IX
After the downfall of The Tribune there was a period of suffering, anxiety, and in some cases despair, for many of the men who had held positions on that paper. One good fellow committed suicide. Others fell into grievous debt while waiting like Mr. Micawber for something to turn up. Fleet Street is a cruel highway for out-of-work journalists, and as so many were turned out into the street together it was impossible for all of them to be absorbed by other newspapers, already fully staffed.
There were rendezvous of disconsolate comrades in the Press Club or Anderton’s Hotel, where they greeted each other with the gloomy inquiry, “Got anything yet?” and then, smoking innumerable cigarettes, in lieu, sometimes, of more substantial nourishment, cursed the cruelty of life, the abominable insecurity of journalism, and their own particular folly in entering that ridiculous, heartbreaking, soul-destroying career.... One by one, in course of time, they found other jobs down the same old street.
I determined to abandon regular journalism altogether, and to become a “literary gent” in the noblest meaning of the words, and anyhow a free lance. I have always regarded journalism as merely a novitiate for real literature, a training school for life and character, from which I might gain knowledge and inspiration for great novels, as Charles Dickens had done. My ambition, at that time, was limitless, and I expected genius to break out in me at any moment. Oh, Youth! Here, then, was my chance, now that I was free from the fetters of the journalistic prison house.
With a wealth of confidence and hope, but very little capital of a more material kind, I took a cottage at the seashore for a month and departed there with my wife and small boy. It was a coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, looking on to the sea and sand, and surrounded by a fence one foot high, like the doll’s house it was. There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my novel, The Street of Adventure, in which I told, in the guise of fiction, the history of The Tribune newspaper, and gave a picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship of Fleet Street.
It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should be a success. Even my wife’s humorous contentment with poverty, which has always been a saving grace in my life, did not eliminate the need of a certain amount of ready money. The Street of Adventure, my most successful novel, cost me more than I earned. In the first place, it narrowly escaped total oblivion, which would have saved me great anxiety and considerable expense. After leaving the coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, with my manuscript complete—150,000 words in one month—I had to change trains at Guildford to get to London from some other place. My thoughts were so busy with the story I had written, and with the fortune that awaited me by its success, that I left the manuscript on the mantelpiece in the waiting room of Guildford Station, and did not discover my loss until I had been in London some hours. It seemed—for five minutes of despair—like the loss of my soul. Never should I have had the courage to rewrite that novel which had cost so much labor and so much nervous emotion. Despairingly I telegraphed to the station master, and my joy was great when, two hours later, I received his answer: “Papers found.” Little did I then know that if he had used them to brighten his fire I should have been saved sleepless nights and unpleasant apprehensions.
It was accepted and published by William Heinemann, on a royalty basis, and it was gloriously reviewed. But almost immediately I received a writ of libel from one of my friends and colleagues on the late Tribune, and sinister rumors reached me that Franklin Thomasson, the proprietor, and six other members of the staff were consulting their solicitors on the advisability of taking action against me. I saw ruin staring me in the face. My fanciful narrative had not disguised carefully enough the actuality of the Tribune and its staff. My fancy portraits and amiable caricatures had been identified, and could not be denied. Fortunately only one writ was actually presented and proceeded with, against myself and Heinemann, but the book was withdrawn from circulation at a time when the reviews were giving it columns of publicity, and it was killed stone dead—though later it had a merry resurrection.
The man who took a libel action against me was the character who in my book is called Christopher Codrington, the same young man who had lifted his hat when the lights went out and said, “Dead! Dead!” He and I had been good friends, and I believed, and still believe, that my portrait of him was a very agreeable and fanciful study of his amiable peculiarities—his Georgian style of dress, his gravity of speech, his Bohemianism. But he resented that portrait, and was convinced that I had grossly maligned him. The solicitors employed by myself and Heinemann to prepare the defense piled up the usual bill of costs (and I had to pay the publisher’s share as well as my own), so that by the time the case was ready to come into court I knew that, win or lose, I should have some pretty fees to pay. It never came into court. A few days before the case was due, I met “Christopher Codrington” in Fleet Street! We paused, hesitated, raised our hats solemnly, and then laughed (we had always been much amused with each other).
