Several feet from our study window, which had a storey underneath it, there was a railing of about the same width. He used to jump from our window on to that railing, and keep his balance. Anybody could do it, he said, if it was nearer the ground. Why should it make any difference?
And he was always ready to jump from a height of twenty or thirty feet, and never hurt himself.
The seventh boy in those football games was Frank Lamb, the youngest brother. I never heard if he did anything in after life, but we six, I am quite sure, had no thought beyond a football which bounced so unevenly on that piece of waste land.
Tommy Lamb was a very fine fellow, singularly modest about his achievements. Several years afterwards, when I first came back from Australia, I went down to Wimbledon to see the Public Schools Veterans’ Match, in which I had captained Cheltenham three or four times. Lamb, who was then in the flower of his shooting, was very anxious that I should take his place in that year’s team. He thought it so wrong that I should not be shooting. I had, fortunately, not fired off a rifle for at least three years, or I should have had great difficulty in dissuading him from effacing himself for me, and if I had been at my very best he would have been heavens above me in the form he showed. That was the sort of man he was. We were in the same house at Cheltenham for two or three years, so I knew him extremely well.
These chapters in no way exhaust the list of my novelist friends—they are merely reminiscences which I thought likely to interest readers about some of them. I have not mentioned, for instance, one of my greatest friends, that brilliant historical novelist, John Bloundelle-Burton; or Hornung, Doyle’s brother-in-law, whom I first met out in Australia thirty years ago; or Richard Pryce, that dainty novelist and playwright; and I have passed by many other well-known authors whom I knew equally well and saw very often.
CHAPTER XXIV
OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS
One is apt to let fiction speak for itself, as if it represented the whole of literature. But it does not. Several of the men mentioned below are novelists, but they owe their importance more to other books.
The late W. H. Wilkins, who was much at our house, is an example. Wilkins, who was the son and heir of a West Country Squire, was an extraordinary mixture—a man of fashion, who was at the same time an industrious museum-worker. He wrote admirable books on the Georgian Courts. But he will be best remembered as the editor to whom Lady Burton entrusted her manuscripts for publication. It was from him that I learned the irreparable loss which she inflicted on literature by burning a number of Burton’s manuscripts because of the grossnesses which they contained. There was no reason why any of these grossnesses should have been published—the manuscripts could have been printed with lacunæ where these passages occurred, and the manuscripts could have been left to the nation in the British Museum on condition that the offending passages never were published. But the idea of burning unpublished works about Arabia, by the greatest of all explorers of Arabia and students of Arab customs, was too infamous. Wilkins put it down to her religion. She was a very ardent Roman Catholic.
He had a good deal to do with the Ladies’ Realm in its early days, when it was published by Hutchinson, and I believe he had a good deal to do with the formation of the fortnightly part publications for which this house is famous. He certainly was a friend and constant adviser of Hutchinson’s. His books enjoyed a considerable sale. The novel he wrote in collaboration with Herbert Vivian was one of the last of the three-volumers.