Once again I return to my statement that Fleet Street is romantic because many of the people in it are romantic. But what is a romantic person? Alas! I cannot define one. Perhaps a romantic person is he whose soul is mysterious and elusive and whose mind is perturbed and exalted by a poetic vision of life. He must care little for the things that Mr Samuel Smiles and the “get on or get out” school value so much.... No. That will not do at all, for a great many men and women who have cared a great deal for money and worldly power were romantic. Nero, for example, and Cleopatra, and Shakespeare, and Queen Elizabeth, and Lord Verulam——

But though a romantic man may be difficult to define, he is very easy to recognise. Ivan Heald was incorrigibly romantic. But perhaps the most romantically minded man I met in Fleet Street was the journalist who went with me to Athens in the very early spring of 1914. He had no right in Fleet Street, for he was essentially a man who preferred to do things rather than write about them. But half the men in London journalism have drifted there not so much because they have a natural aptitude for the [116] ]work but because they are born adventurers, and the great adventure of Fleet Street is bound to cross the path of most roving men one day or another.

Years ago there lived in London a man who wrote books and magazine stories under the name of Julian Croskey. He had been in the Civil Service in Shanghai, had helped to finance and organise a rebellion, and had been turned out of China, whence he came to England to write. In 1901 I began a correspondence with Croskey, who, in the meantime, had gone to Canada and was living alone on a river island. Though we corresponded for years, we never met, and after a time his letters began to show signs of megalomania. But there was such genius in his letters, such brooding energy, such hate of life, and, at times, such an uncanny suggestion of terrific power, that I treasured every word he wrote to me, and, when his letters ceased, something vital and something almost necessary to me passed out of my life. I do not like to believe that he ceased writing to me because I no longer interested him. I hope he still lives. I hope he will read this book. Some day his letters must be published, for they constitute a problem in psychology at once fascinating, mysterious and demonic. And this man whom I never met remains to me the most romantic of all men I have met in the spirit.

[117]
]CHAPTER X
HALL CAINE

My acquaintance with Hall Caine began in a semi-professional way. Whilst still a schoolboy, I was commissioned by Tit-Bits to write a three-column interview with him. I wrote to the novelist for an interview. Perhaps the rawness of my letter aroused the suspicion that I was too young to write adequately about him even in a paper of the standing of Tit-Bits; at all events he refused the interview, but very kindly said that, if I was contemplating a visit to the Isle of Man, he would be pleased if I would call on and lunch with him as an unprofessional visitor. At that time, being young and ardent, I was a young and ardent admirer of his, and I believe I told him so in my letter that requested the interview.

If I went to him as an admirer I came away from that first visit to Greeba Castle a worshipper. In those days he was (but he still is!) an astounding personality. He came into the room quietly and, having shaken hands and sat down by my side, said: “An exquisite day for your walk from St John’s.” So impressively was this spoken, and there was such a fire in his eyes as he said it, such a weight of meaning in his manner, that I felt as though something secret and wonderful had been revealed to me. I wanted to say: “How true!” What I did say was: “Yes; isn’t it?” He asked me a few questions about myself and then spoke about general matters. He probably said quite trivial, kindly things, but at the time they [118] ]were uttered, and for a little while afterwards, they seemed rich and full of wisdom.

After lunch he showed me the MSS. of some of his books. I remember the MS. of The Bondman. It was written in a small, curiously artistic handwriting on half sheets of notepaper, which had been pasted on to much larger sheets handsomely bound. I handled the book as reverently as the young ladies of early days caressed the pages of the great Martin Tupper. There were many “blots” in the MS.—many alterations, excisions and additions, and it was clear, even from a cursory examination, that Mr Hall Caine was a hard and conscientious worker. Upon this and other books he left me to browse for an hour whilst he went to receive other callers—all of them strangers to him—who were just arriving.

Some of those visitors, as I discovered later, were a rather extraordinary crew: men and women from Lancashire and Yorkshire: I mean absolutely from Lancashire and Yorkshire: men and women who had made a little money and who had unbounded respect for people who had made a little more: men and women who were sound and good, but not quite educated and who were either like fish out of water, gasping and floundering spasmodically, or positively frightfully at their ease. I recollect a tall and handsome lady who prodded everything with a green parasol, and two men who, not too furtively, made elaborate efforts to estimate the amount of the author’s income.

We had tea on a terrace in the grounds and in the evening I was driven back to St John’s, all the other callers returning to Douglas.

The impression left by Mr Hall Caine’s personality on my mind by that and many subsequent visits was overwhelming. He was vivid, alive, and full of smouldering fires; short and vehement; his eyes were large and bright; his voice beautiful and capable of a thousand [119] ]inflections—an actor’s voice; his temperament also an actor’s; his point of view an actor’s. But he never did act; invariably he was tragically (and, I must add, sometimes pathetically) sincere. He had humour, but he could not laugh at himself. His dress was eccentric; he wore a flapping hat, breeches and a jacket made of thick, everlasting, hand-made cloth. A big tie bulged and billowed somewhere about his neck. He told me on one occasion that chars-à-bancs full of trippers from Douglas continually passed along the Douglas-Peel road and that when the trippers caught a sight of him they would sometimes hail him with cries of derision and shouts of laughter.