09 Not George Washington Read online

  “Skeffington’s,” he said, “pay me well. I’m worth money to them, and they know it. At present they are giving me a retainer to keep my work exclusively for them. The stuff they have put on the market is neither better nor worse than the average sloe gin. But my advertisements have given it a tremendous vogue. It is the only brand that grocers stock. Since I made the firm issue a weekly paper called Skeffington’s Poultry Farmer, free to all country customers, the consumption of sloe gin has been enormous among agriculturists. My idea, too, of supplying suburban buyers gratis with a small drawing-book, skeleton illustrations, and four coloured chalks, has made the drink popular with children. You must have seen the poster I designed. There’s a reduced copy behind you. The father of a family is unwrapping a bottle of Skeffington’s Sloe Gin. His little ones crowd round him, laughing and clapping their hands. The man’s wife is seen peeping roguishly in through the door. Beneath is the popular catch-phrase, “Ain’t mother going to ‘ave none?”

  “You’re a genius,” I cried.

  “Hardly that,” he said. “At least, I have no infinite capacity for taking pains. I am one of Nature’s slackers. Despite my talent for drawing up advertisements, I am often in great straits owing to my natural inertia and a passionate love of sleep. I sleep on the slightest provocation or excuse. I will back myself to sleep against anyone in the world, no age, weight, or colour barred. You, I should say, are of a different temperament. More energetic. The Get On or Get Out sort of thing. The Young Hustler.”

  “Rather,” I replied briskly, “I am in love.”

  “So am I,” said Julian Eversleigh. “Hopelessly, however. Give us a match.”

  After that we confirmed our friendship by smoking a number of pipes together.

  Chapter 5

  THE COLUMN (James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)

  After the first week “On Your Way,” on the Orb, offered hardly any difficulty. The source of material was the morning papers, which were placed in a pile on our table at nine o’clock. The halfpenny papers were our principal support. Gresham and I each took one, and picked it clean. We attended first to the Subject of the Day. This was generally good for two or three paragraphs of verbal fooling. There was a sort of tradition that the first half-dozen paragraphs should be topical. The rest might be topical or not, as occasion served.

  The column usually opened with a oneline pun—Gresham’s invention.

  Gresham was a man of unparalleled energy and ingenuity. He had created several of the typical characters who appeared from time to time in “On Your Way,” as, for instance, Mrs. Jenkinson, our Mrs. Malaprop, and Jones junior, our “howler” manufacturing schoolboy. He was also a stout apostle of a mode of expression which he called “funny language.” Thus, instead of writing boldly: “There is a rumour that–-,” I was taught to say, “It has got about that–-.” This sounds funnier in print, so Gresham said. I could never see it myself.

  Gresham had a way of seizing on any bizarre incident reported in the morning papers, enfolding it in “funny language,” adding a pun, and thus making it his own. He had a cunning mastery of periphrasis, and a telling command of adverbs.

  Here is an illustration. An account was given one morning by the Central news of the breaking into of a house at Johnsonville (Mich.) by a negro, who had stolen a quantity of greenbacks. The thief, escaping across some fields, was attacked by a cow, which, after severely injuring the negro, ate the greenbacks.

  Gresham’s unacknowledged version of the episode ran as follows:

  “The sleepy god had got the stranglehold on John Denville when Caesar Bones, a coloured gentleman, entered John’s house at Johnsonville (Mich.) about midnight. Did the nocturnal caller disturb his slumbering host? No. Caesar Bones has the finer feelings. But as he was noiselessly retiring, what did he see? Why, a pile of greenbacks which John had thoughtlessly put away in a fire-proof safe.”

  To prevent the story being cut out by the editor, who revised all the proofs of the column, with the words “too long” scribbled against it, Gresham continued his tale in another paragraph.

