Mr. Spivey's Clerk/Chapter 2

I shall not soon forget the day whereon I first came to London, like a stray beam drifted into some stupendous whirlpool, to take up a position in the office of Mr. Spivey, publisher, of Paternoster Row. I was just twenty, an orphan with strong inclinations towards literature as a profession, and eager to get to London, which was, I fancied, the only place where an author should live. I believe that I cared very little what position I secured, so long as it was in the metropolis. Perhaps I should have drawn the line at butchering or baking, but I had certainly had no objection to serving Mr. Spivey. Mr. Spivey wanted a clerk who could do some​thing more than cast up accounts and write dictated letters. My qualifications pleased him; he engaged me. It was not at a great salary. Men of the Spivey persuasion never do pay great salaries. Their method is to secure the largest amount of work at the smallest possible cost, and it matters little to them that the necessary balance is paid out of human flesh and blood.

And yet to look at him, or to hear him speak to strangers or great people, you would not have thought Mr. Spivey a hard man. He was only middle-aged; he had made his way in the world; he was a member of two learned societies, and an extensive dissenting community reckoned him as one of its shining lights. Nay, he was accustomed to preach now and then in the chapels of this community, and he was perpetually holding himself up to us, his clerks, as a model Christian man, repeating daily, with much unctuousness, certain texts which seemed to fit his case, and might possibly some day ​fit ours. He was always attired in sober black, and wore the nattiest of turn-down collars, and black ties, so that no one could possibly mistake him for other than a deacon of the church. He affected the company of his society's ministers, and was never so much pleased as when a dean or a minor canon of the Establishment visited his shop with a view to purchasing certain publications. Nay, sound and somewhat aggressive Protestant as he was, Mr. Spivey was even delighted if the shovel hat and round collar of a Papist priest became visible in his little shop.

I suppose that most of us are somewhat better off in our old age than we were in our youth, at least, as regards worldly position. The man who was born heir to an earldom should, if he plays his cards well, die possessor of a ducal coronet. Tom Scales, the rich grocer's son, should, with like good management, blossom into Sir Thomas Scales, Knt., head of a county family. It is a sad result if a man goes out ​of the world as poor as he came into it, though it is indeed quite certain that none of us, by a strange irony of fate, can carry even a halfpenny away with us. Mr. Spivey, who sprang from very humble beginnings, was evidently impressed early in life with the necessity of climbing the social ladder. What he did in extreme youth, or where he acquired his limited education, I cannot say, but he was very shaky about aspirates, and in moments of excitement or forgetfulness would plough through the grammatical rules with unbounded license. I fancy Spivey had tried more trades than one in his time; but he certainly hit the nail on the head when he decided to become a Father of the Row. How he got to London from his native Yorkshire, none of us ever knew; but it was currently reported in the office that when he first arrived in town, bent upon making his fortune, he possessed as capital the insignificant sum of one hundred pounds. We used to wonder ​how he had managed to build up his business on so small an amount, and admired his pluck as much as we laughed at his peculiarities.

It was, perhaps, fortunate that Mr. Spivey's affairs prospered, for down at Sydenham he had a colony of little Spiveys, whose feet must have worn out a tremendous lot of shoes, and whose mouths must have taken a great deal of filling. I think there were six young Spiveys when I first knew the family, and a new one used to arrive every year. These young olive-branches, of course, necessitated a small army of nurses and servants, and I used to wonder whenever I went down to Spivey's private establishment, wherever the master of the house used to creep when he wanted to be quiet. But, in course of time, Spivey built himself a mansion, a thing of many gables, and turrets, and lancet windows, and hideous stained glass, and, I suppose, he devised a prison for the children somewhere about it.

