Short Fiction · The Adventures of Fred Pickering (3/3)

“Insensate idiot!” said Fred, tearing the note asunder, and then tearing his own hair, on both sides of his head. “And these are the men who make the world of letters! Idiot!⁠—thickheaded idiot!”

“I suppose he has not read it,” said Mary.

“Then why hasn’t he read it? Why doesn’t he do the work for which he is paid? If he has not read it, he is a thief as well as an idiot.”

Poor Fred had not thought much of his chance from the International when he first got the editor’s note; but as he had worked at his Samson he had become very fond of it, and golden dreams had fallen on him, and he had dared to whisper to himself words of wondrous praise which might be forthcoming, and to tell himself of enquiries after the unknown author of the great article about the Philistines. As he had thought of this, and as the dreams and the whispers had come to him, he had rewritten his essay from the beginning, making it grander, bigger, more eloquent than before. He became very eloquent about the Philistines, and mixed with his eloquence some sarcasm which could not, he thought, be without effect even in dull-brained, heavy-livered London. Yes; he had dared to hope. And then his essay⁠—such an essay as this⁠—was sent back to him with a notice that the International did not insert reviews of old books. Hideous, brainless, meaningless idiot! Fred in his fury tore his article into a hundred fragments; and poor Mary was employed, during the whole of the next week, in making another copy of it from the original blotted sheets, which had luckily been preserved.

“Pearls before swine!” Fred said to himself, as he slowly made his way up to the library of the Museum on the last day of that week.

That was in the end of October. He had not then earned a single shilling for many months, and the nearer prospect of that starvation of which he had once spoken so cheerily was becoming awfully frightful to him. He had said that there were worse fates than to starve. Now, as he looked at his wife, and thought of the baby that was to be added to them, and counted the waning heap of sovereigns, he began to doubt whether there was in truth anything worse than to starve. And now, too, idleness made his life more wretched to him than it had ever been. He could not bring himself to work when it seemed to him that his work was to have no result; literally none.

“Had you not better write to your father?” said Mary.

He made no reply, but went out and walked up and down Museum Street.

He had been much disgusted by the treatment he had received from Mr. Boothby, the publisher; but in November he brought himself to write to Mr. Boothby, and ask him whether some employment could not be found.

“You will perhaps remember Mr. Wickham Webb’s letter,” wrote Fred, “and the interview which I had with you last July.”

His wife had wished him to speak more civilly, and to refer to the pleasure of the interview. But Fred had declined to condescend so far. There were still left to them some thirty pounds.

A fortnight afterwards, when December had come, he got a reply from Mr. Boothby, in which he was asked to call at a certain hour at the shop in St. James’s Street. This he did, and saw the great man again. The great man asked him whether he could make an index to an historical work. Fred of course replied that he could do that⁠—that or anything else. He could make the index; or, if need was, write the historical work itself. That, no doubt, was his feeling. Ten pounds would be paid for the index if it was approved. Fred was made to understand that payment was to depend altogether on approval of the work. Fred took away the sheets confided to him without any doubt as to the ultimate approval. It would be odd indeed if he could not make an index.

“That young man will never do any good,” said Mr. Boothby to his foreman, as Fred took his departure. “He thinks he can do everything, and I doubt very much whether he can do anything as it should be done.”

Fred worked very hard at the index, and the baby was born to him as he was doing it. A fortnight, however, finished the index, and if he could earn money at the rate of ten pounds a fortnight he might still live. So he took his index to St. James’s Street, and left it for approval. He was told by the foreman that if he would call again in a week’s time he should hear the result. Of course he called on that day week. The work had not yet been examined, and he must call again after three days. He did call again; and Mr. Boothby told him that his index was utterly useless⁠—that, in fact, it was not an index at all.

“You couldn’t have looked at any other index, I think,” said Mr. Boothby.

“Of course you need not take it,” said Fred; “but I believe it to be as good an index as was ever made.”

Mr. Boothby, getting up from his chair, declared that there was nothing more to be said. The gentleman for whom the work had been done begged that Mr. Pickering should receive five pounds for his labour⁠—which unfortunately had been thus thrown away. And in saying this Mr. Boothby tendered a five-pound note to Fred. Fred pushed the note away from him, and left the room with a tear in his eye. Mr. Boothby saw the tear, and ten pounds was sent to Fred on the next day, with the gentleman’s compliments. Fred sent the ten pounds back. There was still a shot in the locker, and he could not as yet take money for work that he had not done.

