When I first met him he had just completed a series of papers in the Athenæum upon the drama under the signature of “Q,” winning some little renown in a sharp controversy with Charles Reade, in which he was certainly not worsted.
My other stable companion, Francillon, was of an exactly opposite temperament. Endowed with considerable imagination, which was happily exhibited in Pearl and Emerald, a novel which had been published in the Cornhill Magazine, he was by habit plodding and industrious, qualities which aroused in Purnell a degree of disapproval that sometimes almost verged on resentment.
“Now, Francillon,” he used to say, “loves work. I don’t. I hate it; I loathe it! People will tell you, my dear Carribus”—for so he often addressed me—“that to work is to pray. Well, of the two, I find it easier to pray. Why should I work?” he used to add, with an air of deep and earnest conviction. “I want nothing, only my twopence. All I need is a herring and a glass of ale, and when I have earned that I like to be idle. Some men, so they say, like work. I don’t!” And he did not.
One fixed appointment which he held was to contribute a weekly article on Conservative Policy to the pages of an important provincial paper. Long before the day came when this article had to be despatched by the evening post he used to look upon the impending task with something like horror, and yet nothing could ever induce him to anticipate by an hour the execution of his labours.
Indeed, as a rule, he never wrote it at all. When the day came and we had finished our morning’s work on the Globe, he would generally invite Francillon and myself to a frugal lunch at the old Gaiety Restaurant, and when the invitation was issued we always knew what was in store for us. As the lunch neared its end he would breach the subject by imploring us to supply him with a topic.
“It’s the topic, my dear boy, there’s the devil of it. If I only had a topic I could do it in an hour”—a purely fallacious statement, seeing that no amount of topics would ever have induced him to do it single-handed at all.
Francillon would sometimes heave a sigh, and then with newly-lit cigars we would wend our way back to the old Globe office, where our working-room overlooked the chapel of the Savoy. By that time either Francillon or I had found a topic, for although I was then, and have since remained, a Liberal in politics, I found it not difficult, and sometimes even diverting, to engage in the advocacy of Conservative Policy in the service of our indolent friend.
Perhaps it was I who generally found the subject for the article, and when I announced it Purnell would reply, “Then begin, my dear boy; begin it, Carribus; the thing’s done.”
In those days a leading article always consisted of three paragraphs, and the three paragraphs of this authoritative statement on Conservative ideas were on these happy occasions divided between the three of us, Purnell always reserving to himself the conclusion, not because I think he had any special aptitude in bringing the argument to an end, but because it gave him a longer time to smoke his pipe before his turn came to set upon his task.
And so it came about that I having opened the debate, Francillon at the same time would be busily engaged in the discussion necessary for the central paragraph, while Purnell, looking over our shoulders with chuckling glee, and passing contentedly from chair to chair as he saw his task nearing its end, would finally be persuaded to sit down at his own desk and scribble about eight sentences which were supposed, by their invincible logic, to confirm and strengthen the Tory convictions of the city to which the article was to be despatched.