In the end we decided that my mother and Lucy should establish themselves in apartments on the outskirts of Davenham Minster, which apartments would serve my mother permanently, with the relinquishment of a single room after Lucy's marriage. I saw them both established, gathered my few personal belongings in a trunk and a couple of bags, and started for London on a brilliantly fine morning toward the end of June.
At that time a young man went to London as a matter of course, when launching out for himself. It was not that folk liked living in the huge city (though, curiously enough, many did), but they gravitated toward it because the great aim, always, and in those conditions necessarily, was to make money. There was more money "knocking about," so people said, in London than anywhere else; so that was the place for which one made.
I started for London with a capital of precisely eleven guineas over and above my railway fare—and left it again on the same day.
II
AT THE WATER'S EDGE
"Now a little before them, there was on the left-hand of the Road, a Meadow, and a Stile to go over into it, and that Meadow is called By-Path-Meadow."—The Pilgrim's Progress.
My friend, Leslie Wheeler, had left Cambridge a few months before my summons home, in order to enter his father's office in Moorgate Street. His father was of the mysteriously named tribe of "financial agents," and had evidently found it a profitable calling.
As I never understood anything of even the nomenclature of finance, I will not attempt to describe the business into which my friend had been absorbed; but I remember that it afforded occupation for dozens of gentlemanly young fellows, the correctness of whose coiffure and general appearance was beyond praise. These beautifully groomed young gentlemen sat upon high stools at desks of great brilliancy. They used an ingenious arrangement of foolscap paper to protect their shirt-cuffs from contact with baser things, and one of the reasons for the evident care lavished upon the disposition of their hair may have been the fact that they made it a point of honour to go hatless when taking the air or out upon business during the day. Their general appearance and deportment in the office and outside always conveyed to me the suggestion that they were persons of some wealth and infinite leisure; but I have been assured that they were hard-working clerks, whose salaries, even in these simpler days, would not be deemed extravagant. These salaries, I have been told, worked out at an average of perhaps £120 or £130 a year.
Now London meant no more to me at that time than a place where, upon rare occasions, one dined in splendour, went to a huge and gilded music-hall, cultivated a bad headache, and presently sought to ease it by eating a nightmarish supper, and eating it against time. My allowance at Cambridge had, no doubt fortunately for my digestion, allowed of but few excursions to the capital; but my friend Wheeler lived within twenty miles of it, and I figured him already burgeoning as a magnate of Moorgate Street. Therefore I had of course written to him of my proposed descent upon the metropolis, and had been very kindly invited to spend a week at his father's house in Weybridge before doing anything else. Accordingly then, having reached Waterloo by a fast train, I left most of my effects in the cloak-room there, and taking only one bag, journeyed down to Weybridge.