And it was in such a mood, after such a decision, on a wet, breathless January evening that I walked homewards past the few melancholy trees that were once part of the proud avenue down which Dick Turpin cantered plunderwards. Why, I asked myself, had I yielded to those instincts of economy that are the only heritage with which my Scots ancestry has thought prudent to endow me; why, for the sake of a few pennies had I deserted the party at the very moment when it was about to become genuinely amusing. Parties are like bonfires: they smoulder wretchedly for a couple of hours; they emit columns of malodorous, unsightly smoke; then suddenly, gloriously, unexpectedly, they burst into a splendour of leaping flame. Such a transformation had been, I now felt, about to enshrine that party for all time in the memory of those present at the very moment when I had decided to desert it. Harold Scott had just arrived from the Everyman Theatre. And than Harold Scott there are few persons who can be, when he so desires, more cheering and more exhilarating. He had regaled himself, not inappropriately, as he had been that evening impersonating Feste, with a stoup of wine, had been led to the piano, and had struck the first chords of “Another Little Job for the Tombstone Maker.” It was a song of which the fame and the refrain had often reached me, the words never: and why, I asked myself, had I allowed to pass so agreeable an opportunity of making their acquaintance. In a mood, therefore, of uncomfortable self-depreciation, cautiously, so that the dog might not bark and awake the household, I opened the front door, to find on the hat cupboard below the window a letter addressed to me in a bright green envelope.
There is only one person who writes to me in bright green envelopes, and I never see that handwriting without a thrill. Whatever else may in time pass from memory, it is improbable that I shall ever forget the excitement which I felt when, for the first time, I saw that handwriting, and read in the left hand of the envelope the words “Grant Richards Ltd.” I was at Sandhurst at the time, and the day had begun unfortunately. I had appeared on early parade without a lanyard, and had been requested to appear after breakfast at Company Office. I was, indeed, waiting in the passage to be marched before the Major when the mail arrived, and among the letters flung haphazardly on the table of the ante-room was the one telling me that my first book had found a publisher. At such a moment I should with equanimity have accepted any punishment with which the authorities might have thought well to chasten me; but even then I could not help reading into my dismissal, without the reprimand that would have suspended my week-end leave, a happy augury for my book. And after six years a green envelope is still for me a symbol of romance; the miracle may be repeated. I am not of a particularly credulous nature, but I always half expect to find there some equally sensational announcement; and on this grey January evening my dissatisfaction was by the sight of it instantly and marvellously removed.
The letter contained, however, no reckless offer for film rights from America; merely an encouraging inquiry about my new novel. “Soon,” it said, “we shall be preparing our spring and summer list. Can you not at least give us the title of your book?” My dissatisfaction returned. My novel was little nearer its last chapter than it had been when I had discussed its prospects three months earlier with Grant Richards. That is the worst of a creative as opposed to a routine publisher. You have had an admirable lunch; you sit back in a deep and comfortable arm-chair; you smoke a good Egyptian cigarette; a fire is blazing merrily in front of you; your eyes are wooed pleasantly by Sancha’s frescoed decoration, by the photographs on the mantelpiece and walls of those whose names have from time to time appeared among your publisher’s announcements, and among which you are pleased to observe your own conspicuously displayed: you feel content, in harmony, reassured. You begin to talk of your new novel. In this pleasant atmosphere it becomes suddenly very real to you.
“Splendid! splendid!” says Grant Richards; “now, you’ll let me have that in time for the spring, won’t you?” He stands with his back to the fireplace, adjusts his monocle, and begins to tell you of the artist who will design the wrapper, of the cloth in which it will be bound, of the type in which it will be printed, of the special instructions he will give his travellers. You leave his study feeling that your book is finished; that in a few days it will be presented to an enraptured world. Your imagination is already carrying you to your club and opening newspaper after newspaper over which you bow before a volley of critical applause. You discover through fuddled channels of mental mathematics the extent of the fortune that is to be yours, and, on the strength of it, you proceed to order two new suits of clothes. Then you go home, and you accept an invitation to a party, and you play football, and you review a book, and you read a few manuscripts at your office, and you turn into a short story an anecdote you overheard at your club; and in six months’ time you find your novel where you left it, your tailor’s bill in front of you, and your royalties account crippled by a process of diminishing returns.
