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Title: My Life and Times
Author: Jerome, Jerome Klapka (1859-1927)
Photographer: Anonymous [Strand Magazine]
Date of first publication: 1925
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1926
   [first U.S. edition]
Date first posted: 18 June 2010
Date last updated: 18 June 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #557

This ebook was produced by:
Therese Wright, woodie4, Mark Akrigg, Marcia Brooks
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




  [Illustration: JEROME K. JEROME
  FROM A RECENT PORTRAIT]




  MY LIFE AND TIMES

  BY

  JEROME K. JEROME

  _Author of_ "_Three Men in a Boat_," "_The
  Passing of the Third Floor Back_," _Etc._

  NEW YORK   LONDON
  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

  MCMXXVI


  MY LIFE AND TIMES
  COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY JEROME K. JEROME
  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
  FIRST EDITION

  H-A




                      CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                  PAGE

        Introduction                          1

     I. Birth and Parentage                  10

    II. I Become a Poor Scholar              30

   III. Record of a Discontented Youth       47

    IV. My First Book, and Others            67

     V. The Wheels of Change                 86

    VI. More Literary Reminiscences         106

   VII. Trials of a Dramatist               132

  VIII. I Become an Editor                  166

    IX. The Author Abroad                   196

     X. The Author at Play                  222

    XI. America                             244

   XII. The War                             271

  XIII. Looking Forward                     304




MY LIFE AND TIMES




INTRODUCTION


I remember a night in Philip Bourke Marston's rooms. He was blind
and wrote poetry, and lived with his old father, Dr. Westland
Marston, the dramatist, in the Euston Road. They had turned us out
of Pagani's; it must have been about twelve o'clock.

Pagani's was then a small Italian restaurant in Great Portland
Street, frequented chiefly by foreigners. We were an odd collection
of about a dozen. For a time--until J. M. Barrie and Coulson
Kernahan came into it--I was the youngest. We dined together once a
fortnight in Pagani's first-floor front at the fixed price of two
shillings a head, and most of us drank Chianti at one and fourpence
the half flask. A remnant of us, later on, after Philip Marston's
death, founded the Vagabonds' club. We grew and prospered, dining
Cabinet Ministers, Field Marshals--that sort of people--in marble
halls. But the spirit of the thing had gone out of it with poor
Philip.

At Pagani's, the conversation had been a good deal about God. I
think it was Swinburne who had started the topic; and there had been
a heated argument, some taking Swinburne's part and others siding
with God. And then there had been a row between Rudolph Blind, son
of Karl Blind, the Socialist, and a member whose name I forget,
about a perambulator. Blind and the other man, whom I will call Mr.
X, had bought a perambulator between them, Mrs. Blind's baby and the
other lady's baby being expected to arrive the same week. All would
have gone well but that Mr. X's lady had presented him with twins.
Blind's idea was that the extra baby should occupy the floor of the
perambulator. This solution of the problem had been put before Mrs.
X, and had been rejected; she was not going to have her child made
into a footstool. Mr. X's suggestion was that he should buy Blind
out. Blind's retort was that he wanted only half a perambulator and
had got it. If bought out, it must be at a price that would enable
him to purchase an entire perambulator. Blind and X were still
disputing, when all at once the gas went out. It was old Pagani's
customary method of hinting that he wanted to go to bed.

Philip, to whom all hours were dark, guided us downstairs; and
invited us to come round to his rooms and finish up the evening. He
wanted to introduce me to his old father, who was an invalid and did
not, as a rule, come to these gatherings. Accordingly, some
half-a-dozen of us walked round with him, including Dr. Aveling (who
wrote under the name of Alec Nelson and who had married a daughter
of Karl Marx) and F. W. Robinson, the novelist, who was then running
a monthly magazine called _Home Chimes_. Barrie was writing articles
for it, and I was doing a monthly "Causerie" titled "Gossips'
Corner" and headed with the picture of a solemn little donkey
looking over a hedge. At first, I had objected to the presence of
this donkey, but Barrie took a fancy to him, and pleaded for him;
and so I let him stay. Most of the writers since famous were among
its contributors.

In Fitzroy Square we stopped to discuss the advisability, or
otherwise, of knocking up Bernard Shaw and taking him along with us.
Shaw for some time had been known to the police as one of the most
notorious speakers in Hyde Park; and his name was now becoming
familiar to the general public as the result of scurrilous attacks,
disguised as interviews, that were being made upon him by a section
of the evening press. The interviewer would force his way into
Shaw's modest apartment, apparently for no other purpose than to
bully and insult him. Many maintained that Shaw must be an imaginary
personage. Why did he stand it? Why didn't he kick the interviewer
downstairs? Failing that, why didn't he call in the police? It
seemed difficult to believe in the existence of a human being so
amazingly Christian-like as this poor persecuted Shaw appeared to
be. As a matter of fact, the interviews were written by Shaw
himself. They certainly got him talked about. Three reasons decided
us against waking him up on the present occasion. Firstly, no one
was quite sure of the number of the house. Secondly, we knew his
room was up six flights of stairs; and none of us seemed eager for
the exercise. Thirdly and lastly, the chances were a hundred to one
that, even if we ever got there, Shaw wouldn't come down, but would
throw his boot at the first man who opened the door.

The Euston Road had not a good reputation in those days. I expect it
was the cheapness of the locality that kept the Marstons there.
Philip made very little by his writings; and his father's savings
could not have been of any importance. In those days, if a dramatist
made five hundred pounds out of a play, he was lucky. The old
gentleman was in bed when we reached the second floor, but got up
and joined us in a dressing gown that had seen better days. Philip,
a while before, had been sent a present of really good cigars by an
admirer; and sound whisky was then to be had at three-and-six a
bottle; so everything went merry as a marriage bell. Philip's old
father was in a talkative mood, and told us stories about Phelps and
Macready and the Terrys. And this put Robinson on his mettle, and he
launched out into reminiscences of Dickens, and Thackeray whom he
had helped on the _Cornhill Magazine_, and Lewis and George Eliot. I
remember proclaiming my intention of writing my autobiography, when
the proper time arrived: it seemed to me then a long way off. I
held--I hold it still--that a really great book could be written by
a man with sufficient courage to put down truthfully and without
reserve all that he really thought and felt and had done. That was
the book I was going to write, so I explained. I would call it
"Confessions of a Fool."

I remember the curious silence that followed, for up till then we
had been somewhat noisy. Aveling was the first to speak. He agreed
that the book would be interesting and useful. The title also was
admirable. Alas, it had already been secured by a greater than
myself, one August Strindberg, a young Swedish author. Aveling had
met Strindberg, and predicted great things of him. A German
translation of the book had just been published. It dealt with only
one phase of human folly, but that a fairly varied and important
one. The lady of the book I met myself years later in America. She
was still a wonderfully pretty woman, though inclined then to
plumpness. But I could not get her to talk about Strindberg. She
would always reply by a little gesture, as of putting things behind
her, accompanied by a whimsical smile. It would have been
interesting to have had her point of view.

The majority were of the opinion that such a book never had and
never would be written. Cellini's book, if true, was mere melodrama.
Pepys had jotted down a mountain of trivialities. Rousseau, having
confessed himself the victim of an imbecility tolerably harmless,
and more common than he thought, got frightened and, for the rest of
the book, had sought to explain away his vices, and to make the most
of his virtues. No man will ever write the true story of himself;
and if he did Mudie's subscribers would raise shocked eyes to
heaven, and ask each other if such incomprehensible creatures could
possibly exist. Froude ventured to mention the fact that the married
life of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle had not been one long-drawn-out
celestial harmony. The entire middle-class of England and America
could hardly believe its ears. It went down on its knees and thanked
God that such goings-on happened only in literary and artistic
circles. George Eliot has pointed out how we dare not reveal
ourselves for fear of wounding our dear ones. That the beloved
husband and father, the cherished wife, the sainted mother, could
really have thought this, felt that, very nearly done the other! It
would be too painful. Society is built upon the assumption that we
are all of us just as good as we should be. To confess that we are
imperfect, is to proclaim ourselves unhuman.

So every volume of "My Memoirs," every "Book of my Life" conforms to
the strict convention. If, for the sake of a moment's variety, we
hint at the possession of a vice, it resembles those of the Vicar of
Wakefield, and "leans to virtue's side."

The American publisher, whom we had playfully dubbed "Barabbas,"
told us that Mark Twain had told him that he, Mark Twain, was
writing a book of reminiscences, speaking quite frankly about
everybody he had met. To avoid trouble all round, Twain was
instructing his executors not to publish the book until twenty years
after his death. Some time later, when I came to know Mark Twain, I
asked him if it were true. "Quite true," he answered; "I am going to
speak of everybody I have met, exactly as I have found them, nothing
extenuating." He also added that he might, before he left London, be
asking of me a loan, and hoped that, if he did, I should not turn
out to be a mean-spirited skinflint. I still think the book was a
myth, put about by Mark Twain for the purpose of keeping his friends
nervous, and up to the mark. A sort of a book of the kind has, it is
true, been published, since I wrote this chapter; but it isn't a bit
the book he threatened. Anyhow, he never turned up for that loan.

The others drifted away, one by one. The old gentleman had retired
to bed. Philip asked me to stop on awhile. I was living close by, in
Tavistock Place. The site of the house is now occupied by the
Passmore Edwards Institute. Passmore Edwards, who was then the
proprietor and editor of _The Echo_, the first newspaper in London
published at a halfpenny, had been a great friend of my father, back
in the days when they were both young men. My father always claimed
that it was he and Passmore Edwards who had introduced golf into the
South of England. I do not press the point, not being sure of the
view that may be taken of the matter on the Day of Judgment. Perhaps
he was only boasting. They used to play it on the sands at Westward
Ho. My father, at the time, was farming land the other side of the
river, above Instow. Westward Ho was then a wild stretch of desolate
sealand bounded on the north by the great pebble ridge. They used it
as a bunker at low tide. It must have taken some getting over. I
shared the ground floor of number nineteen Tavistock Place with a
chum, George Wingrave by name. The rooms above us were occupied by
two sisters. The elder was the mistress of a gentleman who is now a
well-known member of Parliament, in addition to being a magistrate,
inclined to deal severely with human faults and frailties. She
committed suicide a day or two after he was married. I remember our
quaint little old landlady, Mrs. Peedles--"Mrs. P." George and I
always called her for short--bursting in upon me with a white,
scared face while I was writing. We found her unconscious, her
sister kneeling by the sofa holding her in her arms; but she died
before we could get help. Fortunately for our present well-known
legislator, his father was a man of means and influence. "An
overdose of morphia" was, I think, the verdict. It came out that she
had been suffering from sleeplessness. She had been a quiet,
reserved girl. The younger sister was religious.

So soon as we were alone, Philip re-introduced the subject of
reminiscences. Asking me not to talk about it, he told me he had
done the very thing we had decided to be impossible--had kept a
diary, writing down the thoughts that came to him, his dreams and
desires. Or, to speak more strictly, typing them. Since his
blindness, he had become marvellously proficient on the typewriter.
It was a curious mixture, this diary, according to his own account.
One Philip was an evil thing, full of lusts and horrors, lower than
any beast that crawled the earth. And another Philip was quite
beautiful, and Christ would have loved him. And, in addition to
these two, was yet a third Philip, who stood apart from both. Philip
could not make out who this third one was. He seemed to be always
just behind the other two, watching them both with passionless eyes.
"There are times," so Philip explained to me, "when he looks into my
very soul and I shrivel up with shame; and there are rare moments
when I feel as if he had entered into me and we were one."

From another, I might have deemed this idle talk; but Philip was a
curious fellow. Much tragedy had entered his life that must have
gone to the making of him; and in him the animal and spiritual were
both strongly developed. Behind that veil of darkness, there must
have been many a grim struggle between them. Myself I always
believed in the existence of that book about which we talked that
night. I was abroad when he died. On my return I spoke about it to
his father and he promised to make search for it.

But we never found it.




CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND PARENTAGE


I was born at Walsall in Staffordshire on the 2nd of May, 1859. My
father, at the time, was the owner of coal mines on Cannock Chase.
They were among the first pits sunk on Cannock Chase; and are still
referred to locally as the Jerome pits. My mother, whose name was
Marguerite, was Welsh. She was the elder daughter of a Mr. Jones, a
solicitor of Swansea; and in those days of modest fortunes had been
regarded as an heiress. It was chiefly with her money that the
coal-pits had been started. My mother's family were Nonconformists,
and my father came of Puritan stock. I have heard my mother tell how
she and her sister, when they were girls, would often have to make
their way to chapel of a Sunday morning through showers of stones
and mud. It was not until the middle of the century that the
persecution of the Nonconformists throughout the country districts
may be said to have entirely ceased. My father was educated at
Merchant Taylors School, and afterwards studied for an architect;
but had always felt a "call," as the saying is, to the ministry.
Before his marriage, he had occupied his time chiefly in building
chapels, and had preached in at least two of them. I think his first
pulpit must have been at Marlborough. A silver salver in my
possession bears the inscription: "Presented to the Reverend Clapp
Jerome by the congregation of the Independent Chapel, Marlborough,
June 1828." And at that time he could not have been much over one
and twenty. From Marlborough he went to Cirencester. There he built
the Independent Chapel, and I see from a mighty Bible, presented to
him by the "Ladies of the Congregation," that it was opened under
his ministry on June 6th, 1833. Altered out of all recognition, it
is now the Cirencester Memorial Hospital on the road to the station.
I have a picture of it as it appeared in my father's time. From an
artistic point of view the world cannot be said to progress
forwards.

On his marriage, my father settled down in Devonshire, where he
farmed land at Appledore above Bideford; and also started a stone
quarry. But the passion to be preaching never left him. In
Devonshire, he preached whenever he got the chance, travelling about
the country; but had no place of his own. When he gave up farming to
go to Walsall, it was partly with the idea of making his fortune out
of coal, and partly because a permanent pulpit had been offered him.

Sir Edward Holden of Walsall, a still vigorous old gentleman of over
ninety, with whom I dined not long ago, tells me my father was quite
a wonderful preacher, and drew large congregations to Walsall from
all round the district. He preached at first in the small
Independent Chapel that he found there. Later, the leading
Nonconformists in the town got together, and the Congregational
church in Bradford Street, which is still one of the features of the
town, was built for him, my father giving his services as
architect. It stands on the top of the hill, and in those days
looked out over fields to Cannock Chase. It would be easy, as things
turned out, for a wise man to point the obvious moral that if my
father had followed sound Biblical advice--had stuck to his
preaching, for which God had given him the gift, and had left
worldly enterprise to those apter in the ways of Mammon, it would,
from every point of view, have been the better for him. But if
success instead of failure had resulted, then he would no doubt have
been praised as the ideal parent, labouring for the future welfare
of his children. It was the beginning of the coal boom in
Staffordshire, and fortunes were being made all round him, even by
quite good men. In my father's case, it was the old story of the man
who had the money calling in to his aid the man who had the
experience. By the time my father had sunk his last penny, he knew
all that was worth knowing about coal mining; but then it was too
late. The final catastrophe seems to have been hastened by an
inundation; and to cut a long story short, my father, returning home
late one evening after the rest of the household were asleep, sat
himself down on the edge of my mother's bed and broke to her, as
gently as possible, the not unexpected news that he was a ruined
man. I see from my mother's diary that the date coincides with the
first anniversary of my birthday.

A few hundreds, all told, were perhaps saved out of the wreck. We
moved into a small house in Stourbridge, near by; and, having
settled us there, my father, ever hopeful to the end, went off by
himself to London, with the idea of retrieving our fortunes through
the medium of the wholesale ironmongery business. He seems to have
taken premises with a wharf in Narrow Street, Limehouse, and at the
same time to have secured by way of residence the lease of a small
house in Sussex Street, Poplar. He describes it, in his letters, as
a corner house with a garden; and my mother seems to have pictured
it as something rural. Poor Lady! It must have been a shock to her
when she saw it. Sometimes, when in the neighbourhood of the City, I
jump upon an East Ham 'bus and, getting off at Stainsby Road, creep
to the corner and peep round at it. I can understand my father
finding one excuse after another for not sending for us. Of course
he was limited by his means and the wish to be near his place of
business in Narrow Street. Also, no doubt, he argued to himself that
it would only be for a little while--until he could afford one of
the fine Georgian houses in the East India Dock Road, where then
lived well-to-do ship-owners and merchants. There, till we joined
him, two years later, my father lived by himself, limiting his
household expenses to five shillings a week. For the ironmongery
business was not prospering; and at Stourbridge there were seven of
us, in all, to be kept. My mother did not know at the time--not till
a friend betrayed him to her and then she took matters into her own
hands, and began her packing.

But before that, a deeper trouble than any loss of money had all but
overwhelmed her. My little brother Milton had died after a short
illness when six years old. A dear quaint little fellow he seems to
have been: though maybe my mother's love exaggerated his piety and
childish wisdom. On each anniversary of his death, she confides to
her diary that she is a year nearer finding him again. The last
entry, sixteen years afterwards and just ten days before she died
herself, runs: "Dear Milton's birthday. It can be now but a little
while longer. I wonder if he will have changed."

My brother's death left a gap in the family. My younger sister,
Blandina, was eleven years older than myself; and Paulina, the
elder, was a grown-up young woman with a Sunday School class and a
sweetheart when I was still in frocks. The sweetheart was one Harry
Beckett, an engineer. My mother at first entertained hopes of his
conversion; but later seems to have abandoned them on learning that
he had won in open competition the middleweight championship of
Staffordshire. She writes him down sorrowfully as "evidently little
better than a mere prize fighter," and I gather there were other
reasons, rendering him undesirable from my parents' point of view.
The end, I know, was tears; and Harry departed for Canada. He turned
up again in the eighteen eighties and dropped in unexpectedly upon
my sister. I happened to be staying with her at the time. She was
then the mother of seven hefty boys and girls. A big handsome fellow
he was still, with laughing eyes and kindly ways, I had taken to the
writing of stories and was interested in the situation. He was doing
well in the world; but he had never married. Perhaps he did mix his
whisky and water with less water than there should have been as we
sat together in the evening, we three--my brother-in-law was away
up north on business--but as I watched them, I could not help
philosophising that life will always remain a gamble, with prizes
sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.

It is with our journey up to London, when I was four years old, that
my memory takes shape. I remember the train and the fields and
houses that ran away from me; and the great echoing cave at the end
of it all--Paddington station, I suppose. My mother writes that the
house was empty when we reached it, the furniture not turning up
till four days later. "Papa and I and Baby slept in the house."
There must, of course, have been a little furniture, for my father
had been living there. I remember their making me up a bed on the
floor. And my father's and mother's talk, as they sat one each side
of the fire, mingled with my dreams. "Mrs. Richard put up the two
girls, and Fan and Eliza slept at the Lashfords'." Eliza, I take it,
must have been a servant. Aunt Fan was my mother's sister who lived
with us: an odd little old lady with corkscrew curls and a
pink-and-white complexion. The pictures of Queen Victoria as a girl
always remind me of her.

My recollections are confused and crowded of those early days in
Poplar. As I grew older I was allowed to wander about the streets a
good deal by myself. My mother was against it, but my father argued
that it was better for me. I had got to learn to take care of
myself.

I have come to know my London well. Grim poverty lurks close to its
fine thoroughfares, and there are sad, sordid streets within its
wealthiest quarters. But about the East End of London there is a
menace, a haunting terror that is to be found nowhere else. The
awful silence of its weary streets. The ashen faces, with their
lifeless eyes that rise out of the shadows and are lost. It was
these surroundings in which I passed my childhood that gave to me, I
suppose, my melancholy, brooding disposition. I can see the humorous
side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I
will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life. Of all
this, at the time, I was of course, unconscious. The only trouble of
which I was aware was that of being persecuted by the street boys.
There would go up a savage shout if, by ill luck, I happened to be
sighted. It was not so much the blows as the jeers and taunts that I
fled from, spurred by mad terror. My mother explained to me that it
was because I was a gentleman. Partly that reconciled me to it; and
with experience I learned ways of doubling round corners and
outstripping my pursuers; and when they were not actually in sight I
could forget them. It was a life much like a hare must lead. But
somehow he gets used to it, and there must be fine moments for him
when he has outwitted all his enemies, and sits looking round him
from his hillock, panting but proud.

My father had two nephews, both doctors, one living at Bow; and the
other at Plaistow, which was then a country village. Bow was a
residential suburb. One reached it by the Burdett Road. It was being
built on then, but there were stretches where it still ran through
scrubby fields and pastures. And beyond was Victoria Park, and the
pleasant, old-world town of Hackney. Further north still, one
reached Stoke Newington, where dwelt grand folks that kept their
carriage. I remember frequent visits to one such with my young
sister, Blandina. I see from my mother's diary that a mighty project
was on foot; nothing less than the building of a new railway: from
where to where, I cannot say. In the diary it is simply referred to
as "Papa's Railway." For us it led from Poverty to the land of
"Heart's Desire." I gather that the visits to Stoke Newington were
in connection with this railway. Generally we were met at the iron
gates by a very old gentleman--or so he appeared to me--with a bald,
shiny head and fat fingers. My sister was always the bearer of
papers tied up with red tape, and these would be opened and spread
out, and there would be talking and writing, followed by a sumptuous
tea. Afterwards, taking my sister's hand in his fat fingers, he
would tuck her arm through his and lead her out into the garden,
leaving me supplied with picture-books and sweets. My sister would
come back laden with grapes and peaches, a present for Mamma. And
whenever the weather was doubtful we were sent home in the
deep-cushioned carriage with its prancing horses. Not to over-excite
our neighbours of Sussex Street, it would stop at the end of the
Burdett Road, and my sister and I would walk the rest of the way.

Our visits grew more and more frequent, and my mother's hopes for
"Papa's Railway" mounted higher and higher. Until one afternoon my
sister came back out of the garden empty-handed, and with a
frightened look in her eyes. She would not ride home in the carriage.
Instead we walked very fast to Dalston Junction, from where we took
the train; and I could see that she was crying under her veil. It
must have been an afternoon early in November. I remember his having
asked my sister if she would like to see the Lord Mayor's show. My
mother writes in her diary under date November 16th, "Papa's railway
is not to be proceeded with. We are overwhelmed with sorrow. Every
effort my dear husband makes proves unsuccessful. We seem shut out
from the blessing of God."

Even my father seems to have lost hope for a while. A page or two
later I read, "Dear Jerome has accepted a situation at Mr. Rumbles'.
A hundred a year from nine till eight. Feeling very low and sad."

On November 13th, my mother tells Eliza that she can no longer
afford to keep her. "She wept and was very sorry to leave."

"December 2nd. Jerome had his watch stolen. An elegant gold lever
with his crest engraved that I gave him on our wedding day. Oh, how
mysterious are God's dealings with us!"

On December 4th, the sun seems to have peeped out. "Dear Blandina's
birthday. Gave her my gold watch and a locket. She was very much
delighted. Dear Pauline came home. A very pleasant, cheerful day,
notwithstanding our heavy trials." But early the following year it
is dark again.

"January 12th. A very severe frost set in this week. Skating by
torchlight in Victoria Park. Coals have risen eight shillings a ton.
It is a fearful prospect. I have asked the Lord to remove it.

"January 18th. To-day _suddenly_, to the surprise of all, a thaw
began. The skating by torchlight all knocked on the head. Coals
have gone down again just as we were at the last. 'How much better
are ye than many sparrows.'"

My sisters seem to have taken situations from time to time. As
governesses, I expect: the only calling then open to a gentlewoman.
I read: "Pauline to Ramsgate. Oh, how intensely do I wish we could
all continue to live together!" And lower down on the same page:
"Blanche to Mrs. Turner's. Am feeling so lonely. The briars are too
many for my feet to pass through; and the road is rough and dark."

And then a week or two later, I likewise take my departure, but
fortunately only on a brief visit to friends in the north of London.
I am seen off at the station. My mother returns to the empty house
and writes, "Dear Luther went off delighted. Gracious Father, guard
and protect my little lamb until he returns."

Writing the word "Luther" reminds me of an odd incident. I was
called Luther as a boy, not because it was my name, but to
distinguish me from my father, whose Christian name was also Jerome.
A year or two ago, on Paddington platform, a lady stopped me and
asked me if I were Luther Jerome. I had not heard the name for
nearly half a century; and suddenly, as if I had been riding Mr.
Wells' Time Machine backwards, Paddington station vanished with a
roar (it may have been the pilot-engine, bringing in the 6.15) and
all the dead were living.

It turned out we had been playmates together in the old days at
Poplar. We had not seen each other since we were children. She
admitted, looking closer at me, that there had come changes. But
there was still "something about the eyes," she explained. It was
certainly curious.

For some reason, about this time, there seems to have crept into my
mother's heart the hope that we might get back possession of the
farm in Devonshire to which my father had brought her home after
their honeymoon, and that she might end her days there. It lies on
the north side of the river above Bideford, and is marked by a
ruined tower, near to which, years ago, relics were discovered
proving beyond all doubt that the Founder of our House was one
"Clapa," a Dane, who had obtained property in the neighbourhood
about the year Anno Domini one thousand. It was Clapa, I take it,
who suggested our family crest, upraised arm grasping a battle-axe,
with round about it the legend "Deo omnia data." But as to how much
Clapa owed to God and how much to his battle-axe, found rusted
beside his bones, history is silent. Be all this as it may, my
mother never seems to have got over the idea that by some
inalienable right the farm still belonged to us. Always she speaks
of it as "our farm." Through the pages of her diary one feels her
ever looking out towards it, seeing it as in a vision beyond the
mean streets that closed her in, and among which in the end she
died. One day she writes: "Dear Jerome has told me about Norton and
our farm. Why should it not be? With God all things are possible."
Later on, a large hamper arrives from Betsey, the farmer's wife.
Betsey in my mother's time had been the dairymaid; and had married
the carter. With the hamper, Betsey sends a letter containing
further news concerning Norton--whoever or whatever "Norton" may be.
My mother writes: "Well, God can restore even that to us. Oh, that I
had more faith in God!"

Among all their troubles, one good thing seems to have been left to
my father and mother: their love for one another. It runs through
all the pages. There was a sad day when my sister Pauline lay
dangerously ill. My mother returns from a visit to her.

"Gracious Father, sustain me that I may never distrust Thee, though
wave follow wave in overwhelming succession. Came home with Papa,
whose love is so constant and true. Mrs. Cartwright sent some apples
and a can of cream, and Mrs. E. a pair of boots for Luther. 'His
mercy endureth for ever.'"

"May 2nd, 1865. Dear little Luther's birthday. Six years old. Gave
him a dove. Papa gave him 'Robinson Crusoe.'"

About this time, and greatly to my mother's joy, I "got religion,"
as the saying is. I gave up taking sugar in my tea, and gave the
twopence a week to the Ragged School in Threecolt Street. On
Sundays, I used to pore over a great illustrated Bible and Fox's
"Book of Martyrs." This used to be a popular book in religious
houses, and children were encouraged to wallow in its pictures of
hideous tortures. Old Fox may have meant Well, but his book makes
for cruelty and lasciviousness. Also I worried myself a good deal
about Hell. I would suggest to our ecclesiastical authorities that
they should make up their mind about Hell and announce the result.
When I was a boy, a material Hell was still by most pious folks
accepted as fact. The suffering caused to an imaginative child can
hardly be exaggerated. It caused me to hate God, and later on, when
my growing intelligence rejected the conception as an absurdity, to
despise the religion that had taught it. It appeared one could avoid
Hell by the simple process of "believing." But how was I to be sure
that I did believe, sufficiently? There was a mountain of rubbish on
some waste land beside the Limehouse canal: it was always spoken of
locally as the "mountain." By way of experiment, I prayed that this
mountain might be removed. It would certainly have been of advantage
to the neighbourhood; and as, by comparison with pictures I had
seen, it was evidently but a very little mountain, I thought my
faith might be sufficient. But there it remained morning after
morning, in spite of my long kneelings by my bedside. I felt the
fault was mine and despaired.

Another fear that haunted me was the Unforgivable Sin. If only one
knew what it was one might avoid it. I lived in terror of blundering
into it. One day--I forget what led to it--I called my Aunt Fan a
bloody fool. She was deaf and didn't hear it. But all that night I
lay tossing on my bed. It had come to me that this was the
Unforgivable Sin, though even at the time, and small though I was, I
could not help reflecting that if this were really so, there must in
the Parish of Poplar be many unforgivable sinners. My mother, in the
morning, relieved my mind as to its being the particular
Unforgivable Sin, but took it gravely enough notwithstanding, and
kneeling side by side in the grey dawn, we prayed for forgiveness.

I return to my mother's diary.

"Jan. 1st, 1866. So time rolls on with its sorrows, conflicts, its
unrealized hopes. But these will pass away and be followed by the
full, unmeasured bliss of Eternity. Doctor Cumming prophesies this
year to be our last. He seems to overlook the second coming of
Christ, with the glorious ingathering of Jew and Gentile. Spent the
evening with our friends in Bedford Square. Enjoyed our visit very
much.

"Jan. 31st. Old Wood made another proposal of marriage (to my sister
Blanche, I take it. Wood, no doubt, was the name of the bald-headed
old gentleman of Stoke Newington). But God graciously preserved her
from being influenced by his wealth. Yet our path is very cloudy and
full of sorrow.

"May 22nd. Peace meeting at Cannon Street Hotel. Papa made a
beautiful speech. Caught cold coming home.

"June 7th, 1867. Our wedding day. Twenty-five years have passed
since together we have borne the joys and sorrows, the mercies and
trials of this weary way. But we can still say, 'Hitherto hath the
Lord helped us and preserved us.' But oh, when will it be eventide
with us? 'And at eventide it shall be light.'

"June 30th. 3.45 a.m., heard a queer noise. Came downstairs to
ascertain the cause. A black-and-white cat sprang from the room.
Dear little Fairy's cage was open, his feathers scattered all about.
A thrill of anguish passed through me, and I called aloud in my
sorrow. All came downstairs to mourn our loss. It was no use. We
were all retiring, when a call from Luther made me rush downstairs
again. In the drawing-room there I beheld the little panting
innocent clinging to the muslin curtains, and so delighted to pop
once more into his cage. We were all now overjoyed and overwhelmed
with astonishment at the bird's safety. How he escaped is a mystery.
The Lord must have known how it would have grieved us all.

"July 18th. This morning we started to pay our long-talked-of visit
to Appledore, and although we anticipated much pleasure, I had no
idea of realizing half the kind attention and reception I and the
dear children received. Everybody seemed to remember all my acts of
kindness which I had long ago forgotten, and quite overwhelmed me
with their love and affection. We enjoyed ourselves excessively. My
visit has been to me like the refreshing rain after a long and
dreary drought."

To me, too, that visit was as a glimpse into another world. At
Stourbridge, as a little chap, I must have seen something of the
country. But I had forgotten it. Through the long journey, I sat
with my face glued to the window. We reached Instow in the evening.
The old ferryman came forward with a grin, and my mother shook hands
with him, and all the way across they talked of strange names and
places, and sometimes my mother laughed, and sometimes sighed. It
was the first time I had been in a boat, and I was afraid, but tried
to hide it. I stumbled over something soft, and it rose up and up
until it was almost as tall as myself and looked at me. There must
have been dogs in Poplar, but the few had never come my way, and
anyhow nothing like this. I thought he was going to kill me and
shut my eyes tight; but he only gave me a lick all over my face,
that knocked off my cap. The old ferryman swore at him, and he
disappeared with a splash into the water. I thought he would be
drowned and called out. But everybody laughed, and after all he
wasn't, for I met him again the next day. A group of children was
gathered on the shore, but instead of shouting or making faces at me
they only looked at me with curious shy eyes, and my mother and
sisters kissed them, and by this time quite a number of grown-ups
had gathered round us. It was quite a time before we got away from
them. I remember the walk up the steep hill. There were no lamps
that I could see, but a strange light was all about us, as if we
were in fairyland. It was the first time that I had ever climbed a
hill. You had to raise your feet and bend your body. It was just as
if someone were trying to pull you backwards. It all seemed very
queer.

The days run into one another. I cannot separate them. I remember
the line of reapers, bending above the yellow corn, and feeling
sorry for it as it went down before their sickles. It was one
evening when I had stolen away by myself that I found the moon. I
saw a light among the tree-tops and thought at first to run home in
fear, but something held me. It rose above the tree-tops higher and
higher, till I saw it plainly. Without knowing why, I went down upon
my knees and stretched out my arms to it. There always comes back to
me that evening when I hear the jesting phrase "wanting the moon." I
remember the sun that went down each night into the sea the other
side of Lundy Island, and turned the farmhouse windows into blood.
Of course he came to Poplar. One looked up sometimes and saw him
there, but then he was sad and sick, and went away early in the
afternoon. I had never seen him before looking bold and jolly. There
were picnics on the topmost platform of the old, grey, ruined tower,
that still looks down upon the sea. And high teas in great
farmhouses, and with old friends in Bideford, where one spread first
apply jelly and then Devonshire cream upon one's bread, and lived
upon squab pies and junkets, and quaffed sweet cider out of goblets,
just like gods.

I got left behind on the way home--at Taunton, I think. We had got
out of the train for light refreshment. My mother had thought my
sisters were looking after me, and they had thought I was with her.
It seemed to me unlikely we should ever meet again in spite of the
assurances of a stout gentleman in gold buttons and a braided cap.
But I remember consolation coming to me with the reflection that
here at least was interesting adventure, worthy of being recorded in
my diary. For, unknown to all but my Aunt Fan, I was getting
together material for a story of which I myself would be the hero.
This notion of writing must have been my own entirely, for though my
father could claim relationship with Leigh Hunt, I cannot remember
hearing as a child any talk about literature. The stout gentleman
with the gold buttons came back to me later, bringing a lady with
him. She sat down beside me and guaranteed to take me back to my
Mamma. There must have been something about her inviting confidence.
I told her about the book, and how I was going to use for it this
strange and moving incident. She greatly approved and was sure that
I should succeed because I had the right idea. "There is only one
person you will ever know," she told me. "Always write about him.
You can call him, of course, different names."

By some magic, as it seemed to me, the kind lady and myself reached
Paddington before my mother got there, so that, much to her relief,
I was the first thing that she saw as she stepped out of the train.
My mother hoped I had not been a trouble. But the kind lady assured
her I had been most entertaining. "I always find people interesting
when they are talking about themselves," the kind lady explained.
And then she laughed and was gone.

Returning to our life in Poplar, things, I fancy, must have
lightened a little, for a servant seems to have been engaged again.
They come and go through the remainder of my mother's diary.

"Nov. 11th. Jane very rude, felt she was going to give me notice, so
I gave her notice first. How different servants are to what they
were!

"Dec. 2nd. Jane left. Sarah came. Anyhow it can't be a change for
the worse."

It appears from an entry on December 16th, 1868, that chiefly
through the help of a Mr. Halford I obtained a presentation to the
Marylebone Grammar School, then called the Philological School, at
the corner of Lisson Grove. I read: "It has been an anxious time,
but God has blessed dear Papa's efforts. The committee examined
Luther this day, and the little lad passed through with _flying
colours_. He will begin his school life in January. I must give up
calling him Baby."

So ends my childhood. It remains in my memory as quite a happy time.
Not till years later did I learn how poor we were--of the long and
bitter fight that my father and mother were waging against fate. To
me it seemed we must be rather fortunate folk. We lived in the
biggest house in Sussex Street. It had a garden round three sides of
it with mignonette and nasturtiums that my mother watered of an
evening. It was furnished more beautifully, I thought, than any
house I had ever seen, with china and fine pictures and a semi-grand
piano by Collard and Collard in the drawing-room, and damask
curtains to the windows. In the dining-room were portraits of my
father and mother by Muirhead, and when visitors came my mother
would bring out the silver teapot and the old Swansea ware that she
would never let anyone wash but herself. We slept on mahogany
bedsteads, and in my father's room stood the Great Chest. The
topmost drawer was always locked; but one day, when the proper time
arrived, my father would open it, and then we should see what we
would see. Even my mother confessed she did not know--for
certain--what was hidden there. My father had been a great man and
was going to be again. He wore a silk hat and carried a
walking-stick with a gold head. My mother was very beautiful, and
sometimes, when she was not working, wore silks and real lace; and
had an Indian shawl that would go through a wedding-ring. My sisters
could sing and play and always wore gloves when they went out. I had
a best suit for Sundays and visitings; and always enough to eat. I
see from my mother's diary that one of her crosses was that for a
growing boy I was not getting proper nourishing food, but of this I
had no inkling. There was a dish called "bread and sop" which was
sweet and warm and of which I was fond. For tea there would
sometimes be golden syrup, and for supper bread with dripping spread
quite thick. And on Sundays we had meat and pudding for dinner. If
all things are as my mother so firmly believed, she has long known
that her fears were idle--that notwithstanding I grew up to be an
exceptionally strong and healthy man. But I would that the
foreknowledge could have come to her when she was living, and so
have removed one, at least, of her many sorrows.




CHAPTER II

I BECOME A POOR SCHOLAR


One of the advantages of being poor is that it necessitates the
cultivation of the virtues. I learnt to get up early in the
morning--the beginning of all things that are of good repute. From
Sussex Street to Poplar station on the North London Railway I found
to be a quarter of an hour's sharp walking. So I breakfasted at
half-past six, and caught the seven-fifteen. The seven-thirty would
have done it. But my father's argument was: "Better catch the
seven-fifteen. Then, if you miss it, the seven-thirty will still get
you there in time. But if you catch the seven-thirty, then if you
don't, you're done." The train wound round Bow and Homerton, then a
leafy neighbourhood of market gardens and old wooden houses. At
Homerton still stood Dick Turpin's house, a substantial,
comfortable-looking dwelling, behind a pleasant, walled-in garden,
celebrated even then for its wonderful godetias, said to have been
Dick Turpin's favourite flower. At Dalston Junction one changed, and
went on through Highbury and old Canonbury to Chalk Farm. From there
my way lay by Primrose Hill and across Regent's Park. Primrose Hill
then was on the outskirts of London, and behind it lay cottages and
fields. I remember a sign-post pointing out a footpath to Child's
Hill and the village of Finchley. Sometimes of a morning I was
lucky enough to strike a carriage going round the outer circle of
the park, and would run after it and jump on to the axle-bar. But
clinging on was ticklish work, especially when handicapped by a
satchel and an umbrella; added to which there was always the danger
of some mean little cuss pointing from the pavement and screaming
"Whip behind," when one had to spring off quickly, taking one's
chance of arriving upon one's feet or on one's sitting apparatus.
School hours were from nine till three; and with luck I would catch
the quarter to four from Chalk Farm and get back home at five. Then
there would be tea, which was my chief meal of the day; and after
that I would shut myself up in my small bedroom--in the winter with
a blanket wrapped round me--and get to work on my home lessons.
Often they would take me until ten or eleven o'clock, and difficulty
enough I had to keep myself awake.

It was a silly system; and in most schools it still continues. But I
do not propose to dwell upon my school life. It makes me too angry,
thinking about it. Education is the most important thing in the
world, and the most mismanaged: which accounts for the continued low
intelligence of the human race. Carlyle's definition of school is a
place of torment where youth is confined behind windowless walls and
has books flung at it. If only they would fling the right books, it
would be something. What a boy learns in six years at school, he
could, with the aid of an intelligent bookseller, learn at home in
six months. Whatever knowledge I possess I picked up for myself in
later years. To the British Museum reading-room, with its courteous
officials, I remain grateful; though, on the principle of making the
punishment fit the crime, the party responsible for its heating
arrangements ought to be suffocated. To the Young Men's Christian
Association--not yet then affiliated to the Standard Oil Trust--I
return thanks. But still more am I indebted to shabby, care-worn
ladies and gentlemen, their names forgotten, who, for a sadly
inadequate fee of sixpence to ninepence an hour, put their fine
learning at my disposal.

I am not blaming my own particular school. A French proverb has it
that in all things a man's choice lies, not between the good and the
bad, but between the bad and the worse. Looking back, I am inclined
to regard my dear father's selection--whether of chance or
necessity--as one of the least worse. In one respect it might be
cited as a model. Corporal punishment was never employed. Without
it, excellent discipline was maintained among three hundred chance
assorted youngsters. Tradition was relied upon. Philological boys
did not have to be beaten before they would behave themselves. If a
boy proved to be outside the method, he was expelled. During the
five years that I was there, only three boys had to be shown out.

Man is born sinful. One does not have to accept literal
interpretation of the Book of Genesis to be convinced of it. The
Manicheans maintain that the world, including man, was Devil
created; and evidence can be adduced in support of their theory.
There are times when even one's better feelings incline one to the
argument of the blow. There is no fiercer opponent of the stick
than Bernard Shaw. He and Zangwill were taking a walk. They noticed
a group of boys in a field with their heads close together. When two
or three country boys are gathered together, and seem to be
interested, one is justified in thinking evil. Observation confirmed
suspicion. An animal's shrill cry of pain came from the centre of
the group. Shaw, gripping his walking-stick, vaulted the gate. The
boys let go their victim and fled: Shaw in full chase. "The young
imps of Satan"--to adopt the language of a passing labourer--had the
start and proved fleet of foot. Shaw returned panting; explaining in
heated language what he had intended to do, if only he had overtaken
them.

"But I thought," said Zangwill, "that you were opposed to all
physical punishment."

"So I am," growled Shaw. "But I have never claimed to be
consistent."

Justice may occasionally condone the whip; but the long martyrdom
inflicted upon youth in the name of Education shows human nature in
an ugly light. All cruelty has its roots in lust. The boy has been
beaten, one fears, not for his own good, but for the pleasure of the
Domini. When magisterial gentlemen pass eulogisms on the rod, and
old club fogies write to the papers fond recollections of the birch,
I have my doubts. They like to think about it.

It was one Dan of the lower third who first disturbed my religious
beliefs. He came from the neighbourhood of Camden Town, and
generally we would meet in the outer circle, and walk together
across the park. It was nearing the end of the summer term, and
examinations were in progress. I confided to him my reason for
being sure that I was going to win the arithmetic prize. Every night
and morning on my knees I was praying for it. My mother had
explained to me the mountain failure. I had not understood the verse
properly. God only grants blessings that are good for us. Now here
was something that was good for me. God Himself must be able to see
that. My father was keen about my winning the arithmetic prize: he
had said so. And this time I really did believe. I hadn't really
expected the dust-heap to disappear, but the arithmetic prize I
regarded as already mine. Dan argued that I wasn't playing the game.
If the arithmetic prize was to be decided by prayer, then what was
the use of working? The boy who had swotted hard all the term could
be out-distanced, in the end, by any lazy beggar putting in ten
minutes on his knees just before the examination. And suppose two
boys prayed for it, both believing. What would God do then?

"Don't see the good of working at anything, if you can get
everything you want by praying," concluded Dan.

It was a new light on the subject. Something was wrong somewhere. I
thought at first of putting the problem before my mother, but felt
instinctively that she would not be able to answer it: not to my
help. I had got to fight this thing out for myself. And I didn't win
the prize. I didn't try: I didn't seem to want it, after that.

William Willett was one of my schoolmates. I take it William Willett
did more to give pure enjoyment--both mental and physical--to the
people, than all the forces of Parliament, Press and Pulpit put
together during the last hundred years. But already evil hands are
trying to undo his work. The Devil will never rest till he has
killed the Daylight Saving Bill.

In holiday time, I took up again my wanderings, my season ticket
enabling me to extend my radius. They hunted the deer round Highgate
in those days. I remember sitting on a stile near the Archway and
seeing the van drive up and the stag unloosed. Hampstead was a
pleasant country town, connected with London by a three-horse 'bus.
A footpath led from Swiss Cottage, through corn fields, to Church
Row; and a pleasant country road, following a winding stream, led to
the little town of Hendon. I was always a good walker. It was lonely
country between Wood Green and Enfield. Once I fell into a
snowdrift, just beyond Winchmore Hill. Fortunately some farm
labourers heard my call, and came to my rescue. Walthamstow lay far
off, surrounded by marshes, where cattle grazed. There was a fine
old manor not far from Edmonton. I trespassed there one day. Old
houses have always had a lure for me. The owner himself caught me;
but instead of driving me off, took me into the house and showed me
all over it. He told me how he had often passed it on his way to
work, when he was a boy, apprenticed to a carpenter: and how he had
dreamt dreams. I came to be a visitor there, right till the end. He
had worked his way up by saving and hard work; had never smoked, had
never drunk, had rarely played. At sixty--two years before--he had
tasted his first glass of champagne; and at sixty-five he died,
having drunk himself to death. A kindly old fellow, with a touch of
poetry in him. He was passionately fond of music, and had built
himself an organ room. He left a young wife and two children. The
place is a boarding-house now. Hackney was a genteel suburb. At the
Claptons, quite good class people dwelt. Of afternoons, they took
the air in roomy carriages they called barouches, drawn by great
glossy horses that pranced and tossed their heads. At Highbury there
used to be a fair with open-air dancing--and cock fighting, it was
said.

There was a strange house I came upon one afternoon, down by the
river. It was quite countrified; but how I got there I could never
recollect. There was an old inn covered with wisteria. A two-horse
'bus, painted yellow, was drawn up outside. The horses were feeding
out of a trough, and the driver and conductor were drinking tea--of
all things in the world--on a bench with a long table in front of
it. It was the quaintest old house. A card was in the fanlight, over
the front door, announcing "Apartments to let." I was so interested
that I concocted a story about having been sent by my mother; and
asked to see the rooms. Two little old ladies answered me. All the
time they kept close side by side, and both talked together. We went
downstairs to a long low room that was below the ground on the side
of the road, but had three windows on the other, almost level with
the river. A very old gentleman with a wooden leg and a face the
colour of mahogany rose up and shook me warmly by the hand. The old
ladies called him Captain. I remember the furniture. I did not know
much about such things then, but every room was beautiful. They
showed me the two they had to let. In the bedroom was a girl on her
knees, sweeping the carpet. I was only about ten at the time, so I
don't think sex could have entered into it. She seemed to me the
loveliest thing I had ever seen. One of the old ladies--they were
wonderfully alike--bent down and kissed her; and the other one shook
her head and whispered something. The girl bent down lower over her
sweeping, so that her curls fell and hid her face. I thanked them,
and told them I would tell my mother, and let them know.

I was so busy wondering that I never noticed where I walked. It may
have been for a few minutes, or it may have been for half an hour,
till at last I came to the East India Dock gates. I never found the
place again, though I often tried. But the curious thing is, that
all my life I have dreamed about it: the quiet green with its great
chestnut tree; the yellow 'bus, waiting for its passengers; the two
little old ladies who both opened the door to me; and the kneeling
girl, her falling curls hiding her face.

I still believe that one evening, in Victoria Park, I met and talked
with Charles Dickens. I have recorded the incident fairly truthfully
in "Paul Kelver." He was certainly most marvellously like the
photographs; and he did say "Oh, damn Mr. Pickwick!" Around Poplar,
town and country were struggling for supremacy. There were little
dismal farms scattered about the marshes. An old man in a yellow
smock, driving before him three or four cows with bells round their
necks, used to pass our house every morning and evening. He had his
regular customers who would come out with their jugs: and he would
milk the cows in the street. One summer, a boy and a girl came with
a herd of goats. But they were not so successful. The goats would
not stand still to be milked, and were always straggling. There was
trouble in the world even before Lloyd George's Limehouse speech. I
remember the long processions of the unemployed. They didn't run to
a band, but sang a dreary dirge:

    "We've got no work to do--oo--oo,
     We've got no work to do--oo--oo,
     We're all of us poor starving men,
     We've got no work to do."

My mother's diary is still sad reading during all these years. My
father fell ill. The long walk to and from the city each day was too
much for him. Often I would go to meet him; and he would be glad of
my arm.

Outside "The George" in the Commercial Road there used to sit a
little clean old lady who sold pig's trotters, cooked, at three
halfpence apiece. Sometimes we would take three home with us. My
mother would warm them, and I would be sent out to where a baked
potato man stood at the corner of Pigott Street, calling to the
passers-by: "'Ere you are, 'Ere you are. Warm your 'ands and fill
your belly for one 'alfpenny." And so we would feast and make merry.
One reduces one's denominator. The result is much the same.

There seems to have been a "property" at Notting Hill. On February
2nd, 1870, my mother writes:

"We are enduring a fearful struggle to try and save our property at
Notting Hill, the hard-earned savings and privations of years."

"March 10th. My birthday. How dark! Luther gave me a pencil case,
and Blandina a handkerchief. Papa gave me all he had, his love. He
has had to give up his situation.

"March 12th. Saw the Directors. They will take 670 for the Notting
Hill property. May God direct me how to raise it. Mr. Griffiths sent
a pork pie for Papa. How kind!

"March 21st. To the city and saw Mr. D. Very weary and sad at heart.
Dined with Mr. G. at Wilkinson's  la mode Beef rooms. Very good.

"April 5th. Mr. N. thinks the mortgage may be effected. Saw Mr.
Hobson and the Pelican. Mr. C. would not make an offer. Came home
with a sick headache.

"April 25th. To city. Waited at Mr. M.'s office till quite weary. He
never came. Saw Mr. H. He advises me to give it up."

And then on June 4th my mother writes:

"I will magnify Thee, O Lord, for Thou hast set me up, and not made
my foes to triumph over me."

From which I gather my mother came home that afternoon with a
lighter step than for many a long day, giving herself all the airs
of a smart business woman, the owner of "property" at Notting Hill.

The Franco-Prussian War broke out that year. All we boys were for
Prussia, and "Pro-French" was everywhere a term of opprobrium. The
idea that England would, forty and odd years later, be fighting
side by side with France against Germany, would then have seemed as
impossible, as to some of us nowadays would be the suggestion that
fifty years hence, or maybe sooner, Germany may be our ally against
France, as she was at Waterloo.

My sister Paulina had married one Robert Shorland, known later on in
sporting circles as the father of Frank Shorland, the long-distance
bicycle champion; and that autumn we left Poplar and went to live
near to her in New Southgate: Colney Hatch as it was then called. It
was little more than a country village in those days, with round
about it fields and woods. London was four miles off, by way of Wood
Green and Hornsey, with its one quaint street and ivy-covered
church: and so on till you came to the deer park at Holloway.

I remember a little dog, belonging to my wife. She had had him from
a puppy, and all his life he had lived in London. He was friendly
with the neighbouring cats, and used to play with a white rabbit,
belonging to the children next door. When he was nine years old, we
took him with us into the country, and in less than six months he
was the worst dog in the village. When he wasn't poaching, or
chivying cats up trees, or killing chickens, he was fighting. He
died fighting. A red-haired female was at the bottom of it. In
London he had never looked at them.

