"For near at hand there lay such countless woes, Such up-heaped horrors as no tongue can tell, Where helpless Pity"s ineffectual throes Made that long shambles seem one ghastly h.e.l.l, And all the broken, battered, blood-stained rows Of dead seem blessed in that they sleep so well; Where the soul sickened and the heart grew faint At scenes which Dante scarce had striven to paint."
The rum was all drunk and the wine-gourds were all empty--the last song was sung and the last tale told, and we betook ourselves to rest. Our jackdaw friend, for economic reasons, had found a lodging elsewhere. He found it better to drop in upon the rest of us when there was anything special going than it would have been to forage for himself. By the time at which he left us, it had turned much colder, and the rain was freezing as it fell. The village streets were covered with a slippery _verglas_ and here and there, where a siege sh.e.l.l had fallen, there was an embarra.s.sing hole, not easily to be distinguished in the night-time from the merest puddle. There was scarcely a light agleam in the whole village, and it is not at all a thing to be surprised at that our jackdaw lost his way and had a stumble or two into the icy pools which beset him. He did succeed at last in finding the hut in which he lived, or rather, he found the site of it, for an 18 centimetre sh.e.l.l had burst there in his absence and the hut was not. We were making our apology for breakfast in the dusk before dawn when he returned to us. He was clothed in a thin armour of ice from head to foot and it trickled from him in little showers as he stood forlornly before us. The hardest heart must needs have pitied him, but it was he himself who gave the pathos of the show away. "Has n.o.body got a cup of tea?" he asked. "Tea," cried Bond Moore, who had a special mis-liking for him, "tea, you------" (the blank may be filled in according to fancy, on the understanding that it was neither polite nor complimentary) "there"s no tea within five hundred miles." "Oh!" said the unhappy man, "I wish I had never come on this campaign, I do so miss my little comforts!" There was n.o.body there, I am sure, who would have been much shocked if, in the circ.u.mstances, our jackdaw had been even blasphemously profane. A man in his condition may say almost anything and may expect to be forgiven, but at this most inadequate bleat we yelled with laughter, and the poor jackdaw stood staring at us with eyes of suffering wonder for a full three minutes before we could rouse ourselves to attend to his necessities.
When I first went out to Turkey I was very much under the domination of Mr Gladstone"s opinion. I was quite full of the unspeakable Turk and his wickednesses and was quite as anxious as the great Liberal statesman himself to see the "sick man" bundled out of Europe bag and baggage. But when I began to move about the country and to meet, as I was forced to do, men of all sorts and conditions among its native population, my sentiments with respect to the Turk underwent a thorough and rapid change. The real people, the men of the commercial and artisan cla.s.ses and the rank and file of the army, are amongst the best people I have ever known. Their religion enjoins them to sobriety, and as a race they are brave, truthful and kindly, and I never met one authentic instance in which an act of cruelty was chargeable to the men of the regular forces. The hordes of Bashi-Bazouks, of Smyrniotes and Tripolites were of course a set of most unspeakable ruffians, and there are probably no more deplorable specimens of human nature in the world than are to be found among the Paris-bred sp.a.w.n of the harem.
Almost immediately on my return to London I lunched with Canon Liddon of St Paul"s. Our talk naturally turned upon the campaign, and in the course of it I gave him an account of the affair at Guemlik, as being typical of whatever disturbances had taken place between the citizen Turk and the Bulgarians. When General Gourko first broke into the great plain south of the Balkans with his Cossack advance guard, the Christian population rose rejoicingly to receive them and persuaded themselves without difficulty that the rule of their Mahommedan masters was dead and done with then and there. They were supplied with arms and were urged to revolt. There is no doubt whatever that they had a great deal to complain of. They had been under the heel of official oppression for centuries, although in that respect they were not much worse off than their Mahommedan neighbours, but they were a despised and abject race who ate forbidden food and who lived in an almost inconceivable condition of personal uncleanness. To the Turkish peasant dirt is anathema maranatha; in his own station of life he is the cleanest man in the world, and if there is any dirtier person to be found than a Bulgarian peasant, as I knew him in the war year, I can only say that I have not yet discovered him. The Christian population (G.o.d save the mark!) were forbidden by law to bear arms, and they were cowards by tradition. Villagers of the two races lived peacefully enough together, though there was an open disdain on the one side always and a smouldering hatred on the other.
It befell that in a neighbouring village the Bulgarians broke into revolution, and all the able-bodied Turks in Guemlik sallied out to the a.s.sistance of their countrymen, leaving only a few infirm old men and the women and children. The Guemlik Christians, being persuaded that the fighting force would never return, rose _en ma.s.se_ and put every Turkish soul to death. The ma.s.sacre was characterised by a terrible ferocity; the bodies of the dead were hideously mutilated and were all hurled pell-mell into the well at the Turkish end of the village, and all the houses of that quarter were looted and burned down. Contrary to the expectations of the victors, the Turkish residents returned triumphant.
They took their revenge; they put the Christians to the sword, fired the Christian houses, and filled up the Christian well with corpses.
The account was quite equally balanced, but it is certain that the Bulgarians made the first move in the game. It was so everywhere, so far as my experience went, wherever the citizen Turk was drawn into the conflict Nothing viler than the conduct of the Government in letting loose its vast hordes of irregular soldiery with license to slay and pillage an unarmed population could possibly be conceived. But what I was concerned to prove was that the Mahommedan villagers had no part or lot in the cruelties of that time unless by way of stern reprisal.
