Autobiography of David Christie Murray

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Autobiography of David Christie Murray

THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST

An Experiment In Autobiography

By David Christie Murray


CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1894


[Portrait]
From a Photograph by Thomas Fall


TO J. M. BARRIE




PREFACE

Every man who writes about himself is, on the face of the matter,
obnoxious to the suspicion which haunts the daily pathway of the Bore.
To talk of self and not be offensive demands an art which is not always
given to man. And yet we are always longing to get near each other and
to understand each other; and in default of a closer communion with
our living fellows we take to our bosoms the shadows of fiction and the
stage. If the real man could be presented to us by any writer of his own
history we should all hail him with enthusiasm.

Pepys, of course, came nearer than anybody else; but this is only
because he wrote for his own reading and meant to keep himself a secret.
Dickens exquisitely veils and unveils his own personality and career in
_Copperfield_, and scores of smaller writers have done the same thing in
fiction to our great pleasure. But to set down boldly, openly, and as a
fact for general publication the things of one’s own doing, saying, and
thinking is an impertinence whose only justification can be found in the
public approval. If Pepys had written his Diary for publication he would
have been left to oblivion as a driveller. But we surprise the man’s
secret, we see what he never meant to show us, the peering jackdaw
instinct is satisfied; and we feel, besides, a certain sense of humorous
pity and affectionate disdain which the man himself, had we known him in
life as we know him in his book, could never have excited. Rousseau, to
me, is flatly intolerable, because he meant to tell the world what every
man should have the decency to hide.

The perfect autobiography is yet to seek, and will probably never
be written. A partial solution of a difficulty is offered in this
experimental booklet. It is offered without diffidence, because it is
offered in perfect modesty. I have tried to show how one particular
novelist was made; where he got some of his experiences, and in
what varying fashions the World and Fate have tried to teach him his
business. It has been my effort to do this in the least egotistical and
the most straightforward fashion. The narrative is quite informal and
wanders where it will; but in its serial publication it received marked
favour from an indulgent public, and I like to give it an equal chance
of permanence with the rest of my writings, which I trust will not
convey the notion that I covet a too-exaggerated longevity. Should
the public favour continue, the field of experience is wide; and I may
repeat Dick Swiveller’s saying to Mr. Quilp--‘There is plenty more in
the shop this comes from.’




THE MAKING OF A NOVELIST




I

Only a day or two ago I found myself arrested on my eastward way along
the Strand by the hand of a friend upon my shoulder. We chatted for a
minute or two, and I found that I was in front of Lipscombe’s window.
A ball of cork, which has had a restless time of it for many years,
was dodging up and down the limits of a glass shade, tossed by a jet of
water. The sight of it carried me back twenty years in a flash. ‘In
the year 1872 I came to London, as many young men had done before me,
without funds, without friends, and without employment, trusting, with
the happy-go-lucky disposition of youth, to the chapter of accidents.
For some time the accidents were all unfavourable, and there came a
morning when I owned nothing in the world but the clothes I stood in.
I found myself that morning very tired, very hungry, very down in the
mouth, staring at the cork ball on the jet of water under the glass
shade, and drearily likening it to my own mental condition, flung hither
and thither, drenched, rolled over, lifted and dropped by a caprice
beyond the power of resistance. It was at this mournful moment that I
found my first friend in London. The story of that event shall be told
hereafter. What I want to say now is that the sight of that permanent
show in Lipscombe’s window made me younger for a minute by a score
of years, and opened my mind to such a rush of recollections that I
determined then and there to put my memories on paper.

I am not such an egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether
unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising.
Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the
adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found
enough to stock the lives of a thousand stay-at-homes. At the first
blush it would not appear to the outside observer that the literary
life is likely to be fruitful in adventure; but in the circle of my own
acquaintance there are a good many men who have found it so.

In the city of Prague the most astonishing encounters pass for every-day
incidents. In these days of universal enlightenment nobody needs to be
told that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note that rings
false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have
been vulgarised by people who have never passed its borders. All sorts
of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use, and the
very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of
gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than
they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the
place itself is as real as ever it was. I have lived in it for a quarter
of a century, and, without vanity, may claim to know it as well as any
man alive.

Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company
of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London
daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own
career.

‘I do not suppose,’ he said, ‘that any man in my present position has
experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I
went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I
slept in the Park.’

One of the party turned to me. ‘You cap that, Christie?’

I answered, ‘Four nights on the Embankment. Four days hungry.’

My left-hand neighbour was a poet, and he chimed in laconically, ‘Five.’

In effect, it proved that there was not one of us who had not slept in
that Hotel of the Beautiful Star which is always open to everybody. We
had all been frequent guests there, and now we were all prosperous,
and had found other and more comfortable lodgings. There is a gentler
brotherhood to be found among men who have put up in that great
caravanserai than can be looked for elsewhere. He jests at scars that
never felt a wound, and a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

There are many people still alive who remember the name of George
Dawson. There used to be thousands who recognized it with veneration
and affection. He was my first chief, editor of the _Birmingham Morning
News_, and had been my idol for years. My red-letter nights were when
he came over to my native town of West Bromwich to lecture for the Young
Men’s Christian Association there on Tennyson, ‘Vanity Fair,’ Oliver
Goldsmith, and kindred themes.

Every Sunday night it was my habit to tramp with a friend of mine, dead
long ago, into Birmingham to hear Dawson preach in the Church of the
Saviour. The trains ran awkwardly for us, and many scores of times poor
Ned and myself walked the five miles out and five miles home in rain and
snow and summer weather to listen to the helpful and inspiriting words
of the strongest and most helpful man I have ever known.

I am not sure at this time of day what I should think of George Dawson
if he still survived; but nothing can now diminish the affection and
reverence with which I bless his memory. I had been writing prose and
verse for the local journals for a year or two. I was proud and pleased
beyond expression to be allowed to write the political leaders for the
_Wednesday Advertiser_. I got no pay, and I dare say the editor was as
pleased to find an enthusiast who did his work for nothing as I was to
be allowed to do it. In practical journalism I had had no experience
whatever; but when Dawson was announced as the editor of the forthcoming
_Birmingham Morning News_ I wrote to him, asking to be allowed to
join the staff. I had already secured a single meeting with him a year
before, and he had spoken not unkindly of some juvenile verses which I
had dared to submit to his judgment

He proved to be as well acquainted with practical journalism as myself,
for in answer to my application he at once offered me the post of
sub-editor. Dr. Langford, who held actual command, set his veto on this
rather absurd appointment, and told me that if I wished to join the
journalistic guild at all I must begin at the beginning. I asked what
the beginning might be, and learned that the lowest grade in journalism
in the provinces is filled by the police-court reporter. The salary
offered was 25s. a week. The work began at eleven o’clock in the
morning and finished at about eleven o’clock at night. I have known many
sleepless nights since then; but the first entirely wakeful time I had
passed between the sheets was spent in the mental discussion of that
offer. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth at home when
I decided to accept it. The journal was very loosely conducted--a leader
in the Birmingham Daily Post spoke of us once as the people across
the street who were playing at journalism--and the junior reporter
was permitted to write leaders, theatrical criticisms, and a series of
articles on the works of Thomas Carlyle, then first appearing in popular
form in a monthly issue.

I have always maintained, and must always continue to believe, that
there is no school for a novelist which can equal that of journalism.
In the police court, at inquests in the little upper rooms of tenth-rate
public-houses, and in the hospitals which it was my business to visit
nightly, I began to learn and understand the poor. I began on my own
account to investigate their condition, and as a result of one or two
articles about the Birmingham slums, was promoted at a bound from the
post of police-court reporter to that of Special Correspondent. Six
guineas a week, with a guinea a day for expenses, looked like an entry
into Eldorado. There was a good deal of heartburning and jealousy
amongst the members of the staff; but I dare say all that is forgotten
long ago.

The first real chance I got was afforded me by the first election by
ballot which took place in England. This was at Pontefract, where the
Hon. Hugh Childers was elected in a contest against Lord Pollington.
Some barrister-at-law had published a synopsis of the Ballot Act, which
I bought for a shilling at New Street Station and studied all the way to
Pontefract I sent off five columns of copy by rail in time to catch
the morning issue of the paper, and received the first open sign of
editorial favour on my return in the form of a cheque for ten pounds
over and above my charges. The money was welcome enough; but that it
should come from the hands of my hero and man of men, and should
be accompanied by words of unqualified approval, was, I think, more
inspiriting than anything could possibly be to me now. A very little
while later Dawson came to me with a new commission.

‘I hate this kind of business,’ he said, ‘but it has to be done, and we
will do it once for all.’

There was an execution to take place at Worcester. One Edward Hughes,
a plasterer, I think, had murdered his wife under circumstances of
extraordinary provocation. The woman had left him once with a paramour,
and when she was deserted he had taken her back again. She left him a
second time and was again deserted, and again he condoned her offence.
She left him a third time, and he went to look for her. She was living
in clover, and she jeered when he begged her to return. It was set forth
in evidence that he had told her that he would see her once more.
He walked home--a distance of three or four miles--borrowed a razor,
returned to the house in which the woman was living, asked for an
interview outside in the darkness, and there almost severed her head
from her body. He surrendered himself immediately to the police, was
tried for his life, and sentenced to be hanged.

Rightly or wrongly, the man’s story inspired me with a dreadful
sympathy. I cannot help thinking to this day that the tragedy of that
man’s life went unappreciated, and that his long-suffering devotion
and the passion of jealousy which at length overcame him might have
furnished Shakspeare himself with a theme as terrible as he found in
‘Othello.’ Anyway, the man was to be hanged and I was deputed to attend
the execution.

At that time I had never been a witness at a death scene. I have seen
thousands hurried out of life since then; and though even now I should
find an execution ugly and repellant, I recall with some astonishment
the agony of horror which this commission cost me. I had an introduction
to the sub-sheriff and another to the governor of the gaol; and I
presented these at the gaol itself on a night of rainy misery which was
in complete accord with my own feelings. I went hoping with all my heart
that the permission to attend the awful ceremony of the next morning
would be refused. It was accorded, and I left the gaol in a sick whirl
of pity and horror.

I shall remember whilst I remember anything my last look at the gloomy
building from the fields which lie between it and the town. The flying
afterguard of the late storm was hurrying across the sky, the fields
were sodden, and rainpools lay here and there reflecting the dull steely
hue of the heavens. A single light burned red and baleful in one window,
and right over the black bulk of the gaol one star beamed. It seemed to
me like a promise of mercy beyond, and I went back to my hotel filled
with thoughts which will hardly bear translation.

Next day I had a first lesson in one or two things. I saw death for the
first time; for the first time in my life I saw a human creature in the
extremity of fear, and I had my first lesson in human stupidity. I have
told the story of this execution in another place and have no mind
to repeat it here. But I shall never forget the spidery black-painted
galleries and staircases and the whitewashed walls of the corridor.
I shall never forget the living man who stood trembling and almost
unconscious in the very gulf of cowardice and horror. I shall never
forget the face of the wretched young chaplain who, like myself, found
himself face to face with his first encounter with sudden death, and
who, poor soul, had over-primed himself with stimulant. I shall never
forget, either, that ghoul of a Calcraft, with his disreputable grey
hair, his disreputable undertaker’s suit of black, and a million dirty
pin-pricks which marked every pore of the skin of his face. Calcraft
took the business business-like, and pinioned his man in the cell
(with a terror-stricken half-dozen of us looking on) as calmly to all
appearance as if he had been a tailor fitting on a coat.

The chaplain read the Burial Service, or such portion of it as is
reserved for these occasions, in a thick and indistinct voice. A bell
clanged every half-minute or thereabouts, and it seemed to me as if
it had always been ringing and would always ring. I have the dimmest
notion--indeed, to speak the truth, I have no idea at all--as to how the
procession formed and how we found ourselves at the foot of the gallows.
The doomed man gabbled a prayer under his breath at galloping speed, the
words tumbling one over the other. ‘Lord Jesus have mercy upon me and
receive my spirit.’ The hapless chaplain read the service. Calcraft
bustled ahead. The bell boomed. Hughes came to the foot of the gallows,
and I counted mechanically nineteen black steps, fresh-tarred and
sticky. ‘I can’t get up,’ said the murderer. A genial warder clapped him
on the shoulder, for all the world as if there had been no mischief in
the business. Judging by look and accent, the one man might have invited
the other to mount the stairs of a restaurant. ‘You’ll get up right
enough,’ said the warder. He got up, and they hanged him.

Where everything was strange and dreamlike, the oddest thing of all
was to see Calcraft take the pinioned fin-like hand of the prisoner and
shake it when he had drawn the white cap over the face and arranged
the rope. He came creaking in new boots down the sticky steps of the
gallows, pulled a rope to free a support which ran on a single wheel in
an iron groove, and the man was dead in a second. The white cap fitted
close to his face, and the thin white linen took a momentary stain of
purple, as if a bag of blackberries had been bruised and had suddenly
exuded the juice of the fruit. It sagged away a moment later and assumed
its natural hue.

I learned from the evening paper and from the journals of next morning
that the prisoner met his fate with equanimity. I think that in that
report I bottomed the depths of human stupidity, if such a thing is
possible. I had never seen a man afraid before; and, when I found time
to think about it, I prayed that I might never see that shameful and
awful sight again.




II

I wrote three small-type columns--three columns of leaded minion--about
that execution, describing everything I had seen with a studied
minuteness. Dawson was nervous about the whole affair, and, whilst the
copy was yet in the hands of the printer, asked two or three times what
had been done with the theme. He was kept at bay by the subeditor, who
scented a sensation, and was afraid that the editor-in-chief might cut
the copy to pieces. Dawson was purposely kept waiting for proofs so long
that at last he went home without seeing them; and he often spoke to me
afterwards of the rage and anguish he felt when he opened the paper at
his breakfast-table and found that great mass of space devoted to the
report of an execution. He began, so he told me, by reading the last
paragraph first; then he read the paragraph preceding it; and next,
beginning resolutely at the beginning, found himself compelled to read
the whole ghastly narrative clean through. The machine was at work
all day to supply the local demand for this particular horror, and Mr.
George Augustus Sala wrote specially to ask who was the author of the
narrative. I began to think my fortune made.

The journalist is like the doctor, his services are in requisition
mainly in times of trouble. The Black Country which lies north of
Birmingham is full of disaster, and the special correspondent has a big
field there. Quite early in my career I was sent out to Pelsall Hall,
near Walsall, where a mine had been flooded and two-and-thirty men were
known to be in the workings. I was born and bred in the mining district,
and was familiar with the heroism of the miners. They are not all
heroes, and even those who are are not always heroic. But use breeds a
curious indifference to danger.

I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley Regis
at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There was a sort
of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts, and the
men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two
tallow candles. Down in the midst of them fell a portion of the rocky
roof--enough to have filled a wheelbarrow, and enough certainly to have
put out the vital spark of any man on whom it might have fallen. One
coal-grimed man, at whose feet the mass had fallen, looked up placidly
and said, ‘That stuck up till it couldn’t stick no longer;’ and that
was all that was said about the matter. I suppose there was a tacit
recognition of the fact that the same thing might happen in any part of
the mine at any moment, and that it was useless to attempt to run
away from it. A passive scorn of danger is an essential element in the
miner’s life, and when need arises he shows an active scorn of it which
is finer than anything I have ever seen in battle.

The Pelsall Hall Colliery disaster was the hinge on which the door of my
fate was hung. I wrote an unspeakably bad novel which had that disaster
for its central incident, and it was published from Saturday to Saturday
in the _Morning News_, to the great detriment of that journal; and so
long as the story ran, angry subscribers wrote to the editor to vilify
it and its author. There was some very good work in it none the less;
and an eminent critic told me that, though it was capital flesh and
blood, it had no bones. It resulted years afterwards in ‘Joseph’s Coat,’
which is, if I may say so, less inchoate and formless than its dead and
buried original.

But it was not that exasperating novel which made the Pelsall Hall
disaster memorable in my personal history. I made an acquaintance
there--an acquaintance curiously begun--which did much for me. I met
there the king of all special correspondents, and had an immediate
shindy with him. There was only one decent room to be found by way of
lodging in the village, and this was in the cottage of one Bailey, a
working engineer. Mr. Bailey, without his wife’s knowledge, had let
that room to me for a week at a rent of one sovereign, and Mrs. Bailey,
without her husband’s knowledge, had let the room at a similar rent
to the great Special. Box and Cox encountered, each determined on his
rights and each resolute to oust the other.

I was leaving the cottage at about seven in the morning, when I met
a man in a flannel shirt with no collar attached to it, a three days’
beard, a suit of homespun, and heavy ankle jack-boots much bemired with
the clay of the rain-sodden fields. He smoked a short clay pipe and
looked like anything but what he was--the comet of the newspaper
firmament.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked--The manner was aggressive and
dictatorial, and I resented it.

‘Is that your business?’ I retorted.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. I told him that I was the representative of the
_Birmingham Morning News_, but questioned his right to the information.

‘Look here, young man,’ he said; ‘there’s only one spare room in that
cottage, and it belongs to me. I’ve rented it from the woman of the
house for a pound a week.’

‘And I have rented it,’ I answered, ‘from the woman’s husband for a
pound a week.’

