[CHAPTER XIV]
SOME LONDON ACQUAINTANCES
As the years have gone by I have tried, whenever I have been in London, to look up the Guards that I knew during my first visit, as well as to make acquaintance with the new members. On one of my later visits a young English journalist accompanied me to the "Tavern." I told him what interesting times I had had there, and pointed out to him some of the men I knew.
"They're hacks, you know," he whispered. "Penny-a-liners. Gissing did them in 'New Grub Street.'" The young man liked neither his old companions nor the place, but he did not hesitate to borrow ten bob that he can hand back, if he wishes to, at his earliest convenience.
Call the Guards hacks, penny-a-liners or what you will; as a friend of mine once said about them, they know how to spell the word gentleman, anyhow, and that is more than many do who poke fun at them. They helped to make my first visit to London incomparably amusing at times, and for this I cannot help feeling grateful.
I have spoken of Arthur Symons' interest in my first efforts to describe tramp life. I think it was he and the magazine editors who abetted me in my scribblings, rather than the university and its doctrines of "Inquiral research," who are to blame for all tramp trips made by me in Europe. Of course, the inevitable Wanderlust was probably behind them to some extent, but all of them were undertaken with articles, and probably a book, as the ultimate object in view.
This can hardly be said of the earlier wanderings at home, and yet when eventually writing about them, they have interested me more than the tramps abroad. My vagabond days in foreign parts have received pretty much their just due in other books of mine and my wish here is more to explain what effect they had upon me as a student, and in leading on to other work here at home, than to tell what befell me on the highways. There are a few episodes and anecdotes, however, that were overlooked when making my reports from the field which may not be out of place now.
The most entertaining experience I had in Great Britain during the three weeks or so that I tramped there in 1893, concerns a well meaning professor in Edinburgh. My companion in this venture is now also a professor at one of our universities; at the time he was a fellow-student of mine in Berlin.
One of our "stops" in the itinerary planned by me was Edinburgh. We were to land at Leith from New Castle, anyhow, so why not see Edinburgh, whether we were real tramps or not?