To me, standing in the doorway, the situation was plain at the first glance. Only by a big effort could I prevent myself laughing outright. It was impossible to check a grin. Thomas Blake saw me.
“Hullo!” I said; “what’s all this?”
He stared at me.
“‘Ullo!” he said, “another of ‘em, is it? I’m honest old Tom Blake,
“Why honest, Mr. Blake?” I interrupted.
“Call me a liar, then!” said he. “Go on. You do it. Call it me, then, and let’s see.”
He began to shuffle towards me.
“Who pinched his father’s trousers, and popped them?” I inquired genially.
He stopped and blinked.
“Eh?” he said weakly.
“And who,” I continued, “when sent with twopence to buy postage-stamps, squandered it on beer?”
His jaw dropped, as it had dropped in Covent Garden. It must be very unpleasant to have one’s past continually rising up to confront one.
“Look ‘ere!” he said, a conciliatory note in his voice, “you and me’s pals, mister, ain’t we? Say we’re pals. Of course we are. You and me don’t want no fuss. Of course we don’t. Then look here: this is ‘ow it is. You come along with me and ‘ave a drop.”
It did not seem likely that my class would require any instruction in boxing that evening in addition to that which Mr. Blake had given them, so I went with him.
Over the moisture, as he facetiously described it, he grew friendliness itself. He did not ask after Kit, but gave his opinion of her gratuitously. According to him, she was unkind to her relations. “Crool ‘arsh,” he said. A girl, in fact, who made no allowances for a man, and was over-prone to Sauce and the Nasty Snack.
We parted the best of friends.
“Any time you’re on the Cut,” he said, gripping my hand with painful fervour, “you look out for Tom Blake, mister. Tom Blake of the
At the moment of writing Tom Blake is rapidly acquiring an assured position in the heart of the British poetry- loving public. This incident in his career should interest his numerous admirers. The world knows little of its greatest men.
CHAPTER 11
JULIAN’S IDEA
I had been relating, on the morning after the Blake affair, the stirring episode of the previous night to Julian. He agreed with me that it was curious that our potato-thrower of Covent Garden market should have crossed my path again. But I noticed that, though he listened intently enough, he lay flat on his back in his hammock, not looking at me, but blinking at the ceiling; and when I had finished he turned his face towards the wall—which was unusual, since I generally lunched on his breakfast, as I was doing then, to the accompaniment of quite a flow of languid abuse.
I was in particularly high spirits that morning, for I fancied that I had found a way out of my difficulty about Margaret. That subject being uppermost in my mind, I guessed at once what Julian’s trouble was.
“I think you’d like to know, Julian,” I said, “whether I’d written to Guernsey.”
“Well?”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“You’ve told her to come?”
“No; but I’m able to take my respite without wounding her. That’s as good as writing, isn’t it? We agreed on that.”
“Yes; that was the idea. If you could find a way of keeping her from knowing how well you were getting on with your writing, you were to take it. What’s your idea?”
“I’ve hit on a very simple way out of the difficulty,” I said. “It came to me only this morning. All I need do is to sign my stuff with a pseudonym.”
“You only thought of that this morning?”
“Yes. Why?”
“My dear chap, I thought of it as soon as you told me of the fix you were in.”
“You might have suggested it.”
Julian slid to the floor, drained the almost empty teapot, rescued the last kidney, and began his breakfast.
“I would have suggested it,” he said, “if the idea had been worth anything.”
“What! What’s wrong with it?”
“My dear man, it’s too risky. It’s not as though you kept to one form of literary work. You’re so confoundedly versatile. Let’s suppose you did sign your work with a
“Say, George Chandos.”
“All right. George Chandos. Well, how long would it be, do you think, before paragraphs appeared, announcing to the public, not only of England but of the Channel Islands, that George Chandos was really Jimmy Cloyster?”