In Poplar, I had been a model boy. There must be the Devil in the
country for dogs and boys. I got into a bad set. It included the
Wesleyan minister's two sons, and also the only child of the church
organist. Religion, as Gibbon observes, would seem to be powerless
to control the evil instincts of the human race. We robbed orchards.
We snared rabbits in Walker's wood. It stretched from Colney Hatch
to Old Southgate. The family consisted of eleven brothers, all
enthusiastic cricketers. They formed themselves into a club and
became famous. A stream ran through a park on the way to Palmer's
Green; and I learnt to tickle trout. We acquired King David's knack
of casting stones from a sling. We aimed at birds and cats.
Fortunately, we rarely hit them; but were more successful with
windows.

There were squatters in those days. One had built himself a shanty
where now is Holly Park, a region of respectability; and about it
had pegged out some couple of acres. There he had remained
undisturbed for years: until a new owner appeared, and the question
arose how to get him out. It all depended on a right of way. If he
had not that, he could be built round and imprisoned. Then he would
be compelled to go. In the middle of the argument, the old man died;
and the contest took a new turn. It seemed that where a corpse once
passed was ever after a free way to living men: or so it was said.
Three stout lads the old man had left behind him, together with two
well-grown wenches who could also be useful with their hands, and
events promised to be exciting. The landlord had his men waiting day
and night to prevent the corpse from passing: while the family
within the hut girded their loins, and kept the day and hour of the
funeral to themselves. I had it, late one evening, from the son of
the butcher, that the attempt was to be made at dawn the next
morning; and was up before the sun, making my exit by the window
and down the water spout. I was just in time to see the little band
of mourners emerge from the cottage. The coffin was borne by the two
eldest sons, assisted by a couple of friends. It was only a few
hundred yards to the road. But the landlord's men had been
forewarned. It was an unholy _mle_. The bearers left the footpath
when the landlord's men came towards them, and tried to race to the
road through a gap in the hedge a little lower down. But before they
could reach it, one of them slipped and fell. The coffin came
hurtling down, and around it and over it and all about it a battle
royal took place. And while it was still raging, another coffin,
carried by the two girls and their two sweethearts, had sprinted
down the footpath and gained the road. The first coffin had broken
open and was found to be full of stones. How it all ended I don't
know. I think there was a compromise. But the party I was sorry for,
was the corpse. It was he who had taught me how to tickle trout. He
would have loved to be in that last fight.

My father died the following year; on June 3rd, so I learnt from my
mother's diary.

"Dear Papa never wore his dressing-gown, for the Lord called him
home this morning at half-past nine o'clock. A momentary summons,
and he has gone to receive the reward of his labourings and
sufferings of so many years."

He had contracted heart disease and had died stepping out of bed. I
have never been able to agree with the Prayer Book. I should always
pray myself for sudden death.

My father had never looked old to me. But that may have been because
of his jet-black waving hair. It was not till after he was dead that
I learnt it was a wig; for in bed, according to the fashion of that
period, he always wore a night-cap. One never saw a bald-headed man
in those days: men were more particular about their appearance.

I like to think that to my mother, during the last few years of her
life, came peace. With the dying of hopes, perhaps went the passing
of fears, also. It was a revelation to me, reading her diary. It did
not come into my hands until some twenty years later. I had always
thought of her as rather a happy lady. I used to hear her singing
about her work, even in the grim house at Poplar; and I can remember
our rare excursions to the town, to buy me a new suit of clothes or
to pay a visit: how we would laugh and joke, and linger before the
shop windows, choosing the fine things we would buy when "our ship
came home"!

From among her last entries, I quote the following:

"Sept. 17th. My cousin Henry Tucker came to see me. He has grown
quite an old man. Blandina came home for the afternoon. A very happy
day.

"July 19th. To Croydon with Blanche. Mr. & Mrs. Clouter very kind.
Enjoyed myself.

"December 4th. Dear Blanche's birthday. Dear Paulina and all the
little ones came round and we were all very happy.

"Christmas Day. Blanche and Luther to Mrs. Marris. Fan & I to
Paulina's. Had a pleasant quiet day. The Lord bless my loved ones."

After my father's death we moved to Finchley. There was a path
through the fields to Totteridge, past a thatched cottage where
lived a rosy-cheeked little old lady who sold fruit and eggs. She
had been a farmer's wife in Devonshire. She and my mother became
great chums, and would gossip together on a bench outside the old
lady's door.

I left school at fourteen, and through the help of an old friend of
my father's, obtained a clerkship in the London & North-western
Railway at Euston. My salary was twenty-six pounds a year, with an
annual rise of ten pounds. But that first year, owing to a general
revision of fares, over-time was to be had for the asking. Twopence
halfpenny an hour it worked out, in my case, up till midnight, and
fourpence an hour afterwards. So that often I went home on Saturday
with six or seven shillings extra in my pocket. My Aunt Fan had
died. I fancy the "property" at Notting Hill had disappeared; but my
sister had won examinations and was in a good situation, so that our
days were of peace, if not of plenty.

Lunches were my chief difficulty. There were, of course, coffee
shops, where one quaffed one's cocoa at a penny the half pint; and
"doorsteps"--thick slices of bread smeared plentifully with yellow
grease supposed to be butter--were a halfpenny each. But if one went
further, one ran into money. A haddock was fivepence, Irish stew or
beef-steak pudding sixpence. One could hardly get away under
ninepence, and then there was a penny for the waitress. There was a
shop in the Hampstead Road where they sold meat pies for twopence
and fruit pies for a penny, so that for threepence I often got a
tasty if not too satisfying lunch. The pies were made in little
shallow dishes. With one deft sweep of the knife, the woman would
release it from its dish, and turning it upside down, hand it to you
on a piece of paper; and you ate it as you walked along the street
or round some quiet corner, being careful to dodge the gravy. It was
best to have with one an old newspaper of one's own. Better still,
from a filling point of view, would be half a pound of mixed sweet
biscuits; while in the summer time a pound of cherries made a
pleasant change. Some of the fellows brought their lunch with them
and ate it in the office, but I was always fond of mooning about the
streets, looking into the shop windows, and watching the people.

In my parents' time, among religious people, the theatre was
regarded as the gate to Hell. I remember a tremulous discussion one
evening at Finchley. My sister had been invited by some friends to
go with them to the theatre. My mother was much troubled, but
admitted that times might have changed since she was young; and
eventually gave her consent. After my sister was gone, my mother sat
pretending to read, but every now and then she would clasp her
hands, and I knew that her eyes, bent down over the book, were
closed in prayer. My sister came back about midnight with her face
radiant as if she had seen a vision. "Babel and Bijou" I think had
been the play, at Covent Garden. It was two o'clock in the morning
before she had finished telling us all about it, and my mother had
listened with wide-open eyes; and when my sister suggested that one
day she must adventure it, she had laughed and said that perhaps she
would. Later on, my sister and I went together to the pit of the
Globe with an order I had bought for sixpence from a barber in
Drummond Street. He was given them in exchange for exhibiting bills,
and the price varied according to the success or otherwise of the
play. Rose Massey and Henry Montague were the "stars." I forget what
the play was about. It made my sister cry; and there were moments
when I found it difficult to keep my anger to myself. Rose Massey
remains in my memory as a very beautiful woman. I bought her
photograph the next day for ninepence, and for years it stood upon
my mantelpiece.

My mother died the following year. My sister was away up north, and
we were alone together in the house. It came at eventide.




CHAPTER III

RECORD OF A DISCONTENTED YOUTH


The two or three years following my mother's death remain in my
memory confused and disjointed. The chief thing about them was my
loneliness. In the day time I could forget it, but when twilight
came it would creep up behind me, putting icy hands about me. I had
friends and relations in London who, I am sure, would have been
kind; but my poverty increased my shyness: I had a dread of asking,
as it were, for pity. I seem to have been always on the move,
hoping, I suppose, to escape from solitude. I remember a house in
Camden Town, across a square and down a long, silent street. There
were other lodgers on the floors below. I could hear their muffled
voices as I climbed the stairs. A man hanged himself in one of the
back rooms. His body was not discovered until the Saturday morning,
when the landlady came round for her rents. I had heard a sound one
evening, when passing the door, as of a man hammering on the wall
with his hands--maybe it was his stockinged feet. But it was not
etiquette to be inquisitive about one's neighbours. There was a
ridiculous little house off the Malden Road that was called "The
Castle," with a circular tower and arched windows and battlemented
walls. It had been built by an old German, a widower, who lived in
the basement. Once he had been prosperous, and with his family had
occupied the whole of it. I had the top chamber in the tower. For
some things it was convenient. I could lie in bed in the centre of
the room and reach everything I wanted. Then there was Nelson Square
the other side of Blackfriars' Bridge. Will Owen, the artist, once
lived in Nelson Square. We compared notes, and decided it must have
been the same house. The little landlady, always scant of breath,
had been an actress. A law-writer and his wife had the front attic.
Often he would work all night, coughing incessantly. I got used to
it after a time. It was so incessant that it seemed to be a part of
the night. At one time I had a bed-sitting room in Thanet Place, a
narrow _cul-de-sac_, opposite old Temple Bar. Lloyds' Bank now
stands upon the site. The landlord was a retired engine driver. He
and his wife lived on the ground floor. He was a choleric man,
belonging to the Strict Baptists. They had a chapel just across the
Strand in Clare Market. Our First Floor was a quiet, thick-set young
man, with curly hair. I used to meet him now and then upon the
stairs. He had a German accent, and was always pleasant-spoken. But
one night he came home hilarious, bringing friends with him. There
was popping of corks, and laughter, and singing of songs. After a
while, I heard our landlord shouting up the stairs in stentorian
tones: If First Floor's rubbishy friends were not immediately sent
packing, and there wasn't immediate quiet, First Floor was going to
be shot out into the street, then and there, and all his belongings
thrown after him. Our landlord was a sturdy old fellow, apt in
moments of excitement to be a retired engine driver first and a
Strict Baptist afterwards. Undoubtedly he would have done his best
to carry out his threat, had not First Floor meekly apologized and
promised compliance. There followed a murmur of subdued voices, a
muffled trampling of feet upon the stairs, and then the door closed
softly. Next morning, on my way out, the landlord beckoned me into
his room.

"You heard the row last night?" he said.

I owned up that, leaning over the banisters in my nightshirt, I had
been an interested listener.

"Read that," he said, handing me a newspaper and pointing to a
paragraph. He was chuckling.

It seemed the night before there had been a "Sensational Incident"
at the Aquarium. A gentleman named Samson, well known as a lifter of
weights, a snapper of chains, and a breaker of bars of iron, had
long claimed to be the "strongest man in the world." Half-way
through the performance, a young man in the audience had risen up
and challenged Samson's claim. The audience, scenting sport, had
insisted on immediate contest. The challenger had mounted the stage:
stripped of unnecessary garments, had exhibited the muscles of a
Hercules; and had easily beaten poor Samson at his own game. Asked
for his name, had given it as Mr. Eugen Sandow.

"Next time Mr. Eugen Sandow brings a few friends home with him for a
little jollification, perhaps I won't throw him out into the
street," remarked our landlord. "Provided that is, of course," he
added, "that they don't make too much noise."

Loneliness still dwelt with me. I remember one Christmas day. It was
my own fault. I had received invitations, kindly meant and kindly
worded. But into one I had read patronage and into another
compassion; and had answered stiffly, regretting "prior
engagements." To escape from myself on the actual day, I had applied
for a pass to Liverpool. We railway clerks were allowed four a year.
I took an early train from Euston, arriving at Lime Street a little
after twelve. A chill sleet was falling. I found a coffee shop open
in a street near the docks, and dined there off roast beef and a
whity-brown composition that they called plum pudding. Only one
other table was occupied: the one farthest from the door. A man and
woman sat there who talked continuously in whispers with their heads
close together: it was too dark to see their faces. It appeared from
the next day's papers that an old man had been murdered in a lonely
inn on the Yorkshire wolds; and that a man and a woman had been
arrested at Liverpool. There was nothing to support it, but the idea
clung to me that I had dined with them on Christmas day. To fill out
the time, I took a slow train back that did not reach London till
past ten o'clock. The sleet had turned to snow, and the streets were
strangely empty. Even the public-houses looked cheerless.

It was during this period that I set myself to learn the vices. My
study of literature had impressed it upon me that without them one
was a milksop, to be despised by all true men, and more especially
by all fair women. Smoking, I had begun at school, but from
cowardice had given it up. I take it the race has by now acquired
smoking as an hereditary accomplishment. Your veriest flapper,
nowadays, will enjoy her first cigarette. It was less in our blood
when I was a boy. For the first few months, I found it wiser to
smoke in the open, choosing quiet by-streets, so that if one scored
a failure it was noticed by only a few. But with pluck and
perseverance one attains to all things--even to the silly and
injurious habit of pumping smoke into one's heart and liver.

With the drink I had yet greater difficulty. I commenced, perhaps
ill-advisedly, with claret. It cost twopence-halfpenny the glass at
a "Cave" near to the Adelphi arches. I used to sip it with my eyes
shut: the after results suggesting to me that the wine St. Paul
recommended to Timothy for his stomach's sake must have been of
another vintage. Later on, silencing my conscience with the plea of
economy, I substituted porter at three halfpence the half-pint. It
was nastier, if anything, than the claret; but one gulped it down,
and so got it over quicker. A fellow clerk at Euston, who had passed
through similar ordeals, recommended me to try port. At Shortt's in
the Strand, one got a large glass for threepence with a bun thrown
in. But for Mr. Shortt, I might have been a teetotaller to this day.
I would advise any boy of mine to disregard Doctor Johnson's dictum,
and start straight away with port. He will save himself much
suffering. From port I worked up through cider to bottled beer.
Eventually, I came to drink even whisky without a shudder. The
Chancellor of the Exchequer tells me that drinking during the last
fifty years has increased. I feel sure there must be something he
has overlooked. When I was a youngster, every corner house in
London was a pub. Omnibuses did not go east or west: they went from
one public-house to another. After closing time, one stopped to
stare at a sober man, and drunken children were common. For
recreation, young bloods of an evening would gather together in
groups and do a mouch "round the houses." To be on a footing of
familiarity with a barmaid was the height of most young clerks'
ambition. Failing that, to be entitled to address the pot-boy by his
Christian name conferred distinction.

For the more sentimentally inclined, there was Oxford Street after
the shops were closed. You caught her eye; and if she smiled you
raised your hat and felt sure you had met her the summer before at
Eastbourne--Eastbourne, then, was the haunt of the _haut ton_. All
going well, you walked by her side to the Marble Arch; and maybe on
a seat in the park you held her hand. Sometimes trouble came of it:
and sometimes wedding-bells and--let us hope--happiness ever after.
Most often, nothing further; just a passing of shiplets in the
night. Myself, I had but poor success. My shyness handicapped me. I
would take the lady's preliminary rebuff, her icy suggestion that I
had made a mistake, as final dismissal; and would shrink back
scarlet into the shadows.

Of vice that does not have to be acquired, I would speak if I
thought that to any it would be of use. But, I take it, there is
nothing to be done. Each lad must "dree his own wierd." Nature and
civilization are here, as elsewhere, at cross purposes: and not all
the problems are soluble. Evolution may work cure. A thousand
generations hence, the years between puberty and marriage may not be
the fearsome thing they are to the young men of this day. The only
suggestion I can make is that the writers of our stories should harp
less upon sexuality: though at present there appears no sign of
their doing so: and that among older men there should be less
lewdness of talk and jest. In my schooltime, quite little boys would
whisper to each other "smutty" stories: they must have heard them
from their elders. I do not speak as a prude. Some of the best and
kindest men I have met have been grave sinners in this respect. But
knowing how hard put to it a young man is to keep his thoughts from
being obsessed by sexual lust, to the detriment of his body and his
mind, I would that all men of good-feeling treated this deep mystery
of our nature with more reverence. I think it would help.

A youngster whose acquaintance I had made, a clerk in the city, had
gone upon the stage. He made his first appearance at the old Camden
Town Theatre, opposite the Britannia. It was burnt down the
following year. I was lodging off the Maiden Road, at the time, and
was awakened by the glare upon my window. I dressed and hastened
out. Each street was pouring forth its throng. It was the first time
the inhabitants of Camden Town had shown any interest in the place.
His example had inspired me. Literature was still my goal, but, of
course, I should write plays; and stage experience would be useful.
Charley (I forget his surname) introduced me to "agents," some of
them fat and not too clean. One of them, I suppose, must eventually
have done the trick. I remember selling a ring that had been my
father's, and wandering through endless corridors in Somerset
House, trying to find the room where they stamped agreements. After
the first two months, I was to be paid a salary "according to
ability." I remember the phrase because, when the time came and I
showed the manager my contract to remind him, he said it was
absurd--that no theatre in London could afford it; but that if half
a quid a week would be of any use to me I could have it. He wasn't a
bad sort. His name was Murray Wood. He was the husband of Virginia
Blackwood, a minor star who specialized in Dickens. We had opened at
Astley's, just over Westminster Bridge, a huge barn of a place, used
during the winter as a circus. I had not left Euston. I was in the
advertising department, and my work was mainly going about London,
seeing that bills and time-tables were properly exhibited. I could
take time off for rehearsals and make it up without anybody knowing
or caring. "Dolly Varden" and "Little Nell" were our first two
productions; and then came "Lost in London." I played a wicked
swell, which necessitated a dress suit. I bought one in Petticoat
Lane on a Sunday morning for ten shillings. For years, Petticoat
Lane "turned me out," as the phrase goes; and at no period of my
life have I been so well dressed. I always dealt at the same stall;
and I think the old Sheeny took a liking to me. If I hadn't the
price about me, he would take five shillings down and trust me for
the balance. "And if anybody wanth to know your tailor," he said to
me on one occasion, "you can tell 'em that ith Mr. Poole of Thavile
Row." And I believe it was. Later, we produced an Irish play by
Manville Fenn. I played a policeman. We came across a gentleman
lying in a wood. My superior officer--who was also the hero--wanted
to know whether it was alive or dead. I ought to have knelt down,
and after careful scrutiny pronounced that life was extinct, and had
in my opinion been so for some considerable time. Instead of all
which, on the second night, it came to me to just lean forward, take
one satisfying sniff, and answer laconically, "Dead." It got the
laugh of the evening. The stage manager was furious; but Fenn, who
was watching from the wings, said it didn't matter; and wrote me in
some extra lines. We finished our season with "Mazeppa." I played
three parts--a soldier, a shepherd, and a priest, and they talked so
much alike that I had to look at my clothes to make sure which I
was. Lisa Weber played Mazeppa. She was a magnificent creature, and
in her riding costume was the nearest thing to nature that up till
then had been seen upon the London stage. Nowadays she would have
attracted no attention. Our ninepenny pit was converted into six
shilling stalls, and money was turned away every night. Murray Wood,
good soul, raised my salary to thirty shillings a week.

Our season at Astley's came to an end in November: to make room for
Lord George Sanger and his circus. I chucked the North-western
Railway, and joined a touring company. My sisters were much
troubled. At Euston, I was earning seventy pounds a year, and I
might become general manager. I pointed out to them that, instead, I
might become London's leading actor with a theatre of my own. But
they only cried. We opened at Torquay on Boxing day with a farce, a
two-act drama and a pantomime. I had assumed the name of Harold
Crichton, and our chief comedian turned out to be Haldane Crichton,
who afterwards became a lessee of theatres; and had for daughter
Madge Crichton. I think she is now in America. We were assumed to be
brothers, and he took an interest in me, and taught me dancing and
tumbling. I had to leap through flaps, and sometimes there was a
mattress on the other side to catch me, and sometimes there wasn't;
and arriving on the stage by way of a star trap calls for nerve and
a thick skull. Haldane thought I had the makings of a clown in me,
but my own ambition was rather towards the legitimate. After
Torquay, we travelled round the south with what would now be termed
repertory. Often, during the evening's performance, I would be
handed my part in a piece to be played the next night. For one play
I remember we had three rehearsals.

"What do they think we are," grumbled our first old man, "a pack of
sanguinary amateurs?"

Altogether, I was on the stage three years. Occasionally, I obtained
a short London engagement: at the old Surrey under the Conquests; at
the Brit, and the Pav. Then, as now, the West End, to those without
money or influence, lay behind a closed door. Most of my time I
spent in the provinces. The bogus manager was our haunting fear. So
long as he was making money, salaries were paid: they varied from a
pound to fifty shillings. If the luck changed, the manager would
disappear--generally on a Friday evening during the performance.
Leaving their baskets with their landladies, the company would get
back to their homes as best they could. Often they would have to
tramp, begging their way by the roadside. Nobody complained:
everybody was used to it. Sometimes a woman would cry. But even that
was rare. There were one-night companies that played in Town halls,
Institutes, Assembly Rooms and such like. Here thirty shillings a
week would be the maximum salary--when you got it. "The shilling a
nighters," we were called. If one could not secure a night's lodging
for a shilling, paid in advance, one went without. In summer, one
hunted for an out-of-the-way corner, or climbed the railings and
slept in the church porch. In winter time, we would club together
and, bribing the door-keeper, would sleep in the dressing-rooms,
when there were any; and if not, upon the stage. Now and then, of
course, one struck a decent company and then one lived bravely,
sleeping in beds, and eating rabbit pie on Saturday.

Though I say it myself, I think I would have made a good actor.
Could I have lived on laughter and applause, I would have gone on. I
certainly got plenty of experience. I have played every part in
"Hamlet" except Ophelia. I have doubled the parts of Sairey Gamp and
Martin Chuzzlewit on the same evening. I forget how the end came. I
remember selling my wardrobe in some town up north, and reaching
London with thirty shillings in my pocket. Fortunately the weather
was mild and I was used to "sleeping rough," as they call it in the
country. The difficulty, of course, in London was to dodge the
police. On wet nights I would have to fork out ninepence for a
doss-house. The best I ever struck was one half-way up Pentonville
Hill, where they gave you two blankets; but one had to be early for
that. Literary gents have always been much given to writing of the
underworld. I quite agree there must be humour and pathos and even
romance to be found there; but you need to be outside it to discover
its attractions. It was a jungle sort of existence. Always we slept
with everything belonging to us, even to our leaky boots, underneath
our pillows; and would start up with our hands clenched if a mouse
crept across the floor. Round the common frying-pan, where we cooked
our breakfast, when it ran to it, we stood on guard, ready to defend
our skimpy rasher or our half-starved-looking bloater, if need be,
with our lives. The old and feeble fared badly. The janitor was
supposed to keep order; but among the outcast there is one law for
the strong and another for the weak; and always there would be some
hefty bully with whom it was best to make terms. By luck I came
across a chum, one with whom I had gone poaching when a boy. He,
too, had fallen upon evil days, and had taken to journalism. He was
now a penny-a-liner--or to be exact, a three-half-penny-a-liner. He
took me round with him to police courts and coroners' inquests. I
soon picked it up. Often I earned as much as ten shillings a week,
and life came back to me. I had my own apartment, furnished with a
bed, a table and a chair, which also served for washstand, together
with a jug and basin. But after the doss-house it was luxury.
Sometimes a theatre order came my way. I remember Charles Matthews
and Madame Vestris at the Royalty; and Irving's first appearance in
"The Bells," at the old Lyceum under Mrs. Bateman's management.
Phelps was playing at Sadler's Wells, and "Madam Angot," at the
Philharmonic, opposite the Angel, was being whistled all over the
town. There were hangings in the courtyard at Newgate. You could see
them over the wall from the windows of the houses opposite. There
was a coffee shop in the Old Bailey, where, for half a crown, they
let you climb up on the roof. I found out how to make "flimsy" more
saleable by grafting humour on to it: so that sub-editors would give
to mine a preference over more sober, and possibly more truthful
records. There was a place in Fleet Street called "The Codgers'
Hall," where over pipes and pewter pots we discussed Home Rule,
Female Suffrage, Socialism and the coming Revolution. Gladstone had
raised the Income Tax to eight-pence and those of us who took things
seriously foresaw the ruin of the country. Forster brought in
compulsory education, and the danger was that England would become
too intellectual. One evening, an Irishman threw a water-bottle at
my head: what it was doing there still remains to me unexplainable.
I ducked just in time, and it caught a Nihilistic gentleman on the
side of the head. For the next ten minutes it was anybody's fight;
but eventually we all made friends, and joining hands, sang "Auld
Lang Syne." I took up shorthand at this period. Dickens had started
his career as a Parliamentary reporter. It seemed to me I could not
do better than follow in his footsteps. I attended public meetings,
and on Sundays took down sermons. Spurgeon was a good man. You could
hear every word he said. I remember the Sunday morning when he
began by mopping his brow, and remarking that it was "damned hot."

I grew tired of penny-a-lining. Had I been of a saving disposition
it might have worked out better. One week, I would earn two
pounds--another week three. And then, by some peculiar economic law
I could never understand, my expenditure would be precisely that
same sum. The following week, my takings might total only a few
shillings. How could a gentleman live! The work necessitated
constant running about--hurrying here and there. I recall the idea I
formed of what would constitute competence, beyond which a man need
take no thought: it was, whenever one was tired or bored, to be able
to jump upon a 'bus, indifferent as what the fare might be.

I tried school-mastering. One did not in those days have to be
possessed of diplomas and certificates. I obtained an assistant
mastership at a Day and Boarding School in the Clapham Road. English
and mathematics were my department. But it seemed to include most
things: my chief, a leisurely old gentleman, confining himself to
the classics and theology. My duties included also "general
supervision" of the boarders, the teaching of swimming and
gymnastics, and of proper deportment during our daily walk round
Clapham Common, and at church on Sundays. It was up to me to see
that each boy did really drop his threepenny bit into the bag; but I
have the suspicion that one or two of them, occasionally, may have
been too clever for me. I had to wear gloves and a top hat; and once
a week I had an evening out. The house-and parlour-maid, combined,
a jolly little thing, only laughed at me. "Now you know what it's
like," she said, "and when you're married you can tell your wife."
Things have changed since then, I am informed. I stuck it for a
term. My shorthand had suffered for want of practice. The House of
Commons' gallery loomed distant. I answered advertisements. For
secretarial work my shorthand was sufficient. I could have been
secretary to Herbert Spencer. A friend in London to whom he had
deputed the business, tested and approved me. I was to have gone
down to Brighton the next week. I was eager and excited. But my
sister, when I told her, was heartbroken. The stage had been a long
way towards perdition, and journalism a step further. After Herbert
Spencer, what hope could remain for my salvation? During my days of
evil fortune, I had hidden myself from friends and relatives;
writing lying letters from no address. I had caused her much
suffering, I knew, and shrank from inflicting another blow. I saw
Herbert Spencer's friend--I forget his name--and told him. He
laughed, but was sure that Mr. Spencer would think that I had done
right. So, instead, I became secretary to a builder in the north of
London. He was a wonderful old fellow. He could neither read nor
write; but would think nothing of undertaking a ten-thousand-pound
contract. He had invented an hieroglyphic that his bank accepted as
his signature. He would write it with the pen grasped firmly in his
fist and, after each completion, would pause and take a deep breath.
His memory was prodigious. Until I came, he had kept no accounts
whatever. Every detail of his quite extensive business had its
place in his head; and according to common report no one had ever
succeeded in doing him out of a halfpenny. I tried to reform him. At
first he was grateful; but after a time grew worried and dejected.
Until one Saturday, he planked down five weeks' wages in front of me
and, assuring me of his continued friendship, begged me as a
personal favour to take myself off. My next job was with a firm of
commission agents. People in India--white or coloured it mattered
not--sent us orders, accompanied by cheques; and we got the things
and packed them into tin-lined cases and despatched them. The idea
suggested in our advertisement was that we possessed a staff of
expert buyers, rich in knowledge and experience: but I did most of
it. I bought for far-off ladies their dresses, boots, and underwear,
according to accompanying measurements. I matched their hair and
chose their birthday presents for their husbands--at least, so one
hopes. I selected wines and cigars for peppery old Colonels--I take
it they were peppery. I judged what guns would be most serviceable
to them for tiger-shooting or for hippopotami; and had saddles made
for them under my own eye. It was interesting work. I felt myself a
sort of universal uncle; and honestly I did my best. I was sorry
when my employer left suddenly for South America. From there I went
to a firm of Parliamentary agents. Society is fearfully and
wonderfully contrived. It is calculated that out of every apple,
between the time it leaves the tree and is finally eaten, eleven
people got a bite. When public necessity requires that a new railway
line should be constructed, a new tramway laid, or a new dock
built, Parliamentary sanction must very properly be obtained. This
might be a simple affair. The promoters might present their case
before three or four intelligent members of the House of Lords, and
the needful business be at once set going. But then nobody would get
anything out of it; excepting only those that did the work and the
people who would benefit by the result of their enterprise. This
would never do. What would become of the parasites? Opposition must
be whipped up. Somehow or another, briefs must be found, marked
anything up to a thousand guineas, for half-a-dozen eminent K.C.'s.
The case must be argued for a couple of years, providing bills of
costs for half-a-dozen Parliamentary firms, fees and expenses for
expert advisers, engineers, surveyors, newspaper men. When everyone
has gorged his fill and new prey is in sight, it can suddenly be
discovered that really, as a matter of fact, there is nothing
whatever to be said against the scheme--and never was. Maybe a
hundred thousand pounds or so has been added to the cost of it. The
affair ends in a dinner where everybody proposes a vote of thanks to
everybody else, and thanks God for the British Constitution.

Later, I drifted to a solicitor's office. Memoirs of any old family
solicitor should make good reading. Almost in every dust-covered,
black tin box there lurks a story. Now and again I would open one,
re-arrange its contents. Bundles of old faded letters; fly-blown
miniatures and photographs. Purchase of Harlowe Manor, together with
adjoining lands, April 1832. Draft mortgage. Foreclosed 11.8.'69.
Cosgrove _v._ Cosgrove and Templeton, with note as to custody of
children. Ellenby deceased.--provision for Laura and two children
secured under separate deed. Crown v. Manningham, with cutting from
_The Morning Post_ describing scene in Court. A will enclosing an
advertisement for one Munroe George Hargreaves, and across it in red
ink "Never discovered." And so on. Slowly I would close the lid. The
shadowed shapes I had unloosed would fade into their hiding-place.

"Ouida" was one of our clients. Once a year, she would leave her
beloved Florence to spend a few weeks in London. Her books earned
her a good income, but she had no sense of money. In the course of a
morning's stroll she would, if in the mood, order a thousand pounds'
worth of goods to be sent to her at the Langham Hotel. She never
asked the price. She was like a child. Anything that caught her
fancy she wanted. Fortunately for herself, she always gave us as a
reference. I would have to go round and explain matters. One or two
of the less expensive articles we would let her have. She would
forget about the others.

I remember having to answer an inquiry as to whether Alfred
Harmsworth was likely to prove a desirable tenant for a room in
Chancery Lane at thirty pounds a year. My instructions were to reply
"guardedly." But it turned out all right. It was there he started
_Answers_.

We had a client, the Lord Lieutenant of a Welsh county. One day, in
Pembroke, he saw a little fisher girl. He took her up on his
shoulder and carried her to her home. He arranged with her parents
that she should be sent abroad to school; and when she was eighteen
he would marry her. The programme was carried out, but it proved an
unhappy marriage. He was nearly fifty by then and, as may be
guessed, a somewhat eccentric person. He died a few years
afterwards, leaving her two thousand a year, provided she never
remarried. She was a handsome young woman, and solved the problem by
going out to America with a cousin, a young sailor. Only instead of
her taking his name, he took hers.

I remember another will case that would have made good drama. The
characters were an elderly clerical gentleman who had just come into
some property, and a vamp--to use the modern slang. But what made
the play remarkable was the lady who played the vamp. She was a
woman of over forty, a devoted wife and mother. It was love of her
children, I take it, that prompted her. The elder boy was at Oxford,
and the younger at Sandhurst. But how to keep them there had long
been her difficulty. They met first in our waiting-room, and got
into conversation. The progress of the affair I could only guess;
though I observed that later on their appointments always happened
to coincide, to within half-an-hour or so; and invariably they left
together. This had been going on for about a year when, one morning
early, a slatternly girl brought a note to the office. My chief had
not arrived, and I opened the letter. It was from the old
gentleman--a shaky scrawl in pencil, begging someone for God's sake
to come at once to an address off the Euston Road. A postscript
explained that he was known there by the name of Wilson. I jumped
into a cab and was soon there. I found him lying in bed in a
comfortably furnished room on the first floor. He was evidently most
desperately ill. He could speak only in a whisper.

"She got me last night," he said, "to sign a will. She had a couple
of witnesses outside the door. It leaves her nearly everything. I
must have been mad. When I woke this morning she was gone. She has
taken it with her."

I sought to comfort him by the assurance that such a will could
easily be set aside--that she would not dare to defend it.

"You don't know her," he said. "Besides, my wife will sacrifice
herself rather than drag my name into the mud. She is reckoning on
that."

"What's the matter with you?" I asked him.

"Heart," he managed to answer. "She excited me on purpose, I am sure
of it. I am dying."

I told him his only chance was to keep calm. A hansom was the
quickest thing in London in those days; but I seemed to be hours
getting back to the office. My chief rushed off a four-line will,
leaving everything the man possessed to his wife, and expressly
cancelling the will made the day before. He was in great pain when
we got back, but was just able to sign. And then I went for a
doctor. He died in the evening. The lady changed her solicitors. I
met her years afterwards, at a reception at the Foreign Office. She
remembered me, and was most gracious. She had grown grey, but was
still a handsome woman.

All this time I had been writing stories, plays, essays. But it was
years before anything came of it.




CHAPTER IV

MY FIRST BOOK, AND OTHERS


My first book! He stands before me, bound in paper wrapper of a
faint pink colour, as though blushing all over for his sins. "On the
Stage--and Off. By Jerome K. Jerome" (the K very large, followed by
a small j; so that by many the name of the author was taken to be
Jerome Kjerome). "The Brief Career of a would-be Actor. One shilling
nett. Ye Leadenhall Press. London. 1885."

He was born in Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road, in a second
floor back overlooking a burial ground. The house is now a part of
Whitfield's Tabernacle. A former tenant of the room--some young
clerk like myself, I guessed him to be--had been in love with a girl
named Annie. The bed was in a corner, and, lying there, he had
covered the soot-grimed wall-paper with poetry to her--of sorts. It
meandered in and out among Chinese temples, willow-trees and
warriors. One verse I remember ran:

    "Oh, Annie fair, beyond compare,
     To speak my love I do not dare.
     Oh, cruel Fate that shakes her head,
     And tells me I'm too poor to wed."

Being directly opposite the pillow, it greeted me each morning when
I opened my eyes. It was applicable to my own case also, and had a
depressing effect upon me.

I had tried short stories, essays, satires. One--but one only--a sad
thing about a maiden who had given her life for love and been turned
into a water-fall, and over the writing of which I had nearly broken
my heart, had been accepted by a paper called _The Lamp_. It died
soon afterwards. The others, with appalling monotony, had been
returned to me again and again: sometimes with the Editor's
compliments and thanks, and sometimes without: sometimes returned
with indecent haste, seemingly by the next post; sometimes kept for
months--in a dustbin, judging from appearances. My heart would turn
to lead whenever the dismal little slavey would knock at the door
and enter with them. If she smiled as she handed me the packet, her
thumb and finger covered with her apron so as not to soil it, I
fancied she was jeering at me. If she looked sad, as more often she
did, poor little overworked slut, I thought she was pitying me. I
shunned the postman when I saw him in the street, feeling sure he
knew my shame. I wonder if the smart journalists who make fun in the
comic papers of the rejected contributor have ever been themselves
through that torture-chamber.

By luck, my favorite poet, just then, was Longfellow. It has become
the fashion to belittle him. Perhaps all his verse does not reach
the level of, say, "The Building of the Ship." But even Wordsworth
nods. To youth, face to face with giants, he will long remain a
helpful voice. Some two years before, on a sudden impulse, I had
written him a long rigmarole of a letter, pouring out my troubles
to him, addressing it simply to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America;
and had received an answer proving to me that he understood my case
exactly and knew all about me. Always when things were at their
worst, or nearly so, I would go to him for comfort; and one evening,
crouching over my small fire, I struck the poem beginning:

    "By his evening fire the artist
     Pondered o'er his secret shame;"

I had the feeling that Longfellow must have been thinking about me.
And when I read the last two lines:

    "That is best which lieth nearest;
     Shape from that thy work of art,"

it came to me that Longfellow was telling me not to bother about
other people's troubles--those of imaginary maidens turned into
waterfalls, and such like--but to write about my own. I would tell
the world the story of a hero called Jerome who had run away and
gone upon the stage; and of all the strange and moving things that
had happened to him there. I started on it that same evening, and in
three months it was finished. I hunted up an old actor named
Johnson--the oldest actor on the boards, he boasted himself; and he
certainly looked it. He had played with Edmund Kean, Macready,
Phelps and Booth, not to mention myself. We had been at Astley's
together, during the run of "Mazeppa." It had fallen to our lot, in
the third act, to unbind Lisa Weber from the exhausted steed, and
carry her across the stage. I took her head and old Johnson her
heels. She was what Mr. Mantalini would have called a demmed fine
woman, weighing, I should think, some fourteen stone; and during the
journey she would pour out blood-curdling threats as to what she
would do to both or either of us if we dropped her. Old Johnson lost
his temper one night: "Oh, come on, young 'un," he called out to me
in a loud whisper, "let's chuck her into the orchestra." He began to
heave his end. She kept quiet after that. He was now with Wilson
Barrett at the old Princess's. I used to wait for him at the stage
door, and we would adjourn to a little tavern in Oxford Market. It
really was a market in those days, with wooden booths all round, and
stalls in the centre; where now stands Oxford Mansions. He would
look over my MS. to see that I had made no blunders; and the
anecdotes and stories that he told me would have made a rattling
good book of themselves. I meant to write it. But he died before we
had completed it.

For a workroom I often preferred the dark streets to my dismal
bed-sitting-room. Portland Place was my favourite study. I liked its
spacious dignity. With my note-book and a pencil in my hand, I would
pause beneath each lamp-post and jot down the sentence I had just
thought out. At first the police were suspicious. I had to explain
to them. Later they got friendly; and often I would read to them
some passage I thought interesting or amusing. There was an
Inspector--a dry old Scotchman who always reached Langham church as
the clock struck eleven: he was the most difficult. Whenever I made
him laugh, I went home feeling I had done good work.

When finished, it went the round of many magazines. I think I sent
it first to _The Argosy_, edited by Mrs. Henry Wood. But the real
editor was a little fat gentleman named Peters. He ran also _The
Girls' Own Paper_, for which he wrote a weekly letter signed "Aunt
Fanny," giving quite good advice upon love, marriage, the complexion
and how to preserve it, how to dress as a lady on fifteen pounds a
year--all such-like things useful for girls to know. A kindly old
bachelor. I came to know him. He lived in a dear little cottage in
Surrey and was a connoisseur of port wine. George Augustus Sala,
then editing _Temple Bar_, next had a chance of securing it. He
wrote me that himself he liked it, but feared it was not quite the
thing for family reading. Sala, also, was a connoisseur of port
wine. He had a nose about which, like Cyrano de Bergerac, he was
touchy. He brought a libel action once against a man who had made
some chaffing remark about it at a public dinner. Sala was a
brilliant talker, provided he had the table to himself. I remember a
dinner-party in Harley Street at which a young doctor, unacquainted
with Bohemia, and before poor Sala had got into his stride, started
a story of his own. It was an interesting story, and he followed it
up with another. The conversation became general. When at last we
remembered Sala, we discovered he had gone home.

Afterwards I tried _Tinsley's Magazine_. I never found old Tinsley
at his office, but generally at a favourite little place of his near
by. Prohibition was not then within the range of practical
politics, as Mr. Gladstone would have put it; and the editorial
fraternity had not begun to even think about it. I remember the
first man who ordered tea and toast at the Savage Club. The waiter
begged his pardon, and the man repeated it. The waiter said "Yes,
Sir," and went downstairs and told the steward. Fortunately the
steward was a married man. His wife lent her teapot, and took charge
of the affair. It was the talk of the club for a fortnight. Most of
the members judged it to be a sign of the coming decline and fall of
English literature.

Eventually, despairing of the popular magazines, I sent it to a
penny paper called _The Play_, which had just been started; and four
days later came an answer. It ran:

"Dear Sir, I like your articles very much. Can you call on me
to-morrow morning before twelve? Yours truly, W. Aylmer Gowing.
Editor, _The Play_."

I did not sleep that night.

Aylmer Gowing was a retired actor. As "Walter Gordon," he had been
leading juvenile at the Haymarket Theatre under Buckstone.
"Gentleman Gordon," Charles Mathews had nicknamed him. He had
married well, and ran _The Play_ at a yearly loss because he could
not bear to be unconnected with his beloved stage. His wife, a
little bird-like woman, wrote poetry for it. They lived in a pretty
little house in Victoria Road, Kensington. He was the first "editor"
who up till then had seemed glad to see me when I entered the room.
He held out both hands to me, and offered me a cigarette. It all
seemed like a dream. He told me that what he liked about my story
was that it was true. He had been through it all himself, forty
years before. He asked me what I wanted for the serial rights. I was
only too willing to let him have them for nothing, upon which he
shook hands with me again, and gave me a five-pound note. It was the
first time I had ever possessed a five-pound note. I could not bear
the idea of spending it. I put it away at the bottom of an old tin
box where I kept my few treasures: old photographs, letters, and a
lock of hair. Later, when the luck began to turn, I fished it out,
and with part of it, at a secondhand shop in Goodge Street, I
purchased an old Georgian bureau which has been my desk ever since.

Aylmer Gowing remained always a good friend to me. Once a week, when
he was in town, I dined with him. I guess he knew what a good dinner
meant to a youngster living in lodgings on twenty-five shillings a
week. At his house I met my first celebrities: John Clayton, the
actor, with his wife, a daughter of Dion Boucicault. Poor Clayton! I
remember a first night at the Court Theatre when he had to play the
part of an adoring husband whose wife has run away. The thing had
happened to him that very afternoon. We thought he would break down,
but he played it out to the end; and then went back to his empty
house. Old Buckstone, Mrs. Chippendale, Palgrave Simpson, the
dramatist, were among others. Palgrave Simpson had a great beaked
nose and piercing dark eyes. He always wore a long cloak and a
slouch hat; and one fifth of November arrived at the Garrick Club
followed by a crowd of cheering urchins, who thought Guy Fawkes had
come to life again. Mrs. Chippendale was a very stout lady. I
remember a revival of "Homeward Bound" at the Haymarket in which she
gained the biggest laugh of the evening. She was wandering about the
deck of the ship, carrying a ridiculous little camp stool; but as
she carried it behind her nobody could see it. "Looking for a seat,
dear?" asked old Buckstone, who was playing her husband. "Got a
seat," she answered, "looking for somewhere to put it."

All my new friends thought it would be easy to find a publisher for
the book. They gave me letters of introduction. But publishers were
just as dense as editors had been. From most of them I gathered that
the making of books was a pernicious and unprofitable occupation for
everybody concerned. Some thought the book might prove successful if
I paid the expense of publication. But, upon my explaining my
financial position, were less impressed with its merits. To come to
the end, Tuer of the Leadenhall Press offered to publish it on terms
of my making him a free gift of the copyright. The book sold fairly
well, but the critics were shocked. The majority denounced it as
rubbish and, three years later, on reviewing my next book, "The Idle
Thoughts of an Idle Fellow," regretted that an author who had
written such an excellent first book should have followed it up by
so unworthy a successor.

I think I may claim to have been, for the first twenty years of my
career, the best abused author in England. _Punch_ invariably
referred to me as "'Arry K'Arry," and would then proceed to solemnly
lecture me on the sin of mistaking vulgarity for humour and
impertinence for wit. As for _The National Observer_, the Jackdaw of
Rheims himself was not more cursed than was I, week in, week out, by
W. S. Henley and his superior young men. I ought, of course, to have
felt complimented; but at the time I took it all quite seriously,
and it hurt. Max Beerbohm was always very angry with me. _The
Standard_ spoke of me as a menace to English letters; and _The
Morning Post_ as an example of the sad results to be expected from
the over-education of the lower orders. At the opening dinner of the
Krasnapolski restaurant in Oxford Street (now the Frascati), I was
placed next to Harold Frederick, just arrived from America. I
noticed that he had been looking at me with curiosity. "Where's your
flint hammer?" he asked me suddenly. "Left it in the cloak-room?" He
explained that he had visualized me from reading the English
literary journals, and had imagined something prehistoric.

F. W. Robinson, the novelist (author of "Grandmother's Money"), was
my next editor. He had just started a monthly magazine called _Home
Chimes_. I sent him the first of my "Idle Thoughts," and he wrote me
to come and see him. He lived in a pleasant old house in leafy
Brixton, as it might have been called then; and I had tea with him
in his fine library, looking out upon the garden. It was wintry
weather, and quite a large party of birds were feeding on a
one-legged table just outside. Every now and then, one of them would
come close up to the window and scream; and then Robinson, saying
"Excuse me, a minute," would cut a slice of cake and take it out to
them. He liked my essay, he told me; there was a new note in it; and
it was arranged that I should write him a baker's dozen.

Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, Doctor Westland Marston and his blind son
Philip, the poet, Coulson Kernahan, William Sharp, Coventry Patmore,
Bret Harte, and J. M. Barrie, were among my fellow contributors to
_Home Chimes_. Barrie has left it on record that his chief purpose
in coming to London was to see with his own eyes the editorial
office from which _Home Chimes_ was broadcasted to the world. He had
been disappointed to find it up two flights of stairs in a narrow
lane off Paternoster Row. He had expected that, if only as a result
of his own contributions, Robinson would have been occupying more
palatial premises.

Barrie was an excellent after-dinner speaker, on the rare occasions
when he could be induced to overcome his shyness. His first attempt,
according to his own account, was at a students' dinner given to
Professor Blackie in Glasgow. Blackie had accepted on the express
condition that there was to be no speech-making--a thing he could
not abide. After the dinner, by way of a rag, Barrie, who was
unaware of the stipulation, was half bullied, half flattered into
getting on his legs and proposing the Professor's health. For the
first minute and a half the Professor stared at him, voiceless with
amazement. When Barrie came to this being the proudest moment of his
life and so forth, Blackie sprang from his chair and turned upon him
like a roaring lion. Denouncing him as the offspring of Satan out of
Chaos, and the whole remainder of the company as fit only for the
hangman's rope, he strode out of the room. Barrie, more dead than
alive, sat down and tried to think of a prayer; but as the evening
wore on, surrounded by hilarity, recovered his spirits. Toasts and
speeches became the order of the evening, and somewhere near to
midnight, Barrie--this time of his own volition--rose to add his
contribution to the general happiness. Meanwhile the Professor,
reflecting in the calm of his own study that perhaps he had been
severe towards his youthful hosts, determined to return and make it
up with them. He arrived at the moment when Barrie, warming to his
work, was just beginning to be eloquent. The Professor gave one look
round the room and then threw up his hands.

"Great God, if the chiel is na' at it still," he exclaimed, and
plunged back down the stairs.

Robinson could not afford to pay any of us much. I think I had a
guinea apiece for my essays; and the bigger men, I fancy, wrote more
for love of Robinson than thought of pelf. In those days, there was
often a fine friendship between an editor and his contributors.
There was a feeling that all were members one of another, sharing a
common loyalty. I tried when I became an editor myself to revive
this tradition; and I think to a great extent that I succeeded. But
the trusts and syndicates have now killed it. One hands one's work
to an agent. He sells it for us over his counter at so much a
thousand words. That is the only interest we have in it. Literature
is measured to-day by the yard-stick. The last time I was in
America, one newspaper was inviting the public from every hoarding
to read: "Our great new dollar-a-word story." I don't know who the
author was, the advertisement did not mention his name. "It must be
a fine story, that!" one heard the people saying. Myself, the
highest figure I have ever reached is ten cents. But even so, my
conscience has had much trouble in holding up its end. Every time
that in going over the manuscript I have knocked out a superfluous
adjective or a quite unnecessary pronoun, I have groaned, thinking
to myself: "There goes another fourpence"--or fivepence, according
to the rate of exchange.

It is a pernicious system, putting an unfair strain upon a family
man. One's heroine is talking much too much. It is not in keeping
with her character. It does not go with her unfathomable eyes.
Besides, she's said it all before in other words, the first time
that she met him. From a literary point of view, it ought to all
come out. The author seizes his blue pencil; but the husband and
father stays his hand. "Don't stop her," he whispers, "let her rip.
That passionate outpouring of her hidden soul that you think so
unnecessary is going to pay my water-rate."

I called my sheaf of essays "The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow";
and again the Leadenhall Press was my publisher. The book sold like
hotcakes, as the saying is. Tuer always had clever ideas. He gave it
a light yellow cover that stood out well upon the bookstalls. He
called each thousand copies an "edition" and, before the end of the
year, was advertising the twenty-third. I was getting a royalty of
twopence halfpenny a copy; and dreamed of a fur coat. I am speaking
merely of England. America did me the compliment of pirating the
book, and there it sold by the hundred thousand. I reckon my first
and worst misfortune in life was being born six years too soon: or,
to put it the other way round, that America's conscience, on the
subject of literary copyright, awoke in her bosom six years too late
for me. "Three Men in a Boat" had also an enormous sale in
America--from first to last well over a million. Putting aside Henry
Holt, dear fellow, who still sends me a small cheque each year,
God's Own Country has not yet paid me for either book.

Writing letters to _The Times_, according to Barrie, is--or was in
our young days--the legitimate ambition of every Englishman. Barrie
was lodging in a turning out of Cavendish Square, and I was in
Newman Street near by. I confided to him one evening that the idea
had occurred to me to write a letter to _The Times_. It seemed to me
a handy way of keeping one's name before the public.

"They won't insert it," said Barrie.

"Why not?" I demanded.

"Because you're not a married man," he answered. "I've been studying
this matter. I've noticed that _The Times_ makes a specialty of parents.
You are not a parent. You can't sign yourself 'Paterfamilias,' or
'Father of Seven'--not yet. You're not even 'An Anxious Mother.' You're
not fit to write to _The Times_. Go away. Go away and get married. Beget
children. Then come and see me again, and I'll advise you."

