“Northcliffe’s away,” he said, “buying forests in Newfoundland to make paper with. However, he’ll be back in a week or two, and in the meantime I’ll write you a letter to give to him. And now we’ll take a taxi and see people.”
Harris gave up the whole of that day to me and, largely owing to him, I had within the next few days more work offered to me than I could possibly get through. From time to time, months later, good things would come my [42] ]way, and nearly always I could trace them to something generous and fine that Harris had said of me.
It was chiefly because he was so generous with his time that I so rarely called upon him. Often I would curb a strong desire to see him, feeling that however embarrassing my visit might be, he would, out of a quixotic kindness, throw up his work and come with me to talk. For this reason I had not seen him for some little time, when, one morning, I received a letter from him reproaching me for my absence. “Why have you hidden yourself for so long?” he asked. “I go to the Café every night; come, you will find me there.”
“The Café,” of course, was the Café Royal. It so chanced that, that very afternoon, my duties took me to a symphony concert in the Queen’s Hall; the concert over, I found myself passing the Café Royal on my way from the Queen’s Hall to Piccadilly Circus, and turned in on the remote chance of finding Harris.
At the end of the passage, near the windows where French papers are displayed, I found a crowd of a dozen excited men, all talking and gesticulating. The rest of the Café was empty, as one would expect at that time of the day. In the middle of the small crowd was Harris, who caught my eye almost at once. He came to me, and I saw that he was rather agitated.
“Come and sit over here, Cumberland,” he said. “I’ve just been through a beastly quarter of an hour.”
It appeared that a well-known and very distinguished littérateur had quarrelled with him in the Café.... Blows had been exchanged....
We talked of money—an ever-absorbing topic both to Harris and to me. He told me his books had brought him practically nothing. For The Bomb, if I remember correctly, he received fifty pounds—certainly not more than one hundred pounds.
“If I had been compelled to live by what my books [43] ]have brought me,” he said, “I should have starved. Yet it is not long ago that Arnold Bennett assured me that I should be able to earn five thousand pounds a year if I gave my whole time to fiction. But Bennett is wrong. My books, ever since Elder Conklin was published, have been enthusiastically praised, but they have not had large sales. Most authors must find book-writing the most unremunerative work in the world. I put an enormous amount of labour into The Bomb, as I do into all my books, and the labour was not made any the less from the fact that much of the earliest part of the book is autobiographical. In my young manhood I worked as a labourer, deep under water, at the foundations of Brooklyn Bridge; it is all described in my book.”
Though I went to the Café Royal at frequent intervals after that I very rarely saw Harris there. He had abandoned Hearth and Home, or it had abandoned him, and he was now throwing away his brilliant gifts on Modern Society. I was elected an honorary member of the Cabaret Club, run by Madame Strindberg, the widow of the great Swedish writer, and I used to look in there occasionally in the early hours of the morning, expecting to run across Harris, who, I heard, also visited that exotic, underground and rather riotous place. But I never chanced to see him, and two or three months must have passed without my hearing of him.