I believe he got through a quite unusual amount of work in that profession. Many an evening did I put back our little dinner while he rushed off to Euston to give his copy of Art Criticism for the Manchester Guardian into the hands of the guard for early morning delivery: he wrote on the same subject for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Art Journal, and what with criticism and social articles for the Saturday Review and World, he was never in bed till long after midnight.
It must have been about this time that he took me with him to Paris for a short so-called holiday while he wrote his criticism for the Pall Mall Gazette on the Salon of the year.
A gladsome time it was in that most smiling of cities in spring. There was a day on which a cry of dismay arose from our party—including his fellow-worker and old friend, Adam Gielgud with his wife—when a letter arrived from Edmund Yates refusing to let Joe off his weekly article in the series of Skits on the London newspapers which were then attracting attention in the World—I think the topic for that week was The Old Maid of Journalism (“The Spectator”) and perhaps that dignified lady received a more caustic drubbing than she would otherwise have had because of the distaste with which he set to his task.
Cheerful meals in the humblest of restaurants—whenever we could run to it, in the excellent Café Gaillon—now the fashionable Henry, but then of far simpler ambitions; merry meetings at the house of that good comrade of Joe’s of whom he tells the tale of exchanged French and English lessons at Kettner’s restaurant in London, and lastly a gorgeous feast in the suburban home of a fellow contributor to L’Art, to both of which festivities my sister, Mrs. Harrison—then Alma Strettell—was bidden as being of our party.
Both occasions were a pleasant peep into Parisian bourgeois life. Our first host was eager to show that he could give us a gigot of mutton as well roasted as in London, and sorely crestfallen was the poor man when the little joint came to table black as a cinder and blue when cut. Joe quickly made capital out of the catastrophe, however, by declaring that one didn’t come to Paris to eat home fare, and that it served his friend right for putting his cook to such an unworthy task.
Our second entertainment, though we did not meet such intellectual company as the distinguished writers on the Temps and the Débats, who so courteously helped Joe to express brilliant ideas in daringly lame French and paid such charming court to my sister and myself, was more typical of its class; for, although the young couple of the house were our entertainers, the old couple were our hosts, and it was wondrous and delightful to see the respectful attitude of the son and his wife to the parents and the undisputed supremacy which they held from their two ends of the long table set out under the trees of the flower-laden May.
A rushing week it was, into which my sister and I crammed much enthralling shopping. I can see now Joe’s reproachful face at the door of the café where we had kept him waiting half an hour for déjeuner after his hot and tiring morning’s work at the Salon. I made a shameless excuse to the effect that we had secured many “occasions” (bargains). And as I gave him a toothbrush which he had asked me to buy, he said: “Is this an ‘occasion’ too? I’d rather have a punctual meal than an occasional toothbrush!”
Merry hours but very far from idle ones, and he reaped an additional and unexpected reward for his labours when we got home.
We had been bidden to a cricket match at his old school the day after our return, where, in virtue of his old rank of Captain of the Eleven, he was to play as a visitor; and I seem to see the boyish blush of satisfaction with which he told his beloved master—Dr. Birkbeck Hill—that it was he and no leader-writer on the Times, as was rumoured, who was writing those humorous articles on the newspapers for the World.