He agreed.
We had a good luncheon at The Cock in Fleet Street. I had the honor of paying for it. We discussed our chances in the libel action. Christopher Codrington said he had a “clear case.” He emphasized the damnably incriminating passages. I argued that he would only make himself ridiculous by identifying himself with my pleasantries and giving them a sinister twist. We parted in a friendly, courteous way, as two gentlemen who would cross swords later in the week.
When my solicitors heard that we two had lunched together, they threw up their hands in amazement.
“The two principals in a libel action! And the one who alleges libel allows the other to pay for his lunch! The case collapses!”
They were shocked that the law should be treated with such levity. It almost amounted to contempt.
That evening I called on “Christopher Codrington” and explained the grievous lapse of etiquette we had both committed. He was disconcerted. He was also magnanimous. I obtained his signature to a document withdrawing the action, and we shook hands in token of mutual affection and esteem.... But all my royalties on the sales of the novel, afterward reissued in cheap form, went to pay Heinemann’s bill and mine, and my most successful novel earned for me the sum of £25 until it had a second birth in the United States, after the war.
I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune, when those mocking will-o’-the-wisps lead him through the ditches of disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of times did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would not fit into my combination of circumstances, ending at four thousand words with a dramatic climax! How many hours I have spent glued to a seat in Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband and wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a man, and finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s nerves get “edgy” and one’s imagination becomes feverish with effort, so that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more resolutely it eludes one. It is like the disease of sleeplessness. The more one tries to sleep, the more wakeful one becomes. Then the free lance, having at last captured a good idea, having lived with it and shaped it with what sense of truth and beauty is in his heart, carries it like a precious gem to the market place. Alas, there is no bidder! Or the price offered insults his sensitive pride, and mocks at his butcher’s bill. It is “too good,” writes a kindly editor. “It is hardly in our style,” writes a courteous one. It is “not quite convincing,” writes a critical one.... It is bad to be a free lance in this period, when fortune hides. It is worse to be the free lance’s wife. His absent-mindedness becomes a disease.
(I remember posting twenty-two letters with twenty-two stamps, but separately, letters first and stamps next, in the red mouth of the pillar box!)
His moods of despair when his pen won’t write a single lucky word give an atmosphere of neurasthenia to the house. He becomes irritable, uncourteous, unkind, because, poor devil, he believes that he has lost his touch and his talent, upon which this woman’s life depends, as well as his own.
My life as a free lance was not devoid of those periods of morbid depression, and yet, on the whole, I was immensely lucky, compared with many other beggars of my craft. It was seldom that I couldn’t find some kind of a market for my wares, and I had an industry—I can at least boast of that, whatever the quality of my pen—which astonishes myself when I look back upon those days. I was also gifted to this extent—that I had the journalistic instinct of writing “brightly” on almost any subject in which I could grab at a few facts, and I could turn my pen to many different aspects of life and letters, which held for me always fresh and enthusiastic interest. Not high qualities, but useful to a young man in the capture of the fleeting guinea.