All that has nothing to do with the political prisoners and my mission of inquiry. The end of that story is that after the publication of my articles in The Daily Chronicle, and many papers on the Continent, Affonso Costa declared a general amnesty and the prison doors were unlocked for a great “jail-delivery” of Royalists.
How far my articles had any influence toward that action, I do not know. Certainly I received some share in the credit, and for months afterward there were Portuguese visitors at my little house in Holland Street, to kiss my hand—as the deliverer of their relatives and friends—much to the amusement of my wife.
But the real deliverer of the prisoners was little Miss Tenison, who had pulled all the wires from her haunted house.
XII
Ever since I can remember I have lived in the company of men and women of a “literary” turn of mind, who either gained a livelihood by writing or used their pens as a means of augmenting other forms of income. My memory, therefore, is a long portrait gallery of authors, novelists, and journalists, many of whom, however, as I must immediately confess, were utterly unknown to fame, and entirely without fortune.
My own father was an essayist and novelist in his spare time as a Civil Servant in the Board of Education, where, in those good old days of leisured life, he worked from eleven till four—not, I suspect, in a very exacting way. Anyhow, it was noticed by his sons that whenever they called upon him in his office, he was either washing his hands, or discussing life and literature with his colleagues. A man of overflowing imagination, enormous range of reading, passionate interest in all aspects of humanity, and most vivacious wit and eloquence, it was a brutal tragedy that he should have been fettered to the soul-destroying drudgery of a government office. But he gathered round him many worshipful friends, and was a popular figure in one of the oldest literary haunts of London, still “going strong” as The Whitefriars Club.
As a young boy in an Eton collar, I used to dine with him there, filled with reverence and delight because I sat at table with the literary giants of the day. To my father, whose genial imagination exaggerated the genius of his friends, they were all “giants,” but I expect the world, and even Fleet Street, has forgotten most of them by now. To me, the greatest of them were G. A. Henty, a grand old man with a beard like Father Christmas, who rewrote French and English history in delectable romance—does anyone read him now?—George Manville Fenn, the author of innumerable books of which I cannot remember a single title—O, fleeting time!—and Ascot Hope Moncrieff, who, under his first two names, was the very first editor of The Boy’s Own Paper—surely a thousand years ago!—and the author of the most entrancing boys’ books, and many serious and scholarly volumes.
This fine old man, who is still producing books, was our intimate friend at home, in early days, when a great family of brothers and sisters, of whom I came fifth, welcomed him with real honor and affection.