  “‘Dis am berry insecure,’ murmured the visitor to himself, transplanting the notes in a neighbourly way into his pocket. Mark the sequel. The noble Caesar met, on his homeward path, an irritable cudster. The encounter was brief. Caesar went weak in the second round, and took the count in the third. Elated by her triumph, and hungry from her exertions, the horned quadruped nosed the wad of paper money and daringly devoured it. Caesar has told the court that if he is convicted of felony, he will arraign the owner of the ostrich-like bovine on a charge of receiving stolen goods. The owner merely ejaculates ‘Black male!’”

  On his day Gresham could write the column and have a hundred lines over by ten o’clock. I, too, found plenty of copy as a rule, though I continued my practice of doing a few paragraphs overnight. But every now and then fearful days would come, when the papers were empty of material for our purposes, and when two out of every half-dozen paragraphs which we did succeed in hammering out were returned deleted on the editor’s proof.

  The tension at these times used to be acute. The head printer would send up a relay of small and grubby boys to remind us that “On Your Way” was fifty lines short. At ten o’clock he would come in person, and be plaintive.

  Gresham, the old hand, applied to such occasions desperate remedies. He would manufacture out of even the most pointless item of news two paragraphs by adding to his first the words, “This reminds us of Mr. Punch’s famous story.” He would then go through the bound volumes of Punch—we had about a dozen in the room—with lightning speed until he chanced upon a more or less appropriate tag.

  Those were mornings when verses would be padded out from three stanzas to five, Gresham turning them out under fifteen minutes. He had a wonderful facility for verse.

  As a last expedient one fell back upon a standing column, a moth-eaten collection of alleged jests which had been set up years ago to meet the worst emergencies. It was, however, considered a confession of weakness and a degradation to use this column.

  We had also in our drawer a book of American witticisms, published in New York. To cut one out, preface it with “A good American story comes to hand,” and pin it on a slip was a pleasing variation of the usual mode of constructing a paragraph. Gresham and I each had our favourite method. Personally, I had always a partiality for dealing with “buffers.” “The brakes refused to act, and the train struck the buffers at the end of the platform” invariably suggested that if elderly gentlemen would abstain from loitering on railway platforms, they would not get hurt in this way.

  Gresham had a similar liking for “turns.” “The performance at the Frivoli Music Hall was in full swing when the scenery was noticed to be on fire. The audience got a turn. An extra turn.”

  Julian Eversleigh, to whom I told my experiences on the Orb, said he admired the spirit with which I entered into my duties. He said, moreover, that I had a future before me, not only as a journalist, but as a writer.

  Nor, indeed, could I help seeing for myself that I was getting on. I was making a fair income now, and had every prospect of making a much better one. My market was not restricted. Verses, articles, and fiction from my pen were being accepted with moderate regularity by many of the minor periodicals. My scope was growing distinctly wider. I found, too, that my work seemed to meet with a good deal more success when I sent it in from the Orb, with a letter to the editor on Orb notepaper.

  Altogether, my five weeks on the Orb were invaluable to me. I ought to have paid rather than have taken payment for working on the column. By the time Fermin came back from Scotland to turn me out, I was a professional. I had learned the art of writing against time. I had learned to ignore noise, which, for a writer in London, is the most valuable quality of all. Every day at the Orb I had had to turn out my stuff with the hum of the Strand traffic in my ears, varied by an occasional barrel-organ, the whistling of popular songs by the printers, whose window f
aced ours, and the clatter of a typewriter in the next room. Often I had to turn out a paragraph or a verse while listening and making appropriate replies to some other member of the staff, who had wandered into our room to pass the time of day or read out a bit of his own stuff which had happened to please him particularly. All this gave me a power of concentration, without which writing is difficult in this city of noises.

  The friendship I formed with Gresham too, besides being pleasant, was of infinite service to me. He knew all about the game. I followed his advice, and prospered. His encouragement was as valuable as his advice. He was my pilot, and saw me, at great trouble to himself, through the dangerous waters.

  I foresaw that the future held out positive hope that my marriage with Margaret would become possible. And yet–-

  Pausing in the midst of my castle-building, I suffered a sense of revulsion. I had been brought up to believe that the only adjective that could be coupled with the noun “journalism” was “precarious.” Was I not, as Gresham would have said, solving an addition sum in infantile poultry before their mother, the feathered denizen of the farmyard, had lured them from their shell? Was I not mistaking a flash in the pan for a genuine success?

