My victorious career received a very serious check about this period. I had, of course, bought Aristotle’s Poetics and a cheap edition of Hamlet, and on one or two occasions I much regret to say that Mr. Westonshaugh, the best and kindest of men, had found me reading them when I ought to have been registering policies of insurance.

He had rather a stealthy way of approaching the staff of the Country Department from the rear, and, though a large man, revealed the instincts of a hunter wonderfully developed; so that he was often upon his game, which generally consisted of junior clerks, before the quarry was roused and aware of its danger.

The first time he cautioned me; but the second time I grieve to relate that he reported me. It was, of course, his duty to do so; and I believe he regretted the necessity. But so it was; and it meant that I had to go before the Secretary of the Apollo and meet him face to face, much to my disadvantage.

The Secretary was, of course, the pivot round which the whole office turned. The Directors themselves seldom dared to interfere with him; for he was the hero of a thousand fights, so to say, and had climbed to the giddy altitude of the secretarial chair after a lifetime spent in heroic and successful efforts to advance the prosperity of the Apollo Fire Office. His fame naturally extended far beyond the walls of the Apollo. He was known throughout the whole insurance world as a light in the darkness. He had written more than one book on the subject; and the Insurance Guide, the journal of the insurance craft, seldom appeared without some respectful allusion to his great fame. I believe he was a sort of king over the secretaries of other Fire Offices; at any rate, nobody ever pretended there was anybody to equal him. He was called Septimus Trott, Esquire; and there came a gloomy morning when I stood before him alone in the silence of the secretarial chamber. But, of course, the interest was profound, for my fate might be said to hang in the balance. I had seen Mr. Trott far off on several occasions, and had once, in the Board Room, where I went with a message, witnessed the solemn sight of him conversing on equal terms with six Directors simultaneously, and easily making them think as he thought, thanks to his enormous experience and easy flow of words; but this was the first time I had approached him in propria persona, as we say.

He was of a sable silvered, with a florid complexion, and his eyes had a piercing quality. He wore gold-rimmed glasses divided horizontally, so that when he looked through the tops of them he could see men and things about him, and when he looked through the bottom he could read documents and data, or see to write himself if necessary.

He now looked through the upper story of his glasses and focused me with an expression that I had never seen before on any human countenance. It was not pity, by any means, and it was not scorn. You couldn’t say that Mr. Trott was angry; but then you certainly couldn’t say that he was pleased. He regarded me thoughtfully, yet without what you might call much emotion. He was perfectly calm, yet under his easy self-control I soon found that he concealed a good deal of quiet annoyance at what he had heard about me. Having studied my features, which I had striven to make as apologetic as possible, he dropped to the lower story of his glasses, and I perceived that he had open before him some registers of my writing. They evidently dismayed him, and for some time he said not a word. At length he broke a silence which was becoming exceedingly painful.

“Mr. Corkey,” he exclaimed, “I believe you are in your eighteenth year!”

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “It will be my eighteenth birthday in the autumn.”

“And do you desire to celebrate that event with us, or elsewhere, Mr. Corkey?” he inquired.

I told him that I greatly hoped to celebrate it with him—at least, with the Country Department of the Apollo; and I breathed again in secret, for this showed that I was not going to be dismissed.

Indeed, Mr. Blades had told me that a man was always cautioned once.

“They never fire you the first time,” was his forcible expression.

But the revulsion of feeling caused by knowing that I was saved made me strike rather too joyful a note with Mr. Trott.

“I’m very sorry indeed that Mr. Westonshaugh had to report me, sir,” I said, in a hearty sort of voice. “It was well deserved, and I promise you it shan’t occur again.”

But the Secretary didn’t seem to want my views. In fact, he held up his hand for silence.

“You are here to listen, Mr. Corkey,” he replied. “Now, before me I have some of your recent work. Will you kindly consider these pages in an impartial spirit, and tell me what you think of them? I invite your opinion.”

As bad luck would have it, before him were some registers of policies that I had done under very unusual pressure. In fact, I had made a bet with a chap called Mason that I would register twenty “short period” policies quicker than he would register twenty of the same. My friend, Dicky Travers, held the stakes, which amounted to a shilling a side, and I won by one “short period” policy in record time.

These things, naturally, I did not tell my judge, for they would only have hurt him and led to Mason. Therefore, I merely regarded my handiwork with honest scorn and an expression of contempt, and said the writing was not worthy of the Apollo Fire Office.

“I had come to the same conclusion,” said Mr. Septimus Trott. “We are of one mind, Mr. Corkey. Now, I appeal to your honour as a gentleman, and as one who is drawing a good salary here—I appeal to you, Mr. Corkey, to do your work in future so that we may respect you and value your services, and not deplore them. Remember henceforth, Mr. Corkey, that from ten until four, or later, as the occasion demands, we have a right to your whole time and energy and attention and intelligence. To deny us that right, and to offer us less than your best, is quite unworthy of you, and neither just nor honest to your masters. Good morning, Mr. Corkey; I feel sure that I shall not have to speak again.”

