"I'm drunk," he said to himself. "That's what's the matter."
And later: "What a fool I was to drink so much."
And then, as if in excuse: "But I shouldn't have got the story if I hadn't drunk with them."
A boy came to him. "Mr Selsey says have you got the first sheets of your story."
"Tell him he'll have them in a few minutes," Humphrey said.
And when Wratten came into the room he found Humphrey with his head on his outstretched arms, and his shoulders shaken with his sobbing.
"Hullo! What's up, old man?" asked Wratten, bending over him. "Not well?"
Humphrey lifted a red-eyed face to Wratten. "I'm drunk," he said. "My head's awful."
"Bosh!" Wratten said cheerfully, "you're sober enough. Selsey's delighted you've got your story. I suppose it was a hard story to get."
Humphrey groaned. "I can't write it.... I can't get even the beginning of it."
"That happens to all of us. I have to begin my story half a dozen times before I get the right one. Look here, let me help you. Tell me as much as you can." He touched the bell, and a boy appeared. "Go and get a cup of black coffee--a large cup, Napoleon," he said jovially to the boy, giving him a sixpenny piece.
By the time the coffee had arrived, Humphrey had told Wratten the story. "By George!" said Wratten, "that's fine! Now, let's do it between ourselves. Don't bother about plans. Start right in with the main facts and put them at the top. Always begin with the fact, and tell the story in the first two paragraphs--then you've got the rest of the column to play about in."
The coffee woke Humphrey up. In a quarter of an hour, with Wratten's help, the story was well advanced, and Selsey's boy had gone away with the first slips. Whenever he came to a dead stop, Wratten told him how to continue. "Wrap it up carefully," Wratten said. "Talk about the dead man's pure love for anything that was artistic: say that he was a slave to art, and that Miss Sycamore typified art for him. That'll please her. Say that she never encouraged his attentions, and that realizing life was empty without her, he killed himself. Make it the psychological tragedy of a man in love with an Ideal that he could never attain. And don't gloat."
The story was finished. "That's all right," Wratten said.