The new thought made its mark on Harry's character, but it was not all that he brought away with him from Guildford. The visit fired a train of sufficiently important material results, though the fuse burnt slowly, and for weeks did not seem to be burning at all. Harry came away with the match in his pocket, in the shape of a letter of introduction to a firm of scholastic agents.
Mr. Innes had by no means encouraged his old boy to try to become a schoolmaster; he feared that the two years in Africa would tell against Harry rather than in his favour, and then without a degree there was absolutely no future. He thought better of Harry's chances in literature. It was he who had encouraged the boy's very earliest literary leanings and attempts, and he took the kindest view of the accepted verses, of which he was shown a copy; but when he heard of the many failures which had followed that one exceeding small success, and of all the repulses which Harry had met with in the City, his old master was silent for some minutes, after which he sat down at his desk and wrote the introduction there and then.
"These fellows will get you something if anybody can," he had said; and, indeed, the gentlemen in question, on whom Harry called on his way back to Kensington, seemed confident of getting him something without delay. He had come to them in the very nick of time for next term's vacancies. They would send him immediately, and from day to day, particulars of posts for which he could apply; they had the filling of so many, there was little doubt but that he would obtain what he wanted before long. Their charge would be simply five per cent. on the first year's salary, which would probably be fifty pounds, or sixty if they were lucky.
Harry went home jubilant. The agents had taken down his name and his father's name without question or comment. They declined to regard the years in Africa as a serious disqualification, much less since he had been a tutor there; and Harry began to think that Mr. Innes had taken an unnecessarily black view of his chances. He knew better in a few weeks' time.
It is true that at first he had a thick letter every day, containing the promised particulars of several posts. How used he grew to the clerk's mauve round hand, to the thin sheets of paper damp from the gelatine that laid each opening before Heaven knew how many applicants—to the unvarying formula employed! The Reverend So-and-So, of Dashton, Blankshire, would require in September the services of a junior master, possessing qualifications thereupon stated with the salary offered. The vacant posts were in all parts of the country, and the sanguine Harry pictured himself in almost every county in England while awaiting his fate in one quarter after another. In few cases were the qualifications more than he actually possessed, for he was at least capable of taking the lowest form in a preparatory school, while he could truthfully describe himself as being "fond of games." But the agents' clients would have none of him, and as time went on the agents' envelopes grew thin with single enclosures, and came to hand only once in a way.
And yet several head-masters wrote kindly answers to Harry's application, and two or three seemed on the verge of engaging him. Some interviewed him at the agents' offices, and one had him down to luncheon at his school, paying Harry's fare all the way into Hertfordshire and back. Another only rejected him because Harry was not a fast round-hand bowler, and a fast round-hand bowler was essential—not for the school matches, in which the masters took no part, but for the town, for which they played regularly every Saturday: the music-master bowled slow left, and fast right was indispensable at the other end. But the failures that were all but successes were only the harder to bear, and the bitter fact remained that the lad was no more wanted in the schoolroom than in the office. It struck him sometimes as a grim commentary on the education he had himself received. A thousand or two had been spent upon it, and he had not left school a dunce. He knew as much, perhaps, as the average boy on going up to the university from a public school, and of what use was it to him? It did not enable him to earn his bread. He felt some bitterness against the system which had taught him to swim only with the life-belt of influence and money. It had been his fate to be pitched overboard without one.
Not that he was idle all this time. In the dreadful dog-days, when none but the poor were left in London, and the heat in the little flat became well-nigh insupportable, so that poor Mrs. Ringrose was quite prostrate from its effects, her son sat in his shirt and trousers and plied his pen again in sheer desperation. He wrote out the true incident which he had been advised would make a capital magazine article if written down just as he told it. So he tried to do so; and sent the result to Uncle Tom. It came back almost by return of post, with a civil note from the Editor, saying that he could not use the story as the end was so unsatisfactory. It was unsatisfactory because the story happened to be true, and the author never thought of meddling with the facts, though he weighted his work with several immaterial points which he had forgotten when telling the tale verbally. He now flew to the opposite extreme, and dashed off a brief romance unadulterated by a solitary fact or a single instance of original observation. This was begun with ambitious ideas of a match with some shilling monthly, but it was only offered to the penny weeklies, and was burnt unprinted some few months later.
One day, however, the day on which Harry went down to Hertfordshire at a pedagogue's expense, and was coming back heavy with the knowledge that he would not do, the spirit moved him to invest a penny in a comic paper with a considerable vogue. He needed something to cheer him up, and for all he knew this sheet might be good or bad enough to make him smile; it was neither, but it proved to be the best investment he had ever made. It contained a conspicuous notice to contributors, and a number of sets of intentionally droll verses on topics of the week. Before Harry got out at King's Cross he had the rough draft of such a production on his shirtcuff; he wrote it out and sent it off that night; and it appeared in the very next issue of that comic pennyworth.
And this time Harry felt that he had done something that he could do again; but days passed without a word from the Editor, and it looked very much as though the one thing he could do would prove to be unpaid work. At length he determined to find out. The paper's strange name was Tommy Tiddler ("St. Thomas must be your patron saint," said Mrs. Ringrose), and its funereal offices were in a court off the Strand. Harry blundered into the counting-house and asked to see the Editor, at which an elderly gentleman turned round on a high stool and viewed him with suspicion. What did he want with the Editor?
"I had a contribution in the last issue," said Harry, nervously, "and—and I wanted to know if there would be any payment."