By the end of January Fred had retreated with his wife and child to the shelter of a single small bedroom. Hitherto there had been a sitting-room and a bedroom; but now there were but five pounds between him and that starvation which he had once almost coveted, and every shilling must be strained to the utmost. His wife’s confinement had cost him much of his money, and she was still ill. Things were going very badly with him, and among all the things that were bad with him, his own idleness was probably the worst. When starvation was so near to him, he could not seat himself in the Museum library and read to any good purpose. And, indeed, he had no purpose. Milton was nothing to him now, as his lingering shillings became few, and still fewer. He could only sit brooding over his misfortunes, and cursing his fate. And every day, as he sat eating his scraps of food over the morsel of fire in his wife’s bedroom, she would implore him to pocket his pride and write to his father.

“He would do something for us, so that baby should not die,” Mary said to him. Then he went into Museum Street, and bethought himself whether it would not be a manly thing for him to cut his throat. At any rate there would be much relief in such a proceeding.

One day as he was sitting over the fire while his wife still lay in bed, the servant of the house brought up word that a gentleman wanted to see him. “A gentleman! what gentleman?” The girl could not say who was the gentleman, so Fred went down to receive his visitor at the door of the house. He met an old man of perhaps seventy years of age, dressed in black, who with much politeness asked him whether he was Mr. Frederick Pickering. Fred declared himself to be that unfortunate man, and explained that he had no apartment in which to be seen. “My wife is in bed upstairs, ill; and there is not a room in the house to which I can ask you.” So the old gentleman and Fred walked up Museum Street and had their conversation on the pavement. “I am Mr. Burnaby, for whose book you made an index,” said the old man.

Mr. Burnaby was an author well-known in those days, and Fred, in the midst of his misfortunes, felt that he was honoured by the visit.

“I was sorry that my index did not suit you,” said Fred.

“It did not suit at all,” said Mr. Burnaby. “Indeed it was no index. An index should comprise no more than words and figures. Your index conveyed opinions, and almost criticism.”

“If you suffered inconvenience, I regret it much,” said Fred. “I was punished at any rate by my lost labour.”

“I do not wish you to be punished at all,” said Mr. Burnaby, “and therefore I have come to you with the price in my hand. I am quite sure that you worked hard to do your best.” Then Mr. Burnaby’s fingers went into his waistcoat pocket, and returned with a crumpled note.

“Certainly not, Mr. Burnaby,” said Fred. “I can take nothing that I have not earned.”

“Now my dear young friend, listen to me. I know that you are poor.”

“I am very poor.”

“And I am rich.”

“That has nothing to do with it. Can you put me in the way of earning anything by literature? I will accept any such kindness as that at your hand; but nothing else.”

“I cannot. I have no means of doing so.”

“You know so many authors and so many publishers.”

“Though I knew all the authors and all the publishers, what can I do? Excuse me if I say that you have not served the apprenticeship that is necessary.”

“And do all authors serve apprenticeships?”

“Certainly not. And it may be that you will rise to wealth and fame without apprenticeship;⁠—but if so you must do it without help.”

After that they walked silently together half the length of the street before Fred spoke again. “You mean,” said he, “that a man must be either a genius or a journeyman.”

“Yes, Mr. Pickering; that, or something like it, is what I mean.”

Fred told Mr. Burnaby his whole story, walking up and down Museum Street⁠—even to that early assurance given to his young bride that there were worse things in the world than starvation. And then Mr. Burnaby asked him what were his present intentions. “I suppose we shall try it,” said Pickering with a forced laugh.

“Try what?” said Mr. Burnaby.

“Starvation,” said Fred.

