// ppgen source seventeen-src.txt
// 20161030005822phillpotts
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.dt From the Afngle of Seventeen, by Eden Phillpotts
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Transcriber’s Note:
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FROM THE ANGLE OF SEVENTEEN
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FROM THE ANGLE | OF SEVENTEEN
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BY
EDEN PHILLPOTTS
AUTHOR OF
“WIDECOMBE FAIR,” “THE LOVERS,” ETC.
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BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1914
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Copyright, 1912,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
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All rights reserved
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Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.
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TO
HUGHES MASSIE
IN ALL FRIENDSHIP
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FROM THE ANGLE
OF SEVENTEEN
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I
.sp 2
When the Doctor sent for me to
his study, I hoped it was about
the fireworks, because I was
head boy that term, and, in a great position
like that, there were advantages to
make up for the anxiety. You bossed the
fireworks on the fifth of November and
many other such-like things.
But the Doctor had nothing to say
about fireworks. In fact, a critical moment
had come in my life: I was to leave.
“Sit down, Corkey,” said the Doctor;
and that in itself was a startler, because
he never asked anybody to sit down except
parents or guardians.
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I sat and he looked at me with a friendly
and regretful expression, the same as he did
when he had to tell me my father was
dead.
“Corkey,” he began, “this morning
brings a missive from your maternal aunt,
Miss Augusta Medwin. As you know, she
is your trustee until you come of age, four
years hence. Your Aunt Augusta, mindful
that the time was at hand when you
would be called to take your place in the
ranks of action, has for some time been on
the lookout for you; and to-day I learn
that her efforts have been crowned with
success. It is my custom to require a
term’s notice; but such is my regard for
your Aunt Augusta that I have decided to
waive that rule in your case. A clerkship
in London has been secured for you—a
nomination to the staff of that famous institution,
the Apollo Fire Office. The
necessary examination, to one who has
risen to be head boy of Merivale, should
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prove but a trifle. And yet, since nothing
can be left to chance, we must see that you
are guarded at all points. In a fortnight,
Corkey Major, you will be required to show
that your mathematics are sound, your
knowledge of grammatical construction
above suspicion, and your general average
of intellectual attainment all that the world
of business—the great industrial centers of
finance—have a right to demand from
their neophytes. I do not fear for you: the
appointment and its requirements are not
such as to demand a standard of accomplishment
beyond your powers; but, at
the same time, remember that this modest
beginning may lead the way to name and
fame. The first step can never be too humble
if we look upward to the next. I, myself,
as all the world knows, was once engaged
in the avocation of a bookseller’s
assistant. I have already conferred with
Mr. Brown as to your mathematical attainments,
and, making due allowance for
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his generous ardour to all that pertains to
the First Form, I have no doubt with him
that you will satisfy your examiners. Your
handwriting, however, must be the subject
of anxious thought, and, as you will be
called upon in the course of the examination
to write a brief essay on any subject
that may occur to the examining authorities,
I trust that you will be at pains to
state your views in careful .
Again, if a word arises to your mind concerning
the spelling of which you feel
doubtful, discard it at once and strive to
find another that will meet the case.
Spelling, I have reason to know, is not a
strong point with you.”
The Doctor sighed and continued.
“I am sorry to lose you,” he said. “You
have been a reasonably good and industrious
boy. Your faults were those of
youth. You go into the world armed, I
think, at all points. Be modest, patient,
and good-tempered; and choose high-minded
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friends. I may add, for your encouragement,
that you will receive emolument
from the outset of your official labours.
The salary is fifty pounds a year, and you
will work daily from ten o’clock until four.
On Saturdays they pursue our own scholastic
custom and give their officials a half-holiday.
Your vacation, however, is of a
trivial character. The world is a task-master,
not a schoolmaster. One fortnight
a year will be all the holiday permitted;
and since you enter the establishment at
the bottom, you must be prepared to enjoy
this relaxation at any month in the year
most convenient to your superiors. Should
time and chance allow of it, Corkey Major,
I may tell you that it will give me personal
pleasure to see you on some occasion
of this annual vacation—as a guest. Your
two brothers continue with us until in their
turn they pass out into the world from the
little haven of Merivale.”
The idea of Merivale as a haven pleased
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the Doctor. I hoped he had finished, but
he went off again.
“Yes, the simile is just. You come here
empty and depart on your voyage laden.
You are loaded according to your accommodation--some
more, some less; and I,
the harbour-master—however, we will not
push the image, for, to be frank, I am not
sure as to what exactly pertains to a harbour-master’s
duties in respect of cargo.
To return, Mr. Brown will see you in his
study after morning school with a view to
some special lessons in arithmetic. He inclines
to the opinion that the Rule of Three
should prove a tower of strength, and no
doubt he is right. You may go.”
He waved his hand and I got up. One
thing had stuck exceedingly fast in my
mind and now, though I did not mean to
mention it in particular, it came out.
“Am I really worth fifty pounds a year
to anybody, sir?”
The Doctor smiled.
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“A natural question, Corkey, and I
think no worse of you for having asked it.
The magnitude of the sum may reasonably
puzzle a lad who as yet cannot appreciate
the value of money. This, however, is no
time to enter upon the complicated question
of supply and demand. It will be sufficient
for you to know that the Managers of the
Apollo Fire Office are in reasonable hopes
of getting their money’s worth—to speak
colloquially. For my part, when I think
upon your ten years of steady work at
Merivale, I have no hesitation in saying
the salary is not extravagant. Let it be
your part to administer it with prudence
and swiftly to convince those set in authority
over you that you are worth more than
that annual sum rather than less.”
I cleared out and told the chaps, and
they were all fearfully interested, especially
Morgan, because when I left Morgan
would become the head of the school. He
turned a sort of dirty-drab green when he
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heard that I was going; and first I thought
it was sorrow for me, and then I found it
was funk for himself. He didn’t care a
button about losing me; but he felt that to
be lifted up all of a sudden to the top was
almost too much.
“I feel like the Pope felt when he found
he was going to be elected,” he said. “Only
it’s far worse for me than him, because he
needn’t have entered the competition for
Pope, I suppose, if he didn’t want; but, in
my case, the thing is a sort of law of nature,
and I’ve got to be head boy.”
“There are the advantages,” I said.
But he could only see the responsibilities.
He wasn’t pretending: he really hated
the idea—for the moment.
I told my chum, Frost, too; and I told
him that I’d asked the Doctor whether I
was worth fifty pounds a year to anybody.
“If he’d been straight,” said Frost,
“he’d have told you that you’ve been
worth fifty pounds a year to him, anyway—for
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countless years; because you came
here almost as soon as you were born, and
your brothers, too.”
It was a great upheaval, like things always
seem to be when they happen, however
much you expect them. Of course
I knew I had to go sometime, and was
thankful to think so, and full of ambitions
for grown-up life; but now that the moment
had actually come, I wasn’t particularly
keen about it. Especially as I
should miss the fireworks and lose the
various prizes I was a snip for, if I’d
stopped till Christmas. I rather wished
my Aunt Augusta hadn’t been so busy,
and had left my career alone, at any rate
until after the Christmas holidays.
Of course my going was a godsend to
various other chaps and, though they regretted
it in a way, especially the footer
eleven, such a lot of things were always
happening from day to day at Merivale
that there was no time really to mourn.
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One or two wanted to club up and give me
a present, but it didn’t come to reality;
though of course they were frightfully
sorry I was going, when they had time to
think about it. They were, naturally, very
keen over the various things that I left behind;
but of course these were all handed
over to my brothers.
Then the rather solemn moment came
when a cab arrived for me and I went.
But everybody was in class at the time and
nobody missed me. In fact, it wasn’t what
you might call really solemn to anybody
but myself.
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.h2
II
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So I went to London, where, of course,
I had always meant to go sooner or
later. I had heard and read a great
deal about this place, but had no idea that
it was so remarkable as it really is. Perhaps
the most extraordinary of all things
in London is passing millions of people
every day of your life and not knowing a
single one. My Aunt Augusta met me at
Paddington, and we drove to her home,
where I was to stop for the time being.
Her name was Miss Augusta Medwin, and
she lived in a place called Cornwall Residences
and was an R.B.A. It was a huge
house divided into flats, and her flat was
the top one of all. She was an artist, and
R.B.A. stands for Royal British Artist.
She had a little place leading out of her
flat on to the roof of the building. This
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was built specially for her. It looked out
on to the whole of the top of London and
was a studio. The Metropolitan Railway
had a yard down below, where the engines
got up steam before going to work in the
mornings. It was, of course, a far more
interesting spot than any I had ever yet
met with. I had a little room in the flat,
and my aunt had made it very nice and
comfortable. But the engines always began
to get up their steam at four o’clock
in the morning, and it is a very noisy process,
and it took me some time growing
accustomed to the hissing noise, which was
very loud. There is no real stillness and
silence in London even in the most select
districts. Not, I mean, like the country.
My aunt had one servant called Jane.
She had been married, but her husband had
changed his mind and run away from her.
She was old and grey and like a fowl, but
very good-tempered. I told her about the
engines and she said:
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“This is London.”
My aunt painted very beautiful pictures
in oil colours, and also made etchings of the
most exquisite workmanship. She was
made R.B.A. to reward her for her great
genius in her art. She hung her pictures
at exhibitions and was a well-known
painter, though she told me that she did
not make a great deal of money. I hoped
that she would take at least half of my
fifty pounds a year for letting me live with
her, and assured her that I cared nothing
for money; then she said we would look
into that if I passed my examination. She
was a good deal interested in me, and said
that I had my dead mother’s eyes and artist’s
hands. She was quite old herself,
and might have been at least forty. She
was not yet withered, like the very old.
She wore double eyeglasses when she
painted. Her expression was gloomy, but
her eyes were blue and still bright. I
found her very much more interesting to
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talk to than any other woman I had met;
and I told her my great secret hope for
the future.
I said:
“Some day, if things happen as I should
like, I am going to be an actor. It is a
very difficult and uphill course of life, I
know; but still, that is what I want to be,
because I have a great feeling for the stage,
and I shall often and often go to a theatre
at night after I have done my day’s work,
if you don’t mind—especially tragedies.”
She didn’t laugh at the idea or scoff at it
but she thought that I mustn’t fill my head
with anything but fire insurance for the
present. And of course I said that my
first thought would be to work in the office
and thoroughly earn my fifty pounds, and
perhaps even earn more than I was paid,
and so be applauded as a clerk rather out
of the common.
She took me to a tailor’s shop and I was
measured for a tail-coat. I also had to get
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a top hat, such as men wear. I was tall
and thin, and when the things came I put
them on, and Aunt Augusta said that the
effect was good, and Jane said that I
looked “quite the man.” Aunt Augusta
took me to several picture-galleries, and I
went about a good deal by myself and
made strange discoveries.
Many people seemed to know that I was
new in London without my telling them.
Once I was nearly killed, showing how
easily accidents happen. I had dropped a
half-penny in Oxford Street, as I crossed
the road, and was naturally stopping to
pick it up, when the chest of a horse came
bang against me and rolled me over. Fortunately,
I was not in my new clothes.
It was a hansom-cab horse that had run
into me, and the driver pulled him up so
that the horse simply skated along on his
shoes and pushed me in front of him.
Neither of us was hurt. A policeman appeared,
and the driver asked me whether I
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thought the middle of Oxford Street was
the right place for playing marbles. He
meant it in an insulting way, as if I was
still a boy. And I said that I had dropped
a halfpenny and couldn’t surely be expected
to leave it in the middle of London
for anybody to pick up.
The driver said that no doubt I was one
of God’s chosen—meaning it rudely—and
the people laughed, and the policeman told
us all to move on. I went down a side
street and cleaned myself up as well as I
could. Then I found a lavatory and
washed myself and got a shoeblack to rub
the mud off me. London mud is very
different from all other mud, not being
pure, like country mud, but adulterated
with oil and tar and many other products.
The shoeblack charged three-pence, so it
was an expensive accident for me, besides
the danger.
I passed the examination though they
didn’t praise me much, or give any evidence
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of pleasure or surprise; and then my
aunt said that she thought I ought to call
on the Director of the Apollo Fire Office
and thank him for his great kindness in
giving her his nomination for me. The
Director was out, but when he heard that
I had called, he invited me to dine with
him. I had never been invited to dinner
before and rather wished my aunt would
come too; but she said that she had not
been asked, though she had often been
there—to see Mr. Benyon Pepys and his
original etchings. He followed art in his
spare time, which was considerable, and
my aunt had given him etching lessons, at
which she was a great dab. He was also
a descendant of the great Pepys of diary
fame—so my aunt told me. He was a
bachelor and very fond of pictures and
very rich, as all Directors must be before
they can rise to that high walk of
life.
“You ought to wear dress clothes,” said
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Aunt Augusta; “however, it is not vital.
He will understand.”
“You can hire ’em for a song,” declared
Jane; but my aunt decided that I
should put on my new tail-coat—with a
white tie.
When it came to putting on this tie,
however, she didn’t care about it, and
thought that I looked too much like a
curate. She showed a sort of objection to
curates that much surprised me; because
at Merivale there had never been any feeling
against them; in fact, quite the contrary.
Many of the masters at Merivale
used to read for the Church while they
taught us; and when they had read
enough, they went away and gradually became
curates, as the next stage in their
careers.
But Aunt Augusta didn’t want me to
look like one, and for that matter I didn’t
myself, having no feeling for the Church;
and so I put on a dark blue tie and wore
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my new silver watch and chain and went
like that.
Mr. Benyon Pepys was a short, clean-shaved
man and lived in the utmost magnificence
in a house not far from Cavendish
Square. Naturally, I had never seen
such a house or such magnificence. It was
an abode of the highest art. There were
three footmen and a church organ with
golden pipes in the hall alone; and everything
was done on the same scale throughout.
One footman asked me my name and
another took my overcoat and top-hat and
hung them up on a hat-stand, of which
every hat-peg was the twisted horn of an
antelope! Then the man who had asked
my name threw open a door, on which
were painted rare flowers—probably orchids—and
announced my arrival. “Mr.
Corkey!” he said in a deep voice.
I walked in and found Mr. Benyon
Pepys and Miss Benyon Pepys sitting one
on each side of a palatial mantelpiece,
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which was supported by the figures of
naked girls in pure white marble. They
both rose from their chairs as I walked
down the room amid wonderful creations
of art. They did not seem to realise the
fact that they were surrounded by such
amazing things. There were flowers and
pictures in huge gold frames and statues
on pedestals; and, strange to say, amid all
this profusion they allowed a mere, live
pug-dog with a pink bow tied round his
neck! He sat on a rug, which must once
have been the skin of a perfectly enormous
tiger. It had glass eyes and its teeth were
left in its jaws, which were red, as in life,
and wide open. The pug lounged upon it,
as though to the manner born.
“Well, Mr. Corker, so you’ve passed
your examination and will join us next
week, I hear,” said Mr. Benyon Pepys.
He spoke in a light, easy—you might almost
say a jaunty—tone of voice, though
he was in full dress clothes and wore a gold
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watch-chain on a spotless white waistcoat.
Miss Benyon Pepys was just as kind as
him. There was not a spark of side about
either of them. They were both of great
age and Mr. Pepys was of a shining and
complete baldness, as well as being clean-shaved.
I told him my name was Corkey,
not Corker; and he said, “Yes, yes, Corker—I
know.”
“And how do you like London?” asked
Miss Benyon Pepys. She was clad in some
rare fabric—probably some fabulous embroidery
from the Middle Ages—and
richly adorned with jewels, which flashed
when she moved her limbs; but she paid no
attention to them, and was indeed far more
interested in the pug-dog than anything in
the room.
He was called “Peter,” and made a
steady and disgusting noise, like a man
snoring. He came in to dinner with us, and
had a light meal off a blue china plate,
prepared by Miss Benyon Pepys.
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I was just saying that I liked London,
and had pretty well mastered Oxford
Street and Edgware Road, when a deep
and musical chime of bells rang out and
the door was thrown open.
“Will you take my sister in to dinner?”
said Mr. Benyon Pepys; but I was prepared
for this, because Aunt Augusta had
warned me that it might happen. So I
gave her my right arm, and she put the
tips of her left hand fingers upon it, and
I remember feeling curiously that, what
with diamonds and rubies and one thing
and another, her hand, small though it
was, might easily have been worth many
thousands of pounds.
“If the mere sister of a Director can do
this sort of thing, how majestic must be the
wealth of the Director himself!” I thought.
In fact I very nearly said it, because it
seemed to me that the idea was a great compliment
and ought to have pleased them
both. It would have been well meant anyway.
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But I found it difficult to make
conversation, owing to the immense number
of things all round me that had to be
noticed.
As a matter of fact, I couldn’t be said
to take Miss Benyon Pepys in to dinner,
not knowing the way. But she took me in,
and it was no mere dinner, but a dazzling
banquet on a table groaning with massive
silver and other forms of plate. There was
no tablecloth in the usual acceptation of the
word; but a strip of rich fabric—probably
antique tapestry from France or Turkey—spread
on a polished table which glittered
and reflected in its ebony depths the wax
candles and silver and various pieces of
rare workmanship arranged upon the hospitable
board.
One would have thought, to see them,
that a dinner of this kind—seven courses
not counting dessert—was an everyday
thing with the Benyon Pepys! It may
have been, for all I know. Wine flowed
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like water—at least, it would have done
so if there had been anybody there to drink
it; but, of course, I didn’t, knowing well
that wine goes to the head if you’re not
used to it—and Miss Benyon Pepys
merely drank hot water with a little tablet
of some chemical that fizzed away in it—medicine,
I suppose. It was sad in a way
to see her pass the luxurious dishes without
touching them. She little knew what she
was missing. Even Mr. Benyon Pepys
himself only sipped each wine in turn, with
birdlike sips, but he never drank his glass
quite empty. I expect the footmen dashed
off what he left, doubtless tossing up
among themselves which should have it.
I tried to talk at dinner, though there
was little time, and once a good thing, full
of rich and rare flavours, was swept away
before I had finished it, because I stopped
to speak.
I asked after the Pepys diaries and
hoped they were successful. I said:
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“I shall, of course, keep a diary in London,
and I was going to get a Raphael
Tuck diary; but I shall buy a Pepys now.”
Looking back, I don’t think either of
them heard this. At any rate, that night
when my Aunt Augusta explained about it,
I prayed to God in my prayers that they
might not have heard. The footmen, however,
must have.
But I made Mr. Benyon Pepys laugh
with a remark which, curiously enough, was
not in the least amusing nor intended to
be. I said:
“Of course, the business of a Director is
to direct?”
Because I thought it would show a
proper spirit to be interested in his great
work. But he laughed, and said:
“Not always, Mr. Corker, not always!
I am not myself a man of business; but a
connoisseur and creator. Art is my occupation.
Do not, however, think that I am
not exceedingly interested in the Apollo.
.bn 032.png
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You will find upon the face of each policy
an allegorical representation of the sun-god
in a chariot drawn by four horses. I
cannot claim that the actual design is
mine, but the conception sprang from my
brain twenty-five years ago. The creation,
though severely Greek, is my own.”
He explained that he had found the
greatest difficulty to get anybody to accept
his nomination to the Apollo Fire Office.
“But fortunately,” he said, “your aunt,
the accomplished artist, was able to help
me, and I feel under no little obligation to
her—and you.”
In this graceful and gentlemanly way
he spoke to me. He told me that the staff
was very large and included men of all
ages—many brilliant and some ordinary.
“You will begin work in the Country
Department,” he said; “they are a bit
rough-and-ready up there, I fancy, but I
speak only from hearsay. Certain adventurous
members of the Board have penetrated
.bn 033.png
.pn +1
to those savage regions, though I
cannot honestly say that I have ever ventured.
After signing a hundred or two
policies, my intellect reels and I have to
totter over to Murch’s for turtle-soup. It
is a curious fact that turtle restores brain-fag
quicker than any other form of food.”
“I am glad it has such a good effect on
you, sir,” I said.
Miss Pepys left when the magnificent
dessert was served. She never touched so
much as a grape, though they were the
largest I had ever seen; and after she had
gone, Mr. Pepys asked me to smoke.
Knowing, of course, that a cigarette is
nothing on a full stomach, and also knowing
that my own stomach was now perfectly
adapted for it, I consented, and had
a priceless box of chased silver containing
rare Egyptian cigarettes handed to me by
one of the footmen. With it he brought
a lamp, which appeared to be—and very
likely was—of solid gold. We then had
.bn 034.png
.pn +1
coffee; and when all was over, Mr. Benyon
Pepys proposed that we should again join
Miss Benyon Pepys; so we returned to the
drawing-room and he showed me a portfolio
of his etchings. They were black and
grubby and mysterious and no doubt great
masterpieces, if I had only understood
them. Even as it was, I rather came off
over the etchings and recognised many
things about them in a way that everybody
didn’t. At least, I gathered so from the
fact that Mr. Benyon Pepys was surprised
and pleased. He said that “”
was the secret of his success, and
no doubt it may have been. He praised
my Aunt Augusta very highly; and I was
exceedingly glad to hear him speak so well
of her great genius in her art.
At ten o’clock I got up to go, and a
footman whistled at the door for a cab, and
I luckily had a sixpence which I pressed
into his hand as I leapt into the cab. But
the effect was spoiled, because I forgot my
.bn 035.png
.pn +1
overcoat and had to leap out again. The
footman helped me into it, but didn’t mention
the sixpence. I dare say to him it was
a thing of nought.
So I returned to Aunt Augusta’s flat,
and told her all about the wonders of the
evening; and she was pleased and said that
she hoped Mr. Benyon Pepys would some
day ask me again. But no such thing happened.
And, of course, there was no reason
why it should. Probably they did hear
what I said about the diary, but were too
highly born and refined to take any notice.
.bn 036.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
III
.sp 2
The great first day at the Apollo
Fire Office soon came, and my
Aunt Augusta seemed to be quite
moved as, having discussed two poached
eggs, a roll, butter, toast, and marmalade,
and two cups of coffee, I went forth in
my top-hat and tail-coat to earn my living.