​It was not of course to be supposed that a man who had a large business and a larger family could manage both without some slight diversion. Nothing, according to the doctors, is so bad as keeping your attention fixed on one thing, and Spivey believed this to the letter. I think it was about the second year of my stay with him that he began to frequent certain cafés and restaurants where certain literary persons most do congregate and discuss professional matters over a glass. I dare say Spivey told his wife—if he ever did tell her anything about it—that the exigencies of business required his attendance at the Gaiety and the Criterion bars. Literary men, of course, are fond of whisky-and-water and tobacco smoke, and though Spivey hated both, and was always deadly ill after being in company with either, he displayed a brave spirit and courted the Muses' devotees with an ardour quite praiseworthy. Not that Spivey ever succeeded, in my time at least, in catching any one ​of note. Great authors, nowadays at any rate, do not flock together in public haunts in order to smoke bad cigars and drink fiery spirits, and though Spivey was always bringing some "distinguished writer" to the office, his swan invariably turned out a goose, and a thin one. He was always electrifying us with the news that he had made the acquaintance of Mr. So-and-so, the great author, who was about to call and arrange for the supply of a great novel or a grand poem. When Mr. So-and-so turned up, he generally proved to be down-at-heel and out-at-elbow, while his aptitude for borrowing half-crowns or getting advances was truly wonderful. I think that literary men who were in comfortable positions used to palm their poorer brethren off on Spivey, in order to rid themselves of him. They knew that Spivey paid poorly and expected a great deal.

And yet, in spite of his meanness, and his silliness, and his foolish endeavours to penetrate ​into the society of men who would never have condescended to talk with him for five minutes, Spivey got on and made money, and became fat, and comfortable, and rich. And the way in which he did it was very simple. The books that he published cost him practically nothing, for authorship at any rate. They were all certain to sell. Nothing that was not cheap or popular ever went out of Spivey's shop. Books, he used to say oracularly, the public will have—not, perhaps, as they will have sugar or bacon, but still in fair quantities, and he who can meet the demand cheap must needs succeed. And Spivey's books sold, though no author ever profited by them. Famous novels, the copyright of which had expired, issued from Spivey's doors at fabulously low prices, and were eagerly bought. French novels, too, he published; and paid a poor governess or despairing hack ten pounds for translating. Anything salable, which involved no more cost than printing and bind​ing, Spivey took up with alacrity. If he ever did employ an author, that author had to write a great deal for a very little. Then, too, Spivey had a magazine. A wonderful magazine, too. It was a class magazine. When its proprietor began business, he looked round him and saw a certain profession which needed a journal and had none. Spivey saw his chance and seized it. He founded a periodical for the use of that profession, and made it so useful to that profession, that every member of it subscribed. Spivey's journal attained an enormous circulation. Imitations sprung up, of course; but it was recognised as The Organ. Its advertisement columns were always full, and its editorials regarded as oracular utterances. And when it was at the very height of its prosperity, Mr. Spivey sold it to a Limited Liability Company for twenty thousand pounds.

Mr. Spivey also possessed a weekly paper. It was one of those journals which seem charac​teristic of the present age, when no one is happy unless there is a cause célèbre in the Divorce Court. Its name was Sparks, and the famous literary man-of-all-work, C. Portsmouth McFlynn (author of numberless works in fiction, history, theology, and the drama), was the editor. A wonderful fellow, McFlynn, and never at a loss. To see him throw off a dashing description of a fight between the Brixton Chicken and the Putney Pet, and then turn to a new sheet and commence an essay on the "Brutality of the Age," was something to be admired. His copy for Sparks was always ready, although it usually had to be dashed off at the last moment.

"Ah, me bhoy, Oi'm late agin this blessed afthernoon! Give me some peepor, me bhoy, and a pincil, and Oi'll knock off the shtuff in foive minutes, so Oi will."

I used to keep all the old scraps of letter-paper for McFlynn's use. A more careless, untidy man in preparing his "shtuff," never existed.

​"Did you ever, by any possible chance, buy any scribbling paper of your own, McFlynn?" I asked him once.

He threw back his head and laughed, as only impudent, handsome Irishmen can laugh.

"Faith, me bhoy," he said. "Oi've been a journalist this twenty year, and niver did Oi boy peepor, or pin, or pincil in me loife."

Where McFlynn got all his information from regarding the doings of high life I have often wondered; but Sparks was always so full of chit-chat about Lord This and Lady That, that some of us used to associate its editor with the cream of Society.

"He must be a big swell," said Jones, who was our office swell, "or else how could he know all about the great people's doings?"

Certainly, if ever there was a divorce in the air, McFlynn knew all about it, and would hint of it in carefully considered and suggestive paragraphs in Sparks. I think he must have ​been in the confidence of a good many gentlemen and ladies of the kitchen, judging from the unheroic figures some of our supposed nobility used to cut in his paragraphs. Valets and ladies' maids have, we know, a nasty habit of peeping through keyholes and listening at doors. It only needed men of the McFlynn stamp to turn these "maynials" into first-class journalists.

