Just then he caught sight of me. For a moment he hesitated—I could see him hesitate; then he left the deck and re-appeared at a port-hole in the aft part of the ship, framed once more (and it was my last picture of him) as the very Bindo of old. “Good-bye,” he said, “old man; it was good of you to come, after the way I’ve treated you. Thanks again, most faithful of friends, and good-bye. Forgive and forget. This time, believe me, I’ll go straight. By the way,” he added, “just give this parcel for me to Fred—naming one of his chums—I had intended it for the pilot, but it will be safer in your hands.”
A wave of the hand, as the ship headed for the open water, was the last I saw of Bindo. But a load was off my mind as I walked back to the station. I could look forward hopefully now and patiently to our next meeting.
Glancing at the parcel he had given me, I found it was addressed to myself. It contained a small diamond ring without word or comment. At the time when we found the jewellery at Attenborough’s, this ring had been missing, and, as it belonged to me, I had said nothing to the others about it. I might easily have lost it, and at any rate I gladly gave Bindo the benefit of the doubt. He had pledged it apparently at a different shop; perhaps because it was mine, and he did not wish it to be discovered with the rest; perhaps to remind him more vividly of the task he had set himself during the year to come. Till this ring could be redeemed, he must wait and work in London, and though all his hopes were centred in life abroad, it must not be thought of till this one act of reparation had been done. I never saw or heard from him directly again.
Two years later he died of yellow fever in hospital at Rio; and his last act, while he still had strength to hold a pen, was to write me a loving letter of farewell, enclosing a cheque that covered the sums I had expended on his account. The letter was forwarded to me by the nurse who attended him.
“Is it well with the lad? It is well.”
‘Declined with Thanks’
A Postscript
“Read and rejected” would be a more satisfying formula. But the Oracle is discreetly vague, and condescends not to particulars. Editorial reticence is surely a queer anomaly in these days when a reason is required for everything. When my own effusions have come back to me with the trite ascription, I could have welcomed enthusiastically the scantiest information, the liveliest abuse, in exchange for that exasperating commonplace.
Sometimes even this amount of formal recognition was deferred. At first I augured hopefully from the delay, till experience taught me otherwise. Once, when an editor had kept my MS kicking about in this way, I actually wrote him my mind in free and unorthodox language. “Unwise, most unwise,” you will say. “Yes, but oh! so satisfactory.” Add to which, my letter effected its purpose. He made up his mind then and there on the merits of my article and “declined it with thanks.” (The italics are his own.)
But the mystery remains a mystery. He did not reveal it to me, in spite of his gratitude for my contribution, and I still hold to my opinion that such delay is discourteous to a male contributor, and ungallant to a lady. Besides, what is the reason? Is it that the editor waits to see what space he has got left at the finish, and then accepts an article, not for its merits, but for its length, on much the same principle as a lady will ask you at breakfast for just the amount of bread that will suit a remnant of butter, or vice versa? If so, Aristophanes had anticipated the process, or one very nearly resembling it—“Man, man,” he says, “they are weighing my tragedy as if it were a pound of beef!”
By the way, why shouldn’t the editorial chair be thrown open to competition? It is thus we elect our Professors, or some of them, at Cambridge. Let a candidate for the office be required to compose an “Exercise”—say a complete story for the magazine he aspires to conduct. So should we respect an editor more, or (possibly) fear him less. At any rate, no order of men, least of all one which examines others, should be debarred now-a-days from the privilege of being examined in its turn.