So much might have been done. When I think of that plot wasted in nine words it makes me positively angry.
And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in literature? We are paid by the length of our manuscript at rates from half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards. In the case of fellows like Doyle and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds. How are we to live on novels the serial rights of which to most of us will work out at four and nine-pence.
It can’t be done. It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we should live. That is no answer. I’m talking plain business.
And what about book-rights? Who is going to buy novels of three pages? They will have to be printed as leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen. Marie Corelli and Hall Caine—if all I hear about them is true—will possibly make their ten or twelve shillings a week. But what about the rest of us? This thing is worrying me.
SHOULD SOLDIERS BE POLITE?
My desire was once to pass a peaceful and pleasant winter in Brussels, attending to my work, improving my mind. Brussels is a bright and cheerful town, and I think I could have succeeded had it not been for the Belgian Army. The Belgian Army would follow me about and worry me. Judging of it from my own experience, I should say it was a good army. Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be permitted to get away from you—never ought to be allowed to feel, even for a moment, that he had shaken you off. What tactics the Belgian Army might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but against me personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried out with a success that was astonishing, even to myself.
I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army. I made a point of choosing the quietest and most unlikely streets, I chose all hours—early in the morning, in the afternoon, late in the evening. There were moments of wild exaltation when I imagined I had given it the slip. I could not see it anywhere, I could not hear it.
“Now,” said I to myself, “now for five minutes’ peace and quiet.”
I had been doing it injustice: it had been working round me. Approaching the next corner, I would hear the tattoo of its drum. Before I had gone another quarter of a mile it would be in full pursuit of me. I would jump upon a tram, and travel for miles. Then, thinking I had shaken it off, I would alight and proceed upon my walk. Five minutes later another detachment would be upon my heels. I would slink home, the Belgian Army pursuing me with its exultant tattoo. Vanquished, shamed, my insular pride for ever vanished, I would creep up into my room and close the door. The victorious Belgian Army would then march back to barracks.
If only it had followed me with a band: I like a band. I can loaf against a post, listening to a band with anyone. I should not have minded so much had it come after me with a band. But the Belgian Army, apparently, doesn’t run to a band. It has nothing but this drum. It has not even a real drum—not what I call a drum. It is a little boy’s drum, the sort of thing I used to play myself at one time, until people took it away from me, and threatened that if they heard it once again that day they would break it over my own head. It is cowardly going up and down, playing a drum of this sort, when there is nobody to stop you. The man would not dare to do it if his mother was about. He does not even play it. He walks along tapping it with a little stick. There’s no tune, there’s no sense in it. He does not even keep time. I used to think at first, hearing it in the distance, that it was the work of some young gamin who ought to be at school, or making himself useful taking the baby out in the perambulator: and I would draw back into dark doorways, determined, as he came by, to dart out and pull his ear for him. To my astonishment—for the first week—I learnt it was the Belgian Army, getting itself accustomed, one supposes, to the horrors of war. It had the effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man.