“What about some lunch together?” I suggested.
“It would never do,” he answered. “In a few days we shall be engaged in a legal duel.”
“Meanwhile one must eat,” I remarked casually.
He agreed.
We had a good luncheon at The Cock in Fleet Street. I had the honor of paying for it. We discussed our chances in the libel action. Christopher Codrington said he had a “clear case.” He emphasized the damnably incriminating passages. I argued that he would only make himself ridiculous by identifying himself with my pleasantries and giving them a sinister twist. We parted in a friendly, courteous way, as two gentlemen who would cross swords later in the week.
When my solicitors heard that we two had lunched together, they threw up their hands in amazement.
“The two principals in a libel action! And the one who alleges libel allows the other to pay for his lunch! The case collapses!”
They were shocked that the law should be treated with such levity. It almost amounted to contempt.
That evening I called on “Christopher Codrington” and explained the grievous lapse of etiquette we had both committed. He was disconcerted. He was also magnanimous. I obtained his signature to a document withdrawing the action, and we shook hands in token of mutual affection and esteem.... But all my royalties on the sales of the novel, afterward reissued in cheap form, went to pay Heinemann’s bill and mine, and my most successful novel earned for me the sum of £25 until it had a second birth in the United States, after the war.
I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune, when those mocking will-o’-the-wisps lead him through the ditches of disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of times did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would not fit into my combination of circumstances, ending at four thousand words with a dramatic climax! How many hours I have spent glued to a seat in Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband and wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a man, and finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s nerves get “edgy” and one’s imagination becomes feverish with effort, so that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more resolutely it eludes one. It is like the disease of sleeplessness. The more one tries to sleep, the more wakeful one becomes. Then the free lance, having at last captured a good idea, having lived with it and shaped it with what sense of truth and beauty is in his heart, carries it like a precious gem to the market place. Alas, there is no bidder! Or the price offered insults his sensitive pride, and mocks at his butcher’s bill. It is “too good,” writes a kindly editor. “It is hardly in our style,” writes a courteous one. It is “not quite convincing,” writes a critical one.... It is bad to be a free lance in this period, when fortune hides. It is worse to be the free lance’s wife. His absent-mindedness becomes a disease.
(I remember posting twenty-two letters with twenty-two stamps, but separately, letters first and stamps next, in the red mouth of the pillar box!)
His moods of despair when his pen won’t write a single lucky word give an atmosphere of neurasthenia to the house. He becomes irritable, uncourteous, unkind, because, poor devil, he believes that he has lost his touch and his talent, upon which this woman’s life depends, as well as his own.
My life as a free lance was not devoid of those periods of morbid depression, and yet, on the whole, I was immensely lucky, compared with many other beggars of my craft. It was seldom that I couldn’t find some kind of a market for my wares, and I had an industry—I can at least boast of that, whatever the quality of my pen—which astonishes myself when I look back upon those days. I was also gifted to this extent—that I had the journalistic instinct of writing “brightly” on almost any subject in which I could grab at a few facts, and I could turn my pen to many different aspects of life and letters, which held for me always fresh and enthusiastic interest. Not high qualities, but useful to a young man in the capture of the fleeting guinea.
I worked hard, and I enjoyed my toil. While earning bread and butter by special articles and short stories, I devoted much time and infinite labor to the most unprofitable branch of literature, which is history, and my first love. Goodness knows how many books I read in order to produce my Men and Women of the French Revolution, published in magnificent style, with a superb set of plates from contemporary prints, and almost profitless to me.
It was by casual acquaintance with one of the queer old characters of London that I obtained the use of those plates. He was a dear, dirty old gentleman, who had devoted his whole life to print collecting and had one of the finest collections in England. He lived in an old house near Clerkenwell, which was just a storehouse for these engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and colored prints of the eighteenth century. He kept them in bundles, in boxes, in portfolios, wherever there was floor space, chair space, and table space. To reach his desk, where he sat curled up in a swivel chair, one had to step over a barricade of those bundles. At meal times he threw crumbs to the mice who were his only companions, except an old housekeeper, and whenever the need of money became pressing, as it did in his latter years, he used to take out a print, sigh over it as at the parting of an old friend, and trot round to one of the London print sellers who would “cash it” like a cheque.... I think I made £150 out of Men and Women of the French Revolution, and my best reward was to see it, years later, in the windows of the Paris bookshops. That gave me a real thrill of pride and pleasure....