Mr. McFlynn, besides editing Sparks, was engaged in much other literary work, and only attended in Mr. Spivey's office for an hour or two daily. But we were not without company; for besides Tom Christmas and myself, there was Mr. Jones, who dressed exceedingly well, and had duly qualified as what people now call a "masher," and what was then known as a "toff," and Mr. Denton, who was a somewhat dreamy, poetically-inclined individual, working on a very small salary; and Mr. Rattler, the traveller and advertisement agent, who was a very lively fellow, and kept us all going after Spivey had ​gone home at five o'clock. We used to look forward to Rattler's appearance from a journey, for he would then relate to us all the news of the road, and recount each and every new story and joke which had recently come to his notice. We had also two office-boys, one of whom was perpetually asleep like Pickwick's fat boy, and the other kept in a state of feverish anxiety lest the evening's parcels should be late at Hayden's or Billing's.

On the whole we had very good times at Spivey's. Spivey himself, with all his snobbishness and meanness, was not a bad master. Sometimes, when we had been working extra hard, he would give us each half-a-sovereign, and tell us to go and "henjoy" ourselves for the afternoon. Whenever we worked after seven o'clock, he allowed us sixpence each for tea—which, when one comes to think of it, was extremely handsome conduct. Mr. Rattler, to be sure, never would stop later than half-past five ​o'clock; but then he had a wife waiting tea for him, and scorned our bachelor festivities. Mr. Jones used to observe that sixpence meant three glasses of bitter beer and pocketed the coin, and Mr. Denton used similarly to mention that it meant two goes of Irish whisky, and both worked on while Tom Christmas and myself drank our tea and ate our tea-cake.

Looking back on those days, I believe that I have never since lived such a regular, monotonous life, as during the few years I spent at Spivey's. I used to arrive at the office at half-past nine o'clock; I went out to dinner at one; I went out again to tea at five; I went home at seven. I had a table of my own in a quiet corner, and there I used to sit for hours at a stretch correcting proofs—oh, horrible and dreary task, which I now hate like poison!—or writing letters, or scribbling copy for Mr. McFlynn. Every afternoon I used to visit the printers, where there was more ​proof-reading, and consultations with the printer's foreman about blocks and plates and what not. Now and then, I used to have to hunt up McFlynn, whom I should probably find at the "Cock," or the "Cheshire Cheese," talking politics with a compatriot, and perfectly oblivious of the fact that it was Thursday afternoon, and within two hours of Sparks going to press. When I did so find him, I was bound to treat him to a brandy-and-soda before he would consent to accompany me. Once at the office he would sit down at my table, borrow "pincil an' peepor," and fling off paragraphs about the Royal Family, My Lord Broadacres, the Terrible Scandal in High Life, and the ——— Club Incident, as fast as I could catch and sort them.

The first year that I spent at Spivey's, Tom Christmas and I used to be a great deal together. We were both the sons of clergymen; we had each certain tastes in common; we were ​both very poor. At first, London being a veritable gold mine to me, he took me round to see the sights, and under his guidance I made acquaintance with all that was worth seeing in town. That was in summer, when the evenings were long. In winter, we used to go to the Guildhall Library and read, and I am quite sure that I have never read so much since as I did then. I believe we used to look forward to the winter evenings. We always sat at the same table, the last one on the left hand side as you enter, and we generally stayed there from half-past seven until ten o'clock, at which hour we used to go home, talking on the way of what we had read. I used to read little else than poetry in those days, and some fine verse I first made acquaintance with in that fine old City Library. There I first read William Morris's "Defence of Guenevere" and his "Earthly Paradise;" there I read Swinburne's earlier volumes; there I disinterred many a thin ​octavo, which had not seen the light for many a year. But Tom Christmas, across the table, used to read books whose very appearance used to discomfit me—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and Comte. And he read them carefully and thoroughly, and carried away the pith of them in a bulky note-book. He used to listen patiently to my views on everything, and never contradicted any of my wild and immature statements or assertions; but he taught me much in a quiet, unobtrusive way. In those days I used to write verses, and eventually spoke of them to him. Then I found that he, too, had once flirted with the Muses, though I never saw the result of the flirtation. For life, eminently prosaic, had knocked the poetry out of Tom Christmas's brain, and left there something more tangible, if less real.

