That was all, but it will be no matter for surprise that I sequestrated the knives of both Sa’adi and Ali, our cook and steward, as well as a particularly fine dagger belonging to the former. But one of those Sunday morning “plays” must be seen to be believed possible.
And now I must make a long “fleet,” as we call it, to a time more understandable by my readers, a time when I began to realise that money might be earned by writing, not, that is, in the service of the Government, but for myself. It was a wonderful discovery, for I made it at a time when I sorely needed a little extra money. Not that I might belong to two or three West End clubs, rent an expensive flat, and entertain folks at restaurants where the bills were of fabulous amounts, but for sheer necessities. That this is no figure of speech may be understood from the fact that I wrote my first stories on my shop counter while waiting for customers. Now I’m not going to ape the usual conventional lie and say, “Ah, but they were happy days!” They weren’t. They were very wretched days, full of trouble and apprehension of trouble, even worse. It may be that the full story of that time will never be told, but I have given as much of it to the world as I could in the Confessions of a Tradesman, a book better reviewed than any I have written; a book about which I have received double the number of eulogistic letters evoked by any other of my books, but which has sold, so my publishers tell me, less than 400 copies, and has now gone out of print.
But I look back to that time with gratitude and joy because of the new kind world to which it gave me entrance. Not all at once, that could hardly be expected, but with far less preliminary than might have been expected. And in spite of all that has been said about the poor rewards of literature as a profession, most of which is, I believe, quite true, I make bold to say that I do not believe there is any other profession where the rewards are so immensely greater than the merit in the majority of cases. There are dozens of writers now eating the fat and drinking the sweet, lying soft and riding swift, who as far as any merit in themselves is concerned, are worth exactly 0. They have caught the public ear, that is all. True there are some, thank God, who have attained a grand income by sheer gigantic merit, but they are few and, alas! when they have made a fortune it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it from the clutch of the dishonest company promoter.
But to return. I am grateful to literature because it did for me what no other form of money-getting could do save Charity, which, always hateful, is usually utterly inadequate to the needs. But most of all, it saved me from the Office. Here I must refrain, because otherwise I could fall a-cursing like a very drab when I remember that place and all that I endured there. I was forty-two years of age; I had four children, and I had not a penny at my back; yet such was my horror of the Office and all its works that as soon as I received an offer from a London newspaper of a year’s engagement at £2 per week with six months’ notice on either side, I joyfully accepted it, and at once resigned the situation I had endured so long. If this be not a measure of my hatred of that place I do not know what is, and yet I am sure that many such employments, though the salary be small, are as pleasant to the workers as any occupation can be in this world. It entirely rests with the superiors (sic).
But this is not anecdote, although it certainly is recollection. Now and from henceforth my two avocations ran concurrently, lecturing and writing, and I suppose I worked very hard. Looking back at those years I am inclined to think so; most people who knew me and what I was doing seemed to think so too; but I, accustomed to the most strenuous physical life and breasting a stormy sea of worry at the same time, felt that it was all play. I think I should have been entirely happy but for the sad fact that I had no home. I was essentially a home-lover, yet I had no home in the true sense of the word. More than that I cannot say, except that one day I awoke to the fact that at last and at great cost I had achieved a home and was about to enjoy life as I had never done before. It is true that I was rapidly nearing my jubilee, and that my health was permanently impaired, but—and oh! what a huge but it is—I had emerged into the sunshine and, though that I could not know, ten years of placid joy lay before me.
I had taken a house in the country about fifty miles from London, an ideal place as I thought, the rent being low, £40 a year, for which I had a good eight-roomed house and nearly two acres of land well laid out as orchard, kitchen garden, flower garden, lawn, and plenty of outbuildings. Oh, it was altogether charming, although I afterwards found that the soil was cold and hungry. But that did not matter to me; I was not farming, and I am not going to say a word in dispraise of the place where I spent ten happy years. I must say, however, that they would not have been so happy but that I gave explicit instructions that none of the village talk was to be told me, nor did I do any visiting whatever. You will say that I must have lived like a hermit. Oh no, I had plenty of visitors from town; I often had to go away myself, so that I did not feel at all isolated, and in any case I could never have endured the venomous, slanderous small talk which is the mental pabulum of most English village folk. Poor people, I can hardly blame them. Talk is their only recreation, and it has been very wisely told us that a “multitude of words wanteth not sin.”
However, before I had more than sampled the beauties of the place, and when I had only tasted, as it were, the joys of the “harvest bugs” of summer which made the place almost unbearable, I received an invitation from the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company to be their guest, bringing with me a secretary if I wished, for their West Indian and Central American trip. At first I demurred, for a sea trip has long lost its charms for me; but the offer was enhanced by the promise of a large sum of money if I would write an account of my trip, so I immediately set about finding a secretary. A young lady who did my typing agreed to come, the facilities being so royal, a four-berth cabin each and another cabin for an office, and we sailed from Southampton on what I must always regard as the pleasantest voyage of my life. It is a very long time since I have had any communication with the Royal Mail, and I am never likely to meet Sir Owen Phillips again, therefore I am the more free to say that in the Company’s treatment of me and my secretary the adjective I have used above is the only adequate one.
We went all over the loyal island of Barbados, up to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, up to the capital of Costa Rica, where the climate is of heaven and the death rate was then the highest in the world, for reasons that I may not dwell upon; all along the line of the Panama Canal from Colon to Panama and back, from La Guayra to Caracas, President Castro’s stronghold, and to the pearl fisheries of Margharita Porlomar. Yes, you may say, but surely you must have had many adventures during such a trip as that. True, we did; and I have recorded them all in a book now out of print, I believe, called Back to Sunny Seas. The fine flavour of it all is there, but sitting here in the sunny evenings I often think of those halcyon days and smile, a pleasant happy smile, there was so little that called for anything but happiness.
And yet, in pursuance of Pope’s profound maxim that “Man never is, but always to be, blest,” I often yearned for home and wondered, wondered how things were going there. And when at last, after nearly four months’ joy, we sighted Plymouth one morning at dawn, I could only point and use my handkerchief, for the dear land ahead took away from me the power of speech. It was so when I was a child on my first return to England—see The Log of a Sea Waif (passim)—and it has grown with the years. It was so good to get home again. It had been very good to visit those strange exotic countries en prince, very good to give much simple pleasure to another; but I have always felt and always shall feel, I suppose, that the chief, the choicest charm of a holiday is returning. I think that is how it ought to be. It may be necessary to go, but it should be most delightful to return.
And, as should be the case, all had been well during my absence. Nothing untoward had happened. So that I could sit down now to the finishing of the book with a light heart, with the lecturing season still some months ahead. Happy! happiness had only just come to me, and I felt full of it. I had realised before that such fullness of life as was vouchsafed to other men, though they did not seem to appreciate it as I thought they should, was not for me, and upon the principle of the Spanish proverb, “The best thing to do when it is raining, is to let it rain!” I had “let on” to be content. But my word, the true test of contentment, I am sure, is that the contentee won’t change his condition. And I had never been in such a position. Now, however, I felt that all was so well with me that it could never be better. That I was blest above, far, far above my deserts. All that had ever gone before was just drivel compared with the large joy that was now mine.