I did not know what to answer, for this exceedingly fine man had made me feel both uncomfortable and mean. I had, however, to say something, so thanked him and promised that he should never be bothered by me any more. But he had already dismissed the subject and was buried in a pile of complicated documents, which were no doubt destined to melt under his hands like the dew upon the fleece.

I returned calmly to my department and wrapped myself in silence as with a garment. But I concealed a bruised heart, as the saying is, and determined to rectify this unpleasant event as swiftly as possible. I decided to stop after hours for six consecutive nights and write till eight, or even nine o’clock, and so produce an amount of work during the current account that should delight Mr. Westonshaugh and gratify Mr. Trott, if he ever heard about it. I wanted, before everything, to show them I bore no malice, but quite the contrary.

Mr. Blades thought my idea good, and that very night I stopped on and on, long after the staff had gone. It was a weird and interesting thing to be alone with my solitary gaslight in that huge and empty office. All was profound silence, save where my industrious pen steadily registered policy after policy. Here and there out of the darkness glimmered a knob of brass or some such thing, like the watchful eye of a beast of prey, and far below one heard the occasional, eerie rattle of a hansom, or cry of a human voice in the empty City. In all that huge hive of industry only I appeared to be humming! It was a great thought in its way. And yet I felt the presence of my colleagues in a ghostly sort of fashion, and knew where the warlike Bassett sat, and the musical Wardle, and the sporting Tomlinson, and so on. But, of course, they were all far away in the bosoms of their families, or elsewhere, as the case might be.

And then came a strange experience—the event of a lifetime, or, at any rate, the event of mine so far, for suddenly and without anything much in the way of premonitory symptoms, I got an urgent craving to write a poem! It is impossible to say how it came, or why; but there it was. My fatal experiences of that day, and being so sorry for myself, and one thing and another, depressed me to a most unusual flatness; and then nature, apparently rebelling against this flatness, urged me to write a poem upon a dire and fearful subject.

You might have thought that I should have taken refuge from the troubles of the morning by writing something gladsome and joyous, or even a regular, right-down hymn, with hopeful allusions to higher things; but far from it, owing to the gloom of the silent office, or the gloom of my mind, or perhaps both together, I produced stanza after stanza of the most deathly and grim poetry you could find in the language. It was called “The Witches’ Sabbath,” and I amazed myself by the ease with which I handled corpse-candles, gouts of blood, the gallows tree, ravens, owls, bats, lightning, the mutter of thunder, the stroke of Doom, spectres, demons, hags, black cats, broomsticks, and, in fact, every dreadful image you can possibly imagine from the classics at large. These things simply rolled off my pen; I could hardly write fast enough to catch up with the dance of horrors which seemed to get worse and worse in every stanza; and I remember wondering, while my nib flew, that if this ghastly thing was the result of a mild and temperate rebuke from Mr. Septimus Trott, what sort of poem I should have made if he had dealt bitterly and sarcastically and cruelly with me. I stopped to examine the question, and finally decided that it was the great patience and tenderness of Mr. Trott that had reduced me to this black depth of despair; and I believed that if he had slated me with all the force of barbed invective undoubtedly at his command, I should have gone to the other extreme and not stopped overtime, and been reckless and ferocious and mad, and very likely have produced a wild drinking-song, or some profane limerick of a far lower quality than this stately poem with all its horrors.

One verse especially pleased me, and I set it down here without hesitation, because the time was actually coming when my poem would see the glory of print—not, of course, that I should see the glory of anything else in the way of reward. But merely to be in print glorifies one for a long time.

The effect of this horrible poem was entirely to restore my happiness; and hope, long a stranger to my heart, as they say, returned, like the dove to the ark. I simply rejoiced at the poem. I stopped registering policies for that night and copied out the twelve verses of “The Witches’ Sabbath” carefully. I said farewell to the messengers whose duty it was to guard the Apollo by night; and I took home my poem, filled with a great longing to read it to Aunt Augusta. She consented to hear it and was much interested; and so surprised and pleased did she appear to be that I had not the heart to tell her about the sorrowful thing that led to it.

The next morning my poem was the first thought in my mind, and I read it carefully through before getting up. The glow had rather gone out of it; still, it was good. And I considered whether I should read it at the office to Mr. Blades and others. But, strangely enough, though my affection for Mr. Blades was deep and lasting, as well it might be, considering all his goodness, something seemed to whisper to me that he would not much like “The Witches’ Sabbath.” I had a wild idea of asking Wardle to set it to music, but second thoughts proved best, as so often happens, and I just kept the poem in my desk and waited till the next lesson at the Dramatic School. For I felt that in the genial atmosphere of tragic art my poem would be more at ease than in a hive of industry.

I improved it a great deal before the time came for the next meeting with Mr. Merridew. Not, of course, that I was going to show it to him; but I felt I should have courage to submit it to my fellow-pupil, Brightwin, and ask him for his can-did opinion upon it. Of course, measured according to Aristotle, it might have been found wanting; because there was simply not a spark of pity about it. But the terror was there all right.

To close this rather painful chapter, I may mention that I stuck to the resolve to work overtime for a week, but was not rewarded by inventing another poem. However, the result seemed highly favourable, for Mr. Westonshaugh complimented me on my work in the account, and showed a manly inclination to let the dead past bury its dead, as they say.