by Grant Allen
The editor of the ‘Morning Intelligence’ is an important personage in contemporary politics, and a man of more real weight in the world than half-a-dozen Members of Parliament for obscure country boroughs; but even that mighty man himself would probably have been a little surprised as well as amused (if he could have seen it) at the way in which Ernest and Edie Le Breton anxiously endeavoured to conciliate beforehand his merest possible personal fads and fancies. As a matter of fact, the question of the particular paper on which the article was written mattered to him absolutely less than nothing, inasmuch as he never looked at anything whatsoever until it had been set up in type for him to pass off-hand judgment upon its faults or its merits. His time was far too valuable to be lightly wasted on the task of deciphering crabbed manuscript.
In the afternoon, Berkeley called to see whether Ernest had followed his suggestion, and was agreeably surprised to find a whole article already finished. He glanced through the neatly written pages, and was still more pleased to discover that Ernest, with an unsuspected outburst of practicality and practicability, had really hit upon a possible subject. ‘This may do, Ernest,’ he said with a sigh of relief. ‘I dare say it will. I know Lancaster wants leader writers, and I think this is quite good enough to serve his turn. I’ve spoken to him about you: come round with me now — he’ll be at the office by four o’clock — and we’ll see what we can do for you. It’s absolutely useless sending anything to the editor of a daily paper without an introduction. You might write with the pen of the angel Gabriel, or turn out leaders which were a judicious mean between Gladstone, Burke, and Herbert Spencer, and it would profit you nothing, for the simple reason that he hasn’t got the time to read them. He would toss Junius and Montesquieu into the waste paper basket, and accept copy on the shocking murder in the Borough Road from one of his regular contributors instead. He can’t help himself: and what you must do, Ernest, is to become one of the regular ring, and combine to keep Junius and Montesquieu permanently outside.’
‘The struggle for existence gives no quarter,’ Ernest said sadly with half a sigh.
‘And takes none,’ Berkeley answered quickly. ‘So for your wife’s sake you must try your best to fight your way through it on your own account, for yourself and your family.’
The editor of the ‘Morning Intelligence,’ Mr. Hugh Lancaster, was a short, thick-set, hard-headed sort of man, with a kindly twinkle in his keen grey eyes, and a harassed smile playing continually around the corners of his firm and dose mouth. He looked as though he was naturally a good-humoured benevolent person, overdriven at the journalistic mill till half the life was worn out of him, leaving the benevolence as a wearied remnant, without energy enough to express itself in any other fashion than by the perpetual harassed smile. He saw Arthur Berkeley and Ernest Le Breton at once in his own sanctum, and took the manuscript from their hands with a languid air of perfect resignation. ‘This is the friend you spoke of, is it, Berkeley?’ he said in a wearied way. ‘Well, well, we’ll see what we can do for him.’ At the same time he rang a tiny hand-bell. A boy, rather the worse for printer’s ink, appeared at the summons. Mr. Lancaster handed him Ernest’s careful manuscript unopened, with the laconic order, ‘Press. Proof immediately.’ The boy took it without a word. ‘I’m very busy now,’ Mr. Lancaster went on in the same wearied dispirited manner: ‘come again in thirty-five minutes. Jones, show these gentlemen into a room somewhere.’ And the editor fell back forthwith into his easy-chair and his original attitude of listless indifference. Berkeley and Ernest followed the boy into a bare back room, furnished only with a deal table and two chairs, and there anxiously awaited the result of the editor’s critical examination.
‘Don’t be afraid of Lancaster, Ernest,’ Arthur said kindly. ‘His manner’s awfully cold, I know, but he means well, and I really believe he’d go out of his way, rather than not, to do a kindness for anybody he thought actually in want of occupation. With most men, that’s an excellent reason for not employing you: with Lancaster I do truly think it’s a genuine recommendation.’
At the end of thirty-five minutes the grimy-faced office-boy returned with a friendly nod. ‘Editor’ll see you,’ he said, with the Spartan brevity of the journalistic world — nobody connected with newspapers ever writes or speaks a single word unnecessarily, if he isn’t going to be paid for it at so much per thousand — and Ernest followed him, trembling from head to foot, into Mr. Lancaster’s private study.
