“How long have you been in London?” I asked.
“About two hours.”
The hero of so many striking adventures (in which most people would feel inclined to include the siege of Peking, for he was badly wounded in it, and without his leadership the city would have fallen) is, though his bushy hair has turned snow-white, singularly youthful-looking. His rounded clean-shaven face has not a line or a wrinkle from its long sojourn under Eastern suns. His blue eye has a merry twinkle in it which gives his face a humorous expression when it is not hardened for action. Those who have seen him in a crisis, know how stern and resolute and uncompromising it can be. He has a slim, active figure.
Just before he was appointed Times correspondent in China, I approached Sir Henry Norman, who was at that time one of the editors of the Daily Chronicle, and whom I knew, to try and get the proprietors of that paper to give him a similar appointment in China, or in some country where Spanish is spoken, for Morrison speaks Spanish fluently. I enumerated all the qualifications which immediately afterwards led The Times to make the best appointment they made since De Blowitz. At the end of it Norman just said with a cold smile, “Oh, all your geese are swans,” and changed the subject. I wondered if he ever let the proprietors of the Chronicle know what a goose they had lost, and whom they could have secured for quite a moderate salary. To his honour be it known, that Moberly Bell, of The Times, recognised Morrison’s value the moment the young doctor approached him.
Morrison’s middle fame was of a quite unusual sort. His walk across Australia without money and without arms had been a nine days’ wonder. His gallant explorations in New Guinea, culminating in his being brought home with a barbed wooden spear-head inside him, and being sent on to Edinburgh because no one in Australia could extract it, made him a celebrity in Scotland as well as Melbourne. But when Prof. Chiene extracted the spear-head successfully, Morrison’s exploits, for the time being, were lost sight of in those of the great surgeon, and he became known as “Chiene’s case.”
G. W. Rusden, the only important historian of New Zealand and Australia till Henry Gyles Turner’s book appeared, I knew very well. We lived together, until I was married, at Cotmandene, Punt Road, South Yarra, a suburb of Melbourne. In fact, I was married from there. He had for many years been clerk of the Parliaments in Melbourne, and was actually engaged in writing his histories when we were living together. He was a strange mixture in his sentiments—a violent Tory in everything except where natives were concerned. But he was even more violent as an advocate for coloured people. At that time the Maories were giving a good deal of trouble in New Zealand, and Bryce, the Minister for Native Affairs, showed great resolution and capacity in dealing with them. This infuriated Rusden, who, partly from the yellow journals in New Zealand, and partly from Sir George Grey, who had been Governor and afterwards Premier of the Colony, gleaned a farrago of libels, accusing Bryce of murdering native women and children. He showed these reports to me triumphantly. At the risk of losing his friendship, for he was very touchy, I begged him not to make any use of these materials, which appeared to me patently false. But he persisted in inserting portions of them. Years afterwards, when both he and I were living in England, Bryce brought an action for libel against him in the London Courts on these very grounds. Rusden went to my uncle’s firm, Sladen and Wing, as his solicitors, on account of his friendship with my other uncle, Sir Charles. My cousin told me about it. “Well,” I said, “make him pay anything to keep it out of court. I was living with him when he wrote that part of his history, and saw the materials, and he hasn’t a leg to stand on.”
But Rusden was a great deal too stubborn to compromise—and the verdict against him was five thousand pounds damages.
Turner also is an old friend of mine. He was long manager of the Commercial Bank in Melbourne, and was one of the founders and editors of the Melbourne Review. He and the late Alexander Sutherland, who was a schoolmaster, wrote the excellent book on Australian literature which has been the foundation of all subsequent works on the subject, especially in the matter of our knowledge of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
And here I must mention my two closest Australian literary friends—Arthur Patchett Martin and Margaret Thomas. Margaret Thomas, who was brought up in Australia, though she was actually born in England, began life as a sculptor. She won the silver medal of the Royal Academy, and executed, among other public works, the memorial to Richard Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and the memorials to various Somerset celebrities in the Somerset Valhalla, founded by the Kinglakes at Taunton. She was so successful also as a portrait painter that she was able to retire with a competency, and devote the rest of her life to travel and book-writing. She has written travel-books on Syria, Spain and Morocco, and hand-books on painting and sculpture. Probably no one living has such a wide knowledge of the picture-galleries of the Continent.
Patchett Martin was born at Woolwich, but went to Australia at an early age, and was educated at the Melbourne Grammar School and University. He helped to found, and edited the Melbourne Review, and was intimately associated with the theatre, because his sister married Garner, the principal theatrical impresario of Australia. He settled in London in 1882, and practically introduced Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems to their popularity in England, where they had been neglected except for the reviews and articles which appeared in Baily’s Magazine, about the time of Gordon’s death a dozen years before. While editor of the Melbourne Review, Martin was among the very first to “boom” Robert Louis Stevenson, who was his model in his own delightful poems and essays. His big, burly form and hot, good-humoured face were very familiar in the Savage Club in the ’eighties.