Women are rum. She’d worked like anything
to get me this great appointment,
and yet, when I started off in the best
possible style to begin, Aunt Augusta
seemed distinctly sniffy! I took an omnibus
from Oxford Street, having previously
walked down Harley Street, which is a
great haunt of the medical profession.
Merely to walk down it and read the names
is a solemn thing to do, and makes you
thank God for being pretty well.
.bn 037.png
.pn +1
In due course I arrived at my destination,
in Threadneedle Street in the very
heart of the City of London. First you
come to the Bank of England—an imposing
edifice quite black with centuries of
London fog—and opposite this is the
Royal Exchange, whose weather-vane is a
grasshopper covered with gold and of enormous
size. Often and often, from the
Country Department of the Apollo I used
to look up at it and long to be in the green
places where real grasshoppers occur so
freely.
But, to return, I walked into the Apollo,
which comes next to the Bank of England,
and found there was a book on the first
floor of the office, in which every member
of the staff had to sign his name on arriving.
When the hour of ten struck, a clerk
came forward, dipped his pen into the red
ink, picked up a ruler and drew a line
across the page. This was to separate the
clerks who were in time from those who
.bn 038.png
.pn +1
were late. If you were under the red line
more than once or twice in a month, you
heard about it unfavourably.
There was an amazing record of a wonderful
old clerk who had worked in the
office for forty-five years and never once
been under the line! But at last there
came a day when the hour of ten rang out
and the old clerk had not come. Everybody
was very excited over it, and they
actually gave him ten minutes’ grace, which
was not lawful, but a sporting and a proper
thing to do in my opinion. However, all
was without avail; for he did not come,
and the red line had to be reluctantly
drawn. Everybody almost trembled to
know what the old clerk would do when he
arrived to find the record of forty-five
years was ended; but the old clerk never
did arrive, because a telegram came, a few
minutes after the drawing of the line, to
say that he had died in his sleep at his
wife’s side, and therefore could not get up
.bn 039.png
.pn +1
at six o’clock, which was his rule. It was
rather sad in a way.
To show, however, that everybody didn’t
feel the same rare spirit of punctuality as
the old clerk, there was another interesting
story of the red line and a chap who arrived
late on his very first day. He actually
began his official career under the
red line. He must have been a man like
the great Napoleon in some ways. A very
self-willed sort of man, in fact. He only
stopped in the Apollo a fortnight, and then
was invited to seek another sphere of activity.
He was a nephew of one of the
Directors and died in the Zulu War. A
pity for him he had not been of a clerk-like
turn of mind.
I signed the book in full:
.ce
“Norman Bryan Corkey.”
.ti 0
and then a messenger, who wore a blue
tail-coat with a glittering disc of silver on
his breast, showed me up to the Country
.bn 040.png
.pn +1
Department. It was at the very top of
the edifice—a long room with desks arranged
in such a way that the light from
the stately windows should fall upon them.
About thirty-five men of all ages pursued
their avocation of making policies in this
great room. The Chief had an apartment
leading out of this, and usually he sat in
great seclusion, pondering over the affairs
of the Department. He was a big and a
stout man, with a florid face and a beard
and mustache of brown hair. His eyes
were grey and penetrating. They roamed
over the Department sometimes, when he
came to the door of his own room; and he
saw instantly everything that was going on
and noted it down, in a capacious memory,
for future use. Everybody liked him, for
he was a kind and a good and a patient
man, and his ability must have been very
great to have reached such a high position;
for he was much younger than many other
men who were under him. He welcomed
.bn 041.png
.pn +1
me with friendliness and hoped I should
settle down and soon take to the work.
He said:
“Be industrious, Mr. Corkey, and let me
have the pleasure of reporting favourably
when the time comes to give an account of
your labours to the Secretary.”
I said:
“Yes, sir, I will do my best.”
He looked at me and smiled.
“A great promise,” he said. “To do
your best, Mr. Corkey, is to be one man
picked out of a thousand.”
I had no idea, then, that it was such a
rare thing to do your best; but he knew.
And I found afterwards that it is not only
rare but frightfully difficult, and no doubt
that is why so few people do it.
Mr. Westonshaugh, for that was the
name of this good man, called a subordinate,
and a fair, pale clerk in the prime of
life, with a large amber mustache and a
high forehead, responded to the summons.
.bn 042.png
.pn +1
“This is Mr. Corkey,” said the Chief.
“He goes into your division, Mr. Blades.
I need not ask you to look after him and
indicate the duties. He passed a good
examination and is quite ready to set to
work.”
I followed Mr. Blades and walked down
the great room. There were two desks
apart in one corner at which old, bald,
spectacled men sat, and at the other desks,
already mentioned, the full strength of the
Department was already busily occupied.
I found an empty desk waiting for me
beside Mr. Blades, and I could see by his
manner, which was kindly but penetrating,
that he was considering what sort of clerk
I should make. Others also looked at me.
One man said “Legs!” referring to mine,
which were very long. There was a strange
and helpless feeling about it all. I dimly
remembered feeling just the same when I
first went to Merivale. Mr. Blades called
a messenger and bade him bring pens, fill
.bn 043.png
.pn +1
the ink-bottles and fetch blotting-paper
and paper-cutter, a ruler, an ink eraser,
and other clerkly instruments.
“Your first duty,” he said, “is to copy
policies into the books. Here is a pile of
policies and they are numbered in order.
There are no abbreviations on the actual
policy; but abbreviations are allowed in
copying them into the books. This saves
many hours of time. For instance, the
word ‘communicating’ occurs over and
over again. So, in copying it, we reduce
it to three letters, namely ‘com.’ I will
now copy a policy and you can see how I
do it.”
Mr. Blades was kindness itself and, indeed,
from that day forward I blessed his
name. He was a brick. He was fierce
certainly, and if angered, as sometimes happened,
would utter dreadful imprecations,
such as I thought were only to be heard
among pirates and other story-book people;
but he had a big heart and a very heroic
.bn 044.png
.pn +1
mind. He feared nothing and, though a
small man, exhibited great courage on
many occasions in his private life, of which
he told me when I knew him better. He
was married and lived at Bickleigh and had
offspring.
I settled to the work and nothing much
happened, though I had very often to refer
to Mr. Blades. He never minded and was
always ready with his wide knowledge,
which, of course, extended far beyond the
copying that I had to do. In fact, the
Department teemed with men of the greatest
ability, and not only did every one of
them exhibit perfect mastery of the complicated
art of drawing-out of insurance
policies against fire, but many of them,
as I found gradually—in fact, almost
every one—had some remarkable talent
which was not wanted in their official tasks.
Some could draw and some could play
various musical instruments; some were very
keen sportsmen and understood cricket and
.bn 045.png
.pn +1
football and other branches; and some were
great readers and knew all about literature.
Some, again, were gardeners and cultivated
most beautiful exotics, which they brought
to the office to raffle from time to time.
Others, again, arranged sweepstakes on
horse-races and brightened up the dull
routine of official life in this way. Others
were volunteers and very keen about soldiering.
I hoped that I might find somebody
interested in the stage, but curiously
enough, though many went to the theatre,
none ever wanted to become professional
actors.
When the luncheon interval arrived I
was allowed to go out for refreshments,
and I went and walked about in the City
of London. But I did not go farther than
the huge figures that beat time over a
watchmaker’s shop in Cheapside. It must
have been wonderful mechanism, and I
should like to have had it explained, but
there was no time to go into the shop. And,
.bn 046.png
.pn +1
in any case, I shouldn’t have had the cheek
to ask. By a funny chance, near the Royal
Exchange I found the identical Murch’s
shop, where Mr. Benyon Pepys used to go
and have turtle-soup after the labours of
signing policies; so I thought that if it
suited him so well, it might suit me also.
With great presence of mind, however, I
first asked the price of a plate, and on
hearing it, made some hurried excuse and
went back into the street. Turtle-soup is
out of the question for beginners in the
City of London. I had a Bath bun and a
glass of milk instead and then went back
to work.
It was after returning that the first thing
that I really understood and enjoyed happened
at the Apollo. Up till then I felt
rather small and helpless and strange.
Here was I, like an ant in a nest, but I
felt a fool of an ant—good for nothing
but to make mistakes and worry Mr.
Blades. The huge whirl and rush of business
.bn 047.png
.pn +1
dazed me. I almost heard the thunder
of machinery; but I knew really that all
the machinery was going on inside the
heads of those thirty-five able and industrious
men. I expected that they were
working for their wives and children and
their old, infirm mothers and so on. It
was real grim life. It is true there were a
few boys there besides me; but they also
were able and industrious, if not brilliant,
and they were all doing their part in the
great machine. Even the messengers were.
They were nearly all old, brave, wounded
soldiers. I felt the solemnity. I seemed
like a mere insect in a solemn cathedral
where a mighty service was going on and
everybody was doing their appointed part
but me. I had spoiled several large sheets
of paper and felt a sort of sick feeling that
I was not earning my fifty pounds a year,
and should soon be told so. I made a calculation
on my blotting-paper to see how
much money I ought to earn each day.
.bn 048.png
.pn +1
The amount discouraged me and, besides
that, I had another sort of animal feeling
that I wasn’t getting enough air to breathe.
Then, in this dark and despairing moment,
there happened a thing that bucked me up
and put new life into me. Suddenly I got
a terrific smack on the side of the face,
and an orange, about half sucked, fell from
my cheek upon the page spread before me.
It was like a pleasant breath of Merivale.
I understood it; I knew how to handle it.
For a moment I no longer felt like an
insect in some vast cathedral. I was deeply
interested and hoped that the man who
could do a thing of this sort in a solemn
scene like the Country Department of the
Apollo Fire Office, might be a real friend
to me. It happened that, as I came back
from lunching, I had seen a young man
with the lid of his desk raised. His head
was inside and he was sucking this identical
orange that had now hit me in the face.
I felt at the time that the man who could
.bn 049.png
.pn +1
suck an orange in the midst of this booming
hive of industry must be out of the
common. And so he proved to be. He
was dark and clean-shaved, with broad
shoulders and a purple chin. I knew,
therefore, when the orange arrived, who
had chucked it, and could not help feeling
the purple-chinned young man was a jolly
good shot, whatever else he might be. I
laughed when the orange hit me, and
looked over to him; but he was writing
very busily and not a muscle moved. I
didn’t dare chuck the half-sucked orange
back, for fear of making a boss shot, the
consequences of which might have been
very serious, because at least three men of
considerable age, and one grey, sat between
us. So I picked up the orange and got off
my stool.
“Sit down! don’t take any notice,” said
Mr. Blades, who was trying not to laugh
and failing; but I felt that perhaps he
didn’t quite understand a thing like this,
.bn 050.png
.pn +1
having passed the stage for it and being
married and so on; whereas no doubt the
purple-chinned young man, if he could
chuck an orange, could also get it back
without taking it in the wrong spirit.
A good many chaps watched me and
some thought I was going to take the
orange into Mr. Westonshaugh; but I just
went casually up the room, and when I
got to the purple-chinned young man, who
was writing away like mad, I stopped and
turned suddenly.
“A ripping shot,” I said. “I funked
flinging it back for fear of hitting the
wrong man.”
Then I squashed down the orange hard
on the purple-chinned young man’s head
and hooked back to my desk.
“You long-legged young devil!” he
shouted, but he wasn’t angry, only surprised.
There was rather a row then, because
a good many chaps laughed out loud
and Mr. Westonshaugh came to his door.
.bn 051.png
.pn +1
“Not so much noise, gentlemen, please,”
he said, and then went in again.
Half an hour afterwards the purple-chinned
young man, whose name was Dicky
Travers, came up to my desk.
“It’s all right,” he began. “It was a
fair score; but how the devil did you know
that I threw it? I’ll swear you didn’t see
me.”
“I didn’t,” I admitted; “but when I
came in from lunch you were sucking
it with your head in your desk, so I
guessed.”
That man turned out one of my very
best and dearest friends in the Apollo Fire
Office! He proved to be an athlete of
world-wide fame and a member of the
London Athletic Club. He had won countless
trophies and cups and clocks and cellarettes
and salad bowls, and was simply
tired of seeing his name in print. He
was a champion walker and had on several
occasions walked seven miles inside an
.bn 052.png
.pn +1
hour; and two miles in fifteen minutes was
mere fun to him!
So ended my first day of work. At four
o’clock a good number of the clerks prepared
to leave and Mr. Blades told me
that I could go. Of course I thanked him
very much for all his kindness during the
day.
“That’s all right,” he said; “and to-morrow
bring an office coat with you and keep
that swagger one for out of doors. Let it
be a dark colour—in fact, black for choice.
It’s better form. And to-morrow I will
show you how you can keep your cuffs
clean by putting paper over them. Now
you put your work into your desk and
lock it up and go home. You have made
a very decent start.”
I thanked him again and cleared out.
I walked back and spent a very interesting
hour looking into the shops and so on.
There was a place in High Holborn full of
models of steam engines, and I rather
.bn 053.png
.pn +1
longed for one. But it cost three pounds.
Besides, I was now, of course, past childish
things and thought no more of it. I
stopped, too, to see some Blue Coat boys
playing “footer” in a playground that was
railed off from the street by lofty railings.
It was somewhere near the General Post
Office, I believe. Some of the chaps, despite
their long coats, which they strapped
round their waists, played jolly well. I
felt it would have been fine to have gone
in and had a kick about. But, of course,
the days for that were past. It was rather
sad in a way. But, there it was—I’d
grown up. I had to keep reminding myself
of this, and now and then my beastly
top-hat fell off and reminded me again.
Only it takes a bit of time to realise such
a thing. In fact, I’ve heard grey-haired
men say that they don’t feel a bit old,
though they may be simply fossils really,
to the critical eye; so, no doubt, it was
natural even for me not to feel that I had
.bn 054.png
.pn +1
grown up, and had now got to face things
and run my own show, as well as I could,
for evermore. To rub it in, as it were, I
had my first shave on the way home. Mr.
Blades had advised this course.
Aunt Augusta showed a great deal of
interest in the day’s adventures, and next
morning I took a dark blue “blazer” to
the office. It had the badge of Merivale
first footer team on it; but, of course, I
made my aunt cut that off. Because,
though it meant a good deal at Merivale,
to a man earning his own living in a hive
of industry, it simply counted for nothing
at all.
.bn 055.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
IV
.sp 2
When I heard that there was a
cricket club in connection with
the Apollo Fire Office I was
glad, and still more so when I found that
the team played other Fire Offices; for the
Apollo is by no means the only one in London,
though easily the best. Of course I
never thought that in an office full of
grown men I should be able to play in
matches; but Dicky Travers explained to
me that I might hope, if I was any good,
as only a comparatively small number of
the clerks actually played, though a large
number patronised the games with their
presence and came to the Annual Dinner
at the far-famed Holborn Restaurant.
This restaurant, I may say, is almost a
palace in itself, and the walls are decorated
with sumptuous marbles and works of foreign
.bn 056.png
.pn +1
art. The waiters are also foreign.
There are fountains and a band to play
while you eat; and it shows how accustomed
the London mind can get to almost
anything in the way of luxury, for I have
seen people eating through brilliant masterpieces
of music and not in the least put off
their food by them, though every instrument
in the band was playing simultaneously.
But, of course, there were no
bands or fountains where I went for my
Bath bun and glass of milk. As a matter
of fact, this was rather a light meal
for me, but I hoped to get accustomed to
it. Anyway the result, when dinner-time
came at the flat of my Aunt Augusta, was
remarkably good, and I used to eat in a
way that filled her with fear. And, after
eating, I felt that I simply must have exercise
of some sort, and I used to go out
in the dark to the Regent’s Park and run
for miles at my best pace. It worried
policemen when I flew past them, because
.bn 057.png
.pn +1
it is very unusual to race about after dark
in London if you are honest, and policemen
are, unfortunately, a suspicious race
and, owing to their work, get into the way
of thinking that anything out of the common
may be a clew. Once having flown
past a policeman and run without stopping
to a certain lamp-post, I went back to the
man and explained to him that I had to
sit on an office stool most of the day, and
that at night, after dinner, I felt a frightful
need for active exercise, and so took it
in this way. I thought he would rather
applaud the idea, but he said it was a fool’s
game and might lead to trouble if I persisted
in it. He advised me to join an
athletic club and a gymnasium, and I told
him that the advice was good and thanked
him. As a matter of fact, I was able to
tell the policeman also that a great friend
of mine had put me up for the London
Athletic Club, and that I hoped soon to
hear that I had been elected as a member.
.bn 058.png
.pn +1
I mentioned Dicky Travers and thought
the policeman would be a good deal surprised
that I actually knew this famous
man. However, the surprise was mine,
because the policeman had never heard of
him. But sport was a sealed book to him,
as the saying is.
I only remember one other thing about
those runs. I used to put on very little
clothes, of course, but even so, naturally
worked myself up into a terrific perspiration,
which was what I meant to do, it
being a most healthful thing for people
who have to sit still all day. But my aunt
was quite alarmed when I returned to have
a bath and a rub down; and then it came
out that she had never seen anybody in a
real perspiration before! I roared with
laughter and explained, and she said that
she thought people only had perspirations
when they were ill. She had never been in
one in her whole life apparently. She was
a very nice and kind woman, but I puzzled
.bn 059.png
.pn +1
her fearfully, because she had never known
many boys of my age, and though she
smoked cigarettes herself, she thought they
were bad for me and begged me to be very
temperate in the use of them. To be temperate
in everything was a mania with her.
I must have upset her flat a lot one way
and another; but she was very patient and
wouldn’t hear of my going into lodgings
alone.
“You are much too young,” she said.
“You must look upon me as your mother
till you are eighteen, at any rate.”
Then it was—after I had been in the
City of London six weeks—that I met
with my first great misfortune, though it
began as a most hopeful and promising
affair.
I had heard, of course, from Dicky
Travers and Mr. Blades and others, that
there were plenty of shady characters in
London, and that their shadiness took all
sorts of forms; but this did not bother me
.bn 060.png
.pn +1
much, because a clerk such as I was would
not, I thought, provoke a shady character,
owing to my youth. But a good many of
these shady characters mark down young
men as their regular and lawful prey, like
the tiger marks down the bison in the jungle.
And a great feature of the cunning
of these people is that they get themselves
up in a way to hide their real natures—in
fact, such is their ingenuity, that they pretend
to go to the other extreme, and appear
before their victims dressed just the
very opposite of what one would expect
in a shady character. They are, in fact,
full of deceit.
One day I had eaten my bun and drunk
my glass of milk in about a second and
a half, and was looking at books in a very
interesting bookseller’s window that spread
out into the street near that historic building
known as the Mansion House, where
the Lord Mayor lives. I had found a sixpenny
book about Mr. Henry Irving’s art
.bn 061.png
.pn +1
and was just going to purchase it, bringing
from my pocket a five-pound note to do so,
when an old man of a religious and gentlemanly
appearance spoke to me.
But first, to calm the natural excitement
of the reader at hearing me mention a five-pound
note, I ought to explain that that
morning was pay-day at the office—the
first in which I had actively participated.
The five-pound note was the first that I had
ever earned, and it gave me a great deal
of satisfaction to feel it in my pocket. This
was natural.
“Good literature here, sir,” said the
stranger. “I hope you love books?”
“Yes, I do,” I answered, concealing my
five pounds instantly.
“I write books,” he told me. “I dare
say my name is familiar enough to you, if
you are a reader of poetry.”
I looked at him and saw that he had a
long grey beard and red rims to his eyes.
His clothes were black and had seen better
.bn 062.png
.pn +1
days. He wore rather a low waistcoat
which was touched here and there with
grease; but his shirt was fairly white, and
through his beard I saw a black tie under
his chin. He was tall, and carried an umbrella
and a black and rather tattered bag
of leather. I seemed to feel that his black
bag was heavy with great poetry. It was a
solemn moment for me.
“I’m afraid I’m not much of a hand
at poetry, sir,” I said. “At school one
had a lot to learn, and now I’m rather off
it—excepting Shakespeare.”
“You City men don’t know what you
are missing,” he answered. “I have just
come from Paternoster Row, where I have
been arranging with a great publisher—one
of the greatest, in fact—for my next
volume of poems. Strangely enough, I
saw you handle a book of mine on this
bookstall only a few moments ago, and I
felt drawn to you.”
“Then you are Mr. Martin Tupper!”
.bn 063.png
.pn +1
I exclaimed, “for I picked up a book of
his just now—though only to see what
was under it, I am afraid.”
He felt disappointed at this, but admitted
that I was right in my suspicion.
“I am Tupper,” he confessed; “and
though perhaps nobody in the world has
more unknown friends, yet I allow myself
no intimates. It is owing to my terribly
sensitive genius. I read men like books.
That is why I am talking to you at this
moment. My knowledge of human nature
is such that I can see at a glance—I can
almost feel—whether a fellow-creature is
predisposed towards me or not.”
“It is a great honour to speak to you,
Mr. Martin Tupper,” I answered. “But
I’m afraid a man like me—just a clerk
in a noisy and booming hive of industry—wouldn’t
be any good to you as a friend.
I don’t know much about anything—in
fact, I am nobody, really; though I hope
some day to be somebody.”
.bn 064.png
.pn +1
“I felt sure of that,” he answered.
“Your reply pleases me very much, young
man, because it indicates that you are modest
but also plucky. You recognise that
you have as yet done nothing, but your
heart is high and you look forward to a
time when you will do everything. Had
you read my Proverbial Philosophy, you
would have discovered that—however, you
must read it—to please me. You must
let me send you a copy from the author.”
I was, of course, greatly surprised at
such unexpected kindness, but there was
more to come.
“When I find a young and promising
man studying the books upon this stall between
the hours of one and two o’clock,”
said Mr. Tupper, “my custom is to ask
him to join me at a modest meal—luncheon,
in fact. Now do not say that you
have lunched, or you will greatly disappoint
me.”
Of course I had lunched, and yet, in a
.bn 065.png
.pn +1
manner of speaking, I hadn’t—not as a
man of world-wide fame would understand
the word. To tell the truth, I had
felt from the first that it was rather sad in
a way—having to subsist on a Bath bun
and a glass of milk for so many hours; and
I knew that I never should get to feel it
was a complete meal. So when this good
and celebrated man offered me a luncheon,
I felt, if not perfectly true, yet it was true
enough and not really dishonest to say that
I had not lunched. So I said it, and he
was evidently very glad.
