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 matinée, 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: café complete at eight, déjeuner at twelve, and dìner 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. Étaples 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 habitué 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 châteaux. 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 René 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 déjeuner 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.
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