Canon Liddon was anxious that I should lay my facts before Mr Gladstone.
He despatched a telegram to him and ascertained that he would be willing to receive me at Hawarden on the morrow, and armed with a brief letter of introduction, I set out next day, and found the great Liberal statesman placidly dozing in an armchair in a little study on the ground floor of the house. At first he hardly seemed to recognise why I was there, but in less than a minute he became astonishingly alert, and providing himself with hat and walking-stick took me out into the park.
He walked at an extraordinary pace and plied me with questions in those ringing, rolling, parliamentary tones of his, with which I had been familiar in the House of Commons two or three years before. He could not for one instant lay aside his platform manner, and before I had been in his society for two minutes I appreciated the statement attributed to Her late Majesty Queen Victoria, that Mr Gladstone always addressed her as if she were a public meeting. Every sentence was rounded, polished and precise, every syllable had its particular rhythmic weight and value, and with it all there was a certain suavity and courtesy which, for my own part, I thought very gracious and charming. I had heard one of his remarkable Budget speeches and knew already with what ease he handled figures, but he surprised me more than once by his quickness in calculation. He was questioning me as to Turkish methods of taxation: population of a province so many--piastres per head of population so many--what was the precise value of the piastre? Twopence and a fraction of a farthing.--Ah! in pounds sterling that would be approximately so much. He made his reckoning with lightning rapidity and he was always accurate, as I could tell, having all the figures at my fingers" ends just then.
After two hours" hard walking, he took me in to luncheon. We were by this time in the thick of our theme, and on our arrival at table he banished the servants from the room and himself carved at the sideboard and handed round the dishes. H e ate his own meal standing, and he carried on his questions all the while. I do not know if he had then made his famous rule about the seventy-two bites to a mouthful, but I certainly thought him anything but deliberate in eating. Whether he took much or little I could not tell, but he was certainly talking all the time, and I shall never forget the n.o.ble sonorosity of the tone with which he approached me with a dish in either hand and asked": "Can I a.s.sist you to another potato, Mr Murray?" The simple query was offered in the finest parliamentary manner. There were present at the meal the members of the family and one guest beside myself, a Mr Howard, a corpulent, silent gentleman, who accompanied us when we went out into the park again. We recommenced our walk at about two o"clock, and kept it up until the evening shades were growing pretty thick about us. I was inclined to be pretty glad when it was over, for though I was as hard as nails at that time, being fresh as I was from the severe training of the campaign, I was walked almost off my legs. The talk went on ding-dong all the time, and in the course of it my host asked me with what weapons the Zaptiehs--the mounted police who were relied on to keep order--and the irregulars who were committing unchecked atrocities everywhere, were respectively armed. I was compelled to tell him that the Zaptiehs carried an old-fashioned matchlock, whilst the Irregulars were in great part armed with the Winchester repeating rifle, which was then the latest invention of destructive science. The corpulent visitor had long since resigned the effort to keep within hearing. Gladstone faced round, and in those n.o.ble, oratorical tones of his called out, "Is it not odious, Howard; is it not odious?" The gentleman appealed to was utterly out of earshot, and came trotting briskly towards us to find out what the question meant, but Gladstone was away again at score, and he was again out-distanced in a minute. Gladstone spoke of the duty which was imposed upon him to turn out the Government of Lord Beaconsfield, of whom he invariably spoke as Mr Disraeli. I ventured to say to him, "You will have to fight for that, sir," when he turned upon me with a most vivid gesture, and striking his walking-stick upon the pathway with such vehemence that he made the gravel fly, answered me, "Aye, sir, and we shall fight." When the time came for me to go, he accompanied me to the hall, and with great courtesy a.s.sisted me into my overcoat with his own hands. It was a rather remarkable-looking garment, that overcoat, and one of a sort not often seen in England, but I had pa.s.sed through London so rapidly that I had had no time to replenish my wardrobe. The garment itself was woven of camel"s hair, and it was lined with bearskin. As he was helping me into it he asked, "Where did you obtain possession of this extraordinary garment, Mr Murray?" "I bought it, sir, in Bulgaria,"
I answered. "Ah," said he, with a perfectly grave face and falling back a step to look at it, "I have had much to say of the Bulgarian atrocities of late years, but this is the only one of which I have had ocular demonstration."
I met Mr Gladstone afterwards at a big social function which was engineered by the late William Woodhall, some time member for Stoke and Master of the Ordnance. Finding him unoccupied and alone, I ventured to ask to be recalled to his remembrance. "No need for that, Mr Murray," he answered, "no need for that," and plunged back straightway into the talk at Hawarden as if it had taken place only yesterday. There were all manner of amus.e.m.e.nts provided for Mr Wood-hall"s guests, and into one of them at least he plunged with the delighted enthusiasm of a boy.
Poor Charles Bertram, the conjurer, was there, and it was arranged that a hand of Napoleon should be played under his direction between the statesman and Sir Francis Burnand, then editor of _Punch_. "You, gentlemen, must decide between you," said the conjurer, "as to who is to win." It was agreed that Gladstone was to be the victor, and Bertram, who, of course, had not apparently seen the cards, instructed him as to what he was to lead and what to play in sequence, securing for him all five tricks out of an apparently impossible hand. He was immensely delighted and interested, and held a very animated conversation afterwards with Bertram on the art of conjuring.