“We will go to the ‘Cat on Hot
Bricks,’” he told me. “It is an eating-house
of no pretension, but I prefer the
greatest simplicity in all my ways, including
my food and drink. At the big restaurants
I should be recognised, which is a
source of annoyance to me; but I am unknown
at the ‘Cat on Hot Bricks,’ and I
often take my steak or chop and a pint of
light ale there, with other celebrities, and
.bn 066.png
.pn +1
study life. Ah! the study of life, my
young friend, is the prince of pursuits!
The name that I have made is based entirely
upon that study. Long practice has
enabled me to see in a moment the constituents
of every character and know at a
glance with whom I have to deal.”
I told him my name, and he said that he
had had the pleasure to meet some of the
elder members of my family in the far
past. I ventured to tell him about Aunt
Augusta and her paintings, and he said
that they were well known to him and that
he possessed a good example of her genius.
He even promised to call upon her when
next in that part of London. He was
immensely interested in my work and
asked me many questions concerning fire
insurance. And then I told him that I
hoped in course of time to be an actor,
and he said that, next to the poet, the actor
was often the greatest influence for good.
He himself had written a play, but he
.bn 067.png
.pn +1
shrank from submitting it to a theatrical
manager for production. It was a highly
poetical play and made of the purest
poetry, and so delicate that he feared that
actors and actresses, unless they were the
most famous in London, might go and rub
the bloom off it and spoil it.
He let me choose what I liked for luncheon,
and I chose steak-and-kidney pie and
ginger beer. He then told me that the
steak-and-kidney pie was all right, but
that the only profits made at the “Cat on
Hot Bricks” arose from the liquid refreshment,
and that it would not be kind or
considerate to drink so cheap a drink as
ginger beer. So he ordered two bottles of
proper beer, and then he told me about the
place and its ways.
“The Bishop of London often comes
here—just for quiet,” he said. “Of
course I know him, and we have a chat
sometimes, about religion and poetry and
so on. And the Dean of St. Paul’s will
.bn 068.png
.pn +1
drop in now and then. He has a weakness
for ‘lark pudding’—a very famous dish
here. They have it on Wednesdays only.
Now tell me about your theatrical ambitions,
for I may be able to help you in that
matter.”
I told him all about my hopes, and he
said that one of his few personal friends
was Mr. Wilson Barrett, of the Princess’s
Theatre in Oxford Street.
“That great genius, Mr. Booth, from
America, has been acting Shakespeare
there lately,” I said.
“He has,” answered Mr. Tupper; “his
‘Lear’ is stupendous. I know him well,
for he often recites my poems at benefit
matinees. But Wilson” (in this amazingly
familiar way he referred to the great Mr.
Wilson Barrett) “is always on the lookout
for promising young fellows to join his
company, and walk on with the crowds, and
so learn the rudiments of stage education
and become familiar with the boards. He
.bn 069.png
.pn +1
is anxious to get a superior set of young
fellows on to the stage, and he often comes
to me, because he knows that in the circles
wherein I move the young men are intellectual
and have high opinions about the
honour of the actor’s calling.”
“It would be a glorious beginning for a
young man,” I said, “but, of course, such
good things are not for me.”
Mr. Tupper appeared to be buried in his
own thoughts for a time. When he spoke
again, he had changed the subject.
“Will you have another plate of steak-and-kidney
pie?” he asked, and I consented
with many thanks.
Then he returned to the great subject
of the stage.
“Only yesterday,” he said, “I was
spending half an hour in dear old Wilson’s
private room at the Princess’s Theatre.
He likes me to drop in between the acts.
He is a man who would always rather listen
than talk; and, if he has to talk, he chooses
.bn 070.png
.pn +1
any subject rather than himself and his histrionic
powers. All the greatest actors are
the same. They are almost morbid about
mentioning their personal talents, or the
parts they have played. But the subjects
that always interest Wilson are the younger
men and the future of the drama. ‘Martin,’
he said to me, ‘I would throw up the
lead in my own theatre to-night, if I could
by so doing reveal a new and great genius
to the world! I would gladly play subordinate
parts, if I could find a young man
to play my parts better than I do myself.’
I tell you this, Mr. Corkey, to show you
that one supreme artist, at least, is always
on the lookout for talent, always ready to
stretch a helping hand to the tyro.”
“Perhaps some day,” I said, “years
hence, of course, when I have learned elocution
and stage deportment and got the
general hang of the thing, you would be
so very generous and kind as to give me a
letter of introduction to Mr. Barrett?”
.bn 071.png
.pn +1
Mr. Tupper filled my glass with more
beer and sank his voice to a confidential
whisper.
“I couldn’t ‘give’ you an introduction,
Mr. Corkey, because Wilson himself would
not allow that. I am, of course, enormously
rich, but it is always understood between
me and the great tragedian that I
get some little honorarium for these introductions.
Personally, I do not want any
such thing; but he feels that a nominal sum
of three to five guineas ought to pass before
young fellows are lifted to the immense
privilege of his personal acquaintance,
and enabled actually to tread the
boards with him in some of his most impassioned
creations. The money I give to
the Home for Decayed Gentlewomen at
Newington Butts—in which I am deeply
interested. Thus, you see, these introductions
to Mr. Wilson Barrett serve two
great ends: they advance the cause of the
Decayed Gentlewomen—the number of
.bn 072.png
.pn +1
whom would much distress you to learn—and
they enable the aspirant to theatrical
honours to begin his career under the most
promising circumstances that it is possible
to conceive.”
“But I ought to go through the mill,
like Mr. Barrett himself and Mr. Henry
Irving and all famous actors have done,” I
said; and Mr. Tupper agreed with me.
“Have no fear for that,” he answered.
“Wilson will see to that. He is more than
strict and, while allowing reasonable freedom
for the expansion of individual genius,
will take very good care you have severe
training and plenty of hard work. But the
point is that you must go through his mill
and not another’s. It is no good going to
Wilson after some lesser man has taught
you to speak and walk and act. You would
only have to unlearn these things. If you
want to flourish in his school of tragedy,
which is, of course, the most famous in
England at the moment, you must go to
.bn 073.png
.pn +1
him, as it were, empty—a blank sheet—a
virgin page whereon he can impress his
great principles. Will you have apple
tart, plum tart, or tapioca pudding and
Surrey cream?”
I took apple tart, but Mr. Tupper said
that sweet dishes were fatal to the working
of his mind in poetical invention, so he had
celery and cheese.
“I see Wilson to-night,” he resumed.
“To be quite frank, I have to tell him
about a lad who is very anxious to join him,
and wishes to give me fifty pounds for the
introduction; but such is my strange gift
of intuition in these cases, that I would far
rather introduce you to the theatre than
the youth in question. You are clearly in
earnest and I doubt if he is. You have a
theatrical personality and he has not.
Your voice is well suited for the higher
drama; his is a cockney voice and will always
place him at a disadvantage save in
comedy. Had it been in your power to go
.bn 074.png
.pn +1
before Wilson this week, I should have
substituted your name for the other. I
wish cordially there were no sordid question
of money. I would even advance you
five guineas myself. But you are as delicate-minded
as I am. You would not like
me to do that.”
I assured him that such a thing was out
of the question.
“Indeed, Mr. Tupper,” I said, “you
are doing far, far more than I should ever
have thought anybody would do for a perfect
stranger. And unless I could pay the
money for the decayed Home, I should
not dream of accepting such a great kindness.”
He was quite touched. He blew his
nose.
“We artists,” he said, “are emotional.
There is a magic power in us to find all
that is trusting and good and of sweet
savour in human nature. And yet goodness
and gratitude and proper feeling in the
.bn 075.png
.pn +1
young always move me, as you see me
moved now. They are so rare.”
He brought out a brown leather purse
and took from it half a sovereign. He
then called the waiter and paid the bill.
“We will go down into the smoking-room,”
he said. “No doubt a liqueur will
not be amiss.”
I’d forgotten all about the time and, in
fact, everything else in the world during
this fearfully exciting meeting with Mr.
Martin Tupper; and the end of it all was
that I fished out my first five-pound note
for the introduction to Mr. Barrett and
my first step on the stage.
“It should be guineas,” said Mr. Tupper,
“but in your case, and because I have
taken a very great personal fancy to you,
it shall be pounds. And don’t grudge the
money. Go on your way happy in the
knowledge that it will greatly gladden a
life that has a distinctly seamy side. There
is a sad but courageous woman whose eyes
.bn 076.png
.pn +1
will brighten when she sees this piece of
paper.”
But though he idly threw my note into
his pocket as a thing of no account, yet he
was a man of the most honourable and sensitive
nature.
“I cannot,” he said, “leave you without
carrying out my part of the contract. I
gather that you are rather pressed for time,
or I would drive you to the Princess’s
Theatre in my private brougham, which is
waiting for me near the Mansion House.
No doubt the driver thinks I am lunching
with the Lord Mayor, as I often do. But
to take you just now to the Princess’s
Theatre would interfere with your duties
at the Apollo Fire Office, which I should
be the last to wish to do; so I will write
you a personal introduction to my dear
friend, Mr. Barrett, and you can deliver it,
either to-night or on the next occasion that
you go to see him act.”
“It will be to-night,” I said.
.bn 077.png
.pn +1
He refused to go until his part was done.
“We must avoid even the appearance of
evil,” he told me. “You might feel uneasy
and suspicious were I to leave you with
nothing but a promise. Martin Tupper’s
word is as good as his oath, I believe; but
it is a hard, a cold, and a cruel world. At
any rate, you shall have the letter.”
He opened his bag, which contained
writing materials, and he had soon written
a note to Mr. Barrett, warmly commending
me to the attention of that great man. He
made me read it, and I was surprised how
well he had summed up my character. He
next gave me his own address, which was
No. 96 Grosvenor Square—one of the
most fashionable residential neighbourhoods
in London—and then, hoping that I
would dine with him and Mrs. Tupper two
nights later, at 8 o’clock, he shook me
warmly by the hand, wished me good luck,
and left me.
I saw his dignified figure steal into the
.bn 078.png
.pn +1
street, and though the general public did
not seem to recognise him in his modest
attire, I fancy that a policeman or two cast
understanding glances at him. No doubt
they had seen him before—at royal or
other functions.
I seemed to be walking on air when I
went back to work, for this great man, inspired
by nothing but pure goodwill, had,
as it were, opened the door of success to me
and given me a chance for which thousands
and thousands of young professional actors
must have sighed in vain. He was hardly
the man I should have chosen to know;
but now that I did know him, I felt that it
must have been a special Providence that
had done it. I wished that I could make
it up to him and hoped that he would live
long enough for me to send him free
tickets to see me act. Meantime, I determined
to buy all his books, which was the
least I could do.
But I was brought down to earth rather
.bn 079.png
.pn +1
rudely from these beautiful thoughts, for
when I got back to the office, Mr. Blades
told me that Mr. Westonshaugh wished to
speak to me; and it then transpired that,
instead of taking half an hour for my luncheon,
according to the rules and regulations
of the Apollo, I had been out for two hours
and rather more!
I was terribly sorry, and felt the right
and proper thing was to be quite plain
with Mr. Westonshaugh.
“I met Mr. Martin Tupper at a bookstall,
and he introduced himself and asked
me to lunch, sir,” I said. But the Head
of the Department did not like this at all,
and I was a good deal distressed to find
the spirit in which he took it. He seemed
pained and startled by what I told him;
he even showed a great disinclination to
accept my word.
“Go back to your work, sir,” he said, in
a very stern voice, “and don’t add buffoonery
to your other irregularities. I am
.bn 080.png
.pn +1
much disappointed in you, Mr. Corkey.”
It was a fearful thing to hear this great
and good man misunderstand me so completely.
In fact, the blood of shame sprang
to my forehead—a thing that had never
happened before. And then he made another
even more terrible speech.
“You look to me very much as if you’d
been drinking,” he said. “Have a care,
young man; for if there is one thing that
will ruin your future more quickly than
another, it is that disgusting offense!”
I sneaked away then, in a state of bewildered
grief, sorrowful repentance, and
mournful exasperation. This was by far
the unhappiest event in my life; and things
got worse and worse as the day wore on.
Mr. Blades asked me what the deuce
I’d been doing, and when I told him, he
said “Rats!” This was a word he used to
mean scorn. Then he continued, and even
used French.
“‘Martin Tupper!’ Why don’t you
.bn 081.png
.pn +1
say it was Martin Luther at once? I believe
it’s a case of ‘Sasshay la fam!’”
“Martin Luther died in 1546, so it
couldn’t have been him, and I don’t know
what ‘Sasshay la fam’ means,” I said,
and Mr. Blades replied in a most startling
manner:
“So’s Martin Tupper dead—sure to
be! Ages ago, no doubt. Anyway, I happen
to know that Mr. Westonshaugh thinks
the dickens of a lot of him, so when you
said he’d been standing you a lunch, you
made the worst joke you could have.”
“It wasn’t a joke, but quite the reverse,”
I said; and then I told Mr. Blades
how I had an introduction to Mr. Wilson
Barrett at that moment in my pocket—to
prove the truth of what I was saying.
Mr. Blades read it carefully and shook
his head.
“You’re such a jug, Corkey,” he said.
“This is neither more nor less than a common
or garden confidence trick. The beggar
.bn 082.png
.pn +1
saw you had a ‘fiver’ at the bookstall
and soon found you were a soft thing.
Then he pretended to be friendly and just
hammered away till he found the weak
spot. If you’d go and have a sensible
lunch, like everybody else, instead of wandering
about London in the helpless way
you do, on a bun and a glass of milk, this
wouldn’t have happened.”
“The great point is whether Mr. Tupper
is or is not dead,” I told Mr. Blades. “If
he is dead, really and truly, then no doubt
I have been swindled by a shady character;
but if he is not, then there is still hope that
it was really him.”
Mr. Blades, with his accustomed great
kindness, himself went in to Mr. Westonshaugh
with me and explained the painful
situation in some well-chosen words.
“I shouldn’t have thought of using the
name of such a world-renowned poet, sir,”
I said to the Head of the Department;
“but he told me so himself, and he was
.bn 083.png
.pn +1
exceedingly serious-looking and solemn and
kind; and far above clean clothes—which
is a common thing with poets. But, of
course, if he’s dead, as Mr. Blades
thinks—--”
“He’s not dead,” answered the Chief.
“I am glad to say that he is not dead. It
is my privilege to correspond with Mr.
Tupper occasionally. I heard from him
on the subject of a difficult passage in one
of his poems only a month ago.”
“Does he live in Grosvenor Square, sir?”
I asked; “because this Mr. Tupper said he
did—at No. 96.”
“He does not,” answered Mr. Westonshaugh.
“He doesn’t live in London at
all.”
Then Mr. Blades had a brilliant
idea.
“Would you know Mr. Tupper’s handwriting,
sir?” he asked, and Mr. Westonshaugh
said that he would know it instantly.
.bn 084.png
.pn +1
He examined the letter of introduction
to Mr. Barrett, and pronounced it to be
an unquestionable forgery.
“A great crime has been committed,”
he said. “A professional thief has used
the name and signature of Mr. Tupper in
order to rob you of five pounds, and he has
succeeded only too well. Let this be a
lesson to you, Mr. Corkey, not again to
fall into conversation with the first well-dressed—or
badly dressed—stranger who
may accost you. To think that the insolent
scoundrel dared to use that sacred
name!”
Mr. Westonshaugh evidently considered
it a very much worse thing to forge Martin
Tupper’s name than to steal my five-pound
note. And I dare say it was. He forgave
me, however, and withdrew his dreadful
hint about my having had too much to
drink.
Then I left him and worked in a very
.bn 085.png
.pn +1
miserable frame of mind until six o’clock—to
make up for my wasted time.
It was my earliest great and complete
crusher; and, coming just at this critical
moment, made it simply beastly sad. Because
my very first earnings were completely
swallowed up in this nefarious manner
by a shady customer. I had hoped to
return home and flourish my five-pound
note in the face of Aunt Augusta and tell
her to help herself liberally out of it; but,
instead of that, I had to horrify her with
the bad news that my money was gone for
ever. If it had happened later, I believe
that I should have made less and even felt
less of it; but such fearful luck falling on
my very first “fiver” made it undoubtedly
harder to bear than it otherwise would
have been. And then I got a sort of
gloomy idea that losing my first honest
earnings meant a sort of curse on everything
I might make in after life! I felt
that a bad start like that might dog me
.bn 086.png
.pn +1
for years, if not for ever. I had a curious
and horrid dread that I should never really
make up this great loss, but always be five
pounds short through the rest of my career
to my dying day!
Aunt Augusta tried hard to make light
of it. In fact, it is undoubtedly at times
like this that a woman is far more comforting
than a man. She went to her private
store and brought out another crisp and
clean five-pound note and made me take it.
She insisted, and so reluctantly I took it;
but I didn’t spend it in the least with the
joy and ease that I should have spent the
other. It was, in fact, merely a gift—good
enough in its way—but very different
from the one I had earned, single-handed,
by hard work, in a humming hive
of industry.
The whole thing had its funny side—to
other people, and I heard a good deal about
it at the Apollo Fire Office. In fact, I
must have done the real Martin Tupper a
.bn 087.png
.pn +1
good turn in a way, because it was the
fashion for everybody to quote from his
improving works when I passed by.
It was a great lesson all round; but
London is full of interesting things of this
sort.
.bn 088.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
V
.sp 2
I was too much hurt about the insult
offered Mr. Wilson Barrett and myself
to go and see him act again for a
long time; but other theatres demanded my
attention because I was now a regular
student of the drama and didn’t like to
miss anything. Sometimes I went alone
and sometimes I got a clerk from the
Apollo to go with me. But none of them
much cared about legitimate drama.
I was already deeply in love, in a far-distant
and hopeless sort of way, with Miss
Ellen Terry, and when there came a first
night at the Lyceum Theatre, I resolved
to be present in the pit. I told Aunt
Augusta not to expect me at dinner-time,
but she was well used to this and said she
wouldn’t. So the moment that I was free
from my appointed task I flew off to the
.bn 089.png
.pn +1
Lyceum pit door and took my place. I
was, however, by no means the first to
arrive. A crowd had already collected and
I found myself among that hardy and
famous race of men and women known as
“first-nighters.” There were even youngish
girls in the crowd, for one stood near
me reading the Merchant of Venice, which
was the play we had all come to see. Luckily
for the girl a gas-lamp hung over her
head and she was thus enabled to read the
play and pass the time. Like a fool I had
brought nothing, yet it was enough amusement
and instruction for me to be among
so many regular professional “first-nighters”;
and I listened with great interest to
their deep knowledge of the subject. Five
or six men of all ages evidently knew one
another, and they were talking about a
little book that had just been written on
Mr. Henry Irving by Mr. William Archer.
It was a very startling book—the very one,
in fact, that I was going to buy at the bookstall
.bn 090.png
.pn +1
when the shady customer pretended
he was Mr. Martin Tupper. It was a
small book with rather a grim picture of
Mr. Henry Irving on the outside, and I
found that these old hands of the stage did
not altogether approve of the book and
thought parts of it rather strong coming
from Mr. Archer to Mr. Irving.
“He says that Irving is half a woman,”
said a grey man. “Now that’s going too
far, in my opinion.”
“I know what he’s driving at,” answered
a young man with a very intellectual face.
“You see, every artist has got to be man,
woman, and child rolled into one. Every
great artist has to have the imagination and
power of feeling and fellow-feeling to
identify himself with every other sort of
possible person. If you can’t do that, you
can’t be a first-class actor. That’s where
Irving beats Barrett into a cocked hat—temperament
and power of imagination.
Irving could act anything—from Richard
.bn 091.png
.pn +1
the Third to an infant in arms; Barrett
could not.”
“Barrett very nearly made Hamlet an
infant in arms, all the same,” said the grey
man, and at this excellent and subtle joke
they all laughed. I wanted to laugh in an
admiring sort of way, but doubted whether
it would not be rather interfering. So I
contented myself with smiling heartily;
because I didn’t want them to think so
fine a joke had been lost upon me.
They were very deeply read in everything
to do with the theatre, and I found
that they knew most of the actresses by
their married names, which, of course, I did
not. Thus, greatly to my surprise, I found
out that nearly all the most fascinating and
famous actresses were married. Many
even had families.
Splendid stories were told by the grey
man. He related a great jest about Mr.
William Terriss when he was acting with
Mr. Irving. It was irreverent in a way to
.bn 092.png
.pn +1
such a famous actor as Mr. Terriss; but, of
course, for mere intellectual power Mr.
Terriss was not in it with Mr. Irving—any
more than any other actor was, though
he might, none the less, be very great in
himself. And once, when Mr. Terriss was
rehearsing with Mr. Irving, the latter, failing
to make the former do what he wanted,
said before the actors, actresses, and supernumeraries
at that time assembled on the
spacious boards of the Lyceum Theatre—he
said, “My dear Terriss, do try and use
the little brains that God has given
you!”
The hours rolled by and one or two of
the young men spoke kindly to me. Then
the girl, who had grey eyes and a mass of
yellow hair under a deer-stalker hat, and
was dressed in cloth of the same kind, also
spoke to me and asked me to take my
elbow out of her shoulder-blade. I apologised
instantly and altered my position.
The crush was now increasing and the air
.bn 093.png
.pn +1
was exceedingly stuffy; but there still remained
an hour before the doors opened.
Having broken the ice, the girl, who I
think was tired of keeping quiet for such a
long time, began to talk. We discussed
the drama and “first nights” in general.
From one thing we went to another and
I found, much to my interest, that the girl
intended to become an actress. She was an
independent and courageous sort of girl.
Her parents had a shop in the Edgware
Road and were very much against her
going on the stage; but she was determined
to defy them. There was to be a dramatic
school opened shortly, and she was going
to join it. Then I naturally told her that
I was going to join that school too, and she
was quite pleased.
“Perhaps we shall play parts in the
same play some day,” she said; and I
said I hoped we might.
“Phew!” she exclaimed presently.
“This is getting a bit thick, isn’t it?”