Regretfully I replaced the letter in its bright green envelope. There were still a few coals glowing in my study grate; the room was warm and kindly and sympathetic. The sky-blue walls with the deep black line running round the door and beneath the ceiling, the long low tier of bookshelves which had wooed me so often from my work, the black framed etchings of Nevinson and Wadsworth, the two water colours by Prout, the patterned tiling of the fireplace, and that dazzling screen by Roger Fry which I had bought at the Omega workshop sale with such thrilled misgiving and which has since taken its place so unobtrusively against a background of many coloured volumes; every book and ornament and picture in the room where I had wasted so many hours seemed to welcome me with a smile of affectionate indulgence. “It does not matter,” they seemed to say. “You have been very happy among us—all those hours passing from one book to another, from one chain of memories to another. You have idled away, doubtless, a deal of time in our company, but it was so that we would have you be, and for all we know you may be the richer for that idleness, richer than if you had pursued, as you had intended, with eyes riveted on the green baize of your desk, the fortunes of your really rather dismal heroine!”
Our study, because it is an expression of ourself, our taste, our personality, becomes at times as reassuring, as persuasive, as that rascally confidante of introspection—a friend whom we can persuade to view our failings through our own eyes and in terms of our own conscience.
I made up the fire, turned up the switch of my electric-lamp, drew my arm-chair within the narrow circle of its light, and paused to wonder with what book, with what companion, I should spend the hour or so before I should be tired enough to go to bed. At such an hour one cannot choose a book from the shelves haphazardly and allow it to evoke its own particular series of emotions. The book must suit the mood, must fit it as the words of a song fit the accompaniment. The varied incidents of the day, the people we have seen and spoken to, the words we have written and read, have created little by little the nature and intensity of the state of mind that is upon us at this late hour.
Slowly I ran my eye along the shelves. There in the corner of the wall were the novels, marshalled like soldiers on parade, an even row, with their plain cloth bindings and ink lettering—serviceable stuff for the most part; fashioned to supply a want; strong enough to resist a six months’ battery on the shelves of Smith’s and Boot’s and Mudie’s, and flimsy enough to sink afterwards, without too great resistance, into coverless, dog-eared decomposition. Next to them the taller, prouder, more exclusive demy octavos; the gleaming white backs of the George Moore limited edition; the slim, calf-bound Maupassants; the heavy, formidable works of reference and criticism; and beyond them the gay adventurers; the many sized, the many coloured, the many covered; plays and books of verse, and volumes of essays; “Jurgen,” Max Beerbohm, and Petronius; anthologies, large and square and squat and oblong; personal books whose shape and format have been the result of much thought; for whose sake many specimen pages, many bindings have been returned to their artificer; and on the extreme left, in the shadow of the screen, the cricket books, a shelf of reminiscence and exhortation; and below it a long row of battered Wisden’s, and beside them the faded rust-red Lillywhite’s. A small library, not more than a thousand books probably; but I would rather have a few friends than many acquaintances, and there is hardly a book there that has not some personal significance.
And yet on this particular evening I found the choice of a book by no means easy. I felt in no mood for a book that should deal exclusively with any one subject; and I searched unsuccessfully for the book that should pass casually, irresponsibly as conversation does, from one theme to another. I recalled the many evenings I have spent, tired after a day’s work or an afternoon’s football, talking, in a studio in Edwardes Square, of cricket and poetry, of life and literature and love; thinking how quickly the hours had passed as I lingered talking there. And there came back to me the memory of one particular evening when we had discussed the prospects of a new paper shortly to be presented to the world, in which we were jointly interested: Clifford Bax as editor, myself as publisher; I had been asked how happy I considered to be its prospects. But I disclaimed the rôle of prophet.
“One can’t begin to guess,” I said; “a magazine is like a novel: it’s the expression of the editor’s personal taste. If the editor starts to include work he doesn’t like because he thinks it may succeed, he will fail as surely as the good novelist would fail if he tried to write a pot-boiler. It would be insincere. Think of Tit-Bits. There was a paper produced by a man who stated a fact and asked himself a question. A paper, he said, is a thing that a man wants to read when he’s tired at the end of the day. And the question he set himself was this: ‘What should I myself like to read under similar circumstances?’ He decided that Tit-Bits was the sort of thing that he would like to read; and as he was the average man to the extent that he was miraculously in tune with the taste of the average man, Tit-Bits was a big success. In the same way the success or failure of your paper will depend on the number of people who are sufficiently in harmony with your standard of taste to be prepared to increase their annual expenditure to the extent of one guinea. It is, it must always be, a pure gamble.”