‘Well,’ said the great man with much composure, ‘if I find you there I
shall chuck you out of window.’

I told him that that was a game which two might play at; at which he
burst into a great laugh and clapped me on the shoulder. We agreed to
take bed and sofa on alternate nights, and there the matter ended; but
I found out my rival’s name, and would have been willing, in the
enthusiasm of my hero-worship, to resign anything to him. Anything, that
is to say, but my own ambitions as a journalist and the interests of the
_Morning News_.

Here was a chance indeed. Here was a foeman worthy of any man’s steel.
To beat Archibald Forbes would be, as it seemed then, to crown oneself
with everlasting glory, and I was not altogether without hope of
doing it. For one thing, I was native to the country-side. I spoke the
dialect, and that was a great matter. Forbes was incomprehensible to
half the men, and three-fourths of what they said was incomprehensible
to him. There was to be a descent and an attempt at rescue on the
midnight of the third day after the breaking in of the waters, and I had
secured permission to accompany the party.

I hired a horse at a livery-stable at Walsall, and had him kept in
readiness in the back yard of a beerhouse. My giant enemy, after
maintaining a strict watch on matters for eight-and-forty hours at a
stretch, had gone to bed at last, convinced that nothing could be done.
It was a dreadful night, and not an easy matter for one unaccustomed
to the place to find his way to the pit’s mouth. The iron cages of fire
that burned there in the windy rain and the dark impeded rather than
helped the stranger on his way towards them. The feet of thousands of
people, who had visited the spot since the news of the accident was made
known, had worn away the last blade of grass from the slippery fields
and had left a very Slough of Despond behind them. I was down half a
dozen times, and when I reached the hovel where the rescue-party had
gathered I was as much like a mud statue as a man. Everything was in
readiness, and the descent was made at once.

We were under the command of Mr. Walter Ness, a valiant Scotchman, who
afterwards became the manager of her Majesty’s mines in Warora, Central
India. Five or six of us huddled together on the ‘skip,’ the word was
given, and we shot down into the black shaft, which seemed in the light
of the lamps we carried as if its wet and shining walls of brick rushed
upwards whilst we kept stationary. In a while we stopped, with a black
pool of water three or four fathoms below us.

‘This ‘ll be the place,’ said one of the men, and tapped the wall with a
pick.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Ness, ‘that will be about the place; try it.’

The man lay down upon his stomach upon the floor of the skip and worked
away a single brick, which fell with a splash into the pool below. Then
out came another and another, until there was a hole there big enough
for a man to crawl through. We had struck upon an old disused airway
which led into the inner workings of the mine. One by one we snaked our
way from the skip into the hole; and, whatever the miners thought about
it, it was rather a scarey business for me. We all got over safely
enough and began a journey on all fours through mud and slush five or
six inches deep. Here and there the airway was lofty enough to allow us
to walk with bent heads and rounded shoulders. Sometimes it was so low
that we had to go snakewise. There was one place where the floor and
roof of the passage had sunk so that we actually had to dive for it.
This seemed a little comfortless at the time, but it saved our lives
afterwards. After a toilsome scramble we came upon the stables, and
found there the first dead body.

It was that of a lad named Edward Colman, who had met his death in a
curious and dreadful manner. He was sitting on a rocky bench, and at his
feet lay a rough hunch of bread and meat and a clasp-knife. He had heard
evidently the cry of alarm, had sprung to his feet, and had struck the
top of his head with fatal force against a projecting lance of rock
immediately above him. There had been a speedy end to his troubles, poor
fellow, and he sat there stiff and cold and pallid, staring before him
like a figure in an exhibition of waxworks.

The waters barred our further descent into the mine, but there was
a belief that by breaking through the earthy wall of the stable a
continuation of the old airway would be found. The experiment was tried
with an alarming result No sooner was the breach made than a slow stream
of choke-damp flowed into the chamber, and the lights began to go out
one by one. We scrambled back at once for our lives, and once past
the pool were safe; the water effectually blocked the passage of the
poisonous gas. I got but one whiff of it; but it gave me a painful
sensation at the bridge of the nose which lasted acutely for some days.
In all, our expedition had not lasted an hour; but it had proved to
demonstration the impossibility of saving a single life.

I was dressed and mounted in another quarter of an hour and scouring
hard through the dark and the rain in the direction of Birmingham. When
I arrived there the country edition of the _News_ was already on the
machine and the compositors were leaving work. Word was given at once,
however, the whole contingent detained, and I sat down to write an
account of the night’s adventure--the printer’s devil coming for the
copy sheet by sheet as it was written, and each folio being scissored
into half a dozen pieces so that as many men as possible might work on
it at once. I slept a few hours, and then rode back to Pelsall with a
copy of the paper in my pocket. Forbes packed up his belongings an hour
later and left the scene.

I had an idea that I had made an enemy, and that Forbes would never
forgive me for beating him. I did not know my man, however; for it was
he who took me by the hand in London a year afterwards and secured for
me the first regular engagements I ever held there. He introduced me to
Edmund Yates, who found me a place on the original staff of the _World_,
and to J. R. Robinson, manager of the _Daily News_, who gave me a seat
in the gallery of the House of Commons and a chance to show what I was
good for as a descriptive writer. Forbes did more than this; but the
matter I have in mind is private and confidential. I have no right to
speak of it here, except to say that it was an act of large-hearted
generosity performed in a fashion altogether characteristic of the man,
and that I shall never cease to be affectionately grateful for it.

There were two instances of escape at the Pelsall Hall disaster which
seem worth recording. Every mine has what is known as an ‘upcast
shaft’--a perpendicular tunnel which runs side by side with the working
shaft, and is connected with it at the foot by an airway which serves to
ventilate the workings. When the first rush of water, breaking in from
some old deserted working, came tearing down, a man and a boy were
standing at the bottom of the downcast. They were carried on the crest
of the wave clean through the airway, borne some distance upwards in
the upcast, and were there floated on to the floor of a skip, where they
were found insensible, but living, some hours later. No other creature
was brought to bank alive.

One special correspondent turned up at Pelsall on a Sunday, just as
the pumping apparatus, which had broken down, was on the point of being
repaired, and when everybody concerned was working for the bare life. It
had not then been finally established that hope was over, and everybody
was inspired with an almost superhuman vigour. The correspondent, who
was a mighty person in his own esteem, sent his card to the manager, who
sent him back a sufficiently courteous message, saying how busy he was
and asking to be excused for an hour or two.

‘Take back that card,’ said the special (I was a witness of the scene),
‘say that I represent’ (he named one of the most influential of the
London dailies), ‘and that I insist upon an interview.’

This time a sufficiently discourteous message came back; and the mighty
personage, after loafing about for an hour or two, retired and wrote
an article in which he described the people of the Black Country as
savages, and revived a foolish old libel or two which at one time had
currency concerning them. The old nonsense about the champagne was
there, for one thing. I know the Black Country miners pretty well--I
ought to do so, at least, for I was born in the thick of them and
watched their ways from childhood to manhood--and I never knew a working
miner who had so much as heard of champagne. Now and then a prosperous
‘butty’ (_Anglicè_, chartermaster) may have tried a bottle; but the
working collier’s beverage is ‘pit beer.’ The popular recipe for this
drink is to ‘chuck three grains of malt into the cut, and drink as much
as ye like of it.’

I remember the story of one wine party which met at the Scott’s Arms at
Barr. I dare say Mr. Henry Irving knows the house, for he is President
of the Literary Society there. The tale was told me by the landlord.
Three chartermasters sat at a table in the bar, and old Pountney
overheard their whispered talk.

‘Didst iver drink port, Jim?’

‘No; what is it?’

‘Why, port--port wine; it’s a stuff as the gentlefolks is fond on.’

‘I reckon it’ll be main expensive, then.’

‘Oh, we can stand it amongst the three on us. Got any port wine,
landlord?’

‘Yes, some of the finest in the county.’

‘What’s it run to?’

‘Seven-and-six a bottle.’

‘They figured it out,’ the landlord told me, ‘with a bit of a stump of
an ode pencil on the top o’ the table, and when they’d made up their
minds as siven and sixpence was half a crown apiece amongst the three on
‘em they ordered a bottle. I sent my man down the cellar for it, and
I went out to look at my pigs. When I come back again there they was
sittin’ wry-mouthed an’ looking at one another, wi’ some muddy-lookin’
stuff in the glasses afore ‘em. “Gentlemen,” I says, “ye don’t seem to
like your liquor.” “Like it!” says one on ‘em; “if this is the stuff
the gentlefolks drinkin’, the gentlefolks is welcome to it for we.” I
turns to my man, and “Bill,” says I, “where did ye get this bottle o’
port from?” “Why,” he says, “I got it from the fust bin on the left-hand
side.” “Why, you cussid ode idiot,” I says, “you’ve browt ‘em mushroom
ketchup!”’




III

It was on May 25, 1865, that I enlisted in her Majesty’s Fourth Royal
Irish Dragoon Guards. I was just past my eighteenth birthday, and, for
reasons not worth specifying nowadays, the world had come to an end.
Civil life afforded no appropriate means of exit from this mortal stage,
and I was in a condition (theoretically) to march with pleasure against
a savage foe. I was ignorant of these little matters, and was not
aware of the fact that the Fourth Royal Irish was mainly a stay-at-home
regiment.

My ardour for the military life was cooled pretty early. I dare say that
things have mended somewhat in the last seven-and-twenty years; but my
experience was in the main a record of petty tyrannies and oppressions,
at the memory of some of which my blood boils even unto this day. There
is a comic side to everything, however, and I can laugh over a good many
of my own experiences. I had a dinner engagement that day with a friend
in the Haymarket, and finding myself a little too early for it, I stood
to watch the fountains playing in Trafalgar Square. My mind was in a
state of moody grandeur, which is both comic and affecting to recall at
this distance of time. I was quite a misunderstood young person, and was
determined to be revenged for it, on all and sundry, myself included.
The blue-coated brass-buttoned old spider who came to weave his web
around me had no need to be elaborate. I closed with him at once, and he
led me with a stealthy seeming of indifference into a back yard, where
he put the statutory questions and handed over the statutory shilling.

I had supposed that I should at once enter upon my military career,
but, to my surprise, I was ordered to report myself at the depot at
St. George’s Barracks on the following day at noon. Failing this, I was
instructed that I should be held a rogue and vagabond, and should be
liable to a period of imprisonment I went on to dinner, and bore myself
there with a mysterious gloom, which, as I learned long afterwards, gave
rise to a good deal of conjecture. Next day I was sworn in in a frowsy
back room behind the Westminster Police Court, and learned that I was
now formally bound to the service of her Majesty for a term of twelve
years, my sole hope of escape being the payment of a sum of thirty
pounds as purchase-money.

My military ardour had been a little cooled already at the medical
examination, where, to my horrible embarrassment, I was made to strip
stark naked, and was inspected by an elderly gentleman in a _pince-nez_,
with half a dozen uninterested people looking on, amongst them two or
three louts in fustian who were awaiting their turn. I was put into
a variety of postures, all of which I felt to be ridiculous and
humiliating; and when this ordeal was over there came the swearing-in
and a visit to the depot canteen, where I received payment of a sum of
seven and sixpence and was introduced to some of the raw material of the
fighting forces of the nation.

I may say quite frankly that I did not like the raw material. The young
men who composed it were without exception vulgar and loutish. Their
language was absolutely unreportable, and they were all more or less
flushed with beer. I had been almost a total abstainer all my life, and
though I drank a little of it out of complaisance I thought the canteen
tack the nastiest stuff I had ever tasted The depot barrack-room in
which the recruits slept until the time of their deportation echoed
morning, noon, and night with unmeaning ribaldries and obscenities,
and was stale with the smoke of bad tobacco and the fumes of that most
indifferent beer. I learned that I was bound for Ireland, and that the
head-quarters of my regiment were at Cahir. One respectable old depot
sergeant took some interest in my quiet and isolation. ‘You’ll be out of
this lot soon,’ he said, ‘and you’ll never see anything like it again.
These chaps’ll learn manners when they join the colours; and you’re
lucky in the regiment you’re going to--there’s no smarter in the
service.’

I have made one or two uncomfortable journeys in my time, but I can
recall nothing quite so comfortless as the march with that ragged and
disreputable contingent along Piccadilly, across Hyde Park, down the
Edgware Road, and so on to Paddington Station. It was all very well for
the sore and rebellious heart to be singing inwardly, ‘Yes, let me like
a soldier fall,’ but this was a sordid beginning for military glory,
and I would sooner have been shot outright than I would have encountered
anybody I knew on that journey. I reached the station unobserved, so far
as I know, and was glad to hide myself in a third-class carriage, into
which the sergeant in charge of the party beckoned me. He was very kind
and friendly indeed, advising me in a score of ways suggested by his own
experience, and talking constantly with his hand upon my shoulder. I had
begun to think him quite a genuine good fellow, and my heart was warming
to him, when he let the cat out of the bag.

I was handsomely attired, and the morning suit I was wearing was barely
a week old. He was good enough to offer me ten shillings and a rig-out
for a scarecrow in exchange for it. I declined the friendly offer,
and the sergeant cooled. He condescended to accept a drink at Didcot
Junction; indeed, he did me the honour to ask for it; but when it was
consumed he ordered me into a carriage already fully occupied by half a
score of my fellow recruits, and in their society I finished the journey
to Bristol.

We put up at the Gloucester Barracks, which, as I understood, had once
been an hotel, and the escort sergeant, who had turned spiteful, set me
to work to carry coal upstairs.

This was my first experience of fatigue duty, and I was kept at it
till I was very fatigued indeed, and my smart summer trousers and
spick-and-span shirt-cuffs were a little damaged. This duty over, I met
the escort sergeant no more, but was transferred to the care of a quaint
old boy who made an astonishing display of learning. He had four or five
Latin proverbs at his command. He knew the Greek alphabet, had picked
up a bit of Hindostani on Indian service, and a little bit of French
and Turkish in the Crimea. All these he aired upon me in a very natural
manner, and I was much impressed with his erudition, until a grinning
depot man got me into a corner and told me that ‘the sergeant had
shown me the whole bag o’ thricks at wonst,’ He paid every well-dressed
recruit that compliment, it seemed; and the depot man warned me that
he too would make a bid for my clothes, and would offer me a scarecrow
rig-out in return.

‘If ye’ll take my tip,’ said the depot man, ‘ye’ll say neither yes nor
no till ye get to barracks. Kape the ould blagyard hangin’ on and off
till ye get inside the gates, and then tell him to go to blazes. If ye
loike to work him properly, ye can kape him as smooth as soft soap all
the way. If ye say no too early he’ll be on t’ye like a ton o’ pig-iron.
It’s the truth I’m tellin’ ye,’ he added, ‘as sure as God made little
apples.’

He thought his advice was worth a drink. I thought so too, and he got
it.

We steamed away next day in the _Apollo_, bound for Cork. We had a
rough passage, and the depot sergeant took me into his private cabin
and cheered me with a glass of whisky, the first I had ever tasted. He
began, when he had thus softened my heart, to try the bargain about the
suit of clothes, and produced a set of garments the like of which I do
not think I ever saw.

‘You’ll not be allowed to keep these,’ he explained, fingering me all
over to test the quality of the cloth I wore. ‘You’ll be in regimentals
in a day or two, and it’ll make no difference to you.’

One of the officers of the vessel looked in whilst this business was
going on and broke in gruffly, ‘You join your regiment looking like a
gentleman, young man. Your officers won’t think any the worse of you
for going in decent. Damn it all, sergeant, what d’ye want to spoil the
lad’s prospects for?’

So a second time the suit was saved; but it went a week later to an old
soldier who was leaving the regiment and whom it fitted to a hair. He
was to leave a certain portion of his kit behind for me, which, as he
assured me, would be of the utmost use; but he sold such articles as
belonged to him to the men in his own barrack-room that evening, and
decamped without seeing me again.

The stormy passage ended delightfully amidst the quiet beauties and
serene shelter of the Cove of Cork. I have seen a great many of the
world’s show-places since 1865, and I dare say that my inexperience
counted for much; but I cannot recall any natural spectacle which
afforded me a more genuine delight. It was the morning of the 30th of
May. The sun was just rising, and the roofs and spires of the city
were outlined against a lucent belt of sky. Spike Island lay green and
smiling in the middle of the cove; and on either side, on the emerald
slopes, white villas were dotted here and there. The whole scene looked
very sweet and pure and homelike, and there were certain thoughts in my
own mind which made the view memorable.

We were all bundled up to the Cat’s Hill Barracks, and there held over
Sunday. My companions melted away unregarded, and I travelled down to
Cahir under the charge of a decent old fellow who did not try to buy my
clothes, but spent a good deal of time in exhorting me to write to my
friends and beg their pardon for having made a fool of myself.

‘Yell be doing it late,’ he said, ‘and ye may as well be doing it soon.’

I was quite lonely and sore enough to have taken the advice, and
military glory looked a long way off; but a silly pride withheld me, and
I pretended to feel well satisfied with my prospects and surroundings.