.bn 094.png
.pn +1
Certainly it was. I had never been in
such a tightly packed crowd and, as bad
luck would have it, I was beginning to
feel very uncomfortable. I was, in plain
words, starving. Like a fool I had spared
no time for tea, but rushed off at the
earliest possible moment, and now I began
to feel emptier than I had ever felt in my
life before.
The girl, to whom I mentioned this, said
that I had gone white as chalk, but that I
should be able to buy something to eat and
drink inside. She had some chocolate in
her pocket, fortunately, and with great
generosity insisted upon sharing it with
me; but it amounted really to nothing in
my ravenous state. It was like giving a
hungry tiger a shrimp.
And then a most extraordinary thing
happened—a thing that I should not
have believed possible. I began to feel
funnier and funnier, and to gasp in a very
fishlike way, and to feel a cold and horrid
.bn 095.png
.pn +1
sweat bursting out upon my forehead. I
had not felt like this for many, many years—in
fact, only once before: on the day that
I and Jackson Minor found a cigar at
Merivale and tossed for it and I won and
smoked the cigar secretly to the stump.
And I remembered now, with tragical
horror, what happened afterwards; and the
hideous thought came to me that I was
going to be ill in that seething crowd of
hardy old “first-nighters”! Think of the
disgrace and shame of it; and it wasn’t
only that, because, of course, the “first-nighters”
would never forget a horrible
adventure of that kind, and no doubt the
next time I presented myself among them,
to wait five or six hours before the doors
opened upon some great triumph of Thespian
art, they would recognise me and band
together against me and order me away, as
a man unfit to take his place among seasoned
critics of the drama.
All this and much more flashed through
.bn 096.png
.pn +1
my head and then, just before the climax,
there came the comforting thought that I
couldn’t be ill in that way, having had nothing
since my bun and glass of milk eight
hours before. I am sorry to keep on mentioning
this bun and glass of milk because it
sounds greedy, but for once in a way I was
glad that I was empty—for the sake of
all those artistic and courageous “first-nighters,”
not to mention the brave, grey-eyed
girl.
Then I felt my knees give and the gaslight
overhead whirled about like a comet
with twenty tails; I saw the heads of the
people round me fade off their shoulders;
the gaslight went out; I heard a tremendous
humming and roaring in my ears,
like a train in a tunnel, and all was over.
My last thought was that this was death,
and I wondered if Miss Ellen Terry would
read about it in the paper next day and be
sorry. But, even at that ghastly moment,
I knew she wouldn’t, because of course
.bn 097.png
.pn +1
she would want to hear what the critics
thought of her “Portia”; and that would
naturally be the principal thing in the
newspaper for her.
Of course I wasn’t dying really; but I
fainted and must have put a great many
people to fearful inconvenience. It shows,
however, what jolly good hearts “first-nighters”
have got, in my opinion, that
they didn’t merely let me sink to the
earth, and ignore me, and walk over me
when the doors opened. But far from
that, despite the length of my legs, they
lugged me out somehow and forced open
the side door of a public-house that was
close at hand, and thrust me in.
When I came to, my first instinct was
one of pure self-preservation and I asked
for food. Outside, the people were crushing
into the pit of the theatre, and by the
time I had eaten about a loaf and half a
Dutch cheese, and drunk some weak
brandy-and-water, which the landlord of
.bn 098.png
.pn +1
the public-house very kindly and humanely
insisted upon my doing, the pit was full—not
even standing room remained. It was
rather sad in a way; but I felt less for the
frightful disappointment, after waiting all
those hours, than for the debt I owed the
merciful men who had rescued me. Of
course I didn’t know who they might be
and, in any case, it was impossible to wait
there till midnight, on the off-chance of
seeing them after the play was over and
thanking them gratefully.
I could have kicked myself over it, because
for a chap nearly six feet high, about
to join the London Athletic Club and
going to be an actor some day and so on—for
such a chap, with his way to make
in the world, to go into a crowd and faint,
like a footling schoolgirl who cuts her
finger—it was right bang off, as they say.
I felt fearfully downcast about it, because
it looked to me as if my career might just
as well be closed there and then: but the
.bn 099.png
.pn +1
kind landlord rather cheered me up. He
said:
“You needn’t take on like that. No
doubt you’ve outgrown your strength.
It’s nothing at all. The air out there in
these crushes would choke a crow. It’s
the commonest thing in the world for people
to be dragged out and shot in that
door.”
“Women, I dare say—not men.”
“Women—and boys,” he answered.
“And what d’you call yourself?”
“Well, I’m a man, I suppose,” I replied.
“I’m earning my own living, anyway.”
“So did I—afore I was ten years old,
my bold hero!” said the landlord.
He talked to me, while I ate my bread
and cheese, and presently advised me to
take a cab and drive home; but this I
scorned to do, being perfectly fit again.
I said I hoped to see him once more some
day and he only took sixpence for all my
.bn 100.png
.pn +1
refreshment. He was a good man and I
felt jolly obliged to him—especially when
he told me that my faint was not a disgrace
in itself, but more in the nature of a
misfortune.
I walked home and said nothing about
this unfortunate event; but merely told
Aunt Augusta that I had not been able
to get into the Lyceum, which was the
strict truth and no more. For if I had revealed
to her about fainting she would have
fussed me to death and very likely made
me go to Harley Street in grim earnest
and not merely as a spectator of that
famous spot.
Two nights later I went to the Lyceum
again and waited three hours, and being
laden in every pocket with sausage rolls,
mince pies, and fat, sustaining pieces of
chocolate, simply laughed at the waiting.
However, it was a lesson in its way; and
the lesson was never to be hungry in London.
It is the worst place in the world to
.bn 101.png
.pn +1
be hungry in—owing to the great strain
on the nerves, no doubt. And hunger
weakens the strength in a very marked
way and makes you liable to be run over,
or anything. Besides that, to be hungry
is not only very uncomfortable in itself;
but it makes you a great nuisance to other
people; and the hungry person ought not
to go into crowds for fear of the consequences.
A time was coming when I
was going to see hundreds of hungry persons
all assembled in one place together;
but that remarkable and fearful sight did
not happen until many months later.
The immediate result of the fainting was
a change of diet, and you will be glad to
know I shall never mention the bun and
the glass of milk again; because it went out
of my career from that day forward.
I had no secrets from Mr. Blades, who
was now my greatest and most trusted
friend in London. Therefore I told him
about the catastrophe, making him first
.bn 102.png
.pn +1
swear silence; and he explained it all and
let me go out to lunch with him that very
day, to show me what a good and nourishing
lunch ought to be.
“It is silly to say you can’t pay for it,”
declared Mr. Blades, “because you must.
And it is far better to pay for a chop or
steak or even a sausage and mashed and
half of bitter ale, than to find yourself
in the doctor’s hands.”
He was full of these wise and shrewd
sayings; so I went to an eating-house with
him and never laughed so much before,
owing to the screamingly funny way in
which a waiter shouted things down a tube.
It was not so much the things in themselves
as the way he shortened the names of them,
to save his precious time. Men came in
and gave their orders, and then this ridiculous
but exceedingly clever waiter shouted
his version of the orders down a pipe which
led to the kitchen of the restaurant, where
the dishes were being prepared.
.bn 103.png
.pn +1
It was like this: the waiter cruised round
among the customers and collected orders
for soup. Two men ordered ox-tail soup,
three had mock-turtle soup, Mr. Blades decided
for vegetable soup and I had pea-soup.
Well, of course, that was far too
much to shout down the tube, so the genius
of a waiter said, “Two ox, three mocks, a
veg, and a pea!” And there you were!
In less than no time the various soups appeared,
and the funniest thing of all to me
was, that nobody saw anything funny about
it. But I roared—I couldn’t help it, and
much to my regret annoyed Mr. Blades,
who told me not to play the fool where he
was known. After a time I steadied down
and made an ample meal; and afterwards
it transpired that it was generally the custom
of Mr. Blades to play a couple of
games of dominoes with some of his friends,
who lunched at the same place. But,
though he promised to teach me, it was
impossible that day owing to my being
.bn 104.png
.pn +1
quite unsteadied and helpless and imbecile
with laughing just at the end of the lunch.
It was, I need hardly say, the amazing
waiter. He saw that he had frightfully
amused me and perhaps thought he would
get an extra tip for being so wonderful.
Which he did do, for I gave him sixpence
and made Mr. Blades angry again.
But the waiter deserved a pound, for
when two men ordered Gorgonzola cheese
and another man ordered a currant dumpling
and three others wanted kidneys on
toast, he excelled himself by screaming
down to the kitchen these memorable words:
“Two Gorgons, a dump, and three
kids!” Then he winked at me and I simply
rolled about helplessly and wept with
laughing. This must have been one of
that glorious waiter’s greatest efforts, I
think, because several other quite elderly
men laughed too.
He was called “William,” and I knew
him well in a week. He had a rich fund of
.bn 105.png
.pn +1
humour, but was very honest and hard-working
and a Londoner to the backbone.
He hated foreign waiters and said that the
glitter of his shiny hair was produced by a
little fat from the grill well rubbed in
every morning. No barber’s stuff could
touch it, he said, and if it made him smell
like a mutton chop, who thought the worse
of him for that? He expected twopence
after each luncheon, and if any stranger
gave him less, he made screamingly funny
remarks. In his evenings he waited at the
banquets of the City Companies, which are
the most stupendous feeds the world has
ever known since Nero’s times; and at
these dinners he often heard State and
other secrets, which he said would have
been worth a Jew’s eye to him if he had
not been an honest man. He didn’t, of
course, say these things as if they were
meant to be true. Simple people no doubt
would have believed them, but I soon got
to notice that he accompanied many of his
.bn 106.png
.pn +1
most remarkable statements with a wink,
which disarmed criticism, as the saying is.
He was a good man at heart and had a
wife at home and also a lame daughter
who would never walk; so, though one
would not have thought it, he had his trials.
In fact nearly everybody I met, when I
got to know them, told me about distressing
things which they hid from the world.
Even Mr. Blades, who seemed to preserve
the even tenor of his way with great skill,
confessed to me that he had a brother very
different from himself and evidently very
inferior in every way. In fact it looked
to me, though of course I never hinted at
such a thing, that the brother of Mr.
Blades must have been rapidly sinking
into a shady customer of the deadliest sort.
Really for the moment, after I took to
proper lunches, it seemed as if I was the
only man in the office with no private
worries.
.bn 107.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VI
.sp 2
I found that the clerks at the Apollo
Fire Office were much more interesting
than the work, and I told Mr. Blades
so on an occasion when with his usual great
generosity he had given me some useful
help, because I was behind-hand and had
forgotten what I ought to have remembered.
But that I should find the clerks
more interesting than the work did not
please Mr. Blades, and he thought badly
of the idea.
“If you are going to be an insurance
clerk, the first thing is to master the insurance
business,” he said, very truly and
wisely to me; and then it was that I told
him of my great ambition to become an
actor in the future. He instantly disapproved
of it.
“There was a clerk in this office in the
.bn 108.png
.pn +1
past, and he went on the stage and did
well,” he admitted; “but he was exceptional
in every way. He was older than
you and had a very remarkably handsome
face.”
“In tragedy,” I said, “a handsome face
doesn’t matter so much.”
“When you talk of tragedy,” answered
Mr. Blades, “you mention the greatest
heights of the profession. You are not
built to play tragic parts, being far too
thin and long in the legs, in my opinion.
Besides, it is a calling in which only one in
a thousand does any real good. I should
advise you to stick to insurance and try to
master the principles of it.”
Of course I was getting on, but the lower
walks of the science of insurance are tame,
and it would not be interesting to explain
rates and risks and tariffs and the explosive
point of mineral oils and other important
things, all of which have to be
taken into account by the beginner.
.bn 109.png
.pn +1
But the clerks were far more full of
interest, and some were stern and ambitious
men, who were determined sooner or later
to get to the top of the office and become
Secretary; and some were easy men without
great ambition, but full of ideas, though
the ideas were not about the science of risk
from fire. There was one remarkable man,
whose age was thirty-two, and he lived at
Clapham in lodgings all alone. This man,
whose name was Tomlinson, possessed
enormous ability in the direction of racehorses.
His knowledge of these famous
quadrupeds was most extraordinary. If
you looked into a paper and saw the name
of a racehorse, Tomlinson would instantly
tell you whether it was a male or female
horse, and the name of its father and
mother, or I should say sire and dam.
He would also tell you its age and its
owner and its trainer and the jockeys who
had ridden it, and the races it had run
and was going to run, and the money, if
.bn 110.png
.pn +1
any, it had earned in stakes during its
career.
In this singular man’s desk were evidences
of his passion for the turf. Nailed
to the lid was the shoe or “racing plate”
of a Derby winner, and arranged round it
were photographic portraits of racehorses
extracted from packets of cigarettes. A
particular brand of cigarettes always contained
these portraits, and so, naturally,
Tomlinson smoked them. He seldom went
to race-meetings himself, but read all the
particulars of each race with great perseverance,
in order to guide his future betting
transactions. He had a Turf Agent
and visited him frequently during the
luncheon hour, and on the occasion of the
classic races, such as the Derby and Oaks,
or St. Leger, Tomlinson always arranged
a sweepstake in the Country Department
of the Apollo Fire Office and was well
thought of for doing so.
He said that if he had been blessed with
.bn 111.png
.pn +1
a good income he should have become a
“gentleman backer,” which is some particular
order of turf-specialist; and if he
had been born with real wealth, he should
have been an owner of racehorses, and a
member of the Jockey Club. As it was,
he knew several jockeys—though, curiously
enough, jockeys are not themselves
members of this far-famed club.
Then I might mention Wardle, who was
the chief of one of the divisions of the
Country Department, and a man of such
varied mind that, while very skillful in his
profession of insurance, he yet found leisure
to develop the art of music to the very
highest pitch. He was, in fact, a professional
organist on Sundays; and not
contented with this, actually composed
music in the loftiest Gregorian manner,
and played it on his organ before the congregation.
His way of work was a great
revelation to me, for while Tomlinson
might be calculating the proper weights
.bn 112.png
.pn +1
for a handicap, or taking down names for
a sweepstake, Wardle, with a piece of
music paper before him, which it always
was in his spare moments, would be arranging
triumphs of thorough bass and
counterpoint and so on—all to delight his
congregation some day, when the composition
was finished. He did not like Wagner,
and told me that he was a charlatan
and would soon vanish forever; but Mozart
he considered his own master, and said
that Mozart was the very spirit and essence
and soul of religious music. He spoke
bitterly, but quite patiently, about the vicar
of the church where he played and said that
the man, though a well-meaning and honourable
man, had never grasped the powers
of music in religion.
“If he had,” said Wardle, “I should
have had a new organ to play upon long
ago. Our instrument is very inferior and
our choir a thing of nought. As it is, the
people come to hear me and not him.”
.bn 113.png
.pn +1
But one of his pieces of music had been
played by a friend on the organ of St.
Paul’s Cathedral, and Wardle had heard
it and been a good deal moved to find how
his composition came out amid the solemn
and glorious architecture of that sacred
edifice. He hoped it would be played at
Westminster Abbey, when the regular organist
was taking his holiday and his locum
tenens, as they call it, was in his place.
Because this locum tenens was known to
Mr. Wardle and believed in his powers of
composition.
This genuine musician, on finding that
every sort of art interested me a good deal,
became very friendly and was so good as to
ask me to go to his church one Sunday and
hear him play, and have dinner with him
afterwards. It was a great compliment,
and of course I went and was deeply impressed
to see the amazing ease with which
Wardle, in surplice and cassock, handled
his organ and managed the pedals and
.bn 114.png
.pn +1
pulled out stops, and turned over the music
and played psalms and hymns and responses
and so on,—all with unfailing
success. During the collection the hymn
came to an end too soon, and doubtless,
with a less complete master of harmony
than Wardle, an awkward pause would
have ensued; but, with a nerve begot of
long practice, he permitted his fingers to
stray over the “Ivories,” as they call them,
and his feet to stray over the pedals, with
a result both rich and harmonious. A
solemn melody reverberated through the
aisles and rolled from the instrument, and
entirely concealed the mean sound of pennies
and threepenny pieces falling into the
collecting dishes.
I praised this feat warmly after the service
and Wardle was gratified that I had
noticed it. Then I asked him why he did
not commit such an improvisation to paper,
so that it should not be lost, and he laughed
and said:
.bn 115.png
.pn +1
“Why, it was a music-hall tune: ‘Father’s
teeth are stopped with zinc!’”
He explained, to my great astonishment,
that if you alter the time and the
general hang of a tune, and play it with
all the solemn notes and deep stops and
flourishes of an organ, the most skillful
ear is deceived. It was only another tribute
to the man’s amazing cleverness; but
somehow I felt disappointed that he should
have done this thing. It seemed unworthy
of him. He had a piano of his own, secured
on the hire system; and upon this
instrument, after dinner, he played me a
great deal of his own music, including
many of the numbers from a beautiful
fairy opera that he had written with a
friend—the words being by the friend.
“The libretto is footle,” confessed Wardle;
“but if I could only get a libretto
worth talking about, I should surprise
some of us.”
I told him that he had already surprised
.bn 116.png
.pn +1
me; but, of course, he meant the outer
world of opera-goers and enthusiasts of
music, who abound in London, and are to
be seen thronging the great concert halls
by night.
Another man of exceptional genius was
Bassett—a volunteer and a crack shot.
He belonged to the Artists’ Corps and was,
you might say, every inch a soldier, in the
complete disguise of an insurance clerk.
This martial man seemed always to be
panting for bloodshed, and openly hoped
that England would go to war with some
important nation—in fact, one of the
Great Powers for choice—before he was
too old to participate in the struggle. He
knew as much of our military heroes as
Tomlinson knew of our racehorses. He
was not content with being a sergeant in
the Artists’ Corps and one of their leading
marksmen, but also went into the deepest
science of battle and tactics and strategy.
He read war by day and he dreamed of
.bn 117.png
.pn +1
war by night, and he would have liked to
see conscription come in at any moment.
This fiery, but large-hearted man was
very anxious for me to become a volunteer,
and it was a great sorrow to me to find
that he did not feel any further interest in
me when I refused to do so, while thanking
him heartily for the idea. He said
that drilling was far better and more useful
than going down to the L.A.C. to
caper about half-naked, and that if I did
regular drills and so on, I should in time
come to the Field Days, and have all the
joy of forced marches and maneuvers at
Easter, and sleeping under canvas, and
going on sentry duty by night and waking
to the ringing sound of the trumpet at
dawn.
But none of these things tempted me as
much as Bassett expected. In fact, I had
already discovered in earlier life that the
god Mars was nothing to me. Bassett said
that he didn’t know what the young generation
.bn 118.png
.pn +1
was coming to when I told him this,
and he hinted, rather openly, that I was
unpatriotic. But I would not allow that
I was. I said:
“We can’t all be volunteers, any more
than we can all be proper soldiers.”
And Dicky Travers, who, though also
quite dead to the martial spirit, was a most
patriotic man in sporting matters, called
Bassett a “dog-shooter”!
This, however, was merely repartee, of
which Mr. Travers was a complete master.
In fact, he had invented a nickname for
everybody in the Department, and at his
wish, having a slight turn for rhyming, I
made up a long poem of thirty-eight verses,
being one verse for each man in the Department.
The mere poetry, which was
nothing, was mine; but the rich humour
and subtle irony, not to say satire, was the
work of Dicky Travers. Each verse of
this poem was arranged in the shape of a
“Limerick,” which is a simple sort of
.bn 119.png
.pn +1
rhyme well suited to humour combined with
satire; and it showed the delicate skill of
Mr. Travers and his surprising knowledge
of human nature, that each person who
read the poem invariably laughed very
heartily at thirty-seven verses—in fact, all
except the verse about himself. I noticed
this peculiar fact and was rather astonished
at it; but Travers was not astonished.
He said:
“My dear Corkey, when you are as old
as I am, you will find that to see your
friends scored off is one of those trials in
life which you can always manage to get
over. But the feeling is entirely different
when anybody scores off you.”
I may give a glimpse of yet another
first-class and original man before concluding
this short chapter and proceeding
to more serious business.
In some ways Mr. Bent, who lived at
Chislehurst, was among the most naturally
gifted of the staff of the Country Department
.bn 120.png
.pn +1
of the Apollo. His talent, or you
might almost say “genius,” was purely
horticultural; and by dint of long and
patient study, and devoting his entire
spare income and all his spare time to the
subject, he had gradually arranged and
planted a garden that would undoubtedly
have become historical, if only it had been
a little bit larger.
It was his custom to give the Department
a taste of his great skill during the
summer months, for flowers were to him
what a sporting paper was to Tomlinson,
or a rifle to Bassett—in fact, the breath
of his nostrils.
On his desk he had two vases, and in
these vases always stood choice blossoms
during official hours. Sometimes I recognised
them, and oftener I did not; but
when I did not, Mr. Bent, who was a man
of mild expression and thin and stooping
appearance, told me the names, such as
Alströmeria and Carpentaria and Berberidopsis
.bn 121.png
.pn +1
and Oncocyclus Iris and Pardanthes
and Calochortus and Magnolia
and Mummy Pea and many another horticultural
triumph of the rarest sort. After
the day was done, with the generosity of
the born gardener, he would give away
these precious things to anybody who
wanted a buttonhole; but there were times
when he naturally expected some return
for magnificent hothouse exotics, which he
brought to the office in the depths of winter
or early spring, when flowers were
worth money. Such things as gardenias
and Maréchal Niel roses and Eucharis
lilies he invariably raffled—not, as he told
me, for gain, but simply to pay, or help
pay, for the expense of buying coke for
his hothouse, the temperature of which had
to be kept up to fever heat, as you might
say, in order that the various tropical
marvels grown by Mr. Bent should survive
the English winter.
Finding that I was very anxious to understand
.bn 122.png
.pn +1
gardening, because I knew that
many famous actors had said in newspapers
that they occupied their leisure in
their palatial gardens and orchid houses,
Mr. Bent most kindly allowed me to go
down one afternoon after office hours, not
only to see his garden, but, better still, to
watch him gardening in it.
