“That cove,” he said, indicating the clockmaker “'as never been a-nigh me this four months. The money's always bin 'ere for 'im if 'e'ed a-come for it. What d'you take me for?” he asked savagely. “I ain't a wild beast, am I? It's Government work, and somebody's got to do it.” It turned out upon inquiry that my collector had actually paid three or four weeks' instalment out of his own pocket, rather than face the hangman, after he had discovered the nature of his trade. I am not writing melodrama, but it is a simple fact that I have never seen a man more profoundly distressed. The hangman's speech was broken and obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint together.
His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes, has some sort of human feeling.
At the time at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who, for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the pawn-broker—a harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned out my first contribution to the World, he sat painting and smoking close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the passion, the very rage of achievement, which possessed one's work, are not to be forgotten. The work took Yates's fancy mightily, and he had the good sense and generosity to let me know it. The Bentley Balladist wrote years ago:
“Excuse me, gents, but to poetic ponies,
One ounce of praise is worth ten tons of corn.”
Yates did not stint the corn because he was generous with the praise, and throughout our association he was most unfailingly good and kind. He was a bitter enemy and a hard striker, and he went into battle with a good heart and made for himself many foes, but a more loyal colleague and leader it would have been hard to find.
My search for human oddities led me into strange places and made me acquainted with strange people. The most astonishing and complete example of human vanity and pretence I ever encountered was one of these. He was a pavement artist and he had a pitch outside the railings of the great terminus in Euston Road, where he used to sit and patronise London. There was something in the fellow's look which invited me, and when I got into conversation with him, I learned that nothing but jealousy had kept him from taking a high place as a scene-painter, and that artists of far less merit than himself had a place, year after year, on the line at the Academy. Where he had picked up his phrases it was of course impossible to guess, but he talked a good deal of the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, which resulted from his artistic occupation.
He had one awful daub which he called “The Guardship Attacked,” in which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me was his “chef de hover,” and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for his 'bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week's time he brought the work to me. My chum's painting tools and easels were scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said: “Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush.” I took him outside to give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the unmistakable no accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson's Eccles.
My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar knowledge of Gee's Court I have not been near the place now for more than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it was an awful place, the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, the vilest offsprings of the streets of London. What with the aid of the Scripture-readers, the various nursing and charitable sisterhoods, and the young medical accoucheurs in their fourth year, with whom I scraped acquaintance, I got to be quite well known in Gee's Court and could go about in safety. But one evening as I was entering the low-browed slimy archway by which it was approached from Oxford Street, a young policeman stopped me and asked me if I knew where I was going. I told him that I was quite intimate with the place and quite safe there. “Well, sir,” he answered, “you know your own business best, but I wouldn't go along there for a fiver.” My investigations had by this time brought me acquainted as I have said already with all manner of queer people. Amongst others I recall an omnibus driver who told me that he was the rightful heir to a big estate by Guilford. At my invitation he told his story, and he began it with this astounding proclamation: “It's like this, sir,” he began, “my grandfather died childless,” and when I failed to disguise my amusement he explained. “He was not really my grandfather but he was my father's uncle and we always called him grandfather.” Then he went into a long and tangled statement of which I could neither make head nor tail, but the fact remained clear that in his own opinion he ought to have been a millionaire or thereabouts, and by rights able to pass his time in smoking cigars and drinking champagne wine, which he appeared to regard as the summit of human felicity.
The contract I had made with Edmund Yates was for a series of thirteen articles, and when it was fulfilled, there was no more immediate work for me to do and another little period of stress set in. But in the meantime I had written a little handful of short stories, and one of these, entitled An old Meerschaum, I sent in to Messrs Chatto & Windus. It owed its immediate acceptance to an accident Mr George Augustus Sala had agreed with that firm to supply a two-part story entitled Dr. Cupid. For some reason or another the second part of this story was never forthcoming, and my copy arriving in the nick of time was used to stop the gap. It brought me a regular commission, and month by month thereafter, for quite a considerable time, I contributed a short story to the Belgravia Magazine. Very early in the history of this connection a curious accident happened. I was looking forward to a cheque for seventeen guineas and it came to me as a surprise when, from paymasters so scrupulously punctual, no cheque arrived at the date fixed for its delivery. I could afford to wait for a day or two and I waited, but by and by things became pressing. My landlord, who was a sorter in the Post Office and not particularly well paid, grew exigent The supply in the cupboard became scanty and yet scantier. I found my way to “my uncle's” once more, and week after week went by until I was once more face to face with that grim phantom of actual want which I had already once encountered. Partly from pride and partly from fear of disturbing a valuable arrangement, I refrained from any approach to my publishers, but at last when I had decided upon it as an unavoidable necessity, a slatternly little maid came in with a dirty mildewed envelope between finger and thumb and said she thought that it was addressed to me. I pounced upon it and there, all soaked and bedraggled but still quite legible, I found the cheque, which had been sent to me nearly a month before, and it had been by some accident dropped into the area where it had lain unregarded all this time. There was a feast that night, but the truth is that life was one constant vicissitude, an unfailing series of ups and downs, of jolly happy-go-lucky rejoicings with comrades who were equally careless with myself, and of alternating spells of hardship. “Literature,” said Sir Walter, “is an excellent walking stick but a very bad crutch,” and so in truth I have found it all my days.
As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one's youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other gods of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this time of day, pathetic to remember. I knew him from his portraits at a glance and I was assured of his identity, if any assurance had been necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the big circular hall found it necessary to pass the place at which he had taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a 'bus bound for Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken. When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched until the door closed behind him.