The great editor took up the steaming hot proof that had just been brought him, and glanced down it carelessly with a rapid scrutiny. Then he turned to Ernest, and said in a dreamy fashion, ‘This will do. We’ll print this to-morrow. You may send us a middle very occasionally. Come here at four o’clock, when a subject suggests itself to you, and speak to me about it. My time’s very fully occupied. Good morning, Mr. Le Breton. Berkeley, stop a minute, I want to talk with you.’
It was all done in a moment, and almost before Ernest knew what had happened he was out in the street again, with tears filling his eyes, and joy his heart, for here at last was bread, bread, bread, for Edie and the baby! He ran without stopping all the way back to Holloway, rushed headlong into the house and fell into Edie’s arms, calling out wildly, ‘He’s taken it! He’s taken it!’ Edie kissed him half-a-dozen times over, and answered bravely, ‘I knew he would, Ernest. It was such a splendid article.’ And yet thousands of readers of the ‘Morning Intelligence’ next day skimmed lightly over the leader on organ-boys in their ordinary casual fashion, without even thinking what hopes and fears and doubts and terrors had gone to the making of that very commonplace bit of newspaper rhetoric. For if the truth must be told, Edie’s first admiring criticism was perfectly correct, and Ernest Le Breton’s leader was just for all the world exactly the same as anybody else’s.
Meanwhile, Arthur Berkeley had stayed behind as requested in Mr. Lancaster’s study, and waited to hear what Mr. Lancaster had to say to him. The editor looked up at him wearily from his chair, passed his bread hand slowly across his bewildered forehead, and then said the one word, ‘Poor?’
‘Nothing on earth to do,’ Berkeley answered.
‘He might make a journalist, perhaps,’ the editor said, sleepily. ‘This social’s up to the average. At any rate, I’ll do my very best for him. But he can’t live upon socials. We have too many social men already. What can he do? That’s the question. It won’t do to say he can write pretty nearly as well about anything that turns up as any other man in England can do. I can get a hundred young fellows in the Temple to do that, any day. The real question’s this: is there anything he can write about a great deal better than all the other men in all England put together?’
‘Yes, there is,’ Berkeley answered with commendable promptitude, undismayed by Mr. Lancaster’s excessive requirements. ‘He knows more about communists, socialists, and political exiles generally, than anybody else in the whole of London.’
‘Good,’ the editor answered, brightening up, and speaking for a moment a little less languidly. ‘That’s good. There’s this man Schurz, now, the German agitator. He’s going to be tried soon for a seditious libel it seems, and he’ll be sent to prison, naturally. Now, does your friend know anything at all of this fellow?’
‘He knows him personally and intimately,’ Berkeley replied, delighted to find that the card which had proved so bad a one at Pilbury Regis was turning up trumps in the more Bohemian neighbourhood of the Temple and Fleet Street. ‘He can give you any information you want about Schurz or any of the rest of those people. He has associated with them all familiarly for the last six or seven years.’
‘Then he takes an interest in politics,’ said Mr. Lancaster, almost waking up now. ‘That’s good again. It’s so very difficult to find young men nowadays, able to write, who take a genuine interest in politics. They all go off after literature and science and aesthetics, and other dry uninteresting subjects. Now, what does your average intelligent daily paper reader care, I should like to
know, about literature and science and aesthetics and so forth? Well, he’ll do, I’ve very little doubt: at any rate, I’ll give him a trial. Perhaps he might be able to undertake this Great Widgerly disenfranchising case. Stop! he’s poor, isn’t he? I daresay he’d just as soon not wait for his money for this social. In the ordinary course, he wouldn’t get paid till the end of the quarter; but I’ll give you a cheque to take back to him now; perhaps he wants it. Poor fellow, poor fellow! he really looks very delicate. Depend upon it, Berkeley, I’ll do anything on earth for him, if only he’ll write tolerably.’