We argued the matter. Barrie, by the bye, sat down and wrote an
article on the subject after I was gone. But I was not to be
disheartened, I waited for the Academy to open. As I expected, a
letter immediately appeared on the subject of "The Nude in Art." It
was a perennial topic in the 'eighties. It was signed "British
Matron." I forget precisely what I said. It had to be something to
attract attention. My argument was, that the real Culprit was God
Almighty. I agreed with "British Matron" that no healthy man or
woman--especially woman--was fit to be seen: but pointed out to her
that in going for the mere delineator she was venting her
indignation on the wrong party. I signed the letter with my name in
full; and _The Times_, contrary to Barrie's prediction, inserted it.

In the Victorian Age, no respectable citizen mentioned God, except
on Sunday. I awoke the next morning to find myself famous--or
infamous, I should perhaps say. My only relation worth a penny did
say it, and there was an end of that. I didn't mind. I had heard my
name spoken in an omnibus. I was a public character.

To subsequent letters of mine _The Times_ was equally kind. I wrote
upon the dangers of the streets--dogs connected to old ladies by a
string; the use of the perambulator in dispersing crowds; the rich
man's carpet stretched across the dark pavement and the
contemplative pedestrian. I advised "Paterfamilias" what to do with
his daughters. I discussed the possibility of living on seven
hundred a year. _The Times_, in an editorial, referred to me as a
"humorist." I feel the writer meant to be complimentary; but by
later critics the term has generally been hurled at me as a
reproach.

I was still a literary man only in the evening. From ten to six I
remained a clerk. At the time, I was with a solicitor named Hodgson
in Salisbury Street, Adelphi, where now the Hotel Cecil stands. I
would buy a chop or a steak on my way home and have it fried with my
tea. The London lodging-housekeeper has but one culinary utensil--a
frying-pan. Everything goes in to it, and everything comes out of it
tasting the same. Then, the table cleared, I would get to my
writing. My chief recreation was theatre-going. I got the
first-night habit. For great events, such as an Irving production at
the Lyceum or a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, this meant a wait of
many hours, ending in a glorious scrimmage, when at last the great
doors creaked, and the word ran round "They're opening." First
nights were generally on a Saturday. I would leave the office at
two, and after a light lunch, take up my stand outside pit or
gallery entrance, according to the state of the exchequer. With
experience, some of us learned the trick of squirming our way past
the crowd by keeping to the wall. The queue system had not yet been
imported. It came from Paris. We despised the Frenchies for
submitting to it. Often, arriving only a few minutes before opening
time, have I gained a front seat. Looking behind me at poor simple
folk who had been waiting all the afternoon, my conscience would
prick me. But such is the way of the world, and who was I to
criticise my teachers?

We regular "First Nighters" got to know one another. And to one
among us, Heneage Mandell, occurred the idea of forming ourselves
into a club where, somewhere out of the rain, we could discuss
together things theatrical, and set the stage to rights.

That was the beginning of The Playgoers' Club, which gained much
notoriety; and is still, I believe, going strong: though no longer
the terror to hide-bound managers and unjust critics that it was in
the days of its youth. We met at a coffee shop in Hollywell Street,
a shady thoroughfare of old half-timbered houses and dust-grimed
shop-windows where, jumbled together, were displayed oil paintings
"after" Correggio, Teniers, and others; dilapidated jewellery;
moth-eaten garments; and prominent--but not too prominent--among the
rubbish, books and photographs of salacious suggestion, with
intimation that matter even more "curious" might be inspected
within. In Hollywell Street stood the old Opera Comique, where the
earlier Gilbert and Sullivan's operas were produced; as also the
Globe Theatre, in which first "The Private Secretary," and
afterwards "Charley's Aunt" both ran for over a thousand nights--a
long run in those days; while in Wych Street, round the corner, was
the old Olympic, where I first fell in love with Marion Terry. Wych
Street led into Clare Market, a region of adventure. All have been
swept away. The stately Law Courts stand there now, proclaiming
virtue; and wickedness has sought--and found, one takes it--new
quarters.

Addison Bright was our first president. He was a small man with a
magnificent head. It was said of him that no one could be as clever
as he looked. But he got very near it. He shared a studio with
Bernard Partridge, the artist, in a street near the Langham Hotel.
It was reception-room, dining-room, kitchen and bedroom combined.
There were great gatherings there of youthful wit and wisdom. I had
a deep affection for Addison Bright. Why he never went upon the
stage I cannot understand: he was a wonderful actor. He could read a
play to a manager better than the author could himself; and this led
to his becoming a theatrical agent. It was a new idea, then. All we
younger dramatists were his clients.

All this, however, belongs to another chapter. I speak of the
Playgoers' Club here because it led to my writing "Stageland."
Heneage Mandell, the founder of the club, was connected with a firm
of printers, and persuaded his chief to start a paper called _The
Playgoer_. Poor Heneage died not long afterwards, and the paper came
to an end. I seem to have written the editorial notes--or some of
them. I had forgotten this, until glancing through them the other
day. I must have been a bit of a prig, I fear. I trust I have
outgrown it, but one can never judge oneself. I see that in one
number I lecture Marie Tempest and a gentleman named Leslie from a
very superior height, pointing out to them the internal satisfaction
to be obtained by always wearing the white flower of a blameless
life. Also I come across a paragraph censoring the conceit of one,
Robert Buchanan, for thinking the public likely to be interested in
his private affairs.

It was in _The Playgoer_ that "Stageland" first appeared. The
sketches were unsigned, and journals that had been denouncing me and
all my works as an insult to English literature hastened to crib
them. Afterwards Bernard Partridge illustrated them, and we
published them in partnership at our own risk. It proved to me that
publishing is quite an easy business. If I had my time over again, I
would always be my own publisher.

Bernard Partridge, at five-and-twenty, was one of the handsomest men
in London. I have not seen him for many years. A thing came between
us that spoilt our friendship. But this again belongs elsewhere, and
I content myself, here, with saying that he was right and I was
wrong. Into "Stageland" he put some of the best work he has ever
done. For the Hero he drew himself, and Gertrude Kingston sat for
the Adventuress.

The book was quite a success. They were the palmy days of the old
Adelphi. Sims and Pettitt, Manville Fenn, Augustus Harris, Arthur
Shirley, Dion Boucicault and H. A. Jones were all writing melodrama. The
Stage Hero, his chief aim in life to get himself accused of crimes he
had never committed; the Villain, the only man in the play possessed of
a dress suit; the Heroine, always in trouble; the Stage Lawyer, very old
and very long and very thin; the Adventuress, with a habit of mislaying
her husbands; the Stage Irishman, who always paid his rent and was
devoted to his landlord; the Stage Sailor, whose trousers never fitted
him--they were well-known characters. All now are gone. If Partridge and
myself helped to hasten their end, I am sorry. They were better--more
human, more understandable--than many of the new puppets that have taken
their place.

I see from old letters that I was studying at this period to become
a solicitor. Not that I had any thought of giving up literature. I
would combine the two. If barristers--take, for example, Gilbert
and Grundy--wrote plays and books, why not solicitors? Besides, I
had just married. A new sense of prudence had come to me: "Safety
first," as we say now. I was with a Mr. Anderson Rose in Arundel
Street, Strand. He had a fine collection of china and old pewter,
and was a well-known art collector. Sandys' portrait of Mrs.
Anderson Rose, his mother, made a sensation when it was first
exhibited; and is still famous. He was a dear old gentleman. In the
office, we all loved him. And so did his clients, until soon after
his death, when their feelings towards him began to change. I fancy
Granville Barker must have known him, or heard of him; and used him
for "The Voysey Inheritance."

His death put an end to my dream of being a lawyer. He had been
kindness itself to me in helping me, and had promised to put work in
my way. I decided to burn my boats, and to devote all my time to
writing. My wife encouraged me. She is half Irish, and has a strain
of recklessness.




CHAPTER V

THE WHEELS OF CHANGE


When I was a boy, a stage-coach started each morning (Sundays
excepted) from an old inn off the Minories. Not the shining band-box
of the coloured print, with its dancing horses, its jolly coachman,
and its dandy guard, but a heavy lumbering vehicle drawn by four
shambling horses, all of a different size, driven by a rheumaticy
old curmudgeon, who had to be hoisted on to his seat, and his whip
handed up to him afterwards. It went through Ongar and Epping, but
its final destination I forget. To many of the smaller towns round
London the railway had not then penetrated; and similar relics set
out each morning from other ancient hostelries. Carriers' carts were
common everywhere, connecting London with what are now its nearer
suburbs, but which were then outlying villages. A row of them stood
always in the middle of the Whitechapel Road, opposite St. Mary's
church. They were covered with a hood, and had a bench for
passengers along each side, and a little window at the back. For
those in a hurry who could afford the price, post chaises were still
to be hired, with top-hatted postillions and horses with bells that
galloped over the cobbles. Respectable people--especially
publicans--kept a gig; and sporting old ladies, on visits to their
bankers or solicitors, would drive themselves into the city behind
their own fat ponies.

The bicycle had not yet arrived: though nearly every afternoon an
odd old fellow used to ride down Mare Street, Hackney, on a tricycle
he had made for himself. In wet weather, he carried an umbrella over
his head with one hand, and steered with the other. He was quite a
public character, and people used to wait about to see him pass. The
first bicycles were nicknamed "spiders." The front wheel was
anything from fifty to sixty inches in diameter and was joined to a
diminutive back wheel by a curved steel bar, shaped like a note of
interrogation. Their riders had to be youths of skill and courage,
or woe betide them. They wore tight-fitting breeches and short
jackets that ended at the waist. Your modern youngster on his grimy
"jig-pig" with his padded legs, his bulging mackintosh, his
skull-cap and his goggles, goes further and faster, I admit; but his
slim grandfather, towering above the traffic on his flashing wheel,
was a braver sight for gods and girls.

It was my nephew, Frank Shorland, who first rode a safety bicycle in
London. A little chap named Lawson claimed to have invented it. He
became a company promoter, and later retired to Devonshire. A cute
little chap. The luck ran against him. It was he who first foresaw
the coming of the motor, and organized that first joy ride from the
Hotel Metropole to Brighton in 1896. Young Frank was well known as
an amateur racer. He believed in the thing the moment he saw it, and
agreed to ride his next race on one. He was unmercifully chaffed by
the crowd. His competitors, on their tall, graceful "spiders,"
looked down upon him, wondering and amazed. But he won easily, and
from that day "spiders" went out of fashion; till they came to be
used only by real spiders for the spinning of their webs.

The coming of the "safety" made bicycling universally popular. Till
then, it had been confined to the young men. I remember the bitter
controversy that arose over the argument: "Should a lady ride a
bicycle?" It was some while before the dropped bar was thought of,
and so, in consequence, she had to ride in knickerbockers: very
fetching they looked in them, too, the few who dared. But in those
days a woman's leg was supposed to be a thing known only to herself
and God. "Would you like it, if your sister showed her legs? Yes, or
no?" was always the formula employed to silence you, did you venture
a defence. Before that, it had been: "Could a real lady ride outside
an omnibus?" or "Might a virtuous female ride alone in a hansom
cab?" The woman question would seem to have been always with us. The
landlady of an hotel on the Ripley Road, much frequented then by
cyclists, went to the length of refusing to serve any rider who, on
close inspection, turned out to be of the feminine gender; and the
Surrey magistrates supported her. The contention was that a good
woman would not--nay, could not--wear knickerbockers, "Bloomers"
they were termed: that, consequently, any woman who did wear
bloomers must be a bad citizeness: in legal language, a disorderly
person, and an innkeeper was not bound to serve "disorderly
characters." The decision turned out a blessing in disguise to the
cycling trade. It stirred them to invention. To a bright young
mechanical genius occurred the "dropped bar." A Bishop's wife,
clothed in seemly skirts, rode on a bicycle through Leamington.

Bicycling became the rage. In Battersea Park, any morning between
eleven and one, all the best blood in England could be seen,
solemnly peddling up and down the half-mile drive that runs between
the river and the refreshment kiosk. But these were the experts--the
finished article. In shady by-paths, elderly countesses, perspiring
peers, still in the wobbly stage, battled bravely with the laws of
equilibrium; occasionally defeated, would fling their arms round the
necks of hefty young hooligans who were reaping a rich harvest as
cycling instructors: "Proficiency guaranteed in twelve lessons."
Cabinet Ministers, daughters of a hundred Earls might be recognized
by the initiated, seated on the gravel, smiling feebly and rubbing
their heads. Into quiet roads and side-streets, one ventured at the
peril of one's limbs. All the world seemed to be learning bicycling:
sighting an anxious pedestrian, they would be drawn, as by some
irresistible magnetic influence, to avoid all other pitfalls and
make straight for him. One takes it that, nowadays, the human race
learns bicycling at an age when the muscles are more supple, the
fear of falling less paralyzing to the nerves. Still occasionally,
of an early morning, one encounters the ubiquitous small boy,
pursuing an erratic course upon a wheel far and away too high for
him--borrowed without permission, one assumes, from some still
sleeping relative. With each revolution, his whole body rises and
falls. He seems to be climbing some Sisyphian staircase. But one
feels no anxiety. One knows that by some miracle he will, at the
last moment, succeed in swerving round one; will shave the old lady
with the newspapers by a hair's breadth; will all but run over the
dog; and disappear round the corner. Providence is helpful to youth.
To the middle aged it can be spiteful. The bicycle took my
generation unprepared.

In times of strike, there emerges the old hansom. Its bony horse
must be twenty years older, but looks much the same. Its driver has
grown grey and harmless; thanks you for a shilling over his fare,
and trots away. Once, he was both the terror and the pride of London
town. Nervous old ladies and gentlemen, on their way home to genteel
suburbs, would ride in fear and trembling, wondering what he would
say--or do--to them if they failed immediately to satisfy his
exorbitant demand. Young men, with sweethearts, would furtively
count their change, trying to guess how much it would cost them to
silence his loud-mouthed sarcasm. Myself, I discovered that there
was but one way of teaching him Christian behaviour; and that was by
knowing more bad language than he had ever learnt, and getting it in
first. How could he know that I had slept in doss-houses, shared
hay-ricks with tramps? I had the further advantage over him of being
able to add vituperation both in French and German. Outclassed, he
would whip up his horse, glad to escape. But not all had my gift of
tongues. The late Weedon Grossmith had recourse to guile. He had
found a charming place called "The Old House" at Canonbury. But it
was far from theatre-land; and Weedon's difficulty was getting home
at nights. From the Strand to Canonbury was what the drivers used to
call "collar work." The horse had the work. The driver had the extra
tip. Weedon was willing to pay in reason, but the old hansom-cab
driver was a born bully: especially when dealing with a smallish
gentleman in a lonely _cul-de-sac_. So instead of giving the address
of his own front gate, Weedon always gave the address of a house
near by that happened to be next to a police station. The constable
on duty--not perhaps entirely forgotten on his birthday and other
anniversaries--would stroll up as Weedon Grossmith jumped out. The
cabman would accept his fare, plus a respectable addition, with a
pleasant "Thank you, sir"; and wishing Weedon and the constable
good-night, drive off. And all was peace.

It was a picturesque vehicle, the old hansom: there was that to be
said for it. George Augustus Sala, a bright young journalist, on the
staff of _The Daily Telegraph_, called it the London Gondola. And
the bright young journalists of Venice wrote of their own Gondola, I
doubt not, as the Venetian Hansom. But to ride in, they were the
most uncomfortable contrivances ever invented. To get into them, you
grabbed at two handles, one jutting out from the splash board and
the other just over the wheel, and hauled yourself up on to a small
iron step. If the horse made a start before you got further, you
were carried down the street in this position, looking like a monkey
on a stick. If you had not secured a firm hold, you were jerked back
into the gutter, and the cab went on without you: which was safer,
but even less dignified. Getting out was more difficult. A false
step landed you on all fours, and your aunt or your sister, or
whatever it might happen to be, stepped on you. To enter or alight
without getting your hat knocked off by the reins was an art in
itself. The seat was just big enough for two. It was high, and only
long ladies could reach the floor. The others bobbed up and down
with their feet dangling. The world always thought the worst, but as
often as not, one put one's arm round her purely to prevent her from
slipping off. There was a trap door in the roof. Along dim-lit
roads, one noticed the cabman holding it open, and driving with his
head bent down. A folded window could be let down by the driver to
protect you from the rain. It was called the guillotin. That was
another thing that always knocked your hat off: and then it hit you
on the head. Most people chose the rain. If by any chance the horse
slipped--and he was the sort of horse that made one wonder how it
was that he stood up--then the "apron" doors would fly open and you
would be shot out into the road--minus, of course, your hat. Another
experience that could happen to you in a hansom was the breaking of
the belly-band; and then the whole thing tilted up; and you lay on
your back with your legs in the air and no possibility, if you were
a lady, of getting at your skirts. As they had fallen, so they must
abide; her only hope being that all such things as had now become
visible were seemly. There was nothing to catch hold of--nothing by
which one could regain one's feet. There one had to lie till the
driver had extricated himself, and with the help of the hilarious
crowd, had brought the cab back to the horizontal. Then you crawled
out, and distributed shillings; and walked home, without your hat.

I have no regrets for the passing of the hansom.

The old two-horse 'bus, one is glad has disappeared, if only for the
sake of the horses. It had straw inside and a little oil lamp that
made up in smell what it lacked in illuminating power. It carried
twelve inside, and fourteen out--ten on the knife-board, and two
each side of the driver. The seats by the driver were reserved for
acrobats. You caught a swinging strap and sprang on to the hub of
the front wheel, leapt from there on to the trace-pin and then with
a final bound gained the foot-board. The "knife-board" was easier of
attainment. You climbed up a fixed ladder, the rungs a foot apart.
The only real danger was from the man above you. If he kicked out
you were done. There was no bell. Passengers stopped the 'bus by
prodding the conductor with their umbrellas. The driver wore a
mighty coat with flapping capes, and wrapped a rug round his legs
before strapping himself to his seat. He was a genial soul, not
above accepting a cigar, and had a tongue as clever as his hands.
Wit and sarcasm dropped from him as he drove. The motor has silenced
the humour of the streets.

I cannot help fancying that London was a cosier place to dwell in,
when I was a young man. For one thing, it was less crowded. Life was
not one everlasting scrimmage. There was time for self-respect, for
courtesy. For another thing, one got out of it quicker. On summer
afternoons, four-horse brakes would set out for Barnet, Esher
Woods, Chingford and Hampton Court. One takes now the motor 'bus,
and goes further; but it is through endless miles of brick and
mortar. And at the end, one is but in another crowd. Forty years
ago, one passed by fields and leafy ways, and came to pleasant tea
gardens, with bowling greens, and birds, and lovers' lanes.

Of a night time, threepenny 'buses took us to Cremorne Gardens,
where bands played, and we danced and supped under a thousand
twinkling lights. Or one walked there through the village of
Chelsea, past the old wooden bridge. Battersea Park was in the
making, and farm lands came down to the water's edge. The ladies may
not all have been as good as they were beautiful; but somehow the
open sky and the flowing river took the sordidness away. Under the
trees and down the flower-bordered paths, it was possible to imagine
the shadow of Romance. The Argyll Rooms, Evans' and others were more
commonplace. But even so, they were more human--less brutal than our
present orgy of the streets. Fashion sipped its tea, and stayed to
dinner, at the lordly "Star & Garter," and drove home in phaeton or
high dog-cart across Richmond Park and Putney Heath. The river was a
crowded highway. One went by steamer to "The Ship" at Greenwich, for
its famous fish dinner, with Mouton Rothschild at eight and six the
bottle. Or further on, to "The Falcon" at Gravesend, where the long
dining-room looked out upon the river, and one watched the ships
passing silently upon the evening tide. On Sundays, for half a
crown, one travelled to Southend and back. Unlimited tea was served
on board, with prawns and watercress, for ninepence. We lads had not
spent much money on our lunch, but the fat stewardess would only
laugh as she brought us another pile of thick-cut bread and butter.
I was on the "Princess Alice" on her last completed voyage. She went
down the following Sunday, and nearly every soul on board was
drowned. So, also, I was on the last complete voyage the "Lusitania"
made from New York. They would not let us land at Liverpool, but
made us anchor at the mouth of the Mersey, and took us off in tugs.
We were loaded up to the water line with ammunition. "Agricultural
Machinery," I think it was labelled. Penny Gaffs were common. They
were the Repertory Theatre of the period. One sat on benches and ate
whelks and fried potatoes and drank beer. "Sweeney Todd, the Barber
of Fleet Street," was always a great draw, though "Maria Martin, or
The Murder in the Red Barn," ran it close. "Hamlet," cut down to
three-quarters of an hour, and consisting chiefly of broad-sword
combats, was also popular. Prize fights took place on Hackney
marshes, generally on Sunday morning; and foot-pads lurked on
Hampstead Heath. Theatre patrons had no cause to complain of scanty
measure. The programme lasted generally from six till twelve. It
began with a farce, included a drama and an opera, and ended up with
a burlesque. After nine o'clock, half prices were charged for
admission. At most of the bridges one paid toll. Waterloo was the
cheapest. Foot passengers there were charged only a halfpenny. It
came to be known as the Scotchman's bridge. The traditional
Scotchman, on a visit to a friend in London, was supposed to have
been taken everywhere and treated. Coming to Waterloo Bridge, his
host put his hand in his pocket, as usual, to draw out the required
penny. The Scotchman with a fine gesture stepped in front of him.
"My turn," said the Scotchman. Before the Aerated Bread Company came
along, there were only three places in London, so far as I can
remember, where a cup of tea could be obtained: one in St. Paul's
Churchyard, another in the Strand called the Bun Shop, and the third
in Regent Street at the end of the Quadrant. It was the same in New
York when I first went there. I offered to make Charles Frohman's
fortune for him. My idea was that he should put down five thousand
dollars, and that we should start tea shops, beginning in Fifth
Avenue. I reckon I missed being a millionaire. Gatti's in the Strand
first introduced ices into London. Children were brought up from the
country during the holidays to have a twopenny ice at Gatti's. It
was at the old Holborn Restaurant that first one dined to music. It
was held to be Continental and therefore immoral; and the
everlasting woman question rose again to the surface: could a good
woman dine to the accompaniment of a string band?

As a matter of fact, it didn't really matter in those days. A giddy
old aunt from the country would sometimes clamour to be taken out,
but "nice" women fed at home. At public dinners, a gallery was set
aside for them. They came in--like the children--with the dessert;
and were allowed to listen to the speeches. Sometimes they were
noticed, and their health drunk. The toast was always entrusted to
the comic man, and responded to by the youngest bachelor: supposed
to be the nearest thing to a lady capable of speech. In all the best
houses there was a "smoking-room" into which the master of the
house, together with his friends, when he had any, would retire to
smoke their pipes or their cigars. Cigarettes were deemed
effeminate. A popular writer in 1870 explained the victory of
Germany over France by pointing out that the Germans were a
pipe-smoking people, while the French smoked cigarettes. If there
wasn't any smoking-room he smoked in the back kitchen. After
smoking, and before rejoining the ladies, one sucked a clove. It was
said to purify the breath. I remember, soon after the Savoy Hotel
was opened, a woman being asked to leave the supper-room for smoking
a cigarette. She offered to put it out; but the feelings of the
other guests had been too deeply outraged; forgiveness, it was felt,
would be mere weakness. A gentleman, seen in company with a woman
who smoked, lost his reputation.

Only mansions boasted bathrooms. The middle-classes bathed on
Saturdays. It was a tremendous performance, necessitating the
carrying of many buckets of water from the basement to the second
floor. The practical-minded, arguing that it was easier for Mohammed
to go to the mountain, took their bath in the kitchen. There were
Spartans who professed themselves unhappy unless they had a cold
"tub" every morning. The servants hated them. It was kept under the
bed, and at night time was hauled out, and left ready for him with a
can of water. It was shaped like a wide shallow basin, and the water
just covered your toes. You sat in it with your legs tucked up and
soused yourself with the sponge. The difficulty was emptying it. You
lifted it up and staggered about with it, waiting for the moment
when the waters should grow calm and cease from wobbling. Sometimes
you succeeded in pouring it into the pail without spilling half of
it on to the floor, and sometimes you didn't. It was the Americans
who introduced baths into England. Till the year of Jubilee, no
respectable young lady went out after dusk unless followed by the
housemaid. For years the stock joke in _Punch_ was ankles. If a
lady, crossing the road, lifted her dress sufficiently high to show
her ankles, traffic became disorganized. Crowds would collect upon
the curb to watch her. The high-minded turned their eyes the other
way. But the shameless--like Miss Tincklepot's parrot--would make no
bones about "having a damn good look." There came a season when
Fashion decreed that skirts should be two inches from the ground;
and _The Daily Telegraph_ had a leader warning the nation of the
danger of unchecked small beginnings. Things went from bad to worse.
A woman's club was launched called "The Pioneers." All the most
desperate women in London enrolled themselves as members. Shaw,
assumed to be a feminist, was invited to address them. He had chosen
for his text, Ephesians, fifth chapter, twenty-second verse, and had
been torn limb from limb, according to the earlier reports. And _The
Times_ had a leader warning the nation of the danger, should woman
cease to recognize that the sphere of her true development lay in
the home circle. Hardly a year later, female suffrage for unmarried
women householders in their own right was mooted in the House of
Commons, and London rocked with laughter. It was the typewriter that
led to the discovery of woman. Before then, a woman in the city had
been a rare and pleasing sight. The tidings flew from tongue to
tongue, and way was made for her. The right of a married woman to go
shopping by herself, provided she got back in time for tea, had long
been recognized; and when Irving startled London by giving
performances on Saturday afternoons ("_matines_" they came to be
called) women, unattended by any male protector, were frequently to
be noticed in the pit.

The telephone was hailed as a tremendous advance towards the
millennium. The idea then current was that, one by one, the world's
troubles were disappearing. But for a long while, it saved time and
temper to take a cab and go round and see the man. Electric lighting
was still in the experimental stage; and for some reason got itself
mixed up with Bradlaugh and atheism: maybe, because it used to go
out suddenly, a phenomenon attributed by many to the wrath of God. A
judge of the High Court was much applauded for denouncing it from
the Bench, and calling for tallow candles. A wave of intellectuality
passed over England in the later 'eighties. A popular form of
entertainment was the Spelling-Bee. The competitors sat in rows upon
the platform, while the body of the hall would be filled with an
excited audience, armed with dictionaries. Every suburb had its
amateur Parliament, with real Liberals and Conservatives. At
Chelsea, where we met over a coffee shop in Flood Street, we had an
Irish party, which was always being "suspended": when it would
depart, cursing us, to sing the "Marseillaise," and "The Wearin' of
the Green," in the room below. Rowdy young men and women--of the
sort that nowadays go in for night clubs and jazz dancing--filled
the ranks of the Fabian Society; and revelled in evenings at Essex
Hall. They argued with the Webbs, and interrupted Shaw. Wells had
always plenty to say, but was not an orator. He would lose his head
when contradicted, and wave his arms about. Shaw's plays always led
to scenes on the first night. At "Widowers' Houses," there was a
free fight in the gallery. Shaw made a speech that had the effect of
reconciling both his friends and enemies in a united desire to lynch
him. The Salvation Army came as a great shock to the Press. It was
the Salvation Army's "vulgarity," its "cheap sentiment" that wounded
the fine feelings of Fleet Street. Squire Bancroft was the first
citizen of credit and renown to champion the Salvation Army. Fleet
Street rubbed its eyes. It had always thought the Bancrofts so
respectable. But gradually the abuse died down.

Soho, when I was a young man, was the haunt of revolutionaries. I
came to know a few of them. When the revolutionary is not
revolutionizing, he loves a sentimental song, or a pathetic
recitation: will accept the proffered cigar and grow reminiscent
over a tenpenny bottle of _vin ordinaire_. What I admired about them
was their scorn of all pretences. Fourpence laid out at any barber's
in the neighbourhood might have put the police off the scent. They
despised such subterfuge. Their very trousers were revolutionary.
Except on the legs of the conspirators' chorus in "Madame Angot,"
one never saw the like. I thought, at times, of suggesting to them
that they should wear masks and carry dark lanterns. I believe, if I
had done so, it would have appealed to them. It could have made no
practical difference; and would have added a final touch of
picturesqueness.

A little while before the war, I renewed acquaintance with the
Russian revolutionary, this time at the house of Prince Kropotkin,
in Brighton. Prince Kropotkin himself was a kindly, dapper little
gentleman of aristocratic appearance, but his compatriots, who came
to visit him, there was no mistaking. The sight of them, as they
passed by, struck terror to the stoutest hearts of Kemp Town. There
was one gentleman with a beard down to his waist and a voice that
shook the ornaments upon the mantelpiece. He belonged to a new
religious sect that held it wrong, among other things, to destroy
house flies; but was less scrupulous, I gathered, regarding the
existence of the _petite bourgeoisie_. Alas! even the best of us are
not always consistent. During the war, I have listened to members of
humanitarian societies chortling over the thought that German babies
were being starved to death.

I fancy the At Home has died out. Anyhow one hopes so. It was a
tiresome institution. Good women had a special afternoon: "At Home
every Thursday." Sometimes it was every other Thursday, or every
first Friday, or third Monday. One's brain used to reel, trying to
remember them. Most often, one turned up on the wrong day. Poor
ladies would remain in all the afternoon, sitting in the
drawing-room in all their best clothes, surrounded by expensive
refreshments; and not a soul to speak to. In my mother's day, the
morning was the fashionable time for calls. There were always cake
and biscuits in a silver basket, and port and sherry on the
side-board. They used to talk about the servants, and how things
were going from bad to worse.

Douglas Sladen was the most successful At Home giver that I ever
knew. Half "Who's Who" must have come to his receptions at Addison
Mansions from ten-thirty to the dawn. He had a wonderful way when he
introduced you of summarizing your career, opinions, and general
character in half-a-dozen sentences, giving you like information
concerning the other fellow--or fellowess. You knew what crimes and
follies to avoid discussing, what talents and virtues it would be
kind to drag into the conversation.

Science informs us that another Glacial period is on the way--that
sooner or later the now temperate zone will again be buried under
ice. But, for the moment, we would seem to be heading the other way.
Snow-drifts in the London streets were common in my early winters.
Often the bridges were impassable, till an army of sweepers had
cleared a passage. I have watched the sleighs, with their jingling
bells, racing along the Embankment. One year, we had six weeks of
continuous skating. There was quite a fair on the Serpentine, and a
man with a dog crossed the Thames on foot at Lambeth. Fogs were
something like fogs in those days. One, I remember, lasted exactly a
week. Gas flares roared at Charing Cross and Hyde Park Corner. From
the other side of the road they looked like distant lighthouses.
Link-boys, waving their burning torches, plied for hire; and
religious fanatics went to and fro, invisible, proclaiming the end
of the world.

On a morning in 1896, a line of weird-shaped vehicles, the like of
which London had never seen before, stood drawn up in Northumberland
Avenue outside the Hotel Metropole. They were the new horseless
carriages, called automobiles, about which we had heard much talk.
Lawson, a company promoter, who claimed to have invented the safety
bicycle, had got them together. The law, insisting that every
mechanically propelled vehicle should be preceded by a man carrying
a red flag, had expired the day before; and at nine o'clock we
started for Brighton. I shared a high two-seater with the editor of
a financial journal, a gentleman named Duguid. We were fifth in the
procession. Our driver, a large man, sat perched up on a dicky just
in front of us, and our fear throughout the journey was, lest he
should fall backwards, and bury us. An immense crowd had gathered,
and until we were the other side of Croydon it was necessary for
mounted police to clear a way for us. At Purley the Brighton coach
overtook us, and raced us into Reigate. By the time we reached
Crawley, half our number had fallen out for repairs and alterations.
We were to have been received at Brighton by the Mayor and
Corporation and lunched at the Grand Hotel. The idea had been that
somewhere between twelve and one the whole twenty-five of us would
come sweeping down the Preston road amid enthusiastic cheers. It was
half-past three before the first of us appeared. At lengthening
intervals some half-a-dozen others straggled in (Duguid and myself
were, I think, the last), to be received with sarcasm and jeers. We
washed ourselves--a tedious operation--and sat down to an early
dinner. Little Lawson made a witty speech. All the Vested Interests
of the period--railway companies; livery stable keepers, and horse
dealers; the Grand Junction Canal; the Amalgamated Society of
Bath-chair Proprietors, and so forth, were, of course, all up in
arms against him. One petition, praying Parliament to put its foot
down upon the threatened spoiling of the countryside, was signed
"Friends of the Horse." It turned out to be from the Worshipful
Company of Whipmakers. Some credit is due to the motorists of those
days. It was rarely that one reached one's destination. As a matter
of fact, only the incurable optimist ever tried to. The common
formula was: "Oh, let's start off, and see what happens." Generally,
one returned in a hired fly. Everywhere along the country roads, one
came across them: some drawn up against the grass, others helplessly
blocking the way. Beside them, dejected females sitting on a rug.
Underneath, a grimy man, blaspheming: another running round and
treading on him. Experienced wives took their knitting and a camp
stool. Very young men with a mechanical turn of mind got enjoyment
out of them, apparently. At the slightest sign of trouble, they
would take the whole thing to pieces, and spread it out upon the
roadside. Some cheerful old lady, an aunt presumably, would be
grovelling on her hands and knees, with her mouth full of screws,
looking for more. Passing later in the evening, one would notice
the remains piled up against the hedge with a lantern hung on to it.
At first, we wore masks and coloured goggles. Horses were terrified
when they met us. We had to stop the engine and wait. I remember one
old farmer with a very restive filly. Of course we were all watching
him. "If you ladies and gentlemen," he said, "wouldn't mind turning
your faces the other way, maybe I'd get her past."

They were of strange and awful shapes, at the beginning. There was
one design supposed to resemble a swan; but, owing to the neck being
short, it looked more like a duck: that is, if it looked like
anything. To fill the radiator, you unscrewed its head and poured
the water down its neck; and as you drove the screw would work
loose, and the thing would turn round and look at you out of one
eye. Others were shaped like canoes and gondolas. One firm brought
out a dragon. It had a red tongue, and you hung the spare wheel on
its tail.

Flying-machines, properly speaking, came in with the war. We used to
have balloon ascents from the Crystal Palace on fine Thursdays. You
paid a guinea to go up and took your chance as to where you would
come down. Most of them came home the next morning with a cold. Now
the journey from London to Paris takes two hours. Thus the wheels go
round; and to quote from a once popular poet: "Ever the right comes
uppermost, and ever is justice done."




CHAPTER VI

MORE LITERARY REMINISCENCES


"Three Men in a Boat. To say nothing of the dog," I wrote at Chelsea
Gardens, up ninety-seven stairs. But the view was worth it. We had a
little circular drawing-room--I am speaking now as a married man--nearly
all window, suggestive of a lighthouse, from which we looked down upon
the river, and over Battersea Park to the Surrey hills beyond, with the
garden of old Chelsea Hospital just opposite. Fourteen shillings a week
we paid for that flat: two reception-rooms, three bedrooms and a
kitchen. One was passing rich in those days on three hundred a year:
kept one's servant, and sipped one's Hennessy's "Three Star" at four and
twopence the bottle. I had known Chelsea Gardens for some time. Rose
Norreys, the actress, had a flat there, and gave Sunday afternoon
parties. She was playing then at the Court Theatre with Arthur Cecil and
John Clayton. Half young Bohemia used to squeeze itself into her tiny
drawing-room, and overflow into the kitchen. Bald or grey-headed they
are now, those of them that are left. Bernard Partridge and myself were
generally the last to leave. One could not help loving her. She was a
strange spiritual little creature. She would have made a wonderful Joan
of Arc. She never seemed to grow up. I was rehearsing a play at the
Vaudeville Theatre, when a boy slipped into my hand the last letter I
had from her. The boy never said whom it was from; and I did not open it
till the end of the act, some two hours later. It was written in pencil,
begging me to come to her at once. She had rooms in Great Portland
Street in a house covered with ivy. A small crowd was round the door
when I got there; and I learned she had just been taken away to Colney
Hatch asylum. I never could bring myself to go and see her there. She
had kind women friends--Mrs. Jopling Rowe, the artist, was one--who
watched over her. I pray her forgiveness.

I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I
was a humorist. I never have been sure about it. In the Middle Ages,
I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or
hanged. There was to be "humorous relief"; but the book was to have
been "The Story of the Thames," its scenery and history. Somehow it
would not come. I was just back from my honeymoon, and had the
feeling that all the world's troubles were over. About the "humorous
relief" I had no difficulty. I decided to write the "humorous
relief" first--get it off my chest, so to speak. After which, in
sober frame of mind, I could tackle the scenery and history. I never
got there. It seemed to be all "humorous relief." By grim
determination I succeeded, before the end, in writing a dozen or so
slabs of history and working them in, one to each chapter, and F. W.
Robinson, who was publishing the book serially, in _Home Chimes_,
promptly slung them out, the most of them. From the beginning he had
objected to the title and had insisted upon my thinking of another.
And half-way through I hit upon "Three Men in a Boat," because
nothing else seemed right.

There wasn't any dog. I did not possess a dog in those days. Neither
did George. Nor did Harris. As a boy I had owned pets innumerable.
There was a baby water-rat I had caught in a drain. He lived most of
his time in my breast pocket. I would take him to school with me;
and he would sit with his head poking out between my handkerchief
and my coat so that nobody could see him but myself, and look up at
me with adoring eyes. Next to my mother, I loved him more than
anybody in the world. The other boys complained of him after a time,
but I believe it was only jealousy. I never smelt anything. And then
there was a squirrel--an orphan--that I persuaded a white rabbit to
adopt, until he bit one of his foster-brothers; and a cat that used
to come to the station to meet me. But it never ran to a dog.
Montmorency I evolved out of my inner consciousness. There is
something of the dog, I take it, in most Englishmen. Dog friends
that I came to know later have told me he was true to life.

Indeed, now I come to think of it, the book really was a history. I
did not have to imagine or invent. Boating up and down the Thames
had been my favourite sport ever since I could afford it. I just put
down the things that happened.

A few years ago I took some American friends, who had been staying
with me, to see Oxford. We had left the house at eight o'clock, and
had finished up with the Martyrs' Memorial at a quarter to seven.
Looking back, I cannot think of anything we missed. I had said
good-bye to them at the railway station. They were going on to
Stratford. I was too exhausted to remember I had left the motor at
the Randolph. There was a train going in the opposite direction to
Stratford; and caring about nothing else, I took it. Just as it was
starting there shot in a liver-coloured dog, followed by three
middle-aged and important-looking gentlemen. The dog, a Chow, took
the seat opposite to me. He had a quiet dignity about him. He struck
me as more Chinese than dog. The other three spread themselves
about. The eldest, and most talkative, was a professor: anyhow
that's what they called him; added to which, he looked it. The
stoutest of the three I judged to be connected with finance. It
appeared that if the "A.G. group" did not put up fourteen millions
by Friday, he would have to go to town on Monday, and that would be
a nuisance. I could not help overhearing and feeling sorry for him.
At the period, I was worried over money matters myself. The third
was a simple soul connected with Egyptology and a museum. I was
dropping off to sleep, when the train gave a lurch, and the
Professor suddenly said "Damn."

"Wish I'd never sat down on that corkscrew," remarked the Professor,
while rubbing the place.

"If it comes to that," remarked the Financier, "there were one or
two things that would have been all the better for your not sitting
down upon them: tomatoes, for example."

I kept my eyes closed and listened. I learnt that, brain fagged and
desiring a new thing, they had hit upon the idea of hiring a boat
at Kingston and pulling up the river. They were in reminiscent mood,
and it was clear they had had trouble with their packing. They had
started with a tent. For the first two nights, they had slept in
this tent--at intervals. The tent, it was evident, had shown no more
respect for Philosophy and High Finance and Egyptology than for
Youth and Folly. It had followed the law of its being; and on the
third morning they had deliberately set fire to it and had danced
round it while it burnt. They had bathed of mornings; and the
Egyptologist, slipping on a banana rind, had dived before he
intended and taken his pyjamas with him. They had washed their
clothes in the river and afterwards given them away. They had sat
hungry round hermetically sealed luxuries, having forgotten the
tin-opener. The Chow, whose name it transpired was Confucius, had
had a row with a cat, and had scalded himself with the kettle.

From all of which it would appear that anyone, who had thought of
it, could have written "Three Men in a Boat." Likely enough, some
troop of ancient Britons, camping where now the Mother of
Parliaments looks down upon old Thames, listened amused while one
among them told of the adventures of himself and twain companions in
a coracle: to say nothing of the wolf. Allowing for variation in
unimportant detail, much the same sort of things must have happened.
And in 30,000 A.D.--if Earth's rivers still run--a boat-load of
Shaw's "ancients" will, in all probability, be repeating the
experiment with similar results, accompanied by a dog five thousand
years old.

George and Harris were likewise founded on fact. Harris was Carl
Hentschel. I met him first outside a pit door. His father introduced
photo-etching into England. It enabled newspapers to print pictures,
and altered the whole character of journalism. The process was a
secret then. Young Carl and his father, locking the back kitchen
door, and drawing down the blind, would stir their crucibles far on
into the night. Carl worked the business up into a big concern; and
we thought he was going to end as Lord Mayor. The war brought him
low. He was accused of being a German. As a matter of fact he was a
Pole. But his trade rivals had got their chance, and took it. George
Wingrave, now a respectable Bank Manager, I met when lodging in
Newman Street; and afterwards we chummed together in Tavistock
Place, handy for the British Museum reading-room: the poor students'
club, as it used to be called.

We three would foregather on Sunday mornings, and take the train to
Richmond. There were lovely stretches then between Richmond and
Staines, meadowland and cornfields. At first, we used to have the
river almost to ourselves; but year by year it got more crowded and
Maidenhead became our starting-point. England in those days was
still a Sabbath-keeping land. Often people would hiss us as we
passed, carrying our hamper and clad in fancy "blazers." Once a
Salvation Army lass dropped suddenly upon her knees in front of us
and started praying. Tennis, on Sundays, was played only behind high
walls, and golf had not come in. Bicycling was just beginning. I
remember the indignation of a village publican, watching some lads
just starting for a Sunday outing. "Look at them," he said, "they'll
gad about all day like wooden monkeys on a stick, and won't get home
till after closing time. God forgive 'em."

Sometimes we would fix up a trip of three or four days or a week,
doing the thing in style and camping out. Three, I have always
found, make good company. Two grow monotonous, and four or over
break up into groups. Later on we same three did a cycle tour
through the Black Forest: out of which came "Three Men on the
Bummel" ("Three Men on Wheels," it was called in America). In
Germany it was officially adopted as a school reading-book. Another
year we tramped the valley of the Upper Danube. That would have made
an interesting book, but I was occupied writing plays at the time.
It lingers in my memory as the best walk of all. We seemed to have
mounted Wells' "Time Machine," and slipped back into the Middle
Ages. Railways and hotels had vanished. Barefooted friars wandered,
crook in hand, shepherding their flocks. Peering into the great
barns, we watched the swinging of the iron flails. Yoked oxen drew
the creaking wains. Outside the cottage doors, the women ground the
corn between the querns. We slept in the great guest room side by
side: tired men and women with their children, Jew pedlar,
travelling acrobat. A knapsack on one's back and a stout staff in
one's hand makes joyous travelling. Your modern motor-car, rushing
through history in a cloud of dust, is for Time's rich slaves. Even
on the old push bicycle one is too much in a hurry. One sees the
beauty after one has passed. One wonders: shall one get off and go
back? Meanwhile, one goes on: it is too late. On foot, one leans
one's arms upon the gate: the picture has time to print itself upon
the memory. One falls into talk with cheery tinker, brother tramp,
or village priest. The pleasant byway lures our willing feet: it may
lead to mystery, adventure. Another of our excursions was through
the Ardennes. But that was less interesting, except for a strange
combination of monastery and convent with a sign-post outside it
offering accommodation for man and beast, where monks did the
cooking, and nuns waited, and the Abbess (at least so I took her to
be) made out the bill. It was in the 'nineties. If one asked one's
way of the old folk, one spoke in French; but if of the young, one
asked in German and was answered cheerfully. On the whole, one
gathered that the peasants were nearer to Germany. It was in the
towns that one found the French.

Subsequently Carl, busy climbing to that Mayorial chair, deserted;
and Pett-Ridge, who may be said to have qualified himself by
afterwards marrying a sister of Carl's, made our third. The only
fault we found with him was that he never changed his clothes. Or if
he did, it was to prove the truth of the French proverb: that the
more things change, the more they remain the same. He would join us
for a walking tour through the Tyrol or a tramp across Brittany,
wearing the same clothes in which we had last seen him strolling
down the Strand on his way to the Garrick Club: cut-away coat with
fancy vest, grey striped trousers, kid boots buttoned at the side
(as worn then by all the best people), spotless white shirt and
collar, speckled blue tie, soft felt hat, and fawn gloves. I have
tobogganed with Pett-Ridge amid the snows of Switzerland. I have
boated with him. I have motored with him. Always he has been dressed
in precisely those same clothes. He'll turn up at the Day of
Judgment clothed like that: I feel sure of it. Possibly, out of
respect to the Court, he will substitute a black tie.

We put up with him for the reason that he was--and always is--a most
delightful companion. The worst one can say about his books is that
they are not as good as his talk. If they were, we other humorists
wouldn't have a look in.

"Three Men in a Boat" brought me fame, and had it been published a
few years later would have brought me fortune also. As it was, the
American pirate reaped a great reward. But I suppose God made him.
Of course it was damned by the critics. One might have imagined--to
read some of them--that the British Empire was in danger. One Church
dignitary went about the country denouncing me. _Punch_ was
especially indignant, scenting an insidious attempt to introduce
"new humour" into comic literature. For years, "New Humorist" was
shouted after me wherever I wrote. Why in England, of all countries
in the world, humour, even in new clothes, should be mistaken for a
stranger to be greeted with brickbats, bewildered me. It bewildered
others. Zangwill, in an article on humour, has written:

"There is a most bewildering habit in modern English letters. It
consists in sneering down the humorist--that rarest of all literary
phenomena. His appearance, indeed, is hailed with an outburst of
gaiety; even the critics have the joy of discovery. But no sooner is
he established and doing an apparently profitable business than a
reaction sets in, and he becomes a by-word for literary crime. When
'Three Men in a Boat' was fresh from the press, I was buttonholed by
grave theologians and scholars hysterically insisting on my hearing
page after page: later on these same gentlemen joined in the hue and
cry and shuddered at the name of Jerome. The interval before the
advent of another humorist is filled in with lamentations on the
decay of humour."

There is more in the article my vanity would like to quote, but my
modesty forbids. If few writers have been worse treated by the Press,
few can have received more kindness from their fellow-workers. I recall
a dinner given me on the eve of my setting out for a lecturing tour
through America. Barrie was in the chair, I think--anyhow in one of
them. In the others were Conan Doyle, Barry Pain, Zangwill, Pett-Ridge,
Hall Caine--some twenty in all. Everybody made a speech. I am supposed
to be rather good at after-dinner speaking, but forgot everything I had
intended to say that night. It all sounds very egotistical, but that is
the danger of writing one's own biography.

I had got the habit of going about in threes. I wanted to see the
Oberammergau Passion Play. The party was to have consisted of Eden
Phillpotts, Walter Helmore, brother of the actor, and myself.
Phillpotts and Helmore were then both in the Sun Insurance Office at
Charing Cross. Phillpotts fell ill, and the Passion Play would not
wait, so Helmore and I went alone. That was in 1890. One went to
Oberammergau then in post chaise, and there was only one hotel in
the village. One lodged with the peasants and shared their fare. I
visited there again a few years before the war. The railway had
come, and the great hotels were crowded. The bands played, and there
was dancing in the evening. Of course I had written a book about it:
"The Diary of a Pilgrimage": so perhaps I am hardly entitled to
indulge in jeremiads.

Helmore knew Germany well. We came home through Bavaria, and down
the Rhine. It was my first visit to Germany. I liked the people and
their homely ways, and later some four years residence in Germany
confirmed my first impressions.

Calmour was a frequent visitor of ours at Chelsea. He was secretary
to W. G. Wills, who wrote blank verse plays for Henry Irving:
"Charles I," "Faust," and "The Vicar of Wakefield" among others. We
had a fine old row in the pit on the first night of "Charles I." I
was for Cromwell. I was training a pair of whiskers at the time, and
a royalist woman behind got hold of one of them and spoilt it. Wills
was a bit of an oddity. He did not keep a banking account. He would
take his money always in gold, and after paying what had to be,
would fling the remainder into a lumber room at the top of his
house, and double lock the door. Later on when he needed cash--or
when a friend did, which to Wills was much the same--he would unlock
the door and on hands and knees grope about till he had collected
sufficient, and then fasten up the door again. Calmour was a
playwright himself: "The Amber Heart" and "Cupid's Messenger" were
his best known. He wrote also songs for "Lion Comiques," as they
were called: "Champagne Charlie" and "The Ghost of John Benjamin
Binns" were his. He never earned much money, but had learnt to do
with less. He lived in one room in Sydney Street, and wrote in bed,
not getting up as a rule till the evening. Bed, he used to say, was
the cheapest place he knew. The moment you got up, expense began. He
had a large circle of friends, and his dinners could have cost him
but little. In later years, he lived on a "system"; which he took
with him each winter to Monte Carlo. The difference between his
system and most others was that, in his case, it really did work. He
would stay there till he had in his pocket a hundred pounds over and
above his expenses; and then, with rare strength of mind, would take
the next train home. He had the reputation of being the guest that
lingers too long. He knew of his failing, and settled the thing with
my wife on his very first visit. I had not been present at their
conversation; and was shocked when, the moment our grandfather's
clock had finished striking twelve, my wife got up and said quite
sweetly: "You must go now, Mr. Calmour. And please be sure to shut
the bottom door." Before I could recover my astonishment, he had
wished us good-night and was gone. "It's all right," said my wife.
"I think he's a dear."

W. S. Henley, the actor, often came. Eden Phillpotts and myself were
writing him a play. Henley, like most comic actors, yearned to play
serious parts. As a matter of fact he would have played them very
well. He could be both grotesque and tragic; and had naturally a
rich, deep voice.

"It wouldn't be any good," he once said, in answer to my suggestion.
"I would like to play Caliban, but they'd only think I was trying to
give a comic imitation of something from the Zoo. If I'm out at
dinner and ask a man to pass the mustard, he slaps his leg and
bursts out laughing. Damned silly, I call it."

Gertrude Kingston with her mother and sister lived near by, in a
charming little house in Ebury Street. Pinero's "Creamy English
Rose" will always remain the beloved of the British theatrical
public to the exclusion of all others, or Gertrude Kingston would
long before now have been London's leading actress. She used to
grumble at our ninety-seven stairs, but I persuaded her they were
good for her figure and, not altogether convinced, she would often
climb them. Olga Brandon would arrive at the top speechless, which
perhaps was just as well.

