“You haven’t paid me yet,” I responded; “it will be time enough to give way to your emotions when you have. You kept me here last night an hour longer than the time agreed. Very good! You get an hour less work out of me to-day. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
He raised his thick, podgy hand, and I thought he was going to strike me, which I hoped he would do, for I have always been very fond of boxing, and a scrap with him just then would have been as nectar to me. To my astonishment, however, he suddenly subsided, and, walking out of the room, left me to go on with my work undisturbed. I left the office punctually at six that evening, and for the few remaining days I was with him, the prearranged hours were rigidly adhered to. That was my one and only experience in business. I tried to get on the staff of a newspaper, but although I wrote to almost every editor in London, I did not succeed. I am convinced that no post, outside that of a reporter, for which I had neither the training nor the inclination, can be obtained without the investment of money or colossal influence.
I managed, however, to do some free lance work, and I derived no little interest and amusement, though not much remuneration, interviewing for a weekly journal called “Theatricals.” The first man of any note I met was the late Sir Augustus Harris, to whom I introduced myself on the stage of Drury Lane. It was during a rehearsal of the pantomime, at which, if I remember rightly, Harry Nicholls, Herbert Campbell, Dan Leno, and many other favourites of those times were present. Sir Augustus listened to what I had to say with great courtesy, and told me to go to Mr. Neil Forsyth. I did so, with the result that I was offered a small post on the staff of the theatre. I was grateful to Mr. Forsyth, who was one of the very kindest men that ever breathed, but apart from the smallness of the salary, there were obstacles in the way, and so I had to refuse.
About this time I met a girl with whom I became madly infatuated, and when she refused to marry me, I seriously contemplated suicide. It was this episode that gave me the central idea for my first novel, “For Satan’s Sake,” in which I introduced the girl, and which is written very much round my own life.
I am only too thankful now that she did not accept me, for I do not know how I should have kept her, and that, apparently, as far as she was concerned, was the only thing that mattered.
I fought a desperate battle with myself for some time, and in the end came to the grim resolution to go on living. It was when I was recovering from this state of excessive mental dejection that I came in contact with an old acquaintance, a public schoolman, at whose suggestion I decided to try schoolmastering, and consequently obtained a post at Daventry Grammar School.
But I must now return to the principal subject of this narrative, namely, ghosts.
During the year I was in York Road I thoroughly explored the East End, and in the coffee houses and restaurants of Poplar, Deptford, Tilbury and Whitechapel I heard many first-hand accounts of hauntings. Though it is not generally known, the East End of London is far more haunted than the West. On one of my nocturnal rambles, I made the acquaintance of a Russian Jew, who had an extraordinary mania for spiders, which he kept in specially designed boxes with glass lids. On their half-holidays he used to set his children to work collecting flies and other insects, and the whole family used to revel in watching the spiders gorge themselves on their victims. You could see he was innately cruel by the hard twinkling of his little black eyes, and the spasmodic twitching of his flat, greasy, white fingers, but he was something of a scholar and he had a devout dread of ghosts. “There is a haunted house close to here,” he said to me one evening; “if you like to come with me I will introduce you to the owner. He is a Chinaman, called King Ho, or some such outlandish name, and he keeps an opium den.”
King Ho did not require much of an introduction, for, as soon as we entered, he fixed his little slit-like eyes on me and said:
“Well, what do you want? A smoke?”