“Heart,” he managed to answer. “She excited me on purpose, I am sure of it. I am dying.”
I told him his only chance was to keep calm. A hansom was the quickest thing in London in those days; but I seemed to be hours getting back to the office. My chief rushed off a four-line will, leaving everything the man possessed to his wife, and expressly cancelling the will made the day before. He was in great pain when we got back, but was just able to sign. And then I went for a doctor. He died in the evening. The lady changed her solicitors. I met her years afterwards, at a reception at the Foreign Office. She remembered me, and was most gracious. She had grown grey, but was still a handsome woman.
All this time I had been writing stories, plays, essays. But it was years before anything came of it.
Chapter IV
MY FIRST BOOK, AND OTHERS
My first book! He stands before me, bound in paper wrapper of a faint pink colour, as though blushing all over for his sins. “On the Stage—and Off. By Jerome K. Jerome” (the K very large, followed by a small j; so that by many the name of the author was taken to be Jerome Kjerome). “The Brief Career of a would-be Actor. One shilling nett. Ye Leadenhall Press. London. 1885.”
He was born in Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road, in a second floor back overlooking a burial ground. The house is now a part of Whitfield's Tabernacle. A former tenant of the room—some young clerk like myself, I guessed him to be—had been in love with a girl named Annie. The bed was in a corner, and, lying there, he had covered the soot-grimed wall-paper with poetry to her—of sorts. It meandered in and out among Chinese temples, willow-trees and warriors. One verse I remember ran:
“Oh, Annie fair, beyond compare,
To speak my love I do not dare.
Oh, cruel Fate that shakes her head,