Olga Brandon lived near by. She was a beautiful young woman, serene
and stately. On the stage, she played queens, martyrs and Greek
goddesses as if to the manner born. Off the stage, she spoke with a
Cockney accent one could have cut with a knife, as the saying is,
dropped her aitches, and could swear like a trooper. She was a dear
kind girl. In the end she went the way of many. I remember a first
night at the Vaudeville Theatre. A young actress who was playing her
first big part was standing in the wings waiting her cue. She had a
glass in her hand. Old Emily Thorne had just come off the stage.
She stopped dead in front of the girl, blocking her way.

"Feeling in a tremble all over, aren't you?" suggested the elder
woman.

"That just describes it," laughed the girl.

"And you find a little brandy pulls you together--steadies your
nerves?"

"I doubt if I'd be able to go on without it," answered the girl.

Emily covered the girl's small hand with her own, and sent the
contents of the glass flying. A wandering stage carpenter got most
of it.

"I've known a good many promising young actresses," she said, "and
half of them have ruined their career through drink. I've followed
some of them to the grave. You learn to get on without it, child."

Henry Arthur Jones' brother had the flat beneath us. He was an
acting manager, and called himself Sylvanus Danncey.

Marie Corelli I came to know while living in Chelsea. I used to meet
her at the house of an Italian lady, a Madame Marras, in Princes
Gate. Marie was a pretty girlish little woman. We discovered we were
precisely the same age. Mrs. Garrett Anderson, the first lady doctor
to put up her plate in London, was sometimes of the party. We used
to play games: hunt the slipper, puss in the corner and musical
chairs. I can boast that more than once I sat on Marie Corelli's
lap, though not for long. She was an erratic worker and contracts
would often get behind time. She lived with her adopted brother,
Eric Mackay, son of the poet, and occasionally when her agent would
come to the house tearing his hair because of an instalment that an
editor was waiting for, and that Marie did not feel like writing,
they would take her up and lock her in her study; and when she had
finished kicking the door, she would settle down, and do a good
morning's work.

To keep friends with her continuously was difficult. You had to
agree with all her opinions, which were many and varied. I always
admired her pluck and her sincerity. She died while I was writing
this chapter.

Arthur Machen married a dear friend of mine, a Miss Hogg. How so
charming a lady came to be born with such a name is one of
civilization's little ironies. She had been a first nighter, and one
of the founders of the Playgoers' Club, which was in advance of its
time, and admitted women members. Amy Hogg was also a pioneer. She
lived by herself in diggings opposite the British Museum, frequented
restaurants and Aerated Bread shops, and had many men friends: all
of which was considered very shocking in those days. She had a
vineyard in France, and sold the wine to the proprietor of the
Florence Restaurant in Rupert Street. She had a favourite table by
the window, and often she and I dined there and shared a bottle. The
Florence, then, was a cosy little place where one lunched for one
and three and dined for two shillings. One frequently saw Oscar
Wilde there. He and his friends would come in late and take the
table in the further corner. Rumours were already going about, and
his company did not tend to dispel them. One pretended not to see
him. Machen when he was young suggested the Highbrow. He has
developed into a benevolent-looking, white-haired gentleman. He
might be one of the Brothers Cheeryble stepped out of "Nicholas
Nickleby." For ability to create an atmosphere of nameless terror I
can think of no author living or dead who comes near him. I gave
Conan Doyle his "Three Impostors" to read one evening, and Doyle did
not sleep that night.

"Your pal Machen is a genius right enough," said Doyle, "but I don't
take him to bed with me again."

The memory lingers with me of the last time I saw his wife. It was a
Sunday afternoon. They were living in Verulam Buildings, Gray's Inn,
in rooms on the ground floor. The windows looked out onto the great
quiet garden, and the rooks were cawing in the elms. She was dying,
and Machen, with two cats under his arm, was moving softly about,
waiting on her. We did not talk much. I stayed there till the sunset
filled the room with a strange purple light.

The Thames was frozen over the last year we were in Chelsea. It was
the first winter the gulls came to London. One listened to the music
of the sleigh bells. Down the Embankment and round Battersea Park
was the favourite course.

Friends of ours lived in St. John's Wood, and possessed gardens,
some even growing roses and spring onions; and their boastings made
us envious. Olga Nethersole had a cottage with real ivy and a porch.
Lewis Waller had a mulberry tree; and one day I met Augustus Harris
carrying a gun. He told me he had bought it to shoot rabbits at his
"little place" off the Avenue Road. We found an old-fashioned house
behind a high wall in Alpha Place. Bret Harte was near by. He lived
with great swells named Van der Velde. The old gentleman, I think,
was an ambassador, and the wife, an American lady who had known Bret
Harte when he was young, or something of that sort. Bret Harte
remained with them as their guest till he died. He had his own suite
of rooms. His hair was golden when we first knew him, but as the
years went by it turned to white. He was a slight dapper gentleman,
courteous and shy, with a low soft voice. It was difficult to
picture him, ruffling it among the bloodstained sentimentalists of
Roaring Camp and Dead Man's Gulch.

Zangwill and his family were denizens of the Wood. His brother Louis
also wrote books, calling himself "Z.Z." "The World and a Man"
remains the best known of them. Zangwill was accused of being a "New
Humorist." He edited a comic journal called _Ariel_, and discovered
the English "Shakespeare": Shakespeares were being discovered
everywhere just then. J. T. Grein, the dramatic critic, had
discovered a Dutch Shakespeare, and another critic, not to be
outdone, had dug up one in Belgium. In the end, every country in
Europe was found to possess a Shakespeare, except England. Zangwill
did not see why England should be left out, and discovered one in
Brixton. Judging from the extracts Zangwill published, he certainly
seemed as good as any of the others. The Bacon stunt was in full
swing about the same time; and again it was Zangwill who discovered
that Shakespeare's plays had all been written by another gentleman
of the same name. I first met Mrs. Zangwill at a dinner. She was
Miss Ayrton then, daughter of the Professor, and had been assigned
to me. It is not often that one vexes a woman by taking her to be
younger than she really is; but I quite offended her that evening.
She looked fifteen, and I did my best to adapt myself accordingly. I
have a youthful side to me, and flattered myself for a time that I
was doing well. Suddenly she asked me my age, and, taken aback, I
told her.

"Well, if you are all that," she answered, "why talk as if you were
fourteen?"

It seemed she was quite grown up. She told me her own age. She
evidently thought it a lot, but anyhow it was more than I had given
her credit for; and after that we found we had plenty of interests
in common. I have always thought how wonderfully alike she and Lady
Forbes-Robertson are to one another in appearance. I hope neither of
them will be offended, but one can never tell. I was assured once,
by a mutual friend, that I reminded him tremendously of Mr. Asquith;
and then he added as an afterthought: "But don't ever tell him I
said so."

Zangwill is, and always has been, a strong personality. You either
like him immensely or want to hit him with a club. Myself I have
always had a sincere affection for him. We have in common a love of
Lost Causes, and Under Dogs. He confessed to me once that he had
wasted half his life on Zionism. I never liked to say so to him, but
it always seemed to me that the danger threatening Zionism was that
it might be realized. Jerusalem was the Vision Splendid of the
Jewish race--the Pillar of Fire that had guided their footsteps
across the centuries of shame and persecution. So long as it
remained a dream, no Jew so poor, so hunted, so despised, but hugged
to his breast his hidden birthright--his great inheritance to be
passed on to his children. Who in God's name wanted a third-rate
provincial town on a branch of the Baghdad railway? Most certainly
not the Zionists. Their Jerusalem was and must of necessity always
have remained in the clouds--their Promised Land the other side of
the horizon. When the British Government presented Palestine to the
Jews, it shattered the last hope of Israel. All that remains to be
done now, is to invite contracts for the rebuilding of the Temple.

The London Jew's progress, a Rabbi once informed me, is mapped out
by three landmarks: Whitechapel, Maida Vale, and Park Lane. The
business Jew is no better than his Christian competitor. The
artistic Jew I have always found exceptionally simple and childlike.
Of these a good many had escaped from Maida Vale, and crossing the
Edgware Road had settled themselves in St. John's Wood. Solomon J.
Solomon had his studio off Marlborough Road. He was, I think, the
first artist to paint by electric light--a useful accomplishment in
foggy London. He started to paint my portrait once, while staying
with us at Pangbourne, but complained I had too many faces. At one
moment I looked a murderer and the next a saint, according to him. I
have the thing as he left it unfinished. It reminds me of someone,
but I can't think whom. De Laszlo had the same trouble with me not
long ago, but got over it by luring me to talk about myself. In his
portrait of me there is a touch of the enthusiast. Cowen the
composer had a big house in Hamilton Terrace and used to give
delightful concerts. Sarah Bernhardt hired a house one spring. She
brought a pet leopard with her: a discriminating beast, according to
the local tradesmen. It dozed most of its day in front of the
kitchen fire, and, so long as errand boys confined themselves to the
handing in of harmless provisions, would regard them out of its
half-closed eyes with a friendly, almost benevolent expression. But
if anyone of them presented an envelope and showed intention of
waiting for an answer, it would suddenly spring to its feet, and
give vent to a blood-curdling growl that would send the boy flying
down the garden.

The first time I met her was at one of Irving's first-night suppers
on the stage of the Lyceum: a forlorn, somewhat insignificant little
figure without a word of English. Nobody knew her. (They were
informal gatherings. You just showed your card and walked on to the
stage.) The only thing she would take was a glass of wine. I wanted
to introduce her, but she was evidently hurt at not having been
recognized and made a fuss of. She complained of a headache, and I
got her a cab. There were tears in her eyes, I noticed, as I shut
the door.

Joseph Hatton had a house with a big garden in the Grove End Road,
and gave Sunday afternoon parties. One met a motley crowd: peers and
painters, actors, and thought-readers, kings from Africa, escaped
prisoners, journalists and socialists. It was there that I first
heard prophecy of labour governments and votes for women. Stepniak,
the Russian Nihilist, was a frequent visitor; a vehement dark man,
with an angelic smile. I met him one Sunday afternoon in an omnibus.
We walked together from Uxbridge Road to Bedford Park. We were bound
for the same house. The way then was through a dismal waste land,
and the path crossed the North London Railway on the level. We had
passed the wicket gate. Stepniak was deep in talk, and did not
notice an approaching train, till I plucked him by the sleeve. He
stood still staring after it for quite a time; and was silent--for
him--the rest of the way. The following Sunday he was killed there
by the same train. He had betrayed some secret, it was said, to the
Russian Police, and had been given the choice between suicide or
denunciation. The truth was never known.

We had an excellent cook named Isaacs who claimed to be related to
quite important people of the same name: but whether with truth I
cannot say. She encouraged us to be extravagant and give
dinner-parties. W. S. Gilbert was a good talker. A strain of
bitterness developed in him later, but in the nineties he was
genial. I remember Miss Fortescue explaining that the Greeks had a
custom of carving speeches on their seats. It seemed there was a
term for these which she had forgotten. She appealed to Gilbert:
"What were they called?" "_Arrire-pense_, I expect," replied
Gilbert. He and Crosse (or Blackwell, I am not sure which) had a
dispute concerning shooting rights. Gilbert began his letter: "If I
may presume to discuss with so well known an authority as yourself
the subject of preserves." Another evening he told us of a new
dramatist just discovered by an American manager with whom he had
been lunching. The manager had almost despaired of words with which
to describe his prodigy. At last he had hit upon an inspiration:
"I'll tell you what he is," explained the manager, "he's Mr.
Barrie--" there followed an impressive pause--"with humour."

Barrie could easily be the most silent man I have ever met.
Sometimes he would sit through the whole of a dinner without ever
speaking. Then, when all but the last one or two guests had gone--or
even later--he would put his hands behind his back and bummeling up
and down the room, talk for maybe an hour straight on end. Once a
beautiful but nervous young lady was handed over to his care. With
the _sle-au-gratin_, Barrie broke the silence:

"Have you ever been to Egypt?"

The young lady was too startled to answer immediately. It was
necessary for her to collect herself. While waiting for the
_entre_, she turned to him.

"No," she answered.

Barrie made no comment. He went on with his dinner. At the end of
the chicken _en casserle_, curiosity overcoming her awe, she turned
to him again.

"Have you?" she asked.

A far-away expression came into Barrie's great deep eyes.

"No," he answered.

After that they both lapsed into silence.

He and my wife found birds and animals a subject of never-failing
wonder. I remember his explaining to her how much more intelligent
lambs are than is generally supposed. He was thinking out a story,
and coming to a stile had sat down and was making notes on the back
of an envelope. Barrie rarely wasted an envelope, in those days.
John Hare told me--to account for his having rejected "The
Professor's Love Story"--that half of it was written on the inside
of old envelopes. "Half" I doubt, but an eighth to a sixteenth I can
well believe. Barrie was then an unknown youngster. "How could I
guess the fool was a genius?" growled Hare. "Took him, of course,
for a lunatic." But to return to our muttons.

In the field where Barrie sat there were lambs. One of them strayed
away from its mother, turned round three times, and was lost. It was
in a terrible to-do, and Barrie had to put down his story and lead
it back to its mother. Hardly had he returned to his stile before
another lamb did just the same. The bleating was terrific. There was
nothing else to do, but for Barrie to put down his work and take it
back to its mother. They kept on doing it, one after another. But
the wonderful thing was that, after a time, instead of looking for
their mothers themselves, they just came to Barrie and insisted on
his coming with them and finding their mothers for them. It saved
their time, but wasted Barrie's.

Barrie was always the most unassuming of men, but he could be
touchy. On one occasion, a great lady invited him to her castle in
the country. The house-party was a large one. There were peers and
potentates, millionaires and magnates. Barrie found himself assigned
to a small room in a turret leading to the servants' quarters.
Perhaps the poor lady could not help it, and was doing her best.
Barrie did not say anything, but in the morning he was gone. No one
had seen him leave, and the doors were still bolted. He had packed
his bag and climbed out of the window.

The Great Central Railway turned me out of Alpha Place to make way
for their new line to London. A chasm yawns where it once stood; a
pleasant house with a long dining-room and a big drawing-room
looking out upon a quiet garden. When friends came my wife liked to
receive them in the hall--she was a slip of a young thing
then--standing on the bottom stair--to make herself seem taller.
Wells was a shy diffident young man in those days, Rider Haggard a
somewhat solemn gentleman, taking himself always very seriously.
Mrs. Barry Pain was the only one of us who would venture to chaff
him. George Moore was a simple kindly soul, when off his guard, but
easily mistaken by those who did not know him for a poseur: he had
the Balfour touch. Clement Shorter and his wife, Dora Sigerson the
poetess, George Gissing, with his nervous hands and his deep voice,
Hall Caine, Conan Doyle, Hornung--but the list only grows. I had
better leave them over to another chapter, lest I seem garrulous.

From St. John's Wood we went to Mayfair--to a little house, one of a
row at the end of a _cul-de-sac_ overlooking Hyde Park. George
Alexander had told me of it. He had Number Four. It was there I
first met Mark Twain. Hardly anyone knew he was in London. He was
living poorly, saving money to pay off the debts of a publishing
firm with which he had been connected. (Walter Scott's story over
again.) Our children had met at a gymnasium. I found there were two
Mark Twains: the one a humorist, the other a humanitarian reformer
poet. About these two there was this that was curious: the humorist
was an elderly gentleman, dull-eyed, with a slow, monotonous drawl;
while the humanitarian reformer poet, was an eager young man with
ever-changing eyes and a voice full of tenderness and passion.

They say a man always returns to his first love. I never cared for
the West End: well-fed, well-dressed, uninteresting. The East, with
its narrow silent streets, where mystery lurks; its noisome
thoroughfares, teeming with fierce varied life, became again my
favourite haunt. I discovered "John Ingerfield's" wharf near to
Wapping Old Stairs, and hard by the dingy railed-in churchyard where
he and Anne lie buried. But more often my wanderings would lead me
to the little drab house off the Burdett Road, where "Paul Kelver"
lived his childhood.

Of all my books I liked writing "Paul Kelver" the best. Maybe
because it was all about myself, and people I had known and loved.

It changed my luck, so far as the critics were concerned. Francis
Gribble, God bless him, gave me praise--the first I had ever tasted,
and others followed.

I ought, of course, to have gone on. I might have become an
established novelist--even a best seller. Who knows? But having "got
there," so to speak, my desire was to get away. I went back to the
writing of plays. It was the same at the beginning of me. My history
repeats itself. Having won success as a humorist I immediately
became serious. I have a kink in my brain, I suppose I can't help
it.




CHAPTER VII

TRIALS OF A DRAMATIST


A lady, on one occasion, asked me why I did not write a play.

"I am sure, Mr. Jerome," she continued with a bright encouraging
smile, "that you could write a play."

I told her I had written nine: that six of them had been produced,
that three of them had been successful both in England and America,
that one of them was still running at the Comedy Theatre and
approaching its two hundredth night.

Her eyebrows went up in amazement.

"Dear me," she said, "you do surprise me."

George R. Sims told me that once he dined some friends at the Savoy.
Over the coffee, he asked them if they would like to go to a
theatre, and they said they would. He took them to a play of his
own. For some reason that Sims could not explain, they did not like
it. At the end of the first act, one of them, turning to him, said:

"Rather dull stuff this. Don't you find it so?"

"Well, now you come to mention it, perhaps it is, a trifle," agreed
Sims.

"Let's go on to the Empire," suggested another.

The proposal was carried _nem. con._; and leaving their programmes
behind them, the troop arose and made their way out of the theatre
noisily and cheerfully, followed by Sims, walking soberly.

"It used to annoy me," added Sims, "that not one theatre-goer in a
hundred ever takes the trouble to read the author's name. That
evening, I was glad of it."

"Barbara" was my first play. I am informed that nowadays managers
read plays by unknown authors. In my young days they didn't. I read
it to Rose Norreys, one evening, at her little flat in Chelsea
Gardens; and good comrade that she was, she took it herself to
Charles Hawtrey, and stood over him until he had finished it. He
wrote me, asking me to come and see him the following Tuesday at
twelve o'clock noon--he underlined "noon." He was running "The
Private Secretary" at the Globe. I got there at twenty minutes to,
and walked up and down Hollywell Street until I heard Big Ben strike
twelve. The stage door-keeper said Mr. Hawtrey wasn't in. I said I
would wait. The door-keeper--a kindly soul, I wish I could remember
his name--put me a chair by the fire and gave me a thumbed copy of
"The Talisman." He said that, speaking for himself, he considered it
the best of all Scott's novels. Hawtrey turned up at a quarter past
three. The stage door-keeper introduced us, and explained things.

"I'm so sorry," said Hawtrey. "I thought it was Monday."

His first wife told me that, the night before their wedding, his
best man had--unknown to him--put his watch on an hour and a
quarter, with the result that he got there five minutes too soon;
and in the Bankruptcy Court he used to be known as "the late Mr.
Charles." But he was always so charming about it that one generally
forgave him.

He told me that he liked my little play immensely. There was only
one fault he had to find. It was too short. I record the fact as
being the only known instance in the history of the stage of a
manager suggesting to an author that his play was not long enough. I
promised to write in an extra scene.

"My brother George will see you about terms," he concluded as we
shook hands. "He will want you to sell it outright. Take my tip and
don't do it. It's just the sort of thing to catch on with the
amateurs."

The "producer" had not then arrived. He was an American invention.
The stage manager, together with the promoter and the author, used
to just worry it out. I have never been able myself to detect any
difference. "Dot" Boucicault was one of the first, and for
straightforward work is still among the best. If anything he is too
painstaking. His method at rehearsal is to play all the parts
himself, leaving the actor to copy him. On a certain occasion, he
had been coaching Gertrude Kingston after this manner for about a
fortnight; and then one morning, taking her aside, he asked her how
she liked her part.

"What part?" asked Gertrude Kingston.

"What part?" repeated Boucicault, astonished. "Why, _your_ part--the
Countess."

"Oh, that," answered Miss Kingston. "I thought you were playing
that."

I take it Du Maurier's dictum really sums up the matter: that a play
that is worth producing, produces itself.

Cissy Grahame was my Barbara. She has not changed much, and I love
her still. But she will never be quite as handsome as her mother.
Their Sunday evening supper parties at Hammersmith make pleasant
memories. I fancy that, when young, I must have had a face
expressive of more sympathy than, perhaps, I really felt. People
used to suddenly confide their troubles to me. The first time I met
there Henley the actor, brother to W. E. Henley the poet, he
beckoned me into a corner and poured out to me the secret history of
his private life. What he wanted me to decide for him was: Should he
strangle her or simply leave her? Weighing the matter as a whole, I
chose for him the second alternative. He went off unexpectedly to
America a short time afterwards, so I like to reflect that maybe I
was of service to both parties. I have always wondered what became
of him. He was a brilliant actor. He could get more passion over the
footlights than any other actor I have known. McKinnel comes the
nearest to him. Charles Whibley was another frequent guest there. I
was a die-hard Tory at twenty-five, and Whibley was an anarchist of
the reddest dye. We had some grand sets-to. John Burns was preaching
revolution and the British Constitution was in danger. Whibley
wanted to go a-rioting in Trafalgar Square. We had difficulty in
restraining him. To make things safe, I joined the special
constables and learnt to form fours and to turn my eyes right and
left. Now I am a Vice-President, I believe, of the Oxford University
Labour Party; while Whibley has become a pillar of the State, and
writes for stodgy old _Blackwood_.

"Barbara" ran, on and off, for years, and amateurs still play it.
Following Charles Hawtrey's advice, I had refused to sell it, though
his brother George went up to a hundred pounds, and the temptation
was sore. Another one-act play, "Fennel," I wrote for George
Giddens, who had taken the Novelty, now the Kingsway--or rather
adapted it from the French of Franois Coppe. Managers clamoured
then for adaptations from the French. Sydney Grundy, one of the most
successful authors on the English stage, never wrote an original
play. He was quite frank about it. "Why should I cudgel my own
brains," he would say, "when I can suck other men's?"

"Fennel" was chiefly remarkable for introducing Allan Aynesworth to
the London stage. He played Sandro, the lover. I see that I describe
him in the script as "a fine, dashing, good-looking young fellow."
Aynesworth was all that right enough; but on the first night he got
stage fright. I was watching from the wings. I could see him getting
more and more nervous; and when he came to his big speech, his
memory snapped. I had prided myself upon that speech. I had done my
best to put Coppe's poetry into English blank verse. It was all
about music and the sunrise, and Heaven and love: some two pages of
it altogether. I could have forgiven him forgetting it, and drying
up. But, to my horror, he went on. He had it fixed in his mind that
until the old man returned home he had to stand in the centre of the
stage and talk poetry. And he did it. Bits of it, here and there,
were mine; most of it his own; a good deal of it verses and
quotations that, I take it, he had learnt at his mother's knee. I
shouted to Stuart Dawson, who was playing the old man, to go on and
stop him. But he would finish, and threw such fervour into the last
few laps, that at the end he received a fine round of applause.

"Sorry I forgot the exact lines," he said to me, as he came off.
"But I was determined not to let you down."

"Woodbarrow Farm" was my first full-sized play. Gertrude Kingston
produced it at a _matine_, playing herself the adventuress. The
trial _matine_ was a useful institution. I think it is a pity it
has dropped out. The manager would lend the theatre in return for an
option on the play; and the leading parts could generally be
arranged for on a like understanding. At the cost of about a hundred
pounds, a play could be put before the public and judged: in the
only way a play can be judged--through the test-like tube of an
audience. Three out of four, in spite of friendly stalls, were seen
to be no good: the fourth won the prize. Charles Hawtrey lent us the
Comedy. Frederick Harrison, now the doyen of London Managers, was in
it. He played a gentlemanly villain. And Eric Lewis made the small
part of a valet the chief thing in the play. John Hare bought it. He
wanted a play for young Sydney Brough, son of old Lal Brough, a
bright handsome lad, full of promise then. He had been a pupil of
mine when I was a schoolmaster at the "South Lambeth Road Academy.
For Sons of Gentlemen." I forget how it came about, but eventually
Tom Thorne took it for his opening piece at the new Vaudeville. He
played the valet. Bernard Partridge was the hero.

Conway had been cast for the part originally. That was another sad
story. He had made his name as Romeo to Adelaide Neilson's Juliet:
the best Juliet I have ever seen, though Phyllis Neilson-Terry, some
years ago, ran her close. It was plain, before rehearsals were a
week old, that poor Conway would have to be replaced; and the grim
task of breaking it to him fell upon me. I called upon him early in
the morning at the Adelphi Hotel. He was standing with his back to
me when I entered the room, leaning his head against the
mantelpiece.

"I know what you've come for," he said, without turning round. "It's
my own fault. I thought I'd pulled myself together. I must have
another try--later on."

There is no catch in being the one to put an actor out of his part.
Everybody tries to shift the job on to somebody else. There was a
young actress, I remember, at Terry's Theatre. She had been cast for
a rattling good part on an unwise friend's recommendation, and had
agreed to rehearse on approval. It was her first London engagement.
She was no good; and we all of us agreed that the producer was the
fit and proper person to handle the situation. The producer flatly
refused; and as we still worried him, he gave us his reason.

"I had to do it once, some years ago now," he said. "She was an
angelic-looking little creature. We had done the usual damn silly
trick of just choosing her because of her appearance. She wasn't
bad, but she hadn't the experience. The part was too big for her
altogether. She took it quite nicely. I went round to see her in
the evening. She had a bed-sitting-room in a street off the King's
Road, Chelsea. We sat and chatted, afterwards, about the British
drama in general, and she made me a cup of coffee. I flattered
myself I had got out of it cheaply. She drowned herself that
night--walked down the steps by Battersea bridge into the river.
This child reminds me of her. Somebody else will have to tell her."

Nobody did. We let her play the part. She wasn't good.

Dan Frohman took the play for America. He wrote me that he was
staying at the Hotel Victoria and would call and see me. We were
living then in Alpha Place. My wife thought it would be an artful
plan to lunch him well first and talk business with him afterwards.
He accepted our invitation. We felt we had him in our hands. It was
a gorgeous lunch. There was caviare and a stuffed bird and tricky
things in French. For two days and a half my wife had lived with
Mrs. Beeton. I saw to the cocktails myself, and after there was
Chteau Lafitte and champagne. I can still see my wife's face when
Frohman, in his grave emphatic way, explained that his digestion did
not allow him to lunch; but might he have a few of the greens and
some dry toast with a glass of apollinaris? But he smoked a cigar
with me afterwards, and gave me good terms for the play.

E. H. Sothern played Bernard Gould's part in America; and fell in
love with the lady who played Gertrude Kingston's part. They married
during the run of the piece. I cannot claim to have been always
successful as a match-maker. I introduced J. M. Barrie to Mary
Ansell. That also was a by-product of "Woodbarrow Farm." I had a
travelling company of my own, playing the piece in the provinces,
and had engaged Mary Ansell for the _ingnue_. Barrie was producing
"Walker London" with Toole at the old Folly in King William Street;
and asked me if I could recommend him a leading lady. He didn't want
much. She was to be young, beautiful, quite charming, a genius for
preference, and able to flirt. The combination was not so common in
those days. I could think of no one except Miss Ansell. It seemed
unkind not to give her the chance. I cancelled the contract and sent
for her; and next time it was Barrie who introduced her to me, as
his wife.

It was during another play of mine, "The Prude's Progress," that a
marriage was solemnized between my heroine, Lena Ashwell, and my
light comedian, Arthur Playfair. The last time I saw Arthur Playfair
was at Brighton. We were staying at "The Old Ship," and he was there
with his then wife, and three children. She was a beautiful,
healthy, jolly young woman, and boasted to my wife of never having
had a day's illness in her life. She was dead three weeks
afterwards; and Playfair died a few months later: of a broken heart
folks would have said in a more sentimental age. He had sown his
wild oats, and had grown steady and somewhat stout. Hawtrey was
there at the same time. When living in Park Row, and while shaving
early in the morning, I had often looked down upon Charles Hawtrey
sprinting round Hyde Park, in shorts and a sweater; but it had not
saved him from the common fate of middle age. And even I myself was
not the figure that I once had been. Mrs. Playfair had dug up from
somewhere the photo of a Playgoers' Club dinner, taken twenty years
before, showing us standing side by side; three slim young
gentlemen--almost, one might say, sylph-like. She had cut us out,
and labelled us "The Three Graces."

The brothers Frohman, Charles and Dan, were good men to do business
with. Their word was their bond. Charles used to say that no
contract was ever drawn that a clever man could not get out of, if
he wanted to. Towards the end, I never bothered him to sign
anything. We would fix the terms over a cigar, and shake hands. He
was a natural born sentimentalist: most Jews are. He spent a good
deal of his time when in England at Marlow, where now stands a
memorial to him. I had a house upon the hills, and Haddon Chambers
used to rent a cottage at Bisham, near the Abbey. On a sunny
afternoon, one often found Charles sitting on his own grave in
Marlow churchyard--or rather on the spot he hoped would one day be
his grave: a pleasant six foot into four of English soil, under the
great willow that overhangs the river. He was still in negotiation
for it the last time that I talked to him there. He went down in the
"Lusitania," the year following.

Reading a play to a manager is a trying ordeal. I remember Addison
Bright sending me a message at twelve o'clock one night to come at
once to his flat, and bring with me a comedy of mine, "Dick
Halward," that Sothern was then playing in America. Tree and Mrs.
Pat Campbell were waiting for me. Tree had engaged Mrs. Pat for his
"star" to open at Her Majesty's in three weeks' time; but had not
found a play for her. He thought he had--some half-a-dozen of them
altogether--but she had turned them all down one after the other. It
was a dismal night. Tree sat watching Mrs. Pat's face, and evidently
did not mind what the play was. I fell to doing the same and hardly
knew what I was reading. Sometimes she laughed and sometimes she
yawned, but most of the time she just sat. The dawn was breaking
when I finished. She would not make up her mind, even then. Tree, on
the stairs, thanked me for a pleasant night. Frederick Harrison is
the most courteous manager I have ever read to. If he likes the play
he shows it; and if he doesn't he makes you feel that the fault is
not yours, but his. Frohman, until the end, would give no sign of
what he was thinking. One hoped he was awake, but was not sure. He
never pretended to know what the public wanted, and had a contempt
for anyone who did.

"I'll tell you what a play is going to do, after I've seen the
second Monday night's returns," he would say. "Some people will tell
you before; but they're fools."

First-night receptions tell nothing. First nighters are a race
apart. Like the Greeks, they hanker after a new thing. The general
public, on the other hand, are faithful to their old loves. I met
Arthur Shirley one afternoon. A new and original drama of his was to
be produced that evening at Drury Lane.

"Feeling cheerful?" I asked him.

"Tolerably," he told me. "There are three rattling good situations
in it."

"Capital," I said. "You think they will go all right?"

"Well, they ought to," he answered. "They always have."

The piece, I am glad to record, ran the whole season.

The last play I wrote for Charles Frohman was in collaboration with
Haddon Chambers. He paid us a good sum down, but never produced it.
We had made our chief comic character a Lord Mayor of London, and
Frohman was nervous about it. He had the foreigner's fixed notion
that the Lord Mayor of London is, next to the King, the most exalted
personage in all England; and feared that to put him on the stage in
company with ordinary mortals would be to outrage all the better
feelings of the British public. I am sorry. He was a jolly old chap
and, I think, original. We had given him a sense of humour.

Haddon Chambers had the reputation of being a "dangerous" character;
but my wife always said she was sure it was their fault, and our two
daughters loved him. The elder, who was nearly thirteen, said the
great thing was to keep him to serious subjects. They taught him
croquet and talked to him about horses and religion; and he used to
tell them stories about Bushrangers, and Madame Melba when she was a
little girl.

"New Lamps for Old," I wrote for Cissy Grahame. She produced it at
Terry's Theatre. Horatio Bottomley was her backer. We all liked him.
He used to take us out to lunch at the old Gaiety; and tell us
stories about his early struggles, when he was a poor boy selling
newspapers for his uncle, Charles Bradlaugh; and how he saved his
first half-crown. Penley played the old family lawyer. He made a
wonderful character of it at rehearsal. Penley was really a great
actor. If he had played the part as he rehearsed it, he would have
made for himself a new reputation. But he funked it at the end; and
on the first night he was just Penley, as usual. Fred Kerr, Gertrude
Kingston and Bernard Partridge were in the cast, in addition to
Cissy herself. But the most wonderful person connected with the
affair was our acting manager. I wish I could remember his name. It
deserves to go down to posterity as the man who swindled Bottomley.

"He must have started faking the accounts from the very first week,"
commented Bottomley, more in sorrow than in anger; "and he's done it
so cleverly that, although it is staring me in the face, I can't
prove it. Damned scoundrel!"

Later, he got a cheque out of _The Daily Mail_ for telling lies
about Lloyd George. _The Daily Mail_ was very indignant and charged
him with fraud. The man must have had a sense of humour, when you
come to think of it.

Bottomley had a wonderful tongue. I remember a shareholders'
meeting, called together for the sole and express purpose of
denouncing him. Half of them were in favour of lynching him. He
talked to them for three-quarters of an hour; and now and then there
were tears in his eyes. Before he sat down he had launched a new
company on them. The majority of them subscribed to it before they
left the room. He had his kindly side and was always good company.
Once when I was in sore straits he lent me a thousand pounds; and
never asked me for security or interest.

Augustus Daly took "New Lamps" for America; and Ada Rehan and John
Drew played in it. Ada Rehan was superb in passion. Her Katharine in
"The Taming of the Shrew" was a magnificent performance. It began
like a tornado and ended like a summer's breeze whispering to the
willows. But John Drew in Shakespeare always suggested to me "A
Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." Afterwards, Daly asked me to
adapt Sudermann's "Die Ehre." I had marvelled up till then at the
linguistic range of the average dramatic author who at a moment's
notice "adapts" you from the Russian, or the Scandinavian, or any
other language that you choose. I did not then know very much German
and had to confess it.

"That'll be all right," said Daly. "I'll send you the literal
translation."

For translations, a shilling a folio used to be the price generally
paid to the harmless necessary alien.

Somewhat against my conscience, I consented to bowdlerise
Sudermann's play so as not to offend Mrs. Grundy, who then ruled the
English and American stage. Poor lady! She must have done quite a
lot of turning in her grave since then. Jones went further when he
adapted Ibsen's "Doll's House." In the last act Helmar took the
forgery upon himself, and the curtain went down on Nora flinging
herself into his arms with the cry of "Husband"; and the band played
"Charlie is my Darling." That was the first introduction of Ibsen to
the British public. "A charming author," was the verdict first
passed upon Ibsen in London.

I wrote "The MacHaggis" in collaboration with Eden Phillpotts.
Penley accepted it, but fell ill, and handed the part over to Weedon
Grossmith. Our heroine shocked the critics. She rode a bicycle. It
was unwomanly, then, to ride a bicycle. There were so many things,
in those days, that were unwomanly to do. It must have been quite
difficult to be a woman, and remain so day after day. She smoked a
cigarette. The Devil must have been in us. Up till then, only the
adventuress had ever smoked a cigarette. In the last act, she said
"damn." She said it twice. Poor Clement Scott nearly fell out of
_The Daily Telegraph_. Once before, it is true, a lady (Mrs.
Huntley, I think) had said "damn" upon the stage, but that was in a
translation from the French. No one dreamed the day would come when
Mrs. Pat Campbell would say "bloody." But it is an age of progress,
we are told. One blushes at the thought of what they may say next.
She cost me a friend, that heroine of ours. By chance we christened
the hussy Ewretta; and it happened to be the name of an actress
friend of mine, Ewretta Lawrence. She wouldn't believe we hadn't
done it of _malice prepense_. She never spoke to me again. I am
sorry. It is always with fear and trembling that one chooses names
for one's less immaculate characters. During the run of Pinero's
"Mrs. Ebbsmith," a real Mrs. Ebbsmith committed suicide. She thought
that Pinero had been told her story and had used it.

Phillpotts and myself had bad luck over "The MacHaggis." It was
doing well when Penley suddenly closed the theatre. His illness, it
turned out, was mental.

One of the things I best remember in "The MacHaggis" was Reeves
Smith's performance of a cheerful idiot. He was a delightful actor.
He went to America soon after, and they never let him come back. I
met him there when on a lecturing tour. He was playing with
Nazimova. I went behind to see him.

"Forgive me," I said, so soon as his dresser had left the room, "but
aren't you making him rather too noisy?" They were playing
Ibsen--"The Master Builder," I think.

"Great heavens," he answered. "You don't think it's my idea, do you?
It's the new method, over here. Everybody has to shout at the top of
their voice, except the Star. 'How quiet and natural she is,' they
say. 'What a contrast.' Clever idea. Gillette invented it."

Alia Nazimova was drawing all New York. I found her somewhat changed
from the quiet, simple girl who with her husband (they spelt the
name "Nazimof" then) had knocked at our door in London with a letter
of introduction from friends of ours in Russia. They had got
themselves into trouble with the political police, and had had to
cut and run with barely time to pack a handbag. She spoke German,
but he spoke only Russian. They looked little more than boy and
girl; and he in his way was as beautiful as she was. That first
evening, we taught him an English sentence. He had said it in
Russian, his eyes fixed on my wife. Alla translated it into German,
and then we told him the English for it, which was: "You remind me
of my first love." He repeated it till he had it perfect; and
subsequently quite a number of women mentioned to me casually that
he only seemed to know one English sentence. We chaffed him about
it. He maintained it was not humbug. All beautiful women reminded
him of his first love. But his last love! There was no one like her.
And kneeling, he kissed Alla Nazimof's hand. He was rather a
lovable, childish person. I took them to Tree, and we fixed up a
benefit performance for them at the Haymarket; and afterwards I got
Frohman interested, and he fathered them into America. For some
reason, the boy went back to Russia and was killed in a pogrom. The
first person she asked me about, when I saw her in New York, was
"Madame Needles," as she had always called a small fox-terrier of
ours. They had been great friends, and had played hunt the slipper
together. Madame Needles would go outside the room, while Madame
Nazimof would hide one of her shoes, and then open the door. Only
once Needles failed to find it, and that was when Alla had sprinkled
scent upon it. Needles said, in dog language, that it wasn't fair;
and wouldn't play any more that night.

Another play Phillpotts and I wrote together was "The Prude's
Progress." I read it one evening to a little Jew gentleman, a friend
of Fanny Brough's, at his chambers in Piccadilly. "Read it to him
after dinner," she had counselled me. Dear, sentimental, fat old
gentleman, how he cried over the pathetic parts! At the end, he
shook me by both hands, and wrote me an agreement then and there. He
left the business arrangements to me, and I took the Comedy Theatre
and gathered together a company regardless of expense: among
others, Fanny Brough, Teddy Righton, Cyril Maude, Lena Ashwell,
glorious in her first youth and beauty. Bernard Partridge was to
have played an up-to-date journalist who knew everything and was not
ashamed of it: an amusing fellow, and Partridge would have played
him to perfection. Alas and alack! I listened to advice. The author
who listens to advice is lost. During the second rehearsal, your
manager draws you aside. He has been talking the play over with his
mother-in-law. It seems that she likes it, immensely. She has only
one suggestion to make--or rather two. He propounds them at some
length. You explain that the adoption of either would necessitate
the re-writing of the piece. "Well, better do that, my dear boy," he
answers, "than have a failure; I'm only advising you for your own
good." The producer does not agree with the manager's mother-in-law.
His advice is: "Cut the other woman out altogether. Lighten the play
and save a salary." He slips his arm through yours. "If it was only
a question of art," he continues in a friendly undertone, "I daresay
you're right. Unfortunately, we've got to consider the great B.P.
Now I've had twenty years' experience," and so on. Later on, the
solicitor to the syndicate drops in and watches a rehearsal. He
stumbled over the cat and reaches the stage. He has thought of an
alteration that may save the play. The next afternoon, the stage
door-keeper stops you on your way out. He also has been thinking the
play over with the idea of helping you. They all know what the
public want, and how to give it to them. It is everybody's secret,
except the author's. I once overheard a producer talking to a
friend concerning one of Barrie's plays.

"It was all no good," he was saying. "He wouldn't take my advice. Of
course the piece was successful--in a way, I admit. But think what
it might have been!"

Over the play proper, I had learnt to be firm; but I was young at
producing, and I listened to George Hawtrey. He meant well. He was a
dear fellow, in many respects. He always did mean well. He had
discovered a genius made by the Creator on purpose to play our
journalist. Partridge was my friend, he would not stand in the way
of my making my fortune--of my making Phillpott's fortune--of my
making everybody's fortune. To cut a sad story short, I put it to
Partridge, and, of course, he agreed. But he never forgave me; and I
have always felt ashamed of myself for having done it.

It was hoped, when the Dramatists' Club was formed, that it might
develop into a dramatic authors' trades union on the lines of the
French _Socit des Auteurs Dramatiques_. It would have been a good
thing. The established dramatist can, perhaps, hold his own: though
even he is never sure of not being cheated, especially when it comes
to dealing with the syndicates. But the young and struggling are
fleeced and humbugged without mercy. Often a play out of which the
management will make its tens of thousands is sold outright for a
few pounds down. "Take it or leave it," is presented at the author's
head; and the youngster, impatient to see his play produced, signs
the receipt. Occasionally he makes good, and the future repays him.
More often the play turns out to be his one and only success. We
used to grumble at the actor manager. We wish now we had him back.
He had his failings, but at least he was an artist. The theatrical
bosses who nowadays control the English and American stage have no
idea beyond that of pandering to the popular taste of the moment.
They regard the author's work as raw material to be cut down,
altered, added to, and generally worked up by "experts" at so much
an act. They would have boiled down "Hamlet" to an hour and a half;
written in some comic business for the ghost; and brought down the
curtain on Hamlet cuddling Ophelia. Actors and actresses wail that
not enough plays are being written. Where are the new dramatists?
they bewilderedly inquire. Why don't authors write more plays? The
answer is that authors with any self-respect are being practically
forbidden the stage door. I asked a well-known literary man, when
last in America, why he never wrote for the theatre. There could be
no question of his ability.

"I haven't the courage," he answered. "I could not bear seeing my
play knocked about and rendered senseless by a horde of syndicated
savages. It would break my heart."

The Dramatists' Club, at one time, had the dream of starting a
dramatists' theatre. That would have been a sound scheme, if only we
had had faith. It may yet materialise. The plan was that ten or a
dozen leading dramatists, possessing a bank balance, should form
themselves into a company, lease a theatre and produce their own
plays. Afterwards the doors would be thrown open to all. Cecil
Raleigh and myself were appointed to report upon the scheme. I went
into the City and found there would be no difficulty in obtaining,
if need be, financial assistance. Your City man is a born gambler,
and the theatre being a ready-money proposition, particularly
appeals to him. We could have had a lease of the Savoy at eighty
pounds a week, and I am still of the opinion that we missed a golden
opportunity. The danger confronting a new management is that of
running short of plays. We should have had a dozen to fall back
upon, each one the work of an experienced dramatist. Running a
theatre is the easiest business going. I ran the Comedy Theatre for
six months with the "Prude's Progress." If I had had a better play I
would have made a fortune. As it was I came out with a profit. All
that had to be known I learnt in the first week. Bram Stoker, Henry
Irving's manager, put me up to the art of "papering." It was almost
the rule then for plays to hang fire at first. The house had to be
"dressed," as the saying was. Generally, this was done by handing
out each morning a bundle of passes to the bill-poster for
distribution. The deserving poor came in for, perhaps, more than
their share. Evening dress, so far as the stalls and dress circle
were concerned, was indispensable; but the term is necessarily
elastic in the case of female attire, and often the appearance of
the house would be irresistibly suggestive of Mrs. Jarley's wax
works. Bram Stoker, in those early years when he was building up the
Lyceum, took pains. With a Burke's peerage at his elbow, he would
confine his complimentary admissions to Mayfair and Kensington,
together with, maybe, the park end of Bayswater. It was rarely that
his invitation was declined. The Lyceum floor would blaze with
jewels, and the line of waiting carriages extend to Covent Garden. I
followed the same plan, and kept _The Morning Post_ busy recording
the nobility and gentry that, the previous evening, had honoured the
Comedy Theatre with their gracious presence.

Collaboration, generally speaking, is a mistake. Like on the old
tandem bicycle, each man thinks he is doing all the work. The last
time I tried it was with Justin McCarthy. But that was a play asking
for collaboration. Its subject was re-incarnation. Our hero and
heroine meet for the first time in the days of Prometheus, and he
shows her how to light a fire. A million years later, they turn up
in Athens. He is Socrates and she is a slave. What they've been up
to in the meanwhile we do not bother about. In the end, they come
back to the Present, where the play first opened. I had submitted
the idea to Phyllis Neilson-Terry in New York, and she had been
tremendously keen about it. But her plans fell through. That is the
heart-breaking side of play-writing: you spend a year's labour and
nothing comes of it. Or it is produced only to be jeered at and
promptly buried. True, what one loses on the roundabout failures one
makes on the swinging successes. But, somehow, the failures seem
always to be the ones that we love best.

My first collaboration was with Addison Bright. We wrote a play for
Miss Eastlake. I remember Bright's reading it to Wilson Barrett in
his dressing-room at Birmingham after a performance of "Claudian."
Barrett had not changed his costume, and came to us with two long
hat-pins sticking out of each of his calves. Miss Eastlake had
stuck them into him as she had followed him up the stairs. He never
noticed them until he went to cross his legs. Miss Eastlake had a
great sorrow in the first act, and the curtain went down on her
sobbing her heart out. During rehearsals, she came forward for the
second act still weeping. Bright explained to her that six years had
elapsed, and that the stage directions were: "Enters talking and
laughing."

"I know," she answered, the tears still falling down her cheeks. "I
can't help it, it's so absurd of me. I'll never be able to get over
it in time."

There was some risk of it, especially on the first night. To avoid
danger, we made the second act to take place on the anniversary of
her trouble; and gave her a "pensive" entrance.

She and Annie Hughes both "came out" the same evening at the
Criterion in a play, I think, of McCarthy's. They both had a
wonderful success. The last time I saw poor Miss Eastlake, she was
running a cheap boarding-house in Gower Street. As the result of an
illness, she had lost all her beauty and had grown tremendously
stout. She was still playing the heroine. She was finer than I had
ever seen her: patient and cheerful. She made a jest of the whole
thing. It was in a play that I wrote for Annie Hughes that the
telephone first appeared on the English stage. People talked about
it, and the critics said it was false realism. I wish now I hadn't
done it. But maybe somebody else would have thought of it, if I
hadn't.

I wrote three plays for Marie Tempest, two of which she never played
in, and the third she wished she hadn't. It was her own fault. She
wanted a serious play, and I gave her a serious play. She loved it
when I read it to her. "Esther Castways" was the name of it. She was
magnificent in it, and on the first night received an ovation. But,
of course, the swells wouldn't have it. She had made a groove for
herself; and her public were determined she should keep it. We ought
to have known that, all of us. I didn't get on with her at
rehearsals. I wore a red suit. I rather fancied it myself; but
somehow it maddened her; and I was obstinate and wouldn't change it,
though she offered to buy it off me that she might burn it. My
daughter made a successful first appearance in the play. Marie took
a liking to her. She liked young girls, and was always very nice to
women. It was men she hadn't any use for, so far as I could gather.
A pity she ever got into that groove. She was a great actress pinned
down to frocks and frivolity. Lillah McCarthy gave me an insight
into female psychology when she told me that the first thing she did
with a new part was to dress it. She could not imagine how the woman
would think and feel till she had visualized the clothes that she
would wear. Then she began to understand the woman, working from the
clothes inwards. I can understand: because The Stranger in "The
Third Floor Back" came to me like that. I followed a stooping
figure, passing down a foggy street, pausing every now and then to
glance up at a door. I did not see his face. It was his clothes that
worried me. There was nothing out of the way about them. I could not
make out why it was they seemed remarkable. I lost him at a corner,
where the fog hung thick, and found myself wondering what he would
have looked like if he had turned round and I had seen his face. I
could not get him out of my mind, wandering about the winter
streets; and gradually he grew out of those curious clothes of his.

"Miss Hobbs" (or "The Kissing of Kate," to give the play its
original title), produced by Chas. Frohman in America with Annie
Russell as Kate and wonderful old Mrs. Gilbert as Auntie, was my
first real money-making success: if a gentleman may mention such
detail. She has been a good child to me, God bless her. The Princess
Paulowa presented her in Russia and is now showing her round Italy.
She was a great success in Germany. I was living in Dresden at the
time; and the Kaiser sent me his congratulations, through an
official of the Saxon Court, who brought it to me in a big envelope:
so he couldn't have been all bad. How the coming of the Great War
was kept from us common people may be instanced by the production of
my play, "The Great Gamble," at the Haymarket, six weeks before the
guns went off. The scene was laid in Germany. One of our chief
characters was a dear old German Professor. German students, in
white caps, sang German folk songs and drank Lager beer. We had
incidental music, specially written, in the German style. The hero
had been educated in Germany and the heroine's mother's
co-respondent was an Austrian. For a solid month, we rehearsed that
play without a suspicion that the Chancelleries of Europe were one
and all making their secret preparations to render it a failure.
Talk of organized opposition! It was a conspiracy.

"Fanny and the Servant Problem" I wrote for Marie Tempest. She was
otherwise engaged when it was ready; and Frohman not wanting to
wait, we gave the part to Fannie Ward. I think myself she made a
quite delightful "Fanny," and Charles Cartwright's Butler was a joy.
Alma Murray played the Lady's Maid. I had not seen her for nearly
twenty years. She had been one of the first to put Ibsen on the
London stage. But for that, she might have had her own theatre and
been a leading light. But in those days the feeling against Ibsen
was almost savage, and no player prominently connected with his
plays was ever forgiven. For some reason or another, "Fanny" failed
in London. So Fannie Ward took it to America, and there it was a big
success, under the name of "Lady Bantock." The Americans love a
title. Afterwards it was converted into a musical comedy and ran for
four seasons. With Hamlet, I object to actors speaking more than is
set down for them. But a gag by the American actor cast for the
music-hall manager was quaint, I confess. He finds the Bible that
her Uncle and Butler has placed open on Fanny's desk. He turns over
the pages, and seems surprised. "What have you got there?" asks his
companion. "I don't know," he answers. "It's all about the
Sheenies."

"Fanny" has been translated and played in almost every European
country, except Portugal.