‘You’re awfully good,’ Arthur said, taking the proffered cheque gratefully. ‘I’m sure the money will be of great use to him: and it’s very kind indeed of you to have thought of it.’
‘Not at all, not at all,’the editor answered, collapsing dreamily. ‘Good morning, good morning.’
At Mrs. Halliss’s lodgings in Holloway, Edie was just saying to Ernest over their simple tea, ‘I wonder what they’ll give you for it, Ernest.’ And Ernest had just answered, big with hope, ‘Well, I should think it would be quite ten shillings, but I shouldn’t be surprised, Edie, if it was as much as a pound;’ when the door opened, and in walked Arthur Berkeley, with a cheque in his hand, which he laid by Edie’s teacup. Edie took it up and gave a little cry of delight and astonishment. Ernest caught it from her hand in his eagerness, and gazed upon it with dazed and swimming vision. Did he read the words aright, and could it be really, ‘Pay E. Le Breton, Esq., or order, three guineas’? Three guineas! Three guineas! Three real actual positive gold and silver guineas! It was almost too much for either of them to believe, and all for a single morning’s light labour! What a perfect Eldorado of wealth and happiness seemed now to be opening out unexpectedly before them!
So much Arthur Berkeley, his own eyes glistening too with a sympathetic moisture, saw and heard before he went away in a happier mood and left them to their own domestic congratulations. But he did not see or know the reaction that came in the dead of night, after all that day’s unwonted excitement, to poor, sickening, weary, over-burdened Ernest. Even Edie never knew it all, for Ernest was careful to hide it as much as possible from her knowledge. But he knew himself, though he would not even light the candle to see it, that he had got those three glorious guineas — the guineas they had so delighted in — with something more than a morning’s labour. He had had to pay for them, not figuratively but literally, with some of his very life-blood.
CHAPTER XXV.
HARD PRESSED.
A week or two later, while ‘The Primate of Fiji’ was still running vigorously at the Ambiguities Theatre, Arthur Berkeley’s second opera, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey; or, the Bold Buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs,’ was brought out with vast success and immense exultation at the Marlborough. There is always a strong tendency to criticise a little severely the second work of a successful beginner: people like to assume a knowing air, and to murmur self-complacently that they felt sure from the beginning he couldn’t keep up permanently to his first level. But in spite of that natural tendency of the unregenerate human mind, and in spite, too, of a marked political bias on the author’s part, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ took the town by storm almost as completely as ‘The Primate of Fiji’ had done before it. Everybody said that though the principles of the piece were really quite atrocious, when one came to think of them seriously, yet the music and the dialogue were crisp and brisk enough to float any amount of social or economical heresy that that clever young man, Mr. Arthur Berkeley, might choose to put into one of his amusing and original operas.
The social and economical heresies, of course, were partly due to Ernest Le Breton’s insidious influence. At the same time that Berkeley was engaged in partially converting Ernest, Ernest was engaged in the counter process of partially converting Berkeley. To say the truth, the conversion was not a very difficult matter to effect; the neophyte had in him implicitly already the chief saving doctrines of the socialistic faith, or, if one must put it conversely, the germs of the disease were constitutionally implanted in his system, and only needed a little external encouragement to bring the poison out fully in the most virulent form of the complaint. The great point of ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ consisted in the ridiculous contrast it exhibited between the wealth, dignity, and self-importance of the duke himself, and the squalid, miserable, shrinking poverty of the East-end purlieus from which he drew his enormous revenues. Ernest knew a little about the East-end from practical experience; he had gone there often with Ronald, on his rounds of mercy, and had seen with his own eyes those dens of misery which most people have only heard or read about. It was Ernest who had suggested this light satirical treatment of the great social problem, whose more serious side he himself had learnt to look at in Max Schurz’s revolutionary salon; and it was to Ernest that Arthur Berkeley owed the first hint of that famous scene where the young Countess of Coalbrookdale converses familiarly on the natural beauties of healthful labour with the chorus of intelligent colliery hands, in the most realistic of grimy costumes, from her father’s estates in Staffordshire. The stalls hardly knew whether to laugh or frown when the intelligent colliers respectfully invited the countess, in her best Ascot flounces and furbelows, to enjoy the lauded delights of healthful mine labour in propriâ personâ: but they quite recovered their good humour when the band of theatrical buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs, clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets of the marine-storedealers’ fashionable pattern. It was all only the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the very faintest shades of caricature upon the stage; but it made the incongruities more incongruous still to see them crowded together so closely in a single concentrated tableau. Unthinking people laughed uproariously at the fun and nonsense of the piece; thinking people laughed too, but not without an uncomfortable side twinge of conscientious remorse at the pity of it all. Some wise heads even observed with a shrug that when this sort of thing was applauded upon the stage, the fine old institutions of England were getting into dangerous contact with these pernicious continental socialistic theories. And no doubt those good people were really wise in their generation. ‘When Figaro came,’ Arthur Berkeley said himself to Ernest, ‘the French revolution wasn’t many paces behind on the track of the ages.’
