debts, and lead a godly righteous sober life forever after on a guinea. I was offered help: but help in teaspoonfuls: just enough to keep me alive and chained in the mire: never enough to enable me to raise myself out of it. I asked for work, and they gave me a guinea—and a tacit request to go and agonize elsewhere. My weakness, my fault was that I did not die murdered at Maryvale, at St. Andrew’s College. The normal man, treated as I was ill-treated, would have made no bones whatever about doing so. But I was abnormal. I took help, when it was offered gently. I’m thankful to say that I flung it back when it was offered charitably, as the Bishop of Claughton offered it, and Monsignor—you know whom I mean, Talacryn—and John Newcastle of the Weekly Tabule. I’ll tell you about the last. He said that, being anxious to do me a good turn, he had deposited ten pounds with a printer-man, who would be a kind friend to me, and would consult me as to how that sum could be expended in procuring permanent employment for me. I took seven specimens of my handicraft to that printer-man. He admired them: offered me a loan of five pounds on their security. With that, I fulfilled a temporary engagement. Then I consulted the printer-man, the ‘kind friend.’ He proposed to give me a new suit of clothes, (I was to do without shirts or socks), to accept my services at no salary, and to teach me the business of a printer’s reader for three months; and, then, to recommend me for a situation as reader to some other printer. But, I said, why waste three months in learning a new trade when I already had four trades at my fingers’ ends? But, I said, what was I to live on during those three months? But, I said, what certainty was there at the end of those three months? But, he said, that he would ‘have none of’ my ‘lip, for’ he ‘knew all’ my ‘capers’; and he bade me begone and take away my drawings. Those were ruined: he had let them lie on his dirty office floor for months. Oh I admit that I have been helped—quite brutally and quite uselessly. Helped? Yes. Once, when they told me at the hospital that I was on the verge of a nervous collapse, a Jesuit offered to help me. He would procure my admission to a certain House of Rest, if I would consent to go there. By the Mercy of God I remembered that it was a licensed madhouse, where they imprisoned you by force and tortured you. Fact! There had been a fearful disclosure of their methods in the P.M.G. Well: I refused to go. Rather than add that brand to what I had incurred through being Catholic, I made an effort of will; and contrived to escape that danger: contrived to recover my nerves; and I continued my battle.—Regarding my pseudonyms—my numerous pseudonyms—think of this: I was a tonsured clerk, intending to persist in my Divine Vocation, but forced for a time, to engage in secular pursuits both to earn my living and to pay my debts. I had a shuddering repugnance from associating my name, the name by which I certainly some day should be known in the priesthood, with these secular pursuits. I think that was rather absurd: but I am quite sure that it was not dishonourable. However, for that reason I adopted pseudonyms. I took advice about adopting them: for, in those days, I used to take advice about everything, not being man enough to act upon my own responsibility. Also, the idea of using pseudonyms was suggested to me; and the first one was selected for me. As time went on, and Catholic malfeasance drove me from one trade to another—for you know—Talacryn—Carvale—Semphill—Sterling—that two excellent priests declared in so many words that they would prevent me from ever earning a living—legal assassination, you see definitely was contemplated—I say as Catholic malfeasance drove me from one trade, I invented another, and another; and I carried on each of these under a separate pseudonym. In fact I split up my personality. As Rose I was a tonsured clerk: as King Clement, I wrote and painted and photographed: as Austin White, I designed decorations: as Francis Engle, I did journalism. There were four of me at least. I always have thought it so inexplicable that none of the authorities—you, Talacryn, with your pretended confidence in me and your majestic immobility towards me—that none of you ever realized the tremendous amount of energy which was being expended, misdirected, if you like. Certainly no one of you ever made a practical attempt to direct that energy. I was a like a wild colt careering round and round a large meadow. You all looked on and sneered ‘Erratic!’ Of course I was erratic, for you all did your very best, by stolidity, hints, insinuations, commands, to create obstacles over which I had to jump, through which I had to tear a way; and there was no one to bit and bridle me, to ride me, and to share his couch with me. And of course my pseudonymity has been misunderstood by the stupid, as well as mispresented by the invidious. Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it. So when ‘false pretences’ and similar shibboleths were shrieked, they also took alarm and howled. But, there were no false pretences. I told my name to everyone whom it concerned. I am not the only person who has traded under pseudonyms or technikryms. Take, for example, the man whose shop I am said to have offered to buy. He himself used a trade-name. He begged for my acquaintance
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