SIR GILBERT PARKER
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
Edith Humphris has an extraordinary power of collecting and sifting materials for a book. Off her own bat, she collected all the facts of Gordon’s early life at Cheltenham and Prestbury. The grist which I brought to the mill, besides a study of Gordon’s life in Australia and his poems, which I had blocked out more than thirty years before, when I tried to get Cassell’s to undertake its publication, was the mass of material put at my disposal by people who had known him in the flesh, and treasured remembrances and keepsakes of him. Miss Humphris knew that the letters to Charley Walker existed; I tracked their owner down and got permission to reproduce them. Henry Gyles Turner, who gave me leave to use all the materials in Turner and Sutherland, was a friend of mine in Australia. George Riddoch, who gave us all the Riddoch poems and reminiscences, is a friend of mine, introduced by old friends in Australia. Lambton Mount, Gordon’s partner on the West Australian Station (brother of Harry Mount), is a friend of mine, and gave me all his information orally. General Strange, who was Gordon’s friend at Woolwich, and wrote about him in Gunner Jingo’s Jubilee, is an old, old friend of mine. Frederick Vaughan and Sir Frank Madden and Mrs. Lauder wrote their reminiscences for me, as did Campbell Mackellar of the Gordon country in South Australia. And John Bulloch, the editor of the Graphic, who wrote the wonderfully interesting pedigrees and chapters about Gordon’s family, wrote them for me.
But Miss Humphris wrote all her part of the book, including a great deal about Gordon in Australia, herself, from studies which she had been making since she was a child.
Talking of Australia, at one time I saw a good deal of Basil Thomson, the son of the great Archbishop of York, who in those days was an author, but is now secretary of the Prison Commission, after having been governor of Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubbs prisons.
Thomson, when I first knew him, had just come back from being Prime Minister of the Tonga Islands. I asked why he gave it up. He said that things were no longer what they had been in Government circles in Tonga; when he was there, even the Government could only raise the wind by having fresh issues of postage stamps manufactured for them by stamp-dealers in England, who paid for the privilege of selling the stamps in England without accounting for them to the Government of Tonga. But in the palmy days of Tonga it was very different. Then, a Prime Minister, who was also a Nonconformist missionary, procured the monopoly of selling trousers from the King of Tonga, before he induced the king to make the whole population turn Christian, and make it illegal to appear without trousers.
You sometimes hear people say, “What would you do if you were on a desert island?” I once came very near seeing life on a desert island—it was in a little settlement of less than a dozen families, on an island adjoining the mainland on a desolate coast of Asia. It had a Consul.
“It seems an awfully dead and alive hole,” I said to him.
“It is not so bad as it looks,” he replied. “We have a splendid rule here; as there is no kind of amusement in the place, except making love, we passed a resolution that no one should get in a temper over the infidelity of a spouse. We manage our loves like other people manage their friendships—if a woman likes to have an affair with another woman’s husband, it is nobody’s concern but hers and his. Since we have made this arrangement, this has been the happiest place in the world, though we live on a mud bank, without even a tennis-court. Before this golden age began, the quarrelling was awful. Two men simply could not get out of each other’s way, and they felt obliged to resort to violence to maintain their self-respect, though they might not value the affection they were losing so much as an old glove.” I forget the profession of the Solon to whom the community owed this up-to-date method of law-giving.
Fred Villiers, the war-correspondent, was making his way across Canada at the same time as we were, on a lecture tour. He had a number of wonderful battle-slides, and he looked highly picturesque in his service kit. He had also a splendid advance agent, whom I will only call by his Christian name, because he was the son of an English bishop, and had very distinguished connections. Henry never forgot his dignity, and even in the wilds of the North-West always wore a tall silk hat, with its fur worn thin by constant brushing, because he was Villiers’ agent.
We had run across him at many C.P.R. capitals before he came to our rescue at a woe-begone place called Kamloops in British Columbia. We arrived there after midnight, and proceeded to the hotel, which should have been expecting us, as it was the only train in the day from Montreal. We found the hotel open, but absolutely deserted. We could have helped ourselves to anything we liked in the bar, and taken our choice of the bedrooms. At that moment appeared Henry, who asked us what we would like to drink, and told us the Kamloops charges for it. He then took us round, and gave us our choice of bedrooms, and when we wanted to know why he had suddenly become landlord, told us that the landlord had just died, and the Irish servants were afraid to be in the house with a corpse.