New Grub Street, George Gissing [10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

editor. There was no difficulty whatever about this; I was told to ascend by means of the elevator to an upper storey, and there I walked into a comfortable little room where a youngish man sat smoking a cigar at a table covered with print and manuscript. I introduced myself, stated my business. ‘Can you give me work of any kind on your paper?’ ‘Well, what experience have you had?’ ‘None whatever.’ The editor smiled. ‘I’m very much afraid you would be no use to us. But what do you think you could do?’ Well now, there was but one thing that by any possibility I could do. I asked him: ‘Do you publish any fiction⁠—short stories?’ ‘Yes, we’re always glad of a short story, if it’s good.’ This was a big daily paper; they have weekly supplements of all conceivable kinds of matter. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if I write a story of English life, will you consider it?’ ‘With pleasure.’ I left him, and went out as if my existence were henceforth provided for.”

He laughed heartily, and was joined by his hearers.

“It was a great thing to be permitted to write a story, but then⁠—what story? I went down to the shore of Lake Michigan; walked there for half an hour in an icy wind. Then I looked for a stationer’s shop, and laid out a few of my remaining cents in the purchase of pen, ink, and paper⁠—my stock of all these things was at an end when I left New York. Then back to the boardinghouse. Impossible to write in my bedroom, the temperature was below zero; there was no choice but to sit down in the common room, a place like the smoke-room of a poor commercial hotel in England. A dozen men were gathered about the fire, smoking, talking, quarrelling. Favourable conditions, you see, for literary effort. But the story had to be written, and write it I did, sitting there at the end of a deal table; I finished it in less than a couple of days, a good long story, enough to fill three columns of the huge paper. I stand amazed at my power of concentration as often as I think of it!”

“And was it accepted?” asked Dora.

“You shall hear. I took my manuscript to the editor, and he told me to come and see him again next morning. I didn’t forget the appointment. As I entered he smiled in a very promising way, and said, ‘I think your story will do. I’ll put it into the Saturday supplement. Call on Saturday morning and I’ll remunerate you.’ How well I remember that word ‘remunerate’! I have had an affection for the word ever since. And remunerate me he did; scribbled something on a scrap of paper, which I presented to the cashier. The sum was eighteen dollars. Behold me saved!”

He sipped his coffee again.

“I have never come across an English editor who treated me with anything like that consideration and general kindliness. How the man had time, in his position, to see me so often, and do things in such a human way, I can’t understand. Imagine anyone trying the same at the office of a London newspaper! To begin with, one couldn’t see the editor at all. I shall always think with profound gratitude of that man with the peaked brown beard and pleasant smile.”

“But did the peanuts come after that!” inquired Dora.

“Alas! they did. For some months I supported myself in Chicago, writing for that same paper, and for others. But at length the flow of my inspiration was checked; I had written myself out. And I began to grow homesick, wanted to get back to England. The result was that I found myself one day in New York again, but without money enough to pay for a passage home. I tried to write one more story. But it happened, as I was looking over newspapers in a reading-room, that I saw one of my Chicago tales copied into a paper published at Troy. Now Troy was not very far off; and it occurred to me that, if I went there, the editor of this paper might be disposed to employ me, seeing he had a taste for my fiction. And I went, up the Hudson by steamboat. On landing at Troy I was as badly off as when I reached Chicago; I had less than a dollar. And the worst of it was I had come on a vain errand; the editor treated me with scant courtesy, and no work was to be got. I took a little room, paying for it day by day, and in the meantime I fed on those loathsome peanuts, buying a handful in the street now and then. And I assure you I looked starvation in the face.”

“What sort of a town is Troy?” asked Marian, speaking for the first time.

“Don’t ask me. They make straw hats there principally, and they sell peanuts. More I remember not.”

“But you didn’t starve to death,” said Maud.

“No, I just didn’t. I went one afternoon into a lawyer’s office, thinking I might get some copying work, and there I found an odd-looking old man, sitting with an open Bible on his knees. He explained to me that he wasn’t the lawyer; that the lawyer was away on business, and that he was just guarding the office. Well, could he help me? He meditated, and a thought occurred to him. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘to such-and-such a boardinghouse, and ask for Mr. Freeman Sterling. He is just starting on a business tour, and wants a young man to accompany him.’ I didn’t dream of asking what the business was, but sped, as fast as my trembling limbs would carry me, to the address he had mentioned. I asked for Mr. Freeman Sterling, and found him. He was a photographer, and his business at present was to go about getting orders for the reproducing of old portraits. A good-natured young fellow. He