I made less than £150 by my life of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, one of the most romantic characters in English history, and strangely unknown, except for Scott’s portrait in The Fortunes of Nigel, and the splendid figure drawn by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers, until, with prodigious labor, which was truly a labor of love, I extracted from old papers and old letters the real life story of this man, and the very secrets of his heart, more romantic, and more fascinating, in actual fact, than the fiction regarding him by those two great masters.
I think it was £80 that I was paid for King’s Favorite, in which again I searched the folios of the past for light on one of the most astounding mysteries in English history—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex—and discovered a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies, bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cutthroats and poets, as hideously wicked as in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I was immensely interested in this work. I gained gratifying praise from scholars and critics. But I kept myself poor for knowledge sake. History does not pay—unless it is a world history by H. G. Wells. Never mind! I had a good time in writing it, and do not begrudge the labor.
My book on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, brought me the friendship of the very noble and charming family of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. Lord Denbigh is the descendant of Susan Villiers—the sister of George Villiers—who married the first Earl of Denbigh, and he has in his possession the original letters written by the Duke of Buckingham to his devoted wife, and her beautiful letters to him, as well as a mass of other correspondence of great historical value. Lord Denbigh invited me down to Newnham Paddox, his lovely Warwickshire home, founded by his ancestors in the reign of James I, and in the long gallery I saw the famous VanDyck portraits of the Duke of Buckingham, the “hero” of my book, which have now been sold, with other priceless treasures, when war and after-war taxation have impoverished this old family, like so many others in England to-day. I always look back to those visits I paid to Newnham Paddox as to a picture of English life, before so much of its sunshine was eclipsed by the cost and sacrifice of that great tragedy. They were a large and happy family in that old house, with three sons and a crowd of beautiful girls, as frank and merry and healthy in body and soul as Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Katherine, Rosamond and Celia. I remember them playing tennis below the broad terrace with its climbing flowers, and the sound of their laughter that came ringing across the court when Lady Dorothy leapt the net, or Lady Marjorie took a flying jump at a high ball. On a Sunday afternoon they captured some tremendous cart horses, grazing on the day of rest, mounted them without reins or bridle, rode them astride, charged each other like knights at a tourney, fearless and free, while Lady Denbigh laughed joyously at the sight of their romps. There was an exciting rat hunt in an old barn, which was nearly pulled down to get at the rats.... No one saw a shadow creeping close to those sunlit lawns, to touch the lives of this English family and all others. They played the good game of life in pre-war England. They played the game of life and death with equal courage when war turned Newnham Paddox into a hospital and called upon those boys and girls for service and sacrifice. The eldest son, Lord Feilding, was an officer in the Guards, and badly wounded. Two of the boys were killed, one in the Army, one in the Navy. Lady Dorothy led an ambulance convoy in Belgium, and I met her there when she was under fire, constantly, in ruined towns and along sinister, shell-broken roads, injecting morphia into muddy, bloody men, just picked up from the fields and ditches, crying aloud in agony. Lady Denbigh herself wore out her health and spirit, and died soon after the Armistice. It was the record of many families like that, who gave all they had for England’s sake.
During that time of free lancing I enlarged my list of acquaintances by friendly encounter with some of the great ones of the world, its passing notorieties, and its pleasant and unpleasant people.