  These thoughts numbed my fingers in the act of writing to Margaret.

  Instead, therefore, of the jubilant letter I had intended to send her, I wrote one of quite a different tone. I mentioned the arduous nature of my work. I referred to the struggle in which I was engaged. I indicated cleverly that I was a man of extraordinary courage battling with fate. I implied that I made just enough to live on.

  It would have been cruel to arouse expectations which might never be fulfilled. In this letter, accordingly, and in subsequent letters, I rather went to the opposite extreme. Out of pure regard for Margaret, I painted my case unnecessarily black. Considerations of a similar nature prompted me to keep on my lodging in Walpole Street. I had two rooms instead of one, but they were furnished severely and with nothing but the barest necessaries.

  I told myself through it all that I loved Margaret as dearly as ever. Yet there were moments, and they seemed to come more frequently as the days went on, when I found myself wondering. Did I really want to give up all this? The untidiness, the scratch meals, the nights with Julian? And, when I was honest, I answered, No.

  Somehow Margaret seemed out of place in this new world of mine.

  CHAPTER 6

  NEW YEAR’S EVE (James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)

  The morning of New Year’s Eve was a memorable one for me. My first novel was accepted. Not an ambitious volume. It was rather short, and the plot was not obtrusive. The sporting gentlemen who accepted it, however—Messrs. Prodder and Way—seemed pleased with it; though, when I suggested a sum in cash in advance of royalties, they displayed a most embarrassing coyness—and also, as events turned out, good sense.

  I carried the good news to Julian, whom I found, as usual, asleep in his hammock. I had fallen into the habit of calling on him after my Orb work. He was generally sleepy when I arrived, at half-past eleven, and while we talked I used to make his breakfast act as a sort of early lunch for myself. He said that the people of the house had begun by trying to make the arrival of his breakfast coincide with the completion of his toilet; that this had proved so irksome that they had struck; and that finally it had been agreed on both sides that the meal should be put in his room at eleven o’clock, whether he was dressed or not. He said that he often saw his breakfast come in, and would drowsily determine to consume it hot. But he had never had the energy to do so. Once, indeed, he had mistaken the time, and had confidently expected that the morning of a hot breakfast had come at last. He was dressed by nine, and had sat for two hours gloating over the prospect of steaming coffee and frizzling bacon. On that particular morning, however, there had been some domestic tragedy—the firing of a chimney or the illness of a cook—and at eleven o’clock, not breakfast, but an apology for its absence had been brought to him. This embittered Julian. He gave up the unequal contest, and he has frequently confessed to me that cold breakfast is an acquired, yet not unpleasant, taste.

  He woke up when I came in, and, after hearing my news and congratulating me, began to open the letters that lay on the table at his side.

  One of the envelopes had Skeffington’s trade mark stamped upon it, and contained a bank-note and a sheet closely typewritten on both sides.

  “Half a second, Jimmy,” said he, and began to read.

  I poured myself out a cup of cold coffee, and, avoiding the bacon and eggs, which lay embalmed in frozen grease, began to lunch off bread and marmalade.

  “I’ll do it,” he burst out when he had finished. “It’s a sweat—a fearful sweat, but–-

