Recollections

But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching.

I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening light. "Christianity," he said, "is the moonlight of the soul." It was note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always reserve.

There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of the _Bards of the Bible_ and other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when his congregation built this church for him: "You have started the Church of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church." To which the other George fittingly responded "that the Church had its Saviour already and it was a plain man"s business to preach His plain meaning."

But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have not heard from other mortal lips--I do not hope to hear again--such an expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abas.e.m.e.nt before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the far-off haven to which creation moves.

The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had upon the munic.i.p.al spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world, missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest, the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright--of whom Dawson always spoke as the "great Liberal party"--a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man, whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the Nonconformists of his day and many others.

On one memorable afternoon, he introduced me to John Bright. I do not think I ventured to take any share in the conversation between the two, but I recall one interesting pa.s.sage of it "Tell me, friend George,"

said Bright, "you have, I suppose, as large an experience in public speaking as any man in England. Have you any acquaintance with the old nervous tremor still?" "No," said Dawson, "or if I have, it is a mere momentary qualm which is gone before I can realise it." "Now, for my part," said the great Tribune, "I have had practice enough but I have never risen to address an audience, large or small, without experiencing a shaking at the knees and the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat."

When I enlisted under Dawson"s banner, on the _Birmingham Morning News_, I was the junior reporter, but in the course of a month or two, I was promoted and became the recognised descriptive writer on the staff.

Throughout my journalistic experience I have been fortunate in one respect. The men under whom I have worked have, for the most part, had the knack of extorting one"s best, and one of the ways of extorting the best of an enthusiastic youngster is to let him know cordially when he has done well. I shall never forget the flush of resolve which came over me when Dawson first laid his hand upon my shoulder with a cheery "Bravo, my lad," in acknowledgment of a piece of work of mine. It was the first really great chance I had had. I was just newly married at the time and supposing my work to be over for the day I was taking my way homeward, when the printer"s "devil" overtook me after a breathless run and told me that I was wanted at the office. I went back to learn that there was a mine on fire at Black Lake, some seven miles away, and I was bidden to go and see what was to be seen there.

A hasty search through the time-table showed that there was no train running in that direction for an hour or two and so I was bidden to take a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom"s top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The mine was situated in the midst of an open field and there was a great surging crowd about it which made way for me at a word. Round about the bed shafts of the mine, the downcast and the upcast, a little s.p.a.ce was held voluntarily clear and half a dozen men in coaly flannels were standing there. A little tin pot of an engine in a miniature of an engine-house was labouring and panting at a little distance, and almost as I arrived upon the scene, the great iron bucket capable of containing as I should judge some five or six hundred gallons, was brought from the upcast, lowered there, set upon a trolley and then run along the rails until it could be emptied into the shaft in which the fire was raging.

This poor attempt to extinguish the flames was continued for perhaps a quarter of an hour, but at last one of the little band said, "This is no good, lads, we might as well stand round in a ring and spit at it.

We shall have to get the "Stinktors" out. A man or two will have to go down." The coal-smeared men were all standing close together and they looked at each other with faces pale beneath the grime. For a second or two none of them spoke, but at last one said, "Will you make one?" and the first man answered with a mere nod and a sullen-sounding growl.

The others were appealed to each in turn, and each gave the same sulky seeming acquiescence. I had at the moment no idea as to what it was actually proposed to do, but the plan was soon made clear. What the first speaker had called "stinktors" turned out to be little barrel-shaped objects about one foot by two.

They were called "l"extincteur," and they contained some gas which in combination with water was fatal to fire. But when I reflected that in a confined s.p.a.ce like that into which they proposed to venture, any gas which was fatal to fire would in all probability be fatal to human life, I almost wondered if the men were mad. Mad or no, they made their preparations with a deliberate swiftness which showed that they knew perfectly well what they were about. The man who had first proposed the venture was the first to set out upon it. The large iron bucket, technically called "bowk," was attached to the steel wire rope which hung about the smouldering shaft. The man stepped into this, the chain was pa.s.sed about his waist, he was smothered in heavy flannels which were tied about him with cords; the end of a long coil of dirty, oily, coaly, three-ply twine was fastened round his right wrist, and he was swung into the smoke. The word was pa.s.sed to the engine-room, the little tin pot of an engine began to pant and snort 30 or 40 yards away and the man dropped out of sight. The coal-smeared comrade who had charge of the twine paid it out delicately fathom by fathom. It was the only link between the adventurer down below and the chance of life, and the merest tug at it would have caused an immediate reversal of the engine and would have brought him back to bank. But no signal came, and for anything that anybody there could have told, the man below might have been suffocated by the smoke. There was not a sound to be heard but the creaking of the wheel as it revolved above the shaft and the hoa.r.s.e panting of the little engine, and the crowd which had by this time grown to vast dimensions waited in so tense a silence that there was something awful in it.