A good many years later yet, when I brought over from Australia the nucleus of a comedy company to perform here in a piece of my own writing, I had amongst them a very remarkable child actor, whose name was Leo Byrne. He played the t.i.tle role in my comedy of _Neds Churn_, and when the provincial run of the piece was over he was employed by Sir Henry Irving to play the child"s part in Lord Tennyson"s tragedy of _Becket_. Mr Gladstone was present at one performance, and not wishing for some reason of his own to be identified by the public, took his seat out of view of the audience on the prompt side of the stage. Whilst the curtain was down, Mr Gladstone took the fict.i.tious son of the Fair Rosamund on his knee and began to question him. "You come from Australia, my little man?" he said. "Yes, sir," the boy answered. "And what do you think of England?" he was asked. "I think it is being ruined by the Liberal Party," Master Byrne responded. The great man laughed and suffered him to escape, which I am told he did very willingly. Mr Bram Stoker afterwards took the child apart and told him that one of these days he would be very proud of having been taken on that old gentleman"s knee. "Oh! I know," the imp responded, "it"s old Gladstone; I don"t want to be bothered with him. I have promised another boy to go and spin tops with him behind the scenes."
CHAPTER XII
First Fiction--_A Life"s Atonement_--The Casual Tramp--Poor Law Relief--Charles Reade--_The Cloister and the Hearth_-- Wilkie Collins--The Figure in Mediaeval Costume--_Joseph"s Coat_--At Rochefort--_Rainbow Gold_--The Anarchist--The Police--The Text of Scripture.
Whilst I was still engaged on the staff of the _Birmingham Morning News_, as I have mentioned previously, Mr Edmund Yates was running through its columns a novel which he ent.i.tled _A Bad Lot_. He was lecturing in America at the time, and must have been living a hand to mouth life with his story, for he brought it to an abrupt and rather disastrous conclusion. When the final instalment of copy was received there was a momentary consternation in the office. New arrangements were pending, but we had supposed ourselves to have at least two months in hand. In these circ.u.mstances my chief came to me and asked me if I thought that I could fill the gap. I was simply burning for a chance to try my hand at fiction, and I leapt eagerly at the opportunity. I began that very day and I wrote a chapter which I am quite sure must have led my readers to expect a tolerable weekly entertainment for some time, but I had no plot in mind and I had not the remotest notion as to whither I was going. I struggled on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe, in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked all my characters into such a tangle that, with the exception of the hero and heroine and a few subordinates, whose fate it was not necessary to particularise, I sent them all into a coal-mine, flooded the workings and drowned the lot of them.
A very able and kindly critic told me that this amorphous first attempt at fiction had flesh and blood but no bones, and I have learned since that in writing a work of imagination as in much more serious enterprises, the first essential is to be aware of your own purpose. For some years afterwards I tried my hand on the short story, but before I left England for the Russo-Turkish campaign, I had embarked upon a more ambitious work, which finally took shape in _A Life"s Atonement_. In the hurry of departure I forgot my ma.n.u.script and left it at my lodgings. I had quite resigned myself to think it lost, but when I received my first commission for a three-volume story, it occurred to me that the ma.n.u.script was worth inquiring after, and it surprised me agreeably to find that it had been preserved. It was finished, sent in and accepted, and achieved more than a commonplace success. New commissions came in, and I found myself fairly launched as a novelist.
There is one queer thing about that first book which no critic ever noticed so far as I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly unconscious plagiarism of _David Copperfield_. Had there been no Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the fable and nearly all the characters I owed to d.i.c.kens, and yet I can aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in the book, in any case, was real. I sent my tragic hero wandering about the country, finding shelter in all manner of low lodging-houses, and living generally the life of a tramp. Before I put him to that experience I went through it religiously myself, and for a whole seven weeks in the summer, after my return from Turkey, I was "on the road" as a casual tramp. It was my purpose to prove in my own person what I knew very well already, namely, that it was, as most unhappily it still is, actually impossible for a poor man honestly in search of work, to make his way through England and to hold body and soul together without infringing the law in one way or another.
I found that it was not possible. Well, I had seven weeks of it. I went under the name of "David Vane, compositor," as of course, I knew something about the printing trade. My clothes were shabby at the outset, but were utterly in rags when I had done. "David Vane" had many strange adventures, but the funniest was reserved for the close. I may say that I took a ten-pound note with me, and through the Post Office sent portions of it on before me and walked towards it.
When I got to the "George" at Hereford I had 7, 13s. 6d. left out of the 10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term for the former is the "spike," for the latter the "skipper." I went on "spike" and "skipper" both. I had sent a little portmanteau on before me to the "George" at Hereford, with the initials "D.C.M." at the side. In it I had a change of clothes and a shaving kit. When I got into Hereford I had had no shave for three or four weeks, my boots were absolutely worn out, my clothes were rags and tatters, and exposure to the sun had tanned my face. I drew my money at the Post Office at Hereford, and carrying it in my hand, for all my pockets were worn out, I reached the "George," a good old-fashioned county hotel.
A set of steps reached up to the main entrance, where stood a waiter with a professional napkin. He looked up the street, down the street, and across the street, smiling all the time--a proprietorial sort of smile. I talked to him from below--one always speaks from below with a sense of disadvantage--and said, "I want a room." He gave a wave of his napkin in answer, and said, "Go away, go away." But I did not go away.
