"Mr. Baffall was good enough to recommend you, Larrance, a long time ago; and we accepted that recommendation because he had had a good deal to do with the firm. But Mr. Baffall would be the last to expect us to keep on anybody we don't want. You're all right, Larrance—but you're not all right here. You dream too much; you're not smart enough. I think, for all our sakes, it would be better if you shook hands, and had a look round somewhere else. London's a big place—and I daresay you'll get on."
So Jimmy, with a curious feeling that was half fear and half elation, turned his back upon the warehouse he had known for some four years, and went out into the world in a new sense. He had plenty of money, as he counted money then, in hand; and there was work to be done for the young man who presided over that particular paper, and for other men doubtless, young as well as old.
The first thing Jimmy did was to leave that boarding-house in the neighbourhood of Camden Town, and to look about for a place more suited to his requirements as a literary man, and as an independent one to boot. After much searching, he discovered some rooms at the top of an old house in a small court leading out of Holborn; with an ancient wheezy dame to cook his breakfast and to make his bed, and to shift the dust about his room on occasion. There he established himself with his books; from there, on the first evening, he went as a new luxury to a small restaurant, and partook of a modest meal.
Somehow or other, matters did not seem to go on so smoothly after that time. For example, he went one day to the office over which his first friend presided, to discover that first friend standing outside on the pavement, with his coat on for the first time, thoughtfully scratching his chin and staring at his boots. On Jimmy accosting him, he looked up, and laughed ruefully.
"We've doubled up, dear boy," he said. "The blessed old rag has held out as long as it could; and the circulation has gone down and down till we hadn't got a gasp left in us; and we couldn't even afford to give it away! Not but what we're doing the thing properly, mind you," he added hastily. "You'll find your money all right on Friday—but it's the last. What's going to become of me I don't quite know; but I think there's a chance of my being mopped up by one of the big syndicates. I'm going to try, at any rate; it isn't quite so wearing a life."
Jimmy discovered that they had sold the novelettes; he had an introduction to the new proprietor, and contrived to get a little work out of him, though at a cheaper rate even than before. For the rest, with something like a new despair beginning to knock at his young heart, he scurried round, and wrote anything and everything he could.
Often and often, in those first few months, he knew what it was to have to think more than twice before spending a sixpence for food; he grew, too, to dread the coming of the wheezy old dame with a certain red-covered little book which contained the account for his breakfasts and for her own personal attendance upon him; invented excuses, now and then, to go out, so as to miss seeing her. But in some fashion he managed to pay that; managed also to put aside a little towards that big item—rent. Though that was a nightmare, indeed—a thing that meant the counting of days with a palpitating heart.
He found his way, quite naturally, to the British Museum and its reading-room; discovered also near it a tiny tea shop, where, provided you bought butter-and only one pat at that—you might eat as much bread as ever you liked. Oh—a blessed institution, and one to be encouraged!
So, struggling along, with an occasional flutter of the heart—(only very occasional this) at the sight of his name on a list of contents of some small paper; often hungry, and much perplexed at times over the question of clothes; with a wistful eye to the great men at the top, who had begun long ago perhaps in some such fashion as this; Jimmy trod the ways of freedom with a fair amount of contentment.