How long we waited I cannot tell, but at last the signal came. The word was flashed to the engine room and the rope came gliding swiftly upwards. The hero was comatose and was hanging all limp and loose by the chain which had been pa.s.sed about his waist. He was seized, swung to one side and lowered and landed and one great fiery flake of flannel as big as a man"s hand fell from the rough garments in which he was swathed from head to foot. A bottle of whisky came from somewhere and was put to his lips and in a while he recovered consciousness though he was still gasping and choking and his eyes were streaming. In the meantime another man, as good as he, was ready, and he came back, as it turned out afterwards, blinded for life, but neither that nor anything that fear could urge could stay the rest, and man after man went down and faced that lurid smoke and h.e.l.l of darkness undismayed, until at last their valour won the day and they brought out every man and boy and beast. One coaly giant yelled, "That"s the lot," when the last batch came up, and then the crowd went mad, weeping, cheering, dancing mad. I have seen many deeds of valour in my time, both in peace and war, but I have never seen anything to match the Black Lake rescue for deliberate courage.

I feel inclined to say less about the courage displayed by the members of the next rescue party whose work I saw, for the very sufficient reason that I was a member of it To tell the honest truth, I had not the remotest idea that I was courting any sort of danger. At the Pelsall Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of absolute starvation. There was always the certainty that the inrush of water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact, proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the first body was recovered.

I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began it in a rather curious fashion. The place was a wretched little mining village with a solitary beer shop in it, and there was only one house in which it was possible to secure decent accommodation. I bargained with its tenant for a bed, and agreed to pay him half-a-crown a night for the accommodation. Forbes had made a precisely similar arrangement with the woman of the house, and there was but a single bedroom to be disposed of. Neither of us knew anything of the other"s bargain until the following morning. Forbes was under the belief that an attempt at descent was intended to be made that night, and that it was to break into an old abandoned air-way which had long been bricked up at the side of the shaft, and was believed to lead to the stables of the mine which were situated at a point above the level of the flood.

The dialect of the Black Country, when spoken at its broadest, is not easy for a stranger to understand. I, as a native of the district, was of course familiar with it, but Forbes was out of his element altogether, and might almost have tried talking chockjaw. I, knowing perfectly well that the intended attempt could not be made for at least twenty-four hours, went away with a comfortable mind and slept in Bailey"s cottage. When I left the door next morning I saw striding towards me through the mud a very begrimed and unprepossessing-looking figure. It was, after all, a man with a two days" beard, a very dirty face, a collarless, grimy shirt, who wore heavy ankle Jack-boots, and had his trousers rolled above his ankles. This person accosted me brusquely. "What are you doing in that cottage there?" he asked me, and I asked in turn, "what business of his that might be." He told me he had hired and paid for the only available bed in the house from the landlady, and I told him that I had hired and paid for the same accommodation through the landlord. The stranger claimed precedence, and was good enough to tell me that if he found me attempting to infringe upon his privileges he would take the liberty of throwing me out of the window. I was five-and-twenty at this time, stood five feet eleven in my socks, and reckoned myself a pretty good man with my hands, as a pupil of the old Slasher had a right to be, and in considerable wrath at the stranger"s insolence, I drew myself up shoulder to shoulder with him, and told him hotly that that was a game that two might play at. There came a quiet humorous gleam into his eye, and when he looked at me for half a minute he burst into a great roar of laughter. "Newspaper man?"

he asked me. I answered in the affirmative, and he stretched out an unwashed hand. "I am Forbes," he said. "I am here for the _Daily News_; if I can"t bully a man I make friends with him."

