by Frank Harris
"No, no! my dear fellow," replied Pattison, "but I have ground for thought. My wife tells me that she thinks she's enceinte," and he pursed out his lips in selfsatisfaction.
"Good God." cried the friend, "whom do you suspect?"
When we read Mrs. Pattison's cable in the morning paper, Folkestone exclaimed, "Really, I begin to feel sorry for Dilke; his sins are finding him out," and Harold Frederic's word was much the same: "A bos bleu on a rake will be something novel even in London."
I never liked Lady Dilke. She was a woman of forty-odd when I first met her, an ordinary stout, short blonde with brown hair, blue eyes, commonplace features and complexion, who was always a pedant-indeed the only bluestocking I ever met in England. I may give one typical instance of her pedantry and so leave her to rest. When I had made some reputation as a Shakespeare scholar and had declined her invitations for years and years, she wrote to me once, telling me that the French diplomat, M. Jusserand, was a great Shakespearean authority whom I really ought to meet; and "who wishes to meet you," she added. "Won't you therefore dine with us on the- and meet him? Please come at seven and then you can have an hour together before dinner."
I wrote thanking her and turned up at seven sharp; I was eager to see if any Frenchman knew anything at first hand of Shakespeare. Lady Dilke introduced me at once to M. Jusserand in the little off-drawing-room on the first floor and said, "Now I'll leave you two sommites of learning to talk and straighten out all difficulties, for you both believe, I think, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Bacon, though I remember once-," and the garrulous lady started off on a long story of how she had once met a Baconian at Lincoln College, "whom even my husband had to respect and this is how he approached the great question-"
Jusserand and I looked at each other and listened with courteous, patient inattention; the lady went on for the whole hour and the dinner-bell found us still listening, neither of us having got in a single word edgeways. To this day I know nothing of Jusserand's views.
From his marriage on, Dilke and I used to lunch together once a week, now in this restaurant, now in that, for many a year, and nine-tenths of what I learned about the House of Commons and English politicians came from him.
In fact, it was he who showed me the best side of English Puritanism, its appreciation of conduct and strict observance of all obligations. I always preferred the aristocrat view, at once more generous and looser; but the middle-class semi-religious outlook is perhaps more characteristically English, for it has propagated itself almost exclusively all over the United States and the British colonies.
Dilke taught me where Dickens got his Gradgrind, the master of facts, "the German paste in the Englishman," I called it. Dilke was well informed in politics and worked up all his speeches in the House with meticulous care.
But though he spoke monotonously and without a thrill of any kind, Gladstone, some time before the Crawford divorce case, had solemnly selected Dilke to follow him in the Liberal leadership. Laborious learning is esteemed in England beyond even genius, altogether beyond its value. This is what Goethe meant, I believe, when he spoke of the English as "pedants."
One evening at dinner Dilke corrected Harold Frederic in a little unimportant fact. For some reason or other, Frederic had asserted that only about half the inhabitants of Salt Lake City were Mormons. At once Dilke corrected him: "Ninety per cent, my dear Frederic, and eighty per cent communicants." Harold looked his disgust but said nothing. Afterwards, going home together, he expatiated on this tic of Dilke's and arranged with me to catch him. Harold was to get up the number of Copts in Lower Egypt; of course Dilke would pretend to have the figures at his fingers' ends and Frederic would bowl him out. For my part I was charged to find out the number of Boers in the Transvaal in comparison with men of other nationalities, and accordingly I got up the figures.
At our next dinner in Sloane Street I turned the talk on Cairo and said how surprised I was at the number of different nationalities there were in that strange land. "I met Copts by the score," I said; at once Dilke fell into the trap.
"Surely," he said, "the Copts in Cairo don't number more than a few hundreds."
"What do you think, Frederic?" I asked across the table, to get the proper audience.
"Copts in Cairo," repeated Frederic. "You can hardly be serious, Dilke; there are some eleven thousand of them."
Dilke was nonplussed. "Really, eleven thousand," he kept repeating; "Copts?
Really?" He was evidently shocked by the correction.
A few minutes later he committed himself to the statement that there were comparatively few Boers in Johannesburg and thus fell into my hands. I never saw a man so taken aback; accuracy was his fetish and to have it desert him twice in one evening was too much for his equanimity.
I mention these things just to set off a racial peculiarity of the Englishman which, I'm sorry to say, is showing itself almost as prominently in the American, though, I am glad to believe, without the intolerable presumption of the Englishman that knowledge and wisdom are synonymous.
In my first year in the Evening News I learned and practiced nearly every journalistic trick. When the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge was about to be decided, I found out that the experts usually knew which crew would win. Of course sometimes they are mistaken, but very rarely, and this year they all agreed it was a foregone conclusion for Oxford. Accordingly, on the great morning I had fifty thousand papers printed with "Oxford won" in big letters under the latest preliminary reports of the training, etc. As soon as the telephone message came through that Oxford had won, I let the boys out and this start enabled me to sell all the fifty thousand papers. I did the same thing with race after race on the turf and soon it began to be known that the Evening News had the earliest news of the races. I only mention these things to show that I was really working at high pressure day in, day out.
Time and again, luck favoured me. One morning the announcement came in that the marriage between Lord Garmoyle and Miss May Fortescue had been broken off and that the lady was suing for breach of promise. Within ten minutes I had got her address and was off in a hansom to interview her. I found her a very pretty and very intelligent girl who blamed the whole fiasco upon Earl Cairns, one of the Conservative leaders, who was the father of Lord Garmoyle and naturally enough did not wish his only son to marry an undistinguished actress. I gathered from Miss Fortescue that Cairns was a North of Ireland man, a great lawyer, but very religious and prudish, one who still spoke of Sunday as the Sabbath and thought the stage the antechamber of hell. When Miss Fortescue saw that I meant to fight for her, she gave me letters both of Lord Cairns and Lord Garmoyle that were very interesting and confessed to me that though she "cared for" Lord Garmoyle, she had put the damages for the breach of promise at ten thousand pounds "because his father will have to pay."
I wrote a two-column article at once, telling the whole story under the title "Beauty and the Peer," exciting all the sympathy possible for Miss Fortescue and throwing all the odium on Earl Cairns. The article caused a tremendous sensation. That a Conservative paper should have printed such an attack upon a Conservative peer and leader was unheard of.
Kennard happened to be in Brighton, but he was told about the article within a couple of hours of its appearance and at once wired to me to stop publishing the story, which he characterized as "obscene!" I went to Lord Folkestone for support and found that he was merely amused. He didn't like Cairns, thought him narrow and bigoted, and encouraged me to go on, while promising to smooth down Kennard's ruffled plumage. Accordingly, I kept on and had a second article next day still more sarcastic. To cut a long story short, Lord Cairns couldn't stand the contemptuous exposure, so paid the ten thousand pounds of damages demanded, and everyone, including Miss Fortescue, gave me and the Evening News credit for the victory.
This journalistic triumph doubled the circulation of the paper, increased its advertisements considerably and so gave us all a foretaste of success. I clean
ed out the sub-editors' room and put friends of my own in place of the hacks, notably an Australian Irishman named Dr. Rubie; turned out the old leader-writers too and gave their work to Cluer and other friends. The whole place was soon abuzz with life and vigour.
But I had some rebuffs. The office of the St. James Gazette was just opposite our office in Whitefriars Street, and when I went out at noon I used to see a dozen of their carts drawn up on one side of the street, while our fifteen or twenty carts were drawn up on the other side-all alike waiting to get the papers and hurry off to distribute them to the various shops all over London. I went into the matter and found that we were paying some six thousand pounds a year for our carts. At once I got an introduction to Greenwood, the editor of the St. James's, and offered to give his paper, which cost a penny, the benefit of our very much larger distribution at about half of that his carts cost him. To my astonishment he refused and stuck to his refusal, though it was plainly stupid.
Three years afterwards, when my first stories came out in the Fortnightly Review, Greenwood praised them to the skies, and very ingenuously admitted that he had had a prejudice against me because he had heard me called an "American business man" and now regretted his hostility. We became in fact very good friends, and long before he died I grew to esteem and love the man.
Lord Folkestone often got me to call for him at the Carlton Club and there one day he told me a couple of jokes about club life that seemed to me to be amusing. The Carlton Club, as everybody knows, is the official club of the Conservative party, and one day an influential member, recently joined, put up on the notice board a request that the nobleman who had stolen his umbrella would kindly return it immediately. After this notice had been up a week or so, an irascible nobleman went to the secretary and drew his attention to it.
"It is a libel on our order," he said, "and I insist that the name of the nobleman should be given or the notice should be taken down." Hereupon the secretary went and interviewed the member who had put up the notice. "I don't know his name," said the member.
"Why then do you think it is a nobleman?" asked the secretary.
"Well, this club, according to your own statement, is made up of noblemen and gentlemen. No gentleman would steal my umbrella, so it must be a nobleman."
And here is a story of the Athenaeum Club, which in its own way is almost as amusing. The Athenaeum possessed for many years a famous and polite porter, named, I think, Courtney, who could identify hats, umbrellas and walking sticks belonging to members, and was never known to make a mistake. One day a dignified Bishop on his way out was duly handed his things by the janitor.
"This umbrella does not belong to me, Courtney," said the right reverend prelate.
"Possible not, my Lord," replied Courtney, "but it is the one you brought into the club."
Such stories as these abound in London and give a special, distinctive flavour to life in England, and for that reason I shall reproduce some of the best, not forgetting those coined in New York.
CHAPTER XI
London life and humor; Burn and Marx
… O thou wondrous Mother-age Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife When I heard my days before me and the tumult of my life.
London in the early eighties; London after years of solitary study and grim relentless effort; London when you are twenty-eight and have already won a place in its life; London when your mantelpiece has ten times as many invitations as you can accept, and there are two or three pretty girls that attract you; London when everyone you meet is courteous-kind and people of importance are beginning to speak about you; London with the foretaste of success in your mouth while your eyes are open wide to its myriad novelties and wonders; London with its round of receptions and court life, its theatres and shows, its amusements for the body, mind and soul: enchanting hours at a burlesque, prolonged by a boxing-match at the Sporting Club; or an evening in Parliament, where world-famous men discuss important policies; or a quiet morning spent with a poet who will live in English literature with Keats and Shakespeare; or an afternoon with pictures of a master already consecrated by fame. London: who could give even an idea of its varied delights: London the centre of civilization, the queen city of the world without a peer in the multitude of its attractions, as superior to Paris as Paris is to New York.
If you have never been intoxicated you have never lived. I have felt myself made better and happier by exquisite wine, keyed up, so to speak, to a more vivid and higher spiritual life, talking better than I ever talked before, with an intensified passion that lit all the eyes about me and set souls aflame. But the rapture of such heightened life is only momentary. London made me drunk for years and in memory still the magic of those first years ennobles life for me; and the later pains and sufferings, wrongs and insults, disdains and disappointments, all vanish and are forgotten. I wonder if I can give an idea of what London was to me with the first draught of its intoxicating vintage on my hot lips and the perfumes of it in my greedy nostrils. It's impossible to describe such a variety of attractions, but I'll try, reminding my readers merely that it was my ambition to touch life on many sides.
I had never heard of Frank Burnand, but one night I dropped in to see his burlesque of Blue Beard. The play was worse than absurd, incredibly trivial.
Mr. Burnand's hero keeps a note book for jotting down the names and addresses of interesting young women; otherwise he is not much of a monster.