It was in early spring when I first went to Spivey's. I remember the day well enough. How is it that one remembers some days so ​clearly, and others not at all? Every minute of that day is photographed on my mind, for it was the day when I went to London for the first time. Think of that, ye country swains and maidens, who have never yet seen the great metropolis, and are ardently desirous of doing so. It was afternoon when I reached London—an afternoon in April. The hedges and trees in my native northern county were bare and brown, but the hedges and trees of Middlesex were fair and green. As we approached the great city, its vastness impressed me to the last degree. Houses, houses, houses on every side, and houses, I knew, for many a mile beyond. Once outside the station objects of interest began to appear to me, who had studied my map of London thoroughly. Gray's Inn Road, the old houses in Holborn, Chancery Lane, Fleet Street, Temple Bar, the busy Strand, all these places seemed like old friends, met in strange places, so familiar was I with their ​names if not with their faces. From my hotel I made my way, never once asking a direction, to Paternoster Row. Spivey had gone home. I went away, too, and wandered round Ludgate Circus to the Embankment, where I stood and admired, fairly enchanted by the great buildings of the world's centre, as the setting sun cast his last rays upon them. I wandered into Westminster Abbey, and nearly wept over the tombs in Poets' Corner, going afterwards into Palace Yard, and watching the Members pass into the House. Knowing no one and having none to speak to, I wandered up and down the Strand that night until it was almost next morning, intoxicated with the sensation of novelty, and by the crowds, and gas-glare, and thousand-and-one strange sights. I have often wished that I could go to London for the first time again.

I remained in the quiet hotel, to which domestic authority had consigned me, for a few ​days, during which I tried to find suitable lodgings. One whole day, at Spivey's direction, I devoted to wandering up and down London, endeavouring to come across such accommodation as would fit my limited purse. But I had to present myself in the Row again next morning and confess that I had seen plenty of landladies, but none likely to suit me. And I looked at Spivey wistfully, I have no doubt, hoping, though it was no business of his, that he would descend from his pedestal and find me a place where I could lay my head in peace. Spivey was always particular that his assistants should be lodged in sober "Christian" families. He rang his bell, and summoned Tom Christmas.

"Christmas, Mr. Tempest wants to find lodgings. In a good, respectable, Christian family, Christmas. Do you know of anything?"

Tom Christmas looked at me and I looked at him. Speculation was in his eyes; hope and entreaty in mine. I think he meant his eyes to ​say: "What sort of fellow are you?" I am sure that I meant mine to say: "Help me if you can." We had seen each other for a few minutes on the previous day and I think had been favourably impressed each by the other.

"I am afraid I don't," said Tom Christmas, upon which my hopes fell. "But I will see what I can do," he added, upon which they again rose higher than ever.

"Very good, Christmas," said Mr. Spivey. "I shall be glad if you will. A sober, respectable family, Christmas, mind. Where there are all the spiritual advantages to be had. Family prayer, of course. Also no late hours."

I thought I discerned just the least sparkle in Tom Christmas's patient eyes. He looked at me again.

"I was just thinking," he said, "that there is a room to spare in my own house if Mr. Tempest would like to take it."

"Oh!" I cried, "I should be delighted."

​"But, of course," added Tom, "I must consult my mother and sister, who live with me."

"Certainly," said Mr. Spivey, "certainly. Very kind of you, Christmas. Your mother and sister, I think, are members of the Church?"

Tom Christmas bowed.

"And you—er, you are attached to some body, eh?"

To this question Tom Christmas made no direct answer, but I am sure that his face flushed a little, as though he resented these searching questions. He turned to me.

"If you would like to go home with me this evening," he said, kindly, "I will introduce you to my mother, and we will see what arrangements can be made."

I hastened to thank him, and Mr. Spivey, forgetting his anxiety about family prayer and the spiritual privileges, thanked him too, and told me that I ought to feel much obliged to Mr. Christmas, which I certainly did.

​I went home with Tom Christmas that night. It was seven o'clock when we left the office, and he led the way into Aldersgate Street, where he looked dubiously at the trams and 'buses.

"We will ride, if you like, Tempest," he said, looking at me. "I generally walk. Salaries at Spivey's hardly allow one to spend twopence on a tram."

I hastened to say that I should really prefer to walk and we set out, Tom Christmas talking to me all the way in a kindly fashion. I am sure he had no desire to draw me out; but before we reached the "Angel" at Islington I had told him all about myself, my hopes, and my aspirations. And to everything I said he listened kindly and patiently, impressing me more by this than I had ever been impressed before.