Now Forbes for years had been one of my heroes and I was simply delighted to meet him. We struck up an immediate friendship but in an hour he turned into bed and I saw him no more until the following morning when I believed that I had made of him an enemy for life. I learned at the mine head the hour at which the rescue party was to descend and I made arrangements to join it. Then I walked in to Walsall and there hired a saddle horse which I bestowed in the stables of the beer shop. This done, I made my way back to the mine and found the party just in readiness to make the descent. There were six of us, all told, and the little contingent was captained by Mr Walter Neas, who, partly as a reward for gallantry as I believe, was afterwards appointed manager of Her Majesty"s mines in Warora, Central India. We were all lowered in a skip together and the position of the air-way having been precisely ascertained one man lay face downwards on the skip"s bottom and broke through the brickwork with a pick. The sullen waters of the pool were only some eight or ten feet beneath us. The bricks splashed in one after the other until there was a s.p.a.ce large enough for a man to whirl himself into it, and one by one we entered the pa.s.sage. It was a tremendous scramble, and here and there the roof of the place had sunk so low that we had hard work to squeeze through on our hands and knees.

In places we had almost s.p.a.ce to walk upright. We came at last upon a face of brick, the wall of the stable for which we were bound and beyond which there was some faint hope of finding the imprisoned men. The sound of our picks elicited no response though we paused more than once to listen, but the wall being at length broken down, we entered the stable and I was the first of the party to perceive the dead body of a man who sat leaning against the wall of coal looking for all the world like a wax-work figure.

I was holding a candle to the dead man"s face and we were all gathered round when the light went out suddenly as if it had been quenched in water. In a second we were in pitch darkness and our leader called out "Choke damp--back for your lives," and in the pitchy darkness back we struggled. I have forgotten to say that water was running down the air-way like a little mill-stream, though it was barely over shoe-tops.

We scrambled on with the deadly gas following us, sucked and drawn along by the draught of air. I was last but one and was saved many of the bruises and excoriations which befell the leader. The warning voice would come out of the darkness, "duck here," or "hands and knees," and on we toiled, panting and perspiring, until we reached the shaft and were all drawn up again. I dried myself roughly before a roaring fire in the hovel of the mine and then made all haste to the beer shop where I mounted my horse and rode full tilt into Birmingham. The paper had gone to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was, to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode back to Pelsall. There I found Forbes at breakfast--he asked where I had been and I produced the paper and showed my work in silence. He read it through without a word of comment, good, bad or indifferent, laid it down upon the table and left the room. I heard him rummaging about in the chamber overhead and by and by he came down with a portmanteau in his hand and without a word or a look left the house. I thought that he was galled to feel that he had been beaten by a novice.

Two years had elapsed when I met him again. I found him by hazard in the Ludgate Bar, which was then a great resort of the bigger men among the London journalists. As I entered he sat among a knot of his companions.

Tom Hood was there as I remember, and Henry Sampson, founder of the _Referee_ with Major Henty, the famous writer of books for boys, and poor brilliant young Evelyn Jerrold. Forbes greeted me boisterously, and, springing from his seat, clapped me upon the back. He took me to his friends and introduced me with words that put me to the blush.

"Here," said he, "is a man who writes English, and here is the only man who ever beat me on my own ground." "No," I answered, "it was my ground, Mr Forbes, and I should not have beaten you if you had spoken the language of the natives." I never had a better or more generous friend than Forbes.

The _World_ Journal, founded by Edmund Yates, was just then entering into its first dawn of success. Forbes had been asked to write a series of articles for it on a subject which, as he confessed, had no particular charm for him. He handed it over to me and that gave me my first chance in the higher journalism of London. But I am running far ahead now and there is much to tell before my narrative arrives legitimately at this point.

The _Birmingham Morning News_ was a financial failure from the first, and towards the end of its second year its proprietors determined to reconstruct it. How or by whom they were advised I never knew, but a person who had no acquaintance either with finance or with journalism was entrusted with the command and Dawson threw up his post in dudgeon.