I went up the steps, showed him my money, and told him not to play the fool. I said, "I want a room." He looked at me stolidly, but suddenly I discovered my portmanteau in a corner. I claimed it at once and mounted the stairs, the waiter following with his curiously feline footsteps, and murmuring at intervals, "Well, I am------!" He said it with great conviction, but he took me to the bath room nevertheless. I got a shave, changed my suit, and, as I was something of a dandy at the time, I affected certain airs as to the arrangement of my watch-chain and the like. I came out cleanshaven and with an eye-gla.s.s, and generally looking as different from the man who went in as it was possible to imagine. On the stairs I found my waiter ready, and when he saw me he said most emphatically that _he was_ ----. He took me to the coffee room, where I had a meal. He stood behind my chair, and by means of a mirror opposite I _saw_ him keep saying to himself that _he was_ ----.
I stayed in Hereford for some time, both to rest and to write articles about my experiences, which appeared in _Mayfair_, a society paper, long since dead. I took a private room, and this particular waiter seemed to be told off to attend me in all my doings. Everything seemed to surprise him; he could not measure me up at all, and he was continually saying that _he was_ ----, although I knew quite well that he wasn"t. One day his worship the Mayor of Hereford called to see me. When I asked the waiter to show his worship up he said that _he was_ ----. The mayor was a flamboyant sort of individual, and said, "Now, Mr Christie Murray, Lord Lyttelton is in Hereford, and is most par-tic-ular-ly interested in the subject of which you are treating in _Mayfair_. He will be delighted to meet you, and I have arranged with his lordship that you shall meet him at my house (the mayor"s house) at 7.30 on Friday. You will not fail his lordship?" I said that I would not for the world, and I escorted his worship to his carriage. At the door he turned and said, "Half-past seven on Friday, Mr Christie Murray, at my house, to meet Lord Lyttelton. Profoundly disappointed if you don"t turn out. His lordship will be grieved, Mr Murray." The mayor having gone I turned round--to encounter my waiter, and for the last time he said that _he was_ ----.
And although I had known that he was not, he said it with such sincerity that I more than half believed him.
Either the man must beg, which in itself is, of course, a misdemeanour, or he must starve. To sleep out of doors is a crime, and for a man to appeal for shelter at the workhouse means that he will be detained until every chance of obtaining employment is lost. I remember an unfortunate fellow, whom I overtook near Tewkesbury, a man of about sixty as I should judge, who was sitting by the roadside cooling his blistered heels in a little runnel of clear water, and crying quietly to himself as he tried to rid his fingers of the tar which stuck to them after his workhouse morning"s experience of oak.u.m picking. I sat down beside him and offered him a fill of tobacco, and by and by got into talk with him.
He was a man of some intelligence and education, and had begun life as a journeyman watchmaker. He had risen to be an employer, and had kept a small workshop in Coventry, but misfortune had overtaken him and he had failed in business. The immediate cause of his distress was that he had received notification that employment at his trade of watchmaker was open to him at Evesham. The poor fellow was quite penniless and had been compelled to walk; his strength had failed him by the way, and he had had to take refuge in the workhouse. In payment for his lodging, his two chunks of dry bread and his pint of skilly, he had been compelled to pick his quantum of oak.u.m. The man"s fingers were, of course, as delicate as a lady"s, and in the course of our talk he held them out to me, showing the tips all raw and bleeding and thick with tar. He sobbed bitterly as he told me that he would be unable to do a hand-stroke at his trade for at least a fortnight. He carried with him letters of recommendation which ought to have guaranteed him from any such usage as that to which he had been condemned. He had tried to show them to the labour master, but he had been waved contemptuously aside, and had been forced by threats of being imprisoned as a refractory pauper to betake himself to the task imposed upon him.
It need hardly be said that all the men one encountered were not of this type. I met one engaging ruffian who unbosomed himself to me with the utmost frankness. "Oi meets genelmen on the road," he said, "as arsks me why Oi don"t gaow to wurk; a great big upstandin" chap loike you, they sez, loafin" abaht and doin" nothin"--why it"s disgraiceful! Well, I sez, guv"nor, I sez, "ow can Oi go to wurk? Oi"m a skilled wurkman, I sez, in me own trade, but Oi"m froze aht by modern machinery. Oi"m a "and comb-maker, I sez, and the trade"s bin killed this dozen years.
Oi"m too hold a dawg to learn new tricks, I sez, Oi"m a middle-aged man and what ham Oi to do to yearn my means of loiveli"ood." He added with a wink that there was only one hand comb-maker in business in that wide district of England and Wales over which he wandered. "And," said he, "you can bet your sweet loife Oi don"t go nigh "im." This cadging rascal would very rarely have occasion to present himself as a casual pauper at the Union workhouse, but had he done so, he and the unfortunate watchmaker would have been treated on perfectly equal terms.
The whole system of casual poor law relief is about as rotten and as stupid as it can be, and its administration is in itself a scandal.
