The Tale of Lal Part 24

"'I'm afraid not, sir,' debated Mrs. Durham.

"'Very well, then,' said the Alderman, 'at present there is only one thing to do; we must have somebody here to teach him English, anyway to speak properly and to write and spell before he goes to a school. It must be done, but I think myself it is going to take time,' concluded the Alderman. Then he put on his hat and started for the City.

"I am not going to dwell upon this youthful period of my life, for everybody's school-days very much resemble every other person's, but I do know that the Alderman's belief that my education would take time proved to be only too true. I shall never forget how long and painfully I worked and toiled to speak my verbs in their proper tenses, to stop dropping my aitches, how I longed to drop the c.o.c.kney slang, how my life became possessed with a sort of terror that I should come out with some expression that would cause concern to either my benefactor or to Mrs. Durham.

"Well, I strove, and at last I succeeded so well that I was sent to a fine school where I received a first-cla.s.s education, and the only effect of the great struggles I went through at this time was a sort of nervousness which I shall have all through my life, and which results, no doubt, from intense anxiety all those years not to make mistakes.

"And so I skip along until one night after the school had broken up at the end of a winter term. I remember it all so well. I had taken the best prizes in the fifth form, I was barely fifteen, and I rushed home, tore into the library, and emptied all those beautifully bound books into my benefactor's lap. He had been smoking his cigar, and was dozing in front of the fire.

"'What do you think of that, Dad?' I yelled. I always called him Dad as a sort of distinction, for although he wasn't my father really, he had been a ripping father to me.

"'Bless my heart, my boy,' he said, 'have you taken all these prizes?

Why, I'm proud of you.'

"'And I proud of you,' I said; then I laughed at him. 'You've tried to keep a secret from me, Dad,' I cried, 'and you haven't succeeded a bit.

Where's Mum?'

"'Now how on earth did you know that, miles away at school, too?'

laughed the Alderman.

"'Read it in the papers days ago. Where is she, Dad? I want to give her a good hug.'

"'I'm here, dear boy,' said a voice just over my shoulder, a voice I knew so well, that had helped me more in my childish hours than I could ever count, a voice that was perhaps the one that had taught me to speak correctly in those trying early days. She wasn't Mrs. Durham any longer, she was Mrs. Gold, but she hadn't altered one bit, and she was Mum then, as she has always been since.

"It wouldn't be honest to skip the next part of the story, and yet I always want to omit this part somehow, because it is entirely composed of events brought about by my own selfishness, obstinacy and pig-headedness, although as a young man I never realised the great grief and the real trouble I was causing to people who had always loved me and done everything for me.

"It started after the time I had left the University of Oxford. I had just commenced to feel my wings, so to speak. Everything there had helped to increase and nourish my love of literature, the set I mixed with had placed me on a sort of pedestal which I in no way deserved, everybody seemed to expect a lot from me, every one seemed to believe I would do great and wonderful things, and what was more disastrous still, I believed I should do wonderful things myself. Imbued with these beliefs, I went home after my last year at Oxford, determined to be a great writer, mark you, not an ordinary writer, since I was positively a.s.sured of the fact that I had only to make an appearance in print to be instantly proclaimed one of the immortals. Whilst I was in this ridiculous frame of mind, Dad unfolded to me the cherished scheme of his life. It was that I should go into his office and learn the business, and one day become the head of the firm.

"I think my blank face must have told them the utter hopelessness of the scheme, even before I had explained to them all my hopes and beliefs as to what I intended to be. One of the things I regret most in my life was the grief I saw only too plainly upon the old Dad's face. He had been brought up a business man all his life, he didn't believe in Literature as a living. He never argued, he didn't storm, hardly said anything, except begging me in an appealing sort of way to reconsider my decision. But I saw at once that I had dealt a death-blow to all his hopes, and, like the selfish young brute I was, I didn't care so long as I got my own way.

"I must have been utterly mad at the time, or intoxicated with my own belief in myself, for I even went further, and said I was going away without any further help of any sort, and that I would make a name, and not come back until I had done so. I refused all a.s.sistance; I only wanted their good-will and belief in me, and this I knew neither of them could honestly give me. The Dad implored me to let him a.s.sist me; they both begged me to live at home until I could rely upon myself, feel my own feet, or lastly, the most fatal sentence they could have uttered in my state of pride, to remain at home until I realised the _failure_ I was about to make and alter my mind.