I had fully intended to resign with him, but I had no time given me in which to do it, and in the s.p.a.ce of a few weeks after the arrival of the newcomer, I was free to seek my fortune in London. By the good offices of the late Charles Williams, war correspondent on the staff of the _Morning Advertiser_, I was introduced to Colonel Richards, the editor of that journal, and did actually secure a berth as gallery reporter, but I was suddenly called back to the country by a grave domestic trouble, no less than the illness of my wife, which terminated fatally eight or nine weeks g 97 Recollections later. When I returned to London my place was filled and for a while the outlook was extremely desolate.

My funds were very limited to begin with, and in spite of all the care I could exercise they dwindled at an appalling rate. I abode in a shabby little back bedroom in a lodging off the Gray"s Inn Road and sat at my table wrapped in an ulster to prevent myself from freezing, whilst I wrote, and sent broadcast prose and verse, essays, short stories, journalistic trifles of every kind. All were ignored or returned.

Where the handsome offices of the _Daily News_ now stand in Bouverie Street, there was at that time a doleful place of resort for life"s failures. It was called the Suss.e.x Hotel. The _habitues_ of the place were for the most part broken journalists and barristers, some of whom were men of considerable native talent and attainment. They were mostly given to drink, but they contrived to maintain at least such an outward semblance of respectability as enabled them to loaf about the Fleet Street offices and bars without being actually the objects of derision.

I do not suppose that there is anywhere at this time such a contingent to be found in London. I went to live amongst them for economy"s sake.

We each paid sixpence a night in advance for a bed, the linen of which had a look of having been washed in tobacco juice and dried up a chimney. When a guest had paid his money, he was supplied with a key and about an inch of thin candle, which was affixed by its own grease to a broken shard of pottery. I spent about six weeks there and during the latter part of the time at least, my one daily meal consisted of a hard-rinded roll and thick chocolate. My belongings had all dwindled away, and at last I found myself penniless and homeless in the midst of London.

It is not, when all is said and done, a very dreadful thing for a healthy man to be without food for a few days, nor is it such a hardship as the fastidious might fancy to s.n.a.t.c.h one"s nightly rest on the benches of the Embankment. I pa.s.sed four nights there, chivied with the rest of the abject crowd by the ubiquitous policeman with his eternal "Wake up, move on there!" and for four days I was entirely without food.

I can quite honestly say that I cared very little for these things in themselves, but where the iron enters into a man"s soul in such conditions is when he feels that his degradation is unmerited and knows that he has powers within him which, if he could find a vent for them, might lead him on to fame and fortune. The exasperating raging bitterness of this, the grudging envy with which he looks at those more fortunate than himself, whose intellectual equipment he despises, these are the things which sear the heart.

I had resolved--let come what might come--that I would never go home to confess myself a failure. The thing, of course, might have had a tragic ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises as that in which I was engaged, but in my case, fate ordered otherwise, I have told the tale elsewhere, but it will bear re-telling. I was drifting about Fleet Street, mournfully conscious of the extent to which my appearance had deteriorated, of the unblacked boots and the yellow linen, and the general air of being unkempt and unwashed, when I found myself standing in front of the window of a filter-maker"s shop, close by old Temple Bar. In this window were displayed a number of gla.s.s domes, under each of which a little jet of water tossed about a cork ball. The ball would soar sometimes to the roof of the dome and would then topple over, sometimes to be caught midway upon the jet and sometimes to fall to the bottom, but always to be kept drenched and dancing in a melancholy futile way. I was comparing it with myself when a hand was clapped upon my shoulder and a jolly voice accosted me. The speaker was John Lovell, the president of the Press a.s.sociation, which had its offices in Wine Office Court hard by. He could not have failed to be aware of my condition, but he gave no sign of having observed it and asked me if I could spare the time to earn a couple of guineas, by writing "a good, sea-salt, tarry British article about Christopher Columbus." Time pressed, he told me, and he was too busy to undertake the article himself. If I would accompany him to the office, he would supply me with the necessary materials and would pay money down for the work. On to the office I went with him, with a sudden bright confidence that here at last the lane of ill-luck had found a turning. I was ushered into a little private room, and writing materials were set before me. In a couple of hours I sent in my copy, and there came back to me at once a pill-box, on the lid of which was inscribed in a very delicate handwriting, "The prescription to be taken immediately." The box being opened was found to contain two sovereigns and two shillings, wrapped in cotton wool, and I went away to break a fast which was then entering on its fifth day. My next proceeding, after having somewhat refurbished myself, was to go back to the dingy old hole in Bouverie Street and to write an article on "Impecunious Life in London."