“It is a pursuit that needs certain gifts,”
he told me, as we rode in the train to
Chislehurst. “You must, of course, first
have the enthusiasm and love of the science
for itself but that is not enough. You
must make sacrifices and read learned
books and study the life-history of plants
and their various requirements. Some, for
instance, like lime and some die if you give
them lime. A lily, or a rhodo. or an azalea
hates lime; a rose likes it. Some alpine
plants must have limestone chips to be
prosperous; others, again, like granite
chips. My son, a child of tender age but
already full of the gardening instinct, once
.bn 123.png
.pn +1
gave a choice saxifrage a pennyworth of
cocoanut chips—under the infantile hope
that what pleased him so well would please
the plant. A touching story which does
not in my opinion spoil by repetition.”
In this improving way Mr. Bent talked,
and when we reached his home he disappeared
instantly to don his gardening
clothes, while his wife gave me some tea.
She, too, was a gardener and very kindly
advised me to be especially delighted with
a plant called Mysotidium, which Mr.
Bent had flowered for the first time in his
life. It was rather like a huge forget-me-not
with rhubarb leaves, and it came from
New Zealand and cost five shillings.
Then Mrs. Bent’s little boy arrived and
she told me how he had given cocoanut
chips to the saxifrage; and he didn’t like
me, unfortunately, and wouldn’t go into
the garden with me. And then Mr. Bent
returned accoutred in all the trappings of
the professional gardener. He wore a
.bn 124.png
.pn +1
blue apron and leather gloves and a clump
of bast sticking out of his pocket; and his
trousers and sleeves turned up and everything
complete.
“I must be busy,” he said, “but my
collection is completely labeled, and you
will have no difficulty in following the general
scheme of the garden.”
This was true, because of the great simplicity
of the scheme. The garden, in fact,
ran down quite straight between two other
gardens, and finished at a brick wall.
“A howling wilderness you see on each
side,” explained Mr. Bent, waving his
trowel to the right and left. By this he
meant, of course, that the other gardens
only had roses and wallflowers and carnations
and larkspurs and lilac, and the common
or garden flowers familiar to the common
or garden gardener. But it was no
“side” on Mr. Bent’s part to talk in this
scornful way, because to him, from his
eagle heights of horticulture, so to speak,
.bn 125.png
.pn +1
his neighbours’ gardens were barren wastes,
with nothing in them to detain the expert
for a moment.
His garden was literally stuffed with
rare and curious things. He admitted that
some of them were not beautiful; but they
were rare and in some cases he doubted if
anybody else in Kent had them. It never
occurred to him that nobody else in Kent
might want them. Everything was beautifully
labelled with metal labels, and many
of the rarer and more precious alpine
plants had zinc guards put round them to
keep away garden pests, such as slugs and
snails.
I couldn’t believe that a snail would
have dared to show his face in that garden;
but Mr. Bent said he always had to be
fighting them, and that sometimes they
conquered and managed to scale a zinc
guard and devour a small choice alpine in
a single night!
He had most beautiful flowers to show
.bn 126.png
.pn +1
me; or rather he let me walk up and down
among them while he gardened. It was
very interesting to see the sure professional
touch of Mr. Bent. He never hesitated or
doubted what to do. He knew exactly
what to cut off a plant, or how much water
to give it, or how to tie up a trailer. He
planted out a few seedling zinnias to show
me. Then he watered them in and removed
the seed boxes, and all was neat and
tidy in a moment.
He handled long and difficult Latin
names with the consummate ease of a native,
and he showed me piles of gardeners’
catalogues. Once he had raised a begonia
from seed, which they accepted at Kew
Gardens, and the Director of Kew gave
him something in exchange for his hothouse.
“It died,” said Mr. Bent, “and that
through no fault of mine; but the distinction
and the compliment have not died and
never will.”
.bn 127.png
.pn +1
He was a member of the R.H.S., or
Royal Horticultural Society, and he had
shown a plant now and again at their
meetings, but without any honour falling
to it.
Before supper I was allowed to help
Mr. Bent with a garden hose on the grass;
and while we were at work a man from
next-door looked over the wall and wished
Mr. Bent “good-evening” and asked for
some advice. Seeing me, he told me the
story of Mr. Bent’s little boy and the
cocoanut chips for the third time; then he
explained to Mr. Bent that his sweet peas
were curling up rather oddly and said that
he would thank him to go and have a look
at them.
“Good Lord, the peas a failure!” said
Mr. Bent; then with his usual kindness he
instantly hastened to see if anything could
be done. When he returned I could see
that he was troubled.
“His peas have failed,” he said. “It
.bn 128.png
.pn +1
is one of those disasters that come upon
even good gardeners sometimes. Not that
Mason is a good gardener, or, in fact, a
gardener at all in the real sense. I don’t
know what has happened to his peas—the
trouble is below ground and might be one
of five different things; but all is over with
the peas. I have told him to give up hope
about them. I may be able to spare him
some annuals later.”
Mrs. Bent, who was a most perfect
woman for a gardener’s wife, insisted on
picking me a bunch of good and sweet
flowers before I went away, and then, just
as I was going, Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law
walked past the gate and stopped to ask
a horticultural question. He was a beginner,
but such was Mr. Bent’s fire and
genius in these matters that he inspired
everybody with his own passion for the
science and, as he truly said, no one could
know him intimately without sooner or
later becoming a gardener.
.bn 129.png
.pn +1
I am sure I was full of enthusiastic
joy about it after supper, and if my Aunt
Augusta had had enough garden to grow
a blade of grass, I should have planted
one. Even as it was, I planned a box
for bulbs and things during the next
autumn.
Mr. Bent’s brother-in-law happened to
be going to the tobacconist’s, and he walked
as far as the station with me after he had
bought half a pound of coarse tobacco to
fumigate his greenhouse, which was bursting
with green-fly and other pests. Thus
I heard the story of Mr. Bent’s little boy
and the cocoanut chips for the fourth time,
and it was rather instructive in its way to
find how the fun of it had waned. In fact,
such was my feeling to the story, that I
didn’t even tell it to Aunt Augusta when
I got home; though, coming fresh to her,
it might have faintly amused her.
As an example of the poem that I had
written with Dicky Travers, I may here
.bn 130.png
.pn +1
quote the verse upon Mr. Bent. It ran
as follows:
.pm start_poem
“A middle-aged wonder called Bent,
Made the deuce of a garden in Kent,
And his roses and lilies
And daffadown dillies
All helped with the gentleman’s rent.”
.pm end_poem
Here, you see, was humour combined
with satire. But the peculiarity of the
poem held in the case of this verse, as it
did in all the others. While everybody
else thought it good, Mr. Bent considered
it vulgar and didn’t like it in the least,
because of the ironic allusion to raffles.
He never asked me to see his garden
again, though I entered for raffle after
raffle of his choice exotics and once won
four fine gardenias, at the ridiculous cost
of a penny, and took them home to Aunt
Augusta.
.bn 131.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VII
.sp 2
In course of time Mr. Travers informed
me that I was elected an active
member of the L.A.C. These magic
letters stand for the London Athletic
Club, easily the most famous athletic club
in the world. I had been there as one of
the public on several occasions, and already
knew by sight such giants of the arena as
Phillips and George and Cowie and other
most notable men, all historically famous.
In fact George soon joined the professional
ranks, as we say, and the day was
coming when he would run a mile faster
than anybody in the world had ever run it.
The first time I went to Stamford
Bridge it so happened that a most sad
misfortune fell on my friend Dicky Travers.
He had entered for a two-mile walking
race and trained very carefully for it—as
.bn 132.png
.pn +1
well he might, because, such was his universal
fame at this distance, that he was
handicapped to give all the other competitors
a lot of start. Some had actually
as much as a minute start; but Dicky
started from scratch. He told me in the
morning of the day that he felt very well
and expected to get pretty near fourteen
minutes for the two miles. I lunched with
him on the day, and, as it was an evening
meeting at the L.A.C. and he would not
be racing before six o’clock, he ate a steak
and some bread and cheese; but he drank
nothing but water; because experience had
shown him that beer was no use before a
great struggle of this sort.
In due time, after the first heats of a
“sprint” and a half-mile race, the walking
competition came on, and I was very glad
to hear several spectators cheer Travers
when he appeared on the cinder path. I
also did the same. He wore black drawers
and vest; but the rest of him was, of
.bn 133.png
.pn +1
course, entirely bare, save for his feet,
which were encased in walking shoes which
he had made expressly to his directions.
In each hand he carried an oblong cork,
and his face had a cheerful and calm expression
which little indicated the great
ordeal before him.
Eight men had entered for the race, and
the limit man went off at such a great pace
that it seemed absurd to suppose Travers
could ever get near him. Others started
quickly after each other according to the
handicap, and then a man called Forrester
started. He was next to Travers and received
only ten seconds start from him.
But such was his speed that he had gone
about forty yards before Dicky was told
to go.
Every eye was fixed upon the scratch
man as, with a magnificent and raking
action, he set out on his gigantic task.
Though not very tall, he had a remarkable
stride, and his legs, which were slightly
.bn 134.png
.pn +1
hairy and magnificently shaped, were remarkable,
owing to a muscle that had developed
on the front of the shin bones.
This is the walking muscle, and only great
walkers and racers have it developed in this
extraordinary manner. Travers had a very
long stride and a graceful motion. You
didn’t realise that he was going so fearfully
fast till you saw that, from the first,
he began to gain upon the rest. Some of
the others—all, of course, men of great
distinction—appeared to be walking quite
as fast as Dicky; but they were not. Umpires
ran along on the grass inside the
track to see the walking was fair; and the
men who performed this onerous task had
all been famous also in their day.
At last they exercised their umpiring
powers and stopped one of the competitors.
He had a most curious action, certainly,
and several experts near me prophesied
from the first that he would be pulled out.
He didn’t seem to be actually running and
.bn 135.png
.pn +1
he didn’t seem to be actually walking. It
was a kind of shuffle of a very swift and
speedy character; but whatever it exactly
was, the umpires didn’t like it and told
him that he was disqualified. He was a
very tall man in a red costume, and he
didn’t seem in the least surprised when
they stopped him. In fact he was rather
glad, I believe. A spectator next to me,
smoking a cigar and talking very loud,
said that the man had been really making
the pace for another man.
Now the race had covered a mile and
Travers was walking in the most magnificent
manner it is possible to describe. An
expression of great fierceness was in his
eye and he was foaming slightly at the
mouth, like a spirited steed. He and the
man who had received ten seconds from
him were too good for the rest of the field,
and when they had covered a mile and a
half, they passed the leader up to that distance
and simply left him standing still.
.bn 136.png
.pn +1
It was now clear there was going to be a
historic race for the victory between Forrester
and Travers, and the supporters of
each great athlete shouted encouragement
and yelled and left no stone unturned to
excite their man to make a supreme effort
and win. Travers and Forrester were
walking one behind the other and it was,
of course, a classical exhibition of fair
“heel-and-toe” work, such as is probably
never seen outside the famous precincts of
the L.A.C. I shrieked for Travers and the
man next me, with the cigar, howled for
Forrester. Such was his excitement that
the man with the cigar seized his hat and
waved it to Forrester as he passed; and
seeing him do this, I seized my hat, too, and
waved it to Dicky.
Of course Travers, with the enormous
cunning of the old stager, had kept just
behind Forrester all the way—to let him
set the pace; but now he knew that Forrester
was slacking off a little—to save
.bn 137.png
.pn +1
himself for a great finish—and so Travers
felt that the time had come to make his
bid for victory. It was just passing me
that he did so, and I saw the flash of
genius in his eye as he gathered himself for
the supreme effort that was to dash the
hopes of Forrester. Only one more round
of the cinder track had to be made, so
Dicky instantly got to Forrester’s shoulder
and, after a few terrific moments, during
which I and the man with the cigar and
many others practically ceased to breathe,
Travers wrested the lead from Forrester.
It was a gigantic achievement and a cool
and knowing sportsman near me with a
stop watch in his hand declared that if
Dicky wasn’t pulled up he would do
fourteen and a quarter. “He’s getting
among it,” said the cool hand, which was
his way of meaning that Travers was promised
to achieve a notable performance.
But Forrester was not yet done with.
This magnificent walker, in no way discouraged
.bn 138.png
.pn +1
by his doughty foeman, stuck
gamely to his colossal task and Travers,
try as he would, could not shake him off.
“He’s lifting! He’s lifting!” screamed
the man with the cigar. “Pull him out—stop
him!”
“He’s not—you’re a liar!” I shouted
back, in a fever of rage, because the friend
of Forrester, of course, meant that Travers
was lifting. And if you “lift” in a walking
race, you are running and not walking
and all is over.
They had only two hundred yards to go
and Travers was still in front, when an
umpire, to my horror, approached Dicky.
He had been watching Dicky’s legs with a
microscopic scrutiny for some time and
now he stopped the leader and told him
that he was disqualified.
I shouted “Shame! Shame!” with all
my might, and so did several other men;
but the man with the cigar, who evidently
understood only too well the subtleties of
.bn 139.png
.pn +1
lifting among sprint walkers, screamed
shrilly with exaggerated joy and behaved
like a silly fool in every possible way.
Forrester, relieved of his formidable
rival, took jolly good care not to lift himself.
And as the next man in the race
was nearly a hundred yards behind, he, of
course, won comfortably.
Travers behaved like the magnificent
sportsman he was, and I felt just as proud
of knowing him as if he’d actually won;
for he did not whine and swear and bully
the umpires or anything like that. He
just took his coat from the bench where he
had thrown it before the race, inquired of
the timekeeper what Forrester had done it
in, and presently walked into the dressing-room
with the others, quite indifferent to
the hearty cheers that greeted him and the
victor.
I went in while he dressed and he said
the verdict, though hard, was just.
“I knew he was going to do me when
.bn 140.png
.pn +1
he came up again after I passed him,”
explained Travers. “He’s a North London
chap in a lawyer’s office. I’ve never
walked against him before. I ought to
have pushed him much earlier and tried to
outwalk him for the mile. He’s got fine
pace. Look at the time—14.22—and he
wasn’t walking after I came off. I meet
him again at Catford Bridge next month.
He seems a very good sort.”
Thus did this remarkable sportsman take
his defeat. But he was, of course, cast
down by it, for he had only been stopped
twice before during the whole of his honourable
and brilliant career on the cinder
path.
As for my own experience, I went down
after my election and Travers himself
came to see how I shaped. At Merivale
I had been a sprinter and had done well
up to two hundred yards, and since I came
to London I had seen Harry Hutchings—the
greatest sprinter who ever lived and
.bn 141.png
.pn +1
of course a professional champion. Therefore
I decided to go in for that branch of
the pedestrian’s art. I bought my costume,
which was entirely black, like Dicky’s, and
a pair of spiked running shoes and a black
bag to carry them in. Then I went down
one evening after office hours with my
friend, and he introduced me to Nat Perry
and his son, Charles Perry. Nat Perry
was the hero of many a hard-won field,
and immense and dogged courage sat upon
his bronzed and clean-shaved countenance.
Many hundreds of athletes had passed
through his hands to victory or defeat, as
the case might be, and he was a master
in the art of judging an athlete’s powers.
As the friend of Travers he welcomed me
with great kindness, heard that I wanted
to be a sprinter, but seemed doubtful
whether I was the sort of build for that
branch of running.
“You look more like a half-miler or
miler with them legs,” he said, casting his
.bn 142.png
.pn +1
eye over me critically but kindly. “And
you’re on the thin side. You want to put
on some flesh. But you’re young yet.”
I told Nat Perry that I hoped to put on
some flesh and that I was prepared to follow
his advice in everything. We came
out on to the track presently, and I ran
and Perry watched. But he kept very
calm about it and I had a sort of feeling he
wasn’t much interested. Presently he said:
“You don’t begin running till you’ve
gone fifty yards. Start running from the
jump off.”
He asked another man, who was training,
to show me how to start; because his
own athletic days were, of course, at an
end, and he could not show me in person.
But the other man most kindly came over
and showed me how to get set and how to
start like an arrow from a bow, which is
half the art of sprinting.
After the trial was over Nat Perry said
that it was impossible to prophesy anything
.bn 143.png
.pn +1
until I had shaken down and found
my feet on the cinders. “You may be a
runner or you may not,” he told me.
“I’ve seen bigger duffers than you shape
into runners. You work hard for a month
and get up your appetite and eat all you
can pack away. Running or no running,
the exercise in the open air’s what you
want, and plenty of it.”
He rubbed me down after I had had a
shower bath and gave me a locker for my
things. He was a good man besides being
so famous, and everybody thought a great
deal of him at the L.A.C. His son was
also an exceedingly clever trainer.
In course of time I was introduced to a
few of the stars of the club, with whom,
of course, Travers mixed on terms of perfect
equality. They were all brilliant men,
and their knowledge of athletics and times
and great feats of the past filled me with
interest and respect.
I enjoyed the evenings at the L.A.C.
.bn 144.png
.pn +1
very much indeed, and I gradually improved
till Perry decided that I had better
enter for one of the evening handicaps.
“It will accustom you to the feel of it,”
he said. “You’ll have to get over the
strangeness before you do anything; and
there’s your handicap to be thought on.
As an unknown you won’t have your fair
start at first; but after you’ve lost your
heat for a month of Sundays, then you’ll
be on your proper mark and may get on.
You’re not a flyer and very like never will
be—you ain’t got the physic; but you’ll do
a bit, I dare say. And there’s hope for a
mile, if you come on next year. No good
for a quarter nor yet a half—too punishing.
Your ’eart wouldn’t stand it.”
Thus this able and honest man encouraged
me cautiously and I obeyed him, and
in due time appeared to contest my heat
in a hundred yards’ handicap.
It was exciting, but it didn’t last long.
I took a preliminary spin and then, curiously
.bn 145.png
.pn +1
enough, a thing happened that
quite put me off for the moment. You
must know the L.A.C. ground ran along
one side of a railway cutting and on the
other side, running, in fact, parallel with
the athletic grounds, was a cemetery.
And now, just as I was going to have a
second preliminary spin, there came across
the railway cutting the exceedingly mournful
sound of a funeral bell tolling. Somehow
I felt that while on one side of the
line was a crowd of excited and eager men
full of life and hope and joy, and others,
like myself, also full of life and hope and
joy, going to run in a competition and
exert their wonderful energies to the utmost—while
this was happening upon one
side of the railway cutting, a scene of a
very different nature was going on upon
the other. And I got a sort of fancy they
were burying a young man in his eighteenth
year, like myself—a man who only
a few days before was full of fight, and
.bn 146.png
.pn +1
enjoying life and hoping no doubt some
day to be somebody worth talking about.
And now, instead of taking the world by
storm and getting knighted even, or other
honours, here was the unfortunate chap
being tolled into the earth under the weeping
eyes of a heartbroken mother and
other relations. The reality of the thing
was fearful, and it was rather sad in a way,
too, because it did me no good to have my
mind distracted in this manner just before
I was called upon to battle against four
other men, all considerably older than I
was myself.
In fact they had to rouse me and call
me to the starting-post, where the other
competitors had already assembled. There
was no man at scratch in my heat, but a
great and powerful athlete called Muspratt,
who received four yards from
scratch, was the best runner of the five. I
got eight yards, which was only four from
Muspratt and not enough; and of the
.bn 147.png
.pn +1
other three men in the race, one, who was
startlingly fat to be a sprinter, had nine
yards and one had ten.
At the sound of the pistol we all dashed
off and I started fairly well. The sensation
in a sprint of this kind is most interesting,
because at first your position with
respect to the other runners is unchanged.
Though you are all flying along at a terrific
pace, you appear to be all hardly
moving at all. But then, after about half
the distance had been run, I found, much
to my astonishment, that I had caught the
man who had one yard start from me, and
both he and I were almost dead level with
the front man. Now, of course, was the
time for me to make my supreme effort;
but just as I was about to do so, I became
conscious of something white on my
left and found, to my great interest, that
Muspratt was only a yard behind me. In
fact he was already making his effort, and
when I made mine it proved useless against
.bn 148.png
.pn +1
Muspratt, who was an old warhorse of the
cinder path and a magnificent judge of
pace. Twenty yards from the tape I honestly
believe the whole five of us were in a
dead line; but Muspratt really had us in
the hollow of his hand, though we little
knew it and all strained every nerve for
victory. He slid past us, however, and
broke the tape a yard ahead of myself and
the fat man. And I was honestly more
amazed by the splendid running of the fat
man than anything else in the heat; because
it showed what pluck and training
and the genius of Nat Perry could do,
even for such an unpromising sprinter.
Travers, who most kindly consented to
come down that evening and encourage
me, though he was not doing anything
himself, figured it all out very correctly
on paper afterwards. The heat was run
in ten and three-fifths of a second by Muspratt
with four yards start, and he beat
me by a yard and a half. Therefore
.bn 149.png
.pn +1
Travers considered that I had done what
would have amounted to a shade worse than
eleven seconds from scratch.
Muspratt, who ran in an eyeglass, by the
way, which was interesting in itself, though
spectacles were common enough with
sprinters, got second in the final heat, which
was won by a man with nine yards start,
who had never before won as much as a
salt-cellar, though he had been competing
for two years unavailingly.
But though of great interest to me, I
cannot say any more about my doings at
the London Athletic Club, because other
more important matters have to be told.
What with running and cricket matches
against other Fire and Life Insurance
Offices, I now got plenty of exercise and
felt exceedingly well and keen to proceed
with the most important business of my
life—which was, of course, to become a
tragic actor and play in the greatest dramatic
achievements of the human mind.
.bn 150.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VIII
.sp 2
At last there came the solemn evening
when I arrived at the Dramatic
School.
It was in a quiet sort of corner off the
top of Regent Street, and I got there at
six o’clock for my first lesson in the Thespian
art. No less than four other youngish
men had already assembled, and with
them was an old or, at any rate, distinctly
oldish man of rather corpulent appearance,
with a clean-shaved face and grey hair. I
thought at first he was the famous actor
and elocutionist, Mr. Montgomery Merridew,
of universal fame, who was to be my
instructor in elocution and stage deportment;
but judge of my surprise when I
discovered that the distinctly oldish man
was a pupil like myself! He gazed with
rather an envious look at the other pupils,
.bn 151.png
.pn +1
and no doubt wished that he had turned
to the art earlier in life; and I felt he was
a fatherly and a kindly sort of man, and
certainly added weight and dignity to the
class.