"Cook" (I called it "The Celebrity," and if I had originally called
it "Cook" my manager would have wanted to call it "The Celebrity")
proved to me, I am sorry to say, that the power of the critics to
make or mar a play is negligible. I have never written anything
that has won for me such unstinted praise. I could hardly believe my
eyes when I opened the papers the next morning. Generally, if your
play does get through, it is the actors who have "saved" it. But in
the notices for "Cook," favourable mention was made even of the
author. We all thought we were in for a record run; and I ordered a
new dress suit. I ought to have remembered Charles Frohman's advice
and waited for the second Monday. But "Cook" also has succeeded
abroad, so I comfort myself with the prophet's customary
consolation.

Rehearsals are trying periods. Everybody seems to be wearing their
nerves outside their skin. The question whether the actor should
take three steps to the right, and pause with his left hand on the
back of chair, centre, before proposing to the heroine; or whether
he should do it from the hearthrug, with his left elbow on the
mantelpiece, may threaten the friendship of a lifetime. The author
wants him to do it from the hearthrug--is convinced that from there
and there only can he convey to the heroine the depth and sincerity
of his passion. The producer is positive that a true gentleman would
walk round the top of the table and do it from behind a chair. The
actor comes to the rescue. He "feels" he can do it only from the
left-hand bottom corner of the table.

"Oh well, if you feel as strongly about it as all that, my dear
boy," says the producer, "that ends it. It's you who've got to play
the part."

"Do you know," says the author, "I think he's right? It does seem to
come better from there."

The rehearsal proceeds. Five minutes later, the argument whether a
father would naturally curse his child before or after she has taken
off her hat, provides a new crisis.

In ancient times, the fashion was for movement. The hero and heroine
would be seated, making love, one each side of the piano. At the end
of the first minute, the stage manager, as he was then, would call
out:

"Now then, come along, my dears, break it up. Put some life into it.
You're not glued to those chairs, you know."

The hero and heroine would rise and change seats.

Nowadays the pendulum has swung too far the other way. I remember a
rehearsal where the leading actress suddenly jumped up and began
stamping about the stage.

"Whatever's the matter?" asked the producer.

"I'll be all right in a minute," she answered. "I've got pins and
needles."

My own worst experience was over a musical play I wrote for Arthur
Roberts, then with Lowenfeldt at the Prince of Wales'. Lowenfeldt
was an Austrian who had made a fortune out of Kop's ale. It was a
popular temperance beverage, twenty years ago, until the Revenue
authorities discovered it contained more alcohol than the average
public-house beer. His grievance against the London critics was that
they didn't take cheques. "Why not?" he argued. "A good notice in a
respectable paper is worth a hundred pounds to me. I give the
critic ten. It pays him, and it pays me." He thought the time would
come.

Arthur Roberts took me aside.

"I want you to write me a part with a touch of pathos in it," he
said. "You know what I mean. Plenty of fun, but not all fun. I want
them to go home saying, 'Well, I always knew Arthur could make me
laugh, but damned if I thought he had got it in him to make me cry.'
See what I mean?"

I retired into the country and worked hard. It seemed to me an
interesting story. There were moments in it when, if properly
played, a chocky feeling would, I felt sure, manifest itself
throughout the audience. But it all came right in the end. I made
him a licensed victualler, of the better sort. An uncle died and
left him an hotel. Roberts had not attended the reading. At the
first rehearsal he took me aside. He said:

"I've got an idea for this part. I'm a young farmer----" He gave me
an imitation of a Somersetshire yokel. It was an excellent
performance. "You know," he continued, "a Simple Simon sort of part.
In the second act----"

"But you can't," I said. "You're an hotel proprietor at Maidenhead."

"Good," he answered. "All you'll have to do, is to knock out the
hotel and call it a farm."

I tried reason, but he was just mad to be a farmer. He sketched out
the part. It would be novel and amusing, I could see that. I sat up
for a night or two, and turned him into a farmer. We struggled
through one or two rehearsals; and then he had another inspiration.
He wanted to be a detective, disguised as an Italian waiter.

"Where's the difficulty?" he demanded. "Somebody steals the old
girl's jewels. I'm in love with the daughter. The police are no
good, I take the job on for her sake."

It meant re-writing half an act. I did it. Three days later, he
wanted to be a French Marquis, reduced to giving English lessons in
Soho.

"Don't you see, my dear boy?" he explained. "Gives me an opportunity
for pathos. I've been making them laugh, now I make them cry.
Variety: that's the thing we want."

I never saw the play myself. I was told that he got them all in; and
the critics spoke highly of his versatility. Adrian Ross (Arthur
Ropes) took it off my hands and finished it. He was a wonderful
worker. He would write a scene--quite a good scene--while Arthur
Roberts walked up and down the room and acted it. The next morning,
Arthur had forgotten all about it; and Ropes would write him
another.

I wrote "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" for David Warfield. I
worked it out first as a short story. It was John Murray, the
publisher, who put the idea into my head of making it into a play;
and when I saw Warfield in "The Music Master," it seemed to me he
was just the actor to play it. He would not have had the dignity and
compelling force of Forbes-Robertson. He would have made the
character win rather through tenderness and appeal. I was on a
lecturing tour in America; and I got my agent, Miss Marbury, to put
me into touch with Belasco, Warfield's manager. It was in a Pullman
car between Washington and New York that I sketched out the idea to
him. It got hold of him. We were both doubtful as to how the public
would receive it. I thought I could do it without giving offence.
Belasco agreed to trust me, and on my return to England I got to
work upon it. It was not an easy play to write: one had to feel it
rather than think it. I was living in a lonely part of the Chiltern
hills with great open spaces all around me, and that helped; and at
last it was finished. I had arranged to return to America to produce
"Sylvia of the Letters," a play I had written for Grace George; and
I took "The Passing" with me. I read it to Warfield and Belasco late
one night at Belasco's theatre in New York. We had the house to
ourselves; and afterwards we adjourned to Warfield's club for
supper. It was about three o'clock in the morning, and the only
thing we could get was cold beef and pickles. They were both
impressed by the play, and we found ourselves talking in whispers. I
fancy Belasco got nervous about it, later on. We fixed things up
next morning at Miss Marbury's office, and he asked me to see Percy
Anderson, the artist, when I got back to England, and get him to
make sketches for the characters. It was while he was drawing them,
in his studio at Folkestone, that one morning Forbes-Robertson, who
had a house there, dropped in upon him. Forbes was greatly
interested in the sketches; and Anderson showed him the play.

Forbes-Robertson wrote me telling me this; and saying that if by any
chance arrangements between myself and Belasco fell through, he
would like to talk to me. His letter arrived the day after I had had
one from Belasco, making it clear that he did not want, if possible,
to be bound to his contract; so for answer, I called upon
Forbes-Robertson in Bedford Square; and read the play to him and his
wife. He also was nervous; but Gertrude Elliott swept all doubts
aside and ended the matter.

We got together as perfect a cast as I think any play has ever had.
Ernest Hendrie as the old Bookmaker, Ian Robertson as the Major,
Edward Sass as the Jew, Agnes Thomas as Mrs. Sharpe, and Haidee
Wright as the Painted Lady were all wonderful; and Gertrude Elliott
played the Slavey. I was afraid, at first, that her beauty and her
grace would hamper her; but she overcame these drawbacks and, even
at rehearsal, invested the little slut with a spirituality that at
times transfigured her. My daughter played the part in the country
and afterwards in London during the war, and they two were the best
Stasias I have seen. Lillah McCarthy was to have played Vivien.
Granville Barker was in America, and she consulted Shaw, who read
the play and told her to grab the part and hang on to it. She had an
engagement she thought she could get out of; but it was not so, and
we had to seek elsewhere.

"We must have someone supremely beautiful," said Forbes. "There are
six women in the play; four of them have to be middle-aged, and my
wife has to disguise herself. It's our only chance."

I thought of Alice Crawford. Time was pressing. We sent her a wire.
She had just left for a ball at the Piccadilly Hotel.

"You must go to the ball," said Forbes.

I went as I was, in a blue serge suit, brown boots, and a collar
that I had been wearing since eight o'clock in the morning. I made a
sensation in the ballroom. I gathered that the people round about
took me for a policeman in unnecessarily plain clothes; but I
spotted Alice Crawford, and beckoned her outside. A gentleman came
up and asked if he could be of any use. I take it the idea of bail
was in his mind.

We produced the play at Harrowgate. The audience there mistook it
for a farce. It was by the author of "Three Men in a Boat," so they
had been told. That evening the Robertsons and myself partook of a
melancholy supper. It was Blackpool that saved the play. Forbes
wired me--

"It's all right. Blackpool understands it and loves it."

In London, on the first night, the curtain fell to dead silence
which lasted so long that everybody thought the play must be a
failure, and my wife began to cry. And then suddenly the cheering
came, and my wife dried her eyes.

I was not present myself. I have shirked my own first nights ever
since a play of mine that Willard produced at the Garrick. I thought
the applause was unanimous, but was received with a burst of booing.
The argument is that if an author is willing to be applauded, he
must not object to being hissed. It may be logic, but it isn't
sense: as well say that because a man does not mind being patted on
the back, he ought not to object to being kicked. I remember the
first night of one of Jones's plays. There was a difference of
opinion and Jones very properly did not appear. In the street, I
overheard some critics from the gallery talking:

"Why didn't he come out," said one, "and take his punishment like a
man?"

W. T. Stead used to gather interesting people round him, on Sunday
afternoons, at his house in Smith Square. Soon after the production
of "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" I received an invitation
from him to discuss "The Gospel according to St. Jerome." Another
time, we discussed the chief motive power governing human affairs,
and decided that it was hate: hatred of nation for nation, religious
hatred, race hatred, political hatred. Just then the suffrage
movement was in full swing, and sex hatred had been added to the
list. Stead lived and died a convinced Spiritualist, in spite of the
fact that his spirit friends once let him down badly. They urged him
to start a daily newspaper and assured him of success. It was a grim
failure, but he forgave them.

Forbes-Robertson was doubtful about taking the play to America. It
was his sister-in-law, Maxine Elliott, who insisted. It was at her
theatre in New York that he opened.

Matheson Lang took it East. In China, a most respectable Mandarin
came round to see him afterwards and thanked him.

"Had I been intending to do this night an evil deed," he said, "I
could not have done it. I should have had to put it off, until
to-morrow."




CHAPTER VIII

I BECOME AN EDITOR


"_The Idler_. Edited by Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr. An
illustrated monthly magazine, Price sixpence," was Barr's idea. But
the title was mine. Barr had made the English edition of the Detroit
Free Press quite a good property; and was keen to start something of
his own. He wanted a popular name and, at first, was undecided
between Kipling and myself. He chose me--as, speaking somewhat
bitterly, he later on confessed to me--thinking I should be the
easier to "manage." He had not liked the look of Kipling's jaw.
Kipling had been about two years in London, and had just married his
secretary, a beautiful girl with a haunting melancholy in her eyes
that still lingers.

By writers he was recognized as a new force, though his aggressive
personality naturally made enemies. The critics and the public were
more squeamish then. He was accused of coarseness and irreverence.
The reason, it is said, that he was never knighted was that Queen
Victoria would not forgive him for having called her "The Widdy o'
Windsor." He has not missed much. Lord Charles Beresford used to
tell the story--and those who knew him could easily believe it--that
King Edward on one occasion said to him:

"You remember L----, that fellow at Homburg. Well, I've just made
him a knight."

"Dirty little bounder," said Beresford; "serve him damn well right."

_The Idler_ was a great success, so far as circulation was
concerned. Our business manager was one Robert Dunkerley. I see from
"Who's Who" that he himself explains that he "took to writing as an
alleviation and alternative from business, and found it much more
enjoyable." He is now John Oxenham. We had pleasant offices in
Arundel Street, off the Strand, and gave tea-parties every Friday.
They were known as the "Idler At Homes," and became a rendezvous for
literary London. Burgin, G. B., was our sub-editor. He was a glutton
for work, even then; and his appetite seems to have grown. He thinks
nothing of turning out three novels a year. I once wrote two
thousand words in a single day; and it took me the rest of the week
to recover. Wells is even yet more wonderful. He writes a new book
while most people are reading his last; throws off a history of the
world while the average schoolboy is learning his dates; and invents
a new religion in less time than it must have taken his god-parents
to teach him his prayers. He has a table by his bedside; and if the
spirit moves him will get up in the middle of the night, make
himself a cup of coffee, write a chapter or so, and then go to sleep
again. During intervals between his more serious work, he will
contest a Parliamentary election or conduct a conference for
educational reform. How Wells carries all his electricity without
wearing out the casing and causing a short circuit in his brain is
a scientific mystery. I mentioned once in a letter to him that I was
a bit run down. He invited me to spend a day or two with him at
Folkestone: get some sea-air in my lungs and a rest. To "rest" in
the neighbourhood of Wells is like curling yourself up and trying to
go to sleep in the centre of a cyclone. When he wasn't explaining
the Universe, he was teaching me new games--complicated things that
he had invented himself, and under stress of which my brain would
reel. There are steepish hills on the South Downs. We went up them
at four miles an hour, talking all the time. On the Sunday evening a
hurricane was raging with a driving sleet. Wells was sure a walk
would do us good--wake us up. While Mrs. Wells was not watching, we
tucked the two little boys into their mackintoshes and took them
with us.

"We'll all have a blow," said Wells.

They were plucky little beggars, both of them, and only laughed. But
battling up the Leas against the wind, we found the sleet was
cutting their small faces. So we made them walk one each behind us
with their arms around our waists, while we pressed forward with
ducked heads. And even then Wells talked. But one day Nature got the
better of him and silenced him. That was when he was staying with me
at Gould's Grove near Wallingford. We climbed a lonely spur of the
Chilterns, and half-way up he gave out, and never spoke again till
we had reached the top, and had sat there for at least five minutes,
looking down upon the towers of Oxford and the Cotswold Hills
beyond. Southampton water gleamed like a speck of silver on the
horizon, and at our feet we marked--now rutted and grass-grown--the
long straight line of the old Roman way that led from Grimm's Dyke,
past the camp on the Sinodun hills, and so onward to the north.

I can't remember, for certain, whether it was to Wells at Folkestone
when I was staying with him, or to me at Wallingford when he was
stopping with me, that there came one afternoon a company of garden
city experts on the hunt for a new site. The head of the party was
an American gentleman who had devoted most of his life to the
building of garden cities. He had been invited over to assist with
his experience. He never got further than the two words "garden
city." At that point, Wells took the matter in hand, and for twenty
minutes he explained to the old gentleman how garden cities should
be constructed; the inherent imperfectability of all garden cities
that had hitherto been built; the proper method of financing and
running garden cities. The old gentleman attempted a few feeble
interruptions, but Wells would have none of them.

"Your ideas are all right," said the old gentleman, when Wells at
last had finished, "but they are not practical."

"If the ideas are right," said Wells, "your business is to make them
practical."

Of Shaw, it is said that he is never at rest unless he is working.
Shaw once told me that he only had three speeches. One about
politics (including religion); one about art (together with life in
general); and the other one about himself. He said he found these
three--with variations--served him for all purposes.

"People think I am making new speeches," he said. "I'm repeating
things that I have told them over and over again, if only they had
listened. I'm tired of talking," he said. "I wouldn't have to talk
one-tenth as much, if people only listened."

He used to say there were two schools of elocution: one the Lyceum
Theatre (in Irving's time) and the other Hyde Park. He himself had
graduated in Hyde Park, mounted on a chair without a back, opposite
the Marble Arch. There is only one way of countering Shaw on a
platform. It is hopeless trying to cross wits with him. The only
thing is to force him to become serious. Then I have known him to
flounder. His mind works like lightning. I remember the then
President of the Playgoers' Club coming to him one day. It was at
the beginning of the cinema boom. He was an earnest young man.

"We want you to speak for us on Sunday evening, Mr. Shaw," he said,
"on the question: Is there any danger of the actor being
eliminated?"

"You don't say which actor," answered Shaw, "and, anyhow, why speak
of it as a danger?"

Shaw is one of the kindest of men, but has no tenderness. His chief
exercise, according to his own account, is public speaking; and his
favourite recreation, thinking. He admitted to me once that there
have been times when he has thought too much. He was motoring in
Algiers, driving himself, with his chauffeur beside him, when out of
his musings came to him the idea for a play.

"What do you think of this?" he said, turning to his chauffeur; and
went on then and there to tell the man all about it.

He had usually found his chauffeur a keen and helpful critic. But on
this occasion, instead of friendly encouragement, he threw himself
upon Shaw and, wrenching the wheel out of his hands, sat down upon
him.

"Excuse me, Mr. Shaw," the man said later on; "but it's such a damn
good play that I didn't want you to die before you'd written it."

Shaw had never noticed the precipice.

Conan Doyle used to be another tremendous worker. He would sit at a
small desk in a corner of his own drawing-room, writing a story,
while a dozen people round about him were talking and laughing. He
preferred it to being alone in his study. Sometimes, without looking
up from his work, he would make a remark, showing he must have been
listening to our conversation; but his pen had never ceased moving.
Barrie had the same gift. He was a reporter on a provincial
newspaper in his early days, and while waiting for orders amid the
babel and confusion of the press room, he would curl himself up on a
chair and, quite undisturbed, peg away at something dreamy and
poetic.

A vigorous family, the Doyles, both mentally and physically. I
remember a trip to Norway with Doyle and his sister Connie: a
handsome girl, she might have posed as Brunhilda. She married
Hornung the novelist. Another sister married a clergyman named
Angel, a dear ugly fellow. They lived near to us at Wallingford, and
next door to them happened to live another clergyman named Dam. And
later on Dam was moved to Goring, and found himself next door to a
Roman Catholic priest whose name was Father Hell. Providence, I take
it, arranges these little things for some wise purpose.

We had a rough crossing to Norway. Connie Doyle enjoyed it: she was
that sort of girl: it added to her colour and gave a delightful curl
to her hair. She had a sympathetic nature, and was awfully sorry for
the poor women who were ill. She would burst in upon them every now
and then to see if she could be of any help to them. You would have
thought her mere presence would have cheered them up. As a matter of
fact, it made them just mad.

"Oh, do go away, Connie," I heard one of her friends murmur, while
passing the open door, "it makes me ill to look at you."

Doyle was always full of superfluous energy. He started to learn
Norwegian on the boat. He got on so well that he became conceited;
and one day, at a little rest house up among the mountains, he lost
his head. We had come there in stoljas--a tiny carriage only just
big enough for one person, drawn by a pony about the size of a
Newfoundland dog, but marvellously sturdy. They will trot their
fifty miles in the day and be frisky in the evening. While we were
lunching, with some twenty miles still in front of us, a young
officer came into the room, and said something in Norwegian. Of
course we turned him on to Doyle; and Doyle rose and bowed and
answered him. We all watched the conversation. The young Norwegian
officer was evidently charmed with Doyle, while Doyle stood ladling
out Norwegian as though it had been his mother tongue. After the
officer was gone, we asked Doyle what it was all about.

"Oh, just about the weather, and the state of the roads, and how
some relation of his had hurt his leg," answered Doyle carelessly.
"Of course I didn't understand all of it." He turned the
conversation.

When we had finished lunch, and the stoljas were brought out,
Doyle's pony was missing. It appeared Doyle had "lent" it to the
young officer, whose own pony had gone lame. The ostler, who was
also the waiter, had overheard the conversation. Doyle had said
"Certainly, with pleasure." He had said it once or twice. Also the
Norwegian equivalent for: "Don't mention it."

There wasn't another pony within ten miles. One of our party, who
had taken a fancy to the view, and thought he would like to spend a
day or two in the neighbourhood, let Doyle have his stolja. But for
the rest of that trip, Doyle talked less Norwegian.

Leprosy is still a living terror in Norway. Eating bad fish is the
cause of it. Round about the fjords, preserved fish is the chief
article of food during the long winter. Doyle, as a doctor, got
permission to visit one of the big leper hospitals and took me with
them. Not till one has seen the thing can one understand the full
meaning of that awful cry: "The leper, the leper." The strange thing
was the patience of the poor marred creatures, their quiet
acceptance of their fate. Above the doors were texts of scripture.
"His mercy endureth for ever," was one of them. The bell was ringing
for service when we thanked our guide for an interesting afternoon.
We left them trooping towards the little cold grey chapel.

Doyle had always a bent towards the occult. He told me once a
curious story. It led him to conclusions with which he may now
disagree. He and another member of the Psychical Research Society
were sent down to an old manor house in Somerset to investigate a
"phenomenon," as it is now termed--"ghost story," our grandmothers
would have said. There lived in this house a retired Colonel and his
wife with their only daughter, an unmarried woman of about five and
thirty. For some time past, strange noises had been heard: a low
moaning, rising to a wailing sob, and a sound as of a chain being
dragged across the floor. Night after night, the noises would be
heard. Then, for a while, they would cease. And then they would come
again. The servants--so the old gentleman explained--were being
frightened out of their lives: most of them had left; and even the
dogs were becoming jumpy. Doyle and his friend were to say nothing
about the Psychical Research Society. They were to come merely as
guests, friends of the Colonel's, that he had run across in London.
He had not told his wife and daughter. His idea was that no woman
could keep a secret. The Colonel himself pooh-poohed the whole
thing. He put it down to rats. But his wife's health was becoming
affected. He was evidently more worried than he cared to show.

It was a lonely house. Doyle and his friend arrived there in time
for dinner. In the evening, they played a rubber of whist with the
Colonel and his daughter. It was before bridge was invented. The old
lady looked on while knitting. They seemed a most devoted family.
Doyle and his friend, pleading drowsiness, the result of country
air, retired early. That night nothing happened. On the second
night, Doyle, suddenly waking about two o'clock in the morning,
heard the noises exactly as described: the low moaning, rising to a
wailing sob, and the dragging of a chain. He was out of bed in a
jiffy. The other man, whose turn it had been to keep watch, was in
the gallery overlooking the hall, from where, he felt sure, the
sounds had come. The old lady and gentleman joined them, almost
immediately; and the daughter a few minutes later. The daughter,
while comforting her mother, whose self-control seemed to be at
breaking-point, declared she had heard nothing; and was sure it was
all imagination, the result of "suggestion"; but admitted, after the
old people had gone back into their room, that this was only
pretence. She burst into a violent fit of weeping. Doyle's medical
training came to his aid. The next night they laid their plans; and
discovered, as Doyle had suspected, that the ghost was the daughter
herself.

She was not mad. She protested her love both for her father and her
mother. She could offer no explanation. The thing seemed as
unaccountable to her as it did to Doyle. On the understanding that
the thing ended, secrecy was promised. The noises were never heard
again. The mysteries are with the living, not the dead.

From shining examples of industry and steadfastness I--being a lazy
man myself--find it a comfort to turn my thoughts away to W. W.
Jacobs. He has told me himself that often he will spend (the word is
his own) an entire morning, constructing a single sentence. If he
writes a four-thousand-word story in a month, he feels he has earned
a holiday; and the reason that he does not always take it is that he
is generally too tired. I once recommended him to try a secretary. I
have found it so myself: the girl becomes a sort of conscience.
After a time, you get ashamed of yourself, muddling about the room
and trying to look as if you were thinking. She yawns, has pins and
needles, begs your pardon every five minutes--was under the
impression that you said something. A girl who knows her business
can, without opening her mouth, bully a man into working.

"It wasn't any good," he told me later on. "I put Nance on to it"
(Nance was his sister-in-law). "I felt it wasn't going to be any
use; and I didn't want the disgrace of it to get outside the family.
I suppose I'm too far gone, or else she was too eager. She would
persist in our beginning sharp at ten, and I'm never any good before
twelve."

He told me that if it hadn't been for the Night Watchman, he might
have had to give up writing. He had exhausted all his own stories.
For weeks he cudgelled his brain in vain. Then suddenly in
desperation he seized his pen and wrote:

"Speaking of wimmen," said the Night Watchman.

And after that, it was plain sailing. He left it to the Night
Watchman. The Night Watchman talked on.

I like talking to Jacobs about politics. He is so gloriously honest.

"I'm not sure that I do want the greatest happiness of the greatest
number," he said to me one afternoon. We were driving across the
Berkshire downs, behind a jolly little Irish cob of mine: it was
before the days of motors. "So far as I can see, there's not enough
of the good things of this world to go round evenly, and I want more
than my share."

As a matter of fact, he doesn't. All he wants to make him happy is a
pipe, two Scotch whiskies a day, and a game of bowls three
afternoons a week. But he's an obstinate beggar. I asked him once
why he was afraid of Socialism. I promised him--I offered to
personally guarantee it--that under Socialism all his simple desires
would be assured to him.

"I don't want things assured to me," he answered quite crossly. "I'd
hate a lot of clever people fussing about, making me happy and doing
me good. Damn their eyes."

During the Suffrage movement Mrs. Jacobs became militant. Husbands
lived in fear and trembling in those days. Ladies who, up till then,
had been as good as they were beautiful, filled our English prisons.
Mrs. Jacobs, for breaking a post-office window, was awarded a month
in Holloway. Jacobs did all that a devoted husband could do. Armed
with medical certificates, he waited on the Governor: with all the
eloquence fit and proper to the occasion, pointed out the
impossibility of Mrs. Jacobs' surviving the rigours of prison
rgime. The Governor was all sympathy. He disappeared. Five minutes
later he returned.

"You will be pleased to hear, Mr. Jacobs," said the Governor, "that
you have no cause whatever for anxiety. Your wife, since her
arrival here a week ago, has put on eight pounds four ounces."

As Jacobs said, she always was difficult.

Editorial experience taught me that the test of a manuscript lies in
its first twenty lines. If the writer could say nothing in those
first twenty lines to arrest my attention, it was not worth while
continuing. I am speaking of the unknown author; but I would myself
apply the argument all round. By adopting this method, I was able to
give personal consideration to every manuscript sent in to me. The
accompanying letter I took care, after a time, not to read. So often
the real story was there. Everything had been tried: everything had
failed: this was their last chance. The sole support of widowed
mother--of small crippled brother, could I not see my way?
Struggling tradesmen on the verge of bankruptcy who had heard that
Rudyard Kipling received a hundred pounds for a short story--would
be willing to take less. Wives of little clerks, dreaming of new
curtains. Would-be bridegrooms, wishful to add to their income:
photograph of proposed bride enclosed, to be returned. Humbug, many
of them; but trouble enough in the world to render it probable that
the majority were genuine. Running through all of them, the
conviction that literature is the last refuge of the deserving poor.
The idea would seem to be general. Friends would drop in to talk to
me about their sons: nice boys but, for some reason or another,
hitherto unfortunate: nothing else left for them but to take to
literature. Would I see them, and put them up to the ropes?

That it requires no training, I admit. A writer's first play, first
book, can be as good as his last--or better. I like to remember that
I discovered a goodish few new authors.

Jacobs I found one Saturday afternoon. I had stayed behind by myself
on purpose to tackle a huge pile of manuscripts. I had waded through
nearly half of them, finding nothing. I had grown disheartened,
physically weary. The walls of the room seemed to be fading away.
Suddenly I heard a laugh and, startled, I looked round. There was no
one in the room but myself. I took up the manuscript lying before
me, some dozen pages of fine close writing.

I read it through a second time, and wrote to "W. W. Jacobs, Esq."
to come and see me. Then I bundled the remaining manuscripts into a
drawer; and went home, feeling I had done a good afternoon's work.

He came on Monday, a quiet, shy young man, with dreamy eyes and a
soft voice. He looked a mere boy. Even now, in the dusk with the
light behind him, he could pass very well for twenty-five--anyhow
with his hat on. I remember Mrs. Humphrey Ward whispering to me at a
public dinner not so very long ago--

"Who is the boy on my left?"

"The boy," I told her, was W. W. Jacobs.

"Good Lord!" she said. "How does he do it?"

I made a contract with him for a series of short stories. He was
diffident--afraid lest they might not all be up to sample. I had
difficulty in persuading him. The story he had sent me had been
round to a dozen magazines, and had been returned with the usual
editorial regrets and compliments. I fancy the regrets came to be
sincere.

We had an old farmhouse on the hills above Wallingford. William the
Conqueror had a friend at Wallingford, who opened the gates to him.
It was there he first crossed the Thames. In return, William granted
to the town a boon. Curfew still rings at Wallingford, but at nine
o'clock instead of eight. We would hear it clearly when the wind was
in the west; and always there would fall a silence. The house was on
the site of an old monastery. The ancient yews still stand. There
was a corner of the garden that we called the Nook. A thick yew
hedge, the haunt of birds, surrounded it, and an old nut tree gave
shelter from the sun. It made a pleasant working place. An
interesting tablet might be placed above its green archway,
commemorating the names of those who at one time or another had
written there: among others, Wells, Jacobs, Doyle, Zangwill,
Phillpotts. Zangwill wrote stories of the Ghetto there; but wasted
much of his time, playing with the birds, digging up worms with the
end of his pen to feed the young thrushes and blackbirds.

It was a lonely house, on a western slope of the Chilterns. There
were two front doors. One had to remember which way the wind was
blowing. If one opened the wrong one, there was danger of being
knocked down; and then the wind would rush through all the rooms and
play the devil before one got him out again. I had a liking for
being there alone in winter time, fending for myself and thinking.
The owls also were fond of it. One could imagine all manner of
sounds. Often I have gone out with a lantern, feeling sure I had
heard the crying of a child. I remember reading there one night the
manuscript of Wells' "Island of Doctor Moreau." It had come into the
office just as I was leaving; and I had slipped it into my bag. I
wished I had not begun it; but I could not put it down. The wind was
howling like the seven furies; but above it I could hear the
shrieking of the tortured beasts. I was glad when the dawn came.

Locke came to live at Wallingford. He had a bungalow down by the
river, and lived there by himself until he married. He used to work
at night. We could see his light shining across the river. His
future wife lodged with an old servant of ours. He would tell my
girls stories of the Munchausen family, descendants of the famous
Baron. He used to stay with them in France. The family failing,
judging from Locke's stories, still clung to them. An heirloom they
particularly prized was the sling used by the late King David in his
contest with Goliath. Locke had seen it himself: a simple enough
thing, apparently home-made. We took him to Henley Regatta one year.
We had the saddler's house down by the bridge. It was an awful week.
We got drenched every day. I lent him some clothes. He is longer
than I am. His arms were too long, and his legs were too long. Some
Oxford boys with us dubbed him Dick Swiveller. He did suggest poor
Dick.

Henham, or John Trevena as he called himself, was a neighbour of
ours at Wallingford. He wrote some good books. "Furze the Cruel" and
"Granite" are among the best. The woman to whom he was engaged
died. But he always spoke of her as if she were living--would talk
with her in his study and go long walks with her. He built himself a
solitary house high up on Dartmoor. Lived there by himself for a
time. And then quite suddenly he married his typist.

I suppose luck goes to the making of reputations, as it does to the
shaping of most things human. Next to Hardy, I place Eden Phillpotts
as the greatest of living English novelists: and Hardy has not his
humour. But I take it he will have to wait till he is dead before
full justice is done to him. He was staying with us; and one
afternoon we went on a picnic. Landing at Dorchester lock, we
climbed the Sinodun hills, where once was a Roman encampment,
commanding the river. The ramparts still remain, and one may trace
the ordered streets. And before that, in Druid times, it had been a
British fortress. A grove of trees marks the place now. "A green
crown upon a lovely hill." It is a famous landmark for many miles
around. We talked, as we boiled our kettle, of the danger of fire.
There had been no rain for weeks and all the countryside was
parched. The fear haunted us. The idea once started, we seemed
unable to get away from it. There were dead trunks among the living
that would have served as touchwood to ignite the whole.

After tea, we were preparing to light our pipes. Phillpotts was
standing with his match-box in his hand. I was waiting to ask him
for a light. It is most men's one economy, lucifer matches. Instead,
he replaced the box in his pocket and, turning his back on me,
walked down the hill. I called to him, but he took no notice.
Later, I found him seated on the lock gates, smoking.

"Do you know what was happening to me just now?" he said. "A beastly
little imp was urging me for all he was worth to set fire to that
rotten tree against which we were standing. One lighted match would
have done it, and burnt down the entire grove. If I hadn't come
away, I believe he'd have nagged me into doing it."

Love of Nature is to Phillpotts almost a religion. I wonder if there
is a Devil?

A Scotchman who signed himself Cynicus drew cartoons for _The
Idler_: clever sketches, with a biting satire. He had a quaint
studio in Drury Lane; and lived there with his sisters. One used to
meet Ramsay MacDonald there. He was a pleasant, handsome young
man--so many of us were, five and thirty years ago. He was fond of
lecturing. Get him on to the subject of Carlyle and he would talk
for half-an-hour. He would stand with his hat in one hand and the
door-handle in the other, and by this means always secured the last
word.

Gilbert Parker was another _Idler_ man. He married in 1895 and
became The Rt. Hon. Sir Gilbert Parker, Bart., M.P., L.L.D., D.C.L.
It might have been jealousy--probably was, but there was a feeling
that after his marriage he had become more impressive than was
needful. I remember one evening at the Savage Club. He had kindly
looked in upon us, on his way to some reception. He moved about,
greeting affably one man after another. Eventually he came across
Odell, an old actor; his address now is the Charterhouse, where
Colonel Newcome heard the roll call. Odell was an excellent
raconteur, one of the stars of the club. Sir Gilbert laid a hand
upon his shoulder.

"You must come down and see me, Odell," he said. "Fix a day and
write me. You know the address. B---- Court."

"Delighted," answered Odell. "What number?"

_The Idler_ was not enough for me. I had the plan in my mind of a
new weekly paper that should be a combination of magazine and
journal. I put my own money into it, and got together the rest.
Dudley Hardy designed us a poster. It was the first time a known
artist had condescended to do poster-work. It came to be known as
the "Yellow Girl." She seemed to be stepping out of the hoarding. If
high up, you feared she would land on your head; and if low down,
you feared for your toes. _To-day_, I suppose, is now forgotten; but
though I say it who shouldn't, it was a wonderful twopennyworth.
Stevenson's "Ebb-Tide" was our first serial. Myself, I never read
the serial in a magazine. A month is too long: one loses touch. But
a week is just right: one remembers, and looks forward. Stevenson
agreed with me. I had met him some time before. He was ill, and
looking forward to getting out of England. It was always a
difficulty getting him to talk; but once started he would go on
without a break: reminding me, in this respect, of Barrie. Maybe it
is a Scotch trait. A gentle, unassuming man: he seemed to have no
notion that he was anybody of importance--or if he had, he kept it
hidden.

Anthony Hope wrote for both _The Idler_ and _To-day_. I am sorry he
came into money. He might have been writing to-day if he hadn't.
Poverty is the only reliable patron of literature. He was a
methodical worker. He had his "office" in a street opposite the
Savoy Chapel. He would reach there as the clock struck ten, work
till four, then, locking the door, go home to his flat in
Bloomsbury. I met him for the first time at the house of a young
couple named Baldry, who have since grown older, and become dear
friends of mine. Baldry and Hall Caine, in those days, used to be
mistaken occasionally, by sinners out late at night, for Jesus
Christ. Baldry now suggests Moses, and Hall Caine has come down to
Shakespeare. Baldry was an artist and still is; but is best known as
a critic. She was a slip of a girl then, and even more beautiful
than she is now. She had been chief dancer at the Gaiety--Lily
Lyndhurst on the programme. She confided to me, in the course of the
evening, that she was the original "Dolly" of the famous "Dolly
Dialogues." Anthony Hope had--well, not exactly told her so, but
given her to understand it. He had a way with him. Since then I have
met quite a dozen charming women who have confided to me precisely
the same secret.

_To-day_ was an illustrated paper. Dudley Hardy, Sauber, Fred
Pegram, Lewis Baumer, Hal Hurst, Aubrey Beardsley, Ravenhill, Sime,
Phil May, all drew for it. As I have said, it was a wonderful
twopennyworth. It was difficult to get work out of Phil May in his
later years. He would promise you--would swear by all the gods he
knew; and then forget all about it. I had a useful office-boy. He
had a gift for sitting still and doing nothing. He could sit for
hours. It never seemed to bore him. James was one of his names.

"James," I would say, "you go round to Mr. Phil May's studio; tell
him you've come for the drawing that he promised Mr. Jerome last
Friday week; and wait till you get it."

If Phil May wasn't in, he would wait till Phil May did come in. If
Phil May was engaged, he would wait till Phil May was disengaged.
The only way of getting him out of the studio was to give him a
drawing. Generally Phil May gave him anything that happened to be
handy. It might be the drawing he had intended for me. More often,
it would be a sketch belonging, properly speaking, to some other
editor. Then there was trouble with the other editor. But Phil May
was used to trouble. He was a thirsty soul. His wife used to tell
the story that one night he woke her up, breaking crockery. It
seemed he was looking for water. The water-bottle was empty.

"Oh, well, drink out of the jug," suggested Mrs. May; "there's
plenty of water in that. I filled it myself, the last thing."

"I've finished that," said May.

He had been in the office of an art dealer in Liverpool, before he
came to London. They hadn't got on together. There had been faults
on both sides, one gathered. The old man also came to London and
established himself in Bond Street. From him, I obtained an insight
into the ways of picture dealers. He looked me up one day at my
office.

"Could you put your hand on a journalist," he asked me, "who knows
anything about art?"

"Sounds easy," I answered. "Most of them know everything. What is it
you want?"

"He needn't know much," he went on. "I want him to write me an
article about Raeburn. I'll tell him just what I want him to say.
All he's got to do is to make it readable, with plenty of headlines.
Then I want you to make a special feature of it in _To-day_."

"Wait a bit," I said. "From all I've heard, this man Raeburn is
dead. Where does the excitement come in, from my point of view?"

"I'm not asking you to do it for nothing," he explained. "Send your
advertisement man to me and he and I will fix it up."

I began to understand.

"You've been buying Raeburns?" I suggested.

"Raeburn is going to be the big thing this season," he answered.
"We're just waiting for the Americans to come over."

Another view of the Press was afforded me by the late Barney
Barnato. He had just arrived in London from South Africa; and
_To-Day_ had taken the occasion to give its readers the story of his
life, putting down nothing in malice, I hope; but, on the other
hand, nothing extenuating. Two days after our article had appeared,
he called upon me. He was not of imposing presence; but his manner
was friendly and he made himself at home.

"I've read your article," he said. He seemed to be under the
impression I had written it myself. "There are one or two points
about which you are mistaken."

He was looking at me out of his little eyes. There came a twinkle
into them.

"I've always been friendly with the Press," he continued. "I've made
a note of where you've gone wrong, here and there. What I'd like you
to do is to write another little article--no immediate hurry about
it--just putting things right."

He had taken from his pocket-book a sheet of note-paper. He rose,
and breathing heavily, he came across and laid it on the desk before
me. It was covered with small writing. I took it up to read it.
Underneath it, there was a cheque for a hundred pounds, payable to
bearer and uncrossed.

He was sadly out of condition, it was evident, but he had been a
prize-fighter. Besides, violence is always undignified. I handed the
cheque back to him; and crumpling up his sheet of paper threw it
into the waste-paper-basket. He looked at me more in sorrow than in
anger. A sigh of resignation escaped him. He took a fountain pen out
of his bulging waistcoat and, leaning over the back of the desk,
proceeded quite calmly to make alterations: then pushed the cheque
across to me. He had made it for two hundred pounds and had
initialled the corrections.

It was my turn to give it back to him. I wondered what he would do.
He merely shrugged his shoulders.

"How much do you want?" he asked.

He was so good-tempered about it, that I could not help laughing. I
explained to him it wasn't done--not in London.

There came again a twinkle into those small sly eyes.

"Sorry," he said. "No offence." He held out a grubby hand.

Barry Pain was of great help to me upon _To-day_. He wrote for me
"Eliza's Husband," which myself I think the best thing he has done.
"Eliza" is a delightful creation. Another series he wrote for
_To-day_ we called "De Omnibus." They were the musings, upon things
in general, of a London omnibus conductor, with occasional
intrusions from the driver. One is glad of the disappearance of the
old horse 'bus, for the sake of the horses; but the rubicund-faced
driver one misses with regret. His caustic humour, shouted downward
from his perch, was a feature of the London streets. I remember once
our driver making as usual to pull up by the kerb at the top of
Sloane Street, outside Harvey & Nichols. A gorgeous "equipage"--as
the newspaper reporter would describe it--drawn by a pair of
high-stepping bays, and driven by a magnificent creature in livery
of blue and gold, dashed in between and ousted us. Our driver bent
forward and addressed him in a loud but friendly tone:

"Good-morning, gardener," he said. "Coachman ill again?"

The conductor also was a kindly soul--would recognize one as a
fellow human being. One would hardly dream of trying to be familiar
with the modern motor-'bus conductor.

It was to Barry Pain that the reproach "new humorist" was first
applied. It began with a sketch of his in the "Granta"--a simple
little thing entitled "The Love Story of a Sardine."

Le Gallienne was another of my "Young Men," as the term goes. "The
Chief" they used to call me. "Is the Chief in?" they would ask of
the young lady in the outer office. Just a convention, but always it
gave me a little thrill of pride, when I overheard it. Le Gallienne
was a great beauty in those days. He had the courage of his own
ideas in the matter of dress. I remember at a _matine_, a lady in
the stall next to me looking up at him. He was sitting in the front
row of the dress circle.

"Who's that beautiful woman?" she asked.

It has come to be the accepted idea that woman is more beautiful
than man. It is a masculine delusion, born of sex instinct. I give
woman credit for not believing it. The human species is no exception
to the general law. The male is Nature's favourite. I remember at
Munich a young officer going to a ball in his sister's clothes. He
made a really lovely woman, but over-played the joke. It led to a
duel the next morning in the Englischer Garten between two of his
brother officers; and one of them was killed.

There is nothing of the celebrity about Thomas Hardy, O.M. He
himself tells the story that a very young lady friend of his thought
that O.M. stood for Old Man; and was very angry with King Edward.
The order was created to give Watts, the painter, a distinction that
he could not very well refuse. He had declined everything else. The
last time I saw Thomas Hardy was at a private view of the Royal
Academy. He was talking to the Baldrys. The papers the next morning
gave the usual list of celebrities who had been present: all the
famous chorus ladies, all the film stars, all the American
millionaires. Nobody had noticed Thomas Hardy.

He lives behind a high wall in an unpretentious house that he built
for himself long ago on the downs beyond Dorchester. We called upon
him there, just before the war. His wife was away and it happened to
be the servant's afternoon out. His secretary opened the door to us.
His wife died a little later and she is now the second Mrs. Hardy.
It was a warm afternoon, and we walked in the garden. At first, he
appears to be a gentleman of no importance; but after a while,
behind his quietness and simplicity, you catch glimpses of the real
man. He shows himself in his poetry to be one of the deepest
thinkers of the age. The unassuming little gentleman looking at you
with pale gentle eyes does not suggest it. There was a whispering
towards tea-time between Hardy and the lady. Hardy was worried. It
seemed Mrs. Hardy, careful soul, not anticipating visitors, had
before leaving locked up all the spare tea-things. We had some fun
searching round. My wife and daughter were with me, making five of
us. We got together a scratch lot; and sat down to table.

An interesting club, established in London about thirty years ago,
was the Omar Khayyam club. I was never a member, but frequently a
guest. In the winter, we dined at Anderton's Hotel in Fleet Street,
and in the summer, wandered about to country inns. William Sharpe,
the poet, was a member. So, also, was Fiona McLeod, the poetess, who
wrote the "Immortal Hour." About her, there came to be a mystery.
Some people must have gone about pulling other people's legs. George
Meredith, in a letter to Alice Meynell, dated from Box Hill, writes:
"Miss Fiona McLeod was here last week, a handsome person, who would
not give me her eyes." All I know is that Sharpe himself made no
secret of the fact that he and Fiona McLeod were one and the same
person. It was after an Omar Khayyam dinner, at Caversham near
Reading, that, walking in the garden, I mentioned to him my
admiration of the lady, and my wish to obtain some of her work. He
laughed. "To confess the truth," he said, "I am Fiona McLeod. I
thought you knew." He told me that, when it came to writing, he
really felt himself to be two separate personalities; and it seemed
the better course to keep them apart.

I am writing these memoirs in a little room where, years ago, Edward
Fitzgerald sat writing "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam." The window
looks out across the village street; and some of those who passed by
then still come and go. Mrs. Scarlett, our landlady, who keeps the
village shop, remembers him as a gentleman somewhat "thin on the
top," with side whiskers and a high-domed forehead. He wore
generally a stove-pipe hat at the back of his head (at rather a
rakish angle, so I gather), an Inverness cape with a velvet collar,
and a black stock round his neck. In voice and manner, Mr. Zangwill
reminds her of him. He used to frighten the good fisher folk, at
first, by his habit of taking midnight walks along the shore,
talking to himself as he went by. A favourite working place of his
was the ruined church upon the cliffs. It was still a landmark up
to a few years ago, standing out bravely against the sky. But now
its stones lie scattered on the beach or have been carried out to
sea, and not a trace remains. There, with his back against a
crumbling buttress, he would sit and write of mornings, till Mrs.
Scarlett, to whom in those days steep pathways were of small
account, would fetch him home to lunch. No one knew of his retreat:
until one day some yachting friends dropped in at Mrs. Scarlett's
shop to replenish their larder, and so discovered him.

Mrs. Scarlett's shop was, of course, the hub of the village. The
gossips would gather there and talk. But Fitzgerald had a way of
getting rid of them. Putting on his hat--at the back of his head,
according to that rakish custom of his--he would bustle out and join
them.

"Ah! Mrs. Scarlett," he would say, "you are talking about something
interesting, I feel sure of it. Now tell me all about it."

The ladies would look from one to another, and assure him it was
nothing of importance.

"No, no. You must not keep it from me," Fitzgerald would persist.
"Do let me hear it."

It would occur to the ladies, one after another, that tasks were
awaiting them at home. Excusing themselves, they would drift away.
After a time, it came to be sufficient for Mrs. Scarlett to indicate
by signs that Fitzgerald was in the little front room, working. He
used to write, sitting by the window, in the easy chair (it isn't
really very easy), with his writing-pad on his knee. The ladies
would make their purchases in whispers and depart.

_To-Day_ was killed by a libel action brought against me by a
company promoter, a Mr. Samson Fox, whose activities my City Editor
had somewhat severely criticised. I have the satisfaction of
boasting that it was the longest case, and one of the most expensive
ever heard in the court of Queen's Bench. It resolved itself into an
argument as to whether domestic gas could be made out of water. At
the end of thirty days, the unanimous conclusion arrived at was,
that it remained to be seen; and the Judge, in a kindly speech,
concluded that the best way of ending the trouble would be for us
each to pay our own costs. Mine came to nine thousand pounds; and
Mr. Samson Fox's to eleven. We shook hands in the corridor. He
informed me that he was going back to Leeds to strangle his
solicitors; and hoped I would do the same by mine. But it seemed to
me too late.

A big catastrophe has, at first, a numbing effect. Realisation comes
later. It was summer time, and my family were in the country. I
dined by myself at a restaurant in Soho, and afterwards went to the
theatre; but I recall a dull, aching sensation in the neighbourhood
of my stomach, and an obstinate dryness of the throat.

Of course it meant my selling out, both from _The Idler_ and
_To-Day_. Barr's friends took over _The Idler_, and Bottomley bought
most of my holding in _To-Day_. But it had, from the beginning, been
a one-man paper, and after I went out, it gradually died.

I had always dreamed of being an editor. My mother gave me a desk on
my sixth birthday, and I started a newspaper in partnership with a
little old maiden aunt of mine. She wore three corkscrew curls on
each side of her head. She used to take them off, before bending
down over the table to write.

My mother liked our first number. "I am sure he was meant to be a
preacher," she said to my father.

"It comes to the same thing," said my father. "The newspaper is
going to be the new pulpit."

I still think it might be.




CHAPTER IX

THE AUTHOR ABROAD


It was comparatively early in my life that I found myself a
foreigner. A fellow clerk and I saved up all one winter, and at
Easter we took a trip to Antwerp. We went by steamer from London
Bridge: return fare, including meals, twenty-six shillings; and at
Antwerp, following the second mate's directions, we found an hotel
in a street off the Place Verte where they boarded and lodged us for
five francs a day: _caf_ complete at eight, _djeuner_ at twelve,
and _dner_ at six-thirty, with half a bottle of wine.

I would not care to live the whole of my youth over again; but I
would like to take that trip once more, with the clock just where it
was then.

The following year we bestowed our patronage upon Boulogne; and
ferreting about for ourselves unearthed a small hotel in the
Haute-Ville, where they did us well for seven francs a day _en
pension_. taples had just been discovered by the English artists.
Dudley Hardy was one of the first to see the beauty of its low-lying
dunes and pools of evening light. I became an habitu of the
Continent. I discovered that with a smattering of the language,
enabling one to venture off the beaten tracks, one could spend a
holiday abroad much cheaper than in England. Ten shillings a day
could be made to cover everything. Zangwill once told me that he
travelled through Turkey in comfort on twenty sentences, carefully
prepared beforehand, and a pocket dictionary. A professor of
languages I met at Freiburg estimated the entire vocabulary of the
Black Forest peasant at three hundred words. Of course, if you want
to argue, more study is needful; but for all the essentials of a
quiet life, a working knowledge of twenty verbs and a hundred nouns,
together with just a handful of adjectives and pronouns, can be made
to serve. I knew a man who went to Sweden on a sketching tour,
knowing nothing but the numbers up to ten; and before he had been
there a month, got engaged to a Swedish girl who could not speak a
word of English. Much may be accomplished with economy. At Ostend,
in the season, one can enjoy oneself for eleven francs a day; but to
do so one should avoid the larger hotels upon the front. It was the
smell of them, and of the people dining in them, that first inclined
my youthful mind to Socialism.

Paris is a much over-rated city, and half the Louvre ought to be
cleared out and sent to a rummage sale. On a rainy day with an east
wind blowing, it isn't even gay; and its streets are much too wide
and straight: well adapted, no doubt, to the shooting down of
citizens, with which idea in mind they were planned, but otherwise
uninteresting. All the roads in France are much too straight. I
remember a walking tour in Brittany. All day long, the hot, treeless
road stretched a straight white line before us. We never moved; or
so it seemed. Always we were seven miles from the horizon, with
nothing else to look at. There must have been villages and
farmsteads scattered somewhere around, but like the events of a
Greek drama one had to imagine them. The natives were proud of this
road. They boasted that an army corps could march along it thirty
abreast without ever shifting a foot to right or left. But they did
not use it much themselves. From morn to eve, we met less than a
score of people; and half of them were mending it. A motoring friend
of mine told me that touring in France was ruination. A tyre burst
every day. It was the pace that did it. "But must you go so fast?" I
suggested. "My dear boy," he answered, "have you seen the roads? You
don't want to linger on them."

