My First Book: the experiences of Walter Besant, James Payn, W. Clark Russell, Grant Allen, Hall Caine, George R. Sims, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, M.E. Braddon, F.W. Robinson, H. Rider Haggard, R.M. Ballantyne, I. Zangwill, Morley Roberts,...

Excerpt

'PLEASE, sir,' he said, 'could you tell me the right time?'

'Twenty minutes to eight,' I replied, looking at my watch.

'Oh,' he remarked. Then added for my information after a pause: 'I haven't got to be in till half-past eight.'

After that we fell back into our former silence, and sat watching the murky twilight, he at his end of the park seat, I at mine.

'And do you live far away?' I asked, lest, he having miscalculated, the short legs might be hard put to it.

'Oh no, only over there,' he answered, indicating with a sweep of his arm the northern half of London where it lay darkening behind the chimney-fringed horizon; 'I often come and sit here.'

It seemed an odd pastime for so very small a citizen. 'And what makes you like to come and sit here?' I said.

'Oh, I don't know,' he replied, 'I think.'

'And what do you think about?'

'Oh—oh, lots of things.'

He inspected me shyly out of the corner of his eye, but, satisfied apparently by the scrutiny, he sidled up a little nearer.

'Mama does not like this evening time,' he confided to me; 'it always makes her cry. But then,' he went on to explain, 'Mama has had a lot of trouble, and that makes anyone feel different about things, you know.'

I agreed that this was so. 'And do you like this evening time?' I enquired.

'Yes,' he answered; 'don't you?'

'Yes, I like it too,' I admitted. 'But tell me why you like it, then I will tell you why I like it.'

'Oh,' he replied, 'things come to you.'

'What things?' I asked.

Again his critical eye passed over me, and it raised me in my own conceit to find that again the inspection contented him, he evidently feeling satisfied that here was a man to whom another gentleman might speak openly and without reserve.

He wriggled sideways, slipping his hands beneath him and sitting on them.

'Oh, fancies,' he explained; 'I'm going to be an author when I grow up, and write books.'

Then I knew why it was that the sight of his little figure had drawn me out of my path to sit beside him, and why the little serious face had seemed so familiar to me, as of some one I had once known long ago.

So we talked of books and bookmen. He told me how, having been born on the fourteenth of February, his name had come to be Valentine, though privileged parties, as for example Aunt Emma, and Mr. Dawson, and Cousin Naomi, had shortened it to Val, and Mama would sometimes call him Pickaniny, but that was only when they were quite alone. In return I confided to him my name, and discovered that he had never heard it, which pained me for the moment, until I found that of all my confrères, excepting only Mr. Stevenson, he was equally ignorant, he having lived with the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new man and the new woman, the new pathos and the new humour being alike unknown to him.

Scott and Dumas and Victor Hugo were his favourites. 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'Don Quixote,' and the 'Arabian Nights,' he knew almost by heart, and these we discussed, exchanging many pleasant and profitable ideas upon the same. But the psychological novel, I gathered, was not to his taste....