He was called Henry Smith, but proposed
to change this name for something
more attractive when he got his first engagement;
and the other men were named
respectively Leonard Brightwin, Wilford
Gooding, Harold Crowe, and George Arthur
Dexter.
Naturally, I scanned their faces eagerly
to see if any were destined to the highest
tragical walks of the drama; and I found
that two were evidently going to be low
comedians. These were Harold Crowe
and Wilford Gooding. Crowe was a fair
man with rather prominent eyes, and he
concealed his nervousness under a cloak
of humour of a trivial character; and Gooding
was thin, with a very small head and a
comic face, which he could move about in
.bn 152.png
.pn +1
a most grotesque manner. He and Crowe
already knew each other. George Arthur
Dexter had a keen and knowing face, and
was exceedingly stylishly dressed in a
check suit, with an ivory skeleton’s head in
his tie, a carnation in his buttonhole, and
several rings, which appeared to have genuine
precious stones in them, on his hands.
He had an assertive presence and seemed
inclined to take the lead among us. He
might easily have been mistaken for an
actor already, and indeed told us that he
was an old hand on the amateur boards.
He explained to us that he had only
come for polish, and wasn’t really sure if
Mr. Merridew would be able to teach him
anything that he didn’t know already.
This man, curiously enough, was the
first man I didn’t like in London. Of
course I didn’t like the shady customer
who pretended to be Mr. Martin Tupper,
but I only hated him afterwards; whereas,
in the case of Dexter, I felt a feeling of
.bn 153.png
.pn +1
dislike from the start. He was so fearfully
contented with himself, and his clothes, and
his skeleton’s head and his great histrionic
gifts.
But Leonard Brightwin was a very different
sort of man. Genius blazed out of
his black eyes; he wore his raven locks
long, and from time to time tossed them
back from his forehead in a very artistic
manner. In fact, I felt in the presence
of a future leader of the stage. He was
of medium height and of shy and retiring
nature; but one could not help feeling that
Brightwin was born to be a great tragedian.
I longed to be his friend from the
first.
We all fell into conversation of a very
animated sort, and Dexter, who greatly
fancied his powers of imitating well-known
actors, was just doing Mr. Edward Terry
in The Forty Thieves (as he thought,
though it was utterly unlike), when the
door opened and no less a person than the
.bn 154.png
.pn +1
renowned Mr. Montgomery Merridew
stood before us.
One saw the graceful abandon of the old
stager at a glance. The way he walked,
the way he extended his hand and poised
his leonine head on his sinewy neck—all
showed the practised histrion. He was a
shapely man of fifty, at the least; but such
was the almost panther-like grace of his
movements and rich auburn colour of his
flowing mustache, that, but for the deep
lines of thought on his brow and under his
eyes, one might have imagined him many
years younger.
An air of perfect assurance and the manner
of one accustomed to rule, greatly distinguished
Mr. Merridew. His voice was
a magnificent organ, under perfect control,
and every gesture and step were timed and
studied to perfection. He was, in fact,
an embodiment of the art that conceals art.
He bowed on entering, not in a servile
manner, but with a courtly familiarity,
.bn 155.png
.pn +1
such as doubtless one sees when kings meet
kings. He appeared astonished at the
smallness of the class collected to receive
him; but he concealed his dismay under a
nonchalant air of perfect good-breeding,
which I am sure was a lesson in itself.
He greeted us each in turn and insisted
on shaking hands with all of us. He wore
pince-nez, while engaged in this manner,
and having declared his pleasure at making
our acquaintance, threw off the pince-nez
with an almost regal gesture and lost no
time, but bade us marshal ourselves before
him, and then began an easy but most
illuminating address on the art of stage
deportment and elocution.
While engaged in this opening lecture,
he scanned our faces in turn with such an
eagle glance that only George Dexter had
sufficient cheek to return his look. As for
the two low comedians, they simply curled
up under it, and so did I; and Brightwin,
whose eyes were even more luminous than
.bn 156.png
.pn +1
Mr. Merridew’s, let them fall to the floor
before the professional’s impassioned gaze.
As for poor Mr. Smith, he was, as it were,
mesmerized by the lecturer and kept his
eye fixed upon the great actor’s face,
though evidently not wishing to do so.
Mr. Merridew said some beautiful things
about art and was, in reality, a man of no
little modesty, considering his fame. He
certainly told us a great deal about himself;
but it was only to encourage us and
show us what we might do. His career
had been very picturesque, and he claimed
for himself such rare and brilliant powers
that he said he could act anything and
everything—from a billiard ball to Macbeth.
I mention this startling saying to
show that he allowed stray flashes of
humour—you might almost say badinage—to
enlighten his discourse.
“An actor,” he said, “ought to be as
sensitive as a photographic plate. He
ought to be able instantly to catch the
.bn 157.png
.pn +1
character that he proposes to portray and
allow it entirely to absorb him and soak
into every corner of his soul. When, for instance,
I played Iago some few years ago, I
ceased to be Montgomery Merridew during
the whole progress of the run! I was Iago—not
only when on the boards, for so
thoroughly had I permitted that fiend in
human shape to permeate my being, that
again and again I caught myself thinking
and feeling as Iago thought and felt outside
the precincts of the theatre. That
is an extreme case; and I instance it to
show you a little of the extraordinary
sensibility of the born actor. And not
only can I play on the instrument ‘man’
and move to tears or laughter, with the
ease of an accomplished musician playing
on a musical instrument, but such is my
intense feeling and emotional delicacy that
I am equally moved myself when I watch
another actor playing! The vibrating
chords of my soul respond to him instantly;
.bn 158.png
.pn +1
and though I may know that I could probably
play the part far better myself, yet
such is my sympathy and understanding,
that I weep as readily as any untutored
shop-boy in the audience—provided only
that my colleague on the stage strives honestly
to hold the mirror up to nature.”
He proceeded in this exalted strain for
some time, then looked at his watch and
concluded his preliminary remarks:
“Aristotle, gentlemen, has written a
famous work entitled The Poetics, and no
actor, or would-be actor, can afford to go
without it. I shall ask you all to buy a
copy—Bohn’s cheap edition—and ponder
very carefully what you find there.
Tragedy is a combination of terror and
pity. Through the one you are lifted to
the other, and the actor who embarks on a
classic part must always remember that he
is not there merely to harrow the feelings
of his fellow-creatures. Far from it—far
from it. By all means let him terrify them
.bn 159.png
.pn +1
first by the presentment of fearful passions;
let him freeze them to the bone and
curdle their life’s blood, if he can, by his
representation of rage, remorse, fear, and
so forth; but behind and beneath—permeating,
as it were, the very substance of
the soul, we must have the direct appeal
to humanity, to our fellow man and woman.
We must remind them that what we do and
suffer might be done and suffered by each
one of them, given the dreadful circumstances;
and then, gentlemen—then what
have we achieved? Why, we have summoned
compassion into the theatre! We
have awakened in each member of the
audience the most ennobling emotion of
the human heart! And at such times,
when playing in the greatest parts, I have
felt through the silent, spellbound theatre
an electric thrill for which no human creature
was responsible; and I have said, ‘It
is the wings of the angel of pity!’”
The noble man was much moved by this
.bn 160.png
.pn +1
magnificent feat of eloquence. He blew
his nose on a handkerchief which was
obviously made of silk, and then, with a
masterly touch, turned to us where we
stood, deeply impressed by his spontaneous
eloquence and came, as it were, to earth
with a bound.
“Now we must go through our paces,
gentlemen,” he said. “Upon the occasion
of our next meeting, I will ask each of
you to bring with him the play of Hamlet,
and I shall cast it and rehearse a scene or
two. Thus the business of elocution and
deportment will go hand in hand, and, at
the same time, you will be able to feel the
artist’s pride in uttering words and impersonating
characters that have rejoiced
many generations of men. But to-night I
shall ask each in turn to recite before me
some brief, familiar passage that is precious
to him. I shall thus learn a little about
your defects and can give each of you a
few preliminary hints. Lastly, if time permit,
.bn 161.png
.pn +1
I shall myself speak a speech before
you with the elocution and gesture proper
to it, and explain my reasons as I proceed.
I will ask Mr. Smith, as our senior
student, to begin. Mount the rostrum,
Mr. Smith, and forget our presence. Let
the aura of your poet enfold you as with
a garment, Mr. Smith. Seek to be one
with him, whoever he is, and in tune with
his conception—of course, to the best of
your powers.”
I was greatly encouraged to find that
Mr. Smith could rise to this challenge, for
I’m sure I didn’t feel as if I could; but
Mr. Smith, without any evasion, bowed to
Mr. Merridew and climbed three steps on
to a low stage at the end of the classroom,
and then said that he intended to recite
the poet Shelley’s “To a Skylark.”
“Not all, Mr. Smith. There will hardly
be time for all,” said the preceptor. And
this, I believe, secretly upset Mr. Smith
and made him hurried and uneasy. For
.bn 162.png
.pn +1
he was a retiring man of most delicate
feelings, and the thought that he might be
taking up too much time evidently put him
bang out of his stride, as we say at the
L.A.C.
Mr. Merridew settled himself in his
chair, with the nonchalant attitude of the
King in Hamlet during the beginning of
the play scene, and Mr. Smith, thrusting
out his right arm in a rather unmeaning
way, set off. He spoke in a hollow and
mumbling voice, not suited to a skylark,
and instantly the dreadful truth was forced
upon us that he left out the h’s! He began
like this:
.pm start_poem
“’Ail to thee, blithe spirit,
Bird thou never wert,
That from ’eaven or near it
Pourest thy full ’eart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
.pm end_poem
Mr. Merridew started as though a serpent
had stung him, at the very first word,
for, of course, to his highly strung senses
.bn 163.png
.pn +1
it must have been simple agony; and I
think Mr. Smith knew there was something
wrong, too; but he went on about “’igher
still and ’igher,” and gradually warmed to
his work, so that when he came to “Thou
dost float and run,” he actually tried to do
it and stood on his toes and fluttered his
arms! It might have answered fairly well
for a turkey, to say it kindly, but it was
utterly wrong for a skylark. One felt that
Mr. Smith had thought it all out and taken
immense trouble, and it was rather sad in
a way when the professor stopped him and
told him to come down. Mr. Smith instantly
shrank up; and the fire of recitation
went out of him and he sneaked down
humbly.
“It’s the aspirate,” he said. “I can’t
’elp it. I’ve fought it for years; but it
conquers me.”
Mr. Merridew, however, was most encouraging.
“Be of good cheer,” he answered. “You
.bn 164.png
.pn +1
labour under a common affliction. Much
may be done to cure it with patience and
perseverance. I shall give you some exercises
presently. And you must choose
your recitations with closer regard to your
voice and personality. The ethereal and
the soaring don’t become you, Mr. Smith.
Something in the rugged and masculine,
and even grim manner we must find for
you. ‘Eugene Aram,’ perhaps, or ‘Christmas
Day in the Workhouse,’ or ‘The
Brand of Cain.’”
So that finished off Mr. Smith for the
time being, and one felt, in a curious sort
of way, that Aristotle’s pity and terror
were there right enough, though not, of
course, as Mr. Merridew exactly meant.
“Now, Mr. Dexter, what can you do for
us?” inquired our preceptor, and George
Dexter, who had been sniggering rather
basely at Mr. Smith, leapt lightly to the
platform.
“‘Billy’s Rose,’ by G. R. Sims!” he
.bn 165.png
.pn +1
said, and instantly plunged into that very
pathetic and world-famous recitation. He
accompanied it with a great deal of gesture,
both of legs and arms, and at the end,
when the rose is given to the angel Billy
he suddenly snatched his carnation out
from under his coat, where he had concealed
it, and held the flower aloft with an
expression of radiant and beatific excitement.
He remained in this position for
some moments, and I believe rather expected
that Mr. Merridew was going to
applaud; but he didn’t. All the great
man said was:
“You don’t finish with a conjuring
trick, my dear Mr. Dexter. The rose is
a thing of the spirit. I have the honour to
know the poet who wrote those beautiful
verses and the rose is, as it were, allegorical—an
essence of the soul. And your
mannerisms are thoroughly bad and amateurish.
You’ve walked at least a quarter
of a mile since you began. You are too
.bn 166.png
.pn +1
aggressive, too defiant, too noisy. You
tear a passion to tatters, Mr. Dexter. You
must learn to serve your apprenticeship in
a humble and chastened spirit. You have
been in a bad school and there is much to
undo.”
Of course, though I still hated Dexter,
I was really sorry for this, because I felt
it would knock all the life out of him at
the very start of his career. While he
turned exceedingly pale and dropped his
carnation on the floor and returned to us,
as though he wished to shelter himself from
the bitter criticism of the professor, he was
not really crushed. In fact, he whispered
to me the insulting word “fathead” as he
rejoined us; and I knew that he and Mr.
Merridew would be deadly enemies from
that night forward.
Then Harold Crowe and Wilford Gooding
asked if they might perform together,
and Mr. Merridew permitted it; but when
he found that they proposed to imitate
.bn 167.png
.pn +1
those world-renowned music-hall entertainers,
known as the “Two Macs,” he stopped
them.
“No, gentlemen,” he said, “far be it
from me to quarrel with the ‘Two Macs.’
They are genuine humourists, and their
songs and dances and thoroughly English
fun have often entertained me; but we are
not here to emulate the vagaries of eccentric
original comedians. Our purpose is to
learn to walk first before we run, and we
can develop our personal genius afterwards—if
we have any.”
Unfortunately, Crowe and Gooding
could do nothing but imitate the “Two
Macs,” so they lost their chance for that
evening; and then Leonard Brightwin
took his place on the stage and recited
Antony’s great speech from Julius Cæsar.
I had been very uneasy as my turn approached
for various reasons, because, curiously
enough, the only things I knew by
heart were purely religious, and learned
.bn 168.png
.pn +1
long ago in my schooldays. In a few
minutes, however, my anxieties were
drowned in the joy of listening to Leonard
Brightwin, who spoke with great force
and feeling and accompanied his words
with most appropriate expressions of the
face. I felt that here was one who would
certainly make the rest of us look very
small.
Mr. Merridew was pleased but guarded.
“Quite good,” he said. “A thousand
faults, Mr. Brightwin, a thousand faults;
but there’s ore in the mine and we shall
bring it to the surface presently.”
I congratulated Brightwin at this high
praise, and he was evidently much pleased.
He started to explain his view of Mark
Antony to Mr. Smith, when the professor,
who had begun to tire and yawn several
times, called upon me.
“Mr. Corkey, please; and be brief, Mr.
Corkey, for the lesson has been quite long
enough.”
.bn 169.png
.pn +1
“I must tell you, sir,” I said firmly,
“that I only perfectly know ‘My Duty to
my Neighbour.’”
Dexter laughed, as I knew he would,
but Mr. Merridew by no means laughed.
“You could not know anything better,
Mr. Corkey,” he answered, “but words
hallowed by—by sacred memories and—and—in
fact—no. It will do for the
moment if you just give us the alphabet—speaking
slowly and distinctly, putting
character and feeling into the letters. In
fact, make them interesting.”
I stared in my great ignorance before
this amazing man. I felt that it was quite
beyond my power to make the alphabet
interesting, or put character and feeling
into the letters; and I told him so honestly.
I said:
“No doubt you could, sir; because you
can act anything, from a billiard ball to
Macbeth; but it’s no good my trying, because
.bn 170.png
.pn +1
I haven’t the faintest idea how to
set about it.”
“I’ll show you,” answered Mr. Merridew.
“A thing of this kind, you must
understand, is merely academic—an exercise,
like a Chopin study—but it will give
you a glimpse into the expression and control
of emotions and passions, and show
you how the skilled actor can make bricks
without straw and something out of nothing.”
He rose from his professorial chair and
lightly ascended the steps to the stage.
Then he stood for a moment, rapt in
brooding thought of the profoundest character,
and then suddenly began:
“A!” (astonishment combined with joy,
as though he had suddenly met an old
friend, long given up for lost). “B?”
(a note of inquiry uttered with tremulous
emotion, as though much depended upon
it). “C” (gladly, with great relief and
a nod of the head). “D—E—F”
.bn 171.png
.pn +1
(spoken loudly and swiftly with an expression
of increasing satisfaction and
“G!” (a sudden peal of
laughter which shook the room and echoed
from the walls). “H” (more laughter;
gradually subsiding). “I—J” (laughter;
dying out and at last completely at an
end). “K!” (a loud and ringing note of
alarm accompanied by the raising of the
hands to the breast). “L!” (the alarm
increasing, the hands lifted gradually and
thrown back, the face showing considerable
fear). “M!” (uttered with immense
relief, as though the danger was past, but
the effect still apparent in nervous turning
of the head to right and left). “N—O—P!”
(three gracious bows in different
directions, as though three welcome persons
had come on to the stage to meet the
professor). “Q—R—S” (three gestures
each different from the others, indicating
that the professor was shaking
hands with each of the new arrivals).
.bn 172.png
.pn +1
“T!” (a sudden drawing back, as though
the last of the arrivals wasn’t behaving
nicely). “U!!” (a most tragic and sudden
explosion, accompanied by a dagger-thrust
which settled the last of the arrivals
and laid him dead at the professor’s feet).
“V—W!!!” (a sudden half-turn, during
which the momentary triumph over the
last of the arrivals was evidently swept
away by the onslaught of the others).
“X!!” (a violent struggle, in which the
professor was thrown this way and that
by his invisible antagonists). “Y!!” (a
long-drawn, deadly hiss of rage, accompanied
by a flash of victory in the eye and
a rapid dagger-stroke, which prostrated
another foe). “Z!!!” (a loud cry of acute
despair; both hands pressed over the heart
and the professor sank to his knees, thus
indicating that his remaining foe had been
too much for him).
It was a drama in a minute and a half,
and we were all so much moved that we
.bn 173.png
.pn +1
burst into loud applause. Then the professor
regained his feet gracefully and
bowed, as though we were an audience of a
thousand people. This magnificent inspiration,
executed with consummate aplomb,
almost bewildered me and Mr. Smith and
Brightwin by its magnificence. It showed,
too, the sort of man who was going to take
us in hand.
But Mr. Merridew made nothing of it.
It was just a superb bit of spontaneous
acting, dashed off as Michael Angelo would
dash off a statue, or Beethoven a symphony.
In a way it was rather depressing, because
it showed how much lay before us.
But we were all excited and hopeful on
the whole. Even Mr. Smith felt a sort of
divine fire in his veins. He offered to
stand Brightwin and me some supper after
the lesson was over, and we gladly consented
to let him do so.
Mr. Smith told us about himself presently—how
.bn 174.png
.pn +1
he had come into a little
money and was now in a position to give
up his work (which, he said, had been of a
subordinate character, but didn’t specify)
and seriously devote himself to the stage.
We listened to him very patiently and
made a huge supper.
And afterwards, when we had seen Mr.
Smith home to his wife and family off the
Tottenham Court Road, Brightwin said
that to be stage-struck at Mr. Smith’s age
and with his figure was a tragedy of the
deepest dye.
“There are only certain parts he could
play,” explained Brightwin to me; “but
his voice belongs to quite a different order
of parts. He has the voice of a tragedian
and the body of a second low comedian.
In fact, there is no hope for him that I
can see.
“He might, however, start a theatre;
which would be hope for us, if we kept in
with him,” added Brightwin thoughtfully.
.bn 175.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
IX
.sp 2
My victorious career received a very
serious check about this period.
I had, of course, bought Aristotle’s
Poetics and a cheap edition of Hamlet,
and on one or two occasions I much
regret to say that Mr. Westonshaugh, the
best and kindest of men, had found me
reading them when I ought to have been
registering policies of insurance.
He had rather a stealthy way of approaching
the staff of the Country Department
from the rear, and, though a large
man, revealed the instincts of a hunter
wonderfully developed; so that he was
often upon his game, which generally consisted
of junior clerks, before the quarry
was roused and aware of its danger.
The first time he cautioned me; but the
second time I grieve to relate that he reported
.bn 176.png
.pn +1
me. It was, of course, his duty to
do so; and I believe he regretted the
necessity. But so it was; and it meant that
I had to go before the Secretary of the
Apollo and meet him face to face, much
to my disadvantage.
The Secretary was, of course, the pivot
round which the whole office turned. The
Directors themselves seldom dared to interfere
with him; for he was the hero of a
thousand fights, so to say, and had climbed
to the giddy altitude of the secretarial
chair after a lifetime spent in heroic and
successful efforts to advance the prosperity
of the Apollo Fire Office. His fame naturally
extended far beyond the walls of the
Apollo. He was known throughout the
whole insurance world as a light in the
darkness. He had written more than one
book on the subject; and the Insurance
Guide, the journal of the insurance craft,
seldom appeared without some respectful
allusion to his great fame. I believe he
.bn 177.png
.pn +1
was a sort of king over the secretaries of
other Fire Offices; at any rate, nobody ever
pretended there was anybody to equal him.
He was called Septimus Trott, Esquire;
and there came a gloomy morning when I
stood before him alone in the silence of the
secretarial chamber. But, of course, the
interest was profound, for my fate might
be said to hang in the balance. I had seen
Mr. Trott far off on several occasions, and
had once, in the Board Room, where I
went with a message, witnessed the solemn
sight of him conversing on equal terms
with six Directors simultaneously, and
easily making them think as he thought,
thanks to his enormous experience and easy
flow of words; but this was the first time
I had approached him in propria persona,
as we say.
He was of a sable silvered, with a florid
complexion, and his eyes had a piercing
quality. He wore gold-rimmed glasses
divided horizontally, so that when he looked
.bn 178.png
.pn +1
through the tops of them he could see men
and things about him, and when he looked
through the bottom he could read documents
and data, or see to write himself if
necessary.
He now looked through the upper story
of his glasses and focused me with an expression
that I had never seen before on
any human countenance. It was not pity,
by any means, and it was not scorn. You
couldn’t say that Mr. Trott was angry;
but then you certainly couldn’t say that
he was pleased. He regarded me thoughtfully,
yet without what you might call
much emotion. He was perfectly calm,
yet under his easy self-control I soon found
that he concealed a good deal of quiet annoyance
at what he had heard about me.
