‘Why don’t you try journalism, Le Breton?’ he said to Ernest one night, as they sat discussing possibilities for the future in the little parlour together. ‘Literature in some form or other’s clearly the best thing for a man like you to turn his hand to. It demands less compliance with conventional rules than any other profession. No editor or publisher would ever dream of dismissing you, for example, because you invited your firebrand friend Max Schurz to dinner. On the contrary, if it comes to that, he’d ask you what Herr Max thought about the future of trades unions and the socialist movement in Germany, and he’d advise you to turn it into a column and a half of copy, with a large type sensational heading, “A Communistic Leader Interviewed. From our Special Correspondent.”’
‘But it’s such a very useless, unsocialistic trade,’ Ernest answered doubtfully. ‘Do you think it would be quite right, Arthur, for a man to try and earn money by it? Of course it isn’t much worse than school-mastering, I dare say; nobody can say he’s performing a very useful function for the world by hammering a few lines of Ovid into the skull of poor stupid Blenkinsopp major, who after all will only use what he calls his education, if he uses it in any way at all, to enable him to make rather more money than any other tobacco-pipe manufacturer in the entire trade. Still, one does feel for all that, that mere writing of books and papers is a very unsatisfactory kind of work for an ethical being to perform for humanity. How much better, now, if one could only be a farm-labourer or a shoemaker!’
Arthur Berkeley looked across at him half angrily. ‘My dear Ernest,’ he said, in a severer voice than he often used, ‘the time has gone by now for this economical puritanism of yours. It won’t do any longer. You have to think of your child and of Mrs. Le Breton. Your first duty is to earn a livelihood for them and yourself; when you’ve done that satisfactorily, you may begin to think of the claims of humanity. Don’t be vexed with me, my dear fellow, if I speak to you very plainly. You’ve lost your place at Pilbury because you wouldn’t be practical. You might have known they wouldn’t let you go hobnobbing publicly before the very eyes of boys and parents with a firebrand German Socialist. Mind, I don’t say anything against Herr Schurz myself—what little I know about him is all in his favour—that he’s a thorn in the side of those odious prigs, the political economists. I’ve often noticed that when a man wants to dogmatise to his heart’s content without fear of contradiction, he invariably calls himself a political economist. Then if people differ from him, he smiles at them the benign smile of superior wisdom, and says superciliously, “Ah, I see you don’t understand political economy!” Now, your Herr Schurz is a dissenter among economists, I believe—a sort of embryo Luther come to tilt with a German toy lance against their economical infallibilities; and I’m told he knows more about the subject than all the rest of them put together. Of course, if you like him and respect him—and I know you have one superstition left, my dear fellow—there’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t do so; but you mustn’t parade him too openly before the scandalised faces of respectable Pilbury. In future, you must be practical. Turn your hand to whatever you can get to do, and leave humanity at large to settle the debtor and creditor account with you hereafter.’
‘I’ll do my best, Berkeley,’ Ernest answered submissively; ‘and if you like, I’ll strangle my conscience and try my hand at journalism.’
‘Do, there’s a good man,’ Arthur Berkeley said, delighted at his late conversion. ‘I know two or three editor fellows pretty well, and if you’ll only turn off something, I’ll ask them to have a look at it.’
Next morning, at breakfast, Ernest discussed the possibilities of this new venture very seriously with sympathising Edie. ‘It’s a great risk,’ he said, turning it over dubiously in his mind; ‘a great risk, and a great expense too, for nothing certain. Let me see, there’ll be a quire of white foolscap to start with; that’ll be a shilling—a lot of money as things go at present, Edie, isn’t it?’
‘Why not begin with half a quire, Ernest?’ said his little wife, cautiously. ‘That’d be only sixpence, you see.’
‘Do they halve quires at the stationer’s, I wonder?’ Ernest went on still mentally reckoning. ‘Well, suppose we put it at sixpence. Then we’ve got pens already by us, but not any ink—that’s a penny—and there’s postage, say about twopence; total ninepence. That’s a lot of money, isn’t it, now, for a pure uncertainty?’
‘I’d try it, Ernest dear, if I were you,’ Edie answered. ‘We must do something, mustn’t we, dear, to earn our living.’
‘We must,’ Ernest said, sighing. ‘I wish it were anything but that; but I suppose what must be must be. Well, I’ll go out a walk by myself in the quietest streets I can find, and try if I can think of anything on earth a man can write about. Arthur Berkeley says I ought to begin with a social article for a paper; he knows the “Morning Intelligence” people, and he’ll try to get them to take something if I can manage to write it. I wonder what on earth would do as a social article for the “Morning Intelligence”! If only they’d let me write about socialism now! but Arthur says they won’t take that; the times aren’t yet ripe for it. I wish they were, Edie, I wish they were; and then perhaps you and I would find some way to earn ourselves a decent living.’