When I came to understand things a little I could see that the regiment
was in a splendid state of discipline and efficiency. It had not been so
a few years before, when the Lieutenant Robinson episode at Birmingham
had brought the command of Colonel Bentinck into grave disrepute.
Lieutenant-Colonel Shute, on whom the actual charge of the regiment
devolved, set to work to bring cosmos out of chaos; and did it, though
it took him a day or two of very uphill work. I know more of what a
regiment should be than I did then, and I do not ask a firmer or a
more judicious discipline. The men were enthusiastically loyal to their
colonel, and believed in him as if he had been a sort of deity. I am
persuaded that they would have gone anywhere and have done anything for
him. There is nothing the British soldier respects like justice, and he
likes it none the less if it is a little stern. We all had a holy dread
of the colonel, though he was not a bit more of a martinet than any good
officer should be; and his wife, who had a habit of giving autographed
Prayer Books to the men, was regarded with a genuine affection.

I found the men, in the main, very good fellows indeed. Of course there
were all sorts among them. Many were well bred and well educated, and
one or two might have been met without surprise in almost any society.
Some, again, were thorough-going blackguards, and others, who were
among the most popular and the best soldiers, were incurably rackety and
undisciplined. One man, who had thrice won his stripes as full corporal,
was for the third time broken and reduced to the ranks during my first
month of service. He would keep away from drink for two or three years
at a time, and then in a night would undo all the results of hard work
and self-denial. Take the men in the main, and it would be difficult to
find a better lot; but the petty officers seemed to make it the business
of their lives to put the heaviest of burdens on the shoulders of any
promising recruit. They were none of them very well educated, and I
suppose that it was only natural that they should fear the advancement
of a youngster better tutored than themselves, and should do their best
to keep him down. One only found this disposition amongst the younger
non-coms.--men who had not held their places long enough to grow used to
the dignity of rank.

There is, or was in my time, a soldiers’ proverb, ‘As nasty as a
new-made corporal,’ With one exception the sergeant-majors were good
fellows and popular with their men. I shall not give the name of the
exception, for he may be still alive; but he was commonly known as ‘The
Pig,’ and he deserved his title. There was no meanness and no denial
of military etiquette of which he would not be guilty to get a man into
trouble. One badgered private assaulted him violently with a pitchfork,
and suffered two years’ imprisonment for that misdemeanour. ‘The Pig’
was quite uncured by this experience; and one night, prowling round the
barrack-rooms after ‘lights out’ to see if he could find an after-dark
smoker, he was assailed with a tremendous shower of highlows from every
quarter of the room. The cavalry highlow, well aimed and low, as Count
Billy Considine said about the decanter, may be made a very effective
missile, and its powers of offence are not diminished by the fact that
it pretty often carries a spur in the heel of it This event was spoken
of with bated breath about the regiment for a day or two, but nothing
came of it ‘The Pig’ was by no means sure of his popularity with his
superiors; and there is an admirable and most trustworthy military
tradition to the effect that no good officer is ever assaulted by his
men.




IV

The Fourth Royal Irish prided themselves particularly, and not without
reason, on the smart and soldierlike aspect of the regiment Recruits
were looked on with a jealous eye, and a gawky or loutish fellow was
received with open disfavour. While we were at Cahir a couple of young
fishermen from the North of Ireland joined. They came in sea-boots,
pilot-cloth trousers, and knitted jerseys; and they were for a while
objects of derision. I dare say one story is remembered in the regiment
still. They were sent into the riding-school before they had had time
to get their regimentals. It is no easy business for any unaccustomed
person to mount a saddled horse without the aid of stirrups, and the
young sailors in their huge sea-boots were at a double disadvantage.

‘I can’t get aboard this here craft nohow, Captain,’ said one of them
to old Barron, the riding drill. I shall never forget his expression of
contempt and scorn as he saw the young men ignominiously hoisted into
the saddle. At the first order to trot the fishermen hung on desperately
to saddle and headstall.

‘Jack,’ said Barron, wrinkling his red nose in disdain, ‘look out, or
you’ll be overboard!’

‘Not me,’ says Jack; ‘not so long as the bloomin’ riggin’ holds.’

The sea-going brethren turned out very smart soldiers later on; but
within a month of their arrival there came about the most hopeless
specimen I can remember to have seen. His name was Sullivan, though he
pronounced it Soolikan, and he was an embodiment of every awkwardness
and stupidity. He was a shambling, flat-footed, weak-kneed,
round-shouldered youth, and the Fourth asked with amazement how on earth
the doctors had been induced to pass him. So far as I remember, he never
learned anything. The various drills laboured at him like galley-slaves,
but never succeeded in teaching him the difference between ‘port arms’
and ‘carry arms.’ When he had been diligently instructed in the sword
exercise, he asked the sergeant what was the use of it all. ‘While I was
going through that,’ says he, ‘some bloody-minded Russian ‘d be choppin’
me head off.’ It was his idea that a soldier was supposed to go through
the sword exercise in face of the enemy; and the notion that it was
simply intended to give dexterity in the use of the weapon never
occurred to him.

There was never anything in the world more hopeless than the attempt to
teach Soolikan to ride. Of course he was never trusted in the _manège_;
but he tumbled about on the tan of the riding-school in an astonishing
manner, breaking no bones and incurring, somehow or other, no sort of
damage. Every morning the recruits led their horses into the school and
mounted there, and every morning old Barron addressed his _bête noire_
in the same words, ‘Pick a soft place, Sullivan.’ It was all very well
so long as the ride circled at a walk at the lower end of the school
But then came the order, ‘Go large!’ and shortly afterwards the long
drawling command, ‘Tr-r-o-o-o-t!’

The horses, which were old stagers and knew the words of command far
better than their riders, started at the beginning of the note; and
before the call had well ended the brisk impressive ‘Halt!’ would snap
across it like a pistol-shot. ‘Pick up Sullivan, somebody!’ The luckless
man, after more than three months’ lessons, came to me one morning in
triumph and told me with a broad grin, ‘I didn’t fall, off the day,’ He
was recognised from the first as incorrigible, and when he had spent but
four months in the regiment he disappeared. It was darkly whispered
in the barrack-rooms that he had been told to go, and that he had been
bribed with a ten-pound note to desert the regiment. I dare not mention
names; but I think I could lay my hand on the gallant officer who went
to this expense for the credit of the corps.

I suppose the School Boards have done much within the last score of
years to minimise the mass of popular ignorance; but in ‘65 one
found here and there an amazing corner of mental darkness amongst the
rank-and-file of a dandy regiment like the Fourth. There was a great
hulking fellow named Gardiner, who was boasting one day that he could
carry twice his own weight He was told that he could not so much as lift
his own, and was persuaded into a two-handled hamper, in which he made
herculean efforts to lift himself. There was another man who received
with perfect gravity the chaffing statement of a comrade, to the effect
that he had shot a wood-pigeon at the North Pole, and that the bird had
fallen on the needle on the top of the Pole, and had frozen so hard that
it was impossible to remove it.

‘Ye know the song,’ said the humourist, “True as the needle to the
pole.” There’s no gettin’ the needle out of the Pole, and now there’s no
gettin’ the pigeon off the needle.’

The man for whose benefit the narrative was told smoked his pipe
stolidly, and answered, ‘Begorra, but it must be cold up there!’

Some of the men had odd ideas about the uses to which learning should
be put. One came to me on a Sunday afternoon bearing a Bible, with a
request that I would find for him and read to him all the indelicate
passages. I met this proposal with so loud a negative, and heaped such
invective on the head of its author, that the corporal of the room, who
was smoking a tranquil pipe outside, came in to find out what was the
matter, and, being satisfied, fell to beating the man about the head
with a boot. From the person thus chastised I heard no more of the
matter; but I learned enough from others to know that my refusal had not
helped to make me popular. There was a tacit sense to the effect that I
was not a friendly fellow--that I was not willing to share the results
of my reading with the less favoured.

At this distance of time I can write dispassionately; but for many years
I had recollections of petty tyrannies which made my blood boil. There
was a lanky youth, four or five months older in the regiment than
myself, who was related to one of the sergeant-majors, and who was, of
course, booked by his relative for promotion. It was never, so far as
I can learn, a part of army etiquette, but it was a common practice at
that time, to steal the belongings of a new arrival, and in that way to
eke out a deficiency in the kit of the plunderer. My valise had not been
served out to me a week before it was denuded of one-half its contents,
and I was reduced to a draft of one penny a day for pocket-money until
such time as the depredations were made good. The sergeant-major’s
nephew was found in the act of pipeclaying a pair of gauntlet gloves
which bore my number, and the immediate consequence of this was a
stand-up fight in the riding-school in the presence of some fifty
or sixty of the men and two or three officers who looked on from
the gallery. I came out more than conqueror and recovered the stolen
property; but the lanky young man was made lance-corporal next week, and
it became part of his duty to instruct me in military exercises in which
I was far more proficient than himself. It became a regular habit of his
to keep me at work while the rest of the squad stood at ease, and he had
a vocabulary which, though limited and unoriginal, was as offensive as
can easily be conceived.

He applied to me at last so vile an epithet that, in the heat of
the moment, I forgot that I had a sabre in my hand, and, hitting out
straight from the shoulder, I landed him on the mouth with the guard of
the weapon. This, of course, was flat mutiny, and before I knew where
I was I was seized from behind, the sabre whirled in the air, and I was
lying all abroad with a sprained wrist. Then I was solemnly marched to
the guardroom, and there taken in charge to await an interview with the
colonel in the morning.

One of the men on guard had borrowed from the regimental library a
copy of Charles Reades ‘It is Never too Late to Mend,’ and I read that
masterpiece all the afternoon and as long into the night as the waning
light would allow. The guard-room bed, with its sloping board and wooden
pillow, made no very luxurious sleeping-place, and I was up at daylight
to finish the most absorbing and enchanting story I had ever, until
then, encountered. The book retains a great portion of its old charm and
power until this day for me, but at that time it shut out everything;
and though, for aught I knew to the contrary, I might be sentenced to
be flogged or shot, I resigned myself to the spell of the story as
completely as if the future had been altogether clear. The colonel was
rather dreadful when the time came, and I remember one axiom which I got
from him in the first three minutes of our interview.

‘Well, what have you to say for yourself?’

‘The fact is, sir,’ I answered, ‘this man has been most abominably
insolent.’

‘Nonsense,’ said the colonel; ‘a private can be insolent to his
superior; a superior cannot be insolent to a private.’

I doubt whether the gallant colonel would have felt inclined to sustain
that thesis in the House of Commons, of which assembly he afterwards
became a popular and honoured member; but I dare say it did very well
as an orderly-room apothegm. It had to come out, however, that the
newly-made lance-corporal and I had had a fight a week or so before the
date of his promotion, and that I had come out uppermost. I spoke of the
corporal’s language, but declined to repeat it One of the squad, who
was called in evidence, was less particular, and the colonel, in effect,
read the young non-com, a dreadful lesson and committed me to cells for
ten days, giving orders that I was not to be disgraced--by which was
meant that I was not to receive the prison crop which is made to mark
the ordinary turbulent soldier. From that time care was taken that the
lanky youth no longer had me in charge; but we used to scowl at each
other when we passed, and for a year or two after my return to civil
life I cherished a warm hope that I might meet him and repeat in his
society the exercise I had so sweetly relished in the riding-school.

After this episode the crowd was down upon me. It was felt that I had
triumphed, and it was felt that no recruit had a right to triumph
over any officer, however young or however lowly placed. Even a
lance-corporal must be respected, or it was clear that the service was
going to the devil. A brace of sergeants, with whom I had been none too
much of a favourite already, laid themselves out to get me into trouble,
and the plan they adopted was delightfully simple and easy. It is the
rule on retiring from the _manège_ to make the grooming of one’s horse
the first duty, though an old soldier will take the precaution on wet or
muddy days to run an oily rag rapidly over the burnished portions of the
horse’s fittings in the first instance. This is a labour-saving practice
and is almost universally followed. But I saw one of my enemies with a
sidelong eye upon me, and tackled my horse at once. In two minutes his
confederate was round.

‘What the ----’ (any competent person who knows barrack life can fill
in the blank) ‘do you mean by letting your bridoon and stirrup-irons lie
rusting here? Put ‘em in oil at once.’

Number Two, having delivered this order, went away, clothed with curses
as with a garment, and back came Number One.

‘Now, what the ---- (break to be filled as before, for these people have
no sense of style or invention) ‘do you mean by leaving your horse to
stand and shiver in that beastly lather? A nice bargain the Queen made
when she gave a bob for you!’

This form of insult is traditional, but at first hearing it has power
to gall. The discovery that it is no more than a formula takes off its
edge. Back to the horse, to be again assailed by Number Two for not
having obeyed the order about the bridoon and stirrup-irons. Back to
them, and then the last scene in the comedy, in which, under a charge
of neglecting to groom my horse in spite of repeated warnings, I
was marched straight to the orderly-room, there to appear before the
colonel.

I boiled over in his presence and denounced the little conspiracy.
The colonel was something of a martinet, but he was justice incarnate.
Witnesses were called from the stable; my story was made good; and as I
stood in the ante-room adjusting my forage-cap I heard the beginning of
a tongue-walking which those non-commissioned officers were not likely
to forget.

‘If you dare to bully my recruits again,’ said the colonel, ‘I’ll break
the pair of you. I won’t have my recruits bullied.’

I smiled at this; but I was not allowed to enjoy a further triumph. The
orderly sergeant wrathfully ordered me away, and I went back to my duty.
From that hour any question of comfort in the regiment was, of course,
over, and it would take a volume to tell the history of the shifts and
dodges which made life unbearable; though, of course, that history would
be worth neither the writing nor the reading. Most of the officers were
invariably kind and considerate; but there was one whom I never forgave
until I learned, years afterwards, that he was dead. It was my habit to
think and believe of him that he was the stupidest person that ever sat
upon the magisterial bench in any capacity, civil or military. A wider
experience of the world has modified that opinion, but he deserves a
place in this record for all that.

He was a pale-faced man, with a slight lisp; and the men despised
him because he had not the nerve even to handle them on church parade
without priming himself beforehand. I had been vaccinated by virtue of a
general order, and in a while my arm became swollen and very painful.
I stuck to duty as long as I could, and at last presented myself on
hospital parade to ask to be excused. The doctor, for some reason, was
absent, and, failing his order, I was compelled to join the ride in the
_manège_. It was a beastly morning, and the field was a mere bog. We
were splashed to the very buttons of our forage-caps, and the horses
were loaded with mud to the flaps of the saddles. I was tired and faint
enough before the ride was over, but my poor beast had to be groomed on
the return to stables, and I must needs set to work upon him. It was all
no good. I might as well have tried to carry him as to groom him, and I
represented my case to a non-commissioned officer, who straightway ran
me in. I passed the night in the guardroom, chilled and wet, and now
and then light-headed. Had I been at head-quarters the colonel would
undoubtedly have sent me to the infirmary, which was the proper place
for me. The lisping captain sent me to the cells.

‘Ma-an,’ he said, in a drawl which half the regiment used to loathe and
imitate, ‘what have you to tha-ay?’

I explained my case, and whilst I did so he read something which lay on
the table before him. When I had done he said, with his finicking lisp,
‘Seven days’ cells, hard labour.’ The old regimental sergeant happened
to be there, and for an instant arrested judgment.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, the man is really unfit to perform hard
labour.’

‘Then,’ said the Solon, ‘in that case let him have forty-eight hours’
solitary confinement.’

I ventured as respectfully as I could to protest. I represented that it
was hardly just to punish a man for not performing a heavy physical task
whilst admitting in the very terms of the sentence that he was unfit to
do it. The answer was, ‘Right about face, march!’ I went to cells. I had
my hair cut, and I spent thirty-six delirious hours alone. At the end
of that time my condition was reported and I was removed; but from
that hour I was sullen and rebellious, and whatever spirit of order and
discipline might have lived in me until then vanished completely.

Only four years ago, on a very memorable occasion in my life, I sat
side by side with one of my old officers. He assured me, with every
appearance of gravity, that if I had stayed much longer I should have
disintegrated the regiment. I was sure, on the other hand, that the
regiment would have disintegrated me; and though I was smart enough and
willing enough to have made a good soldier at the beginning, I was too
angry at stupidity and injustice to care to please anybody any longer.
I knew one man who, having been gently nurtured, found himself suddenly
thrown upon his own resources. He enlisted with a full determination
to rise. When I last heard of him, years ago, he held brevet rank in
another regiment; but I know what slights he endured, to what numberless
insults he submitted, and how harsh and cruel the pathway to success was
made for him at the beginning. They tell me things are better now, and
I hope with all my heart they may be. As I knew the ranks they were
made well-nigh intolerable for any well-educated youngster who showed a
disposition to get on.




V

Thousands of people remember the excitement created five or six years
ago by the story of the Missing Journalist. Scores still cherish the
memory of poor MacNeill and think of him as amongst the cheeriest,
friendliest, and most helpful of men. He was a delightful fellow and
a good fellow; but he had a certain boisterous exaggeration of manner
which sometimes made his friends laugh at him. So far as I know, he
neither had nor deserved an enemy through all his effusive, genial, and
blameless life.