During the brief run of the _Ill.u.s.trated Midlands News_, to which I had been a frequent contributor of verse, the late Richard Gowing, then editor of the _School Board Chronicle_, had officiated as Mr Joseph Hatton"s a.s.sistant editor. He had just acquired the copyright in the _Gentleman"s Magazine_, and I bethought me that here lay my opportunity.

I took the article to him, and after turning the ma.n.u.script pages swiftly over, he decided to accept it. It ran, I think, to two and thirty pages, and I received his cheque for ten shillings and sixpence a page.

Thus armed, I felt more than fit to face the world again, and it was whilst I was yet in this new flush of fortune that I walked into the Ludgate Bar as already recorded, and for the second time encountered Archibald Forbes.

And now began a period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand times more about the taste and temper of the public.

He had conceived the idea of a series of articles on our civilisation, in which the writer should deal with the sores and oddities of it, and into this work I plunged with all the splendid vigour and avidity of youth, I chose the hangman as my first theme, because I happened to have had an acquaintance with a gentleman of that profession, and to have been engaged in some personal dealings with him. His name was James Smith, and he lived about midway between Rowley Regis and Dudley. I held that property in trust for my infant daughter, and the rents were collected for me weekly by a little lame clockmaker named Chesson. At one time my business often led me along that road, and I was familiar with the figure of a great, sprawling, muscular-looking, idle fellow, who, whenever I pa.s.sed him, was leaning across the garden-gate in his shirt sleeves and smoking. He seemed to have no sort of employment, and, though I did not notice it at the time, it occurred to me afterwards, when I knew the truth about him, that I had never seen him exchange so much as a pa.s.sing salutation with a single human creature. The rents came in regularly for some time, and then it was reported to me that my idle tenant had not paid. Time went on, and the idle tenant _never_ paid. I determined to look into the thing myself, and I set out with the lame clockmaker to interview the man. He was sprawling over the gate as usual when we reached his cottage, and, to my surprise, the little lame man lagged some yards behind and refused to approach him. I explained my errand to the idle tenant, and he lugged out a handful of half-crowns.

"That cove," he said, indicating the clockmaker ""as never been a-nigh me this four months. The money"s always bin "ere for "im if "e"ed a-come for it. What d"you take me for?" he asked savagely. "I ain"t a wild beast, am I? It"s Government work, and somebody"s got to do it." It turned out upon inquiry that my collector had actually paid three or four weeks" instalment out of his own pocket, rather than face the hangman, after he had discovered the nature of his trade. I am not writing melodrama, but it is a simple fact that I have never seen a man more profoundly distressed. The hangman"s speech was broken and obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint together.

His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes, has some sort of human feeling.

At the time at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who, for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the p.a.w.n-broker--a harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned out my first contribution to the _World_, he sat painting and smoking close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the pa.s.sion, the very rage of achievement, which possessed one"s work, are not to be forgotten.

The work took Yates"s fancy mightily, and he had the good sense and generosity to let me know it. The Bentley Balladist wrote years ago:

"Excuse me, gents, but to poetic ponies, One ounce of praise is worth ten tons of corn."

Yates did not stint the corn because he was generous with the praise, and throughout our a.s.sociation he was most unfailingly good and kind.

He was a bitter enemy and a hard striker, and he went into battle with a good heart and made for himself many foes, but a more loyal colleague and leader it would have been hard to find.

My search for human oddities led me into strange places and made me acquainted with strange people. The most astonishing and complete example of human vanity and pretence I ever encountered was one of these. He was a pavement artist and he had a pitch outside the railings of the great terminus in Euston Road, where he used to sit and patronise London. There was something in the fellow"s look which invited me, and when I got into conversation with him, I learned that nothing but jealousy had kept him from taking a high place as a scene-painter, and that artists of far less merit than himself had a place, year after year, on the line at the Academy. Where he had picked up his phrases it was of course impossible to guess, but he talked a good deal of the dissipation of the grey matter of the brain, which resulted from his artistic occupation.