The best things about Paris are its suburbs. I am sorry they are
rebuilding Montmartre. I never grew tired of the view, and one
lodged there cheaply. The huge lumbering omnibus drawn by three
mighty stallions served one for getting about Paris when I first
knew it. And for playing the grand Seigneur there was the _petit
fiacre_ at one franc fifty the course; or two francs by the hour,
with a _pour-boire_ of twenty cents. But the drivers were cruel to
their half-starved horses.

Provence is the most interesting part of France. The best way is
through Blois and the region of the great chteaux. With a Dumas in
one's pocket, one can dream oneself back in the days of the Grande
Monarque; and when one reaches Orange, and has forgotten the
railway, one hears the marching of the legions. I never succeeded in
finding Tartarin's house at Tarascon, but King Ren still holds his
court there, in the twilight. They were repairing the Palace of the
Popes at Avignon when I first visited the town, some thirty-five
years ago, and they were still repairing it when I was there last,
the year before the war. They did not seem to me to have got much
further. Maybe the British workman does not take so disproportionate
a share of the cake for leisureliness as he is supposed to do. But
everything goes slow, or else stands still, in sunny, sleepy
Provence. I used to like it in the summer time before the tourists
came. We English get accustomed to extremes. I remember, after
_djeuner_ in a cool cellar, strolling through Les Beaux. The houses
are hewn out of the rock on which the town stands: so much of it as
still remains. From one of the massive doors a little child ran out,
evidently with the idea of joining me upon my walk. And next moment
came its mother, screaming. She snatched up the child and turned on
me a look of terror.

"Mon Dieu!" she exclaimed. "To promenade here in the heat for
pleasure! You must surely be Monsieur the Devil himself. Or else an
Englishman."

Another time, at St. Petersburg on a mild winter's morning (as it
seemed to me), I went out without a greatcoat; and made a sensation
in the Nevski Prospect.

A curious thing once occurred to me in Russia, persuading me of the
possibility of thought transference. I was staying with my friends
the Jarintzoffs. General Jarintzoff had been the first governor of
Port Arthur, and Madame, most fortunately for me, had constituted
herself my translator; and had made my name fairly well known in
Russia. A friend had dropped in, and the talk had turned on
politics. Madame Jarintzoff was repeating, in Russian, a
conversation I had had with her the day before on India. Suddenly
she stopped and stared at me.

"I am sorry," she said. "I must have misunderstood you. But how on
earth did you know what I was saying?"

Unconsciously, I had interrupted her, and corrected a statement she
had made. I knew hardly a word of Russian, except a few sentences
she had taught me, enabling me to go out by myself. Her voice could
have conveyed nothing to me, but the thought behind it I had
grasped. I may, of course, have gathered it from her expression.

The Russians are a demonstrative people. On stepping out of the
train at St. Petersburg, I found a deputation waiting to receive me.
The moment they spotted me, the whole gang swooped down upon me with
a roar. A bearded giant snatched me up in his arms and kissed me on
both cheeks; and then light-heartedly threw me to the man behind
him, who caught me only just in time. They all kissed me. There
seemed to be about a hundred of them: it may have been less. They
would have started all over again, if Madame Jarintzoff had not
rushed in among them and scattered them. Since then, my sympathies
have always been with the baby. I knew it was affection; but in
another moment I should have burst out crying. I never got used to
it.

There used to be a special breed of fox-terrier popular in Russia,
employed on bear-hunting expeditions. Being very small and very
courageous, they would contrive to get behind the bear, when
sheltering in his cave, and by biting at his heels drive him out.
Some friends at Zarskoe Selo made me a present of one of these
dogs. He was eleven weeks old at the time, but grew up to be quite
the smallest and quite the fiercest animal that I have ever lived
with. His name--I forget the Russian for it--signified "Seven
Devils," but for short I called him Peter. He was useful on the way
back from St. Petersburg to Berlin. He saw to it that we had the
compartment to ourselves; and were both able to lie down and get
some sleep. There were complaints, of course. But in Russia, in
those days, there was a fixed tariff for officials. Railway guards
and ticket-inspectors cost a rouble; station-masters two; and
Divisional Superintendents, with sword, sometimes as much as five.

My wife met me at the station. Peter was lying curled up in a nest I
had made him inside my fur coat. He was then nine inches long, pure
white with blue eyes. He looked half asleep: that was one of his
tricks. Before I could warn her, my wife stooped to kiss him.
Fortunately she was quick, and saved her nose by a hair's breadth. I
remember her delight, two years later, when she ran back into the
bedroom to tell me that Peter had let her kiss him. I would not
believe it until I had seen it myself.

Yet he was an affectionate little beggar, in his cranky way. He
would sit on my desk while I worked; and would never go to sleep
unless he was lying on something belonging to one or another of us.
One of the girls' hats would do as well as anything. He would take
it on to a chair and curl himself up inside it; and his one answer
to all their storming and raving was: "What I have, I hold; what I
take, I keep." Well, it taught them not to leave their things
about. He would keep close enough to me in the country; but the town
always confused him; and often I would lose him. He would make no
attempt to find me, but would just sit down in the middle of the
street where he had last noticed me, and howl. In Munich, he came to
be known as: "The English dog that for his master screams."
Policemen would knock at my door to inform me that he was screaming
in such and such a street; and that I must come immediately and
fetch him home. His chief trouble was that big dogs, as a rule,
would not fight him; and for little dogs he had too much contempt. I
suppose it was inherited instinct. Something about the size of a
bear was his idea of a worthy antagonist. One day at Freiburg, in
the Black Forest, he succeeded in persuading a great Dane to take
some notice of him. So long as Peter merely leapt about in front of
him and tried to reach his throat to kill him, the Dane just walked
on. Peter ran after him and bit his leg. He bit it hard; and the
Dane turned. Peter's every hair bristled with delight. At last, he
had found a gentleman willing to oblige him. But life brings
disappointments both to dogs and men. The Dane was quicker than
Peter had expected. He made a sudden dive and seized Peter by the
scruff of the neck. I overtook them just as the Dane, with Peter
cursing and kicking, reached the middle of a bridge crossing a small
stream. The Dane put his front paws on the parapet and looked over.
All was clear. So he dropped Peter into the middle of the stream,
waited to see Peter's head come up again, and then trotted off.

The stream flowed between walls, and Peter had to swim quite a
quarter of a mile before he found a landing-place. He was still
looking for that great Dane when we left Freiburg for Dresden, some
six months later.

Taking summer and winter together, Dresden is perhaps the most
comfortable town to live in of all Europe. Before the war, quite a
large English colony resided there. We had a club; and a church of
our own, with debt and organ fund just as at home. A _gemtliche_
town, as the Germans say, and cheap. One went to the opera, the
finest in Europe, in a tramcar. It didn't land you in the mud a
quarter of a mile away, but put you down outside the door. And when
you came out at ten, in time for a cosy supper and so home to bed by
twelve, it was waiting there for you. For the best seats you paid
six marks. You did not have to get yourself up. Nobody did, except
the King's relations. (A kindly old gentleman. He sent a special
messenger round to me one morning to tell how much he had enjoyed my
"Three Men on the Bummel.") You just got up from the tea-table, and
went. The only dress restriction was that ladies must take off their
hats. You had no call to tap her on the shoulder, beg her with tears
in your eyes to do so, and wonder if she would. The gentleman at the
door, in a uniform suggestive of a Field-Marshal, had seen to all
that. She was not bound to take off her hat. She could keep it on
and go home again. It was only if she wanted to get in to hear the
opera that she had to take it off, and leave it in the Garde-robe.
But then the Garde-robe cost twopence, and was surrounded with
looking-glasses. They think of these things, in Germany. Another
Hunnish law that always shocked the English visitor at first, was
one forbidding him to scatter dirty paper in the street. I once
asked a Turkish celebrity I was interviewing for a newspaper what
had most impressed him on his first arrival in England. We always
asked them that. Generally they said it was the beauty of our women,
or the greenness of our grass, or something of that sort. This
ruffian was new to the business and answered without a moment's
hesitation, "Dirty paper."

A kindly, simple folk, the Saxons. We spent two years in Dresden and
made many friends. On Sunday evenings we had music at each other's
houses. Students from the great music _schule_ would drop in, armed
with their favourite instrument; also full-fledged members of the
orchestra. Marie Hall was a student there--a shy, diffident little
girl; and Mischa Elman.

The Military were gods, and everybody feared and loved them. Gaudy
officers, with clanking swords, would walk the pavements two or
three abreast, sweeping men, women and children into the gutter. But
indoors, they could be quite human. We had a visit from the Kaiser,
during the manoeuvres. He was not popular in Saxony; and that year
made himself still less so. The first-floor window of a country
villa commanded a good view of the operations. It was five o'clock
in the morning. The Kaiser would not wait a moment. A door was
forced open and the Kaiser stamped upstairs, marched into the
bedroom, and threw open the window. The Gndiger Herr with his
Gndigen Frau were in bed. Both were furiously indignant, but had
to lie there till it pleased the Kaiser to tramp out again, without
so much as even an apology. He must always have been a tactless
fool.

There was good skating at Dresden in the winter. Every night the
lake in the Grosser Garten would be swept and flooded. In the
afternoon a military band would play, and there was a comfortable
restaurant in which one took one's tea and cakes. The Crown Princess
would generally be there. She was a lovely woman. She mingled freely
with the people, and was popular with all classes, except her own.
She saw me waltzing one day, and sent for me; and after that I often
skated with her. She was a born Bohemian, with, perhaps, the
artist's love of notoriety. The ponderous respectability of the
Saxon Court must have weighed upon her like a nightmare. But there
is no need to believe all the stories that were told against her. A
man I knew well, an Irish doctor, got himself mixed up with the
business; and was given forty-eight hours to clear out of Dresden,
taking all his belongings, including his family, with him. He was in
good practice there, and it ruined him. It transpired afterward that
he was guiltless of all; except maybe of having talked too much. But
the court had got its dander up, and was hitting out all round. His
name was O'Brien. He was aware of his national failing. I asked him
once to support me in a resolution I was putting to the club.

"Don't, my dear J.," he begged me. "Don't ask me to get on my legs.
If I once start talking I go on for ever. And the Lord knows what
I'll say."

We had the same sort of trouble with G. B. Shaw, another Irishman,
on the dramatic committee of the Authors' Club. Shaw could be, and
generally was, the most exemplary and helpful of committee men. But
every now and then the old O'Adam would assert itself.

"Speaking of musical glasses," he would interrupt, "I'll tell you a
thing that happened to a play of my own."

The anecdote would have all Shaw's delightful wit and inconsequence,
and would invariably lead to another. Carton, our chairman, would
take out his watch, and lay it ostentatiously upon the table. But
hints were of no use when once Shaw had got into his stride. Carton
in the end would have to use his hammer.

"I'm sorry, my dear Shaw," he would say, "I should love to hear the
end of it. We all should, I am sure. But----"

With a gesture he would indicate the agenda paper.

"I'm sorry," Shaw would answer. "You're quite right. Now what were
we talking about?"

Knowing Germany well, it would amuse me, if it did not so much
disgust me, to hear the Germans spoken of as brutal and ferocious.
As a matter of fact, they are the kindest and homeliest of people.
Cruelty to animals in Germany is almost unknown. It was Barbarossa
who left his war tent standing that the swallows who had built there
should not be disturbed. Every public park and garden in Germany has7
its Ftterhaus, where, morning and evening, stern officials in grey
uniform spread a table for the "singers," as they call them. They
love the birds in Germany. In the Black Forest, they fix
cart-wheels on the chimney tops, where the storks may build their
nests. Cats are unpopular and rare for the reason that a healthy
cat, in every country, slaughters on an average a hundred birds a
year. How anyone who cares for birds can keep a cat, I have never
been able to understand. The charge I myself should bring against
the German people is that of over indulgence in patriotism. Out of
it have grown most of their follies. The duelling clubs amongst the
students, for example. That he may fight the better for the
Fatherland, the German lad must be made indifferent to wounds and
suffering: so the _mensur_ with all its bloody paraphernalia was
conceived. I attended one or two, while we were living at Freiburg;
and to my horror found I was developing a liking for the smell of
blood. The human tiger is not indigenous to any soil. He roams the
whole world round. In England, we give him the run of the football
field and the prize ring, where he is less harmful. A young
secretary of mine that I took out with me to Freiburg, George
Jenkins by name, first taught the boys there to play football. They
had heard about it and were keen to learn; and when we left, they
were playing it three days a week. The older professors shook their
heads. Almost immediately it had had its effect upon the _mensur_. A
youngster who is going to play for his corps on Saturday does not
want to run the risk of having his eye put out on Friday. The women
were against us, of course. The Frulein took pride in seeing the
face of her Hertzschatz half-hidden behind bandages, but shrank from
him when he came back from the football field dirty and dishevelled.
She agreed with Kipling in thinking him a muddied oaf; and that
fighting was a much more attractive game--for the onlooker, at all
events. But then women and poets (except the really big ones) are
naturally bloodthirsty. Henley, and even dear Stevenson, used to
warble about how fine a thing a blood bath would be for freshening
up civilization. Another thing football did for them in Freiburg was
to encourage them to drink less beer. The Kneiper was another thing
to the debit side of German patriotism. Every true German
hobbledehoy had to be capable of swilling more beer than the
hobbledehoy of any other country. They would turn themselves into
bulging beer-tubs for the honour of Saint Michael. Again, a boy keen
on football thinks about his wind, and goes to bed sober. Perhaps we
overdo sport in England. But, anyhow, it is a fault on the right
side. I should like to see French boys take it up more seriously.

Not far from Freiburg, there stands, upon the banks of the Rhine, a
little fortress town called Breisach. During the middle ages, the
townsfolk of Alt Breisach must have been hard put to it to maintain
their patriotism always at high-water mark. Every few years it
changed hands. Now France would seize it, and then, of course, all
the good citizens of Breisach would have to thank God that they were
Frenchmen; and be willing to die for France. And hardly had the
children been taught to hate the Deutscher Schwein, when, hey
presto! they were Germans once again. God this time had sided with
the Kaiser; and all the men and women of Alt Breisach--all of them
that were left alive--praised "Unserer Gott." Until the next French
victory, when they had to hurry up and praise instead "Notre Dame,"
and impress upon their children the glory of dying for France: and
so on for three hundred years. Patriotism must have been a
quick-change business to the citizens of Alt Breisach.

Tennis, also, was beginning to catch on when we were at Freiburg.
There were only two tennis courts then. Last time I passed through
Freiburg, I could have counted a hundred; and a little red-haired
girl I had taught to play had become Germany's lady champion.

Munich is a fine town, but its climate is atrocious. I used to think
that only we English were justified in grumbling at the weather.
Travel soon convinced me that, taking it all round, English weather
is the best in Europe. In Germany, I have known it to rain six weeks
without intermission. In France, before going to bed, I have stood a
pitcher of water in front of a blazing fire, dreaming of being able
to wash myself in the morning. And, when I woke up, the fire was
still burning, and the pitcher contained, instead of water, a block
of solid ice. In Holland, there is always a cold wind blowing. In
Italy, they have no winter. "In your cold England," they say, "for
six months in the year you have to sit over a fire to keep
yourselves warm. In Italy we have no fires. You can see for
yourself." They are quite right. There isn't even a fire-place. They
carry about a little iron bucket containing two ounces of burning
charcoal. I have never tried sitting on it. It is the only way I can
think of, for feeling any heat from it. Two good friends of mine
have died of cold in Italy. In Russia--well, Englishmen who grumble
at their own climate ought to be made to spend either a summer or a
winter there. I don't care which. It would cure them in either case.

The chief business of Munich is dressing-up. In Munich, it is always
somebody's holiday, and everybody else who has nothing better to
do--and most of them have--join in. For the Christian, there are
carnivals and saints' days. Munich is the paradise of saints. They
swarm there, and each one has his own particular day, winding up
with a dance in the evening. For the more worldly-minded, there are
festivals organized by the guilds; and pageants by the students; and
fancy-dress balls gotten up by the artists. Most folk walk to these
glittering balls. There would not be sufficient cabs for a quarter
of them. On rainy nights, one passes gods and goddesses in
mackintoshes, fairies in goloshes, Socrates and Brunhilda under one
umbrella. On fine nights, the dancers overflow into the streets. On
one's way home to bed, one may be seized by a gang of Knight
Templars and carried off to take part in a witch's sabbath.

German beer is seductive. The trouble is that it does not go to
one's head: the consequence being that one never knows when one has
had enough. I took a Scotchman to the Hofbrau one night.

"See that solemn old Johnny at the table opposite," he said, "looks
like a professor. He's had seven of these mugs of beer--'masses,' or
whatever you call them. I've counted them."

The Frulien was just that moment passing.

"How many beers has my friend had up to now?" I asked her.

"Six," she answered.

"You're one behind him," I said. "You'd better have another."

I ordered it, and he drank it. But he stuck out to the end it was
only his third: which was absurd.

But a little way outside Munich, there is a far-famed brewery, where
they make it different. They brew for a year. Then they placard
Munich, announcing they are ready; and all the town pours forth and
climbs the hill; and in a week, the house is drunk dry and the
garden is closed, till the following spring. They told me it was
strong--"_heftig_." But they did not say how _heftig_. Everybody was
going. We hired a carriage, and I took my girls and their governess.
My wife had left for England, the day before, to see a sick friend.
Our governess, who was from Dresden, said "Be careful." She had
heard about this beer. I claim that I was careful. The girls had
each one mug. I explained to them that this was not the ordinary
beer that they were used to; and that anyhow they were not going to
have any more. It was a warm afternoon. They answered haughtily, and
drank it off. Our governess, a sweet, high-minded lady--I cannot
conceive of her having done anything wrong in all her life--had one
and part of another. I myself, on the principle of safety first, had
decided to limit myself to three. I was toying with the third, when
my eldest girl, saying she wanted to go home, suddenly got up,
turned round and sat down again. The younger swept a glass from the
table to make room for her head, gave a sigh of contentment and
went to sleep. I looked at Frulein Lankau.

"Whatever we do," she said, "we must avoid attracting attention. You
remain here, as though nothing had happened. I will lead the poor
dears away, and find the carriage. A little later, you follow
quietly."

I could not have thought of anything more sensible myself. She
gathered her things together and rose. The following moment she sat
down again: it was really one and the same movement.

"You take the two children," she said, "and find the carriage. Then
come back for me. Hold them firmly, and walk straight out. Nobody is
looking. Go now."

I am very intelligent, and I have formed the habit of taking notice.
I had noticed a common-looking man, of powerful physique, who on
three occasions had passed our table arm in arm with a different
companion; each time he had come back alone. He was now returning
empty-handed. I beckoned to him.

"If you, Frulein Lankau," I said, "and you, my dear Elsie, will
take this gentleman's arm--or rather arms, he will, I am sure,
kindly see you into the carriage. I will rest here, and look after
the child until he returns."

He put one arm round Frulein Lankau, in quite a fatherly way; and
one round Elsie. It seemed to come natural to him.

A few minutes later he reappeared. He lifted up the child without
waking her. As a matter of fact, she did not wake up till much later
in the day. I took his other arm and we sauntered out together. He
mentioned, as he tucked a rug round me, that the price was four
marks. I gave him five, and shook him by the hand.

"I am sorry," remarked Frulein Lankau on the way home, "that dear
Mrs. Jerome was called back to England to see her sick friend. And
yet, perhaps, it was the hand of Providence." Having said which, she
went to sleep.

Poor Frulein! She had much faith in Providence. She died of
starvation during the blockade.

Lenbach, the painter, was a prominent figure in Munich, when we were
there. His daughter was a beautiful child, then about six years old.
Her mother was away; and she did the honours of the studio with a
grave dignity. Most of the visitors would want to kiss her. But
there she drew the line, putting out her little hand with a
reproving gesture. Another interesting party I met at Munich was a
grand-looking, red-haired dame. She was the wife of a Baron. They
were common then in Germany. She lived in a sombre, silent street,
the other side of the river; and few people associated her with
Clotilde von Rdiger, who, at seventeen, had been the talk of
Europe. Meredith tells her story in "The Tragic Comedians": A
passionate, mad love affair. She, of the older nobility. He, Jew,
rebel, demagogue, stormy leader of the people. Aristocratic family
at first unbelieving, then furious, as was to be expected. All the
material of an historical romance, the characters still living.
Heroine devoted, ecstatic, defying her world for love. Hero,
magnificent, all daring. In the last chapter, shot dead by high-born
rival, the suitor approved and favoured by stern parents. So far,
all in order. We prepare to shed our tears. And then the curious
epilogue. Clotilde von Rdiger gives her hand to Prince Romaris, the
man who killed her lover. Meredith understands her, and is thus able
to forgive. He explains her to us, but leaves us still puzzled.
Talking to her--one tactfully avoids religion, politics or
sex--about the opera, her stage experiences in America; answering
her inquiries as to whether one takes lemon in one's tea, and so
forth, it is difficult to dismiss the dismal Gastzimmer with its
shabby, shop-made furniture, and think of her flaming youth, when
she made havoc in the world.

One of the reasons that snobbery hardly exists upon the Continent
must be that titles are so plentiful. Among others in Munich, there
was an Italian Prince, of lineage dating back to Charlemagne, whom
we came to know well. His wife, who was a Princess in her own right,
had her "At Home" on Thursdays. They lived in a three-roomed flat
not far from us. A charming little man. On Thursday mornings, one
could always meet him in the neighbourhood of the Theatinerstrasse,
with a basket on his arm, selecting pretty cakes and fancy biscuits
against the afternoon's reception. He did most of the marketing. He
was so clever at it, the Princess would explain. She, herself, took
more interest in cooking. Another lady we knew, an Austrian
Countess, won a carriage in a lottery. Originally, it must have been
intended for a circus: a gorgeous affair, all yellow and gold,
suggesting a miniature of our own dear Lord Mayor's coach. But it
never occurred to her that there was anything ridiculous about it.
Seated in it, very upright, behind an ancient, raw-boned steed,
hired by the hour from a livery stable, and a little coachman in a
chocolate coat belonging to the eighteenth century, she would
solemnly, of afternoons, make the tour of the Englischer Garten. Our
Dienstmdchen was related to her Dienstmdchen, and we came to know
that the poor lady had put aside many a small comfort to pay for
that hired horse and little coachman. But the charm of the whole
turn-out was that none could pretend they had not seen and
recognized it. Through the throng it would make its way, the
cynosure of every eye. Hats would be raised, and fair heads bowed.
The Countess, her old dull face transfigured, would shower her
gracious acknowledgments.

There was a large English Colony in Brussels before the war. It is a
cheap town to live in: provided you possess a knowledge of the
language and are quick at mental arithmetic. At first, the new
arrival, on being introduced to fellow-countrymen, is often
perplexed.

"Mr. and Mrs. Blankley-Nemo," you whisper to your wife. "I seem to
know the name. Where have we met them?"

"I can't be sure," your wife answers. "I know her face quite well."

Experience teaches you not to say anything much at the time, but to
make discreet inquiries later on.

"Remember her face!" laughs your friend. "Well, you ought to. It was
in all the newspapers every day for a fortnight. Interesting case.
Three co-respondents. They called them 'The Triple Alliance.' Nemo
seems to have been the leading member. Anyhow, he married her. Nice
people. Give jolly little dinners."

Another, whose name sounds familiar, turns out to be an ex-company
promoter, about whose previous address it is not considered
etiquette to make inquiry. During our stay of two winters in
Brussels I make the acquaintance of three gentlemen, all of whom, so
they themselves informed me, had been known as the "Napoleon of
Finance": an unfortunate family, apparently.

An added trouble besetting the newly arrived is the habit among
Brussels tradesmen of calling and leaving their cards. There is
nothing on the card to indicate the nature of the compliment. Just
the gentleman's name and address. My wife and I made a list. None of
their ladies had accompanied them, so far as we could tell; but
maybe that was a custom of the country. On Sunday afternoon, we
started on a round. The first people we called on lived over a
grocer's shop. They were extremely affable; and yet we had a feeling
that, for some reason, they had hardly been expecting us. It was so
pronounced that we could not shake it off. My wife thought it might
be that they were Sabbatarians; and apologized for our having come
on a Sunday. But it was not that. Indeed, they were emphatic that
Sunday was the most convenient day we could have chosen; and hoped,
if ever we thought of calling upon them again, that it would be on a
Sunday. They offered to make us tea; but we explained that we had
other calls to make and at the end of the correct twenty minutes we
departed.

The next people on our list lived over a boot shop. "The
International Shoe Emporium." Their door was round the corner, in a
side street. Monsieur was asleep, but Madame soon had him awake; and
later the children came down and the eldest girl played the piano.
We did not stop long, and they did not press us. Madame said it was
more than kind of us to have come, and was visibly affected. The
entire family came to the door with us, and the children waved their
handkerchiefs till we had turned the corner.

"If you want to finish that list," I said to my wife, "you take a
cab. I'm going home. I never have cared for this society business."

"We will do one more," said my wife. "At least we will see where
they live."

It turned out to be a confectioner's. The name was over the door. It
was the third name on our list. The shop was still open.

"We'll have some tea here," said my wife.

It seemed a good idea. They gave us very good tea with some quite
delicious cream buns. We stayed there half-an-hour.

"Do we leave cards, or pay the bill?" I asked my wife.

"Well, if the former," explained my wife, "we shall have to ask them
to dinner."

There is a vein of snobbery in most of us. I decided to pay the
bill.

The late King Leopold was the most unpopular man in Brussels when we
were there. It was the time when the Congo horrors were coming to
light. One hopes, for the credit of the Belgians, this may have had
something to do with it. The people would rush to the windows, when
his carriage came in sight, and hastily draw down the blinds. In the
streets, he was generally followed by a hooting crowd. His brother,
the Vicomte de Flandres, was much liked. A quaint old gentleman. He
would promenade the Avenue Louise, and talk to anyone he met: for
preference anyone English. Waterloo is a pleasant bicycle ride from
Brussels; through the Fort de Soignes, where little old Thomas 
Kempis once walked and thought. It was always good fun to take an
Englishman there, and get a Belgian guide I knew, an old Sergeant,
to come with us and explain to us the battle. We would be shown the
Belgian Lion, on a pyramid, proudly overlooking the field; and would
learn how on the 18th of June, 1815, the French were there defeated
by the Belgian army, assisted by the Germans, and some English.

We tried to winter once in Lausanne. But Swiss town life holds few
attractions. We had a villa at the top of the hill. The view was
magnificent. But of an evening one yearns rather for the caf and
the little theatre. Oswald Crawford and his wife were staying at the
Beau Rivage. It was there that he invented Auction Bridge. I used to
go down and play with him. He was tired of the old game, and was
working out this new idea with the help of some French officers. I
took a dislike to invalids that winter. The Beau Rivage was given
over to them. There were men and women who would take seven
different medicines with their dinner, and then sit nipping all the
evening. Young girls would lure you into a corner, and tell you all
their kidney troubles; and in the middle of a game your partner
would break off to give an imitation of the sort of spasms that had
happened to him in the night. It was difficult at times to remember
what were trumps.

It gave me a good conceit of myself, living abroad. I found I was
everywhere well known and--to use the language of the early
Victorian novel--esteemed and respected. I cocked my head and forgot
the abuse still, at that time, being poured out upon me by the
English literary journals. If it be true that the opinion of the
foreigner is the verdict of posterity, said I to myself, I may come
to be quite a swell dead author.

Speaking of my then contemporaries, Phillpotts I found also well
read, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Zangwill was known
everywhere in literary circles. Barrie, to my surprise, was almost
unknown. I was speaking of him once at a party in Russia. "Do you
mean Mr. Pain?" asked one of the guests. Shaw had not yet got there.
Wells was popular in France, and Oscar Wilde was famous. Kipling was
known, but was discussed rather as a politician than a poet.
Stevenson was read and Rider Haggard. But of the really
great--according to Fleet Street--one never heard.




CHAPTER X

THE AUTHOR AT PLAY


Advanced friends of mine, with a talent for statistics, tell me
that, when the world is properly organized, nobody will work more
than two hours a day. The thing worrying me is, what am I going to
do with the other twenty-two. Suppose we say seven hours sleep, and
another three for meals: I really don't see how, without over-eating
myself, I can spin them out longer. That leaves me fourteen. To a
contemplative Buddhist this would be a mere nothing. He could, so to
speak, do it on his head--possibly will. To the average Christian,
it is going to be a problem. It is suggested to me that I could
spend most of these hours improving my mind. But not all minds are
capable of this expansion. Some of us have our limits. During the
process, I can see my own mind wilting. It is quite on the cards,
that instead of improving myself I'd become dotty. Of course, my
fears may be ungrounded. One of Shaw's ancients, in "Back to
Methuselah," to whom some young persons have expressed their fear
that he is not enjoying himself, retorts in quite the Mrs. Wilfer
manner: "Infant, one moment of the ecstasy of life as we live it
would strike you dead." After which, according to the stage
directions, he "stalks out gravely." And they, the young persons,
"stare after him, much damped." Just as one feels poor Mr. Wilfer
would have done. It may come to that. Like the old road-mender, who
sometimes sat and thought, and sometimes just sat, we may eventually
acquire the habit of doing nothing for fourteen hours a day without
injury to our liver. But it will have to come gradually. In the
interim, we shall have to put in more play.

I have wasted a good deal of time myself on play. Gissing, in a
short story, relates the history of a tramp. I have never been able
to make up my mind whether Gissing intended the story to be humorous
or tragic. He is quite a superior young tramp, fond of flowers and
birds. He does not write poetry--is always a bit too tired for
that--but thinks it. Not of much use in the world--perhaps few of us
are--but, on the other hand, harmless. Unfortunately, for everybody,
he awakens love in the bosom of a virtuous young woman. She reforms
him: persuades him of the sin of idleness, the nobility of labour.
For her sake, he borrows money and starts a grocer's shop; works up
from bad to worse till he becomes a universal stores; and ends
eventually a bloated capitalist. I have always told that story to my
conscience whenever it has reproved me for not sticking closer to my
desk. I'd only have written more books and plays: might have ended
as a best seller, or become a theatrical manager.

The genius has no call to shirk his work. He likes it. Shaw never
wastes his time. Hall Caine is another. You hear that Hall Caine has
gone to Switzerland for the winter. You picture him dancing about on
a curling rink with a broom; or flying down a toboggan slide
without his hat shouting "Achtung." You find him in his study, at
the end of a quiet corridor on the top floor of the hotel, doing
good work. I lured him out into the snow one day. He was at St.
Moritz, at the Palace Hotel, and I was at Davos with my niece. It
was snowing. Sport was off. But Satan can always find some mischief
for idle legs. It occurred to us to train over and disturb Hall
Caine in the middle of his new novel. It happened to be "The
Christian." Often a good book will exert an influence even on the
author himself. He received us gladly and when, after lunch, I
proposed a walk, answered with gentleness that he would be pleased.

He said he knew a short cut to Pontresina. It led us into a
snowdrift up to our waists.

"I know where we are now," said Caine. "We are in a hollow. We ought
to have turned to the right."

We turned to the right, then and there. A minute later, we were up
to our necks.

"I've been to Pontresina," I said. "It's not particularly
interesting."

"Perhaps you're right," said Caine.

It is easier to get into a snowdrift, than to get out. It was dusk
before we reached Celerina. We left Caine walking up the railway
track, and made ourselves for the station. It was still snowing.

"No joke," I said, to my niece in the train. "We might have been
buried alive. Such things often happen."

My niece, Nellie, is a pious girl, and a great admirer of Hall
Caine.

"I should have felt anxious," she said, "if we hadn't had Mr. Hall
Caine with us. I felt so sure that Mr. Caine was being watched
over."

St. Moritz used to be a homely little place. The Kuln was the only
hotel, practically speaking. My wife and I stayed at the Palace the
first winter it opened. They charged us seven francs a day,
inclusive. I am told that since then prices have gone up. About a
dozen of us had the place to ourselves: among us a retired Indian
General who was keen on skating.

"Haven't had a pair of skates on for forty-five years," he confided
to me the first morning. "Used to be rather a dab at it. Daresay it
will soon come back."

A sporting old fellow! He had had pads made: two for his knees, two
for his elbows, and one for the back of his head.

"My nose I can always save with my hands," he explained. "And the
only other place doesn't matter. It's bones that we have to be
careful of, at my age."

Jacobs contents himself with bowls. As he points out, it is a game
you can play without getting hot and excited, and losing your
dignity. Phillpotts and his wife used to be good tennis players, in
the old days at Ealing--how many years ago there is no call to
discuss. Lawn tennis had not long come in. We used to play it with
any kind of racquet. Keen players designed their own. Some were the
shape of a kidney, and others bent like an S, with the idea of
giving the ball a twist. It was not till the time of the Renshawes
that we settled down to a standard size and form. There was a period
when we played it--those of us who wished to be in the fashion--in
stiff shirts and stand-up collars; and women wore trains which they
held up as they ran. W. S. Gilbert, always original, would persist
in having his court twenty feet too long. I forget the argument. It
was about as long as the court. He was an obstinate chap. I remember
one man making him awfully ratty by shouting out in the middle of a
game--he hadn't thought to notice the court before we started:

"I say, Gilbert, what are we supposed to be doing? Playing tennis or
rehearsing a Bab Ballad?"

Tennis is the only active game that a man can play when he is old.
Golf I have always regarded as a remedy rather than a game. A friend
of mine was completely cured of hay fever by a six months' course of
golf. For most nervous complaints it is excellent. Doctors used to
recommend "a little gentle carriage exercise." Now they prescribe
golf. Much more sensible. A rattling good game of tennis I have seen
played by four men whose united ages totalled two hundred and forty
years. I had a first-class court at "Monks Corner" on Marlow Common.
It costs much labour to keep a grass court in good condition. They
say that at Wimbledon, on the centre court, each blade of grass has
its own pet name. I didn't go so far as that, but there was rarely a
day I did not spend an hour there on my knees. Wilfred Baddeley--he
held the All England Championship for three years--said it was the
best private grass court he had ever played on. We used to get good
players there. My neighbour Baldry, the art critic, had laid down a
cement court, and a short path through the wood connected them. Both
courts were well sheltered. So, except in flood time, we could
always be sure of a game. Mrs. Lambert Chambers is a delightful
partner to play with. She puts quietness and confidence into one. It
seems quite an easy game. We had the Italian champion, one summer.
He had an impossible service. He would put a backward spin on the
ball. It would drop just over the net, and bounce backward.
Wimbledon had to summon a meeting, and hastily make a new rule: to
the effect that, in service, the ball must continue a forward
course. In play, the stroke is still permissible. It is a most
irritatingly difficult stroke to counter. The only chance is to
volley, and even then there is the devil in it. Kathleen McKane and
her sister, when they were little girls, used often to come over.
The family generally put up for the summer at the lock-keeper's
house at Hambledon, which was just a bicycle ride.

Doyle was an all-round sportsman; but was at his best, perhaps, as a
cricketer. I was never any good at cricket myself. I had no chance
of learning games as a boy, and cricket is not a thing you can pick
up any time. Barrie was a great cricketer, at heart. I remember a
match at Shere, in Surrey. We had a cottage there one summer. It was
a little Old World village in those days. There was lonely country
round it: wide-stretching heaths, where the road would dwindle to a
cart track and finally disappear. One might drive for miles before
meeting a living soul of whom to ask the way: and ten to one he
didn't know. Barrie had got us together. He was a good captain. It
was to have been Married _v._ Single. But the wife of one of the
Married had run away with one of the Singles a few days before. So
to keep our minds off a painful subject, we called it Literature
_v._ Journalism. Burgin, who was then my sub-editor on _The Idler_,
caught a ball hit by Morley Roberts, I think. But it came with such
force that it bowled Burgin over. He turned a somersault, and came
up again with the ball still clutched in his hands. Burgin argued
that the ball had not touched the ground, and that therefore the
catch ought to count. There was a distinct mark of mud on the ball.
But Burgin said that was there before he caught it. He had noticed
it. I forget how the argument ended.

Doyle was great on winter sports; and was one of the first to
introduce ski-ing into Switzerland. Before that, it had been
confined to Norway. All Davos used to turn out to watch Doyle and a
few others practising. The beginner on skis is always popular. My
own experience has convinced me that it is, practically speaking,
impossible to break your neck, ski-ing. There may be a way of doing
it: if so, it is the one way I haven't tried. I must have been
forty-five when I first put on skis. I had the advantage of being a
good skater, and knowing all that could be done with the
old-fashioned snow-shoe. Eventually I became fairly proficient. But
were I to have my time over again, I would not leave it quite so
late. Back somersaults, and the splits are exercises less painfully
acquired in youth.

But it was worth the cost. The last time I put on skis was at Arosa,
the first year of the war. We were an oddly mixed lot. American
girls and German officers skated hand in hand. French, Germans and
Italians clung together on the same bob-sleigh. A kind gentleman
from St. Petersburg, who claimed to be related to the Tzar, gave
lessons in Russian every morning to three Austrian ladies from
Vienna, who were fearful that after the war they might have to talk
it. We were all on the best of terms with one another. Sport is a
shameless internationalist. It was the last day of my holiday. Arosa
is an excellent centre for ski-ing. I had had some fine runs and was
in good form. I hired a boy from the village to come with me: and
climbed the slopes of the Weibhorn. No experienced skier ever goes
out alone. There are positions, quite easy to fall into, from which
it is anatomically impossible to rise without assistance. The snow
was just perfect that day. There had been a slight fall in the
night, and the surface had not yet frozen. We climbed for two hours;
and then on a narrow plateau we stripped the skins from our skis and
fastened them round our waists, tightened our straps, and launched
forth. Often have I envied the swallows, watching them sweep on
poised wing downward through the air till they almost touch the
ground. I envy them more now that I know what it feels like. I can
imagine only one more wonderful sensation, and that is the
"jump"--an ugly word that does not really describe it. The signal is
given to go, and the skier gently moves forward, skis straight, side
by side, with the knees just bent. The hard, beaten track grows
steeper. The pine trees glide past him, swifter and swifter.
Suddenly the trees divide: the track heads straight as an arrow
to--nothing. And then that glorious leap into sheer space with arms
outstretched and head thrown back. I wonder how long it seems to him
until the earth comes rushing up to meet him, and he is flying
through the cheering crowd towards the flagstaff. It only wants
nerve.

One of the most dangerous things that can happen when ski-ing is to
strike a sunk-fence. A broken ankle is generally the result of that;
and once I came upon a man, sitting on the edge of a precipice, over
which his skis were projecting. He dared not move. He had plunged
his arms into the snow behind him and was hoping it would not give
way. But having regard to all the dangers that a skier is bound to
face, the marvel is that so few accidents occur: and even were they
umpteen times as frequent, I should still advise the average
youngster to chance it.

The thing to beware of is exhaustion. Ski-ing, like riding, requires
its own particular set of new muscles. Until these have been built
up, avoid long excursions. It was at Villars I first put on skis.
One, Canon Savage, got up a ski-ing party and asked me to come in. I
told him I was only a beginner, but he said that would be all right;
they would look after me; and at eight o'clock the next morning we
started. On the way home, I found it impossible to keep my legs. I
would struggle up merely to go down again. Towards dusk, I fell into
a drift, and lost my skis. The fastenings had become loosened. They
slipped away from under me, and I watched them sliding gracefully
down the valley. They seemed to be getting on better without me. I
had taken an equal dislike to them and, at first, was glad to see
them go. Until it occurred to me that with nothing on my feet but a
pair of heavy boots, I had not much chance--in my then state of
exhaustion--of extricating myself. I shouted with all the breath I
had left. Maybe it wasn't much; and anyhow the Canon and his party
were too far ahead to hear me. Fortunately a good Christian, named
Arnold, thought of me and came back. I mentioned the incident to the
Canon the next morning, but his sense of humour proved keener than
mine. He found it amusing.

I never cared for the English school of skating. I have the idea it
must have been invented by someone with a wooden leg. I learnt
it--sufficiently, at all events, to be able to pass judgment on it.
There is no joy in it. It is difficult, I admit. So, likewise, would
be dancing in a strait-waistcoat. Why do a thing merely because it
is against the laws of nature? Pirouetting around with arms and legs
stretched out, looking like something out of a Russian ballet, may
not be a dignified amusement for an elderly gentleman of middle
weight. But I still enjoyed it up to fifty-eight.

Tobogganing down a carefully prepared snow run soon loses its charm.
It answers too closely to the Chinaman's description of it: "Swish.
Then walk a milee." Beginners can come off at a bend and perform a
few more or less amusing antics before they come to a standstill.
Fortunately they often do, or the spectators would have a dull time.
I remember one winter, a lady at Mrren attempting to steer herself
by means of a pole some twenty feet long, which she used as a
rudder. She wasn't good. At every bump the pole shot up into the
air; and then it was the crowd on the bank that performed the
antics, and did all the swearing. The bob-sleigh is, of course,
another matter. That wants both pluck and skill. Freeman of Davos,
who was skipper, once broke his arm at the beginning of a race, and
yet steered on to the end. It must have been grim work getting her
round those hairpin bends above Klosters, with a splintered bone
sticking into your flesh. The best use to make of the ordinary
toboggan is to take it out for an afternoon's run down the valley.
One walks a little, here and there, where the road is on the level.
In the Gasthaus of the scattered village, one halts to drink a glass
of beer, and to smoke. One glides through pine-woods, looking down
upon the foaming torrent far below. It is good sport dodging the
woodcutters' sledges. The horses watch you out of their quiet eyes,
and jingle their bells as you pass. The children, coming out of
school, bar your way. You shake your fist at them and plunge on
headlong. You know that, at the last moment, they will leap aside.
But you must be prepared for snowballs. You overtake stout farmers'
wives, seated upright with their basket of eggs between their knees;
and exchange a grave "Grss Gott." And so on till you reach the
sleepy town at the gateway of the valley. There you take coffee,
with perhaps a glass of schnapps. Then home in the little bustling
train, crowded with chatty peasant folk; and maybe, if your seat is
near the stove, you fall asleep.

Climbing, so far as Switzerland is concerned, will soon be a thing
of the past. Every peak will have its railway. The fine thing was to
talk about it afterwards, round the great pitcher of wine in the
Gastzimmer of the village inn, listening to the wisdom of the
guides, comparing notes with your fellow climbers, recounting your
dangers and hairbreadth escapes. Who cares to do that now, when a
sportsman in spats and a jazz jumper may, at any moment, burst in
upon your tale of peril and exhaustion with a cheery: "Oh, yes, we
bumped up there this morning by the nine forty-five. Not a bad view,
but a rotten lunch"?

Only on one occasion have I been mixed up with a mishap. We were
crossing a glacier, and my friend Frank Mathew fell into a crevass.
We were roped together, and he did it so carelessly that he nearly
pulled me in after him. The guide, of course, stood firm; but it
took some time to get him out. I was all for going on; but Mathew
took a more serious view of it; and we helped him to limp home.

Frank Mathew was a nephew of Father Mathew, the great temperance
preacher. Frank wrote delightful Irish stories for _The Idler_. I am
convinced he would have made a name for himself in literature if he
had stuck to it. Alas! he came into money and married happily.

A snow slope is the most dangerous thing to negotiate. One day,
Mathew and I walked up the Scheidegg. The hotel was not then built.
It was only a hut in those days. We were looking forward to getting
something to eat, but found the old landlord too scared to attend to
us, crying, and hardly able to stand. He had been watching through
his telescope, and had just seen three men follow one another down a
snow slope and over one of the precipices of the Jungfrau. Their
bodies were recovered a few days later. They were three young
Italians who had ventured without a guide.

The amateur photographer is the curse of Switzerland. One would not
mind if they took one at one's best. There was a charming photograph
in _The Sphere_ one winter of my daughter and myself, waltzing on
the ice at Grindelwald. It made a pretty picture. But, as a rule,
beauty does not appeal to the snap-shotter. I noticed, in my early
ski-ing days, that whenever I did anything graceful the Kodak crowd
was always looking the other way. When I was lying on my back with
my feet in the air, the first thing I always saw when I recovered my
senses, was a complete circle of Kodaks pointing straight at me.
Poor Rudyard Kipling never got a chance of learning. I was at
Engelberg with him one winter. He was in the elementary stage as
regards both skating and ski-ing; and wherever he went the Kodak
fiends followed him in their hundreds. He must have felt like a
comet trying to lose its own tail.

I took him one morning to a ski-ing ground I had discovered some
mile or more away: an ideal spot for the beginner. We started early
and thought we had escaped them. But some fool had seen us, and had
given the hulloa; and before we had got on our skis, half Engelberg
was pouring down the road.

Kipling is not the meekest of men and I marvelled at his patience.

"They might give me a start," he sighed; "I would like to have had
them on, just once."

Engelberg is too low to be a good sports centre. We had some muggy
weather, and to kill time I got up some private theatricals.
Kipling's boy and girl were there. They were jolly children. Young
Kipling was a suffragette and little Miss Kipling played a
costermonger's Donah. Kipling himself combined the parts of
scene-shifter and call boy. It was the first time I had met Mrs.
Kipling since her marriage. She was still a beautiful woman, but her
hair was white. There had always been sadness in her eyes, even when
a girl. The Hornungs were there also, with their only child, Oscar.
Mrs. Hornung, _ne_ Connie Doyle, was as cheery and vigorous as
ever, but a shade stouter. Both boys were killed in the war.

It was election time in England, and the hotel crowd used to
encourage Kipling and myself to political argument in the great
hall. I suppose I was the only man in the hotel who was not a
Die-hard conservative. Kipling himself was always courteous, but not
all the peppery old colonels from Cheltenham and fierce old ladies
from Bath were. Notwithstanding, on wet afternoons, when one
couldn't go out, it wasn't bad sport. Conan Doyle in his memoirs
writes me down as one "hot-headed and intolerant in political
matters." When I read the passage I was most astonished. It is
precisely what I should have said myself concerning Doyle. I suppose
the fact is that tolerance is another name for indifference. A man
convinced that his views, if universally adopted, would be of
ineffable service to humanity, is bound to attribute opposition to
stupidity or else to original sin. Socrates himself--if Plato is to
be trusted--was quite an intolerant person. I am not sure that,
arguing with Socrates, I would not rather he called me a fool and
have done with it, than proceed to prove it to me, step by step,
according to that irritating method of his. Thrasymachus, I am
prepared to wager, thought Socrates one of the most intolerant men
he had ever met. If Doyle can get into touch with Thrasymachus, he
might put it to him if I am not right. Not until we have come to see
that man's goal lies within him, not without--that what we call the
"progress of the Race" is never towards the truth, but always round
it, do we become tolerant--on most matters of opinion.

The road has disappeared. The motor track has taken its place. But
the wheel is a poor substitute for the ribbons. I speak as an old
coachman. It was good sport, going for a drive with jolly horses
that you loved; who knew they were part of the game, and took care
that it never got dull. I have a city friend who, in the old days,
whenever he would take his mind off business worries, would have out
his dog-cart, and drive tandem through Piccadilly and the Broadway,
and so home by Richmond Hill and Brentford. Now, he takes out his
motor, and all he has to do is to watch the policeman. It is no help
to him whatever. Driving a coach and four was interesting but,
compared with tandem driving, it was restful. In a team your leaders
were coupled together and, unless they had talked it over beforehand
and arranged upon a signal, could not suddenly turn round and look
at you. Your tandem leader could, and sometimes would; and then you
had to be quick with the flick of your whip: and maybe an oath or
two, thrown in. Of course, the perfectly trained tandem was easy to
take anywhere; but such was only for the rich: and, after all, there
was more fun when your horses were not mere machines, and you had to
watch their twitching ears and try to guess what they were
thinking. I had a little Irish horse. He was a born leader. I did
not have to drive him, beyond just giving him a general idea of
where I wanted to get. He would pick his own way through an
agricultural town on market day, leaving me to concentrate myself
upon the wheeler. But that was when he was feeling good. And when he
wasn't, he was just a little devil. I had some Oxford boys staying
with me one summer. The horses hadn't been out all day, and the boys
suggested a tandem drive by moonlight. We didn't take my old
coachman, and he didn't clamour to come.

"I should keep my eye on the Little 'un, if I were you, sir," he
advised me, as he handed me the reins. "I don't like the way he has
been picking up his feet."

We started all right. "Pat" let his collar hang and seemed sleepy,
but I knew his head was full of mischief: I could feel it through
the eighteen feet of rein. In the hope of discouraging him, I turned
up a narrow road with a high bank on either side. He still seemed
drowsy, but I wasn't trusting him. It was a winding road. Suddenly,
at a bend, he flung up his head and laid back his ears. "Hold on," I
shouted. The next moment we were charging up the bank. There was
nothing else to be done but to let the wheeler follow: a dear quiet
girl, when left to herself; but Pat always gave her a bit of his
devil. The two men behind were shot out, but hung on, and managed
somehow to scramble back. I wish they hadn't. I could have got on
better without them. We cleared the top, and then they started
cheering. We went through that cornfield at twenty miles an hour. I
saw an open gate and made for that. We crossed a lane and through
the hedge to the other side: by good luck it was chiefly bramble.
The two fools at the back, I gathered, were unhurt. They were
singing "Annie Laurie." We took the Ewelme golf links still at the
gallop. They seemed to me to be all bunkers. At the Icknield corner,
I managed to get the horses on to the road. It rises four hundred
feet in a mile and a half; and at Swyncombe, Pat agreed to my
suggestion that we should pull up and have a look at the view. We
returned home, via Nettlebed, at a gentle trot. Beyond having lost
our hats, and the temporary use of my left eye, we were not much
damaged. My Oxford friends crowded round Pat and congratulated him.
The youngest of them, who had an indulgent mother, offered me my own
price for him, then and there. He had been bitten with the idea of
starting a tandem of his own.

Poor Pat! I had to shoot him when the motors came. He had never let
anything pass him on the road, before, and one day, at the Henley
Fair Mile, he ran his last race. He was only a few days short of
twenty then: though you wouldn't have thought it. He had had a good
time.

