128. Slaving at the Athenaeum, May 1885.
In May 1885, Burton obtained leave of absence, and on arriving in England he made various arrangements about the printing of The Arabian Nights and continued the work of translation. When in London he occupied rooms at the St. James's Hotel (now the Berkeley) in Piccadilly. He used to say that the St. James's Hotel was the best place in the world in which to do literary work, and that the finest place in the whole world was the corner of Piccadilly. Still, he spent most of his time, as usual, at the Athenaeum. Mr. H. R. Tedder, the Secretary, and an intimate friend of Burton's, tells me that "He would work at the round table in the library for hours and hours—with nothing for refreshment except a cup of coffee and a box of snuff, which always stood at his side;" and that he was rarely without a heavy stick with a whistle at one end and a spike at the other—the spike being to keep away dogs when he was travelling in hot countries. This was one of the many little inventions of his own. Mr. Tedder describes him as a man of great and subtle intellect and very urbane. "He had an athletic appearance and a military carriage, and yet more the look of a literary man than of a soldier." In summer as usual he wore white clothes, the shabby old beaver, and the tie-pin shaped like a sword. Mr. Tedder summed him up as "as a compound of a Benedictine monk, a Crusader and a Buccaneer."
The Hon. Henry J. Coke, looking in at the Athenaeum library one day, and noticing the "white trousers, white linen coat and a very shabby old white beaver hat," exclaimed, "Hullo Burton, do you find it so very hot?"
"I don't want," said Burton, "to be mistaken for anyone else."
"There's not much fear of that, without your clothes," followed Coke. [424]
During this holiday Burton visited most of his old friends, and often ran down to Norwood to see his sister and her daughter, while everyone remarked his brightness and buoyancy. "It was delightful," says Miss Stisted, "to see how happy he was over the success of his venture." He had already resolved to issue six additional volumes, to be called Supplemental Nights. He would then take sixteen thousand pounds. He calculated printing and sundries as costing four thousand, and that the remainder would be net profit. As a matter of fact the expenses arose to £6,000, making the net profit £10,000 [425] Burton had wooed fortune in many ways, by hard study in India, by pioneering in Africa, by diplomacy at Court, by gold-searching in Midian and at Axim, by patent medicining. Finally he had found it in his inkstand; but as his favourite Jami says, it requires only a twist of the pen to transmute duvat into dulat [426]—inkstand into fortune.
Except when his father died, Burton had never before possessed so large a sum, and, at the time, it appeared inexhaustible. Bubbling over with fun, he would pretend to make a great mystery as to the Kama Shastra Society at Benares, where he declared the Nights were being printed.