I explained my case, and whilst I did so he read something which lay on the table before him. When I had done he said, with his finicking lisp, 'Seven days' cells, hard labour.' The old regimental sergeant happened to be there, and for an instant arrested judgment.
'I beg your pardon, sir, the man is really unfit to perform hard labour.'
'Then,' said the Solon, 'in that case let him have forty-eight hours' solitary confinement.'
I ventured as respectfully as I could to protest. I represented that it was hardly just to punish a man for not performing a heavy physical task whilst admitting in the very terms of the sentence that he was unfit to do it. The answer was, 'Right about face, march!' I went to cells. I had my hair cut, and I spent thirty-six delirious hours alone. At the end of that time my condition was reported and I was removed; but from that hour I was sullen and rebellious, and whatever spirit of order and discipline might have lived in me until then vanished completely.
Only four years ago, on a very memorable occasion in my life, I sat side by side with one of my old officers. He assured me, with every appearance of gravity, that if I had stayed much longer I should have disintegrated the regiment. I was sure, on the other hand, that the regiment would have disintegrated me; and though I was smart enough and willing enough to have made a good soldier at the beginning, I was too angry at stupidity and injustice to care to please anybody any longer. I knew one man who, having been gently nurtured, found himself suddenly thrown upon his own resources. He enlisted with a full determination to rise. When I last heard of him, years ago, he held brevet rank in another regiment; but I know what slights he endured, to what numberless insults he submitted, and how harsh and cruel the pathway to success was made for him at the beginning. They tell me things are better now, and I hope with all my heart they may be. As I knew the ranks they were made well-nigh intolerable for any well-educated youngster who showed a disposition to get on.
V
Thousands of people remember the excitement created five or six years ago by the story of the Missing Journalist. Scores still cherish the memory of poor MacNeill and think of him as amongst the cheeriest, friendliest, and most helpful of men. He was a delightful fellow and a good fellow; but he had a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and blameless life.
He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone. He was unusually radiant and assured, and 'At last, at last,' he said, 'I've got my foot on the neck of this big London!' The triumphant phrase set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money to back him, and no reputation to begin with.
I came to London just after the opening of the Parliamentary session of 1872, at a time when every nook and corner of the journalistic work-room was filled, and when the doors were besieged, as they always are at such a season, by scores of outsiders eager for a turn at the good things going. I forget now precisely how it came about, but I went to live at a frowsy caravanserai in Bouverie Street, an astonishingly dirty and disreputable hotel called the 'Sussex.' It is down now, and its site is occupied by the extended offices of the Daily News; but in its day it was the home of as much shabby gentility as could be found under any one roof in London. Beds were to be had there at threepence and sixpence. I remember no arrangement for meals, and certainly never troubled the establishment in that way myself. The linen had a look of having been washed in pea-soup and dried in a chimney, and the whole aspect of the house and its clientèle was wo-begone and neglected to the last extreme. Paper and pen and ink are cheap enough, and I used to sit all day long in my bedroom, fireless in the winter weather, wrapped up in an ulster and with a counterpane about my knees, writing for bare life. I wrote verses grave and gay, special articles, leading articles, and leaderettes. These were delivered at all manner of likely and unlikely places, and came back again, like the curses and the chickens and the bad penny in the proverbs.