Frank Hopkinson Smith is a man I should have liked to see more of at Addison Mansions; he was one of the men I liked best among my friends in American literary clubs. He was an engineer by profession, who had carried out many important contracts. Writing, though he was one of the best writers in America, was an afterthought with him. Like Du Maurier, that delightful man and delightful writer, he stumbled upon his most brilliant gift.
Du Maurier became a novelist because he had become such a master of situation and polished dialogue in his pictures and their titles. Frank Hopkinson Smith grew to be a novelist out of the anecdotes which he told so brilliantly at story-tellers’ nights at the Century Club. He had a fund of stories about the Italian labour which he employed in contracts. He always used to declare that engaging Italian labour was as simple as Kodaking, which had for its motto, “You press a button—we do the rest.” He said that no matter how many men he needed, all he had to do was to ring up an Italian boss the night before, and tell him that he wanted so many men for a certain kind of job. Then they would be at any station in the city at seven o’clock the next morning, with the proper tools. He added that he always put a clause into the contract that if any of them murdered each other, the number was to be made up at once.
“That is their weakness,” he said, “but they only practice it on each other. It’s the only kind of labour I would undertake a contract with. They’re better than the Irish, anyway.”
“I don’t agree with you,” said Vermont, the sculptor; “they’re so cruel.”
“Cruel!” retorted Hopkinson Smith. “What price this? An Irishman named Larkin hired an organ-monkey from an old Dago for a dollar a day. The monkey was often badly bruised when he came back at night, and looked frightened to death when Larkin came to fetch him in the morning. So one Saint’s day when the old Dago had a holiday, he determined to follow them up and watch them. The Irishman drove along till he came to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Twelfth Avenue, where the coal carts all pass on their way up from the depot. Then he took the monkey out of the cart, and tied him to a post ten or twenty yards away from the bridge, but in full sight of it. Then he drove his horse and cart to a convenient place a little way off, and awaited events.
“Presently the coal carts began to stream across the bridge, and the monkey in terror ran up to the top of the post. The whole way across every carter took cock-shots at it with pieces of coal. Occasionally one hit it, and then the monkey screamed with rage and pain. As soon as there was a cart load of coal lying at the foot of the post, Larkin brought up his horse and cart and shovelled them in, first putting the monkey where he could not be seen, to show that the sport was over for the present. When he was loaded up, he hitched the monkey to the cart again, and drove into New York to the retailer who bought the coal from him.
“But the next morning, when he came for the monkey, he found not only that monkey, but every monkey in the organ-grinders’ quarter, gone, and when he got down to the bridge, the place was looking like a zoo.”
Suddenly the popular anecdote-teller wrote Colonel Carter of Cartersville, one of the best American novels of its generation.
William de Morgan, the other novelist who achieved his first book success so late in life, was never at Addison Mansions, but I had the honour of meeting him at a much more interesting place—the little atelier, somewhere in the Kilburn district, where he made the famous lustre tiles by which he was known before he took to literature. George Joy, the artist who painted the famous picture of Gordon meeting his death at Khartum, took me to see De Morgan, knowing how enthusiastic I was over the famous Mazzara Vase, and the other pieces preserved in Sicily of the old Sicilian Arab lustre ware.
Of Bret Harte and Maarten Maartens I have spoken elsewhere.