But it is not only the books she has written, and the brilliant intellectual people whom she has gathered around her, which constitute her claim to being remembered, for she has taken a leading part in the betterment of London. She has naturally worked hardest in Lambeth, where she became acquainted with the swarming thousands of Surrey when Stanley was member for one of the Lambeth Divisions, and it was from Lambeth that she drew most of her boy-models to make studies for her book illustrations of London ragamuffins.
Isabella Bird—Mrs. Bishop—one of the most famous travellers in the East, I met once near Hakone in Japan. She was a curious-looking old lady, dressed like a native woman, with nothing but rope-sandals, which cost three-halfpence a pair, on her feet. We came upon her very suddenly, because Norma Lorimer and I had gone in to examine the interior of a pretty building made of some light-coloured, unpainted wood, into which people seemed to go as they pleased. As Miss Lorimer was then not long out of her teens, and the building proved to contain naked men and women bathing together, only separated by a bamboo floating on the top of the steaming pool, we came out much quicker than we went in, and almost fell upon Isabella Bird and her attendant.
When we were at Khartum, the Sirdar, Sir Reginald Wingate, introduced me to the famous Father Ohrwalder, the good old Austrian priest who had made the sensational escape from Omdurman twenty years before, and wrote the extraordinarily vivid account of his captivity which is one of our principal sources of knowledge of life in Omdurman. He was then a venerable old man, with a patriarchal beard, very frail, and exhausted by conversing for a few minutes, but the Austrian Bishop, who spoke excellent English, took his place, and we had an interesting conversation. He was not, he informed me, allowed to make converts in the northern part of the Sudan, where the inhabitants are chiefly Mohammedan. I asked him if he made many converts among the pagans in the southern part. He said not as many as he ought, but I elicited from him that he set his face sternly against polygamy, and the Sirdar’s Intelligence officer had informed us that one of the favourite forms of investment in those provinces was to buy as many wives as you could and make them work for you.
Wingate himself was most kind to us during our visit to the Sudan. He placed his three steamers or yachts at our disposal, and deputed his Intelligence officer to accompany us, whenever he had no actual need of him.
The late John Ward, F.S.A., I never met on any of his journeys to Egypt or the Sudan or Sicily, though we corresponded for some years. I have found his books most valuable. He had a perfect genius for collecting indispensable illustrations, and his books are encyclopædias of local colour.
The late George Warrington Steevens, the finest correspondent the Daily Mail ever had—it is said that they paid him five thousand a year—a small, pale, delicate-looking man, with double eye-glasses, and an alert, rather humorous expression, used to come to us at Addison Mansions with his wife. She was a good deal older than he was, but he always said that she had been the making of his career, which came to an untimely end while he was besieged in Ladysmith.
His conversation was as sparkling as his journalism. I remember when we were discussing Kitchener’s conquest of the Sudan at the Authors’ Club one night, telling him that Maxwell (now Sir John Maxwell, late commanding the Army of Occupation in Egypt), who was one of Kitchener’s most trusted officers, had been at Cheltenham College with me.
“What sort of man is Maxwell now?” I asked; and he answered, “The sort of man you put in charge of a conquered town.”
Arthur Weigall, who was Inspector of Monuments in Upper Egypt when we were there, came to see us several times at Addison Mansions. One hardly expected to find a member of the great Kent cricketing family one of the chief experts in deciphering Egyptian inscriptions and judging their antiquities. Weigall was rather superstitious for so great an Egyptologist, though I confess that I should not have liked to outrage the dignity of the tomb of a queen at Thebes, as he and a house-party he had at his fine mansion on the river near Luxor, proposed to do. They got up a sort of comedy to be performed in the tomb, and the performance was blocked by a series of accidents—sudden illness, the breaking of a leg, and so on.
We had a delightful expedition with him to some of the less-known tombs at Thebes. At his house I saw a couple of articles he had published in Blackwood’s Magazine on Aknaton, the heretic Pharaoh, and I think Queen Ti. I saw at a glance that, like Sir Frederick Treves, he was a born writer, with quite a Pierre Loti feeling for style, and learned, to my surprise, that he had not been able to find a publisher for two books which he had ready. I gave him a letter of introduction to my literary agent, setting forth the circumstances, which resulted in the instant acceptance of both books by leading publishers. One of them was his admirable Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt.