My life and loves Vol. 3

by Frank Harris

  "I don't really know," I said. "I'm afraid that I don't believe in any general rule."

  "But do you like me a little?" she asked. "I know you like Grace; but she's too young, don't you think? Love is only understood in maturity."

  What could I say? For answer I began kissing her again and again and when she was fully wound up, I put my sex in and found that she was quite a good performer at the game. But she wearied me as well with her passion as with her praise. She told me she hoped I would stay with her always, and when I said that I'd soon have to be getting back to London to go on with my journalistic work, she begged me to leave it; she was rich, why need I work?

  She hoped for a child by me: she had always wanted a child-and a deluge of similar hopes and desires.

  A length I returned to my room thoroughly disillusioned, and scarcely had I bolted her door and got into bed when I heard a timid "tap" from Grace's side.

  I hurried over and opened her door. "You were not coming?" she pouted.

  "I thought you were tired and sleepy," I said, "but I am glad you tapped." and I carried her to the bed.

  Grace was already a wonderful lover. From the beginning she set herself to give one all the pleasure possible and was bold in asking whether this maneuver or that response had been most successful. Accordingly her progress in the art was astoundingly rapid. Already she was such a perfect bedfellow as one only finds twice or thrice in a lifetime. I know that whoever she married later would esteem himself fortunate, and the more experienced he was, the higher he would prize her. The women who complain of their husbands are, I have always found, those who do not know how to heighten delight to ecstasy.

  A month later I had a telegram calling me back to London, but I met Grace again later, as I shall tell perhaps in due course. All I can say now is that no one ever had a more perfect mistress than Grace!

  CHAPTER XI

  Parnell and Gladstone

  In April, 1886, Mr. Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill. The House was so thronged that members sat about on the steps leading up from the floor, and even on the arms of the benches and on each other's knees, while I had to give up my usual seat in the small compartment on the floor of the chamber and be content with a place in the first row of the Distinguished Strangers'

  Gallery. Herbert Bismarck sat on my left and the Marquis of Breteuil on my right, yet the visitors that night were so world famous that these men were not even mentioned in next day's papers. Not a seat was vacant in any of the galleries; even that of peers was crammed; every diplomat in London seemed to be present; and cheek by jowl with the black uniform of bishops, Indian princes by the dozen blazing with diamonds, lent a rich Oriental color to the scene.

  I had heard Mr. Gladstone often before, and especially on the war in the Sudan a few years earlier, when he had risen, I thought, to great heights, but this performance of the Old Man was none the less remarkable. His head was like that of an old eagle-luminous eyes, rapacious beak and bony jaws; his high white collar seemed to cut off his head of a bird of prey from the thin, small figure in conventional, black evening dress. His voice was a high, clear tenor; his gestures rare, but well chosen; his utterance as fluid as water; but now and then he became strangely impressive through some dramatic pause and slower enunciation, which emphasized, so to say, the choice and music of the rhythmic words.

  Though I did not believe in him at all and was, indeed, repelled by the conventional Christian sentimentality he poured out on us when deeply moved, I could not but admit that the old man was singularly eloquent and the best specimen of the Greek rhetor of modern times. Everyone knew that his proposals were a mere resultant of a dozen opposing forces, yet he seemed so passionately sincere and earnest that time and again you might have thought that he was expounding God's law, conveyed to him on Sinai.

  He was a great actor, and as Mr. Foster once said, could persuade himself of anything and the House of Commons of tragic absurdities.

  Herbert Bismarck, a giant of thirty perhaps, with a long Viking-fair moustache and blue eyes, declared at the end that he had never heard so great a speech. And the effect was prodigious; for five minutes the whole House cheered and the people in the galleries sat spell-bound.

  A few nights later, Parnell spoke; the House was nothing like full; the galleries more than half empty; the Indian dignitaries conspicuous by their absence; not a bishop nor archbishop to be seen; yet to me the scene was more impressive. There he stood, a tall, thin, erect figure; no reporter had ever said that he was handsome; yet, to my astonishment, he was by far the handsomest man I ever saw in the House of Commons-magnificently good-looking. Just forty years of age, his beard was beginning to grey, but what drew one was the noble profile, the great height, and the strange, blazing eyes in the thin, white face. I could not account for the effect of heat and light in his eyes, till later I noticed that the dark hazel of them was dotted, so to speak, with golden pin heads that in excitement seemed to blaze; the finest eyes that I have ever seen in a human head, except the eyes of Richard Burton.

  He began amid Irish cheers, but very quietly in his ordinary voice. I soon noticed that the hands holding his coat were so tense that the knuckles went white; he hadn't a single oratorical trick; he spoke quite naturally, but slowly, as if seeking his words, and soon I began to feel that words to this man stood for deeds. When he spoke of the crimes and coercion of the previous five years, his words seemed to me those of some recording angel; the absence of inflection or passion gave the impression of immutable truth. I remember his very words: they were prophetic; they could be used for the events of thirty years later:

  You have had during these five years-I don't say this to inflame passion- you have had during these five years the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act; you have had a thousand of your Irish fellow-subjects held in prison without specific charge, many of them for long periods of time, some of them for twenty months, without trial and without any intention of placing them upon trial (I think of all these thousand persons arrested under the Coercion Act of the late Mr. Foster scarcely a dozen were put on their trial); you have had the Arms Act; you have had the suspension of trial by jury-all during the last five years.

  You have authorized your police to enter the domicile of any citizen of your fellow subject in Ireland, at any hour of the day or night, and search any part of his domicile, even the beds of the women, without warrant. You have fined the innocent for offenses committed by the guilty; you have taken power to expel aliens from the country; you have revived the curfew law and the blood money of your Norman conquerors; you have manufactured new crimes and offenses, and applied fresh penalties unknown to your law for these crimes and offenses. All this you have done for five years, and all this and much more you will have to do again.

  The chill atmosphere of hatred in which he had begun his speech had changed: a good many English members were listening now with all their ears. I felt very much as I had felt when drinking in Bismarck's great speech in the Reichstag five years before, that a great man was talking and the words were prophetic and the place sacred.

  Then he spoke of Trevelyan and himself and I thrilled.

  Mr. Trevelyan has said that there is no half-way house between separation and the maintenance of law and order in Ireland by Imperial authority. I say, with just as much sincerity of belief and just as much experience as the right honorable gentleman, that in my judgment there is no half-way house between the concession of legislative autonomy to Ireland and the disenfranchisement of the country and her government as a Crown colony.

  That was the whole problem in a couple of phrases, and I was in no doubts as to who was in the right.

  Yet when he sat down the cheering was purely Irish, and the Chief didn't even notice the enthusiasm of his followers.

  One day, shortly before I got the editorship of the Fortnightly Review, I received a letter, from a man in Dublin, full of curious statements that greatly excited me. I answered him, and in the course of our correspo
ndence I came to see that he was a mine of information about the Irish Party and their doings in Ireland. He stated quite boldly that the Irish Party was responsible for the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Phoenix Park and for most of the subsequent deeds of violence in Ireland. He did not hesitate to implicate Parnell in this knowledge; and so I wrote to him, asking him to come over to London and spend a week with me. He had already told me that he was poor, so I sent him money and asked him to be my guest; and in due time Richard Pigott came and stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore.

  The very first evening he told me how the knives which had been used in the Phoenix Park murder had been taken from the offices of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster and brought across and distributed to the murderers in Dublin. I was quite willing to believe it all, and my manifest interest seemed to excite him, for he went on expanding the story in every direction. After two or three days I began to doubt him; and at the end of a week I knew that he was drawing on his imagination for his facts and was wholly untrustworthy. At the end I said that I would take the matter into consideration and would let him know. I did let him know in a day or two that I would have nothing to do with publishing his stories.

  A little later The Times began publishing its exposure of Parnell, and at length printed a letter purporting to be from Parnell, which plainly implicated him in the Phoenix Park murder. I got a facsimile made of it and reproduced the letter in the Evening News. Next day I was out riding to Richmond with Arthur Walter, the son of the owner of The Times. He told me, without circumlocution, how glad he was that I had published the letter.

  "Why?" I asked. "I published it merely as a piece of news." "Surely you wouldn't have published it," he said, "if you hadn't believed it."

  "I don't believe a word of it," I cried. "I published it as news, on the authority of The Times."

  "But it is plainly Parnell's handwriting," said Walter. "In these days," I replied, "handwriting can be photographed and reproduced precisely; it is absurd to trust to similarity in handwriting to prove the authenticity of a letter."

  I can't remember whether I told him then or a little later how I had come to know Pigott, but about this time he admitted to me that Pigott was the chief source of The Times information, and I warned him against the man. All the world knows how Parnell brought his action against The Times and how Pigott broke down in the witness box and shortly afterwards shot himself in Madrid. But the hatred of Parnell was so pronounced in England that in due time his enemies induced O'Shea to begin his action for divorce and make Parnell the co-respondent. Parnell believed, and said openly, that the result of the case would be to show that he was not guilty of the grave accusation of having brought disunion between husband and wife: it was perfectly well known that the O'Sheas were practically separated before Parnell came upon the scene, but any weapon is good enough to beat a dog with, and so the dispute was given an exaggerated importance by the English press.

  Gladstone threw up his hands in holy horror and pretended to be shocked at Parnell's sin; I called Gladstone an "old hypocrite" and stated that on more than one occasion he had sent to Mrs. O'Shea for intimate information about Parnell and his views. In her book on Parnell and their mutual love, Mrs.

  O'Shea tells the plain truth.

  For ten years Gladstone had known of the relations between Parnell and myself, and had taken full advantage of the facility this intimacy offered him in keeping in touch with the Irish leader. For ten years! But this was private knowledge. Now it was public knowledge, and an English statesman must always appear on the side of the angels.

  So Mr. Gladstone found his religion could at last be useful to his country.

  Parnell felt no resentment towards Gladstone. He merely said to me, with his grave smile: "That old Spider has nearly all my flies in his web," and, to my indignation against Gladstone, he replied: "You don't make allowances for statecraft. He has the Nonconformist conscience to consider, and you know as well as I do he always loathed me. But these fools who throw me over at his bidding, make me a little sad."

  On the next page she tells of the traitorism of certain members of the Irish Party, when those who owed most to the great Chief turned most currishly against him. Mrs. O'Shea adds, "How long the Irish Party had known of the relations between Parnell and myself need not be here discussed. Some years before certain members of the party opened one of my letters to Parnell."

  As I wrote at the time, this traitorism signed the death warrant of Irish Home Rule for a generation at least.

  In December, 1890, a vacancy occurred in Kilkenny, and Parnell went over to support his nominee. Miss Katherine Tynan gives a great picture of the scene before his speech in the rotunda at Dublin.

  It was nearly eight-thirty when we heard the bands coming. Then the windows were lit up by the lurid glare of thousands of torches in the street outside. There was a distant roaring like the ocean. The great gathering within waited silently with expectation. Then the cheering began, and we craned our necks and looked on eagerly, and there was the tall, slender, distinguished figure of the Irish leader making its way across the platform. I don't think any words could do justice to his reception. The house rose at him; everywhere around there was a sea of passionate faces, loving, admiring, almost worshipping that silent, pale man. The cheering broke out again and again; there was no quelling it. Mr. Parnell bowed from side to side, sweeping the assemblage with his eagle glance. The people were fairly mad with excitement. I don't think anyone outside Ireland can understand what a charm Mr. Parnell has for the Irish heart; that wonderful personality of his, his proud bearing, his handsome strong face, the distinction of look which marks him more than anyone I have ever seen. All these are irresistible to the artistic Irish…

  I said to Dr. Kenny, who was standing by me, "He is the only quiet man here."

  "Outwardly," said the keen medical man, emphatically. Looking again, one saw the dilated nostrils, the flashing eyes, the passionate face.

  When Mr. Parnell came to speak, the passion within him found vent. It was a wonderful speech; not one word of it for oratorical effect, but every word charged with a pregnant message to the people who were listening to him, and the millions who should read him. It was a long speech, lasting nearly an hour, but listened to with intense interest, punctuated by fierce cries against men whom this crisis has made odious, now and then marked in a pause by a deep-drawn moan of delight. It was a great speech-simple, direct, suave- with no device and no artificiality. Mr. Parnell said long ago, in a furious moment in the House of Commons, that he cared nothing for the opinion of the English people. One remembered it now, noting his passionate assurances to his own people, who loved him too well to ask him questions.

  I went across to Ireland for the Kilkenny election. Parnell was stopping in the hotel. In public he wore a bandage over his right eye, saying that some one had thrown quicklime in it and injured it. But when he received Harold Frederic and myself in the inn he had laid aside the bandage and his eye seemed altogether uninjured.

  One incident took place then which I shall never forget. Frederic, the American journalist, was a great friend and loyal supporter of Parnell, and the chief therefore talked with us naturally and without pose. But I was shocked by the deep shadows under Parnell's eyes and a look of strain- I had almost said, of wild fear in his eyes. He had been through deep waters!

  Suddenly, while we were chatting, there came some noise from outside, and before we could interfere Parnell had whipped outside the window and was standing on the balcony. A funeral was passing down the street in solemn silence. Everyone knows how seriously death is regarded in Ireland.

  Suddenly Parnell cried at the top of his voice: "There goes the corpse of Pope Hennessy," his opponent in the electoral struggle. In a minute some friends came and helped Frederic to drag him into the room, reminding him that he had forgotten his bandage, which he wore even a week later. The loss of selfcontrol, so marked in so proud and masterful a man, made a de
ep impression on me. I told Frederic that night that Parnell had serious nerve trouble and would go mad soon if be didn't take care.

  Fate was more merciful to him. He returned to his adoring wife at Brighton, but in spite of all her care and devotion, died in her arms in October, 1891, aged just 45. They had been lovers eleven years.

  Parnell was a great character, if not a great intellect. But it was natural that England, which couldn't use the far greater man, Burton, couldn't use Charles Parnell. And the whole misery and disunion in Ireland today conies from this fact. Parnell ought to have been an English hero. His love for Mrs. O'Shea was the love of his whole life, and he gave himself to her with the same singlehearted devotion he had vowed in political life to the cause of Ireland.

  Almost everyone took for granted that Gladstone was the greatest Englishman of his century, but in my heart I have always regarded him as negligible. His political achievements were merely parochial.

  The insane misjudgment of Gladstone reminds me of a dinner I was asked to in London where Mr. Chauncey Depew was to appear for the first time. Every one was agog to hear the man who came to London with the reputation of being the best after-dinner speaker in America.

  After dinner Mr. Depew got up, heralded with fantastic praise and applause, and began a long series of platitudes punctuated with age-worn anecdotes, chestnuts familiar to me in boyhood. He went on interminably while the applause grew fainter and fainter. At length, I said to my vis-d-vis, a wellknown judge, "Haven't you had enough of this?" He replied, "Enough for a life tune," and we both got up and left the room.

  Years later I told this to a young friend from New York, one Allan Bowling. "I once heard Depew," he said, "in New York, say the most stupid thing conceivable. 'The greatest American I ever met,' he said, 'was undoubtedly Abraham Lincoln; the greatest man was William Gladstone!'" For monumental stupidity, the remark would be hard to beat.