Having studied my features, which I had
striven to make as apologetic as possible,
he dropped to the lower story of his
glasses, and I perceived that he had open
before him some registers of my writing.
.bn 179.png
.pn +1
They evidently dismayed him, and for
some time he said not a word. At length
he broke a silence which was becoming exceedingly
painful.
“Mr. Corkey,” he exclaimed, “I believe
you are in your eighteenth year!”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “It will be
my eighteenth birthday in the autumn.”
“And do you desire to celebrate that
event with us, or elsewhere, Mr. Corkey?”
he inquired.
I told him that I greatly hoped to celebrate
it with him—at least, with the
Country Department of the Apollo; and
I breathed again in secret, for this showed
that I was not going to be dismissed.
Indeed, Mr. Blades had told me that a
man was always cautioned once.
“They never fire you the first time,”
was his forcible expression.
But the revulsion of feeling caused by
knowing that I was saved made me strike
rather too joyful a note with Mr. Trott.
.bn 180.png
.pn +1
“I’m very sorry indeed that Mr. Westonshaugh
had to report me, sir,” I said,
in a hearty sort of voice. “It was well
deserved, and I promise you it shan’t occur
again.”
But the Secretary didn’t seem to want
my views. In fact, he held up his hand
for silence.
“You are here to listen, Mr. Corkey,”
he replied. “Now, before me I have some
of your recent work. Will you kindly
consider these pages in an impartial spirit,
and tell me what you think of them? I
invite your opinion.”
As bad luck would have it, before him
were some registers of policies that I had
done under very unusual pressure. In
fact, I had made a bet with a chap called
Mason that I would register twenty “short
period” policies quicker than he would
register twenty of the same. My friend,
Dicky Travers, held the stakes, which
amounted to a shilling a side, and I won
.bn 181.png
.pn +1
by one “short period” policy in record
time.
These things, naturally, I did not tell
my judge, for they would only have hurt
him and led to Mason. Therefore, I
merely regarded my handiwork with honest
scorn and an expression of contempt, and
said the writing was not worthy of the
Apollo Fire Office.
“I had come to the same conclusion,”
said Mr. Septimus Trott. “We are of
one mind, Mr. Corkey. Now, I appeal to
your honour as a gentleman, and as one who
is drawing a good salary here—I appeal
to you, Mr. Corkey, to do your work in
future so that we may respect you and
value your services, and not deplore them.
Remember henceforth, Mr. Corkey, that
from ten until four, or later, as the occasion
demands, we have a right to your
whole time and energy and attention and
intelligence. To deny us that right, and
to offer us less than your best, is quite
.bn 182.png
.pn +1
unworthy of you, and neither just nor
honest to your masters. Good morning,
Mr. Corkey; I feel sure that I shall not
have to speak again.”
I did not know what to answer, for this
exceedingly fine man had made me feel
both uncomfortable and mean. I had,
however, to say something, so thanked him
and promised that he should never be
bothered by me any more. But he had
already dismissed the subject and was
buried in a pile of complicated documents,
which were no doubt destined to melt
under his hands like the dew upon the
fleece.
I returned calmly to my department
and wrapped myself in silence as with a
garment. But I concealed a bruised heart,
as the saying is, and determined to rectify
this unpleasant event as swiftly as possible.
I decided to stop after hours for six consecutive
nights and write till eight, or even
nine o’clock, and so produce an amount of
.bn 183.png
.pn +1
work during the current account that
should delight Mr. Westonshaugh and
gratify Mr. Trott, if he ever heard about
it. I wanted, before everything, to show
them I bore no malice, but quite the contrary.
Mr. Blades thought my idea good, and
that very night I stopped on and on, long
after the staff had gone. It was a weird
and interesting thing to be alone with my
solitary gaslight in that huge and empty
office. All was profound silence, save
where my industrious pen steadily registered
policy after policy. Here and there
out of the darkness glimmered a knob of
brass or some such thing, like the watchful
eye of a beast of prey, and far below one
heard the occasional, eerie rattle of a hansom,
or cry of a human voice in the empty
City. In all that huge hive of industry
only I appeared to be humming! It was
a great thought in its way. And yet I felt
the presence of my colleagues in a ghostly
.bn 184.png
.pn +1
sort of fashion, and knew where the warlike
Bassett sat, and the musical Wardle,
and the sporting Tomlinson, and so on.
But, of course, they were all far away in
the bosoms of their families, or elsewhere,
as the case might be.
And then came a strange experience—the
event of a lifetime, or, at any rate, the
event of mine so far, for suddenly and
without anything much in the way of premonitory
symptoms, I got an urgent craving
to write a poem! It is impossible to
say how it came, or why; but there it was.
My fatal experiences of that day, and being
so sorry for myself, and one thing and another,
depressed me to a most unusual flatness;
and then nature, apparently rebelling
against this flatness, urged me to write a
poem upon a dire and fearful subject.
You might have thought that I should
have taken refuge from the troubles of the
morning by writing something gladsome
and joyous, or even a regular, right-down
.bn 185.png
.pn +1
hymn, with hopeful allusions to higher
things; but far from it, owing to the gloom
of the silent office, or the gloom of my
mind, or perhaps both together, I produced
stanza after stanza of the most deathly and
grim poetry you could find in the language.
It was called “The Witches’ Sabbath,”
and I amazed myself by the ease with
which I handled corpse-candles, gouts of
blood, the gallows tree, ravens, owls, bats,
lightning, the mutter of thunder, the stroke
of Doom, spectres, demons, hags, black
cats, broomsticks, and, in fact, every dreadful
image you can possibly imagine from
the classics at large. These things simply
rolled off my pen; I could hardly write
fast enough to catch up with the dance of
horrors which seemed to get worse and
worse in every stanza; and I remember
wondering, while my nib flew, that if this
ghastly thing was the result of a mild and
temperate rebuke from Mr. Septimus
Trott, what sort of poem I should have
.bn 186.png
.pn +1
made if he had dealt bitterly and sarcastically
and cruelly with me. I stopped to
examine the question, and finally decided
that it was the great patience and tenderness
of Mr. Trott that had reduced me to
this black depth of despair; and I believed
that if he had slated me with all the force
of barbed invective undoubtedly at his
command, I should have gone to the other
extreme and not stopped overtime, and
been reckless and ferocious and mad, and
very likely have produced a wild drinking-song,
or some profane limerick of a far
lower quality than this stately poem with
all its horrors.
One verse especially pleased me, and I
set it down here without hesitation, because
the time was actually coming when my
poem would see the glory of print—not,
of course, that I should see the glory of
anything else in the way of reward. But
merely to be in print glorifies one for a
long time.
.bn 187.png
.pn +1
.pm start_poem
“Through a dim gloaming with the hurtling crash
And thunder of their batlike wings they came.
Their tongues drip poison and their eyes they flash;
And twenty thousand others did the same.”
.pm end_poem
The effect of this horrible poem was entirely
to restore my happiness; and hope,
long a stranger to my heart, as they say,
returned, like the dove to the ark. I simply
rejoiced at the poem. I stopped registering
policies for that night and copied
out the twelve verses of “The Witches’
Sabbath” carefully. I said farewell to
the messengers whose duty it was to guard
the Apollo by night; and I took home my
poem, filled with a great longing to read
it to Aunt Augusta. She consented to
hear it and was much interested; and so
surprised and pleased did she appear to be
that I had not the heart to tell her about
the sorrowful thing that led to it.
The next morning my poem was the
first thought in my mind, and I read it
carefully through before getting up. The
.bn 188.png
.pn +1
glow had rather gone out of it; still, it
was good. And I considered whether I
should read it at the office to Mr. Blades
and others. But, strangely enough, though
my affection for Mr. Blades was deep and
lasting, as well it might be, considering
all his goodness, something seemed to
whisper to me that he would not much
like “The Witches’ Sabbath.” I had a
wild idea of asking Wardle to set it to
music, but second thoughts proved best,
as so often happens, and I just kept the
poem in my desk and waited till the next
lesson at the Dramatic School. For I felt
that in the genial atmosphere of tragic art
my poem would be more at ease than in
a hive of industry.
I improved it a great deal before the
time came for the next meeting with Mr.
Merridew. Not, of course, that I was going
to show it to him; but I felt I should
have courage to submit it to my fellow-pupil,
Brightwin, and ask him for his can-did
.bn 189.png
.pn +1
opinion upon it. Of course, measured
according to Aristotle, it might have been
found wanting; because there was simply
not a spark of pity about it. But the
terror was there all right.
To close this rather painful chapter, I
may mention that I stuck to the resolve
to work overtime for a week, but was not
rewarded by inventing another poem.
However, the result seemed highly favourable,
for Mr. Westonshaugh complimented
me on my work in the account, and showed
a manly inclination to let the dead past
bury its dead, as they say.
.bn 190.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
X
.sp 2
The rehearsal of the first scene of
Hamlet, conducted by Mr. Montgomery
Merridew, went off with
great verve. We were all very eager to
please him and there was naturally a good
deal of excitement among us to know how
he would cast the parts.
He decided that Leonard Brightwin
should be Horatio and George Dexter
Marcellus. I was Bernardo, and Harold
Crowe took the rather minor part of Francisco.
Mr. Henry Smith had the honour
of playing the ghost, and it was very valuable
to him for stage deportment and
gesture; but not much use in the way of
his h’s, because the ghost does not make a
single remark in the first scene. Nevertheless,
after Horatio, who was easily the
best, came Mr. Smith. In fact, he quite
.bn 191.png
.pn +1
suggested “the Majesty of buried Denmark,”
in my opinion, though he didn’t
manage his hands well, and put rather too
much expression into his face for a ghost.
Dexter as Marcellus was bad. He made
Marcellus a bounder, and when he said,
referring to the ghost, “Shall I strike at
it with my partisan?” you felt it was just
the sort of utterly caddish idea that Dexter
would have had. My rendering of Bernardo
was not well thought of, I regret
to say. Mr. Merridew explained that I
must avoid the sin of overacting.
He said:
“You must correct your perspective,
Mr. Corkey, and remember that the dramatist
designed Bernardo for an honest
but simple soldier. He is, we see, punctual
and we have every reason to believe
him an efficient member of the corps to
which he belonged. He is, moreover, an
officer; but more we do not know. You
impart to him an air of mystery and importance
.bn 192.png
.pn +1
that are calculated to arrest the
audience and make them expect wonderful
things of him, which he is not going to
perform. In the matter of deportment,
Mr. Corkey, a man of your inches cannot
be too careful. Your legs—you understand
I don’t speak offensively, but practically—your
legs are long and thin.
They are, in fact, the sort of legs that
challenge the groundlings. It behoves you,
therefore, to manage them with perfect
propriety; to tone them down, as it were,
and keep them as much out of the picture
as possible.”
I very soon found, when it came to
stage deportment in earnest, that I had not
time left to overact Bernardo. In fact,
when I once began to grasp the great difficulties
of walking about on the stage with
the art that conceals art, I had no intelligence
left for acting the part at all, and
my second rendering of Bernardo was colourless,
though my legs were better.
.bn 193.png
.pn +1
After a third rehearsal Wilford Gooding
took my place, and he gave a very different
reading. In fact, when he and his friend
Harold Crowe found themselves together
on the stage, they showed a decided inclination
to repeat their former imitation of
the “Two Macs,” and Mr. Merridew reproved
them angrily.
“You are here to work, not to fool,
gentlemen,” he said, “and if you think the
battlements of Elsinore by moonlight at
the beginning of Hamlet is the proper
place to be funny, then let me tell you
you have mistaken your vocation.”
A rehearsal, in fact, has to be conducted
with deadly earnestness, and for beginners
to take it in a casual or lightsome spirit is
a very great mistake. There is nothing
lightsome about it.
Mr. Merridew directed us to buy a
further book, written by himself, on the
subject of voice production. It contained
throat exercises for strengthening the
.bn 194.png
.pn +1
larynx and diaphragm and vocal chords,
and so on; and among other things, for a
full hour every day we had to go into some
private place and shout the vowels with the
full blast of our lungs.
“It will make a great deal of noise,
and people won’t like you for doing it,”
prophesied Mr. Merridew, “but you must
not mind a little opposition. Your voices
naturally want quality and tone, and these
can only be got with severe practice. Recollect
that merely to speak is useless; you
must shout.”
He told us where to buy his book, which
fortunately cost no more than sixpence—in
fact, only fourpence-halfpenny in
reality.
During this lesson Mr. Merridew had to
leave us for a short time, to attend a meeting
of the Directors of the Dramatic
School; and while he was away I ventured
to show Leonard Brightwin my poem entitled
“The Witches’ Sabbath.” He read
.bn 195.png
.pn +1
it with great interest and was much struck
by it.
“I’d no idea you were a writer,” he
said; and I told him I hadn’t either;
but he believed it was in me. He, too,
was a writer, and he offered to introduce
me to a friend of his who was an
editor.
A glimpse of literary life was, of course,
worth almost anything to me, and I said
that I should be exceedingly thankful to
meet a professional editor, if he didn’t
think such a thing was above me. Then
he explained that his friend, Mr. Bulger,
was an enthusiast of the drama and edited
a penny paper called Thespis.
“He owns it and does everything himself
but print it,” explained Brightwin.
“It is not strictly self-supporting yet, but
the amateurs read it regularly, for he devotes
a good deal of attention to their performances.
I often go and criticise them
for him. He pays expenses and hopes
.bn 196.png
.pn +1
some day to do more than that. I write a
good deal for him. My belief is that he
would publish that poem in his paper,
though, of course, I can’t promise.”
With the kindness and enthusiasm of
the true creator for an inferior artist,
Brightwin promised to show the poem to
Mr. Bulger, and I was still thanking him
most gratefully when our preceptor returned.
His face was gloomy, but he did not divulge
the reason, and he proceeded with
the rehearsal.
An event of considerable interest overtook
me an hour later, when the evening’s
work was at an end. As I left the school
I met an old acquaintance of the opposite
sex, and instantly recognised the grey-eyed
girl who was waiting at the pit door
of the Lyceum on the memorable occasion
when I fainted. She remembered me, too,
and was able to tell me the details of the
event after I had lost consciousness.
.bn 197.png
.pn +1
She was a pupil like myself, only she
belonged to the girls’ class.
“They ain’t going to allow mixed acting
for the first six months,” she said.
“Funny, ain’t it? You’d think it was as
tricky as mixed bathing. How are you
getting on?”
I told her of Mr. Merridew and Hamlet;
and she told me that there were seven
girls in her class, and that none of them
could “act for nuts,” to use her own forcible
expression.
An oldish woman had come to see the
grey-eyed girl home, and when I offered
to accompany them to their door, the oldish
woman refused in peremptory tones.
In fact, you might almost have thought
she regarded me as a shady character. It
transpired that she was the cook of the
grey-eyed girl’s mother, and had been told
off to the service of seeing the pupil to and
from the classes at the Dramatic School.
Before the cook’s rebuff I had, of course,
.bn 198.png
.pn +1
to explain that I was also a pupil at the
school, and a person of the most honourable
behaviour where the fair sex is concerned;
but the cook was not prepared to argue,
and hurried away her charge without more
words.
I met the grey-eyed girl again, however,
the very next evening—at a first-night—and
we enjoyed an uninterrupted conversation
of three hours before the doors
opened. Thus a friendship was established
of the most interesting character; for we
found that we had much in common, and
I was able to tell her several things which
she did not know.
She was not a happy girl, for her parents
only allowed her to study for the stage
under protest, and her family was entirely
against her and of a very unsympathetic
turn of mind; but she felt that, sooner or
later, she would triumph. She indicated
by certain allusions to my necktie and
hands that I interested her. She considered
.bn 199.png
.pn +1
that I had artist’s hands, which in its
turn interested me a great deal, because
my aunt had noticed it as well as this penetrating,
grey-eyed girl; and in return I
ventured to tell her that her eyes were exceedingly
remarkable. I hinted that I
wrote poetry as well as acted, and, getting
rather above myself, as we say, told her
that a poem of mine would probably be appearing
in a well-known theatrical journal
called Thespis at no distant date. I’m
afraid in my excitement I even hinted I
should be paid for it, which was going too
far.
She said:
“Lor! Fancy!” Then, after a pause,
she remarked, looking at me sideways under
her eyelids, that perhaps I should be
making poems to her eyes next, since I
seemed to think they were “a bit of all
right.” The idea had not occurred to me;
but now, of course, my chivalric instincts,
hitherto somewhat dormant, came to my
.bn 200.png
.pn +1
aid, and I assured her that the poem was
only a question of time. In fact, we may
be said rather to have gone it, and when
the doors were open and we entered the
theatre, I sat beside her.
I may state here that I had no objection
to girls as a class, or in a general way—in
fact, rather the contrary, if anything.
But they were not so interesting to me as
men; and I also understood that there is
not a rose without a thorn, as the poet says.
There are nocturnal girls in London
known, generally speaking, as “light.”
They are as common as blackberries in the
Sacred Writings, and Shakespeare and the
classics generally; and I may say that they
have often linked their arms in mine, when
I have been returning home after nightfall
through some of the main London thoroughfares.
The first time this happened, being new
to their unconventional ways, I explained
to two girls, who approached me simultaneously,
.bn 201.png
.pn +1
that I didn’t know them. Whereupon,
with the swift repartee for which
this class is famous, they told me that they
were the Duchess of Edinburgh and the
Empress of Russia, and that they were
stopping with Queen Victoria at Buckingham
Palace, and had just popped out for
a breather before supper. Of course, the
right thing to do is to take these dashing
meteors in their own spirit; and when they
invited me to return with them to the
palace, I explained that some other night
I should be delighted to do so, but that I
was bound for Marlborough House myself
on this occasion, and already half an
hour late. They appreciated the bon mot
and rather took to me. Though doubtless
they might have been called bad girls, nobody
would have called them bad company.
They had an air of abandon and
heartiness which put you entirely at your
ease with them. In fact, when they asked
me to stand them a drink, I very nearly
.bn 202.png
.pn +1
did so; but not quite. Instead, I left them
abruptly and vanished into the night,
followed by epithets humorous in their
way, but not intended for publication.
To return to Brightwin: in due course
he took me to see Mr. Bulger, editor of
Thespis, and I found myself confronted
with a type of the poet mind. Mr. Bulger
was evidently a dreamer. His great ambition
centred upon a State theatre for
England, similar to that in foreign countries.
He had very exalted opinions and
an intense hatred of bad Art. He wanted
to gather round him a band of young enthusiasts
who would work for love; because,
as he explained to me, the pioneer
is seldom rewarded, excepting with the
laurels of fame.
“Even these,” said Mr. Bulger bitterly,
“seldom encircle his own brow. You will
generally find them on the bronze or marble
forehead of his statue, long after he
has vanished into the dust.”
.bn 203.png
.pn +1
In this high strain he talked, and I saw
in a moment that I stood before genius.
His soul looked out of his eyes and made
them water. His physical frame was of
no consequence, and one forgot it when he
talked. I trembled to think that this aspiring
man was going to read my poem;
but he did so, and Brightwin and I sat
silent and watched him. Once or twice he
nodded in a slightly approving way; and
once or twice he shook his head, and I felt
the blush of shame upon my cheek.
When he had finished, he said:
“Quite excellent, Mr. Corkey; we must
publish this in the paper. There are, however,
some failures of technique and a few
flashes of unconscious humour that will be
better away. May I take it that you will
not mind if I edit the poem for publication?”
Little knowing what this exactly meant,
I replied that it would be a great privilege
to me if he would do so.
.bn 204.png
.pn +1
“Good,” he said, and put my poem
under a paper-weight upon his desk.
We then discussed the drama, and he
told us exactly what the young actor
should think and feel about his profession.
It was clear that I had not thought and
felt at all rightly on the subject of the
stage, for I had rather intended to shine,
and be somebody, and play the tragic
lead, and so on. But Mr. Bulger was
all for quite a different spirit. He worshipped
at the shrine of Art, and explained
that in the service of Art we must regard
the world and ourselves as well
lost.
He advised a spirit of self-sacrifice, and
admitted it was not so much the ruling
principle in the histrionic mind as it should
be. He said some hard things about actor-managers,
and declared that in some cases
the charwomen who cleaned their theatres
were doing more for Art than they were.
His eyes blazed against actor-managers in
.bn 205.png
.pn +1
general, and they must tremble when they
hear his name.
Presently we rose to take our leave,
and then, diving among a mass of tickets
and documents, he produced a card of
admittance to the Clapham Assembly Room
on the occasion of an amateur theatrical
entertainment a fortnight hence.
“You can try your hand at that, Mr.
Corkey,” he said to me. “You may, in
fact, criticise the show for our columns.
Keep it short, and don’t indulge in pleasantries
at the expense of the company.
The Macready Dramatic Club of Clapham
is a well-meaning body and their productions
are most painstaking. Let me have
an account of your expenses, as I shall
defray them according to my rule.”
This was, naturally, a very great moment
for me. I had but one fleeting
twinge that perhaps it was rather rough
on the Macready Dramatic Club of Clapham;
but I thanked Mr. Bulger heartily
.bn 206.png
.pn +1
for placing such confidence in me, and
promised that I would devote the whole of
my energies and experience to the performance.
Not until Brightwin and I had left the
editorial presence did I begin seriously to
doubt; but he assured me that it was quite
unnecessary.
“My dear chap,” he said, “you spend
all your spare time at the theatre; you
are studying for the stage, and you have
an immense natural aptitude for the art;
therefore, if you are not good enough
to review the efforts of a purely amateur
crowd of this sort, you ought to be.”
So I imitated Brightwin’s slightly scornful
view of the Macreadies of Clapham,
and felt that, if I could keep up this
haughty spirit through the actual performance,
all might possibly be well.
.bn 207.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XI
.sp 2
I was now quite one of the busiest
men in London. Every moment of
my time was occupied, and I felt it a
bore to have to go to bed at all and waste
precious hours in the arms of Morpheus.