There is no general rule throughout the country as to dietary or as to the nature of the labour executed, or as to the hours over which that labour shall be extended. The habitual loafer knows perfectly well the places where life is made easy to him, and as a matter of course avoids those in which the fare is poorest and the work most arduous. The honest seeker after work knows nothing of these things and the whole iniquitous and idiotic system is at once a direct bribe to the inveterate work-shirker and a scourge to the honest and industrious poor. I published the result of my own researches into it in the columns of _Mayfair_ now nearly thirty years ago, and suggested a very simple and easy remedy for its defects. I had some hope that I might be attended to. The late Lord Lyttelton, Mr Gladstone"s friend, was at one time disposed to take the matter up, but his melancholy death put an end to that, and recent inquiries a.s.sure me that the old intolerable methods of casual relief are still unreformed.
Looking back now, I can see how very large a part that seven weeks"
experience played in my life as a novelist. For years afterwards it cropped up as inevitably in my work as King Charles"s head in Mr d.i.c.k"s Memorial, but at least it has enabled me to feel that few writers of fiction in my time have gone nearer to reality in their studies than myself. I certainly worked the little mine that I had opened for all that it was worth, and readers of mine who give themselves the trouble to remember will recall the wanderings of the hero of _Skeleton Keys_, of Frank Fairholt, of Hiram Search and of young George Bush.e.l.l. Speaking of Hiram Search naturally reminds me of Charles Reade. I dedicated the book in which Hiram appears to that great writer and sent a copy of it to him with what I daresay was a somewhat boyish letter. I have the terms of my dedication in mind still, and I remember that I wrote of a great genius which has always been put to lofty uses. Reade"s letter in response has always held a place amongst my treasures. "It is no discredit," he wrote, "for a young man to appreciate his seniors beyond their merits." I have always thought that very n.o.ble and modest and well-said. Reade is the only one of the writers who in my own boyhood were already reckoned great with whom it was my happiness to come into personal contact.
I have met with but four men in my experience who have been distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought to express the acme of high breeding. Charles Reade was one of them. I never knew him intimately enough to get beyond it, but that he himself could break through it upon occasion was known to everybody. A beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery or oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright vitriolic. Hardly anything could have excused the retort he flung at some unhappy disputant who had called one of his facts in question.
"You have dared," he wrote, "to contradict me on a subject in which I am profoundly learned, while you are ignorant as dirt." It was true enough, but perhaps it was hardly worth while to say it in that fashion. Nearly all his life he was embroiled in controversy of one sort or another. He spent himself in the exposure of abuses and the people whom he exposed a.s.sailed him rashly. He took prodigious pains to be accurate, and before he a.s.saulted the prison system in _It"s Never Too Late to Mend_, or the conduct of private lunatic asylums in _Hard Cash_, he had gathered and indexed huge volumes of information culled from every available source.
These memoranda he called _nigri loci_. His system of indexing was so precise that he could lay an instant finger on any fact of which he was in search, and n.o.body who ventured to impugn his facts escaped from him unmutilated. In one instance, a barrister was so misguided as to tell him publicly that a legal incident in one of the two books I have mentioned was obviously impossible and absurd.
Reade was down upon him like a hammer: "The impossibility in question disguised itself as fact and went through the hollow form of taking place" on such and such a date, in such and such a court, and the proceedings were recorded in volume so and so, on certain pages of the official Law Reports for a given year. His adversary was left with no better resource than to charge him with hurling undigested lumps of official doc.u.ments at the head of the public; and this left his equanimity undisturbed.
But it was when they charged him with plagiarism that his critics. .h.i.t him on the raw. About the time when I first knew him somebody started a controversy with respect to his story of _The Wandering Heir_, and the accusation was made that he had lifted a page or two out of Swift"s _Polite Conversations_. "Of course I did," said Reade to me, "but the essence of a plagiarism is that it shall have some chance of going undetected; it is the appropriation to one"s self of the property of another with the intent to display it as one"s own, and to me it was impossible to suppose that a writer like Dean Swift was so obscure that I could play a trick like that with him with impunity. A recognisable quotation is not a plagiarism. They brought the same charge against me because I translated the etchings of Corot into accurate English. The sources I tapped for _The Cloister and the Hearth_ are open to anybody, and any man who chooses may study them and make a romance out of them if he can. It is perfectly true that I milked three hundred cows into that bucket, but the b.u.t.ter I churned was my own." It seems scarcely fair to have brought such an accusation against a writer who not only made no disguise of his literary methods, but who so openly proclaimed and defended them.
In the last page of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ he acknowledges his debt to the great Erasmus, for example, in these very n.o.ble and eloquent phrases:--"Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed from generation to generation, and from age to age." The professional critics have never been just to Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It has long seemed to me that _The Cloister and the Hearth_ is, in fiction, the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he said one thing about that immortal book which I have ever since thought memorable. "To read _The Cloister and the Hearth_" he declared, "is like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern." And indeed the criticism is true. You travel from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome and every man and woman you encounter on the way is indisputably alive, though there is no he or she amongst them all who has a touch of modernity. They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the Princess Claelia, from the _mijauree_ of the Tete D"Or to the tired and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent, placed over him.
He was always fighting against some legal oppression. In the latest case in which I knew him to be engaged, an attempt had been made by a wealthy ground landlord to squeeze an unprotected widow lady out of her rights and to compel her to surrender the house and grounds which had belonged to her deceased husband. With the impetuosity which distinguished him in such matters, Reade flung himself into the conflict. It was enough for him to know that an injustice was being done or attempted to fire him at the centre. He caused to be inscribed on the outer wall of the garden of the mansion in dispute the words, "Naboth"s Vineyard," and he used to relate with great glee how a Jew old clothesman one day translated this into "Naboth"s Vinegar," and after a wondering reading of it, said: "Good Lord! I should have taken it for a gentlemanth houth." "From which," said Reade, quaintly, "you may conclude that Houndsditch thumbs not the annals of Samaria!"