"What a hopeless and silly thing is pride. It must be a dangerous thing, too, if it can suddenly choke years of love and devotion.

"Pride was uppermost then when I left the house where we had all been so happy, and went out into the world, and I told them both I would only return when I had made myself famous, and not before. I believe they both broke down when I left, but I was a selfish young brute, and I never saw their view of things, nor how bitterly it must have hurt them. Retribution was not long in coming; I found as time went on that there were dozens of men, and women too, who could write better than I could. I found a living was not easy to get. I went even further still, and found at last that it was impossible to get any living at all. Education--there were hundreds of men, highly educated men, too, without any means of earning a living. Inspiration--and I had prated about inspiration often enough; inspiration only became inspiration when it was recognised as such. Luck, chance--I found there were no such things, save as words. Money--I never made any now, and gradually I went down and down, grew shabby, was pa.s.sed hurriedly by friends of my own choosing; then followed shabby rooms and little food, only to give place in turn to an attic and no food at all. Pride must have been still at work with a vengeance, for whatever I suffered there was not a single day or night that I could not have rushed home and been welcomed like the Prodigal of old, and been rejoiced over. But the very idea of this gave me a chill feeling of horror. How could I go home with all my boasts unfulfilled? Was I to creep home a self-confessed failure, with the alternative of acknowledging it and mending my ways and becoming the head of a business firm with a heart embittered for life? I felt I would never do this. I would prefer to starve upon the Embankment, and when I made that resolution I knew only too well what I was in for. I had done the same thing in my earlier life, only it needed a far greater courage to face that life now than it required then. Things were at their very worst when one day, as I was wending my way through the poverty-stricken locality in which I lived, I was hailed by my name. The man was shabbily dressed, but about my own age as far as I could gather, yet I never remembered having met him before.

"'You don't remember me?' he asked.

"'No,' I replied.

"'Humph!' he rejoined, 'and yet at school you had quite a slap-up fight upon my behalf, which ought to have been a lesson to sn.o.bs in general, simply because I insisted upon talking to my own father when he was driving one of his own furniture vans.'

"'Murkel Minor,' I murmured. 'Jove, yes, I remember.'

"'Well, I'm a dealer now, got a place of my own, first-cla.s.s antiques, you know, doing rather well, too.'

"I nodded.

"'But, I say, how about yourself? you don't look up to much. What are you doing? You know all the swell chaps at school, who always looked down on me, used to think you would do no end of things.'

"Somehow or other a sudden feeling of utter frankness came over me. 'I am not doing anything,' I said. 'I've never done anything, and I don't believe now I ever shall do anything.'

"'What are you supposed to do?' asked Murkel, and he asked it in rather a nice way.

"'Writing,' I said.

"'Books?'

"'Yes, and stories, and any blessed thing that comes along; that is to say, when it _does_ come along.'

"Murkel mused for awhile as we walked along, and to this day I do not know whether he considered he was paying off an old debt, or whether he really required my services. Anyway he told me he wanted a descriptive catalogue written of some of his best antiques, their history guaranteed and authenticated, and that he would pay me a fair sum for writing it.

"I left my one-time schoolfellow Murkel Minor, with the certainty of work for which I should be paid, and with something like a ray of hope, and oddly enough I did not lament over the strange fortune which had prevented any one from accepting any of my books or poems, but had given me instead the writing of a catalogue of bric-a-brac. There was one thing I often resented in my own mind, and frequently sneered at most bitterly whenever I remembered it; that was the fact that Lal had prophesied that I should become great, and also that I should meet d.i.c.k Whittington. Both these imaginary things I regarded now as being utterly unreliable, and looked upon as two ghostly myths of the past.

I might have known better. The nervousness from which I suffered, and which I have already alluded to, was becoming so marked that it greatly stood in my way, particularly whenever I had any writing to do. I would fidget, bite my fingers, nibble the pen, break the nibs, a thousand things sooner than deliberately sit down to write.

Concentration seemed at times to me wholly impossible. One day, after sacrificing many nibs, and breaking my only ink-bottle, I settled down sufficiently to finish Murkel's catalogue, and received the sum of five pounds for the work. It seemed untold riches to me at the time. As I went homeward through the maze of dirty streets towards where my garret was situated, I had to pa.s.s through one where the outside pavement stalls were always heaped up upon either side of the way with every imaginable thing from greengrocery and sc.r.a.p-iron to old prints and china-ware.

