July not a shilling was earned, nor was there any prospect of
the earning of a shilling. People were then still in town, but in
another fortnight London would have emptied itself of the rich and
prosperous. So much Pickering had learned, little as he was qualified to
write the London letter for the _Salford Reformer_. In the last autumn
he had complained to his wife that circumstances had compelled him to
begin at the wrong period of the year--in the dull months when there was
nobody in London who could help him. Now the dull months were coming
round again, and he was as far as ever from any help. What was he to do?
“You said that Mr. Webb was very civil,” suggested his wife: “could you
not write to him and ask him to help us?”
“He is a rich man, and that would be begging,” said Fred.
“I would not ask him for money,” said Mary; “but perhaps he can tell you
how you can get employment.”
The letter to Mr. Webb was written with many throes and the destruction
of much paper. Fred found it very difficult to choose words which should
describe with sufficient force the extreme urgency of his position, but
which should have no appearance of absolute begging.
“I hope you will understand,” he said, in his last paragraph, “that what
I want is simply work for which I may be paid, and that I do not care
how hard I work, or how little I am paid, so that I and my wife may
live. If I have taken an undue liberty in writing to you, I can only beg
you to pardon my ignorance.”
This letter led to another interview between our hero and Mr. Wickham
Webb. Mr. Webb sent his compliments and asked Mr. Pickering to come and
breakfast with him. This kindness, though it produced some immediate
pleasure, created fresh troubles. Mr. Wickham Webb lived in a grand
house near Hyde Park, and poor Fred was badly off for good clothes.
“Your coat does not look at all amiss,” his wife said to him, comforting
him; “and as for a hat, why don’t you buy a new one?”
“I sha’n’t breakfast in my hat,” said Fred; “but look here;” and Fred
exhibited his shoes.
“Get a new pair,” said Mary.
“No,” said he; “I’ve sworn to have nothing new till I’ve earned the
money. Mr. Webb won’t expect to see me very bright, I dare say. When a
man writes to beg for employment, it must naturally be supposed that he
will be rather seedy about his clothes.” His wife did the best she could
for him, and he went out to his breakfast.
Mrs. Webb was not there. Mr. Webb explained that she had already left
town. There was no third person at the table, and before his first
lamb-chop was eaten, Fred had told the pith of his story. He had a
little money left, just enough to pay the doctor who must attend upon
his wife, and carry him through the winter; and then he would be
absolutely bare. Upon this Mr. Webb asked as to his relatives. “My
father has chosen to quarrel with me,” said Fred. “I did not wish to be
an attorney, and therefore he has cast me out.” Mr. Webb suggested that
a reconciliation might be possible; but when Fred said at once that it
was impossible, he did not recur to the subject.
When the host had finished his own breakfast he got up from his chair,
and standing on the rug spoke such words of wisdom as were in him. It
should be explained that Pickering, in his letter to Mr. Webb, had
enclosed a copy of the Braes of Birken, another little poem in verse,
and two of the London letters which he had written for the _Salford
Reformer_. “Upon my word, Mr. Pickering, I do not know how to help you.
I do not, indeed.”
“I am sorry for that, Sir.”
“I have read what you sent me, and am quite ready to acknowledge that
there is enough, both in the prose and verse, to justify you in
supposing it to be possible that you might hereafter live by literature
as a profession; but all who make literature a profession should begin
with independent means.”
“That seems to be hard on the profession as well as on the beginner.”
“It is not the less true; and is, indeed, true of most other professions
as well. If you had stuck to the law your father would have provided you
with the means of living till your profession had become profitable.”
“Is it not true that many hundreds in London live on literature?” said
our hero.
“Many hundreds do so, no doubt. They are of two sorts, and you can tell
yourself whether you belong to either. There are they who have learned
to work in accordance with the directions of others. The great bulk of
what comes out to us almost hourly in the shape of newspapers is done by
them. Some are very highly paid, many are paid liberally, and a great
many are paid scantily. There is that side of the profession, and you
say that you have tried it and do not like it. Then there are those who
do their work independently; who write either books or articles which
find acceptance in magazines.”
“It is that which I would try if the opportunity were given me.”
“But you have to make your own opportunity,” said Mr. Wickham Webb. “It
is the necessity of the position that it should be so. What can I do for
you?”
“You know the editors of magazines?”
“Granted that I do, can I ask a man to buy what he does not want because
he is my friend?”
“You could get your friend to read what I write.”