In the first class was that curious old gentleman, the Duke of Argyll, husband of Princess Louise. As poor as a church mouse, he was given house-room in Kensington Palace, where I used to take tea with him now and then, and discuss literature, politics, and history, of which he had a roving knowledge. I was a neighbor of his, living at that time in what I verily believe was the smallest house in London, at Holland Street, Kensington, and it used to amuse me to step out of my doll’s house, with or without eighteenpence in my pocket, and walk five hundred yards to the white portico on the west side of the old red brick palace, to take tea with a Royal duke. The poor old gentleman was so bored with himself that I think he would have invited a tramp to tea, for the sake of a little conversation, but for the austere supervision of Princess Louise, of whom he stood in awe. As the Marquis of Lorne, and one of the handsomest young men in England, he had gained something of a reputation as a poet and essayist. His poetry in later years was ponderously bad, but he wrote idealistic essays which had some touch of style and revealed a mind above the average in nobility of purpose.
As an editor I had bought some of his literary productions, and had put a number of useful guineas into the old man’s pockets, so that he had a high esteem for me, as a man with immense power in the press, though, as a free lance, I had none.
This acquaintanceship startled some of my brother journalists on the day of King Edward’s funeral at Windsor Castle. The Duke of Argyll was a grand figure that day, in a magnificent uniform, with the Order of the Garter, decorations thick upon his breast, and a great plumed hat. After the ceremony, standing among a crowd of princes, he hailed me, and walked arm in arm with me along the ramparts. I felt somewhat embarrassed at this distinction, especially as I was in the full gaze of my comrades of Fleet Street, who stood at a little distance. They saw the humor of the situation when I gave them a friendly wink, but afterward accused me of unholy “swank.”
It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm Tree, in many ways the greatest, and in more ways the worst, of our English actors. He was playing Caliban in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him on the subject of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare!... Shakespeare!” he said, leering at me with a beastlike face, according to the part he was playing, and clawing himself with apelike hands. “I seem to have heard that name. Is there anything I can say about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know a thousand times, and more than I know more times than that.”
He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, but suggested that I should run away and write what I liked. I did, and it was at least a year before the article was published in a series of provincial papers, a long article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought to say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own passion.
One evening I received a long telegram from him.
“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His Majesty’s and kindly call on me between the acts.”
I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. When I called on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped my hand as though he loved me.
“Little do you know the service you have done me,” he said. “My secretary told me the other night that I was booked for a lecture on Shakespeare at the Regent Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had nothing prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t go.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ ... Two minutes later a bundle of press cuttings was brought to me. It contained your interview with me on the subject of Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I had said all those things. What a memory you must have! I took the paper to the Polytechnic, and delivered my lecture, by reading it word for word.”
After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot that little service. In return he invited me to the Garrick Club, or to his great room at the top of His Majesty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes which were vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and told them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which revealed him at his best. His acting was marred by affectations that became exasperating, and sometimes by loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the part of Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he had to sit crouched below a bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, he dozed off, wakened with a start, and missed his cue.
Tree’s egotism was almost a disease, and in his last years his vanity and pretentiousness obscured his real genius. He was a great old showman, and at rehearsals it was remarkable how he could pull a crowd together and build up a big picture or intensify a dramatic moment by some touch of “business.” But he played to the gallery all the time, and made a pantomime of Shakespeare—to the horror of the Germans when he appeared in Berlin! They would not tolerate him, and were scandalized that such liberties should be taken with Shakespearian drama, which they have adopted as their own.
Another great figure of the stage whom I met behind the scenes was Sarah Bernhardt, when she appeared at the Coliseum in London. She took the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, in which she was an unconscionable time a-dying, after storms of agony and mad passion. I had an appointment to meet her in her room after the play, and slipped round behind the scenes before she left the stage. Her exit was astonishing and touching. The whole company of the Coliseum and its variety show—acrobats, jugglers, “funny” men, dancing girls, “star turns”—had lined up in a double row to await this Queen of Tragedy, with homage. As she came off the stage, George Robey, with his red nose and ridiculous little hat, gravely offered his arm, with the air of Walter Raleigh in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She leaned heavily on his arm, and almost collapsed in the chair to which he led her. She was panting after her prolonged display of agony before the footlights, and for a moment I thought she was really dying.
I bent over her and said in French that I regretted she was so much fatigued. My words angered her instantly, as though they reflected upon her age.
“Sir,” she said harshly, “I was as much fatigued when I first played that scene—was it thirty years ago, or forty?—I have forgotten. It is the exhaustion of art, and not of nature.”