A cold hand seemed laid upon my heart. My mind leaped to what he meant. Something had gone wrong with the Orb holiday work, my sheet-anchor.
“Do you remember writing a par about Stickney, the butter-scotch man, you know, ragging him when he got his peerage?”
“Yes.”
It was one of the best paragraphs I had ever done. A two-line thing, full of point and sting. I had been editing “On Your Way” that day, Fermin being on a holiday and Gresham ill; and I had put the paragraph conspicuously at the top of the column.
“Well,” said Fermin, “I’m afraid there was rather trouble about it. Hamilton came into our room yesterday, and asked if I should be seeing you. I said I thought I should. ‘Well, tell him,’ said Hamilton, ‘that that paragraph of his about Stickney has only cost us five hundred pounds. That’s all.’ And he went out again. Apparently Stickney was on the point of advertising largely with the Orb, and had backed out in a huff. Today, I went to see him about my holiday, and he wanted to know who was coming in to do my work. I mentioned you, and he absolutely refused to have you in. I’m awfully sorry about it.”
I was silent. The shock was too great. Instead of drifting easily into my struggle on a comfortable weekly salary, I should have to start the tooth-and-nail fighting at once. I wanted to get away somewhere by myself, and grapple with the position.
I said good-bye to Fermin, retaining sufficient presence of mind to treat the thing lightly, and walked swiftly along the restless Strand, marvelling at what I had suffered at the hands of Fortune. The deceiver of Margaret, deceived by Eva, a pauper! I covered the distance between Groom’s and Walpole Street in sombre meditation.
In a sort of dull panic I sat down immediately on my arrival, and tried to work. I told myself that I must turn out something, that it would be madness to waste a moment.
I sat and chewed my pen from two o’clock till five, but not a page of printable stuff could I turn out. Looking back at myself at that moment, I am not surprised that my ideas did not flow. It would have been a wonderful triumph of strength of mind if I had been able to write after all that had happened. Dr. Johnson has laid it down that a man can write at any time, if he sets himself to it earnestly; but mine were exceptional circumstances. My life’s happiness and my means for supporting life at all, happy or otherwise, had been swept away in a single morning; and I found myself utterly unable to pen a coherent sentence.
At five o’clock I gave up the struggle, and rang for tea.