Edward Ayrton, a most brilliant young Egyptologist, who discovered the famous gold treasure in the tombs of the Kings at Thebes, and has since been Government Archæologist in Ceylon, we met at his lonely hut among the tombs of the Kings. We came upon him the first time, dressed in immaculate flannels, as if he was just starting off for a tennis match, and playing diavolo. He is young enough to have been at St. Paul’s with my son. It required a man of strong nerve to live where he lived, surrounded by the spirits of so many Egyptian monarchs and their great officers, and practically at the mercy of any evilly-disposed Arabs. The spirits of bygone Egyptians have, above all others, in the history of psychical science, manifested their sustained interest in human affairs. Ayrton was acting then, not for the Government, but for a rich American.
John Foster Fraser, who was my colleague on To-day, though he is so much younger than I am, a remarkably able and energetic man, who once went a bicycle tour of nearly twenty thousand miles round the earth, and would have gone farther if the land had not come to an end, has made many long and adventurous journeys through dangerous countries, and has written notable books. The story I liked best about his wanderings was that he always used the public tooth-brush, provided by a civilised Shah who had been to Europe, in the rest-houses of Persia. He certainly added that no previous visitor to these rest-houses had ever known what the brushes were used for.
Speaking of teeth, I once knew a dentist who visited Persia. Knowing the prestige of the royal family there, he thought that his fortune was made, when the Shah and his mother ordered sets of false teeth—the Shah’s made of pearls, I think, and his mother’s of diamonds. But next day he was overtaken by a crushing blow. The Shah, to prevent false teeth from becoming too common, confined their use to the royal family, and the poor dentist had to fall back on writing novels—it was C. J. Wills.
This Shah, or another, on his return from a visit to Europe, made his entire harem adopt British ballet-girls’ skirts.
This same Shah, when he visited London, asked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to recommend some one to show him round the gilded hells of London. The man, whose accomplishments thus received official recognition, gave great satisfaction, I believe, but as he is still alive, I shall not divulge his name, lest he should be overwhelmed with overtures from publishers. His mother was a famous Society hostess.
I have known some Arctic and Antarctic explorers. I was, as I have mentioned elsewhere, in the chair at the Savage Club on the night that we entertained Nansen. Trevor-Battye, who afterwards conducted an expedition to Kolguev in the Barents Sea, himself, came up to me, asking me to introduce him to Nansen. Of course, I had great pleasure in doing so. Nansen, who was a tall, wiry man, and looked much less at home in his dress-clothes and his Orders than in his Arctic furs, looked my friend up and down. The latter was a remarkably smart-looking man, and was very well dressed. Nansen was not to know that he came of a family famed for their strength and endurance in Indian frontier warfare, so he said with a smile, which showed the wide openings between his teeth in his lower jaw, “If you come with me, remember that you won’t be able to wash for three years”—he meant, of course, after they had got to the Arctic regions. Battye, who is a most distinguished naturalist, and a well-known author, was not deterred, but Nansen’s list was already really full. Battye was editor-in-chief of Natural History in the Victoria History of the Counties of England. At the Authors’ Club, where he was a habitué in those days, we used to ask him why he had not gone to the North Pole whenever we wanted to get a rise out of him. He was a frequent visitor to our house.
Another Arctic explorer who often came to see us after he had got back from his three years in the Arctic circle, was Fred Jackson, who conducted the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition. Jackson was a very adventurous man. He had made an expedition across the Great Tundra Desert, and another across Australia, before he went to Franz Josef Land. With his swarthy face, bright dark eyes, and general air of joie de vive, Fred Jackson looks much more like the manager of some great English business concern in the Tropics than an Arctic explorer. Yet he was an Arctic explorer, and a very hardy one. Everybody remembers the photograph of the meeting of Nansen and Jackson in the Arctic circle—Nansen swaddled to the chin in the fur clothes of his kind, Jackson showing a starched English collar, a proper tie, and a triangle of shirt-front.
Back from the Arctic circle, Jackson volunteered for South Africa, distinguished himself, won medals, and became a captain in the Manchester Regiment—Hac arte Pollux.
We often had with us I. N. Ford, whose advent to England as correspondent of the New York Tribune was practically the beginning of the entente cordiale between Great Britain and the United States. His predecessor, the well-known G. W. Smalley, had been very much spoiled in English society, but he never set himself whole-heartedly to produce hearty relations between the two countries any more than Harold Frederic did in his correspondenting in the New York Times. The Tribune, had, in fact, been frequently in open hostility to England—so open that I heard the following conversation at a dinner-party in Washington in the year 1889 at Colonel John Hay’s. General Harrison had just been elected President of the United States, and the moderate Republicans made no secret of the fact that they would have liked to see Colonel John Hay, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, Harrison’s Secretary of State. His character stood as high as any one’s in America; no man since George Washington had been so fit to be President of the United States; for he was as clear-headed and able and unwavering as he was honourable, and his immense private wealth set him above temptation. But it was that very wealth which prevented him from being nominated. Americans are determined that wealth shall not command the Presidency as it has the Senate.
Well, that night Savage Landor and I and a number of leading American politicians—the men who were to form Harrison’s Cabinet were most of them there—were dining with Hay at his palatial mansion, built in a heavy-browed sort of Spanish-Moresco style by the celebrated Richardson. The new President’s private secretary, a commercialish little Englishman, had promised to come, and he kept us waiting so long that finally we went in to dinner without him, half-an-hour late.