“What! with your baby⁠—with your wife and baby? Come; you must take my ten-pound note at any rate. And while you are spending it write home to your father. Heaven and earth! is a man to be ashamed to tell his father that he has been wrong?” When Fred said that his father was a stern man, and one whose heart would not be melted into softness at the tale of a baby’s sufferings, Mr. Burnaby went on to say that the attempt should at any rate be made. “There can be no doubt what duty requires of you, Mr. Pickering. And, upon my word, I do not see what other step you can take. You are not, I suppose, prepared to send your wife and child to the poorhouse.” Then Fred Pickering burst into tears, and Mr. Burnaby left him at the corner of Great Russell Street, after cramming the ten-pound note into his hand.

To send his wife and child to the poorhouse! In all his misery that idea had never before presented itself to Fred Pickering. He had thought of starvation, or rather of some high-toned extremity of destitution, which might be borne with an admirable and perhaps sublime magnanimity. But how was a man to bear with magnanimity a poorhouse jacket, and the union mode of hair-cutting? It is not easy for a man with a wife and baby to starve in this country, unless he be one to whom starvation has come very gradually. Fred saw it all now. The police would come to him, and take his wife and baby away into the workhouse, and he would follow them. It might be that this was worse than starvation, but it lacked all that melodramatic grandeur to which he had looked forward almost with satisfaction.

“Well,” said Mary to him, when he returned to her bedside, “who was it? Has he told you of anything? Has he brought you anything to do?”

“He has given me that,” said Fred, throwing the banknote on to the bed, “⁠—out of charity! I may as well go out into the streets and beg now. All the pride has gone out of me.” Then he sat over the fire crying, and there he sat for hours.

“Fred,” said his wife to him, “if you do not write to your father tomorrow I will write.”

He went again to every person connected in the slightest degree with literature of whom he had the smallest knowledge; to Mr. Roderick Billings, to the teacher who had instructed him in shorthand-writing, to all those whom he had ever seen among the newspapers, to the editor of the International, and to Mr. Boothby. Four different visits he made to Mr. Boothby, in spite of his previous anger, but it was all to no purpose. No one could find him employment for which he was suited. He wrote to Mr. Wickham Webb, and Mr. Wickham Webb sent him a five-pound note. His heart was, I think, more broken by his inability to refuse charity than by anything else that had occurred to him.

His wife had threatened to write to his father, but she had not carried her threat into execution. It is not by such means that a young wife overcomes her husband. He had looked sternly at her when she had so spoken, and she had known that she could not bring herself to do such a thing without his permission. But when she fell ill, wanting the means of nourishment for her child, and in her illness begged of him to implore succour from his father for her baby when she should be gone, then his pride gave way, and he sat down and wrote his letter. When he went to his ink-bottle it was dry. It was nearly two months since he had made any attempt at working in that profession to which he had intended to devote himself.

He wrote to his father, drinking to the dregs the bitter cup of broken pride. It always seems to me that the prodigal son who returned to his father after feeding with the swine suffered but little mortification in his repentant submission. He does, indeed, own his unworthiness, but the calf is killed so speedily that the pathos of the young man’s position is lost in the hilarity of the festival. Had he been compelled to announce his coming by post; had he been driven to beg permission to return, and been forced to wait for a reply, his punishment, I think, would have been more severe. To Fred Pickering the punishment was very severe, and indeed for him no fatted calf was killed at last. He received without delay a very cold letter from his father, in which he was told that his father would consider the matter. In the meanwhile thirty shillings a week should be allowed him. At the end of a fortnight he received a further letter, in which he was informed that if he would return to Manchester he would be taken in at the attorney’s office which he had left. He must not, however, hope to become himself an attorney; he must look forward to be a paid attorney’s clerk, and in the meantime his father would continue to allow him thirty shillings a week. “In the present position of affairs,” said his father, “I do not feel that anything would be gained by our seeing each other.” The calf which was thus killed for poor Fred Pickering was certainly by no means a fatted calf.

Of course he had to do as he was directed. He took his wife and baby back to Manchester, and returned with sad eyes and weary feet to the old office which he had in former days not only hated but despised. Then he had been gallant and gay among the other young men, thinking himself to be too good for the society of those around him; now he was the lowest of the low, if not the humblest of the humble.

He told his whole story by letters to Mr. Burnaby, and received some comfort from the kindness of that gentleman’s replies. “I still mean,” he said, in one of those letters, “to return some day to my old aspirations; but I will endeavour first to learn my trade as a journeyman of literature.”