He had one awful daub which he called "The Guardship Attacked," in which was depicted a vessel, broadside on to the spectator, wedged very tightly into the sea and sky of an impossible blue, with little pills of white smoke clinging to a porthole here and there. This work he told me was his "chef de hover," and he volunteered to furnish me with a copy of it on cardboard for half a crown, and to deliver it at my lodgings for his "bus fare and a drink. I closed with that proposal and in a week"s time he brought the work to me. My chum"s painting tools and easels were scattered about the room in which I received him, and a dozen or so of sketches in various stages of progress were propped up on the buffet and the mantelpiece. He surveyed these with an ineffable sniff and said: "Oh! I perceive you are a brother of the brush." I took him outside to give him his promised drink and found that he was accompanied by an elderly, bearded, incredibly dirty man, who dealt in chick-weed, and who shared his room with him in Gees Court, Oxford Street. This fearsome person was absolutely alive with vermin and his unkempt grey beard was as the wrinkled sea. The pavement artist ordered a drink for him at my expense and when he had consumed it, he told me that I was a patron of the arts and wanted to embrace me. I held him off by the aid of an umbrella, and his companion told me that he had been a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and a companion for dukes and princes. However that might have been, the wretch had certainly the unmistakable _no_ accent of a gentleman and spoke with a certain beery eloquence which reminded one of poor Tom Robertson"s Eccles.

My acquaintance with these gentlemen led me to a somewhat familiar knowledge of Gee"s Court I have not been near the place now for more than thirty years and, for aught I know to the contrary, it may long since have been wiped out of existence. But when I knew it it was an awful place, the haunt of thieves and prost.i.tutes, the vilest offsprings of the streets of London. What with the aid of the Scripture-readers, the various nursing and charitable sisterhoods, and the young medical accoucheurs in their fourth year, with whom I sc.r.a.ped acquaintance, I got to be quite well known in Gee"s Court and could go about in safety.

But one evening as I was entering the low-browed slimy archway by which it was approached from Oxford Street, a young policeman stopped me and asked me if I knew where I was going. I told him that I was quite intimate with the place and quite safe there. "Well, sir," he answered, "you know your own business best, but I wouldn"t go along there for a fiver." My investigations had by this time brought me acquainted as I have said already with all manner of queer people. Amongst others I recall an omnibus driver who told me that he was the rightful heir to a big estate by Guilford. At my invitation he told his story, and he began it with this astounding proclamation: "It"s like this, sir," he began, "my grandfather died childless," and when I failed to disguise my amus.e.m.e.nt he explained. "He was not really my grandfather but he was my father"s uncle and we always called him grandfather." Then he went into a long and tangled statement of which I could neither make head nor tail, but the fact remained clear that in his own opinion he ought to have been a millionaire or thereabouts, and by rights able to pa.s.s his time in smoking cigars and drinking champagne wine, which he appeared to regard as the summit of human felicity.

The contract I had made with Edmund Yates was for a series of thirteen articles, and when it was fulfilled, there was no more immediate work for me to do and another little period of stress set in. But in the meantime I had written a little handful of short stories, and one of these, ent.i.tled _An old Meerschaum_, I sent in to Messrs Chatto & Windus. It owed its immediate acceptance to an accident Mr George Augustus Sala had agreed with that firm to supply a two-part story ent.i.tled _Dr. Cupid_. For some reason or another the second part of this story was never forthcoming, and my copy arriving in the nick of time was used to stop the gap. It brought me a regular commission, and month by month thereafter, for quite a considerable time, I contributed a short story to the _Belgravia_ Magazine. Very early in the history of this connection a curious accident happened. I was looking forward to a cheque for seventeen guineas and it came to me as a surprise when, from paymasters so scrupulously punctual, no cheque arrived at the date fixed for its delivery. I could afford to wait for a day or two and I waited, but by and by things became pressing. My landlord, who was a sorter in the Post Office and not particularly well paid, grew exigent The supply in the cupboard became scanty and yet scantier. I found my way to "my uncle"s" once more, and week after week went by until I was once more face to face with that grim phantom of actual want which I had already once encountered. Partly from pride and partly from fear of disturbing a valuable arrangement, I refrained from any approach to my publishers, but at last when I had decided upon it as an unavoidable necessity, a slatternly little maid came in with a dirty mildewed envelope between finger and thumb and said she thought that it was addressed to me. I pounced upon it and there, all soaked and bedraggled but still quite legible, I found the cheque, which had been sent to me nearly a month before, and it had been by some accident dropped into the area where it had lain unregarded all this time. There was a feast that night, but the truth is that life was one constant vicissitude, an unfailing series of ups and downs, of jolly happy-go-lucky rejoicings with comrades who were equally careless with myself, and of alternating spells of hardship.

