“Thought you had rather that look,” he said; and went on quickly as if he were afraid that I might, in the circumstances, be tempted to detail my own achievements; “and that being so, my case might interest you, professionally, as you might say.”
“It certainly would, if you care to....” I began, but I saw that he was not listening. Those queer-looking eyes of his had taken on the expression of one who is engaged in some immense effort of memory.
“As a young man,” he said—I guessed him to be, then, about thirty-five—“I had a great ambition to become a writer; but although my mind was full of ideas, I had no gift for putting them into language. At first, I tried in the ordinary way, just as all beginners do, to write stories for the magazines; but they none of them got accepted. Which wasn’t to be wondered at. I knew myself how bad they were, and I used to console myself a little with that knowledge. I may have read somewhere that so long as you kept a cool head about your own writing, there was hope for you.
“Anyway, I left off writing for a time—I wasn’t twenty then—and took to studying. I read all the best authors—carefully, trying to see how the thing was done. I had a lot of spare time one way and another, and in the next five years I got through a wonderful lot of reading. I didn’t confine myself to English authors, either; I read a heap of translations from Russian, French, and German. And all that time I never once tried to write again, myself. I was just getting to learn my trade, I thought.
“Then I lost my job in the city, and while I was looking about for another one I had another shot at writing a magazine story. Well, it was certainly the nearest I’d got up to then of being the right thing. It was a lot better written than any of my other shots, but the plot was too weak. And I found that in learning to write I had lost all my ideas. I’d forgotten all the old ones, and no new ones came to me. At least, not at first.”
He paused a moment and looked out of the window before he continued, rather abruptly: “An idea came to me, though, in the train one day—the best I’d ever had. And I not only saw the whole story clear in my mind, but I saw just how it ought to be written. I went home and began it at once. I had it finished in two days. A little masterpiece I thought it was. I submitted it to one of the reviews, and it was accepted within a week.
“A fortnight later I’d written another. It was very different from the first—done in another mood, as you might say, and lighter altogether. But that one came, too, as an inspiration, and was accepted by one of the magazines. And, after that, I used to get inspirations every other day almost—all sorts of inspirations. I saw myself as the most versatile and gifted writer of the day. I fancied that when my stories were collected and published in book form they would cause a lot of attention. By the time my second story appeared in the magazine—that was the first to get into print—I had written about eight altogether, and they’d all been taken by some editor or another—except one.”
He paused again, and remained silent for so long that I prompted him by saying: “What was the matter with that one exception?”
He looked at me and sighed. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the story, as you might say,” he said; “but there was a note from the editor in which he said that my story appeared to be a translation from some French writer, I’ve forgotten the name, and should not have been submitted as an original contribution. Rather a nasty note it was.
“And about a week later my first story came out in the review, and then there was the devil to pay. It seems that that was a translation, too, from the Russian, and had been printed in English, in a collection of the fellow’s works. His name began with a T, too, I fancy, but it wasn’t Tolstoi.”