His mysterious Blue Chamber contains nothing more terrible than hair-dyes.
He is a beardless lad of one-and-twenty; has, however, a blue lock to show; but it's a fraud. His wife and his father-in-law are to lose their heads for discovering his secret; the catastrophe is averted by the timely arrival of troops of young ladies in fantastic martial costumes that reveal most shapely figures.
The dancing and singing, and above all the astonishing plastic beauty of the chorus girls, gave me a foretaste of London, for in Paris the chorus women were usually hags.
Miss Nelly Farren is the Baron Abomelique de Barbe Bleue and Miss Vaughan, Kate Vaughan is Lili, the Baron's bride. Here is the first verse of her song in the second act:
French language is a bother,
To learn it I don't care,
Don't like to hear my mother
Called by the French a mere.
I like a husband to myself
But the dear one is my cher
Though I've only got one father
Yet they swear he is a pere.
Then Kate danced as no one ever danced before or since, with inimitable grace, and the way she picks up her dress and shows dainty ankles and hint of lovely limbs is a poem in itself; and all about her beautiful, smiling girls, in costumes that reveal every charm, sway or turn or dance, as if inspired by her delightful gaiety. In another scene she imitates Sarah Bernhardt and there is infinite humour in her piquant caricature; some one else mimics Irving, and all this in a rain of the most terrible puns and verbal acrobatics ever heard on any stage-an unforgettable evening which made me put Burnand down as one of the men I must get to know as soon as possible, for he was evidently a force to count with, a verbal contortionist, at least, of most extraordinary agility.
I will give one proof of his quality from my memories of ten years or so later, just to give handsome little Frank his proper standing, for he was as kindly pleasant as he was good-looking and witty, and that's saying a good deal.
In the London New York Herald, a weekly paper, there had appeared the story of Lord Euston's arrest, so detailed that it was almost as libellous as the account in the Star, the ha' penny Radical evening paper, of which Ernest Parke was the editor. I knew Euston pretty well and he had told me that he meant to make it "hot" for anyone who traduced him. He was a big, wellmade fellow of perhaps thirty, some six feet in height and decidedly manlylooking, the last person in the world to be suspected of any abnormal propensities. The story in the Star was detailed and libellous: Lord Euston was said to have gone in a
n ill-famed house in the West Central district; and the account in the Sunday Herald was just as damning. On the Monday following, Burnand came to lunch with me in Park Lane and by chance another guest was the Reverend John Verschoyle, whose talent for literature I have already described.
For some reason or other Verschoyle at table had condemned those who married their deceased wife's sister, evidently ignorant of the fact that Burnand had committed this offence against English convention. A little later, after the ladies had left the table, Verschoyle brought the conversation on the article in the New York Herald about Lord Euston; he was positive that a Sunday paper, by even mentioning such an affair, had killed itself in London. Burnand remarked, smiling, that he could not agree with such a verdict; surely it was the function of a newspaper to publish "news," and everyone was talking of this incident. But Verschoyle, purity-mad, stuck to his guns. "How could you explain such an 'incident'," he insisted, "to your wife or daughter, if she asked you what it was all about?"
"Very easily," retorted Burnand, still smiling, but with keen antagonism in his sharp enunciation; "I'd say: 'my dear, Lord Euston feels himself above the ordinary law, and having nothing better to do, went to this notorious gambling house to play. He thought the game was going to be poker, but when he found it was baccarat he came away.' "
No wittier explanation could be imagined; even Verschoyle had to try to smile. Curiously enough, in the libel action which Lord Euston brought against the Star newspaper, and which resulted in the condemnation of Ernest Parke, the editor, to a year's imprisonment, the explanation of Lord Euston was something like Burnand's excuse for him. He said that someone in the street had given him a card with poses plastiques on it; as he was at a loose end that night, he went to the address indicated. When he found that there were no poses plastiques, he came away.