"Literature," said Sir Walter, "is an excellent walking stick but a very bad crutch," and so in truth I have found it all my days.

As one is drawn into late middle-age there are few things more affecting and in a measure more surprising than the recollection of the ardent hero-worship of one"s youth. Whether, if my dear old chief were back again and I could survey him in the light of a riper experience than I had during his lifetime, I should still be able to offer him such an undivided fealty as I paid him then, I cannot guess; but all the other G.o.ds of youth and early manhood, with one exception only, have fallen somewhat into the sere and yellow leaf. For some six or eight enthusiastic years, I was saturated with Carlyle; I thought Carlyle and talked and wrote in unconscious Carlylese, and one day when in the library at the British Museum I got an actual bodily sight of my deity, I was translated into a heaven of adoration which is really, at this time of day, pathetic to remember. I knew him from his portraits at a glance and I was a.s.sured of his ident.i.ty, if any a.s.surance had been necessary, by the profound and flattering deference which was paid to him by the officials and by the unanimity with which the students in the big circular hall found it necessary to pa.s.s the place at which he had taken his seat. He was not there more than a quarter of an hour, and during that time he behaved quite like an ordinary mortal except when he once produced a dark red handkerchief of enormous size and broke the silence of the place by a nasal blast which sounded like a trumpet call to arms. When he arose to go I arose also and followed him; I could no more have helped it than if he had been a magnet and I a bit of iron filing. He walked to Oxford Street and took a seat in a "bus bound for Chelsea. I followed and sat opposite, hardly daring to lift my eyes to him until I found that he was wholly absorbed in the notes he had taken.

When he alighted I followed him all the way to Cheyne Walk and watched until the door closed behind him.

A week later Dawson was lecturing at the Birkbeck Inst.i.tute and I went to hear him and afterwards drove with him to the Victoria Hotel at Euston where he was staying for the night. I told him of the tremendous adventure just recounted and he asked me if I would like to meet Carlyle. In the explosive mood which came natural to seven and twenty, I answered that I would go on my hands and knees from there to Chelsea only to hear him speak and to be able to boast that I had shaken him by the hand. "No need for that," said Dawson, "I"ll take you to him one of these days, when I have an hour or two to spare in town," and then he began to tell me that he had often thought of leaving behind him some intimate record of his a.s.sociation with the great man whose most popular and familiar translator he himself had been to the people of England.