He burst into the Savage Club one day when I happened to be there alone.
He was unusually radiant and assured, and ‘At last, at last,’ he said,
‘I’ve got my foot on the neck of this big London!’ The triumphant phrase
set me thinking at the moment, and has often recalled to me since, the
time when this big London had its foot on me: a thing of the two which
I am afraid is the much more likely to happen in the experience of any
young aspirant to literary honours when he has neither friends nor money
to back him, and no reputation to begin with.

I came to London just after the opening of the Parliamentary session of
1872, at a time when every nook and corner of the journalistic work-room
was filled, and when the doors were besieged, as they always are at such
a season, by scores of outsiders eager for a turn at the good things
going. I forget now precisely how it came about, but I went to live at
a frowsy caravanserai in Bouverie Street, an astonishingly dirty and
disreputable hotel called the ‘Sussex.’ It is down now, and its site is
occupied by the extended offices of the _Daily News_; but in its day it
was the home of as much shabby gentility as could be found under any one
roof in London. Beds were to be had there at threepence and sixpence.
I remember no arrangement for meals, and certainly never troubled the
establishment in that way myself. The linen had a look of having been
washed in pea-soup and dried in a chimney, and the whole aspect of
the house and its _clientèle_ was wo-begone and neglected to the last
extreme. Paper and pen and ink are cheap enough, and I used to sit all
day long in my bedroom, fireless in the winter weather, wrapped up in an
ulster and with a counterpane about my knees, writing for bare life.
I wrote verses grave and gay, special articles, leading articles, and
leaderettes. These were delivered at all manner of likely and unlikely
places, and came back again, like the curses and the chickens and the
bad penny in the proverbs.

I lived for weeks on hard-rinded rolls and thick chocolate, procured at
an Italian restaurant on the opposite side of Fleet Street, and found
myself admirably healthy on that simple diet. I wrote now and then to
friends in the country, disguising my estate, and telling them what
I was working at without hinting what became of the work when it was
finished. One of my correspondents remonstrated with me for taking up
my quarters in a hotel in that part of London, and advised me to try
cheaper lodgings. Until I had something regular to rely upon, I was
told, it was absurd to launch into an extravagance of that sort. I have
often had to think how many hundreds of men, better equipped for the
intellectual arena than I was, as plucky, as determined, and as full of
hope, have gone down in the lonely and bitter sea of poverty in which
I floated in those days. My breakfast expenditure of threepence, with
a halfpenny to the waiter, secured me a look at the daily papers,
and every morning I went back to that beastly bedroom to write at my
dressing-table in denunciation of the Ministry, or to hold up to public
contumely some unpaid justice of the peace who had given a hungry
labourer six months for stealing twopenny-worth of turnips. I redressed
countless wrongs on paper in that draughty garret; but nothing came of
it There is no use in being too minute in narrating the history of that
time. It was bad enough to begin with, and grew at last to be about as
bad as it could be. That obliging uncle, who becomes your aunt when you
cross the Channel, was useful for a time. But at last there was nothing
more for him to take or for me to offer, and I was alone in London with
a vengeance.

Thousands of well-to-do people endure privation and discomfort every
year for the pure pleasure of it. In my campaigning days I lived on
black bread and onions and dirty water for seven weeks, and topped up
that agreeable record with four days’ absolute starvation, But I had a
pocketful of money, though there was nothing to be bought with it, and
I had staunch comrades, and we were marching on with the certainty of
plenty before us. It was all endured easily enough, and now and then
there were outbursts of rollicking jocundity in spite of it The mere
physical suffering of privation is not a thousandth part of its pain.
The sense of loneliness, of defeat, of unmerited neglect; the blind
rebellion against the inequality with which the world’s chances are
distributed; the impotent sense of power which finds no outlet--these
are the things which make poverty bitter. But there was nothing else for
it, and I took up _la vie en plein air_.

My favourite chamber in the Hotel of the Beautiful Star during the
hours of darkness was the Thames Embankment. I have passed many years
in London since then, and must have heard the boom of Big Ben and the
monotonous musical chime which precedes it many thousands of times. They
have rarely greeted a conscious ear without bringing back a memory of
the stealing river (all dull shine and deep shadow), the lights on the
spanning bridges, the dim murmur of distant traffic, the shot-tower
glooming up against the sky, the bude-light flaring from the tower of
the Palace of Parliament, the sordid homeless folks huddled together
on the benches, the solemn tramp of the peeler, and the flash of the
bullseye light that awoke the chilled and stiffened sleepers. There is a
certain odour of Thames Embankment which I should recognise anywhere. I
have encountered it often, and it brings back the scene as suddenly and
as vividly as the chimes themselves.

There is plenty of elbow-room in the Hôtel de la Belle Etoile, and there
is water enough; but in other respects the provision it offers is scanty
and comfortless. I spent four days and nights in it, and was on the
borders of despair, when what looked like a mere chance saved me.
Suppose I had not walked down Fleet Street; suppose I had not stopped
to look at the little cork balls in Lipscombe’s window, so mournfully
emblematic of my own condition; suppose that the unsuspected
good-hearted friend had not come by and clapped me on the shoulder, what
would have happened? _Quien sabe?_ These are the narrow chances of
life which give one pause sometimes. He came, however, the unsuspected
helpful friend.

It was John Lovel, then manager of the Press Association. I have since
had reason to believe that he deliberately deceived me from the first
moment of our encounter, and that later in the day he was guilty of a
plagiarism. If deceit were always as kindly and guileless, lying would
grow to be the chief of human virtues; and if plagiarism always covered
a jest so generous, the plagiarist would be amongst the most popular men
alive.

Was I busy? he asked. Was I too busy to undertake for him a very
pressing piece of work he had on hand? I made an effort not to seem
quite overborne, and told him that I was entirely at his service. He
said (I suppose it was the first thing he could think of) that to-morrow
was the anniversary of the birthday of Christopher Columbus. He wanted
an article about that event for a country paper and had no time to write
it He wanted no dates, no historic facts, but simply--‘a good, rattling,
tarry-breeches, sea-salt column.’ The pay was a couple of guineas;
and if I could so far oblige him as to let him have the article that
morning, he could make it money down.

I wrote the article in the reporters’ room at the P.A. and sent it in
to the chief. In return I received a pill-box, on the top of which was
written, ‘The prescription to be taken immediately.’ I found within the
pillbox two sovereigns and two shillings wrapped in cotton-wool, and I
went my way to a square meal with the first money I had ever earned in
London. I found out afterwards that the date was nowhere near that of
Christopher Columbus’s birthday; and, so far as I know, the article I
had written was never used. I was telling the story years afterwards,
and somebody informed me that the prescription on top of the pill-box
was Thackeray’s. I was quite content to discover that, and I don’t think
poor Lovel would have minded it either. He paid the debt of nature some
time ago, and when he left this world had the memory of more than one
good deed to sweeten his parting moments.

I went back to that gruesome hostelry and wrote an article on
‘Impecunious Life in London.’ It appeared in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_,
then published by Messrs. Grant & Co. and under the editorship of my
old friend Richard Gowing. The article was not far from being
autobiographical. I think--but I am not quite sure--that I got sixteen
guineas for it. I know that it set me on my feet, and that since then
any acquaintance I may have had with the Thames Embankment has been
purely voluntary.

Poverty makes a man acquainted with strange bedfellows; and I made one
or two queer acquaintances on the Thames Embankment and acquired a taste
for vagabondising about among the poor which lasted a year or two and
has proved to be of no small service since. Slumming had not become
a fashion at that time of day; but I have never aimed at being in the
fashion, and I did a good deal of it. Through Archibald Forbes’s kind
offices, I found an introduction to the _World_ journal, and, at Edmund
Yates’s instigation, wrote a series of articles therein under the title
of ‘Our Civilisation,’ picking up all the quaint and picturesque odds
and ends of humanity I could find in London.

I met many people whom it was very difficult to describe and impossible
to caricature. Amongst them was a street artist who lived in Gee’s
Court, off Oxford Street--a worthless, drunken, and pretentious
scoundrel, who seriously believed himself to be the most neglected man
of genius in London. I employed him to repeat what he called his _chief
de hover_ on cardboard, and paid him half a crown for it. He called this
work ‘The Guard Ship Attacked.’ It represented a Dead Sea of Reckitt’s
Blue with two impossible ships wedged tightly into it, each broadside on
to the spectator. From the port-holes of each issued little streaks of
vermilion, and puffs of smoke like pills. The artist gloated over
this work, and was ready to resent criticism of it like another Pietro
Vanucci. He told me he was unappreciated; that he was a man of the
supremest talent, and was kept out of the great theatres, where he could
have shone as a scene-painter, by nothing but the pettiest and shabbiest
jealousies. I don’t know where he had picked up the phrase, but he had
something to say about the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain,
and he returned to it fondly as long as I would allow him to talk to
me. His artistic labours and his art invention were dissipating the grey
matter of _his_ brain. All he asked for was a fair field and no favour.
If I would give him three pound ten he could buy an easel, a canvas,
and a set of painting tools, and would at once proceed to show the Royal
Academy what was what I was well to do by this time, but yet not quite
wealthy enough to venture on such an experiment. The most amusing thing
this vagabond said was when he found in my room the painting materials
and sketches of an artistic friend of mine with whom I was chumming at
the time. His nose wrinkled with an infinite disdain as he turned the
sketches over, and he said, with a delightful air of patronage, ‘I see,
I see. A brother of the brush.’ He brought with him on his journey
from Gee’s Court to the north of London an incredible ghoul of a man, a
creature whose face was muffled in a huge beard alive with vermin. He,
it seemed, was another neglected man of genius; but I declined to be
introduced to him. I looked up the artist’s address, however, and got to
know his neighbourhood pretty well. Boulter’s Rents, in my first novel,
‘A Life’s Atonement,’ were drawn from Gee’s Court.

I thought the picture rather like at the time, within limits; but I
never had the heart--or the stomach--to be a realist. Feebly as I dared
to paint it, I had to re-form it in fancy before the book was finished.
The original horror stands there, pretty much unreformed; though I dare
say its walls get a coat or two more whitewash than they did when I was
intimate with them.

I have kept for this place in a rambling record a story which might have
been told in my last paper. When I left the barracks of Ballincollig and
said good-bye to her Majesty’s service, I had an encounter with one of
my non-commissioned enemies. I had my leave of absence in my pocket, and
my discharge was to follow me by post I was in civilian dress and was
smoking a cigar at the barrack gates. My enemy saluted before he had had
time to recognise me, and then, seeing to whom he had done this homage,
stood abashed at himself for a minute and then exploded. He could think
of nothing better to say than to order me to put out my cigar. I refused
to obey, for I was yards beyond the magazine limit, within which it was,
of course, forbidden to smoke, and I gave that sergeant a piece of my
mind. One is a good deal more vehement at nineteen than one grows to be
when creeping on towards the fifties, and I made my sergeant a dreadful
promise. I told him that he had acted like an unmitigated brute to me,
and I undertook, if ever I should meet him in civil life, to inflict
upon him a chastisement which should repay us both amply. I never met
him again for thirteen years, and I was slumming when I ran against him.
He was acting as commissionaire at a big manufacturing place in the East
End, and when I accosted him he had no idea of my identity. I wore a
beard and had taken to wearing spectacles, and, if ever I had looked
warlike, had lost that aspect long ago. I asked him if he were
Sergeant ----. He admitted that at once. He had served in the Fourth
Royal Irish?

‘Seventeen years, sir; but I don’t remember you.’

He had been quartered at Cahir, I reminded him, in the year ‘65, and
in ‘66 at Ballincollig. He admitted that quite willingly and seemed
interested. Did he remember a recruit who was nicknamed ‘Oxford?’ He
thought he remembered that recruit, and paled visibly. He was not the
stalwart fellow he had been, but looked bowed down as if by a premature
old age. I asked him why he had left his regiment.

‘Hernia, sir; hernia and pulmonary consumption,’

I had promised this man a hiding thirteen years ago, and thirteen years
ago I am persuaded he had richly merited it, and am quite sure it would
have done him good. It is very likely that at that time I might have
been unable to give it him; but now, between a florid manhood on my side
and hernia and pulmonary consumption on his, the task should have been
easy. But the events of ‘65-66 looked a long way off in ‘78; and somehow
it seemed hardly worth while to reveal one’s identity. So the sergeant
got half a crown and was left with a bit of a puzzle to occupy his
leisure moments.




VI

I have seen a good deal of the working of the English Poor-law, and have
learned to have some decisive opinions about it It has always seemed to
me, since I had any acquaintance with it at all, that it might have been
constructed on purpose to restrict the free action of honest labour and
to set a premium on idle vagabondage. I determined, fourteen or fifteen
years ago, to put the system to a test in my own person, and for my own
sake to start with the odds in favour of the institution. My belief was,
and is, that no law-abiding man could travel in search of work through
England under the provisions of the Poor-law without danger to health
and even life, whilst any worthless and shiftless idler can by its
provisions eke out a tolerably comfortable subsistence.

I got me a shabby suit of clothes, sent a portmanteau to the place where
I intended to end my journey, and, posting a ten-pound note in advance,
carried a money order for that sum in the lining of my hat. Thus
provisioned, and with a shilling in my pocket, I started to walk towards
the money. I was David Vane, compositor, and it was my object to see
if David, with the best will in the world, could live under Poor-law
provisions without bringing himself into the mesh of the policeman’s net
I gave him seven weeks of it, and walked over half the south, midland,
and western counties; giving him an occasional rest in a cheap
lodging-house when workhouse fare had come to be too much for him.

When; I came to a town where my money lay at a post-office, I drew a
shilling or two and sent the bulk on further; but during the whole seven
weeks I only trespassed on my hoard to the extent of fifty shillings.
Without that hoard, or without a breach of the law, my imaginary
compositor would surely have died. I see now and again in the newspapers
a sporadic correspondence about the treatment of men on tramp, about the
food supplied them, the hours of their imprisonment, and the amount of
labour they are compelled to perform. I notice that chairmen of boards
of guardians are quite satisfied with the existing condition of things.
I encounter, in the newspapers, gentlemen who have tasted workhouse
skilly and soup, and who like it, and consider it well made and
nourishing. I meet others who account the sleeping accommodation good,
the bread excellent, and the labour demanded no more than reasonably
adequate. I should ask nothing better than to see these easily contented
gentlemen each enjoying a seventh part of my personal experience.

I may say at once that my notes of this journey were destroyed years
ago, and that I cannot tell with absolute certainty in what places
certain things happened. My experiences were challenged at the time, and
the challengers got little good by their denial of my statements. I had
hoped that my Quixotic enterprise might have some good result, but the
absurd old system has undergone no alteration.

It was in a green lane in Oxfordshire that I came across my first
travelling companion. He was a man of about sixty, a decent-looking old
fellow, and, as I found out when I got into talk with him, by trade a
tailor. He had stopped to bathe his feet in a little brook spanned by
a single arch of mossy brickwork, and whilst he cooled his feet in the
stream he rubbed his cotton socks with a bit of yellow soap the size
of half a crown. He was civil and ready to talk; but he was very
downhearted, He showed me his fingers, the tips of which were raw and
smeared with tar.

‘That’s this mornings work,’ he said. He named the workhouse he had
stayed in. ‘That’s put me off earning a living for a good week to come.
A man can’t sew whilst his fingers is in this state. Stone breaking’s
bad enough; but when it comes to oakum-picking it’s all up with work for
one while. There was another chap there last night,’ he went on, as I
should take to be worse off than me. He’s a watchmaker. Dressed very
nice and tidy he was, and got a job to go to in the town this morning.
He begged hard to be let off, and offered to pay for his night’s
lodgings if they’d let him. They kep’ him to it, hows’ever, and he did
his work, ‘wouldn’t ha’ done it,’ he concluded. ‘I’d ha’ gone afore the
Bench first; though that ain’t mostly any good in these ‘ere country
places.’

This disclosure interested me, for I myself belonged provisionally to
one of the light-fingered professions. It would be about as easy for a
compositor to earn a living fresh from oakum-picking as for a tailor
or a watchmaker; and I determined, if that task were set before me, to
plead my trade and see what came of it I had no longer to wait than next
morning; but when the work was given out it looked to my ignorant eye so
inconsiderable that I forbore to make any complaint about it. A piece
of old tarred rope, six or seven inches long and an inch and a half in
diameter, had to be picked into fine oakum between seven o’clock in the
morning and eleven. The business looked anything but formidable, and I
began upon it with a light heart.

The accustomed men began by hammering the ends of their strands upon the
stone floor, and I followed their example, and, having secured a hold
for the finger-tips, went ahead with the work. I may say that until a
man of delicate fingers has tried this occupation he can have no idea
of the long-drawn and exasperating misery of it. It is no use to be
impatient, for in attempting to go too fast you succeed only in skinning
your thumb and fingers. The only chance is patience, and that is not an
easy thing. The old stagers, who had had years of it, got along quite
comfortably, and were thankful that they were not stone-breaking. The
new men swore and grumbled and flayed their fingers. The result of
my own experience was that David Vane, compositor, was put beyond the
chance of earning a living at his legitimate trade for a good fortnight
The accommodation paid for by the labour consisted, all told, in one
hunk of dry bread--weight, I should say, about four ounces; one pint
of stirabout made of Indian meal and flavoured with soot; and
a particularly dirty and uninviting bed. Having bestowed these
benefactions on the harmless workman, the British Poor-law in return
insists that he shall become a hopeless pauper by stealing from him his
handicraft.

