Speaking of Abyssinia, it is natural to me to mention Prince Alamayu—Ali, as we used to call him. He was sent to Cheltenham College, so that he might live in the house of Jex-Blake, then Principal of Cheltenham, and afterwards head master of Rugby and Dean of Wells. Of all the head masters of his time, Jex-Blake had the most considerable reputation as a courtier and a man of the world. Alamayu was brought to England after the capture of Magdala, and came to Cheltenham in 1872, when he was eleven years old. He was just a royal savage when he came to Cheltenham; if he was hot, he took his coat off and threw it on the ground, and left it. He had no tutor to go about with him; he just mixed with the boys in the ordinary way. And at first he had the cruelties of his bringing-up; he once, for instance, pushed a small boy into the water to see the splash he would make. But he soon got cured of this, for Jex-Blake wisely left him to fight his own battles, and though a sense of chivalry made the boys very indulgent to the poor little orphaned black, they soon let him know that bullying was not to be one of his privileges, though almost anything else was treated as a joke.
When Jex-Blake went to Rugby, Alamayu went with him, and thence, when he was eighteen, he went to Sandhurst to qualify for the British Army. That was fatal. He was his own master there, with no one to make him take care of his health, or restrain himself in taking spirits. He soon contracted some deadly disease—pneumonia, I think—and died. Queen Victoria showed her regret by having him buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.
I knew him very well, because I was in the head form when he came to the school, and was often at Jex-Blake’s house, and was asked by “Jex” to keep an eye on him. He was a nice little boy, with a very affectionate disposition, and not at all stupid. It was his misfortune to lose at a critical moment of his life the firm and tactful hand which had disciplined and protected him for seven years.
Green Chartreuse is almost as deadly as aeroplanes. I knew a man, a very well-known man, who went mad because he drank thirty-six green Chartreuses in one day.
It is natural to mention George Manville Fenn in the same breath as Henty. He was another old friend of mine, and of all the men I have known, retained his youth the longest. Fenn’s hair remained golden and undiminished in its vigour, and his figure remained slim and upright till he was nearly seventy. He lived at the beautiful old red-brick house on the river at Isleworth, which stands at the gates of the Duke of Northumberland’s park, and is known as Syon Lodge. There he turned out those wonderful boys’ romances of his in a steady stream. Like Henty, I met him constantly at the Savage and Vagabond Clubs, and at my own flat. He was very fond of meeting his fellow-craftsmen. His son, Fred Fenn, used to come too. At that time he was sub-editor of the Graphic, and I think he afterwards became first editor of the Golden Penny. In any case, he freed himself from the fetters of journalism by writing Amasis, that admirable Egyptian comic opera, in which Ruth Vincent won all hearts. He not only had the cleverness to write it, but formed the company which put it on, and stood an action at law about it triumphantly—a rare instance of grit.
Richard Jefferies never came to see me at Addison Mansions; he was dead, I think, before we went there. But I have a long and pathetic letter which he wrote to me some time before he died, setting forth the cross-fire of diseases from which he was suffering, and asking me if I thought the climate of the exquisite Blue Mountains of New South Wales would afford him any relief. One can picture how the genius of Jefferies would have blossomed forth amid that matchless gorge scenery (where you hear the bell-birds calling) and amid the natural history curiosities of a new land.
Grant Allen, who lived in a charming house in the Haslemere district, was a constant visitor to our flat. We had visited his people in Canada before we met him. His father was the principal inhabitant at Kingston, Ontario, the dear old-fashioned town which contains Canada’s Military Academy. The old Allen had a fine house with a delightful garden, right on Lake Ontario. Grant Allen was a remarkable-looking man, with his long red beard, and keen, hawk-like face. He always reminded me of the gaunt, red-bearded faces one sees on knights and lovers in the great French tapestries of the fifteenth century. And he had the same spare figure as they have, and the same habit of arching his back. He was a remarkable man, who, famous as he was, never got his due as a writer. He was never an F.R.S., though half the Fellows of the Royal Society were his inferiors in scientific attainments, and he never reached eminence as a novelist, though he wrote some amazingly clever and powerful books. He had a great contempt for actresses on account of their want of conversation. He said they could not talk about anything but the stage. I once came away with him from a party at H. D. Traill’s, where he had taken down to supper a woman who was beyond dispute the greatest actress of her time. He was complaining loudly about it; he said that he thought she was the most stupid woman he had ever met.
But he was happy in his friendships. His brother-in-law, Franklin Richards, father of the publisher, Grant Richards, was recognised as one of the soundest philosophers of his day at Oxford—I say this though his lectures were entirely thrown away on me. I had to attend them because he was a don of my College, but Philosophy was Chinese to me.
One of Grant Allen’s greatest friends in the last part of his life was Richard le Gallienne, who went to live in that house in the wood beyond Haslemere to be near him. Le Gallienne had a sort of summer-house in the wood, a long way from the house, in which he wrote those charming poems, secure from interruption. I often went to see him in the days when he lived in the King’s Farm at Brentford, which was not a very farm-like house. But I only once went to see him at Haslemere, and on that occasion I found him at the summer-house, dressed as carefully as if he had been in town, but with an eye on country effects. He had on a black velvet coat and waistcoat, and a rich black evening tie, but immaculate white flannel trousers; and I must admit that even in this costume he managed to look appropriate.
When we were living at Cherwell Lodge, Oxford, that delightful marine villa across the Cherwell from the Gothic part of Magdalen, Grant Allen brought his best friend to see us, Edward Clodd, the secretary of the London Joint Stock Bank, who, in the intervals of a business career, had written a number of great books, beginning with The Childhood of the World.