Tandem driving is asking for trouble, sooner or later. I had driven
tandem, summer and winter, for over ten years, in and out among the
Chilterns, which isn't an easy country; and my escapes had put it
into my head, I suppose, that nothing ever could happen to me. And
then, one afternoon, driving quietly round a corner at eight miles
an hour, I tilted over a heap of stones that had been shot out
there that morning for road-mending and broke poor Norma Lorimer's
leg. She and Douglas Sladen were staying with us at the time. Sladen
had remained behind to write a book-review in answer to a telegram:
which shows how wise it is always to put duty before pleasure.
Fortunately, we were near home, and some labourers quickly came to
our assistance. I got on my bicycle and rode down to Wallingford,
and wired for a bone setter; and when I started to return, I
discovered I had broken an ankle. I had not known it till then, when
my excitement had begun to cool down. I remember we boys had a way
of getting into the Alexandra Palace by climbing a tree and dropping
down inside the fence. One day, I slipped and fell upon the spikes.
I felt nothing at the time, except the desire to put distance
between myself and a young policeman who seemed to have suddenly
sprung out of the earth. It was my mother who noticed that my arm
was in ribbons. Nature, red though she be in tooth and claw,
provides an ansthetic. It was man who invented cold-blooded
cruelty. Miss Lorimer stayed with us for a month, and forgave me.
She talked as if all I had done had been to provide her with a good
excuse for a pleasant holiday. But I was glad of that broken ankle.
I'd have felt mean merely saying "I'm sorry." We used to play
croquet on crutches.

Killing has never attracted me. I give myself no airs. As Gilbert
points out, there is no difference, morally speaking, between the
Judge who condemns a man to be hanged and the industrious mechanic
who carries out the sentence. If I like eating a pheasant (which I
do) I ought, logically, to take a pleasure in shooting it. Possibly,
if we all had to be our own butchers, vegetarianism would be less
unpopular. But there would still remain a goodly number to whom the
cutting of a pig's throat would afford enjoyment; and such, alone,
are entitled to their bacon. There was an old farmer I knew in
Oxfordshire, a simple soul. He owned the shooting over one solitary
field, in the centre of which was a three-acre copse of beech wood.
All round him, for miles, were rich men who spent quite fabulous
sums on rearing pheasants.

"No," he said to me one day during a big shoot. We were leaning over
the gate of his one small field. "No, I don't myself go in for
breeding. I just take what the Lord sends me."

I didn't count them but, speaking roughly, I should say about a
hundred birds had gained the shelter of that three-acre copse while
we had been talking.

"They've got more sense than people think," he added musingly. "They
know they'll find a little corn there; and will be safe, poor
things--till after Christmas."

Riding to hounds would be good sport, if it were not for the fox. So
long as the gallant little fellow is running for his life,
excitement, one may hope, deadens his fear and pain. But the digging
him out is cold-blooded cruelty. He ought to have his chance. How
men and women, calling themselves sportsmen, can defend the custom
passes my understanding. It is not clean.

As for the argument about the dogs, that is sheer twaddle. Is
anybody going to tell me that my terrier will decline to chase
rabbits on Tuesday, because the rabbit he ran after on Monday had
the good luck to get away from him! I only wish it were so. Many a
half-crown I'd have been saved, in my time.

I learnt riding with the Life Guards at Knightsbridge barracks. It
was a rough school, but thorough. You were not considered finished
until you could ride all your paces bareback, with the reins loose;
and when the Sergeant-Major got hold of a horse with new tricks, he
would put it aside for his favourite pupil.

"I've got a daisy for you, sir, this afternoon," he would whisper to
you, his honest face illumined with a kindly grin. "As full of play
as a litter of kittens. Look at her--she's laughing."

You looked. She would be standing with her head stretched out
straight, and all her teeth showing. And you would wonder if the
Sergeant-Major had noticed that, while he was patting her neck, you
had slipped off your spurs and put them in your pocket.

There used to be a belt of well-kept grass along most country roads;
and riding was a pleasant mode of taking a short journey. While for
the joy of a stretch gallop on the turf, there were the commons.
There was a fine straight course from the top of Nuffield Hill to
Heath Bottom, across what are now the Huntercombe golf links. All
the commons have been appropriated by the golfers; and the grass-way
by the roadside is a tangle of briar and weed: and one comes across
the old brown saddle in a corner of the loft, covered with cobwebs,
and dreams of days gone by: as old men will.

The river must have been the mother of sport. Little brown-skinned
picaninnies of the Stone Age must have played upon its banks;
pushed each other in: splashed and shouted; learnt to swim and dive.
Hairy, low-browed Palolithic gentry must have crouched there with
their fishing spears; launched their bark canoes. One day, some
blue-eyed, lithe young cave man must have shouted that first
challenge to a friendly race. Most of my life, I have dwelt in the
neighbourhood of the river. I thank old Father Thames for many happy
days. We spent our honeymoon, my wife and I, in a little boat. I
knew the river well, its deep pools, and hidden ways, its quiet
backwaters, its sleepy towns and ancient villages. It is pleasant to
feel tired when evening comes and the lamp is lighted in the
low-ceilinged parlour of the inn. We stayed a day at Henley for the
Regatta.

It was King Edward who spoilt Henley Regatta. His coming turned it
into a society function, and brought down the swell mob. Before
that, it had been a happy, gay affair, simple and quiet. People came
in craft of all sorts, and took an interest in the racing. One could
count the people on the tow-path: old blues, the townsfolk, with the
farmers and their families from round about. The line of
house-boats, decked with flowers, stretched from Phyllis Court to
the Island, and we all came to know one another. My nephew, Harry
Shorland, brought his houseboat up from Staines by easy stages, one
year. A pair of swallows had started building on it, and came with
him all the way. They finished the nest just in time to take a day
off, and watch the finals.

Goring Regatta was always good fun when Frank Benson, the actor,
stage-managed it. He lived at Goring, and was an all-round
sportsman. One year, his ambition ran away with him. He planned an
aquatic drama. I am a little confused, regarding the details. I was
at the time, I remember. The main idea was that a bevy of beauteous
damsels--some half a dozen of them--had to be rescued from an island
in mid-stream; and that time was the essence of the contract, as we
say in the law. The mistake Benson made, in my opinion (and I was
not the only one), was in arranging for the rescue to be made in a
canoe. Myself, I should have given the young man a fishing punt, or
one of those old-fashioned dinghies that ferrymen used to ply. The
journey might have taken him longer, but time would have been saved
in getting the lady on board and comfortably seated. The first young
man dashed off at a terrific pace. His particular damsel was on the
bank of the island, waiting for him, holding up her skirts. (They
wore them, in those days.) Not a moment was to be lost. The
husband--I think he was the husband: of the whole six, if I remember
rightly--was already in sight. The gentleman, with one foot in the
canoe and one foot on the island, held out his arms; and the lady
sprang. Having said this much, I need hardly add that they both sat
down in the water. Fortunately, the gentleman's right leg was still
in the canoe. With great presence of mind, he dragged the lady on
board and, stepping lightly over her, regained the opposite bank:
where there was much cheering. The second lady may have been
rendered nervous by seeing what had happened to the first. The
general opinion was that, if she had kept her head, it might have
been avoided; and that after all there are worse things than being
soused in the river on a pleasant July afternoon. The remaining four
ladies elected to be rescued by the umpire's launch.

Croquet is an irritating game; but a boon to cripples. I took it up
when I was suffering from a broken ankle. The more you try, the
worse you play. I know a man who never touches a mallet except once
a year, when he enters for the county tournament, and carries off
half the prizes. Children, before they are old enough to have known
trouble, make good players. What the game seems to require is a
thoughtless temperament. My eldest girl, at the age of about twelve,
was a demon. She'd just whack round and hit everything. It used to
make me mad. I remember being Lady Beresford's partner against Lord
Charles and Miss Beresford. Three times that child croquetted her
mother to the other end of the lawn, and then Lady Beresford--very
properly, as it seemed to me--put an end to the atrocity.

"You do that again, my girl, and you go straight to bed," she told
the child. Eventually, Lady Beresford and myself won that game.

Zangwill used to be keen on croquet, but never had the makings of a
great player. Wells wasn't bad. Of course, he wanted to alter all
the laws and make a new game of his own. I had to abandon my lawn,
in the end. I had laid it out in the middle of a paddock where the
farmer kept his young bulls. They couldn't resist the sight of the
fresh green grass. I had fenced it round with barbed wire, but they
made light of that. They would gather into a little group and
confabulate, and then suddenly would lower their heads and charge.
Sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn't: but it used to
distract us. I remember a nightingale that would perch on one of the
sticks and sing--often while we were playing. Nightingales love an
audience. There was another that had his nest in a garden of ours by
Marlow Common. Like the swallows, they return each year to the same
loved spot. If one went to the gate and whistled, he would soon
appear and, perching on the branch of an old thorn, sing for so long
as one remained there, listening.




CHAPTER XI

AMERICA[1]


[1: The Author made three visits to America, separated by a
number of years, the first at a time when both he and America were
younger than they are now. The incidents and the observations made
on all of these visits are recorded together in this chapter. It is
natural in such a brief account that the date, or even the visit, on
which a given incident occurred could not be recorded. The reader
will readily see that, in many cases, the Author is recounting
to-day the American scene of a day that is long since past.--THE
PUBLISHERS.]

"How do you like America?"

"Oh," I said, "are we there?"

"Soon will be," he answered. "How do you pronounce your name?"

I told him. He repeated it louder, for the benefit of the
others--some dozen of them, grouped around him. They made a note of
it.

"What would you say was the difference between English and American
humour?"

A chill north wind was blowing, and I hadn't had my breakfast. I did
my best.

"These things," I said, "are a natural growth, springing from the
soil. In England, to go no further back than Chaucer----" Nobody was
listening. They were all busy writing. I wondered where they had
come from. Out of the sea, apparently. I had been pacing the deck,
scanning the horizon for my first sight of New York, and suddenly
had found myself in the midst of them. Their spokesman was a
thick-set, red-haired gentleman. He had a military manner. The rest
were a mixed collection. Some of them looked to me to be mere boys.

"Say, can you tell us a story?" he questioned me.

I stared at him. "A story?" I repeated. "You want me to tell you a
story?"

"Why, sure," he answered.

What on earth did they mean! Did they want me to start off and spin
them a yarn, at a quarter to eight in the morning? And if so, was it
to be adventure or romance, or just a simple love episode? I had a
vision of being, perhaps, expected to sit down in the centre of
them, taking the youngest of them on my knee.

He saw I was bewildered. "Anything happened to you on the voyage,"
he suggested, "anything interesting or amusing?"

I had the feeling of a condemned prisoner, reprieved at the last
moment. In gratitude, I tried to think of something interesting and
amusing that really might have happened to me. Given time, I could
have done it. But they stood there waiting with their pencils
poised, and I had to fall back upon the truth. I told them the only
thing that had happened--that, three days out, we had sighted an
iceberg. It was a silly little iceberg. I had mistaken it, myself,
for a portion of a wreck; and a man who had been looking at it
through a telescope had pronounced it to be a polar bear. If it had
not been for the bartender, none of us would have known it was an
iceberg. I made the most of it, describing how we had "run before
it," and speaking highly of the Captain. It appeared in the evening
papers under the heading, "The Ice Queen shows her Teeth."

We got on better after that. They saw that, at all events, I was
trying. I told them how the American woman struck me--or rather how
I felt sure she was going to strike me when I saw her; and gave them
(by request) my opinion of Christopher Columbus, the American drama,
the future of California, President Roosevelt and Elizabeth B.
Parker. Who Elizabeth B. Parker was I have never discovered to this
day; but that, I take it, is my fault. I gathered her to be one of
America's then leading idols (they don't last long); and said that
one of my objects in coming to America was to meet her. This seemed
to give general satisfaction, and we parted friends.

I make no charge against the American interviewer. One takes the
rough with the smooth. I have been described, within the same period
of seven months, as a bald-headed elderly gentleman, with a wistful
smile; a curly-haired athletic Englishman, remarkable for his
youthful appearance; a rickety cigarette-smoking neurotic; and a
typical John Bull. Some of them objected to my Oxford drawl; while
others catalogued me as a cockney, and invariably quoted me as
dropping my aitches. All of them noticed with unfeigned surprise
that I spoke English with an English accent. In the city of Prague,
I once encountered a Bohemian ruffian who claimed to be a guide--a
Czecho-Slovakian, I suppose he would be called to-day. He had learnt
English in New York from a Scotchman. Myself, I could not understand
him; but the New York interviewer would, I feel sure, have found in
him his ideal Englishman. To anyone visiting America for a rest
cure, I can see the American interviewer proving a thorn in the
flesh. In pursuit of duty, he makes no bon es about awakening you at
two o'clock in the morning to ascertain your opinion of the local
baseball team; and on arriving at your hotel, after a thirty-six
hours' journey, you may find him waiting for you in your bedroom,
accompanied by a flashlight photographer. But not many people, I
take it, go to America for their health. At Pittsburgh, my wife woke
with a sick headache, and I had to leave her behind me for a day or
two. In the evening, better but still shaky, she dressed herself and
slipped down into the lounge. Little black things were running about
the floor. She thought they were kittens and tried to make friends
with them, but they none of them would come to her. The place was
poorly lighted, but there seemed to be about a score of them;
sometimes more and sometimes less. The chambermaid looked in. She
was an Irish girl. My wife drew her attention to these black
kittens, as she thought them, commenting upon their shyness.

"Oh, they're not kittens," explained the chambermaid, "they're
rats."

It seemed they came up from the kitchen, making use of the air
shaft. If you did not interfere with them or tease them, they did
you no harm.

It was a slack time and the girl, at my wife's earnestly expressed
wish, brought in her sewing. The girl was full of stories about
rats, but doubted their being as intelligent as it was said.
Otherwise, so the girl argued, you would hardly find them in
Pittsburgh.

"But you yourself are in Pittsburgh," said my wife, "and you told me
yesterday you had been here six years."

The girl explained the seeming riddle. She hoped in another three
years to have saved enough to be able to return to Ireland and
settle down. She had pigs and a small holding in her mind, not
unconnected with one named Dennis. Thousands of Irish girls, she
assured my wife, came to America with similar intention. Not all of
them, of course, succeeded, but it was long before they lost hope.
It is the dream of every "Dago" to return to his native village and
open a shop with dollars brought back from America. Nor is it only
the hyphenated alien who looks forward to spending abroad money got
out of the United States. In travelling about, I have discovered
that all the best parts of Europe are inhabited by hundred-per-cent
Americans. Sooner or later, it occurs to the English literary man
that there is money to be made out of lecturing in America. But
without the American interviewer to boom us in advance, and work up
the local excitement for us when we arrive, we would return with
empty pockets. For what I have received in the way of lecturing fees
out of America the Lord make me truly thankful to the American
interviewer: and may his sins be forgot.

The most impressive thing in America is New York. Niagara
disappointed me. I had some trouble in finding it. The tram
conductor promised to let me know when we came to the proper
turning, but forgot; and I had to walk back three blocks. I came
across it eventually at the bottom of a tea garden, belonging to a
big hotel. My tour did not permit me to visit the Yellowstone Park.
But I saw the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, and it struck me as
neglected. The Rockies are imposing, but lack human interest. The
Prairies are depressing. One has the feeling of being a disembodied
spirit, travelling through space, and growing doubtful as to one's
destination. To the European, what America suffers from is there
being too much of it. In Switzerland, one winter, I met a man from
Indianapolis. We were looking out of the window on our way to
Grindelwald.

"This would be quite an extensive country," he said, "if it were
rolled out flat."

In America everything seems to have been sacrificed to making an
extensive country. In Arizona, they point out to you the mirage; but
to the stranger it still looks like salt. The American lakes are
seas surrounded by railways. In New Orleans, there are old-world
nooks and corners, but these are disappearing. The first thing they
do with you in New Orleans is to take you a drive through the
cemeteries. There are miles and miles of them. You go in a
char--banc, and the gentleman with the megaphone draws your
attention to the most important tombs. "Seeing New Orleans" they
call it.

California is beautiful (one can forget the "movies"). I was in San
Francisco the week before the earthquake. My wife and I were the
guests of Bancroft, the historian. I shall never forget the kindness
of himself and his sweet wife. He took us drives into the country
behind two grand grey horses. He was a splendid whip. One afternoon,
he proposed an excursion down into the town: "But we will leave your
dear little lady to rest herself," he said. And, later, I understood
and was grateful to him. It was a curious experience. During the
war, round Verdun, I came across roads that reminded me of that
drive. Every few yards we went down into a hole and often it took
the horses all their strength to pull us out. I asked if there had
been an earthquake; but my host said no. For years the roads had
never been repaired, the mayor and corporation ("Grafters" they are
termed in America) having found another use for the money.

In Florida, one seems to have dropped back into antediluvian times,
or, to be more exact, the third day of the Creation, before God had
quite finished separating the dry land from the waters, and creeping
things sat about, wondering which they were.

Virginia has an atmosphere and speaks English; but the new towns in
the Middle states, with their painted canvas "Broadways," suggest a
Wild West exhibition at Earl's Court. One looks instinctively for
the sign-board, pointing to the switchback. Here and there, New
England reminds one of the old country. I forget who it was said he
would like to come back and see America when it was finished. One
has the fancy that, returning in a thousand years or so, one might
find there little cottages standing in gay gardens; pleasant
rambling houses amid soft lawns and kindly trees. But there will
never rise the clustering chimneys with the blue smoke curling
upward. America will still be central-heated. I missed the friendly
chimneys. Elsewhere in America, there is no country. There are
summer resorts, and garden cities, and health centres; and just
outside the great towns long avenues of "homes," each on its
parallelogram of land. The larger ones have verandahs and towers
and gables; and the smaller ones are painted red. They told me that
the reason why all the houses in America are painted red was that
the Trust made red paint only. You can paint your house red or leave
it alone, according to your taste and fancy. In America, a man who
wants to paint his house any other colour than red is called a
radical. America never walks. I am told that now every fifth
American owns an automobile and the other four crowd in. In my time,
you took a surface car. I used to dream of going for a walk, and
when I asked my way, they would direct me to go straight on till I
came to nine hundred and ninety-ninth street--or some such
number--and there I would find the car.

"But I want to walk," I would explain.

"Well, I'm telling you," they would reply, "you walk to the end of
the block. The car starts from round the corner."

"But I don't want the car," I would persist. "I want to walk--all
the way."

Then they would dive into their pocket and press a twenty-five cent
piece into my hand and hurry off to catch their own car.

But New York reminds you of nothing, suggests no comparison. New
York is America epitomized: fierce, tireless, blatant if you will,
but great. Nature stands abashed before it. The sea crawls round it,
dwarfed, insignificant. Trees, like waving grasses, spring from its
crevices. The clouds are rent upon its pinnacles.

It strikes a new note. Behind the mere bigness is a new idea:
something that you feel is tremendously important. You worry for a
time, wondering. And then suddenly it springs upon you. In London,
Paris, Rome--go where you will in the old world it is the great
cathedral, the spires of a hundred churches, the minarets, towers,
domes, the theatres and palaces that pierce the sky-line: that rise
serene above the market place, the byways of the money-changers. In
New York it is Business Triumphant that towers to heaven,
dominating, unchallenged. The skyscraper alone is visible. Religion,
art: they have their hiding-places, round its feet.

In a town of the middle west, a kind man put me up. He was rich and
had one child, a daughter Margaret, who was the apple of his eye.
She was twelve years old at the time. She had her own banking
account, and drew her own cheques. I remember a conversation between
them one evening. He had just returned home from his office; and she
had fetched him his house shoes and was sitting on his knee.

"I brought off a good stroke of business to-day, Maggie," he said to
her, while stroking her hair. "So I paid five thousand dollars into
your account. How do you propose to invest it?"

The child sat for a while with puckered brows, one arm about his
neck.

"Well," she answered at length, "if, as the papers say, there is
going to be a famine in Russia this winter, hadn't I better put it
into wheat?"

He kissed her.

"That's right," he answered. "I'll fix it up for you in the
morning."

I have made three American tours. It was offered to me to make a
fourth just after the war. My agent assured me there would be no
difficulty about drinks; but there were other reasons also, and I
shirked it. The first must be twenty years ago by now. That it was
not as profitable to me as it might have been was my own fault.
Never in my life have I felt so lost and lonesome as during my first
days in New York. Everything was so strange, so appallingly
"foreign." I had never been outside Europe before. Never, so it
seemed to me, would I be able to adapt myself to the ways and
customs of the country. And then there was the language problem. In
Vevey, on Lake Leman, there sits cross-legged--or used to sit--a
smiling small Italian shoeblack: behind him on the wall a placard
with this wording, "English spoken--American understood." I thought
of him, as I wandered bewildered through the New York streets, and
wondered how long it had taken him.

At the end of a fortnight, I cabled what would now be called an
S.O.S. to my wife, and she, gallant little lady, came to my help.

And she it was who persuaded me to further extravagance, as is the
way of women. Major Pond, or rather his good widow, had booked me a
stupendous tour. It took in every state in the Union, together with
Canada and British Columbia. Five readings a week, the average
worked out; each to last an hour and twenty minutes. I showed my
wife the list. She said nothing at the time, but went about behind
my back, and got round my agents. Among them, they decided that, to
avoid a funeral, I had best have help; and found one Charles
Battell Loomis. He was, I think, the ugliest man I have met. But
that was only the outside of him. All the rest of him was beautiful;
and sad I am to have to speak of him in the past tense. Through him,
I came to know the other America--the America of the dreamers, the
thinkers, the idealists. He took me to see them in their shabby
clubs; to dine with them in their fifty-cent restaurants; to spend
fine Sundays with them in their wooden shanties, far away where the
tram-lines end. He was a wonderful actor, but had never been able to
afford a press agent. His writings, as scattered through the
magazines, were mildly amusing, but that was all. Until he stood up
before an audience and read them: when at once they became the most
humorous stories in American literature. He made no gestures; his
face, but for the eyes, might have been carved out of wood; his
genius was in his marvellous voice. His least whisper could be heard
across the largest hall. He had to be careful when using the
telephone. Once, when I was with him, a Hello girl irritated even
him after a time and, forgetting himself, he shouted "No, I didn't."
There was no answer. After a while the bell boy knocked at the door
to suggest that if we wanted to go on talking we had better come
downstairs. For some reason or another, our telephone had suddenly
gone out of order.

I envied him. The lecturer through America has to cultivate
adaptability. For one night a rich man would hire us to read to his
guests in a drawing-room. He was always very kind, and would make us
feel part of the party. The next evening we would find ourselves
booked to perform in a hall the size of Solomon's Temple, taking
Mr. H. G. Wells' figures as correct. There was a "Coliseum," I think
they called it, down South. I forget the name of the town. But I am
sure it was down South, because of the cotton that floated on the
wind, and turned our hair grey. Even Loomis had found the place
difficult. The first few dozen rows must have heard him. Anyhow they
laughed. But beyond and above brooded the silence of the grave. By
rare chance, we had a few hours to spare the next morning; and
coming across the place I stepped in, wondering how it looked in
daylight. Men were busy hauling scenery about. It served for all
purposes--mass meetings, theatrical performances, religious
revivals, prize fights. On one wet fourth of July, a display of
fireworks had been given there with great success. A small lady in
black was standing just inside the door, likewise inspecting. It was
Sarah Bernhardt. She was billed to play there that evening. She was
finishing a tour with a few one-night stands, and had been
travelling all night. She recognized me, though we had met only once
before, at a Lyceum supper in Irving's time.

"My God!" she said, throwing up her arms. "Why, it's as deep as
hell. How do they expect me to reach them?"

"They don't," I told her. "They want to see you, that's all. They
are a curious people, these Americans. They paid last night to see
me. They must have known they would not hear me."

"But they will not see her," she answered. "They will see only a
little old woman. I am not Sarah Bernhardt until I act. It would be
a swindle."

"Well, isn't that their affair?" I suggested.

She drew herself up. She was quite tall when she had finished--or
looked it.

"No, my friend," she answered, "it is mine. Sarah Bernhardt is a
great artist. And I am her faithful servant. They shall not make a
show of her."

She held out her hand. "Please do not tell anyone that you have seen
me," she said. She drew down her veil and slipped out.

What actually happened I do not know. They were posting notices up
when we left, announcing with regret Madame Sarah Bernhardt's sudden
indisposition.

I have always found American audiences most kind. Their chief fault
is that they see the point before you get there, which is
disconcerting. One morning I woke up speechless with a sudden cold.
I could not even use the 'phone. I telegraphed to my chairman,
explaining, and asking him to call the reading off. In half-an-hour
the answer came back: "Sorry you won't be able to read but do come
or it will be a real disappointment to us we want to see you and
thank you for the pleasure your books have given us as for fee that
has been posted to your agent and is too unimportant a matter to be
talked about among friends."

I went and had a delightful evening. They put me in the middle of
the room and entertained me. We had music and songs and stories. I
whispered a few to my chairman, and he translated them. They turned
the whole thing into a joke. At the end, one of them, a doctor,
gave me a draught to take in bed. I wish I had asked him what it
was. My cold was gone the next morning.

At Salt Lake City, we ought to have arrived with an hour to spare,
instead of which our train was three hours late. A deputation met us
on the platform with hot coffee and sandwiches. They put us into
cabs and took us straight to the platform. An audience of three
thousand people had been waiting patiently for two hours. Our
chairman, in his opening, apologized to us for the train service;
and asked everybody to agree that, as we must be tired, we should be
asked to read for only half-an-hour, unless we felt ourselves equal
to more. Both Loomis and myself felt bucked up, and gave them the
full programme. Not one of them left before the end, which must have
been about twelve o'clock; and if they didn't like it they were good
actors.

A leading Elder put us up in Salt Lake City. He introduced us to his
wife. He noticed I was looking expectant.

"There are no more," he explained. He put his arm round her. "The
modern American woman," he continued, "has convinced us that one
wife is sufficient for any man."

I was told that domestic establishments on a more generous basis
still existed; but they were rare; and later on the law put an end
to them.

It is difficult to know what your audience really thinks of you.
Even if bored, I feel convinced they would pretend to be enjoying
themselves. There are times when hypocrisy can he a virtue. But
hidden behind a newspaper in a smoking car, I once overheard praise
of myself.

"Were you at the lecture last night?" asked one man of another.

"Yes," came the answer in a soft, low, drawling voice. "The wife
thought she'd like to go. I'd never heard of him myself."

"What was he like?"

"Well"--there was a pause. I guessed he was fixing a plug of
tobacco--"for an Englishman--good."

Once only--at Chattanooga--did I meet with disagreement: and then I
was asking for it. Two negroes had been lynched a few days before my
arrival on the usual charge of having assaulted a white woman:
proved afterwards (as is generally the case) to have been a
trumped-up lie. All through the South, this lynching horror had been
following me; and after my reading I asked for permission to speak
on a matter about which my conscience was troubling me. I didn't
wait to get it, but went straight on. At home, on political
platforms, I have often experienced the sensation of stirring up
opposition. But this was something different. I do not suggest it
was anything more than fancy, but it seemed to me that I could
actually visualize the anger of my audience. It looked like a dull,
copper-coloured cloud, hovering just above their heads, and growing
in size. I sat down amid silence. It was quite a time before anybody
moved. And then they all got up at the same moment, and turned
towards the door. On my way out, in the lobby, a few people came up
to me and thanked me, in a hurried furtive manner. My wife was
deadly pale. I had not told her of my intention. But nothing
happened, and I cannot help thinking that if the tens of thousands
of decent American men and women to whom this thing must be their
country's shame, would take their courage in both hands and speak
their mind, America might be cleansed from this foul sin.

American hospitality is proverbial. If I had taken the trouble to
arrange matters beforehand, I could have travelled all over America
without once putting up at an hotel. Had I known what they were
like, I would have made the effort. In the larger cities they are
generally of palatial appearance. If their cooking and attendance
were on a par with their architecture and appointments, there would
be no fault to find with them. But often I have thought how gladly I
would exchange all the Parian marble in my bathroom, all the silver
fittings in my dressing-room, for a steak I could cut with a knife.
It appears from the statistics of the Immigration Bureau that there
arrive every year in the United States well over four thousand
professional cooks. What happens to them is a mystery. They can't
all become film stars.

On the great routes, European customs prevail; but in the smaller
towns, hotels are still run on what is termed the "American plan." A
few days after landing in New York, I went to Albany to give a
reading. I was due on the platform at eight. I did not have any
lunch. I thought I would dine early and afterwards sit quiet. I put
out my clothes and came downstairs. The dining-room was empty. There
didn't seem to be any bell. I found the gentleman who had sent me up
to my room. He was sitting in a rocking-chair, reading a newspaper.

"I beg your pardon," I said. "But are you the hotel clerk?"

"Yup," he grunted and went on reading.

"I am sorry to disturb you," I continued, "but I want the head
waiter."

"What do you want him for?" he said. "Friend of yours?"

"No," I answered, "I want to order dinner."

He was still reading his newspaper. "You haven't got to order it,"
he said. "It will be ready at half-past six."

"But I want it now," I said. The time was a little after four.

He put down his paper and looked at me.

"Say, where do you come from?" he asked me.

"I have come from New York," I answered him.

"You ain't been even there long," he commented. "Englishman, aren't
you?"

I admitted it.

He rose and laid a kindly hand on my shoulder.

"You run along and take a look round the town," he said.
"Interesting city. Anyhow, there's nothing else for you to do, till
half-past six."

I followed his advice. It wasn't really an interesting city. Or
maybe I was not in the mood. At six o'clock I came back and dressed.
I was feeling hungry. When I saw the "menu" I felt hungrier still.
It would have made Lucullus sit up and smile. It covered two closely
written pages, and contained, so far as I could judge, every
delicacy in and out of season.

I order caviare and clam soup, to open with. I was doubtful about
the clam soup, being new to it. But if too rich, I could just toy
with it. The waiter, a youthful gentleman who apparently had mislaid
his coat, remained standing.

"I'll think of the next thing to follow," I said, "while you are
getting that."

"Better think of it now," he said. "We haven't got the time to spare
over here that you have in the old country."

I did not want to antagonize him. I took up the menu again. I
ordered whitebait to follow the soup. I told him I liked them crisp.
A slice of broiled ham with truffles. Peas in butter. Lamb cutlet
with tomatoes. Asparagus. Chicken (I mentioned I preferred the
wing). A caramel ice cream. Dessert, assorted. Coffee, of course, to
finish up with.

I was sorry to miss all the rest; but I had to think of my lecture.
Even as it was I feared I had overdone it.

"That all?" asked the coatless young gentleman.

I thought he meant to be sarcastic, and put a touch of asperity into
my tone.

"That is the order," I said.

He was gone longer than I had expected. When he reappeared he was
carrying a sort of butler's tray. He put it down in front of me,
straightened out the four sides and left me.

There was everything on it--everything I had ordered, beginning with
the caviare and ending with the coffee. All the things (except the
soup and the coffee) were on little white saucers, all the same
size. The whole thing suggested a doll's tea party. The soup was in
a little white pot with a handle. That also might have been part of
the furnishing of a doll's house. One drank it out of the pot--about
a tablespoonful altogether. There were six whitebait and one shrimp.
Thirteen peas. Three ends of asparagus. Five grapes and four nuts
(assorted). Two square inches of ham, but no truffle: the thing I
took for the truffle turned out to be a dead fly. The lamb cutlet I
could not place. I fancy they must have given me the wrong end. The
tomato I lost trying to cut it. It rolled off the table and I hadn't
the heart to follow it up. For some reason or another they had fried
the chicken. I did my best, but had to put it back. It didn't look
any different. I wondered afterwards what happened to it.

I suppose it was not having had any lunch. If I had been by myself,
I'd have put my head down on the tray and have cried. But three or
four other men were feeding near me and I pulled myself together. I
started with the coffee. It was still lukewarm. It seemed a pity to
let it get quite cold. The caviare did not appeal to me. It may have
been the smell. After the coffee, I tackled the ice cream, which by
that time was already half melted. I stole a glance at my
companions. None of them were bothering about a knife. They were
just picking up things with a fork, first from one saucer and then
from another. Somehow they suggested the idea of mechanical
chickens. But it seemed the simplest plan and I followed their
example.

I never got used to it. Natives, to whom occasionally I talked upon
the subject, admitted that, considered as an art, the "European
plan" of dining might be preferable; but would hasten to explain
that America was "too busy"--the spry American citizen had not the
time for all these social monkey tricks. I would leave them,
settling themselves into their rocking-chairs, ranged round the
hotel lounge, preparing to light their cigars and shape their plugs
of tobacco. On my return some two or three hours later, they would
still be there, smoking and spitting.

America can be proud of her railways. An American train with its
majestic engine and its thousand feet of steel cars, is a fine
sight. Always, we were glad to get into them, away from the
comfortless hotels where one is harassed by the bell boy, bullied by
the waiter, and patronized by the clerk. The darky porter welcomes
one with a smile, and is not above being courteous. It is only in
the dining-car that one can hope for a decently cooked meal. In the
sleeping-car there is no telephone over one's bed, no patent
improved radiator to go wrong, and keep one awake all night. There
are stretches where for miles one can look out of the window without
being pestered with advertisements. But one knows one is nearing a
town by the hoardings each side of the track. The magnificent
approach to San Francisco is spoilt by twenty miles of boards,
advertising somebody's stores. "Carter's Little Liver Pills" does
the same thing in England, to a lesser degree. I used to find them
helpful, but have given up taking them, myself. At a Rotary dinner
in London Mr. Carter (not to be personal) made quite a good speech
on the subject of how one could best serve God. Anthony Hope
suggested that one way might be not to mar God's landscapes with
advertisement signs. In New York, I was arrested by a notice in a
shop window. It ran: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest." It was an advertisement for
somebody's spring mattress. Except on a few main routes, punctuality
is rare. There is excuse. The distances are enormous. The permanent
ways are still in the making. Nature plays her tricks upon them. One
does not bother about time-tables--the "schedule" as they call it.
One waits until the message is sent round the town from the dept
that the train is signalled. One day, to my amazement, my train came
in on time. It was at a junction. I had just got out of the branch
train and was wondering what I would do with myself. The
station-master was passing by.

"Any notion when she is likely to turn up," I asked him--"the 11.33
for Sioux Falls?" It was then a minute past the half hour.

"Hurry up," he said, "she's coming in now."

She glided in as he was speaking, and drew up with a soft low sigh
as of self-satisfied content. He was a big, genial man. He looked at
my face and laughed.

"It's all right," he said. "To be quite candid, this is yesterday's
train."

Sioux Falls, by the way, is--or was then--the centre of the American
divorce trade. The hotels were filled with gorgeous ladies waiting
their turn: many of them accompanied by "brothers." It was a merry
crowd. Three ladies, a mother and her two daughters, the younger
just seventeen, sat at the table next to us and were friendly. The
mother had been divorced before, but the two girls were new to it.
They expected to be through by the end of the week.

Roosevelt was President at the time of my first tour; and was kind
enough to express a wish to see me. By a curious coincidence, he had
received that morning a letter from his son, then at school, talking
about my books. He had the letter in his hand when we were shown in.
Somewhat the same thing happened the first time I met Lloyd George.
A relation had written him, a day or two before, urging him to read
my last book. He was then in the middle of it. I couldn't get him to
talk about anything else. There was a delightful boyishness about
Roosevelt. You were bound to like him if he wanted you to. My wife
has still the gloves in which she shook hands with him. They lie in
her treasure box, tied with a ribbon and labelled.

Joel Chandler Harris ("Uncle Remus") lives in my memory. A sweet
Christian gentleman; even if he did spit. We spent an afternoon with
him at Atlanta. Frank Stanton dropped in, and brought with him a
volume of his songs which he had dedicated to me. James Whitcomb
Riley was kind and hospitable, but made me envious, talking about
the millions his books had brought him in.

I was in America when Maxim Gorky came to lecture upon Russia. He
was accompanied by a helpmeet to whom he had not been legally
married. America is strict on this point. So was Henry VIII. At a
Press lunch in Chicago, I sat next to a man who that morning had
published a leader, fiercely demanding the immediate shipping back
to Europe of Maxim Gorky and his "concubine." America must not be
contaminated and so forth. A few evenings before he had introduced
Loomis and myself to his mistress, a pretty Swedish girl with flaxen
hair. His wife was living abroad, the air of Chicago not agreeing
with her. I admit the sign-post argument. I have found it useful
myself. But in America there would appear to be almost more
sign-posts than travellers. I have been about a good deal in
America. My business has necessitated my spending much time in
smoking-cars and hotel lounges. My curiosity has always prompted me
to find out all I could about my fellow human beings wherever I have
happened to be. I maintain that the American man, taking him class
for class and individual for individual, is no worse than any of the
rest of us. I will ask his permission to leave it at that.

The last time I visited America was during the first year of the
war. America then was all for keeping out of it. I had friends in
big business, and was introduced to others. Their opinion was that
America could best serve Humanity in the bulk by reserving herself
to act as peace-maker. In the end, she would be the only nation
capable of considering the future without passion and without fear.
The general feeling was, if anything, pro-German, tempered in the
East by traditional sentiment for France. I failed to unearth any
enthusiasm for England, in spite of my having been commissioned to
discover it. I have sometimes wondered if England and America really
do love one another as much as our journalists and politicians say
they do. I had an interesting talk with President Wilson, chiefly
about literature and the drama. But I did get him, before I left, to
say a little about the war; and then he dropped the schoolmaster and
became animated.

"We have in America," he said, "twenty million people of German
descent. Almost as many Irish. In New York State alone there are
more Italians than in Rome. We have more Scandinavians than there
are in Sweden. Here, side by side, dwell Czechs, Roumanians, Slavs,
Poles and Dutchmen. We also have some Jews. We have solved the
problem of living together without wanting to cut one another's
throats. You will have to learn to do the same in Europe. We shall
have to teach you."

Undoubtedly at that time Wilson was intending to remain neutral.
Whether his later change of mind brought about good or evil is an
arguable point. But for America the war would have ended in
stalemate. All Europe would have been convinced of the futility of
war. "Peace without Victory"--the only peace containing any
possibility of permanence would have resulted.

To the democrat, America is the Great Disappointment. Material
progress I rule out. Beyond a certain point, it tends to enslave
mankind. For spiritual progress, America seems to have no use. Mr.
Ford has pointed out that every purchaser of a Ford car can have it
delivered to him, painted any colour he likes, so long as it's
black. Mr. Ford expresses in a nutshell the mental attitude of
modern America. Every man in America is free to do as he darn well
pleases so long as, for twenty-four hours a day, he does what
everybody else is doing. Every man in America is free to speak his
mind so long as he shouts with the crowd. He has not even Mr.
Pickwick's choice of choosing his crowd. In America there is but one
crowd. Every man in America has the right to think for himself so
long as he thinks what he is told. If not--like the heretics of the
middle ages--let him see to it that his chamber door is locked, that
his tongue does not betray him. The Ku Klux Klan, with its
travelling torture chamber, is but the outward and visible sign of
the spirit of modern America. Thought in America is standardized.
America is not taking new wine, lest the old bottles be broken.

I ask my American friends--and I have many, I know--to forgive me. Who
am I to lecture the American nation?--I feel, myself, the absurdity of
it--the impertinence. My plea is that I am growing old. And it comes to
me that before long I may be called upon to stand before the Judge of
all the earth, and to make answer, concerning the things that I have
done and--perhaps of even more importance--the things that I have left
undone. The thought I am about to set down keeps ringing in my brain. It
will not go away. I am afraid any longer to keep silence. There are many
of power and authority who could have spoken it better. I would it had
not been left to me. If it make men angry, I am sorry.

The treatment of the negro in America calls to Heaven for redress. I
have sat with men who, amid vile jokes and laughter, told of "Buck
Niggers" being slowly roasted alive; told how they screamed and
writhed and prayed; how their eyes rolled inward as the flames crept
up till nothing could be seen but two white balls. They burn mere
boys alive and sometimes women. These things are organized by the
town's "leading citizens." Well-dressed women crowd to the show,
children are lifted up upon their fathers' shoulders. The Law,
represented by grinning policemen, stands idly by. Preachers from
their pulpits glorify these things, and tell their congregation that
God approves. The Southern press roars its encouragement. Hangings,
shootings would be terrible enough. These burnings; these slow
grillings of living men, chained down to iron bedsteads; these
tearings of live, quivering flesh with red-hot pinchers can be done
only to glut some hideous lust of cruelty. The excuse generally
given is an insult to human intelligence. Even if true, it would be
no excuse. In the majority of cases, it is not even pretended. The
history of the Spanish Inquisition unrolls no greater shame upon the
human race. The Auto-da-f at least, was not planned for the purpose
of amusing a mob. In the face of this gigantic horror, the lesser
sufferings of the negro race in America may look insignificant. But
there must be tens of thousands of educated, cultured men and women
cursed with the touch of the tar-brush to whom life must be one long
tragedy. Shunned, hated, despised, they have not the rights of a
dog. From no white man dare they even defend the honour of their
women. I have seen them waiting at the ticket offices, the gibe and
butt of the crowd, not venturing to approach till the last white
man was served. I have known a woman in the pains of childbirth made
to travel in the cattle wagon. For no injury at the hands of any
white man is there any redress. American justice is not colour
blind. Will the wrong never end?




CHAPTER XII

THE WAR


One of my earliest recollections is of myself seated on a shiny
chair from which I had difficulty in not slipping, listening to my
father and mother and a large, smiling gentleman talking about
Peace. There were to be no more wars. It had all been settled at a
place called Paree. The large gentleman said Paris. But my mother
explained to me, afterwards, that it meant the same. My father and
my mother, so I gathered, had seen a gentleman named Napoleon, and
had fixed it up. The large gentleman said, with a smile, that it
didn't look much like it, just at present. But my father waved his
hand. Nothing could be done all at once. One prepared the ground, so
to speak.

"The young men, now coming forward," said my mother, "they will see
to it."

I remember feeling a little sad at the thought that there would be
no more war--that, coming too late into the world, I had missed it.
My mother sought to comfort me by talking about the heavenly warfare
which was still to be had for the asking. But, in my secret heart,
it seemed to me a poor substitute.

With the coming of the Alabama claim things looked brighter. My
father, then President of the Poplar branch of the International
Peace Association, shook his head over America's preposterous
demands. There were limits even to England's love of Peace.

Later on, we did have a sort of war. Nothing very satisfying: one
had to make the best of it: against a King Theodore, I think, a sort
of a nigger. I know he made an excellent Guy Fawkes. Also he did
atrocities, I remember.

At this period France was "The Enemy." We boys always shouted
"Froggy" whenever we saw anyone who looked like a foreigner. Crcy
and Poitiers were our favourite battles. The "King of Prussia," in a
three-cornered hat and a bob-tailed wig, swung and creaked in front
of many a public-house.

I was at school when France declared war against Prussia in 1870.
Our poor old French Master had a bad time of it. England, with the
exception of a few cranks, was pro-German. But when it was all over:
France laid low, and the fear of her removed: our English instinct
to sympathize always with the underdog--not a bad trait in
us--asserted itself; and a new Enemy had to be found.

We fixed on Russia.

Russia had designs on India. The Afghan War was her doing. I was an
actor at the time. We put on a piece called "The Khyber Pass"--at
Ashley's, if I remember rightly. I played a mule. It was before the
Griffith Brothers introduced their famous donkey. I believe, if I
had been given a free hand, I could have made the little beast
amusing. But our stage-manager said he didn't want any of my damned
clowning. It had to be a real mule, the pet of the regiment. At the
end, I stood on my hind legs, and waved the British flag. Lord
Roberts patted my head, and the audience took the roof off, nearly.

I was down on my luck when the Russo-Turkish War broke out. There
were hopes at first that we might be drawn into it. I came near to
taking the Queen's shilling. I had slept at a doss-house the night
before, and had had no breakfast. A sergeant of Lancers stopped me
in Trafalgar Square. He put his hands on my shoulders and punched my
chest.

"You're not the first of your family that's been a soldier," he
said. "You'll like it."

It was a taking uniform: blue and silver with high Hession boots.
The advantages of making soldiers look like mud had not then been
discovered.

"I'm meeting a man at the Bodega," I said. "If he isn't there I'll
come straight back."

He was there; though I hadn't expected him. He took me with him to a
Coroner's inquest, and found a place for me at the reporter's table.
So, instead, I became a journalist.

The music-hall was the barometer of public opinion in those days.
Politicians and even Cabinet Ministers would often slip in for an
hour. MacDermott was our leading Lion Comique. One night he sang a
new song: "We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do." Whatever
happened, the Russians should not have Con-stan-ti-no-ple, the "no"
indefinitely prolonged. It made a furore. By the end of the week,
half London was singing it. Also it added the word Jingo to the
English language.

Peace meetings in Hyde Park were broken up, the more fortunate
speakers getting off with a ducking in the Serpentine. The
Peacemonger would seem to be always with us. In peace-time we shower
palm leaves upon him. In war-time we hand him over to the mob. I
remember seeing Charles Bradlaugh, covered with blood and followed
by a yelling crowd. He escaped into Oxford Street and his friends
got him away in a cart. Gladstone had his windows broken.

And, after all, we never got so much as a look in. "Peace with
Honour," announced Disraeli; and immediately rang down the curtain.
We had expected a better play from Disraeli.

To console us, there came trouble in Egypt. Lord Charles Beresford
was the popular hero. We called him Charlie. The Life Guards were
sent out. I remember their return. It was the first time London had
seen them without their helmets and breastplates. Lean, worn-looking
men on skeleton horses. The crowd was disappointed. But made up for
it in the evening.

And after that there was poor General Gordon and Majuba Hill. It may
have been the other way round. Some of us blamed Gladstone and the
Nonconformist conscience. Others thought we were paying too much
attention to cricket and football, and that God was angry with us.
Greece declared war on Turkey. Poetical friends of mine went out to
fight for Greece; but spent most of their time looking for the Greek
army, and when they found it didn't know it, and came home again.
There were fresh massacres of Armenians. I was editing a paper
called _To-day_, and expressed surprise that no healthy young
Armenian had tried to remove "Abdul the damned," as William Watson
afterwards called him. My paragraph reached him, by some means or
another, and had the effect of frightening the old horror. I had not
expected such luck. The Turkish Constitution used to be described
as: "Despotism tempered by assassination." Under the old rgime, the
assassin, in Turkey, took the place of our Leader of the Opposition.
Every Turkish Sultan lived in nightly dread of him. I was hauled up
to the Foreign Office. A nice old gentleman interviewed me.

"Do you know," he said, "that you have rendered yourself liable to
prosecution?"

"Well, prosecute me," I suggested. Quite a number of us were feeling
mad about this thing.

He was getting irritable.

"All very well, for you to talk like that," he snapped. "Just the
very way to get it home into every corner of Europe. They can't be
wanting that."

The "they" I gathered to be the Turkish Embassy people.

"I am sorry," I said. "I don't seem able to help you."

He read to me the Act of Parliament, and we shook hands and parted.
I heard no more of the matter.

It was about this time that America made war upon Spain. We,
ourselves, had just had a shindy with America over some God-forsaken
place called Venezuela, and popular opinion was if anything
pro-Spanish. The American papers were filled with pictures of
Spanish atrocities, in the time of Philip II. It seemed the
Spaniards had the habit of burning people alive at the stake. Could
such a nation be allowed to continue in possession of Cuba?

The Fashoda incident was hardly unexpected. For some time past,
France had been steadily regaining her old position of "The Enemy."
Over the Dreyfus case it occurred to us to tell her what we thought
of her, generally. In return, she mentioned one or two things she
didn't like about us. There was great talk of an Entente with
Germany. Joe Chamberlain started the idea. The popular Press, seized
with a sudden enthusiasm for the study of history, discovered we
were of Teutonic origin. Also it unearthed a saying of Nelson's to
the effect that every Englishman should hate a Frenchman like the
Devil. A society was formed for the promotion of amicable
relationship between the English and the German-speaking people.
"Friends of Germany" I think it was called. I remember receiving an
invitation to join it, from Conan Doyle. An elderly Major, in Cairo,
who had dined too well, tore down the French flag, and performed
upon it a new dance of his own invention. This was, I believe, the
origin of the Fox-trot. One of the Northcliffe papers published a
_feuilleton_, picturing the next war: England--her Navy defeated by
French submarines--was saved, just in the nick of time, by the
arrival of the German Fleet.

The Boer War was not popular at first. The gold mines were so
obviously at the bottom of it. Still, it was a war, even if only a
sort of a war, as the late Lord Halsbury termed it. A gentleman
named Perks resigned from the Presidency of the Peace Society, in
order to devote himself to war work. Other members followed his
example. There were Boer atrocities. But they were badly done and,
for a while, fell flat.

It was the Kaiser's telegram that turned the wind. I was in Germany at
the time, and feeling was high against the English. We had a party one
evening, at which some Dutch ladies were present--relations of De Wet,
we learnt afterwards. I remember in the middle of the party, our
Dienstmdchen suddenly appearing and shouting "Hoch die Buren," and
immediately bursting into tears. She explained to my wife, afterwards,
that she couldn't help it--that God had prompted her. I have noticed
that trouble invariably follows when God appears to be interesting
Himself in foreign politics.

In France it was no better. Indeed, worse. In Paris, the English
were hooted in the street, and hunted out of the cafs. I got
through by talking with a strong American accent that I had picked
up during a lecturing tour through the States. Queen Victoria was
insulted in the French Press. _The Daily Mail_ came out with a
leader headed "Ne touchez pas la Reine," suggesting that if France
did not mend her manners we should "roll her in the mud," take away
her Colonies, and give them to Germany. The Kaiser had explained
away his famous telegram. It seemed he didn't really mean it. In a
speech at the Vagabonds' Club, I suggested that God, for some
unrevealed purpose of His own, had fashioned even Boers, and was
denounced the next morning in the Press for blasphemy.

At the time, there was much discussion throughout Europe as to when
the twentieth century really began. The general idea was that it was
going to bring us luck. France was decidedly reforming. On the
other hand, Germany was "dumping" things upon us. She was dumping
her goods not only in England, but in other countries, where
hitherto we had been in the habit of dumping ours, undisturbed.
After a time we got angry. There was talk of an Entente with France,
who wasn't dumping anything--who hadn't much to dump. The comic
papers took it up. France was represented to us as a Lady, young and
decidedly attractive. Germany as a fat elderly gentleman, with
pimples and his hair cropped close. How could a gentlemanly John
Bull hesitate for a moment between them!

Russia also, it appeared, had been misunderstood. Russia wasn't half
as bad as we had thought her: anyhow, she didn't dump.

And then, out of sheer cussedness as it seemed, Germany, in feverish
haste, went on building ships.

Even the mildest among us agreed that Britannia could tolerate no
rival on the waves. It came out that Germany was building four new
cruisers. At once we demanded eight. We made a song about it.

    "We want eight,
     And we won't wait."

It was sung at all the by-elections. The Peace parties won moral
victories.