I tried stone-breaking pretty often later in the course of my tramp, and
found it a much less painful occupation. The handling of cricket-bat
and sculls hardens the palm of the hand whilst it leaves the tips of the
fingers unprotected. But though at the time of my excursion I was fresh
from life on the river, it took me some time to get inured to this new
occupation, and stone-breaking alone would, of course, unfit for his
work any man who needed lightness and steadiness of hand. Work and
accommodation varied very widely. In one or two places we got good bread
at night, good broth in the morning, and a bed to sleep in which, as I
suppose, the average tramp would find almost luxurious. The bedclothes
were coarse, as they had a perfect right to be, but they were clean;
and the food, though scanty and of the plainest, was wholesome and
nourishing. In one place, I remember, the bread actually stank, and the
hungriest of the hungry crowd left it uneaten. The broth served out next
morning was nothing more or less than the water in which bacon had been
boiled. The beds were kennels. A long wooden bench was divided into
compartments by upright boards; a quantity of dirty straw which might,
by the look of it, have served already in a stable was spread in each
recess, and was covered with foul sacks which bore the name of a local
miller. Several of these sacks, cut open and stitched together, served
for a counterpane.

‘I’d ‘eard about this place,’ said my neighbour when the able-bodied
pauper who superintended us had trooped us into this abominable chamber,
‘and I’d a dam good mind to smash a lamp or summat and get run in
instead o’ comin’ here. If I’d ha’ knowed the truth about it, I’d ha’
done it.’

This was the worst, and by far the worst, of the places I encountered.
Indeed, I met nothing else comparable to it. I made a trifling error in
my description of it at the time. By a slip of the pen I represented the
shed in which the casual paupers were accommodated as being a lean-to
against the body of the workhouse, whereas it was in fact a lean-to
against the outer wall of the workhouse grounds. This was enough in the
minds of the guardians to justify them in denouncing me, through their
chairman, as a liar, and was held to be triumphant proof that I had
never been there, though I proved ‘David Vane, compositor,’ upon their
books and upon those of the two neighbouring workhouses.

In some country places we went straight to the relieving officer, who
gave us our tickets for the night. In other places of more considerable
population we were allowed to lounge about the outside of the police
station until the hour appointed for distribution. Once inside the
workhouse, we were prisoners until at least eleven o’clock next morning
whether the tale of stones were broken or no, or the strands of rope
were or were not reduced to oakum. In default, men were occasionally
detained to be taken before the Bench; but what became of them I
never had an opportunity of learning apart from the experiences of my
travelling companions, who estimated the punishment at seven or fourteen
days. A good many of these had gaol experiences, and I am forced
to admit that the decent folk on tramp were few in number. But the
occasional honest mechanic or skilled workman in search of employment
was hard bestead.

I met two journeymen printers, one of whom, having threepence for a
bed outside the workhouse, was able to find employment in the town of
Gloucester; whilst the other, being unable to get away from durance
before eleven, was left out in the cold. I met other men who, in order
to escape this absurd imprisonment, slept in the fields, and so risked
liberty on the other side rather than miss the early labour market; for
to sleep in the fields is a misdemeanour punishable at law: though why
it should be so, if nothing else be provable against a man, Heaven only
knows. In the language of the road, to sleep in the open is to ‘skipper’
and to sleep in the workhouse is to go ‘on the spike.’ It was a common
question in fine weather, ‘Skipper or spike to-night?’ The habitual
loafer invariably chose the spike. The man who had business and wanted
to get along elected to skipper, though he lost two meals thereby.

The law, which ruins the hands of the skilled workman, and detains
skilled and unskilled alike until the labour market is closed to
them, supplies a dietary which would kill anybody but a professional
fasting-man in a month, and keeps a keen eye on mendicancy. It is like
the sun, with a difference: it looks alike on the just and the unjust
The mischief is, it is made for the comfort of the worthless and is
the plague of the deserving. There are easy-going boards of guardians,
easy-going workhouse masters and labour masters, who do not insist upon
the tale of work which is demanded by others. The old stagers know the
easy places and give them a natural preference.

The one place of terror on the line I took was Gloucester. The guardians
of the Gloucester Union had made up their minds to put down the casual
pauper, and, as the means readiest to hand, they determined to make the
work too hard for him. I was so persistently warned against Gloucester
that I went there to see for myself what it was like. The house itself
was orderly and clean, and the discipline as complete as in a gaol. The
only thing which distinguished it from other places of its kind was the
severity of the labour imposed.

The limits of labour are fixed by law. There is such and such a weight
of oakum to be picked, or such a weight of stone to be broken; but
the good guardians of Gloucester, without in the least infringing the
provisions of the Poor Law Board, made the work twice as severe as
it was in other houses than their own. Before every casual pauper was
placed the regulation quantity of stone--it was the hardest I tackled on
my pilgrimage--and beyond the morning’s stint was set a screen through
which every atom of the stone had to be passed before the job was
finished and the wanderer was allowed out upon his way again. It was no
business of mine to be refractory, and I hammered away with such zeal
as I could command; but it took me six hours to get through the tale
of work. When I had earned my own discharge I left a handful of
unfortunates behind me who had theirs yet to finish. They were
all unaccustomed and inexperienced, or they would not have been at
Gloucester. Whether that charming western city keeps up its reputation
until now I do not know; but the guardians found their system succeed
so well that they have probably adhered to it I had forgotten to mention
one fact which is common to all workhouses. The casual tramp breakfasts
when he has done his work, but not before.

Discerning private critics of my novels have noticed how much capital I
have made of this odd adventure. In ‘A Life’s Atonement’ Frank Fairholt
goes on tramp, seeking to efface himself amidst the offscourings of
the poor after an accidental deed of homicide, In ‘Joseph’s Coat’ Young
George goes on tramp, slinking from casual ward to casual ward until he
meets Ethel Donne at Wreath-dale. In ‘Val Strange’ Hiram Search on tramp
opens the story; and it was by way of spike and skipper that John Jones,
of Seven Dials, brought fortune to his sweetheart in ‘Skeleton Keys,’
I fully admit the impeachment, and, indeed, I am not indisposed to brag
about it. Perhaps few writers of fiction have gone as close to nature
for their facts.

I met more queer people and found more queer adventures on that tramp
than I have ever been able to find a literary use for. One amazing
vagabond with a moustache announced himself to me, when I had found a
way into his confidence, as a professional deserter. He had enlisted in
every militia regiment in the country and in half the regiments of the
line. When he had secured the first instalment of his bounty he made a
bolt of it, and, by way of securing safety, took immediate refuge in the
next military depot. I understood that he had pledged himself to serve
her Majesty for a period of something like a thousand years. Wherever I
had the chance to test him I found him a most enterprising liar, and
I dare say he exaggerated a little here. I asked him what trade
he followed or professed between whiles. The rascal grinned with a
delightful cunning and said he was a hand comb-maker.

‘The trade’s dead,’ he told me; ‘machinery’s knocked the bottom out
of it. There’s only one shop in England where they makes combs by ‘and
nowadays, and you can bet as _I_ steers clear o’ _that_. It’s a lovely
lay to go on, matey. “The trade’s ruined,” you says, “by machinery,”
 you says. “I was brought up to it for a livin’,” says you, “an’ it’s
the only thing,” you says, “as I’ve got to yearn my daily bread by the
sweat of my brow by,” you says. Lord! I’ve had as much as ninepence in a
day out o’ that yarn on the very road as we’re a travellin’ now.’

I had a qualm of conscience; but his artless tale was told, as it were,
under the seal of confession, and I never betrayed him.




VII

It was at least as agreeable to starve on the non-proceeds of landscape
painting as on those of journalism, and when nothing in the way of meat
and drink was to be got out of either, it was only a choice as to the
form of euthanasia. I guessed I could make no money out of painting;
but I knew by practical experience that there was nothing to be made by
journalism.

I was daubing in a friend’s chambers when the angel of opportunity came.
He appeared in the form of an American gentleman with a fur collar and
an astonishing Massachusetts accent. War had been actually declared
between Russia and Turkey a week or two before. The Russians were
already at Giurgevo, building a bridge of boats with intent to cross the
Danube, and the Turks were gathered in force at Rustchuk and Schumla.
So much I knew from I the newspapers, but no further intelligence of the
opening campaign had reached me.

My visitors card announced him as Colonel ------, and he bore a letter
of introduction from the representative of a leading New York journal.
He was himself in London as the representative of a newspaper published
in Chicago, and in the course of a five minutes’ conversation he told me
that he was in search of a young, healthy, and enterprising journalist
who was willing to risk his life for the honour of his craft, and a
rather considerable sum per column for copy delivered at the office
of the newspaper of which he made himself the flying herald, The only
engagement I had in the world was to breakfast with a man on Sunday
morning, and that I waived instantly. An immediate 40L. was put into my
hands; an arrangement was made that on calling at the American Embassy
at Vienna I should receive more, and that at the bank at Constantinople
I should find a sum of two hundred sterling on arrival. With this
understanding I started for the seat of war at seven o’clock on the
following morning, and in due course found myself at Vienna. There I
tried, in pursuance of instructions, for an interview with the Turkish
Ambassador, who steadfastly declined to see me. I made certain necessary
preparations, and called at the bank half a dozen times over. There was
no hint or sign of my Chicago friend; and possibly if I had been more
experienced than I was I might have at once taken warning and returned
home. As things were at the time no such idea entered my head; and when,
after a delay of two days, half the promised money reached me, I took
ticket gladly for Trieste, and embarked on a Messageries Maritimes boat
for Constantinople.

It was the twelfth of May of that year when we set sail down the
Adriatic, and I had never seen anything so heavenly beautiful as the
coast and sea. We were five days on our journey; and now, when I have
travelled the wide world over, have seen most of its show places, and
have made myself familiar with exotic beauties of the landscape and
seascape sort, I can recall nothing like that five days’ dream of
heaven. Perhaps the fact that I was going to look at war for the
first time, and had some premonition of its horrors, made the placid
loveliness of the Mediterranean more charming and exquisite by a kind
of foreseen contrast. But I do not remember to have beheld (and I do not
think I shall fail to remember it all till the day I die) anything so
beautiful as the far-off islands that lifted their purple heads as we
steamed through the Piraeus, and the long-drawn wonderful panoramic
splendours of the Mediterranean sunsets. I have travelled in many ships
since then, and have never missed the inevitable fool. There is always
a fool aboard ship; and I remember one day when we were within sight of
Corfu that the fool who was our local property for the moment touched me
on the shoulder as I hung over the bows, and pointed to the island.

‘They say that’s land,’ said he, ‘but you d think it was a sweetmeat.
Looks good to eat, doesn’t it? It’s like them biled violet things in
sugar that they sell in Paris.’

I was all on fire to see the interior of my first Eastern city, and when
I saw the domes and minarets of Constantinople actually before me, the
traveller’s instinct was quickened to a passion. We got in at sundown,
and behind the picturesque roofs of the town lay an amber and crimson
mystery of light, which was half-obscured by the smoke and steam of a
score or two of vessels. The whole scene looked like a smeared landscape
from the hand of Turner. He, at least, would have seen to it that the
colour was clear; but Nature is very often behind the artist, and the
effect was grossly muddy and untransparent.

In common with the rest of the world I had heard of baksheesh, but until
then I never understood its magic power. A huge functionary took charge
of my trunk and portmanteau, and impounded them so decisively in the
name of the law that I had made up my mind to see neither of them any
more. The captain of the boat whispered in my ear that a mejidieh
would do it, I tried a French five-franc piece! which proved instantly
efficacious; and a minute or two later I was on shore at Galata, astride
a donkey whose tail was industriously twisted round by his driver,
and who was followed by an unequally laden brother ass, who bore my
portmanteau on one flank and my trunk upon another.

We scrambled up the stony road towards the main street of Pera. The city
had looked like a Turneresque dream from the outside, but known from
within it was the home of ugliness, and of stinks innumerable. The
yellow dogs tripped the feet as often as the abominable pavement, and
seemed as immovable and as much a part of the road itself. Now and again
in the side streets a whole horde howled like a phalanx of advancing
wolves; but they were outside the parish of the brutes who encumbered
the roadway I had to travel, and though the noise of war was near,
the canine regiment not actually called to fight rested immobile, its
members suffering themselves to be kicked by foot passengers, trodden on
by cattle, and rolled over by wheels with an astonishing stolidity.

We reached the hotel in time for an admirable dinner--the precursor of
many admirable meals, whose only fault was that they were built too much
on one pattern. We were served, as I recall too well, with tomato soup,
red mullet, quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet. Next morning at breakfast
came red mullet, quail, and tomato farcie. At luncheon came red mullet,
quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet At dinner came tomato soup, red mullet,
tomato farcie, quail, and cutlet. It was a charming menu--for once:
but when we had gone on with it for a week my travelling companions and
myself grew a little weary of it, and would fain have found a change.
Poor Campbell--Schipka Campbell we called him afterwards--had arrived
with an earlier boatload of adventurers and was staying at the Hôtel de
Misserie. Captain Tiburce Morrisot, of the Troisième Chasseurs, stayed
at the Byzance; and we three made a party together to dine at Valori’s
and to escape the eternal red mullet, tomato farcie, and quail.

We found there an astonishing German waiter who seemed, more or less,
to speak every language under heaven. There were in the café Greeks,
Italians, Spaniards, Turks, Bulgars, Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen,
and people, for aught I know, of half a dozen other nationalities; and
the head waiter addressed each and all of these in turn in any language
which might be addressed to him. One of us asked him with how many
tongues he was familiar, and he answered, with an apologetic aspect,
‘Onily twelf.’ What could we have for dinner? ‘Fery good dinner,
gentlemen. There is red mullet, there is tomato farcie, there is qvail,’
We elected finally to dine on something which was announced as roast
beef and looked suspiciously like horse. Anything was better than that
eternal round of delicacies which had grown to be so tiresome. The
city was in a state of siege, and every ramble along the street was
productive of interest and amusement--sometimes of a rather striking
sort. I had only been there some three or four days when, in the course
of a morning stroll, I found myself in front of the Wallach Serai. The
footpaths were lined pretty thickly with loungers who had stood to watch
the march-past of a regiment of Zeibecks. The bare-legged ruffians, with
their amazing beehive hats and their swagging belly-bands crammed
with the antique weapons with which their ancestors had stormed Genoa,
straggled past in any kind of order they chose to adopt and made their
way towards the Sweet Waters of Europe, by whose shores they were
destined to encamp. When they were all gone and the stagnant tide of
passage was revived there came by an old Hoja, a holy man, dressed in
green robe and caftan and wearing yellow slippers--self-proclaimed as
one who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was followed by a very
small donkey laden with panniers. By my side on the footwalk stood a
Circassian who had been flourishing in the air, whilst the troops
went by, a formidable-looking yataghan, and had been cheering in some
language of which I did not understand a syllable.

This man was now standing, with an admiring crowd about him, licking
the back of his wrist and shaving off the hair that grew there by way
of showing the edge and temper of his weapon. It must have been set as
finely as a razor, and, like a razor, it was broad-backed and finely
bevelled. Just as the old Hoja went by, and the placid little donkey
followed at his heels, the Circassian stepped into the horse-road, gave
the weapon a braggadocio swing, and at a single blow divided the head of
the poor little ass from the body as cleanly as any dandy swordsman of
the Guards will sever a hanging sheep. The head fell plump; but for a
second or two the body stood, spouting a vivid streak of scarlet from
the neck, and then toppled over. The old green-clad Hoja turned at the
noise made by the crowd, saw the blood-stained sword waving behind him,
understood at a glance what had happened, and shuffled on as fast as his
yellow pantoufles would carry him.




VIII

It is probable that there never was in the history of the world a
city so crammed with every sample of the tribes of rascaldom as
Constantinople at this epoch. I saw, from the carriage gateway at the
Hôtel de Byzance, three coffee-coloured scoundrels pause at the place
of custom held by an itinerant moneychanger. The man sat with his little
glazed box of Turkish and foreign coins before him on the pavement, his
whole financial stock-in-trade amounting to perhaps twenty or thirty
pounds. One of the passing rascals offered for his inspection
a diminutive gold coin, and the grey-bearded, venerable-looking
money-merchant, having examined it, opened his case and took out a
handful of coins to give change for it. The glass lid was no sooner
lifted, than each one of the trio dipped in a coffee-coloured paw and
took out a handful of money. The man who had shown the small gold coin
pouched it again and walked on. The poor old money-changer rose to his
feet and made a motion as if he would follow; but one of the ruffians
half drew the sword which hung at his side, and turned upon him with
a sudden snarl. The old man sat down to his loss, and made no further
attempt to recover his stolen belongings.

Wandering up and down the city I was witness to a score of acts of
equal lawlessness, and in point of fact the whole place was a prey to a
restless terror. Between the city and the Sweet Waters of Europe there
was an encampment of perhaps the most remarkable and varied assortment
of blackguards that ever got together in the history of civilised
warfare. Until they were known, the curious citizens used to ride out to
look at them and wander about the camp; but one or two days’ experience
cured the people of Constantinople of this habit A Greek lady and her
daughter were hideously done to death by the encamped ruffians, and
the coachman who strove to rescue them had his throat cut Two or three
events of this kind set the Christian part of Constantinople in a panic,
and no white man ventured abroad after nightfall without carrying arms.

