Matt carried this request to the pillar-box through the stuffy splendor of a summer night in Holborn back streets. As he heard the slight thud of the letter in the box he had a sense of something achieved, and had no compunction in spending one of his nine remaining pennies on his supper of “baked fagot” in a muggy pork-butcher’s shop. Nightmare, followed by a giddy uprising with furred tongue and aching forehead, was the sequel of this devil-may-care diet, and early in the afternoon the nightmare seemed to resume its riot in the guise of a reply from Herbert.
Dear Matt,—What in the name of all that is unholy made you send that letter to my house instead of to the club? There’s been a devil of a row. The Old Gentleman opened the letter. He pretends he did so without noticing, as it came mixed up with his, and so few come for me to the house. When I got down to breakfast the mater was in tears and the Old Gentleman in blazes. Of course, he’d misread it altogether—imagined you wanted to borrow money instead of to get it back (isn’t it comical? It’s almost an idea for a farce for our dramatic society), and insisted you had been draining me all along (you did write you were sorry to bother me again, you old duffer). Of course I did my best to dispel the misconception, but it was no use my swearing till all was blue that this was the first application, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. He said he had had his suspicions all along, and he called the mater to witness that the first time he saw you in the shop he said you were a rogue. And at last the mater, who’d been standing up for you—I never thought she had so much backbone of her own—was converted, and confessed with tears that you had been here pretty nigh every day and swore you should never set foot here again, and the Old Gentleman dilated on the pretty return you had made for his kindness (sucking his boy’s blood, he called it, in an unusual burst of poetry), and he likewise offered some general observations on the comparative keenness of a serpent’s tooth and ingratitude. And that’s how it stands. There’s nothing to be done, I fear, but to let the thing blow over—he’ll cool down after a time. Meanwhile, you will have to write to me at the club if you want to meet me. I am awfully sorry, as I enjoyed your visits immensely. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. I’m in a frightful financial mess, but I might give you introductions here or there. I know chaps on papers and that sort of thing. I am sure you have sufficient talent to get along—and you can snap your fingers at creditors, as you haven’t got anything they can seize, and can flit any day you like. I wish I was you. With every good wish,
Yours always,
Herbert Strang.
Matt took this letter more stoically than he would have predicted. He even grinned like a Red Indian at the stake. In truth, he was already so prostrated by illness, hunger, and above all by the heat, that there was nothing left in him to be prostrated. He crawled out soon after the receipt of the letter, and recklessly bought a halfpenny currant loaf, which he washed down with water.
CHAPTER VII
TOWARDS THE DEEPS
The summer rolled heavily along, bringing strange new experiences to Matt Strang, and strange glimpses of other art-worlds than Herbert’s. For he did not starve, though Herbert had gone quite out of his life, and he had none with whom to exchange the thoughts of youth.
Two pounds ten shillings lent on his dress-suit staved off hunger and his tailor (who got the pounds), till, by the aid of the landlady’s son’s book, he found out how to tint photographs, and earned sixpences and shillings by coloring cartes-de-visite and cabinets for cheap touting photographers, censoriously critical and given to refusing the work of hours. By-and-by the Christian Home took him to its hearth, situate at the summit of a cobwebbed ramshackle staircase in Bolt Court, and paid him seven and sixpence for a half-page illustration of an unworldly serial. “Pay-day” was a delightful weekly emotion, the staff adjourning to a public-house in Fleet Street to drink one another’s health and their own damnation. Matt was forced to join them because Dick Gattel, the puffy-faced author of the spiritual romance he was illustrating (“A Godly Atonement”), insisted on standing treat, declaring with odd oaths that he’d never been so well interpreted before by any blooming paper-smudger. He also initiated Matt into the secrets of his craft, summing up in a formula the experience of a quarter of a century of story-writing. “Emotion for the penny papers, excitement for the halfpenny, self-sacrifice for the religious.” Strange impecunious beings gathered in this public-house or outside it, uncouth, unclean, unshaven; many had drifted down from society, from the universities, from the army, from the navy, with reserve forces from India and America, the flotsam of life’s wreckage, and they consoled themselves by babbling of the seamy side of the successful, rolling under their tongues the money these others were making, and parading a confident familiarity with their doings and their pass-books. Matt shuddered at the thought that he might one day become even as these—the damned-before-death. There was another artist on the staff—a thick-set German, whose wife was wont to waylay him on “pay-day,” and who always wrote on professional paper girdled with his own designs in proof of his prowess, and expressive of his willingness to undertake wash-drawings, line-drawings, color-work, or lithography, at reasonable rates and with prompt deliveries.
Through this German, who was good-natured after his second glass, Matt procured extra employment in a comic-picture factory managed by a solemn, snuffy Scotchman, who selected from old comic papers the jokes that were to be illustrated by his “hands,” and, signing the sketches with his own name, peddled them in the offices of new comic papers. Matt was paid half a crown per sketch, and his employer from four to five shillings; but when the young man tried to send original jokes and sketches direct to these papers, he got only the same two and sixpence for the few things they accepted. One editor, whose pages bristled with ballet-girls, took the trouble to explain to him that the presence of a clergyman in a sketch was a disqualification, as any attack on the Church would be distasteful to his public. From another, the Merry Miracle, whose proprietor was a philanthropist, a member of the school board, and a candidate for Parliament, he received a prospectus instructing him to eschew cross-hatching, solid black, line-work, and society figures, in favor of rough-and-tumble farce in bold outline. The more sober of the comic papers had settled staffs and settled jokes, and new-comers were not welcomed. Not that Matt’s jokes were very good: labored verbal oddities for the most part, intellectual quips and cranks which, he was quite aware, lacked the true humorous insight of Jimmy Raven, upon whom he modelled himself, feeling no first-hand impulse. Humor, indeed, was not his vocation; when he saw the world through Jimmy’s eyes he was tickled yet fortified, as one set face to face with the prose of the real, and finding it genial; but he could not see it like this himself. His was a world of beauty set over a strange, disquieting substratum of ugliness, from which it were best to avert one’s eyes, and which, perhaps, existed only as something to aspire away from.
Jimmy Raven had published A Sketch-Book of Beggars which Matt Strang had found vastly entertaining; and yet Matt Strang saw rather the tragedy of beggars than their humor, and this tragedy seemed to him outside the realm of Art. It was only their occasional picturesqueness that attracted his artistic interest at this period of his development, and all the figures of his so-called comic sketches were either pretty or picturesque. He studied extensively in the streets, note-book in hand, fearful of losing the subtleties of nature through his inability to afford even the cheap, casual models of his first days in London, and training himself to catch the salient points of character or movement at first glance. Probably no artist ever made comic pictures so seriously as Matt Strang, with such scrupulous backgrounds, in the which, when they were done in wash, he strove with entirely unappreciated thoroughness, by careful adjustment of values, to make his black and white yield veracious color-effects. When the drawings were accepted, they came out so reduced and so badly reproduced that the subtleties were blurred away, and the values quite transmuted. Wood-engraving falsified the lines or photography the color, and thus their appearance in print was as much a pain as a pleasure.