“I thought you said you had dealings with the other man,” I interjected.
“I did,” said Orrington, “but I never met him. It was this way. I was editing a cheap magazine at the time, the kind of thing that intends to be popular and isn’t. The man who published it was on his uppers, the wretched magazine was at death’s door, and I was getting about half of my regular stipend when I got anything at all—something like forty cents a week, if I remember correctly. I was young, of course, so all that didn’t so much matter. I was rather proud of being a real editor, even of a cheap and nasty thing like—but never mind the name. It died many years ago and was forgotten even before the funeral. I suspect now that the publisher took advantage of my youth and inexperience, but I bear him no grudge. I managed to keep afloat, and I liked it.
“Of course I had to live a double life in order to get enough to eat—a blameless double life that meant all work and no play. A fellow can do that in his twenties. After office hours I got jobs of hack writing, and occasionally I sold some little thing to one of the reputable magazines. It was hard sledding, though—a fact I emphasize not because my biography is interesting, but because it has its bearing on the incident in question.
“Well, one fine day I got hold of a job that was the best I’d ever landed. I suspect I apostrophized it, in the language of that era, as a ‘peach.’ It was hack work, of course, but hack work of a superior and exalted kind—the special article sort of thing. I went higher than a kite when I found the chance was coming my way. I dreamed dreams of opulence. Good Lord! I even looked forward to getting put up for this ill-run club which we are now honoring by our gracious presences.”
Orrington stopped and shook with silent laughter till he had to wipe his eyes. The joke seemed less good to me than to him, for I had been only six months a member of the club and had not yet acquired the proper Olympian disdain of it. Reynolds smiled. I fancy that he still regards the club as of importance. In spite of his vast renown, he is never quite easy in his dignity.
“One has no business to laugh at the enthusiasms of youth,” Orrington went on presently. “I suppose it’s bad manners to laugh even at one’s own, for we’re not the same creatures we were back there. It’s a temptation sometimes, all the same. And I was absurdly set up, I assure you, by my chance to do something of no conceivable importance at a quite decent figure. But I never did the job, after all.”
He nodded his head slowly, as if he had been some fat god of the Orient suddenly come to torpid life.
“You don’t mean that you came near starving?” I asked incredulously. The pattern of the story seemed to be getting confused.
“No, no. I wasn’t so poor as that, even though I gave up the rich job I’m telling you about. The point is that I was chronically hard up and needed the money. I couldn’t afford to do without it, but I had to. It was like this, you see. On the very day the plum dropped into my mouth, a story came into the office that bowled me over completely. I hadn’t much experience then; but I felt somehow sure that this thing wasn’t fiction at all, though it had a thin cloak of unreality flung about it. It was a cheerful little tale, the whole point of which was that the impossible hero killed himself rather than starve to death. It was very badly done in every respect, as far as I remember, but it gave me the unpleasant impression that the man who wrote it knew more about going without his dinner than about writing short stories. Of course I couldn’t accept the thing for my magazine, though I could take most kinds of drivel. Our readers didn’t exist, to be sure, but we thought they demanded bright, sunshiny rubbish. I used to fill up our numbers with saccharine mush, and I shouldn’t have dared print a gloomy story even if it had been good.
“This wasn’t good. It was punk. But it bothered me—just as the youngster’s book has been bothering me lately. I suppose I’m too undiscriminating and sentimental for the jobs I’ve had in life.”