Joyously the conductor mounted the steps and called to the driver.
“I’ve won that bet, Bill. It is ’is ’Oliness!”
There are many such stories about O’Dell, who had a biting wit and a reckless tongue. He is now, like Colonel Newcome in his last years, a Brother of the Charterhouse, in a confraternity of old indigent gentlemen who say their prayers at night and dine together in hall. Among the historic characters of Fleet Street he will always have a place and I am glad to have met that link between the present and the past.
Among my literary friends as a young man was, first and foremost—after my father, who was always inspiring and encouraging—my own brother, who reached the heights of success (dazzling and marvelous to my youthful eyes) under the name of Cosmo Hamilton.
After various flights and adventures, including a brief career on the stage, he wrote a book called Which is Absurd, and after it had been rejected by many publishers, placed it on the worst possible terms with Fisher Unwin. It made an immediate hit, and refused to stop selling. After that success he went straight on without a check, writing novels, short stories, and dramatic sketches which established him as a new humorist, and then, achieving fortune as well as fame, entered the musical comedy world with “The Catch of the Season,” “The Beauty of Bath,” and other great successes, which he is still maintaining with unabated industry and invention. He and I were close “pals,” as we still remain, and, bad form as it may seem to write about my brother, I honestly think there are few men who have his prodigality of imagination, his overflowing storehouse of plots, ideas, and dramatic situations, his eternal boyishness of heart—which has led him into many scrapes, given him hard knocks, but never taught him the caution of age, or moderated his sense of humor—his wildness of exaggeration, his generous good nature, or the sentiment and romance which he hides under the laughing mask of a cynic. In character he and I are the poles apart, but I owe him much in the way of encouragement, and his praise has always been first and overwhelming when I have made any small success. As a young man I used to think him the handsomest fellow in England, and I fancy I was not far wrong.
As a journalist, it was natural that my most familiar friends should be of that profession, and therefore not necessarily famous as men of letters, unless they broke away from the limitations of newspaper work. They are still those for whom I have most affection—H. W. Nevinson, Beach Thomas, Percival Phillips, H. M. Tomlinson, Robin Littlewood the dramatic critic; Ernest Perris, editor of The Daily Chronicle; Bulloch, editor of The Graphic; all good men and true, and others less renowned.
One comrade who has “gone west,” as they used to say in time of war, was a brilliant young Jew named Alphonse Courlander. I used to meet him, at home and abroad, on all sorts of missions, and wherever we were, we used to get away from the crowd to talk of the books we were going to write (and for the most part never wrote!) and the latest masterpieces we had discovered. Alphonse had more of a Latin than a Jewish temperament, with irresistible gayety and wit, which concealed a profound melancholy. It was when he had drunk one glass too much, or perhaps two, that his melancholy surged up, and he used to shed tears over his poor little naked soul. Otherwise, he had gifts of comic speech and mimicry, which used to make me laugh outrageously, sometimes in the most solemn places. One trick of his was to make the face of a codfish, which was beyond all words funny, and in order to upset my gravity, he used to do this in the presence of royalty, or at some heavy political function, or even during a walk down Pall Mall.
I remember one night in Ireland, when we supped with a party of Irish journalists in a little eating house called Mooney’s Oyster Bar. A young Irish girl was playing the fiddle in the courtyard outside, and we called her in, and bribed her to play old Irish ballads, which are so pitiful with the old tragedy of the race that Alphonse the Jew was touched to his heartstrings and vowed that he was descended from the kings of Ireland.
He was with me during the episode in Copenhagen with Doctor Cook, in whom he had a passionate and chivalrous belief, until I shook his faith so much that he sent messages to his paper saying that Cook was a liar, and then later messages to say that he wasn’t. Courlander could write in any kind of style which impressed his imagination for a time, and his novels ranged from imitations of Thomas Hardy and R. L. Stevenson, to W. W. Jacobs. But his best book—really fine—was a novel on Fleet Street called Mightier Than the Sword, when he wrote about the things he knew and felt. In giving me a copy, he was generous enough to write that I was its godfather, through my own novel The Street of Adventure. Poor Alphonse Courlander was a victim of war’s enormous agony, and his end was tragic, but in Fleet Street he left no single enemy, and many friends.
For several years while I was in Fleet Street, I lived opposite Battersea Park, in a row of high dwellings stretching for about a mile, and called Overstrand Mansions, Prince of Wales Mansions, and York Mansions. Nearly all the people in the road were of literary, artistic, or theatrical avocations, either hoping to arrive at fame and fortune, or reduced in circumstances after brief glory. The former class were in the great majority, and were youngish people, with youngish wives, and occasionally, but not often, a baby on the balcony. G. K. Chesterton, who lived in the Overstrand Mansions, immediately over my head—I used to pray to God that he would not fall through—once remarked that if he ever had the good fortune to be shipwrecked on a desert island, he would like it to be with the entire population of the Prince of Wales Road, whom he thought the most interesting collection of people in the world. I thought so, too, and wrote a very bad novel about them, called Intellectual Mansions, S. W. That book appeared in the time of the militant suffragettes who were playing hell in London, and as my chief lady character happened to be a suffragette, they claimed it as their own, bought up the whole edition, bound it in their colors of purple, green, and white, and killed it stone dead.