"In any case," says Mrs. Filmer, "whatever you manage to do or decide to do, you'd better come and live here. You can live far more cheaply here than letting a London landlady have part of your income."
Only for one sharp moment he protests. "I couldn't!" Young Wriford cries. "I couldn't work here. I simply couldn't."
"You can have a nice table put in your bedroom," says Mrs. Filmer. "If you're really sorry, if you really intend to do your duty by your brother's children—"
"All right," says Young Wriford. "It's very kind of you. All right."
VIII
He does not return to Gamber's. He is one of the lucky ones. The great daily newspaper, the Intelligence, has a particular fame for its column of leaderettes and latterly is forever throwing out those who write them in search of one who shall restore them to their old reputation (recently a little clouded). Young Wriford puts in for the post and gets it and holds it and soon couples with it much work on the literary side of the paper. There is a change in the proprietorship of the penny evening paper, the Piccadilly Gazette, bringing in one who turns the paper upside down to fill it with new features. Young Wriford puts in specimens of a column of facetious humour—"Hit or Miss"—and it is established forthwith, and every morning he is early at the Piccadilly Gazette office to produce it.
Thus within a very few weeks of leaving Gamber's and of coming to live at Surbiton, he is earning more than twice as much as he had relinquished—proving himself most manifestly one of the lucky ones, and earning the money and the reputation at cost to himself of which only himself is aware.
He is from the house at seven each morning to reach the Piccadilly Gazette by eight, hunting through the newspapers as the train takes him up for paragraphs wherewith to be funny in "Hit or Miss." There are days, and gradually they become more frequent, when nothing funny will come to his mind; when his mind is hopelessly tired; when his column is flogged out amid furious protests, and expostulations informing him that he is keeping the whole damned paper waiting; when he leaves the office badly shaken, cursing it, hating it, dreading that this day's work will earn him dismissal from it, and hurries back to the "nice table" in his bedroom at Surbiton, there desperately to attack the two weekly articles for Gamber's, the book-reviewing for the Intelligence and the work upon his novel: that "better work," opportunity for which had caused him to leave Mr. Occshott and now is immeasurably harder to find.
He gets into the habit of trying to enter the house noiselessly and noiselessly to get to his room. He comes back to the house trying to forget his misgiving about his "Hit or Miss" column and to force his mind to concentrate on the work he now has to do: above all, trying to avoid meeting any one in the house, which means, if he succeeds, avoiding "a scene" caused by his overwrought nerves. He never does succeed. There is always a scene. It is either irritation with Alice or with one of the boys who delay him or interrupt him, and then regret and remorse at having shown his temper; or it is a scene of wilder nature with Dragon Mrs. Filmer or with Mr. Filmer. Whatever the scene, the result is the same—inability for an hour, for two hours, for all the morning, properly to concentrate upon his work.
It will be perhaps the matter of his room. The servant is making the bed, or it isn't made, and he knows he will be interrupted directly he starts.