With all this the streets had never been bare. Every night the Grande
Rue de Péra swarmed with passengers; the restaurants and hotels were
full; and you could hear the raucous voices of the vocal failures of a
dozen countries shrieking and bellowing through the open windows of the
_cafés-chantants_ along the street The one place that we frequented was
the Concert Flamm. It was kept by one Napoléon Flamm, who in those days
was known to almost every Englishman in Constantinople. He had a little
silver hell beside the concert-room, and the swindling roulette-table
there was presided over by a fat oily Greek, who might from his aspect,
had some friend taken the trouble to wash him, have been supposed to
be a diplomat of high rank. The table, as I very well remember, had but
twenty-four numbers and at either end a zero. Had the game been fair,
and had all the players been skilled, the proprietor of this contrivance
must have taken by mathematical law a penny out of every shilling
which was laid against the bank. I make no pretence to an extraordinary
credulity; but I still believe that the fat Greek had a dodge by means
of which it was possible to arrest the action of the wheel at the most
profitable moment.

There was a Dutchman in the silver hell one night--a gentleman who told
us that he was known in South Africa as the King of Diamonds. We learned
later on, from independent sources, that though he had kept the suit he
had changed the card. From Kim-berley to Table Bay the fame of the Knave
of Diamonds had travelled, and if only one-half we heard of the man was
true he had earned his title. For something like an hour and a half
this gentleman and myself stood side by side at the roulette-table, and
noticed unfailingly that whenever black was most heavily backed red won,
and whenever the major part of the money was on red black turned up. We
formed our own conclusions, and in our sober hours at least declined to
play at that particular table.

There was a tremendous fight in these rooms one evening, which was begun
in a comic way enough by Captain Georg von A------, of the 4th Kônig’s
Dragoons--a handsome, dashing young giant of a cavalry officer, who had
done excellent service against the French at Gravelotte, and who was now
bent on joining that ill-fated Polish Legion which was for a while
the receptacle into which was swept half the scoundreldom and half the
honest adventurous spirit of young Europe.

Poor dear old Campbell, dead these many years now (he fell under
Wolseley leading the black contingent on Secocoeni’s Height), the young
German captain, and myself, had dined together, and Von A------ had
dined not wisely, but too well. He had learned a word or two of
Turkish, and, supposing that the inhabitants of the Grande Rue and
the frequenters of the Concert Flamm were Turks, he rose and uttered
a patriotic phrase, ‘Chokularishah Padishah!’ which means, as I am
informed on credible authority, ‘May the Sultan live for ever!’ All
the befezzed and bearded gentry, hook-nosed, sloe-eyed and greasy of
complexion, who frequented the café of Monsieur Napoléon Flamm were
Greeks and Armenians, and whether the Sultan lived for ever or died next
day they did not care one jot They stared somewhat impolitely at the
handsome fair-haired young German, but said nothing. He carried on his
parable in Turkish: ‘Muscov dormous,’ and illustrated his meaning by
drawing his thumb with Masonic vigour across his windpipe.

The words and the action together were meant to signify that the Russian
was a hog and ought to have his throat cut Straightway up stood a
little Greek with a ‘Je suis Muscov, monsieur,’ and the captain promptly
knocked him down. He had not meant to do anything of the sort, but the
mere windy buffet of his big hand toppled the little Levantine on to the
floor. There was an immediate shindy. A coffee-cup was hurled by
some indignant compatriot of the man assaulted and sent a splendid
looking-glass, seven or eight feet high, to irremediable ruin< A
coffee-cup in a Constantinople café is made of porcelain as thick as a
lady’s little finger, and weighs something like a quarter of a pound.
In less time than it takes to tell it the nationalities were mixed and
sorted again. Gaul, Briton, and Teuton--there were seven of us from the
north-western end of Europe--got shoulder to shoulder, and every man of
us had half a score to tackle. I never saw so funny a fight in all my
life, and certainly never enjoyed myself at less personal risk. The
room was clear in something under five minutes, and England, France, and
Germany stood triumphant. The little Levantine crowd streamed down the
winding stair, and Campbell added insult to injury and injury to insult
by picking up the hindmost small man and dropping him on to the heads
of those who had gone before him. We all laughed heroically; but when
we got downstairs, after the outgoing crowd, the aspect of affairs was
changed considerably.

I am talking of many years ago, and I am not quite certain of local
names at any moment People who know Constantinople can correct me if I
mistake the name of the place; but I think it is the Rue Yildijé which
stands nearly opposite the entrance to the old Café Flamm and leads, or
led, to the low Greek quarter. Anyhow, there is a sloping street there
which runs down by a flight of rough stone steps towards the Galata
district, and from this a fierce crowd came swarming, armed with
broom-handles, knives, pokers, tongs--any weapon snatched up in the
vengeful tide of the moment. Poor Campbell took command of our party,
formed us in line, and made us draw our revolvers. The entrance to the
café was wide enough to allow us to issue shoulder to shoulder in a sort
of bow. We ranged ourselves along the wall, flanked the crowd, and took
up a position across the pavement. Amongst our enemies those behind
cried ‘Forward!’ and those in front cried ‘Back!’ We paced backward
until we reached the Byzance Hotel, some fifty or sixty yards away,
and there, once within the gateway, we put up our weapons, entered the
hotel, and called for drinks. In a better-regulated city we might have
heard something more about it; but, as it was, nothing happened, and the
Chief Constable of the Consulate--from whom, by the way, I had bought
the Irish Constabulary revolver which enabled me to make my show against
the crowd--joined us in the course of the evening and laughed heartily
at the tale.




IX

I have told how I went out as ‘special correspondent’ to an American
paper in the Russo-Turkish war. From the hour at which we said good-bye
to each other on the platform of Charing Cross railway station, some
seventeen years ago, until now, I have never seen the military gentleman
from Chicago at whose instance I went out to watch the events of the
Russo-Turkish war. When I got home again, a month after the fall of
Plevna, I made inquiries about him, and learned that he had exceeded his
instructions, and that if he had followed the directions laid upon him
by his proprietors he himself would have gone out to the seat of war.
What object he proposed to himself in shirking that duty, and in sending
out a man whose salary he could not pay, I never definitely learned.

For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman
Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted
I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams
insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my
messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It
was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks
of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under
a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned
London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled ‘In a State
of Siege,’ got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some
ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately
round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of
men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. They were seated round
a little table, drinking vishnap and lemonade, and chattering gaily
amongst themselves. One of them called me to join the party, and
another, whom I knew to be acting as agent for the _Scotsman_, was
reading a newspaper. We talked indifferently for a while; and the
reader, laying down his journal on the table, set his hand upon it
with a solid emphasis and said, ‘If I could find the man who wrote that
article, I should ask him to go to the front at once.’

I glanced at the open sheet, and, lo! the article was mine. I said so,
and in ten minutes I had made a bargain. I was to go up country at the
earliest possible moment; and received instructions as to how to proceed
in application for the necessary _teskerai_, a form of passport or
safeguard without which no stranger was allowed to enter the interior.
The search after that abominable _testerai_ delayed me for many days,
and I danced attendance on Said Pasha (English Said as he was called)
until I was weary and heartsick.

At last I determined to go without the passport, and did so; but the
delay I experienced brought me into contact with as queer a body of
adventurers as I ever encountered in my life. At the head of these
gentlemen was a Mr. Montague Edie, or Edie Montague (for he wrote the
name both ways)--a young fellow of apparently four or five and twenty,
who gave himself out, I think, as a lieutenant in the English navy, and
who professed to have authority from the Turkish Government to sail a
war-ship under letters of marque and to harry Russian commerce in the
Black Sea.

Constantinople at this time was full of hare-brained adventurers,
and Mr. Montague Edie was not long in gathering about him a band of
officers. The business of the expedition was supposed to be a profound
secret; but it was talked about with a childish _naïveté_ in all manner
of public places. The chieftain laid in uniforms of his own designing,
and strolled about the Grande Rue de Péra, gaudy in a Turkish military
fez, white ducks and gloves, and a blue coat beplastered with gold lace.
One or two of his lieutenants followed his example; and the unfortunate
tailor who had provided these sartorial splendours held the Hôtel
Misserie and the Hôtel Byzance in siege for days in the vain hope of
extracting payment for his labours.

A droller set for the management of a ship of war was never seen
anywhere. The second lieutenant, I remember, was fresh from St. John’s
College, Oxford. He had left his native shores for the first time on
this journey, and his whole experience of the sea had been acquired
in the passage of the Channel and the voyage from Marseilles to
Constantinople. Poor Schipka Campbell put him under examination one
evening at a _brasserie_ in the Grande Rue, and elicited the fact that
he supposed port and starboard to mean the same thing, and larboard
to be the antithesis of the two. I forget the first lieutenant; but a
subordinate officer was a fat City clerk who had been a volunteer in
some London corps, and who on the strength of his military experiences
had come out with intent to seek a commission in the Polish Legion.

The peculiarity of that contingent was that, so far as I know, not
a solitary Pole ever attempted to join its ranks. The City clerk
was seduced from his original purpose by die splendour of Mr.
Edie’s uniform. He was himself rigged out at the expense of the same
unfortunate tailor who had supplied his fellow-officers; but he only
wore the uniform once, having been caught and mercilessly chaffed by a
contingent of British officers who were waiting for the formation of the
Turkish gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this
crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American
doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had
been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary
craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity,
had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some
distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He
had money of his own, and Heaven only knows how many generous things he
did amongst the crowd of stranded foreigners at that time in the city.

‘I don’t lay out to know much,’ he said to me one day; ‘but I have made
one discovery. Civilisation and the paper collar air ttwrterminous.
Turkey is a civilised country. I bought half a gross of paper collars at
the Bon Marché this morning. So long as I can purchase a paper collar I
know I am in a civilised country, and when I cayn’t, I ain’t.’

I met the doctor a day or two after the publication of this memorable
discovery, He was talking with one of the officers of the expedition,
and suddenly he threw the walking-stick he carried high into the air.

‘That lets me out!’ he said, in a very loud and decided tone; and,
quitting his companion, he beckoned to me to follow him. The old
gentleman’s face and gesture were so urgent that I joined him at once.
He told his story in a vernacular racier than I dare to copy; but it
came to this. The Government had got wind of the precious scheme (to
which it had, of course, never given a moment’s sanction), and had come
down with an intimation that the originator of it and his subordinates
would do well immediately to leave the country.

The chieftain was not thus easily to be balked, however. He called a
council of war, and proposed to his astonished satellites that they
should steal a gun-boat and turn pirates against the Russians on their
own account. This delectable scheme was instantly rejected by the
gentlemen to whom it was submitted, and it was the news of it which
let the doctor out. He took steamer that afternoon for Syra, and I
have never since heard of him. The officers of the letter of marque
surrendered their uniforms to the tailor whom they had blessed with
their patronage, and the chieftain went for a day or two to the lock-up
at the British Consulate.

Sir John Fawcett--Mr. Fawcett he was in those days--chose rather
to laugh at the whole business than to treat it seriously, and the
adventurous young gentleman was released on a promise to leave the
country. I myself was offered a post of honour in this remarkable
contingent. The secret at which all Constantinople had been laughing for
a week was confided to me in whispers at the Concert Flamm. I think--but
at this distance of time I am not quite sure--that the post offered to
me was that of Captain of Marines. I don’t mind confessing, in justice
to my own unwisdom at that time of day, that if there had been a boat
and a marine I might have thought twice before refusing the offer. As it
was, of course it was simply a matter for laughter.

I hardly like to leave Constantinople without a memory of the Polish
Legion. I took a journey by the Shooting Star Railway with a chance
companion, to see him sworn in and receive his commission as an officer
of that regiment The place of assignation was a loft over an untenanted
stable, for the time being the head-quarters of the corps. I never heard
of their having any others; and I remember with unusual distinctness an
interview one of the officers had with Said Pasha, who told him, with a
perfect absence of reserve, that the Legion ‘would be sent to the front
and would be dissipated.’ As a matter of fact, it never got really into
form. I believe that there was never at any moment a solitary private
in its ranks. So long as it lasted it consisted entirely of officers of
various grades. Many of these, seeing how hopeless the whole enterprise
had grown to be, abandoned it openly; others quietly slipped away
without warning; and a good many willingly allowed themselves to be
drafted into other regiments, where some of them did good service.

The English journalists in Turkey were divided by faction. We were
mainly Philo-Turkish or Philo-Russian, according to the political
colours of the journals we represented; and I know now very well that
I was, for my own part, so impressed by the Bulgarian atrocities scare
that I hardly knew how to look for mercy or right feeling in a Turk.
The plain truth was very hard to get at, but now, through the far
perspective of the years that lie between, it is easier to see with a
judicial eye. If there is to be found anywhere in the world a gentler,
a more hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal
creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet
him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty,
braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I
would walk a long way to find him.

While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to
the civilised world found the Turk _anathema maranatha_, and the other
half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable
and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern
themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and ‘the
unspeakable Turk,’ of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the
main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.

The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work
of the auxiliaries--the Tchircasse, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the
Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of
these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing the _Times_)
and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known
as the ‘Roumelian atrocity district.’ Day after day we lived among the
Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the
heights of the lower Balkans--as at Sopot--we could see the horizon red.
The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals.
About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously
in the dark.

It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit
could revive itself in these modern days--‘Kill, slay! leave not one
stone standing upon another.’ In Kalofer, where there had been a busy
and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a
creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might
not have laid one’s hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to
heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war
shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against
the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering
little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his
knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean
impassioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My
dragoman translated for my benefit ‘Man with the two sweet eyes,’ said
the kneeling orator, in possible tribute to my spectacles, ‘why did
we enter upon this disastrous journey? Allah has forgotten us. Let us
return.’ We were in two minds about it already, for the place was weird
to look at and the air was a slow poison; but the horses were tired, and
we ourselves had had almost enough of the day s march.

Suddenly I sighted a domestic rooster, walking with a certain air of
pensive reflection down the street. I rested my revolver on my left
arm, took careful aim and fired. The bird towered madly, executed a wild
waltz, and went round the corner. The noise of the shot disturbed some
members of his harem, and a hen fluttered into the branches of a tree
close by. Francis potted her, and she fell at our feet. Here, at least,
was supper; but at the first corner we turned, in search of a place in
which to camp for the night, we found the rest of the feathered brood
feeding on the carcase of a pig which literally heaved in waves of
vermin life. We were very hungry; but there was a good two to one chance
that our bird had enjoyed that uninviting diet, and we threw her over
the nearest wall into the cinders of a smoking cottage.

We were resigned to remain supperless, when, with a prodigious clatter
on the stony street, and a wild calling of voices, came down three
Turkish Cossacks, detached, to call us back, from a party of regular
troops which we had passed that morning. The news they brought was, that
the country was alive with every species of unconscionable blackguard
known to the time and region; and at their urgent advice we mounted
our tired beasts once more, and rode until a journey of some half-dozen
miles brought us to the camp. There we fed royally, and slept in safety.




X

There is a theory to the effect that every man or woman in the world
could write at least one readable and instructive novel out of his or
her own actual experience. There is a very apparent disposition to put
this idea to the test of practice, though, happily, not more than half
the world’s population has been so far animated by it. An equally sage
idea is that anybody, and everybody, can take a part upon the stage.
To write a novel or to turn actor--to astonish the world with a new
Waverley, Esmond, or Copperfield, or to dazzle the mimic scene with a
novel Hamlet, Falstaff, Richelieu, or Othello--would seem the simplest
thing in the world to the apprehension of a good many excellent people.

Charles Dickens observed a great many years ago that to ‘come out’ in
a great part is one of the easiest things in the world; while to avoid
going in again is one of the most difficult. In my time I have both come
out and gone in again; and though I am not disposed to tax my modesty
for defences, or to offer prophecies for the future, it is not
improbable that I may repeat the experience in its completeness. I
suppose that the pursuit of the successful actor is the most fascinating
in the world. Here and there one learns that it has been distasteful in
an individual instance; but these cases are only the exceptions which
prove themselves and nothing else.

A great many people have been good enough to tell the story of my first
appearance on the stage; and they have told it in ways so diverse, and
yet so circumstantially, that I have been sometimes tempted to doubt
the genuineness of my own recollections. Here, however, for what it is
worth, is my belief about the matter.

I was in New Zealand some three years ago, when a travelling manager
whom I ran across in the course of my wanderings asked me if I happened
to have such a thing as a new and original drama about me. I confessed
that I had a scheme for a drama in my mind (the manager confessed
himself to be singularly anxious to produce it), and I undertook to
finish it and to see it through rehearsal. It will be observed that none
of the usual difficulties which lie in the way of the ordinary pretender
to dramatic fame obstructed my progress. There was no question of
suitability--no thought of excellence or the reverse. The travelling
manager had anything to gain and nothing to lose by the production of a
piece from my hand. It meant no more than the trouble of rehearsing; and
if the thing failed, it failed and there an end; and if it succeeded,
the manager stipulated for half profits wherever the piece might be
produced. He has not, so far, retired from business. In the innocence
of my heart I promised that the piece should be ready for rehearsal in
three weeks’ time, and I set to work with the greatest vigour, burying
myself for the first week at Gisborne, a weird and lonely seaside town
where there has as yet been no whisper of a railway, and where
the steamers which ply along the coast may or may not call for the
traveller, according to the weather.

