Chapter 4

AN EDITOR

A devout lady, to whom some friend had presented one of my books,
used to say when asked how she was getting on with it, 'Sal, it's
dreary, weary, uphill work, but I've wrastled through with tougher
jobs in my time, and, please God, I'll wrastle through with this
one.' It was in this spirit, I fear, though she never told me so,
that my mother wrestled for the next year or more with my leaders,
and indeed I was always genuinely sorry for the people I saw
reading them. In my spare hours I was trying journalism of another
kind and sending it to London, but nearly eighteen months elapsed
before there came to me, as unlooked for as a telegram, the thought
that there was something quaint about my native place. A boy who
found that a knife had been put into his pocket in the night could
not have been more surprised. A few days afterwards I sent my
mother a London evening paper with an article entitled 'An Auld
Licht Community,' and they told me that when she saw the heading
she laughed, because there was something droll to her in the sight
of the words Auld Licht in print. For her, as for me, that
newspaper was soon to have the face of a friend. To this day I
never pass its placards in the street without shaking it by the
hand, and she used to sew its pages together as lovingly as though
they were a child's frock; but let the truth be told, when she read
that first article she became alarmed, and fearing the talk of the
town, hid the paper from all eyes. For some time afterwards, while
I proudly pictured her showing this and similar articles to all who
felt an interest in me, she was really concealing them fearfully in
a bandbox on the garret stair. And she wanted to know by return of
post whether I was paid for these articles as much as I was paid
for real articles; when she heard that I was paid better, she
laughed again and had them out of the bandbox for re-reading, and
it cannot be denied that she thought the London editor a fine
fellow but slightly soft.

When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted the
subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something more of
the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and then I
tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it began to
look as if we had him. Now my mother might have been discovered,
in answer to certain excited letters, flinging the bundle of
undarned socks from her lap, and 'going in for literature'; she was
racking her brains, by request, for memories I might convert into
articles, and they came to me in letters which she dictated to my
sisters. How well I could hear her sayings between the lines: 'But
the editor-man will never stand that, it's perfect blethers' - 'By
this post it