"Upon one of these stalls an inkstand immediately attracted my attention, partly from the fact that I had broken my own ink-bottle, and had resolved to buy another, but more particularly because this inkstand appeared to me to be one of the most uncommon receptacles for ink I had ever seen. It was made in what I judged must be some old form of china-ware I never remembered to have seen before, and beneath the dirt which was thickly coated over it I could see that both the modelling and colouring of it were very beautiful. It represented a figure lying upon the ground beside a big tree-stump, which, after the mud should be sc.r.a.ped out of it, was evidently intended to contain ink, and a milestone, when a similar operation had taken place, would doubtless contain one pen; a coloured three-cornered hat flung beside the figure upon the ground was obviously designed to hold a taper.

"The inkstand attracted me strangely, and I was so fascinated with it that I could not take my eyes off it. The woman to whom the stall belonged, doubtless spotting a likely customer, asked me how much I would give her for it. I deliberated for some time, as I had not the remotest idea what its value might be in her eyes, so I offered her eighteenpence as a sort of compromise between the inkstand and other articles ticketed upon her stall.

"'Give us two bob, and it's yours,' suggested the stall woman.

However, I was firm, and was upon the point of going away when she called me back, and thrust it into my hand, carefully holding on to one of the square corners of it until she saw the money safely deposited.

"It took me some time to clean it properly when I got it home, but I must say it fully rewarded all the efforts I made to wash it, and somehow the more I looked at it the more beautiful I thought it was.

"There was something about that contemplative figure lying upon the gra.s.s that gave me confidence and rea.s.surance, and I found myself regarding it as an old friend and talking to it, and when the big tree-stump was filled with ink I used to sit and write from it for hours. There always seemed to be encouragement and inquiry in the laughing face that looked from the figure on the inkstand, as if it were saying, 'Well, what are you going to write now, and when are you going to finish it?' I began to imagine that it gave me inspiration whenever I wrote; whether that was so or not, it certainly answered much better than its predecessor, the dull old ink-bottle that had been broken.

"So day by day I worked hard, and somehow became convinced that the wonderful little inkstand helped and inspired me in some curious manner which I could in no way account for, and after a few months I finished my book, eking out a scanty existence with other odd literary jobs. It was about this time that Murkel called on me.

"He stumbled up the winding stairs to my garret one day, smoking a quite objectionable pipe, and declared that I was the only old schoolfellow he had ever cared to call upon, as all the rest were sn.o.bs, and wound up by stating that we probably got along so well together as he came from the people, and he was certain that I came from the people also, and only those people who came from the people themselves ever got there eventually.

"After I had listened patiently to this harangue he came to the point by declaring he was a great friend of a publisher who sometimes bought the Murkel curios, furniture, china, pictures, etc., and if I liked he would get him to read my new book.

"I was only too thankful to accept this offer, and was saying so when a curious thing happened. Murkel, whose eyes had been roaming around my one attic room with the curious instinct of the dealer, and finding nothing that in any way interested him, suddenly crossed over to my rickety writing-table, and pouncing upon my inkstand emitted a low and prolonged whistle which might have been emblematical of either astonishment or delight.

"'Don't drop that inkstand,' I said. 'I'm very fond of that.'

"'Drop it!' almost shouted Murkel, 'drop it! Great Scott, do you know _what_ it is?'

"'Yes,' I said, 'of course, it's an ink-stand.'

"Murkel looked at me almost pityingly. 'Oh, my great aunt,' he said, 'the ways of writers are beyond understanding. Here's one who lives in a garret, probably hasn't enough to eat, and upon a rickety three-legged writing-table, which would be a disgrace to a fifth-rate coffee-house, he has a jewel worth a hundred guineas and more.'

"'Bos.h.!.+ you're joking,' I retorted.

"Murkel gave a queer smile. 'Am I?' he said. 'Well, I am prepared to go back to my place and write you a cheque for a hundred guineas for this, now on the spot.'

"I suppose I still continued to stare at him stupidly, and most likely the signs of my utter disbelief were plainly to be seen in my countenance, for Murkel continued hurriedly--