‘Better even than the Primate, Mr. Berkeley,’ said Hilda Tregellis, as she met him in a London drawing-room a few days later. ‘What a delightful scene, that of the Countess of Coalbrookdale! You’re doing real good, I do believe, by making people think about these things more seriously, you know. As poor dear Mr. Le Breton would have said, you’ve got an ethical purpose — isn’t that the word? — underlying even your comic operas. By the way, do you ever see the Le Bretons now? Poor souls, I hear they’re doing very badly. The elder brother, Herbert Le Breton — horrid wretch! — he’s here to-night; going to marry that pretty Miss Faucit, they say; daughter of old Mr. Faucit, the candle-maker — no, not candles, soap I think it is — but it doesn’t matter twopence nowadays, does it? Well, as I was saying, you’re doing a great deal of good with characters like this Countess of Coalbrookdale. We want more mixture of classes, don’t we? more free intercourse between them; more familiarity of every sort. For my part, now, I should really very much like to know more of the inner life of the working classes.’ ‘If only he’d ask me to go to lunch,’ she thought, ‘with his dear old father, the superannuated shoemaker! so very romantic, really!’
But Arthur only smiled a sphinx-like smile, and answered lightly, ‘You would probably object to their treatment of you as much as the countess objected to the uupleasant griminess of the too-realistic coal galleries. Suppose you were to fall into the hands of a logical old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his
opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman — perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular downright minx and hussey?’
‘Charming,’ Lady Hilda answered, with perfect candour; ‘so very different from the senseless adulation of all the Hughs, and Guys, and Berties! What I do love in talking to clever men, Mr. Berkeley, is their delicious frankness and transparency. If they think one a fool, they tell one so plainly, or at least they let one see it without any reserve. Now that, you know, is really such a very delightful trait in clever people’s characters!’
‘I don’t know how you can have had the opportunity of judging, Lady Hilda,’ Arthur answered, looking at her handsome open face with a momentary glance of passing admiration — Hilda Tregellis was improving visibly as she matured— ‘for no one can possibly ever have thought anything of the sort with you, I’m certain: and that I can say quite candidly, without the slightest tinge of flattery or adulation.’
‘What! YOU don’t think me a fool, Mr. Berkeley,’ cried Lady Hilda, delighted even with that very negative bit of favourable appreciation. ‘Now, that I call a real compliment, I assure you, because I know you clever people pitch your standard of intelligence so very, very high! You consider everybody fools, I’m sure, except the few people who are almost as clever as you yourselves are. However, to return to the countess: I do think there ought to be more mixture of classes in England, and somebody told me’ — this was a violent effort to be literary on Hilda’s part, by way of rising to the height of the occasion— ‘somebody told me that Mr. Matthew Arnold, who’s so dreadfully satirical, and cultivated, and so forth, thinks exactly the same thing, you know. Why shouldn’t the Countess of Coalbrookdale have really married the foreman of the colliers? I daresay she’d have been a great deal happier with a kind-hearted sensible man like him than with that lumbering, hunting, pheasant-shooting, horse-racing lout of a Lord Coalbrookdale, who would go to Norway on a fishing tour without her — now wouldn’t she?’