"But," he acknowledged, "I have always been too busy or too idle and I begin to fear that that duty will never be performed. I"ll tell you what," he added suddenly, "I"ll hand the whole thing over to you if you care to have it. I make a point of going now and then down to Rickmansworth, where I had my first cure of souls and where there are still a few of my old friends left. We"ll go down there together and have a quiet day." Dawson began straightway to open, as it were, a bag of samples. He told me three stories of Carlyle; they were all I ever had from him, for that was the last occasion on which we met. I learned that when Carlyle, who was then engaged in the preparation of those seven tremendous volumes of _The Life of Frederick the Great_, made an excursion into Germany for the purpose of getting a view of his hero"s battlefields, Dawson was one of his travelling companions--the other was a German gentleman who, according to my old chiefs account, did a great deal of what he Called the underground work on which Carlyle"s monumental edifice was reared. The trio, if I remember rightly, rested at Munich and the historian expressed a wish to find some quiet place in which he could a.s.sort his notes and at the same time enjoy a day or two"s repose. Dawson and his companion set themselves to work and found a charming little farmhouse within easy distance of the city. "And between ourselves," said he, "we weren"t sorry to be left for a little while to our own devices; we were like a pair of schoolboys broken loose. We went to the theatre and afterwards dropped in to listen to the music in the Beer Garden and altogether we made rather a late night of it. We were breakfasting in the open air at our hotel the next morning about eleven o"clock when suddenly I spied Carlyle with his coat tails flying and his old felt hat rammed on angrily anyhow. He was gesticulating wildly with his walking-stick and began to talk whilst he was twenty yards away. "Ca" ye that a quiet place?" he shouted, "ca" ye that a quiet place? At three o"clock they d.a.m.ned c.o.c.ks began to crow, and a hour later they d.a.m.ned oxen began to low and every dog was barking for a mile around; and that," he said, casting both hands to heaven as if he were appealing for a judgment on some heart-breaking iniquity, "and that"s your notion of a quiet place!" The culprits looked guiltily at each other, but for the life of them they could not refrain from smiling; the smile became a laugh in spite of effort, and Carlyle, after one withering glance at the pair of them and one frenzied exclamation of "Ma Goad!" dropped suddenly into a chair and laughed uproariously."

When Emerson was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods.

Life was not worth living--the whole world was rotten and wrong--and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow"s _Golden Legend_, why G.o.d didn"t lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like gla.s.s. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned supreme. "And in a world like this, George," he was concluding with a tragic emphasis, "I see nothing for it, for two honest men like you and me, but just to sit down on yon heap of road metal and have a quiet smoke together."

I wish I could tell the third story with half the gusto with which Dawson related it. At the time of that visit to Germany of which I have already spoken, there was no Prussian Empire. Bismarck may, even then, have dreamed of it, but what is now a united Germany was split into an infinite number of little princ.i.p.alities. In one of these, a Serene Transparency--or some personage of that order--held rule over a handful of subjects. It happened that he was a profound worshipper of Carlyle, regarding him as the greatest humorist, philosopher and historian of his age. He wrote to Carlyle a letter full of German enthusiasms, begging him to name an hour at which he could present himself for the personal delivery of his homage. "But," said Carlyle, "we are in the man"s territory and it is only in the fitness of things that we should pay our respects to him." Accordingly the two set out together and reaching the palace proposed to send in their names. They were encountered by some kind of glorified flunkey, an official of the toy court of the princ.i.p.ality--who a.s.sured Carlyle that it was impossible to present him to the Serene Transparency in the costume he was then wearing. Carlyle wanted sardonically to know what was the matter with the costume, and the major-domo instanced his hat. Carlyle tore the hat savagely from his head and punched it two or three times before he thundered: If His Serene Transparency objected to the hat he might object; it was the only hat the philosopher owned and he had no immediate intention to provide himself with another! And whilst he was brandishing the hat and raging at the astonished major-domo, who should appear on the scene but His Serene Transparency, who rushed forward and, falling on his knees, embraced the legs of the amazed philosopher. Dawson declared the whole scene to have been beyond pen and pencil. Carlyle"s face was a wonder for wrath and astonishment, but that of the court official was beyond speaking for amazement. Who or what he supposed the visitor to be was altogether beyond conjecture!

I was still waiting for that promised invitation to Rickmansworth when Dawson died. He had suffered for some years, though he did not know it, from an aneurism of the aorta, and the bursting of the aneurism into the larynx was the cause of death. He used to say that he should pray to be taken suddenly and to be spared the misery of a prolonged deathbed. He had his wish, for it was all over in a few minutes and was absolutely painless. I was staying with a chum of mine in his chambers in Dane"s Inn--long since gone the way of all stone, bricks and mortar. My host came in with a newspaper and laid it on the table before me with his finger on a cross-headed paragraph, "Death of George Dawson, M.A."

Nothing in all my experience had ever hit me so before, and whatever may be held in reserve for me, nothing can ever so profoundly affect me again. The whole world went dark and empty--George Dawson dead! He had been my man of men, for years my dearest friend and helper, my Moses in the spiritual wilderness through which it is the doom of every young and ardent soul to travel, and with his going, everything seemed blank and waste.