“I have called about my articles,” I began, rather brusquely, to the editor, a scholarly man who knew far more about Elizabethan literature than he did about human nature. “I have found just lately that I am so busy that I have resolved to give up some of my work. Your magazine is one of those with which I am anxious to retain my connection, partly because my relationship with you has always been so pleasant.”
And I stopped. It is not everyone who knows the right place at which to stop in conversations of this kind. “My relationship with you has always been so pleasant” was, most indubitably, the right place.
He tried to force me into further talk by remaining [114] ]silent himself. A clock ticked: a clock always does tick on these occasions. He coughed. I looked steadily towards the window. For a full minute there must have been silence: to me it seemed an hour; to him I have no doubt it seemed eternity.
“I think, Mr Cumberland, we shall be able to come to a satisfactory arrangement,” he said, when eternity had passed. “What do you say to such-and-such an amount?”
And he staggered me by mentioning a sum exactly treble the amount I had been receiving for the last two years.
As I walked into the Strand, I felt a mean and disagreeable bargain-driver, but after I had lunched at Simpson’s, I said to myself: “What a fool you were not to go to see him twelve months ago!”
But though many people equally as obscure as myself earn a thousand pounds a year by their pens, you must not imagine that all the men who are famous writers do likewise. By no means always does it happen that a man combines literary genius and the power of earning money, and there are many men rightly honoured in our own day whose earnings do not involve them in the payment of income tax. The faculty of making money, no matter whether it is made out of the sale of pills or poems, tripe or tragedies, is innate. No man by taking thought can add a thousand pounds a year to his income, for money is not made by thought but by intuition.
I know a man in Chelsea who earns fifteen hundred pounds a year by writing what, in my schoolboy days, we called (and perhaps they are still called) “bloods.” He knocks off a cool five thousand words a day every day for three weeks, and then takes a week’s holiday—boys’ “bloods,” servant-girls’ novelettes, children’s fairy tales and newspaper serials. He is a cheerful, energetic man, whose hobbies are bull-dogs and Shakespeare, and he has [115] ]five different pen-names. For the matter of that, I use three different pseudonyms, my reason for doing this being that the editor of The Spectator, say, might not accept my work if he knew I was writing at the same time for The English Review (I have written for both publications), and I am doubtful if The Morning Post would have printed a single word of mine if the editor had been aware that I was having a thousand words a day printed in The Daily Citizen. Some editors like what they call “versatility of thought,” others (I think rightly) distrust it.
But I can very well believe that this gossip about money appears to you very sordid. Well, so it is. My final paragraph shall not be permitted to mention, or even hint at, hard cash.
. . . . . . . .