That shapeless production _Grace Forbeach_ had one idea in it which I was able to use later on to some advantage. In those days a writer of fiction expended much more care upon the actual mechanism of his plot than seems to be thought necessary nowadays. Even a man of the genius of Charles d.i.c.kens did not feel himself at liberty to work untrammelled by the exigencies of some intricate and hara.s.sing framework of invention on which he made it his business to hang all his splendours of description and his observation of human character. The power of the plot in English fiction found its culmination in the work of Wilkie Collins, whose _Moonstone_ is probably the finest piece of mere literary cabinet-making in the world. All the younger writers of his time were strongly under his domination and it was quite a necessity for us to have some merely mechanical central idea round which we could evolve a story which, in its serial form, should keep the reader perpetually upon the tenterhooks of expectation. Such an idea I had stumbled on in _Grace Forbeach_ where one of the characters was made feloniously to possess himself of his own property and thereby rendered himself liable to penal servitude. I elaborated this notion in _Joseph"s Coat_ and made the development of the whole fable dependent on it.
Leaving forgotten _Grace Forbeach_ out of the reckoning, _Joseph"s Coat_ was my third novel in the order of writing and the second in order of publication. The second half of _A Life"s Atonement_ was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker"s shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the s.p.a.ce of some ten weeks, I was ent.i.tled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the doormat, except on Sat.u.r.days, when three were left there, one for the needs of the day and a double allowance for the Sunday. A loaf and a tin of Chicago beef stocked the larder, and that being once attended to, the remnant of my income served for such necessaries of life as beer and tobacco, and pen and ink and paper. The bargain I had made with Messrs Chambers was that I should receive one-half payment for the book--one hundred and twenty-five pounds--on delivery and acceptance, and the other half on the conclusion of the serial publication of the story in their journal. This left an interval of twelve months between the two payments, and the first was all but exhausted when my second commission from the firm reached me. It was then drawing towards the close of the year, and Mr Robert Chambers wrote me to say that the writer with whom he had bargained to follow _A Life"s Atonement_ had broken down in health, and asking if I were in a position to supply her place. I went off post-haste to Edinburgh and saw him there, and it was arranged between us that I should deliver to him six chapters of an original novel per week, that I should remain in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh in order to give him opportunity for consultation from time to time, and that whilst the book was being written I should receive a living wage.
He recommended me to locate myself in Portobello, and there in the dead season I had no difficulty in finding lodgings.
I had scarcely deposited my portmanteau when I set to work. I began to write without the faintest idea of a plan, and for the first day or two I swam boldly enough along the stream of chance. The first chapters pleased Robert Chambers greatly and he was wise and generous enough to say so. For six tremendous weeks I wrote, beginning punctually every morning at eight o"clock and pretty generally bringing the day"s work to a finish in the neighbourhood of midnight. I gave myself two half-hours for exercise and rambled in all sorts of weather about the sands and the deserted promenade. I was approaching the end of the work when a very curious experience befell me. I was sitting towards the end of the day"s labour at my table when I felt suddenly that somebody was standing just behind me. The impression was so strong that I turned round hastily and made a survey of the little room. There was n.o.body there and I went back to work again. The feeling returned so often that I repeatedly found myself turning round in the middle of a sentence, but in an hour at most I was able to dismiss the fancy for the time. I got to bed too excited and too tired to sleep, and whilst I was lying there in the dark, the idea of that fancied presence came back again. It was standing at my bed-head in the darkness, and though I knew that to be a physical impossibility because the bed and the wall were close together, I found myself no longer able to dismiss the image. I went to sleep in spite of it at last, but at the instant at which I sat down at my table to take up the thread of last night"s work, it was there again. Little by little it a.s.sumed shape and colour in my imagination, until at last it was as clearly present to me as if I had seen it with my bodily eyes. I have it before me at this instant; it was the figure of a man in mediaeval costume, in trunk and hose and doublet, and his clothing was red on one side and yellow on the other. The face, so far as it could be seen, was cadaverous and cruel, but half of it was concealed by a black vizor of velvet, through which lamped a pair of dark, unwinking eyes. The figure was there all day and every minute of the day, but I pegged stolidly on and gave as little heed as I could to it. But that night when I had got to bed, a development occurred. The figure took up that impossible position at my head, and I became aware that it had, balanced over its shoulder, an axe with a broad back and an edge like a razor, with which it stood in act to strike.