  “Skeffington’s have written urging me to undertake a rather original advertising scheme. They’re very pressing, and they’ve enclosed a tenner in advance. They want me to do them a tragedy in four acts. I sent them the scenario last week. I sketched out a skeleton plot in which the hero is addicted to a strictly moderate use of Skeffington’s Sloe Gin. His wife adopts every conceivable measure to wean him from this harmless, even praiseworthy indulgence. At the end of the second act she thinks she has cured him. He has promised to gratify what he regards as merely a capricious whim on her part. ‘I will give—yes, I will give it up, darling!’ ‘George! George!’ She falls on his neck. Over her shoulder he winks at the audience, who realise that there is more to come. Curtain. In Act 3 the husband is seen sitting alone in his study. His wife has gone to a party. The man searches in a cupboard for something to read. Instead of a novel, however, he lights on a bottle of Skeffington’s Sloe Gin. Instantly the old overwhelming craving returns. He hesitates. What does it matter? She will never know. He gulps down glass after glass. He sinks into an intoxicated stupor. His wife enters. Curtain again. Act 4. The draught of nectar tasted in the former act after a period of enforced abstinence has produced a deadly reaction. The husband, who previously improved his health, his temper, and his intellect by a strictly moderate use of Skeffington’s Sloe Gin, has now become a ghastly dipsomaniac. His wife, realising too late the awful effect of her idiotic antagonism to Skeffington’s, experiences the keenest pangs of despair. She drinks laudanum, and the tragedy is complete.”

  “Fine,” I said, finishing the coffee.

  “In a deferential postscript,” said Julian, “Skeffington’s suggest an alternative ending, that the wife should drink, not laudanum, but Sloe Gin, and grow, under its benign influence, resigned to the fate she has brought on her husband and herself. Resignation gives way to hope. She devotes her life to the care of the inebriate man, and, by way of pathetic retribution, she lives precisely long enough to nurse him back to sanity. Which finale do you prefer?”

  “Yours!” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Julian, considerably gratified. “So do I. It’s terser, more dramatic, and altogether a better advertisement. Skeffington’s make jolly good sloe gin, but they can’t arouse pity and terror. Yes, I’ll do it; but first let me spend the tenner.”

  “I’m taking a holiday, too, today,” I said. “How can we amuse ourselves?”

  Julian had opened the last of his letters. He held up two cards.

  “Tickets for Covent Garden Ball tonight,” he said. “Why not come? It’s sure to be a good one.”

  “I should like to,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Julian dropped from his hammock, and began to get his bath ready.

  We arranged to dine early at the Maison Suisse in Rupert Street— table d’hôte one franc, plus twopence for mad’moiselle—and go on to the gallery of a first night. I was to dress for Covent Garden at Julian’s after the theatre, because white waistcoats and the franc table d’hôte didn’t go well together.

  When I dined out, I usually went to the Maison Suisse. I shall never have the chance of going again, even if, as a married man, I were allowed to do so, for it has been pulled down to make room for the Hicks Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.
When I did not dine there, I attended a quaint survival of last century’s coffee-houses in Glasshouse Street: Tall, pew-like boxes, wooden tables without tablecloths, panelled walls; an excellent menu of chops, steaks, fried eggs, sausages, and other British products. Once the resort of bucks and Macaronis, Ford’s coffee-house I found frequented by a strange assortment of individuals, some of whom resembled bookmakers’ touts, others clerks of an inexplicably rustic type. Who these people really were I never discovered.

  “I generally have supper at Pepolo’s,” said Julian, as we left the theatre, “before a Covent Garden Ball. Shall we go on there?”

  There are two entrances to Pepolo’s restaurant, one leading to the ground floor, the other to the brasserie in the basement. I liked to spend an hour or so there occasionally, smoking and watching the crowd. Every sixth visit on an average I would happen upon somebody interesting among the ordinary throng of medical students and third-rate clerks—watery-eyed old fellows who remembered Cremorne, a mahogany derelict who had spent his youth on the sea when liners were sailing-ships, and the apprentices, terrorised by bullying mates and the rollers of the Bay, lay howling in the scuppers and prayed to be thrown overboard. He told me of one voyage on which the Malay cook went mad, and, escaping into the ratlines, shot down a dozen of the crew before he himself was sniped.

  The supper tables are separated from the brasserie by a line of stucco arches, and as it was now a quarter to twelve the place was full. At a first glance it seemed that there were no empty supper tables. Presently, however, we saw one, laid for four, at which only one man was sitting.

  “Hullo!” said Julian, “there’s Malim. Let’s go and see if we can push into his table. Well, Malim, how are you? Do you know Cloyster?”

  Mr. Malim had a lofty expression. I should have put him down as a scholarly recluse. His first words upset this view somewhat.