“Throne Hotel, Harrogate,
“September 7th, 1911.
MY DEAR BRUCE,—The day before yesterday I finished that thing for the Christmas number of the Vivid, after nearly a fortnight’s hard grind; late last night I destroyed it all but a redeeming bit that may come in for something else. You must make my peace with the Vivid, like the good agent and the still better pal that you always are to me. I don’t know what they will say at being let in like this at the last moment; but I know what I should have said in their place if another author had traded on his contract to shoot in such stuff as I have been grinding out down here against the grain. It wouldn’t have done, Bruce, not at any price per thousand words; and I don’t mind telling you (or your telling them, if you like) that I wanted their money at least as much as they can possibly have wanted my name or yarn. But there are limits imposed upon the most mercenary of us, not only by the saving vanity of the artisan, but by the lowest and most calculating sort of self-interest. If I had forced this thing upon the Vivid, I should not have been able to hold up my head while their Christmas Number was on the stalls, and they would never have given me another contract.
“I wish to goodness I had never accepted this one, or at least that I had not been such a fool as to take on the job in this penitential spot, in the intervals of a cure which most people find quite hard enough work in itself. It doesn’t give the cure a chance, while the cure is simply fatal to one’s work. I don’t mean to inflict a long screed upon you, but you are my only correspondent in these days, and I should like just to give you a sample of them in further extenuation of my breach of treaty.
“At 7.15 I am called from a couch against which I have no complaint to make; but no cup of tea assists me to my legs, and I only get my letters and the papers on my way to the Old Pump Room at eight o’clock. Oh, that Old Pump Room, and the first whiff of it when the wind is the other way! A foul libation of sulphur hot and strong, twenty minutes of one’s letters and the band, another deadly draught and then back to breakfast with what appetite one may. I glower from my solitary table, and think I never saw a body of people who appealed so little to my gregarious instincts; but if they honour me with a thought, I am sure it is quite as unflattering as my impression of them. Indeed, I should expect to suffer heavily from an impartial comparison, for they keep up their spirits but I make no attempt in that direction. I doubt if I have ever been detected smiling in this hotel. I see my neighbours through sulphuric glasses, and they see me under the influence of sulphur, probably conning my programme for the day. This, of course, includes another drink to cut up my morning, and then some highly elaborate bath or skilled man-handling to cut it short an hour before lunch. In the afternoon my doctor would have me take an enormous walk and climb some legendary rocks, which I have not been man enough to find as yet. After tea I am grist for some new mill in the Royal Baths; after dinner I am a dead man, and the thing I tore up last night was a dead man’s effort.
“Yet I began with all the will in the world; my very first act, or more correctly my last before the cure began to kill me, was to hire a great brute of a desk and a swivel-chair for my room; on these I was to indite my little masterpiece for the Christmas number of the Vivid. But you see what my days have been; let me only add that, in the odd moments I do spend at my hireling desk, first all the coaches and char-a-bancs of Harrogate start from under my window for the outlying resorts, compelling me to shut it in spite of the heat, and when they are gone a popular Punch and Judy show gives a daily matinée on the green across the road. Five minutes ago a band was playing selections from the ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ and as I write a sentimental cornet is blurting out ‘Killarney’ with explosive feeling. Can you wonder that in these conditions I have done a long week’s work for the wastepaper basket? I hope the Vivid people know that my loss is greater than theirs; they can easily fill my place, but my vain effort is both time and money lost. Also I almost wish that these good folk downstairs knew what a load I have been carrying all these dreary days; then perhaps they might realise how a man may glower and glower, and yet not be quite such a villain as he looks.
“I never meant to let myself go like this, Bruce; it only shows that I really do want to write, if a congenial idea would but come in time. And that’s past praying for now, I fear; wasn’t it the day after to-morrow that we promised to deliver the MS? I suppose I have a note of that somewhere; but everything except the addled tale itself lies buried beneath the dust of my defeat. I never was more haunted and hunted by anything in all my literary life; the last few days I have been going about like a person in a bad dream, and doing the most absent-minded things. I always was given that way, but I thought I had plumbed my nadir the other morning when I threw my book into the clothes-basket and marched downstairs with my dirty pocket-handkerchief under my arm! Luckily for me, the first person I saw was an old friend who has just turned up at this hotel; she put me right, and I had my first sound laugh since I got here. It is a great thing to strike a friend in a place like this. I believe you once met a soldier man named Vereker, an old schoolfellow of mine, at my rooms in town? Well, this is his sister, and we were tremendous pals when I used to stay with him in the holidays a thousand years ago; now she’s here with their old father, a decrepit curmudgeon who chains her to his side, but tells me between ourselves that she’s engaged to be married. She doesn’t mention it herself, or wear a ring, or look the part in the least. I must take her on about it when I get a chance.
“By Jove! I saw her in the road this instant as I looked up from my hired desk. Good-bye, Bruce! I must dash out and post this at once. Remember that you’re about my only friend; don’t be hard on me for letting you in with the Vivid, and do make my peace with them if you can.
“Yours ever,
“P. A.
“N.B.—I’d have a fresh shot if they could give me another week and I could only get an idea.”
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