He stared at me.

"'Ullo!" he said, "another of 'em, is it? I'm honest old Tom Blake, _I_ am, and wot I say is----"

"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 cla.s.s 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-p.r.o.ne 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 _Ashlade_ and _Lechton_. No ceremony. Jest drop in on me and the missis. Goo' night."

At the moment of writing Tom Blake is rapidly acquiring an a.s.sured 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 _(James Orlebar Cloyster's narrative continued)_

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 _nom de plume_."

"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?"

"What rot!" I said. "Why the deuce should they want to write paragraphs about me? I'm not a celebrity. You're talking through your hat, Julian."

Julian lit his pipe.

"Not at all," he said. "Count the number of people who must necessarily be in the secret from the beginning. There are your publishers, Prodder and Way. Then there are the editors of the magazine which publishes your Society dialogue bilge, and of all the newspapers, other than the _Orb_, in which your serious verse appears. My dear Jimmy, the news that you and George Chandos were the same man would go up and down Fleet Street and into the Barrel like wildfire. And after that the paragraphs."

I saw the truth of his reasoning before he had finished speaking. Once more my spirits fell to the point where they had been before I hit upon what I thought was such a bright scheme.

Julian's pipe had gone out while he was talking. He lit it again, and spoke through the smoke:

"The weak point of your idea, of course, is that you and George Chandos are a single individual."

"But why should the editors know that? Why shouldn't I simply send in my stuff, typed, by post, and never appear myself at all?"

"My dear Jimmy, you know as well as I do that that wouldn't work. It would do all right for a bit. Then one morning: 'Dear Mr. Chandos,--I should be glad if you could make it convenient to call here some time between Tuesday and Thursday.--Yours faithfully. Editor of Something-or-other.' Sooner or later a man who writes at all regularly for the papers is bound to meet the editors of them. A successful author can't conduct all his business through the post. Of course, if you chucked London and went to live in the country----"

"I couldn't," I said. "I simply couldn't do it. London's got into my bones."

"It does," said Julian.

"I like the country, but I couldn't live there. Besides, I don't believe I could write there--not for long. All my ideas would go."