I got out of bed and re-lit the lamp, refilled my pipe and sat down to think things over. Wherever I went, the figure was behind me and always in the same threatening att.i.tude. I began to talk to it at last in set phrases: "I know perfectly well what you are," I said; "you are an inhabitant of the land of Mental Overwork. I"m going to hold you at arm"s length, because if I allowed you to take liberties, you might grow dangerous. We will travel together if you will insist upon it until this book is finished and then I will take you into some quiet, rural, restful place and lose you." I did not lose him when the work was over; he went about with me for a week or two. He travelled with me from Edinburgh to London, then from London by the long sea-route to Antwerp; from Antwerp to tranquil little Roche-fort in the Belgian Ardennes; and it was not until I found myself one day with my easel and my paintbox sketching some quaint bulbous old trees in the Avenue des Tilleuls, that I woke up to the fact that I had lost him. He came back to me once more and once only. I think it was owing to the fact that a fire had occurred at the printing premises of Messrs Grant & Co. in Turnmill Street, in which the ma.n.u.script of a work of fiction had been destroyed, that I was asked by my old friend Gowing to put extra pressure upon myself for the completion of a story on which I was engaged for him. It was a question of days and almost of hours, and I remember that at the last, from Friday morning until late on Sunday night, I wrote almost incessantly, s.n.a.t.c.hing an hour or two"s sleep in an armchair, only when Nature imperatively demanded it. I delivered the ma.n.u.script in person on Monday morning and as I was walking home along Holborn, I suddenly became aware of the presence of my old unpleasant comrade. I gibed at him with a feeling of perfect security, but I was brought to a halt by a sudden horrible discovery--the paving-stone in front of me was not a real paving-stone at all but a mere paper imitation, with an actually measureless gulf below it. The delusion was so real and convincing that I was able to pursue my way only by the most desperate resolution, and all the way to Fitzroy Square, where I was living at the time, the fear clung to me. I took a liberal dose of whisky, went to bed and slept the clock round, and woke to find the whole thing vanished.
I spent five happy years at Rochefort, and although when I first went there I had no idea of staying for more than three or four weeks" rest and quiet, it was actually eighteen months before I left the place at all.
In dealing with my experiences in the Press gallery of the House of Commons, I had occasion to speak of the curious premonition which a.s.sailed me at the instant at which the unfortunate Dr Kenealy made use of the rhetorical symbol of the dewdrops and the lion"s mane. I do not know that I have any right to claim the possession of any psychic faculty which goes beyond the ordinary, but I do know that that sort of premonition of a coming circ.u.mstance has not been at all rare in my experience. Something very like it befell me whilst I was living at Rochefort, and in that instance it proved of signal service to me, I wrote the final scene of _Joseph"s Coat_ on a certain wintry day and was within a page or two of the conclusion of the story when I was called to luncheon. In the ardour of work I had allowed the fire to die out in my bedroom stove, and encountering on the stairs a certain lout, whose name was Victor, who did duty about the stables of the hotel, I gave him instructions to see to it. Ten minutes later a dreadful inspiration occurred to me, and I dashed upstairs. The man was kneeling before the stove and was in the very act of striking a lucifer match when I arrived. A glance at my writing-table showed me that the impulse on which I had acted was only too well-founded. The man had taken a dozen pages of my ma.n.u.script, and an instant later he would have set them blazing. In those days I wrote on an unruled large quarto, and since it was my habit to crowd sixteen hundred words into a page, the loss of time and labour would have been, at least, considerable. I recovered my MS. all crumpled and dirty, and I applied to that ostler pretty nearly all the opprobrious names in his language with which I was acquainted.
"Mais, monsieur," the criminal responded, "le papier etait deja gate; vous avez ecrit la-dessus." If this had been intended as a literary criticism, it might possibly have been justified, but seeing that it was offered by a man who could not read, there was something in the frank imbecility of it which disarmed me, and I daresay that the shout of laughter with which I received it was just as incomprehensible to the man as the rage with which I had fallen upon him only a moment earlier.
When I first took up my residence in that little Belgian village, I mistook it for an Arcadia, but a more intimate knowledge of it and the acquaintanceship I formed with the village doctor and the _doyen_ of the little local cathedral served to undeceive me. It was full of poverty and of all the more sordid forms of vice which everywhere seem inseparable from physical distress and overcrowding. I taught both the medico and the cleric to appreciate the flavour of Scotch whisky, and on many a score of winter nights I used to sit and listen to them whilst they engaged in long discussions on the Christian faith. The venerable _doyen_ laboured hard to convince the doctor, who was an Agnostic of the aggressive type. "La religion," said the latter, on one occasion, "est une bonne et belle chose pour les femmes, les enfants et les imbeciles,"
but in spite of their antagonism in this respect, they worked together with a devotion which was beyond praise amongst their poor. The priest used to tell the doctor that he would have been the best of Christians if he had only known it, and the doctor used to a.s.sure him in return that he would have been the best of men if only his mind had never been distorted by the fables of the Church. They met on the common ground of benevolence and scholarship and I think they were a pair of the most lovable old fossils I have ever known. The doctor was a man of prodigious attainment and I often used to wonder what had induced such a man to bury himself in such a place, until I learned that the genial old bachelor bookworm had known a day of romance long before, and that the lady of his choice had, on the very eve of marriage, resigned herself, like Carlyle"s Blumine, to wed someone richer. The romance spoiled his career, but it was a G.o.dsend for his native village, where he laboured till the day of his death, expending the whole of his professional income in works of charity. He has no place in this simple record apart from my affectionate remembrance of him and these remembrances may be taken simply as a flower laid in pa.s.sing on the burial mound of an old friend.
