Next morning I felt a little better; but not much. However, it was, I reflected, no good sitting down and repining, and I started out to look for work. After a while I got a job as potman and under-barman at seven shillings a week in a public-house in the Battersea Park Road.
One day a travelling conjuror came into the saloon bar, and did a few tricks with coins. The proprietor was greatly interested in the show, and the next day, when he and I were having dinner together in a little recess behind the bar, he remarked:
“Clever chap that conjuror who was here yesterday. Those coin tricks of his were wonderful.”
“Oh!” I replied, “I didn’t think very much of them. Why I could do better than that myself. Look here!” And I took a penny from my pocket, and palming it from one hand to the other I made it disappear before his eyes.
To my unbounded surprise my employer promptly jumped up, his face crimson with rage. “You young rascal!” he cried. “That’s quite enough for me. I’ve been missing money from the till for quite a long while now. Out you go!” And, suiting the action to his words, he seized me by the scruff of the neck and the seat of my trousers, and threw me out of the house on to the pavement.
When I got home and told my story, my mother was naturally very much upset, and she went round and expostulated with the landlord; but all to no purpose. He insisted that money had been missed, and that I must be the thief, as there was nobody else who could have taken it except the head barman, and he had been with them a long while and was quite above suspicion.
This individual, who slept in the same room as myself, was, I may add, a very great pet of the landlady, who was firmly convinced that he could do nothing wrong.
Yet he was the thief all the while, as it turned out; for some little time afterwards, and while I was away in the country, he was convicted and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, the stolen money having been found in his box. My mother sent me a copy of the local paper with the account of the police-court proceedings.
Some few years later I had succeeded in making a name for myself. I was at the Palace Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, and my name was blazoned in letters a foot long on the buses, and on all the hoardings in London. It was a hot day, and I felt thirsty. I turned into a little “pub” in Wellington Street, Strand. There behind the bar was my old “boss.”
I had grown a lot in the intervening years, and he didn’t know me; but I knew him directly.