Sir Edward Grey has been accused of having "jockeyed" us into the
war--of having so committed us to France and Russia that no
honourable escape was possible for us. Had the Good Samaritan
himself been our Foreign Secretary, the war would still have
happened. Germany is popularly supposed to have brought us into it
by going through Belgium. Had she gone round by the Cape of Good
Hope, the result would have been the same. The Herd instinct had
taken possession of us all. It was sweeping through Europe. I was at
a country tennis tournament the day we declared war on Germany.
Young men and maidens, grey-moustached veterans, pale-faced curates,
dear old ladies: one and all expressed relief and thankfulness. "I
was so afraid Grey would climb down at the last moment"--"It was
Asquith I was doubtful of. I didn't think the old man had the
grit"--"Thank God, we shan't read 'Made in Germany' for a little
time to come." Such was the talk over the tea-cups.

It was the same whichever way you looked. Railway porters, cabmen,
workmen riding home upon their bicycles, farm labourers eating their
bread and cheese beside the hedge: they had the faces of men to whom
good tidings had come.

For years it had been growing, this instinct that Germany was "The
Enemy." In the beginning we were grieved. It was the first time in
history she had been called upon to play the part. But that was her
fault. Why couldn't she leave us alone--cease interfering with our
trade, threatening our command of the sea? Quite nice people went
about saying: "We're bound to have a scrap with her. Hope it comes
in my time"--"Must put her in her place. We'll get on all the better
with her afterwards." That was the idea everywhere: that war would
clear the air, make things pleasanter all round, afterwards. A
party, headed by Lord Roberts, clamoured for conscription. Another
party, headed by Lord Fisher, proposed that we should seize the
German Fleet and drown it. Books and plays came out one on top of
another warning us of the German menace. Kipling wrote, openly
proclaiming Germany, The Foe, first and foremost.

In Germany, I gather from German friends, similar thinking
prevailed. It was England that, now secretly, now openly, was
everywhere opposing a blank wall to German expansion, refusing her a
place in the sun, forbidding her the seas, plotting to hem her in.

The pastures were getting used up. The herds were becoming restive.

The only contribution of any value a private citizen can make
towards the elucidation of a National upheaval is to record his own
sensations.

I heard of our declaration of war against Germany with cheerful
satisfaction. The animal in me rejoiced. It was going to be the
biggest war in history. I thanked whatever gods there be that they
had given it in my time. If I had been anywhere near the age limit I
should have enlisted. I can say this with confidence because later,
and long after my enthusiasm had worn off, I did manage to get work
in quite a dangerous part of the front line. Men all around me were
throwing up their jobs, sacrificing their careers. I felt ashamed of
myself, sitting in safety at my desk, writing articles encouraging
them, at so much a thousand words. Of course, not a soul dreamt the
war was going to last more than a few months. Had we known, it might
have been another story. But the experts had assured us on that
point. Mr. Wells was most emphatic. It was Mr. Wells who proclaimed
it a Holy War. I have just been reading again those early letters of
his. A Miss Cooper Willis has, a little unkindly, reprinted them. I
am glad she did not do the same with contributions of my own. The
newspapers had roped in most of us literary gents to write them
special articles upon the war. The appalling nonsense we poured out,
during those hysterical first weeks, must have made the angels weep,
and all the little devils hold their sides with laughter. In justice
to myself, I like to remember that I did gently ridicule the "War to
end war" stuff and nonsense. I had heard that talk in my babyhood:
since when I had lived through one of the bloodiest half centuries
in history. War will go down before the gradual growth of reason.
The movement has not yet begun.

But I did hate German militarism. I had seen German "offizieren"
swaggering three and four abreast along the pavements, sweeping men,
women and children into the gutter. (I had seen the same thing in
St. Petersburg. But we were not bothering about Russia, just then.)
I had seen them, insolent, conceited, over-bearing, in caf, theatre
and railway car, civilians compelled everywhere to cringe before
them, and had longed to slap their faces. In Freiburg, I had seen
the agony upon the faces of the young recruits, returning from
forced marches under a blazing sun, their bleeding feet protruding
from their boots. I had sat upon the blood-splashed bench and
watched the Mensur--helpful, no doubt, in making the youngsters fit
for "the greatest game of all," as Kipling calls it. I hated the
stupidity, the cruelty of the thing. I thought we were going to
free the German people from this Juggernaut of their own creation.
And then make friends with them.

At first, there was no hate of the German people. King George
himself set the example. He went about the hospitals, shook hands
with wounded Hans and Fritz. The Captain of the _Emden_ we
applauded, for his gallant exploits against our own ships.
Kitchener's despatches admitted the bravery of the enemy. Jokes and
courtesies were exchanged between the front trenches. Our civilians,
caught by the war in Germany, were well treated. The good feeling
was acknowledged, and returned.

Had the war ended with the falling of the leaves--as had been
foretold by both the Kaiser and our own Bottomley--we might--who
knows?--have realized that dream of a kinder and better world. But
the gods, for some purpose of their own, not yet perhaps completed,
ordained otherwise. It became necessary to stimulate the common
people to prolonged effort. What surer drug than Hate?

The Atrocity stunt was let loose.

A member of the Cabinet had suggested to me that I might go out to
America to assist in English propaganda. On the ship, I fell in with
an American Deputation returning from Belgium. They had been sent
there by the United States Government to report upon the truth--or
otherwise--of these stories of German frightfulness. The opinion of
the Deputation was that, apart from the abominations common to all
warfare, nineteen-twentieths of them would have to be described as
"otherwise."

It was these stories of German atrocities, turned out day by day
from Fleet Street, that first caused me to doubt whether this really
was a "Holy War." Against them I had raised my voice, for whatever
it might be worth. If I knew and hated the German military machine,
so likewise I knew, and could not bring myself to hate, the German
people. I had lived among them for years. I knew them to be a
homely, kind, good-humoured folk. Cruelty to animals in Germany is
almost unknown. Cruelty to woman or child is rarer still. German
criminal statistics compare favourably with our own. This attempt to
make them out a nation of fiends seemed to me as silly as it was
wicked. It was not clean fighting. Of course, I got myself into
trouble with the Press; while a select number of ladies and
gentlemen did me the honour to send me threatening letters.

The Deputation published their report in America. But it was never
allowed to reach England.

America, so far as I could judge, appeared to be mildly pro-French
and equally anti-English. Our blockade was causing indignation. In
every speech I made in America, the only thing sure of sympathetic
response was my reference to the "just and lasting" peace that was
to follow. I had been told to make a point of that. A popular
cartoon, exhibited in Broadway, pictured the nations of Europe as a
yelling mob of mud-bespattered urchins engaged in a meaningless
scrimmage; while America, a placid motherly soul, was getting ready
a hot bath and bandages. President Wilson, in an interview I had
with him, conveyed to me the same idea: that America was saving
herself to come in at the end as peace-maker. At a dinner to which I
was invited, I met an important group of German business men and
bankers. They assured me that Germany had already grasped the fact
that she had bitten off more than she could chew, to use their own
expression, and would welcome a peace conference, say at Washington.
I took their message back with me, but the mere word "conference"
seemed to strike terror into every British heart.

It was in the autumn of 1916 that I "got out," as the saying was. I
had been trying to get there for some time. Of course my age,
fifty-five, shut all the usual doors against me. I could have joined
a company of "veterans" for home defence, and have guarded the
Crystal Palace, or helped to man the Thames Embankment; but I wanted
to see the real thing. I had offered myself as an entertainer to the
Y.M.C.A. I was a capable raconteur and had manufactured, or
appropriated, a number of good stories. The Y.M.C.A. had tried me on
home hospitals and camps and had approved me. But the War Office
would not give its permission. The military gentleman I saw was
brief. So far as his information went, half the British Army were
making notes for future books. If I merely wanted to be useful, he
undertook to find me a job in the Army Clothing Department, close by
in Pimlico. I suppose my motives for wanting to go out were of the
usual mixed order. I honestly thought I would be doing sound work,
helping the Tommies to forget their troubles; and I was not
thinking of writing a book. But I confess that curiosity was also
driving me. It is human nature to jump out of bed and run a mile
merely to see a house on fire. Here was the biggest thing in history
taking place within earshot. At Greenwich, when the wind was in the
right direction, one could hear the guns. Likewise masculine craving
for adventure. Quite conceivably, one might get oneself mixed up
with excursions and alarms: come back a hero. Anyhow, it would be a
relief to get away, if only for a time, from the hinterland heroes
with their shrieking and their cursing. The soldiers would be
gentlemen.

I had all but abandoned hope, when one day, outside a photographer's
shop in Bond Street,--I met an old friend of mine, dressed up in the
uniform of a Major-General, as I took it to be at first sight.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. I knew him to be over
fifty, if a day. The last time I had seen him, about three weeks
before, had been in his office. He was a solicitor. I had gone to
him about some tea-leaves my wife had been saving up. She was afraid
of getting into trouble for hoarding.

He shook hands haughtily. "Sorry I can't stop," he said. "Am sailing
from Southampton to-night. Must look in at the French Legation."

"One moment," I persisted. "Can't you take me out with you, as your
Aide-de-camp? I don't mind what I do. I'm good at cleaning
buttons----"

He waved me aside. "Impossible," he said. "Joffre would----"

And then, looking at my crestfallen face, the soldier in him
melted. The kindly stout solicitor emerged. Taking out a note-book,
he wrote upon a page. Then tore it out and gave it me.

"You can tell them I sent you," he said. "Ta-ta." He dived into a
waiting taxi. The crowd had respectfully made way for him.

It was an address in Knightsbridge that he had given me. I saw a
courteous gentleman named Illingworth, who explained things to me.
The idea had originated with a French lady, La Comtesse de la
Panousse, wife of the military attach to the French Embassy in
London. The French Army was less encumbered than our own with
hide-bound regulations. Age, so long as it was not accompanied by
decrepitude, was no drawback to the driving of a motor ambulance. I
passed the necessary tests for driving and repairs, and signed on.
Thus I became a French soldier: at two and a half sous a day (paid
monthly; my wife still has the money). The French Legation obtained
for me my passport. At the British War Office I could snap my
fingers. Passing it, on my last day in London, I did so: and was
spoken to severely by the constable on duty.

Upon our uniform, I must congratulate La Comtesse de la Panousse. It
was, I understand, her own creation: a russet khaki relieved by dark
blue facings, with a swordbelt and ornamental buttons. It came
expensive. Of course, we paid for it ourselves. But I am sure that
none of us begrudged the money. The French army did not quite know
what to make of us. Young recruits assumed us, in the dusk, to be
Field-Marshals. One day, in company with poor Hutchinson, the
dramatist, who died a few months after he got back to England, I
walked through the gateway of the Citadelle at Verdun, saluted in
awed silence by both sentries.

I sailed from Southampton in company with Spring-Rice, brother to
our Ambassador at Washington, and our Chef de Section, D. L. Oliver,
who was returning from leave in England. We took out with us three
new cars, given by the British Farmers' Association. The ship was
full of soldiers. As we stepped on deck, we were handed life
collars, with instructions to blow them out and tie them round our
necks. It gave us an Elizabethan touch. One man with a pointed
beard, an officer of Engineers, we called Shakespeare. Except for
his legs, he looked like Shakespeare. But lying down in them was
impossible. Under cover of darkness, we most of us disobeyed orders,
and hid them under our greatcoats. Passing down the Channel was like
walking down Regent Street on a Jubilee night. The place was blazing
with lights. Our transport was accompanied by a couple of torpedo
destroyers. They raced along beside us like a pair of porpoises.
Every now and then they disappeared, the waves sweeping over them.
About twelve o'clock the alarm was given that a German submarine had
succeeded in getting through. We returned full speed to Southampton
dock, and remained there for the next twenty-four hours. On the
following night, we were ordered forward again; and reached Havre
early in the morning. The cross-country roads in France are designed
upon the principle of the Maze at Hampton Court. Every now and then
you come back to the same village. To find your way through them,
the best plan is to disregard the sign-posts and trust to prayer.
Oliver had been there before but, even with that, we lost our way a
dozen times. The first night we reached Caudebec, a delightful
medival town hardly changed by so much as a stone from the days of
Joan of Arc, when Warwick held it for the English. If it hadn't been
for the war, I would have stopped there for a day or two. As it was,
Spring-Rice and myself were eager to get to the front. Oliver, who
had had about a year of it, was in less of a hurry. At Vitry, some
hundred miles the other side of Paris, we entered "the zone of the
Grand Armies," and saw the first signs of war. Soon we were running
through villages that were little more than rubbish heaps. The
Quakers were already there. But for the Quakers, I doubt if
Christianity would have survived this particular war. All the other
denominations threw it up. Where the church had been destroyed the
"Friends" had cleared out a barn, roofed it, and found benches and a
home-made altar--generally, a few boards on trestles, with a white
cloth and some bunches of flowers. Against the shattered walls they
had improvised shelters and rebuilt the hearth-stone. Old men and
women, sitting in the sun, smiled at us. The children ran after us
cheering. The dogs barked. Towards evening I got lost. I was the
last of the three. Over the winding country roads--or rather cart
tracks--it was difficult to keep in touch. I knew we had to get to
Bar-le-Duc. But it was dark when I struck a little town called
Revigny. I decided to stop there for the night. Half of it was in
ruins. It was crowded with troops, and trains kept coming in
discharging thousands more. The _poilus_ were lying in the streets,
wrapped in their blankets, with their knapsacks for a pillow. The
one miserable hotel was reserved for officers. My uniform obtained
me admission. The _salle--manger_ was crammed to suffocation: so
the landlady put me a chair in the kitchen. The cockroaches were
having a bad time. They fell into the soups and stews, and no one
took the trouble to rescue them. I secured some cold ham and a
bottle of wine; and slept in my own ambulance on one of the
stretchers. I pushed on at dawn; and just outside Bar-le-Duc met
Oliver, who had been telephoning everywhere, enquiring for a lost
Englishman. I might have been court-martialled, but the good fellow
let me off with a reprimand; and later on I learnt the trick of
never losing sight of the car in front of you. It is not as easy as
it sounds. At Bar-le-Duc we learnt our destination. Our unit, Convoi
10, had been moved to Rarcourt, a village near Clermont in the
Argonne, twenty miles from Verdun. We reached there that same
evening.

We were a company of about twenty Britishers, including Colonials.
Amongst us were youngsters who had failed to pass their medical
examination, and one or two officers who had been invalided out of
the army. But the majority were, like myself, men above military
age. Other English sections, similar to our own, were scattered up
and down the line. The Americans, at that time, had an Ambulance
Service of their own: some of them were with the Germans. A French
officer was technically in command; but the chief of each section
was an Englishman, chosen for his knowledge of French. It was a
difficult position. He was responsible for orders being carried out
and, at the same time, was expected to make things as easy as
possible for elderly gentlemen unused to discipline: a few of whom
did not always remember the difference between modern warfare and a
Piccadilly club. Oliver was a marvel of tact and patience. We drew
the ordinary army rations. Meat and vegetables were good and
plentiful. For the rest, we had a mess fund, and foraged for
ourselves. Marketing was good fun. It meant excursions to Ste.
Menehould or Bar-le-Duc, where one could get a bath, and eat off a
clean tablecloth. For mess-room, we had a long tent in the middle of
a field. In fine weather it was cool and airy. At other times, the
wind swept through it, and the rain leaked in, churning the floor
into mud. We sat down to _la soupe_, as our dinner was called, in
our greatcoats with the collars turned up. For sleeping, we were
billeted about the village. With three others I shared a granary. We
spread our sleeping sacks upon stretchers supported on trestles, and
built ourselves washing-stands and dressing-tables out of
packing-cases that we purchased from the proprietress of the
_picerie_ at a franc a piece. Later, I found a more luxurious
lodging in the house of an old peasant and his wife. They never took
their clothes off. The old man would kick off his shoes, hang up his
coat, and disappear with a grunt into a hole in the wall. His wife
would undo hidden laces and buttons and give herself a shake, put
her shoes by the stove, blow out the lamp, and roll into another
hole opposite. There was a house near the church with a bench
outside, underneath a vine. It commanded a pretty view, and of an
evening, when off duty, I would sit there and smoke. The old lady
was talkative. She boasted to me, one evening, that three officers,
a Colonel and two Majors, had often sat upon that very bench the
year before and been quite friendly. That was when the Germans had
occupied the village. I gathered the villagers had made the best of
them. "They had much money," added Madame.

Fuel was our difficulty. It's an ill wind that blows nobody good.
The news that a shelled village had been finally abandoned by its
inhabitants flew like wildfire. It was a question of who could get
there first, and drag out the timbers from the shattered houses.
Green wood was no good: though, up in the dug-outs, it was the only
thing to be had. They say there is no smoke without fire. It is not
true. You can have a dug-out so full of smoke that you have to light
a match to find the fire. If it's only French matches you have, it
may take a boxfull. It was our primus stoves that saved us. Each
man's primus was his vestal fire. We kept them burning day and
night: cooked by them, dried our clothes, and thawed our feet before
going to bed. Mud was our curse. The rain never ceased. We lived in
mud. Our section worked the Argonne forest. Our _point de secours_,
where we waited, was some hundred yards or so behind the front
trenches. The wounded, after having passed through the Field
Dressing Station, were brought to us on stretchers; or came limping
to us, twisting their faces as they walked. So long as we were
within call we could wander at our will, creep to where the
barbed-wire ended, and look out upon the mud beyond. Black, silent,
still, like some petrified river piercing the forest: floating on
it, here and there, white bones, a man's boot (the sole uppermost),
a horse's head (the eyes missing). Among the trees the other side,
the stone shelters where the German sentries watched.

The second night I was on duty, I heard a curious whistling just
above my head. I thought it some night bird, and looked up. It came
again, and I moved a few steps to get a better view. Suddenly
something butted me in the stomach and knocked me down; and the next
moment I heard a loud noise, and a little horse, tethered to a tree
some few yards off, leapt up into the air and dropped down dead. It
was Monsieur Le Mdecin, a chemist from Peronne, who had bowled me
over, and was dragging me down the steps into his dug-out. I didn't
hang about another time, when I heard that whistling in the trees.

There must have been some means of communication between the men
themselves on either side. During the two hours, every afternoon,
when the little tramway was kept busy, hauling up food, both French
and German batteries were silent. When the last barrel of flour, the
last sack of potatoes, had been rolled in safety down the steps of
the field kitchen, the firing would break out again. When a German
mine exploded, the Frenchmen who ought to have been killed, were
invariably a quarter of a mile away sawing wood. One takes it that
the German peasant lads possessed like gift of intuition, telling
them when it would be good for their health's sake to take walking
exercise.

A pity the common soldiers could not have been left to make the
peace. There might have been no need for Leagues of Nations. I
remember one midday coming upon two soldiers, sitting on a log. One
was a French _poilu_ and the other his German prisoner. They were
sharing the Frenchman's lunch. The conqueror's gun lay on the
ground, between them.

It was the night call that we dreaded. We had to drive without
lights: through the dense forest, up and down steep, narrow ways
with sudden turns and hairpin bends--one had to trust to memory: and
down below, in the valley, were the white mists into which one
strained one's eyes till it felt as if they were dropping out of
their sockets. We had to hasten all we dared, the lives of men
behind us depending upon time. Besides, we might be wanted for
another journey. We often were. There ought at times to have been a
moon, according to the almanac: but to that land of ceaseless rain
she rarely came. It was nerve-racking work. The only thing to do was
not to think about it till the moment came. It is the advice that is
given, I understand, to men waiting to be hanged. One takes off
one's boots, and tunic, blows out the candle and turns in. A rat
drops from somewhere on to the table, becomes immovable. By the
light of the smouldering logs, we look at one another. One tries to
remember whether one really did put everything eatable back into the
tin. Even then they work the covers off, somehow--clever little
devils. Well, if he does, he does. Perhaps he will be satisfied with
the candle. Ambulance Driver Nine turns his head to the wall.
Suddenly he is up again. A footstep is stumbling along the wooden
gangway. It is coming nearer. He holds his breath. The gods be
praised, it passes. With a sigh of relief he lies down again, and
closes his eyes.

The next moment--or so it seems to him--a light is flashing in his
eyes. A bearded, blue-coated figure is standing over him. Ambulance
to start immediately! ("_Ambulance faut partir_.") The bearded
figure, under its blue iron helmet, kindly lights the candle (rat
having providentially found something more tasty) and departs.
Ambulance Driver Nine struggles half unconsciously into his clothes
and follows up the steps. Pierre, the _aide_, is already grinding
away at the starting handle, and becoming exhausted. One brushes him
aside and takes one's turn, and with the twentieth swing--or
thereabouts--the car answers with a sudden roar, as of some great
drowsy animal awakened from its slumbers; and Pierre, who has been
cursing her with all the oaths of Gascony, pats her on the bonnet
and is almost amorous. A shadowy group emerges apparently from the
ground. Two stretchers and three assis is the tale. The stretchers
are hoisted up and fitted swiftly into their hangings. The three
assis mount slowly and shuffle painfully into their places. Rifles
and knapsacks are piled up beside them, and the doors are clanged
to. Another "case" is to be picked up on the way--at Champ Cambon.
You take the first road on the left, after passing the ruins of the
Ferme de Fort, and the camp is just beyond the level crossing. It
seems you cannot miss it. And Ambulance Driver Nine climbs into his
seat.

Through the forest, he keeps his eyes upon the strip of sky above
his head. Always he must be in the exact centre of that narrow strip
of sky. And it will wobble. Pierre sits on the foot-board, his eyes
glued to the road. "_Gauche, gauche_," he cries suddenly. Driver
Number Nine pulls the wheel to the left. "_A droit_," shrieks
Pierre. Which the devil does he mean? And what has become of the
sky? Where's the damned thing gone to? The deep ditch that he knows
to be on either side of the road seems to be calling to him like
some muddy Lorelei. Suddenly the sky reappears. It seems to have
come from behind him. He breathes once more.

"_Arretez_," cries Pierre, a little later. He has detected a vague,
shapeless mass that might be the ruins of a farm. He descends. One hears
his footsteps squelching through the mud. He returns triumphant. It is a
farm. Things seem to be shaping well. Now, all they have to do is to
look out for a road on the left. They find a road on the left--or hope
they have. The descent appears to be steep. The car begins to jump and
jolt. "_Doucement, camarade--doucement!_" comes an agonized cry from
within. Pierre opens the little window and explains that it cannot be
helped. It is a _mauvaise_ route: and there is silence. The route
becomes more and more _mauvaise_. Is it a road, or are they lost? Every
minute the car seems as if it were about to stand on its head. Ambulance
Driver Nine recalls grim stories of the mess-room: of nights spent
beside a mud-locked car, listening to groans and whispered prayers: of
cars overturned, their load of dying men mingled in a ghastly heap of
writhing limbs, from which the bandages have come undone. In spite of
the damp chill night, a cold sweat breaks out all over him. Heedless of
Pierre's remonstrances, he switches on his electric torch and flashes it
downwards. Yes, it is a road of sorts, chiefly of shell-holes,
apparently. The car crashes in and out of them. If the axles do not
break, they may get down. The axles do not break, by some miracle.
Pierre gives a whoop of joy as the car straightens herself out. They
have reached the level, and the next moment they bump over the crossing,
and hear the welcome voice of a sentry.

The _bless_ is brought out. He has been unconscious for two hours.
Driver Nine had best make speed. The mist that fills the valley
grows whiter and whiter. It is like a damp sheet, wrapped round his
head. Shadows move toward him, and vanish; but whether they were men
or trees or houses he cannot tell. Suddenly he jams on his brakes
and starts up. It is clear enough this time--a huge munition wagon,
drawn by a team of giant horses. They are rearing and plunging all
round him.

But no sound comes from them! Pierre has sprung to the ground and is
shouting. Where is their driver?

The whole thing has vanished. They listen. All is silence. Pierre
climbs up again and they break into a loud laugh.

But why did Pierre see it, too!

They crawl along on bottom gear. There comes a low crashing sound.
Even the torch is useless, a yard in front of them. They find by
feeling that they are up against a door. Fortunately the back wheels
are still on the road, so that they can right themselves. But it
seems useless going on. Suddenly, Pierre dives beneath the car and
emerges, puffing a cigarette. He dances with delight at his own
cleverness. He holds the lighted cigarette behind his back and walks
jauntily forward, feeling the road with his feet. Ambulance Driver
Nine drives on, following the tiny spark. Every now and then, the
invisible Pierre puffs the cigarette, covered by his hand, and it
reappears with a brighter glow. After a time the mist rises; and
Pierre bursts into song and remounts. A mile or so farther on they
reach the barrier, beyond which lamps are permitted, but decide not
to light up. Their eyes are in training now, and had better not be
indulged; it will spoil them for the journey back. They are both
singing different tunes when they arrive at the Base Hospital,
twenty kilometres behind the lines.

"Have any trouble?" asks a fellow driver from another section, who
has just discharged his load and is drawing on his gloves.

"The mist was a bit trying," answers Driver Nine. "We had to come
round by Champ Cambon."

"Nasty bit of road, that, down the hill," agrees the other. "So
long!"

From Rarcourt we were moved to Verdun. It was in ruins then. From
some of the houses merely the front wall had fallen, leaving the
rooms intact, just as one sees them in an open dolls' house: two
chairs drawn close together near the hearth, the crucifix upon the
wall, a child's toy upon the floor. In a shop, were two canaries in
their cage, starved to death, a little heap of feathers that fell to
pieces when I touched them. In a restaurant, the soup still stood
upon the table, the wine half finished in the glasses. The
Citadelle was still occupied: an underground city of galleries and
tunnels, streets of dormitories, mess-rooms, a concert hall, stores,
hospitals and kitchens. Here and there, one came across groups of
German prisoners removing the dbris, tidying up generally. There
must have been great shortage of wool in Germany, at that time. It
was a bitter winter, yet the most of them had no underclothing but a
thin cotton shirt. One could see their naked bodies through the
holes. A company of French Engineers was quartered in the Cathedral.
The altar served them for a kitchen table. The town was strangely
peaceful, though all around the fighting still continued. Our Unit,
Section 10, had been there the winter before, during the battle, and
had had a strenuous time. During the actual fighting, Hague
Conventions and Geneva regulations get themselves mislaid. The guns
were eating up ammunition faster than the little tramways could
supply them, and the ambulances did not always go up empty.
Doubtless the German Red Cross drivers had likewise their blind eye.
It is not the soldiers who shout about these things. I was on the
"Lusitania," the last voyage she made from New York to Liverpool,
before she was torpedoed. We were loaded to the Plimsol line with
war material. The Germans were accused of dropping shells on to the
hospital. So they did. How could they help it? The ammunition park
was one side of the railway head and the hospital the other. It was
the most convenient place for both. Those who talk about war being a
game ought to be made to go out and play it. They'd find their
little book of rules of not much use. Once we were ordered to take
a company of staff officers on a tour of inspection. That did seem
going a bit too far. Spring-Rice bluntly refused: but not all of us
had his courage.

From rain the weather had turned to frost. Often the thermometer
would register forty degrees below zero. The Frenchmen said it was
"_pas chaud_." A Frenchman is always so polite. It might hurt the
Weather's feelings, telling it bluntly that it was damn cold. He
hints to it that it isn't exactly warm, and leaves the rest to its
conscience. Starting the cars was horse's work. We wrapped our
engines up in rugs at night and kept a lamp burning under the
bonnet. One man made a habit of using a blow-pipe to warm his
cylinders, and the rest of us gave him a wide berth. The birds lost
the use of their wings. They lay huddled up wherever there was
shelter from the wind. Some of the soldiers took them scraps of
food, but others caught and cooked them. It wasn't worth the
trouble: there was nothing on them.

One day, in a wood, I chanced upon a hospital for animals. It was a
curious sight. The convalescents were lying about in the sun, many
of them still wearing bandages. One very little donkey was wearing
the Croix de Guerre. His driver had been killed and he had gone on
by himself, with a broken leg, and had brought his load of letters
and parcels safely up to the trenches. The transport drivers were
kind to their beasts; and many of the soldiers had their little dog
that marched with them and shared their rations. But they used to
pour petrol over the rats, when they caught them, and set fire to
them. "He ate my sausage," a bright-eyed little _poilu_ once
answered me. He regarded it as an act of plain justice. Some of the
officers had made gardens in front of their dug-outs; and the little
cemeteries, dotted here and there about the forest, were still
bright with flowers when I first saw them. A major I used to visit
had furnished his dug-out with pieces of genuine Louis Quatorze:
they had been lying about the fields when he had got there. We used
to drink coffee out of eggshell china cups. In the villages further
back, life went on much as usual. Except when a bombardment was
actually in progress, the peasants still worked in the fields, the
women gossiped and the children played about the fountain.
Bombardment or no bombardment, Mass was celebrated daily in the
church--or what was left of it. A few soldiers made the
congregation, with here and there a woman in black. But on Sundays
came the farmers with their wives and daughters in fine clothes and
the soldiers--on week days not always spick-and-span--had brushed
their uniforms and polished up their buttons.

But within the barrier, which ran some ten kilometres behind the
front, one never saw a woman or a child. Female nurses came no
nearer than the hospitals at the base. It was a dull existence,
after the first excitement had worn off. We worried chiefly about
our food. The parcel from home was the great event of the week.
Often, it had been opened. We had to thank God for what was left.
Out of every three boxes of cigarettes that my wife sent me, I
reckon I got one. The French cigarettes, that one bought at the
canteens, were ten per cent poison and the rest dirt. The pain
would go out of a wounded soldier's face when you showed him an
English cigarette. Rum was our only tipple, and the amount that each
man could purchase was limited. It was kind to us, and warmed our
feet. The Paris papers arrived in the evening--when they did arrive.
They told us how gay and confident we were. For news, we preferred
reading the daily bulletin, posted up each morning outside
headquarters: it told the truth, whether pleasant or unpleasant. We
got used to the booming of the guns. At the distance of a few miles
the sound was not unmusical. Up in the dug-outs, we were close to
our own batteries. They were cleverly hidden. I remember once
sitting down upon a log to read. It was a pretty spot, underneath a
bank that sheltered one from the wind. Suddenly something happened.
I thought, at first, my head had come off. I was lying on the
ground, and became aware of a pair of eyes looking at me through a
hole in the bank. I had been sitting outside a battery of
seventy-fives. The boyish young officer invited me inside. He
thought I'd be more comfortable. Round Verdun, they barked
incessantly, and got upon one's nerves. Sometimes the order would be
given for "all out" on both sides, and then the effect was
distinctly terrifying. But one had to creep out and look. The entire
horizon would be ablaze with flash-lights, stars and rockets,
signalling orders to the batteries. Towards dawn the tumult would
die down; and one could go to bed. One had no brain for any but the
very lightest literature. Small books printed on soft paper, the
leaves of which could be torn out easily, were the most popular. We
played a sort of bridge and counted the days to our leave. The
general opinion among the French was, that the English had started
the war to capture German trade, and had dragged France into it.
There was no persuading them of their mistake.

It had been a trying winter, and my age had been against me. At the
end of it, I was not much more good for the work. I came back cured
of any sneaking regard I may have ever had for war. The
illustrations in the newspapers, depicting all the fun of the
trenches, had lost for me their interest. Compared with modern
soldiering, a street scavenger's job is an exhilarating occupation,
a rat-catcher's work more in keeping with the instincts of a
gentleman. I joined a little company who, in defiance of the Press
and of the Mob, were making an appeal for a reasonable peace. We
made speeches in Essex Hall and in the provinces. Among others on
our platform, I recall Lord Parmoor, Buckmaster, the Earl of
Beauchamp, Ramsay MacDonald, Dean Inge, Zangwill, the Snowdens,
Drinkwater, and E. D. Morel the great-hearted. We had one supporter
in the Press, _Common Sense_, edited by F. W. Hirst, who right
through the war kept his flag flying with tact and good-humour.
Later, Lord Lansdowne came to our aid. Lord Northcliffe, who died
not long afterwards of a lingering brain disease, suggested he must
be suffering from senile decay. Whether we did any good, beyond
satisfying our own consciences, I cannot say.

The war ended in 1918. From 1919 to 1924 there was every prospect of
France's regaining her old position as The Enemy. Reading the French
papers, one gathered that nothing would please France better. At
the present moment (1925) a growing party would seem to be in favour
of substituting Russia. It may be that the gods have other plans.
The white are not the only herds. The one thing certain is that
mankind remains a race of low intelligence and evil instincts.




CHAPTER XIII

LOOKING FORWARD


We were chapel folk. My mother came of Welsh Nonconformist stock;
and my father, until he was forty-five, had been an Independent
minister--Congregationalists they call them now--and had preached
from his own pulpit. I remember talk of pamphlets he had written.
One had been in answer to a writer named Thomas Paine, who,
according to a great-aunt of mine, credited with knowing the whole
of the New Testament by heart, was really Antichrist, and had been
prophesied. I was brought up to believe in a personal God who loved
you if you were good; but, if you were wicked, sent you, after you
were dead, to a place called Hell, where you were burnt alive for
ever and ever. My mother had the idea that it was not really for
ever and ever; because God was so full of loving-kindness that He
would not want to hurt any creature more than He could help; and
that, when they had been punished sufficiently and had repented, He
would forgive them. But that was only her fancy; and perhaps it was
wrong of her to think so. I had had a little brother who had died
when I was a baby. My mother would never tire of telling me about
him, repeating all the wonderful things that he had said. She would
always end by explaining that he was now in Heaven with Jesus, and
far happier than he ever could have been on earth: adding, as she
would wipe the tears from her cheeks, that it was wicked and selfish
of her not to be able to help crying when she thought of him. I
remember the look of happiness that came into her eyes, years later,
a few days before she died. She had been lying very quiet, with her
eyes wide open. Suddenly she clasped her hands. "I shall see him
soon now," she said, "and he will be so beautiful." It was a queer
place, this Heaven of my people. It rather frightened me. Gold
entered a good deal into the composition of it. You wore a golden
crown, and you played upon a golden harp, and God sat in the centre
of it--I pictured it a bare, endless plain--high up upon a golden
throne; and everybody praised Him: there was nothing else to do. My
mother explained that it was symbolism. All it meant was that we
should be for ever with the Lord, and that He would take away all
pain. But it was the ever-and-everness of it that kept me awake of
nights. A thousand years--ten thousand--a million! I would try to
count them. And still one would be no nearer to the end. And God
would always be there with His eyes upon one. There would never be
any getting away by oneself, to think.

Until I was fourteen, I used to kneel and say my prayers each night
and morning. I was told that whatever I prayed for, really believing
that I should obtain it, would be granted me. If it were not, that
proved I had not had sufficient faith. They were a mixed collection,
those childish prayers of mine. If they ever did reach Heaven, I
cannot help thinking they must have caused amusement, even up
there: that God would wake me early in the morning; that He would
forgive me for having wished that the boy at the coalshed was
dead--he used to run after me and kick me; that God would put it
into somebody's heart to give me a white rabbit; that He would make
me like fat--preferring it, if anything, to lean--because it was
good for me. There were others: some of them quite reasonable. Once,
I prayed that I might find a half-sovereign I had lost. My father
had sent me out with it to buy a post-office order. It was in my
trousers pocket when I started. Both my mother and I had felt it
there. But, when I went to pay for the order, it was gone. I had run
up and down the crowded streets for hours, though knowing it was
useless. My father had said nothing; but my mother's face had gone
white; and I had cried myself to sleep. I went straight to the post
office the next morning, getting there before the doors opened. It
was lying in the dust, underneath the counter, just where I had been
standing. And that time, I had not believed, or attempted to
believe: it had seemed too impossible. While other times, when I
really had believed, God had taken no notice.

My mother thought the explanation was that God granted us only those
things that were good for us: and that always He knew best.

"Papa and I," she confided to me, "so often kneel and pray that
business may improve, and that He will bless papa's enterprises, so
that our burthen may be lighter. But things don't seem to get any
better."

God tried us in the furnace. But whatever happened we must always
believe in Him. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him."

But why then all this fuss about faith, if He did not really mean
it? And why did He think things were not good for us that were good
for other people? It was not till long after, when I came across an
old diary of my mother's, that I learnt how hard had been the
struggle for bare existence during those last years of my father's
life. But I knew that we were poor. I remember how tired my mother
would get, walking, and yet would never take the omnibus. She
promised she would always do so when our ship came home. Sometimes,
I could not help feeling angry with God for showering favours upon
others while being so stingy, as it were, to us. There was a
white-whiskered old gentleman, who occasionally asked us to tea, a
Mr. Wood, with fat fingers and a great gold chain, of whom God must
have been particularly fond. He rode in a carriage and pair, and had
servants to wait upon him. He told me once it was God who had given
him everything. God had "prospered" him. He had lately built God a
chapel, and as a result was richer than ever. My father had built a
chapel, mostly out of his own money, when he was a young man. True,
it was only a little one, compared with Mr. Wood's great red-brick
edifice off the Bow Road; and God had apparently forgotten it,
altogether.

For in those days, among religious folk, there was no doubt that God
gave all things literally: the good things of this world as well as
of the next. I remember a hymn I learnt at Sunday school:

    "Whene'er I take my walks abroad,
       How many poor I see.
     How grateful should I be to God
       For all His gifts to me."

I was to praise God that I was well fed and warmly clad, while
others wore but filthy rags, and begged from door to door. God
ordered all things, and was satisfied with them, presumably.

    "The rich man in his castle,
       The poor man at his gate,
     God made them, high or lowly,
       And ordered their estate."

I remember the cold sweat that broke out over me one grey chill
evening in the street, when suddenly I heard my own voice saying out
aloud: "It isn't right of Him. It isn't just."

After my mother's death, my prayers were few and far
between--occasional cries for help such as a shipwrecked swimmer
might fling out into the darkness without any real hope of response.
I did not pray that she might live. I had prayed so hard that my
father might live, spending whole nights upon my knees. Of what use?
If it depended upon children's prayers, what loved father or mother
would ever die? The thing was absurd. I was beginning to doubt the
whole story. The more I thought about it, the more unbelievable it
seemed to me.

As it had been presented to me--as to this day it is still taught to
Youth--it was this. God the omniscient, the omnipotent creator of
all things had made man in His own image, and had placed him in a
garden, in the centre of which grew the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil. The fruit of this particular tree man was forbidden
to eat. Even as a child, I had never been able to understand what
the tree was doing there. God had planted this garden Himself, had
meant it for man's dwelling-place. It seemed to me it could have
been put there for no other purpose than to be a perpetual
temptation to poor Adam, to say nothing of Eve. To add to their
difficulties, a serpent--which likewise God had made and placed in
the garden--was allowed to come and talk to Eve and to persuade her.
God must have known of this serpent and that it was very subtle. It
seemed to me that God might, at least, have warned them. Man,
evidently a simple soul, easily beguiled, listened to the cunning
words of the serpent and ate of the forbidden fruit. God's
astonishment on discovering that he had done so, I was never able to
entirely credit.

For this one act of disobedience, Adam--and not only Adam but all
his descendants, myself included--had been condemned by God to
everlasting perdition. When I was older, Bishop Butler and other
worthy writers, sought to point out to me how just and reasonable
had been God's behaviour in this matter. But I was never able to see
it. To me it seemed that Adam, and with him the entire human race,
had been treated with undue severity, to say the very least of it.
Indeed, God Himself, later on, must have felt that He had been too
harsh. To put matters right, He sent His only-begotten Son into the
world to die for our sins. By this means Adam and Eve's original
transgression had been wiped out and mankind given another chance.
Why God, who was all-powerful and could do anything, had not chosen
some simpler and more human method was never explained to me; and
the question I felt was too awful to be uttered aloud. Even as it
was, not all mankind were to be saved, but only those who
"believed." If you didn't believe the story you were still to be
damned.

As a child, my difficulty was that I was never quite sure whether I
believed it or not. That I made every effort in my power to believe
it, goes without saying. My not believing would break my mother's
heart: that I knew. Added to which, it meant going to Hell. From
many a fiery pulpit, I had heard vivid and detailed descriptions of
Hell. The haunting horror of it was ever present to my mind. Face
downwards on my pillow, I would repeat "I do believe," over and over
again: ending by screaming it out aloud, sometimes, in case God had
not heard my smothered whisperings. For periods, I would be
confident that I had conquered--that I really did believe: there
could be no doubt about it. And then the fear would come to me that,
after all, I was only pretending to believe; and that God saw
through me and knew I didn't. I dared not open my mouth. To ask
questions would be to confess my disbelief. I tried not to think
about it. But the thoughts would come. It was the Devil tempting me,
I told myself. But neither prayers nor fasting drove him away. And
as the years passed by he became more persistent.

I could not understand God going about His work in this
hole-and-corner way. All men were surely His children. Why had He
revealed Himself only to the Jews, an insignificant tribe of
wandering shepherds, leaving it to them to disseminate His message
or not as they thought fit? As a matter of fact, they had made no
attempt to do so. Regarding Him as their own property, they had done
their best to keep Him to themselves. Even among the early
Christians, it was fiercely debated whether Christ should be shared
with the Gentiles or confined to the circumcised. The vast majority
of mankind are to this day in ignorance of the Gospel upon which
their salvation depends. Why had God made a secret of Himself? Why
had He not spoken His commands in trumpet tones that all the world
might hear?

Why did He not speak to me? If it really was the Devil that was
whispering to me my doubts, why did not God speak also, and with a
word dispel them? Why had reason been given me, if blind faith--the
instinct of an animal--was all that was required of me? Why would
not God speak? Or couldn't He?

Was there a God? This God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, what had I to
do with Him? This God who made blunders and "repented" them: who
"grieved" at the result of His own work--would destroy what He had
made. This God of punishments and curses. This "jealous" God, so
clamorous for His meed of praise and worship, His sacrifices and
burnt offerings, His blood of lambs and goats. This God with a
pretty taste in upholstery. This Designer of curtains and of
candlesticks, so insistent on His shittim wood and gold. This God of
battles. This God of vengeances and massacres. This God who kept a
Hell for His own children. This God of blood and cruelty! This was
not God. This was a creature man had made in his own image.

There were three subjects about which, when I was a young man,
respectable folk were not supposed to talk: politics, sex, and
religion. I remember how fervently my early editors would seek to
impress upon me this convention. Round about me, must have been
many, sharing my doubts and difficulties. We might have been of help
to one another. But religion, especially--even in Bohemian
circles--was strictly taboo. To be interested in it stamped a
youngster as not only priggish but unEnglish. Books dealing with the
subject from the free thinker's point of view I knew existed: but
for such I had no use. The usual standard works in support of
orthodox opinion I did read. I do not think it altogether my fault
that, instead of removing, they had the effect of increasing my
perplexities.

I passed through a period of much mental suffering. The beliefs of
childhood cling close. One tears them loose at cost of pain.
Gradually, I arrived at what Carlyle terms the centre of
indifference. What did we know--what could we know? What were all
the creeds but the jargon of a High Court affidavit, to be sworn
before the nearest solicitor at a fee of eighteenpence? "I have been
informed, and I believe."

And, after all, what did it matter? Beliefs did not alter facts.
There must be a God. The watch proclaims the watchmaker. The starry
firmament above me proved that. Some time--somewhere, the Truth
would be revealed to us. Meanwhile, what needed man other than the
moral law within him? That was the only true religion. The voice of
God Himself, speaking to us direct, requiring no interpreter. That,
one could believe.

I remember a conversation I once had with Zangwill. We were sitting
in a wood upon a fallen tree. My little dog was with us. A cute
little fellow. He sat between us, looking intently from one to the
other as we talked. Zangwill thought that, as a dog is able to
conceive of certain attributes of man, so man is able to grasp and
understand a little part of God. A portion of man's nature is shared
by the dog. So far, my dog, looking up into my eyes, knows me--can
translate my wishes and commands. But for the rest, I remain a
mystery to him. His earnest eyes look up at me, wondering, troubled.
Till a rabbit crosses his path, and he scampers off.

A part of God's nature man shares. To that extent, he apprehends
God--can be the friend, the helper of God. But God Himself, man's
finite mind cannot conceive. For knowledge of God, we must be
content to wait. But, meanwhile, our business is to seek Him, lest
we lose touch with Him. The creeds will pass away. But the altar to
the Unknown God will still remain.

For man's desire will ever be towards God. He cannot help himself.
It is the part of God within him, seeking to return to its source.
If there be any meaning in this life, beyond the mere animal
existence we share with the dumb beasts, it is that we may prepare
ourselves to meet God.

That man is immortal seems to me self-evident. Not even a cabbage is
lost. It is but resolved into its component parts, to be used again.
There is no road by which man's soul can escape out of the
Universe. The only question is whether it be absorbed back into the
fountain of all life from which it came, or retain its separate
existence. But, if the former, why should it have been given a
separate existence only on this earth: where it is so soon to be
done for: where its opportunities for development are so limited?
The chief argument against the immortality of man is that of his
kinship with the lower animals. Man's intellect he shares with all
sentient creation. The difference between instinct and reason is
merely of degree. At their extremes, they overlap. In the unfolding
of man's brain, instinct has been the chief educator. That many
animals exhibit powers of reasoning is capable of proof. Man's
superior intelligence entitles him to the lordship of the world, but
cannot be held to guarantee him a future beyond its boundaries.

Nor in his moral nature does man stand apart from the transient life
around him. The creeping myriads of the dust labour and sacrifice
themselves unceasingly for the good of their community, for love of
their offspring. The law of the tribe--of the nation is but the law
of the herd, amplified, extended. Man shares his virtues, with the
inhabitants of the jungle. Courage, devotion, faithfulness even unto
death are theirs too. God speaks to them also. The moral law within
them guides them likewise through the darkness.

Any claim of man to immortality, based upon his intellectual or
moral perception, would have to apply equally to the entire animal
creation. The argument may be granted. Yubisthira's dying prayer to
Brahma that his dog might be suffered to accompany him does not
strike one as altogether without reason. It may be that all life is
struggling upward by many ways, through many stages. King Yubisthira
and his dog may yet meet, and remember.

But man, in his journey, has already made the tremendous leap from
blind existence to self-consciousness. Still trembling, wondering,
amazed, he stands upon the other side of the immeasurable gulf
separating him from all other living creatures.

When did it happen, this new birth of man, through which he acquired
kinship with God, also? At what turning-point of man's story first
came the thought to him: "What am I? Whence came I? Whither goeth?"
How long had man been wandering upon earth before he discovered the
unseen land around him, and made himself a grave to mark the road?

The desire--the intuitive belief in a future state must have grounds
for its growth, or it would not have taken root in us. If our souls,
like our bodies, were to be dissipated, we should not possess this
instinct: it would be useless to us--a hindrance. The stoics were
prepared to face the possibility; but that was that they might be
free from all fear. They acknowledged that God moved in them. Their
ideal was absorption back into the Godhead--the Nirvana of the
Buddhists. It may be so. Eternity is a long lane. It may lead to
rest.

But surely labour will come first. Kant put the moral law within him
and the starry firmament above him as parts of the same whole. Man's
soul must have been given to him that he should become the
helper--the fellow-labourer with God. The building of the Universe
is not completed. God is still creating.

That a man shall so spend his life that, when he leaves it, he shall
be better fitted for the service of God, that surely is the
explanation of our birth and death.

The battle of life is a battle not for, but against self. One has
not to subscribe literally to the book of Genesis to accept the
doctrine of original sin. How sin came into the world, we shall know
when we have learnt the secrets of Eternity. Meanwhile, our business
is to fight it. By wrestling with it, we strengthen our souls. Of
all who have been given power to help man in his struggle for
spiritual existence, one must place Christ Jesus as the highest. As
a child, I had been taught that Christ was really God. There was
some mystery about a Trinity, which I did not understand--which no
one ever has understood, which the early Church wisely forbade its
votaries from even trying to understand. Christ, himself I could
have loved. I doubt if any human being has ever read or heard his
story without coming to love him--certainly no child. It was
thinking of him as God that caused me to turn away from him. If all
the time he was God then there had been no reality in it. It had all
been mere play-acting. If Christ was God, what help to me the
example of his life?

But Christ my fellow-man--however far above me--was still my
brother, sharer of my bonds and burthens. From his sufferings, I
could learn courage. From his victory, I could gather hope. What he
demanded of me, that I could give. Where he led, I too might
follow.

The Christ spirit is in all men. It is the part of man that is akin to
God. By listening to it, by making it our guide, we can grow more like
to God--fit ourselves to become His comrade, His fellow-labourer. By
neglecting it, by allowing it to be overgrown with worldliness, stifled
under the evil that is also within us, we can destroy it. That the wages
of sin is death is literally true. Sin drives out the desire for God. If
we do not seek Him, we shall not find Him. Christ was the great
Exemplar. By his teaching, by his life and death, he showed us how a man
may become truly the Son of God. All the rest makes only for confusion.
The idea that Christ was sent into the world to be the scapegoat for our
sins is not helpful. If God has no further use for us--if all that
awaits us is an eternal idleness, to be passed in either bliss or pain,
the doctrine might conceivably be comforting. But if it is for labour
that God is seeking to prepare us, then it is but a stumbling-block.

It is not our sins that will drag us down, but our want of will to
fight against them. It is from the struggle, not the victory, that
we gain strength. "Not what I am, but what I strove to be, that
comforts me." It was not that we might escape punishment, win
happiness, that we were given an immortal soul. What sense would
there have been in that? Work is the only explanation of existence.
Happiness is not our goal, either in this world or the next. The joy
of labour, the joy of living, are the wages of God. Those realms of
endless bliss in which, according to popular theology, we are to do
nothing for ever and ever, one trusts are but a myth--at least, that
they will still recede as we advance. Perfect rest, perfect
content, can only be the final end, when all things shall have been
accomplished, and even thought has ceased. Until that far-off
twilight of creation, we trust that, somewhere among His many
mansions, God will find work for us, according to our strength.

To prepare ourselves for the service of God: for that purpose came
we into the world. How have we quitted ourselves? How have we
prospered? Who among us dare hope to meet The Master, face to face,
with head erect, saying, "Lord, I have done my best"?

But if we have truly sought Him, let us not lack courage. It may be,
in some contest by ourselves forgot, that we won further than we
knew. Where we have succeeded, He will remember. And where we have
failed, we trust He, understanding, will forgive.



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| Transcriber's note:                                                |
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| Puntuation errors were corrected.                                  |
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| The following printers errors were addressed.                      |
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| Page 157 'delighful' to 'delightful' (she made a quite delightful  |
| "Fanny")                                                           |
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| Page 178 'cripped' to 'crippled' (of a small crippled brother)     |
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| Page 267 'possibilty' to 'possibility' (any possibility of         |
| permanence)                                                        |
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[End of _My Life and Times_ by Jerome K. Jerome]
