You observe that there is nothing in the mere words. But their spontaneity and appositeness told at once. The effect was electrical. The audience was put into a good humour, and the lecture went with a roar of laughter and applause from start to finish.
Dr. Gordon Hake was a friend whom I made through a review of his “Poems and Parables,” printed by my Tapleyan editor. Hake was a most courtly old gentleman, and when actively engaged in the pursuit of his profession—he had been a general medical practitioner—must have possessed an enviable degree of what is known among physicians as “a fine bedside manner.” The doctor had a pleasant little place at Coombe End, just beyond the spot at which Roehampton Lane impinges on Wimbledon Common. Under his hospitable roof I met one or two famous men and a goodly number of men who aspired to be famous. Of the famous men I shall here make mention of one only.
George Borrow, author of “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye,” was an old friend of Hake’s, and I was invited down to Coombe End to meet that very extraordinary old gentleman. Dr. Hake had taken care to warn me that it would be as well to say nothing of my contributions to periodical literature, as Borrow had a great dislike to literary persons. My claim to that description being of the slightest, I quite gladly assented, and as a result George Borrow and I became on fairly friendly terms—or I had rather put it: the Gipsy King was less bearish to me than to some of the others with whom he was thrown into contact. I did not at that time understand his hostile attitude to contemporary professors of literature. I do now. Borrow had enjoyed for a brief period the questionable delights of being lionized in London society. His “Bible in Spain” had created a furore. An immense amount of curiosity was created as to the personality of a man who had gone through the extraordinary adventures described in that romantic book. For a couple of seasons Borrow was invited everywhere, and then as capriciously he was dropped. At the end of the sixties, when I met him, the hostesses who had fought with each other for his presence could not have told you whether the great man was alive or dead.
A big, broad-shouldered, slightly stooping man, with white hair, shaven face, and bushy eyebrows, was the George Borrow whom on a fine summer afternoon I met on the lawn at Coombe End. He was dressed in rusty broadcloth. At the moment he was about to take a walk across the common. He did me the honour to ask me to accompany him. The only book of his that I had read at that time was “The Bible in Spain.” It used to be given to me when I was quite a little boy as suitable Sunday reading. It was very unlike the general run of Sunday reading to which I had become accustomed. It was, indeed, a series of lurid adventures, hairbreadth escapes, desperate encounters, fire, thunder, murder, and sudden death—a boy’s book of the most pronounced type. And its title notwithstanding, I felt, even in those young days, that the incidents related must have been evolved by the teeming imagination of a novelist.
My first walk with Borrow confirmed me in the certainty of my childish instinct. Crude uncritical people, without a due respect for literary genius, would, on the strength of his conversation during that walk of mine, have characterized him offhand as a flamboyant liar. The true explanation is that he was continually evolving or devising incidents which, once given shape, remained with him as facts to be thenceforth remembered and related as occurrences duly observed. I feel sure that Borrow firmly believed that he had personally experienced all the eburescent transactions described in his “Bible in Spain.” On our way across the common he was accosted by a tramp. Borrow was infuriate. He invited the sturdy beggar to fight—he even began to divest himself of his broadcloth frock-coat; but the beggar made off. He was in search of benefactions, not of blows. Had the beggar been a gipsy, Borrow’s attitude would have been quite friendly. He would have, were it needed, administered to the wants of the swarthy nomad; but an English beggar was in the eyes of Borrow simply an habitual criminal, and as such should be soundly trounced whenever encountered.
In a road t’other side the common he took me into a beerhouse, and called for two half-pints of “swipes.” Thus in such places they call their thinnest, sourest, and cheapest ale. Borrow drank his as one enjoying a rare vintage. With difficulty I sipped a tipple, which I found to be simply villainous. In the far corner of the taproom sat a man at a table. He had finished his mug of ale, and was slumbering.
“See that fellow?” asked Borrow in an impressive stage whisper.
“Yes,” I replied faintly, for the beer was positively making me ill.
“That man is a murderer. Finish your swipes. I’ll tell you all about it when we get out.”
And once out, he proceeded to tell me all about it. Here he was at his best. You could not help listening, admiring, and—almost—believing. It was so wonderfully done: the whole invented narrative, the squalid details, the sordid motive, the escape from justice owing to the presence on the jury of a friend of the prisoner, the verdict of “Not Guilty” rendered by an eleven of the vaunted Palladium starved into acquiescence by one determined boot-eater—all this the venerable old gentleman related with the utmost sincerity and circumstantiality.