jovial solicitor who smacked his clients on the back had absconded, and the minor poet had no longer fifty pounds per annum. Although he was a minor poet, which—strangely enough—is a term of contempt in this country, though we are enjoined to be grateful for even small mercies, he was as human as minor novelists and minor critics, and he suffered. Also he woke; he realised how small had been the world's demand for the wares in which he dealt—he acknowledged that for twenty years he had been living on his little income, not on his little books.
His name was Smith. It was, perhaps, one of the reasons why his poetry was unread. Only a reviewer possessed of unusual courage could have discovered "the great poetry of Mr. Smith." Only a poet devoid of commercial instincts could have failed to adopt a nom de guerre.
In the face of disaster Mr. Smith did not make precisely this reflection, but he reflected painfully that a lack of commercial ability was no longer a matter to be recognised with a smile. He stood among the daffodils in the village garden, and asked Heaven what would become of him. He was seven-and-thirty; the only craft that he had learnt was useless; and he had to earn his bread-and-cheese.
As Heaven returned no answer, he sought the advice of friends. He was a lovable creature, though a writing man, and his friends were sympathetic. They all invited him to dinner, and assured him warmly that they would bear his necessities in mind. If anything turned up, he might rely upon their telegraphing to him. Being of a trustful disposition, Mr. Smith returned to the daffodils, encouraged.
And they withered while he waited for a telegram.
When they hung their heads, he sought advice again. This time his friends did not invite him to dinner, but they pointed out to him, lest he should overlook it, that he was a poet—in other words, that he was a difficult person to serve. "You have no experience, you see," they said frankly. "You are intelligent, but you have no experience, Robert." When a man is untravelled in the groove that we ourselves tread, we say that he has "no experience."
One afternoon the poet went abroad. The journey cost him a penny, and he travelled from Charing Cross as far as the Bank. He was bound for an office in Lombard Street, and as he called by appointment, a clerk showed him promptly to Mr. Hutton's private room.
The business man who received him had once been a little boy in a sailor suit, and he and Robert had played together in a nursery. To-day he had numerous financial irons in the fire, and one of them required an obedient gentleman to watch it. Affection suggested Robert for the post. The duties were simple, and the salary was slight, but if the iron came out in good condition, there was to be a slice of the iron, too.
They chatted for a long while. Robert was admitted to some confidences about the other irons—the patents, and the shares, and the concessions. All the time that he listened he was seeing the business man as a little boy in a sailor suit again, and was awestruck to hear the little boy talking so glibly of such mysteries. Blankly he felt that he himself had omitted to grow up; he decided that people were right in declaring that he had no experience; it appeared to him suddenly that he had learnt nothing in his life. But, of course, he had learnt many things, though never the most important one—how to make money.
Often they were interrupted by the telephone bell, and during one of the colloquies on the telephone Mr. Hutton seemed depressed. Robert feared he was being browbeaten until he hung up the receiver, and announced, smiling, that he had "made five hundred pounds by that conversation." It was miraculous. Robert had not made five hundred pounds by twenty years of work.
"Let's go out and get a cup of coffee," said Mr. Hutton, and piloted the poet through a maze of alleys to a retiring doorway. "What will you have to drink?" The poet discovered that after two o'clock "a cup of coffee" in the City is generally a synonym for a whisky-and-soda.