The hunting lodge of Leopold, King of the Belgians--the Chateau des Ardennes, as it is called--is situate some half a dozen miles from Rochefort, on the road to Dinan on the Meuse. It was a favourite relaxation of mine when I found myself in want of exercise and a holiday, to mount a knapsack and to stroll to Dinan, which is only a score of English miles away. On one of these jaunts I had my only interview with a reigning monarch. I was sauntering homeward in the dusk of a summer"s evening when I saw at the gate of the chateau, a tall, gaunt figure with a long, peaked beard, a pheasant"s feather stuck in the ribbon of a bowler hat, and trousers very disreputably trodden into rags behind. As I pa.s.sed him he raised his hat and gave me a courteous "Bon soir, monsieur." I returned his salute and answered "Bon soir, sire." "Ah, ha!" said His Majesty, like a pleased child, "vous me connaissez alors?" I responded that everybody knew the King of the Belgians and I added that I had never ventured to enter His Majesty"s dominions without carrying his portrait with me. "Comment donc!" said His Majesty, and when I produced a brand new five-franc piece, the jest enjoyed a greater prosperity than it deserved. We got into conversation on the strength of it and he stood for perhaps five minutes chatting not unintelligently about English books and authors.
The years I spent in Rochefort were, I think, the happiest and most fruitful of my life, but the last piece of work I did there came very near to landing me in a contretemps which might, for a time at least, have had an uncomfortable result. At that time Mr James Payn had just taken over the editorship of the _Cornhill_ magazine, the price of which he had reduced to 6d. My story--_By the Gate of the Sea_--had been the last to appear in the original series founded by Thackeray, and I was invited by Mr Payn to inaugurate the new and cheaper issue. With this purpose I wrote _Rainbow Gold_, and since it was Mr Payn"s unbreakable editorial rule not to take any work into consideration until its last line was in his hands, and he at this time was in a mighty hurry about his literary supplies, I had to undertake again pretty much such a spell of work as I had undertaken with _Val Strange_, and with an almost equally unfortunate result. My methods of work have often brought me near a nervous breakdown, and by the time at which _Rainbow Gold_ was finished, I was all but a wreck. It had been arranged between the editor of the _Cornhill_ and myself that the completed copy of my book should be in his hands on a given date, and for some reason I was afraid to trust it to the post, and determined to carry it to London and deliver it with my own hands. For this purpose it was necessary that I should catch the Malle Des Indes early on the Sunday morning at Jemelle two miles away. I had a little leather case constructed, in which to carry my ma.n.u.script, and this I had seen more than half completed on the Thursday afternoon. I strolled into the shop of the village _cordonnier_ on Sat.u.r.day morning to ask why it had not been delivered, and I found the man busy on a duplicate of it which he promised to deliver before the evening. It came out on inquiry that he had sold the case I had ordered to a person who described himself as a commercial traveller, and who was staying at the Chevaux Blancs, a little hotel in the village which was frequented by people of his cla.s.s. I satisfied myself that the work would be done in time, and when it was delivered in the course of the evening, I naturally supposed that there was an end of the matter. I met the purchaser of my box on the platform at Jemelle, and we travelled by the same train as far as Lille. There I got another momentary glimpse of him and thenceforth saw him no more.
I travelled on to Dover without adventure, but there, as I was quitting the boat, I was encountered by a man who, although he was in plain clothes, was immediately recognisable as a member of the police force.
He laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: "I beg your pardon, but I must ask you to accompany me to the Captain"s cabin." I not unnaturally asked him why. He pointed to the box I held and asked if that were my property. I answered of course in the affirmative and he said in quite the official manner that he must trouble me to go with him, and made a motion to relieve me of my burden. I handed the box to him and he conducted me, still with a hand upon my shoulder, to the companion-way.
In the captain"s cabin I found two or three men who were all very grave, and all very suave and polite. One of them asked me my name, and another whether I had not left the village of Rochefort by such and such a train in the morning. I answered both questions without hesitation, and I noticed that my interlocutor looked a little puzzled. I was asked next what I was carrying in that leathern case, and, by way of answer, I unlocked the box and produced my ma.n.u.script. There was a curious restraint visible in the manner of my examiners when I performed this simple action, and I could not in the least understand it at the time, although its reason became clear enough a minute later. "I beg your pardon, Mr Murray," said the man who had first laid a detaining hand upon me, "there has been a mistake, but we were compelled to do our duty." He intimated that I was at liberty to go, which in some heat I declined to do, until I had received some explanation of this arrest of a private citizen bound on legitimate affairs. I had missed the tidal train, and I represented that this had caused me some inconvenience.
Then the truth came out The hotel des Chevaux Blancs, in innocent seeming little Roche-fort, had been for some months past a hot-bed of European anarchy. The people who went and came there were surrounded by spies, and the police of Dover had been advised by telegraph, of the departure of a noted anarchist, who was carrying precisely such a box as that in which I had bestowed my ma.n.u.script. Before I left Dover, it transpired that a man had been arrested in Folkestone who was carrying with him enough of Atlas dynamite to have wrecked a whole square. The movements of each of us had been watched by the continental police, and had been wired to England. There had been a moment at which the two boxes had been laid on the same bench on the platform at Jemelle, and I have often since pictured to myself the imbroglio which might have ensued if they had been accidentally exchanged. It could not have lasted long in the nature of things, but it would certainly have afforded me a new experience.
I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard.
The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the _Birmingham Morning News_. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries of "help" and "murder," and behind her staggered a drunken ruffian brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head it had come in contact. I was enc.u.mbered with a heavy ulster which was b.u.t.toned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper went to bed.