If I may say so of myself without immodesty, I am a rapid and assured
workman.

All my best work has been done at a tremendous pace. I turned out
‘Joseph’s Coat’ in thirty-six sittings, a chapter at a sitting. ‘Val
Strange,’ a work of equal length or nearly, was written in as many
consecutive days. ‘Aunt Rachel,’ the one work of mine which may outlive
me by a score of years, was written at such a pace that a copying
clerk would have some ado to transcribe it in the time. Its three last
chapters were written between sunset and sunrise in the midst of as
tragic interruptions as ever befell the writing of comedy anywhere.

With this lifelong habit of swift workmanship upon me, I thought that
all I needed was to see my theme before me, and to go at it with my
whole heart as I would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you
want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book
is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I
shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to
write ‘Chums’ upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember,
been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic
critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the
exigencies of stage construction as the average man, and found that
that meant a little less than nothing. The very method of work looked
curiously bare and bald. My study for years has been to me a theatre in
which I have acted many scores of different parts, often enough before
a mirror to assure myself of nature. Yet I no sooner began to write
consciously for the stage than this useful faculty abandoned me
entirely. I no longer saw my living people; but in their stead the
members of the travelling company obtruded themselves upon me.

My leading lady was before me in the place of Lucy Draycott. She was and
is a most excellent and charming actress; but she was only playing at
being Lucy Draycott, and she stood in between me and my own conception
in a way which filled me with a cold embarrassment. Then, again, Square
Jack Furlong, a rustic rascal, who, as I boldly hoped, was to make quite
a new type of stage villain, was to be impersonated by a heavy man of
quite the conventional sort--a man who (small blame to him) would have
no idea of the accent my scoundrel was to speak in (a vital point to me)
and not a conception of the inner workings of his mind. In this way
all the real people who supposed they were to interpret my shadows into
flesh and blood converted my flesh and blood into shadow. Understand
that I am not apologizing for a bad play or a failure. It was not
counted either one or the other, though I must do something different
to touch the mark I am in quest of. I am only trying to show in what
fashion I was embarrassed by new conditions. My travelling manager
nearly broke his heart because I would not at first consent to allow my
villain to shoot little Harold, and at last in desperation I took his
advice and killed an idyll with a single grain of melodrama.

The piece was somehow written in the time prescribed, and was produced
‘under the direct supervision of the author,’ by which fact it gained
perhaps as much as might have been expected. It was produced at
Auckland, and achieved a success which it was not destined to repeat in
its fulness. It was admirably, and in one respect originally, staged.
The second act was laid in the New Zealand bush: and since at Auckland
folks know what a New Zealand bush-scene is like, it was needful to be
a little truer to nature than we found it easily possible to be when the
play was produced for a single experimental night at the Globe, or when
it ran its twelvemonth course in the English and Scotch provinces later
on.

Sir George Grey was interested in the production; and in Auckland Sir
George Grey does pretty much as he likes, as he has a right to do when
one remembers what the city, and indeed the whole colony, owes to his
patriotism, his statesmanship, and his personal generosity. Without his
aid the stage-manager’s proposal could not possibly have been carried
out; but, armed with his authority, I presented myself to the curator of
the park, and from him obtained leafage enough to dress the whole scene
without the help of the scene-painter’s art. We had a backcloth, to
be sure, and an artificial waterfall (which flooded the cellars,
by-the-by), but for everything else we were indebted to Sir George
Grey and pure nature. The live bush, the wounds of the woodman’s axe
concealed by heaps of vari-coloured mosses, bloomed and rustled under
the limelight as I suppose it never bloomed and rustled elsewhere in the
history of the theatre, and the stage was ankle-deep in withered leaves;
the scent of the forest actually getting beyond the footlights for once
in a way.

I have never in my life seen any theatrical spectacle one-half as
lovely; and this one scene had a great deal to do with the success of
the piece. It was frantically applauded, and the scene-painter walked
in front and bowed as if he had been responsible for its beauties. I
overheard from a sun-tanned gentleman in the dress circle near whom
I sat one useful trifle in the way of criticism. When Mr. Stuart
Willoughby entered with his swag on his shoulder my neighbour whispered
to _his_ neighbour that _that_ fellow had never learned to hump
his bluey in Otago. ‘I’ll bet my head,’ he added, ‘that chap’s
an Australian.’ And so he was. The future Stuart Willoughbys were
instructed in this particular, and the most critical New Zealander could
have found no fault with the style in which Mr. David James, junior,
carried his belongings in the Otago bushland of the Globe Theatre,
London.

‘Chums’ hit the New Zealand fancy, and the little play was kindly
received in many places. I had begun to write another drama of a much
more serious sort, and was working pretty busily as well at a revised
edition of my first effort, when a serious accident befell us. My
manager and I were travelling together to Dunedin (for we had formed a
definite scheme of partnership, and had arranged to spend a year or two
in the preparation of a _repertoire_ of pieces which might be fit to
face the lights of London by the time we got there), when a telegram
found us at a railway station _en route_. It told us that an important
member of the company had seceded. I know now the story of his
secession; but I have some slight acquaintance with the law of libel,
and the history is of no particular interest to anybody.

We were announced to open in Dunedin in ‘Jim the Penman,’ and our
missing man was to have played the part of Baron Hardfeldt The town was
billed, seats were booked; there was no going back from the engagement
without disaster. Then I had a goodly number of friends in Dunedin who
were coming to see my own play, and there was a financial loss to be
encountered into the bargain. Personally I experienced a keen sense of
disappointment; but the manager was in despair. There was no filling
the place of the recalcitrant for love or money--there was very little
capital behind the concern; and, in short, it looked as if we had found
a finish for our enterprise. Then it was that I bethought me, ‘Why the
dickens shouldn’t I play Baron Hardfeldt?’

I communicated my idea to my companion, who grasped at it as a drowning
man grips a straw. We consulted together. We found it possible to begin
to study at midnight, and we arranged for a rehearsal on the morrow. I
had seen the piece once, and recalled its general tenor, and began to
construct a Hardfeldt. One of my dearest friends is a Zliricher, and I
felt certain of his accent. That was a point gained, for the rascally
Baron might as well have come from Zurich as from anywhere else in the
world. I recalled, with no twinge of inward apology, every tone of my
old friend’s voice, every trick of facial expression, and every little
touch of Swiss gesture which helps his breezy and warm-hearted talk. I
determined to dower Sir Charles Young’s admirable scoundrel with all my
dear old J---- G----‘s tricks and manners; and I was the less
remorseful in copying his cheerful and childlike _bonhomie_ because our
recalcitrant had been in the habit of giving the Baron away at his very
entrance, and had stamped him from the first as a ruffian of the deepest
dye, whereas I was disposed to think that a really successful adventurer
would be likely to have an honest and engaging manner.

At midnight I began to study; and at three o’clock in the morning I went
away to bed, carrying with me the words and business of the part and a
pretty bad headache. We rehearsed at eleven; and I was ‘letter-perfect,’
as actors say, and was always to be found on the very nail of the stage
on which I was wanted. I have always boasted a verbal memory like a
steel rat-trap. It never lets anything go upon which it once seizes.
So far excellent. ‘But Linden saw another sight’ at night-time. I knew
platform fright as well as anybody. I have thrice been physically sick
before addressing a strange audience, though I have been hardened by
nearly a quarter of a century of practice. John Bright once said in
my hearing that he never arose to speak in public without a feeling of
insecurity at the knees and ‘the sense of a scientific vacuum behind
the waistcoat.’ But this first appearance on the boards took me beyond
anything I had hitherto experienced. I recalled the phrase about
the ‘scientific vacuum’ which had fallen from the lips of England’s
greatest orator, and tried to console myself with the hope that I might
not play so very vilely in spite of the fact that I had forgotten every
line and word. I was bathed in a coward sweat whilst I stood near the
central doors of the stage-chamber into which I was shortly to walk
like a sheep to the slaughter. The cue came, and I entered mechanically
crushing an opera-hat against my shirt-front. I know that if the
audience could have seen the face below the grease-paint and the powder,
they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.

Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the space beyond the yellow glare
of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The
Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and
introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I
had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow,
and I half fancied that my old friend J---- G---- had spoken them.

There was a scattered round of applause at the end of the simple words I
had to speak; for some of my friends in front had recognised me, as they
might easily do, since I wore my own hair and beard. I did not think of
this, but wondered dimly that I should have begun to make an impression
so very early in the evening. I could see my breath rising like steam
against the darkness of the auditorium, for it was cold weather and
there was a touch of frost thus early even in the theatre. I sat and
talked in dumb-show with Lady Duns-combe, was fittingly snubbed by Lord
Dre-lincourt, and at length found myself alone with my confederate. The
scene before me I knew to be one of the strongest of its class in the
whole range of modern drama. I knew, impotent as I was, that I _could_
play it--I could feel the sense of power tingling through my own
impuissance. But the first essential was to know the words, and never
a word knew I. Luckily Jim the Penman was an old stager, had played the
part some two or three hundred times, and so knew most of the Baron’s
lines.

Whilst we were having our dumb talk with Percival I had told him that
my head was as empty as a blown egg-shell, and had fairly frightened him
into taking care of me. He gave me my first words in a guarded whisper
at the close of every speech of his own, and shepherded me with
the utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the
well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending
terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words
supplied piecemeal by the sufferer.

‘And vot haf you to do vith shame?’ inquired the Baron, and there stuck.
‘Wife you cherish,’ whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the
inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached ‘Wife you cherish,’ stuck
again. ‘Children you adore,’ whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at
his tyrant with filmy eyes of suffering.

‘And the children you adore,’ echoed the Baron in a tone which spoke his
unrelenting nature. At last came one intolerable, awful moment, when the
hopeless Jim could prompt no longer. The prompter was at his post, but
took no earthly notice of the scene. He had witnessed the rehearsal and
was taking things easily. There was nothing else for it. I walked across
to him and asked him for the line, received it, and spoke it with
a biting scorn which nipped my confederate to the quick. I was
congratulated on that unwilling walk across the stage afterwards by an
old hand who was present at this first appearance of mine. He told me
that the pause, the walk, the turn, and the indignant scorn with which
the words were spoken had impressed him greatly, and had assured him
that I was a born actor. But by that time I had found the courage of
desperation, and all my fears had melted into thin air. The words of the
subsequent acts came readily, and before the last curtain fell I was as
much at home as I had ever found myself on the lecture platform.




XI

Amongst actors one finds some of the queerest people in the world. The
men of the modern school are very much like other people; but the old
stagers can still find some of their number who are as richly comical as
Mr. Vincent Crummies himself. They are like the dyer’s hand, subdued
to what they work in. I was thrown a great deal into the society of one
elderly young gentleman whose speciality had for years been that sort
of high-flying rattling comedy of which Charles Mathews was the chief
exponent in my youth. He had the most suasive, genial, and gentlemanly
comedy manner conceivable, and was never for a minute away from the
footlights. At breakfast, at luncheon, at dinner, he played to the
public of the hotel coffee-room. In the street he played to his
fellow-promenaders. He played, and played hard, in the simplest private
conversation. He had no more sense of moral responsibility than a
butterfly. He was as admirable a stage liar, or nearly, as Mr. Hawtrey
is; and off the stage he was as free from the trammels of veracity as he
was when on it He could promise, explain, evade, as dexterously in
his own person as in the character of Lord Oldacre or Greythorne or
Hummingtop. The world to him was literally a stage, and all the men and
women merely players. Old age will teach him no sadness. He will play at
being old. Death will have none of its common terrors for him. He will
play at dying. When last I heard of him I was told that he was very,
very poor; but I am sure he suffers little. He is playing at making a
fortune or playing at having lost one: pluming himself on some visionary
splendour, or commiserating some picturesquely broken nobleman in his
own person.

I enjoyed the most astonishing adventure of my lifetime with this
gentleman’s aid, and by his express invention. He had secured the right
to perform a play of mine through the Australasian colonies and through
India. Of course there were certain pecuniary obligations attached to
the matter, and, these being disregarded, I ventured into the theatre
with a request for a settlement My comedian was not in a position to
effect a settlement, or perhaps he did not care to do it. He found a way
out of the difficulty which I do not think would have occurred to one
man in a million. He got rid of his creditor by giving him into custody
for trespass; and I, being marched off by the police, had to find bail
until the case was heard next morning. The magistrate advised me that
I had a legal remedy; but my gentleman disbanded his company and betook
him to a neighbouring colony. I was incensed at the time, though the
business is laughable enough now, and I took out a writ against him, but
never succeeded in serving it When I had found my bail (a local editor
was kind enough to pledge his word to save me from durance), I had to
put in an appearance at the police station. There was a big policeman
on duty there, and he went through the essential technicalities with so
grave a face that the farce for a moment seemed quite real.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the big policeman.

I told him, and spelled it for him.

‘Your age?’

I answered that question also.

‘What trade are you?’

‘I am a man of letters.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Man of letters. Write it down. Man--of--letters,’

‘Are y’ educated? Can ye read and write?’

I was flippant enough to say that I could read and write a little, and
the big policeman entered me as being imperfectly educated. That record
stands against me unto this day.

We played all through the principal towns, and then we took to
bush-whacking, setting up one or two night stands in places rarely
visited by a theatrical company; and I believe that the business done in
these small places was almost always highly satisfactory from a monetary
point of view. Some of the villages we visited--for they were nothing
more--yielded fuller houses and realised better profits than we found
always in the capitals. I remember that we played once in a schoolroom
built of corrugated iron and without a vestige of scenery. We put on
‘Chums;’ and the settler’s parlour, the forest scene, and the outer view
of the Otago homestead were each and all represented with the help of
a green baize cloth, which hung at the rear and on either side of the
stage, three upturned petroleum tins, three chairs, a tub, and a little
oblong deal table with red legs. We had a stage space of about four
yards by three. I played Square Jack Furlong; and in the last act my
revolver hung fire and exploded a second or two too late, when it was
unfortunately and accidentally levelled at the back of the leading man’s
head. The waxen pellet which packed the powder hit him smartly on the
philoprogenitive bump, and he swore audibly.

A revolver is always a nuisance on the stage and a terror to the actor
who has to use it. You may buy the best weapon in the trade, you may
have your cartridges made with the utmost care; but there will always
be a chance of its missing fire. You may have a double in the wings, of
course, but even that provides no surety. I have known my own revolver
and the double refuse duty at the same instant, and have faced the
moaned inquiry of the leading man, who ought to have been stretched out
in apparent death throes, ‘What the devil’s going to happen now?’ To
make matters better, when I had thrown away the useless weapon with an
improvised execration and was about to hurl myself upon the virtuous
victim, the pistol in the wings obeyed the pressure of the prompter’s
finger, and the leading man dropped to a shot from nowhere, to the great
mystification of the audience.

I am really disposed to believe that the illusion of the scene is
very little helped by the most elaborate and realistic works of
scene-painter, carpenter, and upholsterer. I have seen the house drowned
in tears over that lugubrious and hollow ‘East Lynne’ when the stage
has been enclosed in green baize and there has not been a stick of
respectable furniture on the boards. ‘East Lynne,’ by the way, is one of
my puzzles. Except that it has once or twice wearied me to the point of
exasperation, it has never moved me in any way; and countless thousands
have cried over it. In the New Zealand back blocks people used to weep
like watering-carts over its tawdry pathos; and when that awful, awful
child, whose business it was to die and who would _not_ do his
business, talked to his mother about his mamma, the handkerchiefs waved
everywhere, and a chorus of sympathetic sniffings and throat clearings
almost drowned the fustian rubbish of the dialogue. I played Lord
Somebody in the piece one night. I forget the unreal wretch’s name; but
he will be remembered as taking money to Isabel. He appears in one scene
only and has some twenty or thirty lines to speak; but he contrives
to go further and oftener away from nature than any stage person whose
acquaintance I have practically made. Nothing but the good old-fashioned
‘moo-cow’ style could possibly have suited him. I believe I can boast
a tolerable imitation of that antiquated elocutionary method, and I
certainly spared no effort.

‘And you, Isabel, the daughter of an earl! how have you fallen!’

That is one of the gems of the old humbug’s speech, and I mouthed it
as it was made to be mouthed. The house took the burlesque with
perfect seriousness and good faith--chiefly, I suppose, because it was
impossible to make the vulgar rant too clap-trappy and stagy. But as I
was leaving, and as the house was already in a roar of applause, I came
to grief. There was a dreadful draught at the back of the stage, and one
of the ladies had been so careful against it as to pin the green-baize
linings of the stage together so as to leave no place for an exit; and
I was compelled to grope about for a minute or two in search of a way of
escape whilst the applause changed to boisterous laughter.

And the memory of that little incident helps me to a reflection on one
detail of the actor’s art which is more effective when fitly used, and
more disastrous when neglected, than any other of the multitudinous
things he has to know and to bear in mind. An exit is half the business
of the most important scene ever written. You may play like an angel,
you may hold the stage for half an hour and thrill your audience; but,
after all, you may kill your supremest efforts by getting off clumsily.
I write, of course, for the ignorant. The actor knows these things,
and more than I can teach him into the bargain. But I had a singular
instance of the fact in my own experience. It came early and gave me
a lesson to be laid to heart. I never played before a more friendly
audience. Good reports had gone ahead, and the house was willing, and
I think was even eager, to be pleased. I had settled to that bright
and happy confidence which is the actor’s most blissful experience in
comedy.

I think I never played so well in my life as in that first act of ‘Jim
the Penman;’ but the stage was vast in comparison with any on which
I had until then appeared, and my customary business brought me only
within half a dozen paces of the door-way by which I should have
vanished. A sudden sense of strangeness and constraint came down upon
me like a cloud. The happy feeling of confidence vanished in a whiff
of chill spiritual wind. The last line was spoken before that unhappy
half-dozen of paces was achieved; and I left the stage in a dead
silence, which was as eloquent of failure as it had been one brief
minute earlier of success. I played half as well next night, but
disappeared with _aplomb_, with an effect as encouraging as the most
exigent artist could demand. So painful a thing is it to learn a new
trade! ‘So much to learn, so much to do!’

I am ready to propound a novel theory, and I am insolent enough
to believe that I illustrate it in my own person. The time of full
middle-age is that at which a man most readily adapts himself to a
new art. It is at that time most assuredly necessary to accept certain
physical limitations. I advise no hitherto unpractised person to seek
excellence as a ground and lofty tumbler after five-and-forty. No
sensible person who has attained that respectable altitude of years will
try to make a _début_ as Romeo. But supposing that a lad of fifteen
and a man of five-and-forty begin on the same day to study
landscape-painting, which of the two do you think will get nearer
Nature’s secret in five years’ time? Personally I shall back--_coteris
paribus_--the man of middle age. Or if it come to acting, who is likely
(physical limitations on both sides duly considered, of course) to offer
you the better study of a bit of human nature--the matured observer
or the unpractised un-regarding youth? I back the middle-aged man once
more.

My friendly critics of the London press told me that a middle-aged man
had taken to the stage as a duck takes to water. It was a bit of kindly
nonsense. I had worked like a galley-slave for nine months, and the nine
months of a man of the world is worth the nine years of a boy. And do I
profess to be an actor now? Not a bit of it, my friendly critic--not
a bit of it, in all honesty. But I mean to be. There is no art so
difficult--granted; but there is none so enchanting, so inspiring. Night
after night for a whole week, bar Saturday, when Nature took a late
revenge, I left a sick-room at Newcastle-on-Tyne; and every ache and
pain fell away, and the sick treble changed to a healthy baritone, and
manly strength came to pluck the halting pace of the invalid to marching
time, and a feebly intermittent pulse grew full and calm at the splendid
all-compelling influence of the stage. Had it been a cold lecture, now,
or a speech on politics--and no man loves that kind of exercise more
than I--the armchair and the warm fireside had not reached to me and
beamed on me in vain. But the stage? That was another matter altogether.
It is a better stimulant than the society of old friends. It is a finer
anodyne than tobacco. It is a quicker and more constant pick-me-up than
champagne. Sternest duty and purest pleasure wear one smiling face. And
to think that I was well into the forties before I guessed this splendid
truth!

But Nature is compensatory in everything, and her balance works in this
accessible fairyland as elsewhere. The stage is the natural home of
petty _contretemps_. When a man has dared to play in a piece of his own
writing in a city like London it would be absurd to affect modesty or
a want of belief in his own power to please. If under such conditions
a man had no such faith, he would be an ass beyond the reach of satire.
What else but faith in himself should bring him there? ‘Que diable
faisait-il dans _cette_ galère?’ Yet the bold amateur intruding is
conscious of a resemblance in himself to the demons mentioned in Holy
Writ He believes (in himself), but he trembles.

The night of the tentative production of ‘Ned’s Chum’ at the Globe
Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for
my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and
I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all
the agonies of _mal de mer_. The call-boy’s warning cry slew one keen
anguish with another, and the wretch who had been physically sick with
fear a minute before was, under fire, as cool as a cucumber. But there
came one moment more of heroic trial before the play was over. I keep
religiously the notices of that first night, and I have laughed more
than once at the gentle trouncing I got at the hands of Mr. William
Archer in the columns of the _World_. My critic complained, tenderly
enough, that at one point I took the stage with an obvious effort, as if
determined to show that thus and thus should a man behave under sudden
news of irreparable ruin. I cannot quite tell, said Mr. Archer in
effect, why it was not admirable acting, and yet it was not If he could
have told, he went on to say, he might himself have been an excellent
actor, and not a critic. But he wanted something--something was missing.

The miserable fact was this. I had never worn a wig in the part until
that night, and I had forgotten for a mere instant that I wore one then.
It was a part of the stage business to dash my wideawake hat to the
ground, and--the wig came with it. For two or three dreadful seconds I
stood frozen, expectant of the howl of laughter which generally
follows such an accident. But the fates were kind, and the thing passed
unnoticed save by two or three. My natural hair was much of the length
and colour of the wig, and no derisive roar sounded in my ears. But I
shall never forget the horror of those few waiting seconds; and I should
like to ask Mr. Archer how far in his judgment such an occurrence might
excuse an actor’s momentary absence from pure nature.

I was once hit in the eye by a fragment of half-sodden turf thrown up by
the explosion of a shell, and had time to think myself a dead man before
I realised what had happened. On one occasion, his Excellency Ibrahim
Pasha threatened to hang me out of hand; and I believed he meant to do
it. I have been in many awkward corners in my time; but my inward forces
were never more thoroughly routed than by that episode of the lost wig
on the stage of the Globe Theatre.




XII

I suppose the confession I am about to make will stamp me in the minds
of a great many people as an irredeemable barbarian. I care little for
that, however, and I am staunch in the opinions which I have held all my
lifetime. Perhaps my voice may find an echo here and there.

I am a lover of the noble art of self-defence, and to my way of thinking
few greater blunders have been made by those who legislate for our
well-being than was fallen into by the moral people who abolished the
Prize-Ring. It should be admitted at once that the Ring was full of
abuses at the time at which an end was made of it; but it was not beyond
mending, and a marked deterioration has been noticeable in the character
of our people since the sport of the Ring ceased to be a source of
popular amusement. British fair play was a proverb amongst the roughest.
The rules of the game were recognised even in a street fight, and the
man who broke them was likely to be roughly handled.

It matters little that the sense of honour was crude and rough. It was
there, and all bullies and blackguards were compelled to abide by it So
long as it was the fashion to fight with fists, the use of the knife,
the bludgeon, and the brickbat was far rarer than it is now. The most
ignorant crowd could be trusted to police a brace of combatants. There
is no harm in a stand-up fight with the weapons of nature. Men _will_
fight, and we English people had the least harmful way of fighting of
all the peoples of the world. No man was ever good for much with his
hands who was not chaste and temperate in life. Excellence in this
pursuit was the growth of all the more masculine virtues.

I have the kindliest memories of some of the old heroes. The very
first man who helped me on with a pair of boxing-gloves was the mighty
‘Slasher’--the Tipton Slasher, William Perry, who in the days of my
nonage kept the Champion of England public-house in my native parish of
West Bromwich, in South Staffordshire. He it was who trained my youthful
hands to guard my youthful head; and I have a foolish stupid pride and
pleasure in the memory of that fact The Worcester and Birmingham Canal
divides the parishes of Smethwick and West Bromwich, and the Slasher’s
house was the last on the right-hand side--a shabby, seedy place
enough, smoke-encrusted on the outside and mean within, but a temple of
splendour all the same to the young imagination. The Champion of England
dwelt there--the unconquered, the undisputed chieftain of the fighting
clan. He reigned there for years, none daring to make him afraid.

I have been soundly flogged time and time again for visiting him. I have
been put on bread and water and held in solitary confinement for the
same misdemeanour, but the man had a glamour for me and drew me with the
attraction of a magnet. I can see him now, almost as plainly as if he
stood before me. He was a Hercules of a man, with enormous shoulders,
and his rough honest mid-England features had a sort of surly welcome in
their look. But for an odd deformity he would have had the stature of a
giant; but he was hideously knock-kneed, and his shamble when he walked
was awkward to the limits of the grotesque. You have only to invert the
letter V to have an image of the Slasher’s legs from foot to knee.
His feet were strangers to each other; but his knees were inseparable
friends, and hugged each other in a perpetual intimacy. In fighting
he used to await his man, propped up in this inverted V fashion, and
somehow he gained so solid a footing in that strange and clumsy attitude
that he never, in all his experience of the Ring, received a knock-down
blow until he encountered Tom Sayers in that last melancholy fight which
cost him the championship, and the snug little property in the Champion
of England public-house, and his friends and his reputation, and all he
had in the world.

I earned one of the soundest thrashings I ever got in my life by playing
truant from school in order to follow the Slasher to a wretched little
race meeting, held at a place called The Roughs, on the side of the
Birmingham Road, in the parish of Hands-worth. My hero was there in
glory, followed about by an innumerable tag-rag and bobtail, and I am
afraid that on two occasions at least he was tempted to swagger and
‘show off,’ as children say. He shambled up to one of the ‘try your
strength’ machines: the figure of a circus clown, with a buffer to
punch at in the neighbourhood of his midriff, and a dial on his chest to
indicate the weight of the blow administered. The Slasher tossed a penny
to the proprietor of the machine and waved him on one side; but the man
stood in front of the contrivance and besought him pathetically not to
strike.

‘Not you, Mr. Perry, ‘he said humbly; ‘oh, not you, Mr. Perry.’

The Slasher, with an ‘Away, slight man’ motion of the hand, said
‘Gerrout!’ and the fellow obeyed, seeing that there was nothing else
for it. Hercules spat upon his hand, clenched his fist, and smote. Crash
went the whole machine into ruin, the wooden upright splintered, and
the iron supports doubled into uselessness. The destroyer rolled on
rejoicing; but the crowd made a subscription, and the owner of the
machine stowed away his damaged property well pleased.

Mr. Morris Roberts was a gentleman known to local fame in those days--I
am writing of five-and-thirty years ago--and Mr. Morris Roberts had
a boxing-booth on the ground. In front of the booth he had a little
platform, and from it he addressed the congregation gathered together at
the beating of a gong.

‘Walk up, gentlemen; walk up, and see the noble art of self-defence
practised by Englishmen, not like the cowardly Frenchman or Italian,
as uses sticks, knives, pistils, and other firearms, but the wepons
pervided by nature. I’ve got a nigger inside as won’t say No to no man.
Also George Gough, as has fought fifteen knuckle fights within the
last two years, and won ‘em all, one man down and the next come on.
If there’s any sportsman here as cares to ‘ave a turn at him, there’s
half-a-crown and a glass of sperrits for the man as stands before George
Gough five minutes, no matter wheer he comes from.’

The Slasher, in the full tide of his wicked humour, stood below, and
when the oration was ended he threw his old silk hat upon the stage. Mr.
Morris Roberts was bawling that twopence did it--a first-rate sample of
the noble art was to be seen for twopence--when this unexpected action
froze him in mid-torrent.

‘Come, come, Mr. Perry,’ he said, when he had recovered himself a
little, ‘you can’t expect George to stand up again the Champion of all
England. That doesn’t stand to reason, that doesn’t. Now, does it, Mr.
Perry?’

The Slasher smiled. ‘All right Hand down half a crown and that there
glass o’ sperrits.’

‘You don’t mean it, Mr. Perry,’ said Mr. Morris Roberts.

‘Don’t I?’ cried the Slasher.

A sudden inspiration illumined Mr. Morris’s mind. ‘All right Come up,
Mr. Perry. Sixpence--sixpence--sixpence does it!’

It was no sooner known that the Champion was really resolved on business
than the entrance to the booth was besieged. I was borne in breathless,
all the wind being squeezed out of my small body by the pressure of the
crowd, and bang went sixpence, the one coin which was to see me
through the expenses of the day. It turned out that Mr. Gough had been
impertinent to the Slasher, and the offended dignitary punched him, as I
thought, a little unmercifully. At the close of the first round the man
of the booth said--truthfully enough, no doubt--that he had had enough
of it, and the entertainment came to a premature end.

That was the last I saw of the Slasher for years. He was the cynosure
of all eyes then, and observed of all observers. But there is no wolf
so strong but he may find another to make wolves’ meat of him; and Tom
Sayers, who had fought his first fight--so tradition tells--on the canal
bank within a mile of the Slasher’s public-house, sent in his challenge,
and poor old Tipton’s colours were lowered for once and for ever. He
mortgaged the stock and goodwill of the house and backed himself for
every penny he was worth, and he was beaten. He was grey and over-fat,
and his fighting days were over. I forget now for how many years he had
held the Championship Belt, but he ought to have been left to rest upon
his laurels, surely.

He was dying when I saw him again, and his vast chest and shoulders were
shrunken and bowed, so that one wondered where the very framework of the
giant man had fallen to. He was despised and forgotten and left alone,
and he sat on the side of his bed with an aspect altogether dejected
and heartless. In his better days he had liked what he used to call ‘a
stripe of white satin,’ which was the poetic for a glass of Old Tom gin.
I carried a bottle of that liquor with me as a peace-offering, and a
quarter of a pound of bird’s-eye. He did not know me, and there was no
speculation in his look; but after a drink he brightened. When I entered
the room he sat in he was twirling an empty clay with a weary listless
thumb and finger, and the tobacco was welcome.

‘They mought ha’ let me aloon,’ he told me, when his wits grew clear,
‘I’d held the belt for seventeen ‘ear,’ (I think he said seventeen, but
‘Fistiana’ is not at hand, and I can but make a guess at memory.) ‘They
mought ha’ let me aloon. Turn’s a good un. I’ve sin ‘em all, an’ I’ve
niver sin a better. But he owed to ha’ let me be. Theer was no credit to
be got in hommerin’ a man at my time o’ life. All the same, mind ye, I
thowt I should ha’ trounced him. So I should if I could ha’ got at
him; but he fled hither an’ he fled thither, and he was about me like a
cooper a-walkin’ round a cask. An’ I was fule enough to lose temper,
an’ the crowd begun to laugh an’ gibe at me, an’ I took to räacin’
round after him, an’ my wind went, an’ wheer was I then? He knocked me
down--fair an’ square he did it. Th’ on’y time it iver chanced to me. I
put everythin’ I had o’ that fight, an’ here I bin.’

It will be within the memory of such as care for these things that,
after the last great battle which brought the fistic history of England
to a glorious close, Tom Sayers and the Benicia Boy, his late opponent,
enlisted with Messrs. Howes and Cushing, proprietors of a circus
in those days, and travelled the country, sparring nightly in amity
together. My father, who had naturally about as much sympathy with
the Prize-Ring as with the atrocities of the King of Dahomey, was
nevertheless fired with admiration for the hero of Farnborough, and must
needs go to see him. He astonished everybody who knew him by showing his
silver head and whiskers in the bar parlour of the hotel at which Mr.
Sayers was quartered for the night I suppose that the worshippers at
Tom’s shrine were of another sort as a rule; but he was evidently and
mightily impressed by the old gentleman’s interest in his career. He
told a story which, in its main lines, I remember as well as if I had
heard it yesterday, though I rack my brains in vain for the names of
the two people concerned in it.

‘I suppose, sir,’ said Tom, ‘as you never heard how I come to
fight’--let me call him Jones.

No, my father never had heard.

‘Well, it was like this. Lord ---- comes to me a week or two before the
Derby, and “Tom,” he says, “I’ve got a notion. You and me,” he says,
“is goin’ down to the Derby together,” he says. “I’ve got a pair of
snow-white mokes,” he says, “and I’ve bought a coster’s shallow. I’m
having it painted white and picked out in gold,” he says, “and it’s
going to be upholstered in white satin. Now, you and me, Tom,” says his
lordship--“you and me’s going to get up in white shoes, white kickseys,
white westcuts, white hats, white coats, white ties, and white gloves,”
 he says. “We’ll go down a reg’lar pair of bloomin’ lilies!” Well,
we did, and it was agreed to be the best turn-out of the day. We was
walkin’ in the ring when up comes Jones, and, without with your leave or
by your leave, he hits me on the nose. Well, I was that soft and out of
condition the clarrit was all over me in no time. I was goin’ for Jones
like a shot; but his lordship he stops me and he says, “Tom,” he says,
“you shall fight him,” he says, “for two hundred pound.” I did, and you
may believe as I paid him out for that.’

We were greatly impressed with this narrative, and I have always thought
the regular pair of blooming lilies delicious. I told Tom that I
had known the poor old Slasher, and he spoke of him with respectful
sympathy.

‘He was the right sort, the Tipton was, and I was sorry to take him
down. Perhaps somebody ‘ll come one of these days and lower my colours.
It’s my turn to-day and somebody else’s to-morrow.’

I vex the shades no more. Their form of valour is no longer known
amongst us; but there are some who regret. I find pathetics among them,
and quaint humours, in my memory.


The End

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