First there was, of course, the office;
then my elocution and stage-gesture work
for the drama; then running at the L.A.C.;
then cricket matches on Saturday afternoons,
which were very refreshing to
me, especially as I was doing fairly well
in them; then literature, in the shape of an
order from Mr. Bulger to go and criticise
the amateurs of Clapham; and lastly an
idea for another poem—but not about the
grey-eyed girl. One lived in a regular
maelstrom, if the word may be pardoned;
and, as though all this were not enough,
Mr. Westonshaugh suddenly sent for me
.bn 208.png
.pn +1
and told me that I must appear on the following
Monday morning at the West-End
Branch of the Apollo!
“I have selected you, Mr. Corkey,” he
said, “to help our branch during the usual
quarterly rush of work. At these times
the branch stands in need of assistance,
and the experience will be very desirable.
Be at No. 7 Trafalgar Square, sharp at
ten o’clock on Monday next, and let me
hear my confidence is not displaced.”
On telling Mr. Blades of this event,
he said that it was an excellent thing for
me, and would introduce me to some of
the leaders in the Apollo Fire Office.
“You will be in the hands of Mr.
Bright and Mr. Walter,” he said, “and
they are two of the most original and delightful
men in London. I have the pleasure
of knowing them personally, and you
can tell them that you are a friend of
mine, which will interest them in you.”
I thanked Mr. Blades for this further
.bn 209.png
.pn +1
example of his unwavering kindness to me,
and he gave me a brief description of the
men who were to command my services in
the West End of London.
“Bright is the best all-round man in the
A.F.O.,” said Mr. Blades, meaning, of
course, the Apollo Fire Office. “He is a
good sportsman, and was also a volunteer
in his time. He is the champion of the
office at billiards, and in his leisure he is
a County Councilor and a keen politician.
There are great stories told about him in
his earlier days in the City. He was a
dare-devil man then and took frightful
risks. I don’t mean insurance risks,” added
Mr. Blades, “but sporting risks, involving
danger to life and limb. For a wager he
once walked round that narrow ledge that
surrounds the top of the gallery outside
this department. You know the place.
One false step would have dashed him to
instant death; but he didn’t care. He
didn’t make the false step. It is a record.
.bn 210.png
.pn +1
We haven’t got any chaps like that
now.”
I instantly went out to look at the ledge
mentioned by Mr. Blades, and the sight
of it impressed me enormously. You
would have thought a bird would have
hesitated to walk along it.
“He must be a great man,” I said,
“and have a nerve of iron.”
“He has,” assented Mr. Blades. “And
he has a wide grip of politics, too; he is
a keen debater and will set some of your
ideas right on many subjects. He understands
capital and labour and such like;
which you do not.”
I admitted this, and then asked about
the remarkable points of Mr. Walter.
“Walter is a ray of sunshine,” answered
Mr. Blades. “He has a nature
none can resist, and is the most popular
man in the office. He is a most humorous
man and will make you die of laughing.
He has two brothers on the professional
.bn 211.png
.pn +1
stage, and he is for all practical purposes
a professional actor himself; but he thinks
two brothers on the regular stage are
enough. He plays parts in public, however,
and is a comedian who has nothing
left to learn. If he chokes you off this
nonsense about the stage, it will be a good
thing done.”
I could hardly believe my ears, for Mr.
Blades described just such a man as I
hungered to know. Whether he would be
interested in an utter beginner was, of
course, only too doubtful; but, as Mr.
Blades said that he was like a ray of sunshine,
I hoped with a great hope that he
would shine on me a little if he had time.
My impatience for Monday to come was
so extreme that during Sunday I took the
opportunity to go down to Trafalgar
Square and look at the outside of our
West-End Branch. Trafalgar Square is
naturally too well known to need any
lengthened description from me; but I
.bn 212.png
.pn +1
may mention that the National Gallery
stands on one side, and our West-End
Branch on the other, with Nelson’s Monument
between them. Nothing else really
matters.
Our premises were stately without ostentation,
and richly but not gaudily decorated.
The entrance was hidden under a
shutter of iron, and the windows were also
concealed in the same manner. The building
ascended to some rather striking architectural
details at the top and was, upon
the whole, an imposing pile, though without
the gloomy grandeur of the Head Office
in Threadneedle Street, E.C.
Punctually to time, I arrived on the
following morning, and was greeted with
the utmost friendliness. The Manager of
this most important Branch was called
Mr. Harrison, and I consider that he was
the most dignified man I had yet beheld
in the flesh. For pure dignity it would
have been difficult to find his equal. He
.bn 213.png
.pn +1
said little, but pursued the even tenor of
his way and controlled the great business
of the Branch with a skill begot of long
practice. He was slightly bald, very handsome,
and very thoughtful. His thoughts
were, of course, hidden from the staff, as
a rule, but he was a most popular Chief,
and everybody took a pride in doing what
he wished with the utmost possible celerity.
He did not rule by fear; but by his great
dignity and aristocratic manner. He was
never flustered, never excited and never
annoyed; and this fine manner, of course,
left its mark on the whole of the West-End
Branch. In fact, I found there was
a different atmosphere here, and the staff
looked at life from rather a new point of
view. I felt my mind broadening from the
moment I arrived. The men all had such
wide ideas. This, no doubt, was owing to
the proximity of Buckingham Palace to
some extent; also the Houses of Parliament
and the National Gallery. It is true
.bn 214.png
.pn +1
that I was next door to the Bank of England
in the City, and that, in its way, enlarges
the mind on financial subjects; but
to be in a place where Queen Victoria
might drive past the window at any moment,
and yet leave the staff perfectly cool
and collected, was very impressive. In
fact, there was an element of awe.
Mr. Bright proved to be my personal
Chief, and indicated my work with affability
combined with speed. He was a
very masculine man, with blue eyes of
extraordinary brightness, and a genial
manner of tolerant amusement at life in
general, that doubtless concealed immense
experience of it. He was fair and athletic,
and had a most unusual way of coming to
the heart of a matter and not wasting
words. He feared nothing, and his knowledge
of his official duties was, of course,
supreme. But he carried it lightly.
I had never seen the great British public
coming in to insure its goods and chat-tels
.bn 215.png
.pn +1
before; but they continually poured
in at our West-End Branch; and to see
Mr. Bright and Mr. Bewes and Mr. Walter
stand at the counters of the office and
deal with the fearful complexities of the
highest insurance problems was a great experience
for me.
Mr. Walter was even more wonderful
than Mr. Blades said he would be. His
knowledge ranged over every branch of
Art, and he was just as much at home in
a Surrey-side theatre, laughing at a melodrama,
as he was in the National Gallery
among masterpieces of painting, or at St.
James’ Hall listening to the thunderous
intricacies of Wagnerian music. He understood
nearly as much as Mr. Merridew
about the stage, and was himself an accomplished
histrion, well known to many professional
actors. At Trafalgar Square
there are, of course, great natural facilities
for approaching the Strand; and Mr. Walter
had availed himself of them, with a
.bn 216.png
.pn +1
result that he knew the haunts of the sock
and buskin as few knew them.
In person he was of medium stature,
with an eye wherein Momus had made his
home. He extracted humour from everything,
and his facial command was such
that while his audience might be convulsed
with merriment, not a muscle moved.
Occasionally he and Mr. Bright would indulge
in a war of wit across the floor of the
house, as they say; and on these occasions
it was utterly impossible for me to pursue
my avocation of registering policies.
Of Mr. Bewes I need only say that he
was a silent and an obviously brainy man.
He had a short black beard, a penetrating
glance from behind his spectacles, and was
a Roman Catholic. Of this important but
secretive man I can mention one highly
interesting fact. He never went out of
doors for lunch, but descended to a lower
chamber, where one might have a chop or
steak, cooked by the Senior Messenger of
.bn 217.png
.pn +1
the West-End Branch. Mr. Bewes always
had a chop, except on Friday, when, being
a staunch Catholic, he denied himself this
trifling pleasure. But the extraordinary
thing was that he never varied his lunch,
or branched off in the direction of a steak
or sausage. Thus he ate five chops every
week, year after year, excepting when
away for his holidays, when, of course, the
staff did not know what he ate. For fifty
weeks in the year he persisted in this
course, with a result that the simplest statistics
will show he ate two hundred and
fifty chops per annum. A further calculation
was also possible, which produced
even more remarkable results, for it transpired
that Mr. Bewes had been in the
Apollo Fire Office for forty-eight years,
and had persisted in his regular habits
within the memory of man. Therefore, it
followed that during his official career he
had devoured no less than twelve thousand
chops! One might work this out in sheep,
.bn 218.png
.pn +1
and doubtless find that Mr. Bewes had consumed
a very considerable flock in his
time. His health was good, and his memory
unimpaired; but he was now nearly
seventy years of age, and proposed retiring
on a pension fairly soon.
It gave one a good idea of the age and
solidity of the Apollo, when one heard of
a life like this devoted to its service. In
fact, in the words of the poet, it can truly
be said that “men may come and men
may go; but the Apollo goes on forever.”
It would be impossible to describe how
Mr. Bright and Mr. Walter enlarged my
mind. They did not do it on purpose, or
in an improving manner, but they just
showed me, in casual conversation, their
knowledge of life and its realities and the
things that matter and the things that do
not. And over it all was cast a mantle of
easy tolerance and patience with the fools
who came to insure, and the idiots who
.bn 219.png
.pn +1
didn’t understand the very rudiments of
the science, and the occasional shady customers,
who gave wrong change and pretended
they had made a mistake, and so on.
It was the hand of steel in the velvet glove
with Mr. Bright. I should think he must
have been the hardest man to score off in
the entire Apollo. His repartee was of
the deadliest sort, and, on principle, he
never allowed himself to be worsted in
argument. You might have described his
line of action as a combination of the
suaviter in modo with the fortiter in re;
while Mr. Walter trusted almost entirely
to the suaviter style, combined, of course,
with a sense of the ludicrous which constantly
enabled him to see funny things
that nobody else saw. He was a mine of
rich and rare quotations from the dramatists,
and would apply these with an aptitude
little short of miraculous. He would
make puns at a moment’s provocation, and
his draughtsmanship, in the impressionistic
.bn 220.png
.pn +1
style, was such that he would make a lightning
sketch of a man to his very face, while
engaged in insuring his household goods.
Occasionally Mr. Harrison felt called upon
to check the universal hilarity; but he always
did it with reluctance, for he also
had a keen sense of humour, especially for
jokes involving the Irish dialect.
Into this cheerful and exhilarating hive
of industry I came, to find everybody most
kindly disposed towards me. The work
was, of course, hard; but it was lightened
by occasional gleams of Mr. Bright or
Mr. Walter; while another most excellent
and genial man also came and went. He
flitted in and out mysteriously, and proved
to be called Mr. Macdonald. He was,
therefore, of Scottish origin, and his work
concerned the mysteries of Life Insurance.
The science is even more abstruse than
Fire Insurance, and needs what is known
as the actuarial instinct. This must be
rare, for I heard Mr. Bright declare to
.bn 221.png
.pn +1
Mr. Macdonald that the great actuary
is born, not made. Then there were also
surveyors—men of special knowledge—who
also came and went, and other junior
clerks, who were rather more austere to
me than the senior ones.
It was here, on the third day of my visit,
that Mr. Bright kindly corrected my views
with regard to demand and supply and
other pressing questions of the day.
In politics I was a Conservative, but
only by birth, and only up to the time of
going to the West-End Branch of the
Apollo. Then, under the greater knowledge
and more philosophical intelligence of
Mr. Bright, I began to calm down. It
happened over a matter of a tailor. My
Aunt Augusta, womanlike, attached importance
to my clothes, and now directed
me to buy a new suit. Mr. Walter was
good enough to tell me of his tailor, who
was a man of temperate views in the matter
of cost, and I went to him. It was not
.bn 222.png
.pn +1
far to go, as his emporium happened to be
next door to the Apollo.
Well, this man was distinctly haughty.
He was a large, amply-made man with a
yellowish beard and full eye; and he looked
down the sides of his nose like a camel. I
told him that I had come to be measured
for a suit of clothes, and he showed no
interest whatever, but merely beckoned a
lesser man and left me with him. Presently
he strolled back, while I was being measured;
and when, to show the gulf there must
always be fixed, as I thought, between the
customer and the tradesman, I hoped his
business was prosperous and offered to let
him have a pound or two in advance. At this
he appeared amused, and asked me if I
was one of those American millionaires in
disguise. In fact, he was not content with
putting himself on my level, but rather
clearly indicated that he thought himself
above it. This view from a tailor had all
the charm of novelty to me; but I felt
.bn 223.png
.pn +1
myself grow rather hot, and in my annoyance
I tried a repartee in the style of Mr.
Bright.
“Is it true that it takes nine tailors to
make a man?” I said.
“It depends,” he answered. “I expect
it would take nine men like you to make
a tailor.”
Now, even to a tyro in repartee, it was
of course apparent that I had got the
worst of this. There ought to have been
something further to add on my side; but
my admiration at such a brilliant flash of
badinage was such that I could only laugh
with the greatest heartiness. I was, however,
merely laughing at the humour, not at
the beast of a tailor; and when I had recovered
from my amusement, I told him so.
I said: “That’s jolly good; but, at the
same time, you oughtn’t to talk to new
customers in this withering way. You
don’t know who I am. I may be the son
of a duke, and worth very likely ten or
.bn 224.png
.pn +1
fifteen pounds a year to you for the rest
of your life.”
It then transpired that he had seen me
in the office, when he went to pay his own
fire insurance a few days before.
“You have a yarn with Mr. Bright
and Mr. Walter,” he said. “They’ll tell
you a thing or two well worth your knowing.”
I fell in with this suggestion and submitted
the case to Mr. Bright, who spoke
in the following manner:
“To put on side, because you think you
are more important than that tailor, is
absolute footle, my dear Corkey,” he declared.
“That tailor, if you’ll excuse me
for saying so, is worth forty thousand of
you. He’s richer; he’s wiser; he’s
smarter; he’s worked harder; he knows
more; he’s traveled farther; he’s better-looking;
in fact, he can give you yards and
a beating in every possible direction; so
why the deuce do you think yourself, in
.bn 225.png
.pn +1
some mysterious way, the better man?
Where do you reckon you’re better?”
“Well,” I said, “my father was a soldier
and died for his country.”
“That’s all right,” said Mr. Bright.
“Your father was a hero, no doubt, and
any properly minded person would have
treated him as such. But you’re not.
You haven’t died for your country, by the
look of you, and haven’t the smallest intention
of doing so. My grandfather was
a bishop; but I don’t expect people to ask
for my blessing on the strength of it.
There’s only one exception to the rule that
one man’s as good as another, my dear
Corkey—only one exception.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“The only exception is—when he’s a
jolly sight better!” answered Mr. Bright.
“You must judge of a man by himself, not
by the accidents of birth or cash. The
tailor next door has won his place in the
world by hard work and sense and brains;
.bn 226.png
.pn +1
therefore he has a perfect right to reserve
his judgment, so far as you are concerned,
until he sees what you are good for. And,
seeing that he’s got probably a thousand
pounds to every one of your shillings, the
spectacle of you advancing a quid on your
clothes—to keep him going—naturally
amused him.”
This was my first introduction to political
economy and the rights of man, so
naturally I found it exceedingly interesting.
In fact, so much did the force of
Mr. Bright’s arguments impress me that,
in a week, I was an advanced Socialist,
and going too far altogether in the opposite
direction.
But now an exciting event claims my
attention; for at the West-End Branch
a fresh duty devolved upon me, and I had
to attend upon the Directors of the Company,
when they dropped in from time to
time to put their signatures to the new
policies. Every policy had the signature
.bn 227.png
.pn +1
of two Directors upon it, otherwise it was
not a complete legal document; so the
great men came occasionally, and I had
to stand beside them, blotting-paper in
hand, and blot their names as they wrote
them, and draw away each policy in turn
as it was signed.
Judge of my great pleasure when who
should arrive one morning to put his signature
to policies but my old friend, Mr.
Pepys! I carried in a hundred policies
for his attention, and beamed upon him
with the utmost heartiness; but only to
be met by a look of polite, but complete,
unrecognition! It was, as it were, a
further illustration of the great gulf between
capital and labour—Mr. Pepys, of
course, standing for the former commodity.
But, though he did not associate me with
his past, Mr. Pepys was exceedingly polite.
He adopted the genial manner of a man
who falls in with a strange but friendly
dog, and encourages it.
.bn 228.png
.pn +1
After signing twenty policies, he tired
and sighed and had to rest. Then, being
the kindliest of men, he addressed a few
words to me on an official subject.
“Had any fires lately?” he asked.
But I didn’t know in the least, as fires,
of course, belonged to one of the highest
branches of the subject. I chanced it,
however, and said:
“Nothing of much consequence, sir.”
“Good!” he answered. Then he was
seized with a sudden fit of caution.
“But you keep an account of them,
don’t you?” he asked, almost anxiously.
This afforded me the extraordinary experience
of finding a man who knew less
about fire insurance than I did; and I remembered
how, in the far past, months
ago, Mr. Pepys had spoken slightingly of
his knowledge of the business. I felt
quite an old, trusty official after this—one
of the faithful, dogged sort of men
who are actuated solely by enthusiasm for
.bn 229.png
.pn +1
their masters’ interests. I slightly patronised
Mr. Pepys, but not intentionally. I
said:
“Oh yes, sir; we don’t allow them to
pass.”
“That’s right!” he replied, and showed
a satisfaction which may or may not have
been genuine.
“They are all embalmed in the archives
of the Society, sir,” I added.
He looked at me doubtfully after this,
and didn’t seem to be sure of his ground.
At any rate, it silenced him; to my disappointment
he made no further remarks
about fire insurance or anything else, but
took up his pen again, sighed, and signed
a few more policies. At this moment another
director entered, and Mr. Pepys
wished him good morning, and he said,
“Morning!”
He was a very different type of Capital.
He was, in fact, a retired general officer
of some repute in his time, which was,
.bn 230.png
.pn +1
however, long past. He had recently been
made a peer, and from being called Lamb
had soared into a title and taken the name
of some place that interested him in Scotland.
I doubt, when selecting his title,
whether he had remembered the policies of
the Apollo; for while “Lamb” is a word
you can dash off in a second, “Corrievairacktown”
is not. He laboured
frightfully at it and heaved like a ship at
sea, and sometimes actually forgot how to
spell it! He jerked his snow-white head
abruptly, as though he had acquired the
habit of dodging cannon-balls, and from
time to time he gave off little sharp explosions
of breath, like a cat when trodden
upon. This man realised his own greatness
in a way that perhaps nobody else did. He
was a Conservative to his soldierly backbone,
and I think sometimes, when he came
to the Apollo for the tame occupation of
signing policies, he was almost ashamed
that a man, who had seen many a shot fired
.bn 231.png
.pn +1
in anger and moved like an avenging spirit
under the hurtling wings of the God of
War, should have come down to signing
policies for such homely things as—cooking
utensils, and so on.
To illustrate the nerve and courage of
Mr. Bright at a supreme crisis, I may tell
you that in his younger days he had once
been attending to General Sir Hastings
Lamb, as he was then, and during an explosion
on the part of the gallant warrior
he hurled fifty or sixty policies in a heap
to the ground. Doubtless, he expected
Mr. Bright to bound forward and pick
them up again; but far from it!
Mr. Bright, well versed in Capital and
Labour and Political Economy and the
Rights of Man, knew that he was not
there to pick policies off the floor which an
irritated representative of Capital had
thrown upon it. He knew the machinery
of the office provided that, in such a contingency,
he must ring the Board Room
.bn 232.png
.pn +1
bell and summon a messenger, for the subordinate
task of putting the policies on the
table again. Accordingly, he summoned a
messenger and directed him how to proceed.
Whereupon, the representative of
Capital subsided instantly and signed the
rest of the policies like the lamb he was in
those days. Undoubtedly you might call
this a triumph for the sacred rights of man;
and it also showed that Mr. Bright’s moral
courage was equal to his physical, which
is saying a great deal.
.bn 233.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XII
.sp 2
“With an auspicious and a dropping
eye,” as Shakespeare says,
I returned in due course to the
Parent Office of the Apollo. I was glad
to go back to Mr. Blades and Travers and
other friends; but I was exceedingly sorry
to leave Mr. Walter and Mr. Bright. In
fact, I missed them a great deal, and wrote
to them once or twice; and they answered
without hesitation, and hoped to see me
again at some future time.
And now I was faced with my first
great critical task for Mr. Bulger, and
secretly I viewed it with great nervousness,
though openly to Brightwin I approached
the test in a jaunty spirit. Needless to
say I had taken preliminary steps, and
the greatest of these was to hire a dress
suit. At this stage in my career, unfortunately,
.bn 234.png
.pn +1
to buy a dress suit presented insuperable
difficulties; but I found from
fellow-pupils at the Dramatic School that
one might hire for a merely nominal sum.
So I hired, and had a dress rehearsal of
the part I was to play at Clapham Assembly
Room, in which my Aunt Augusta
and her servant, Jane, constituted the
audience.
Then came the important night. I returned
home direct from the office, partook
of a slight repast, and reached the
Clapham Assembly Room three-quarters
of an hour before the doors opened. This
was rather feeble in a way, and not worthy
of Mr. Bulger, or Thespis, because we all
know that professional critics dash up at
the last moment in their private broughams
and sink into a sumptuous stall just as the
curtain rises on new productions. But I
had come, as a matter of fact, in a tram
and was far too early. A sense of propriety,
however, told me that I ought not
.bn 235.png
.pn +1
to be there—skulking about at least an
hour before I need be; and so, with a fair
amount of presence of mind, I started off
to take a look at Clapham, which was a
district quite unknown to me. I decided
with myself that nothing would make me
return to the Assembly Room until ten
minutes before the curtain actually rose. I
should then lounge in, present my ticket,
and appear with a bored and weary air
among my fellow-critics.
But as all roads were said by the ancients
to lead to Rome, so all roads at
Clapham appear to lead to the Assembly
Room. I walked away again and again
and kept going in directions that seemed
to point exactly opposite from the Assembly
Room, yet, sooner or later, I invariably
found myself back in the same
old spot. The exterior of this edifice was
of an unattractive architecture, and not
until two minutes before the doors opened
did people begin to collect in front of it.
.bn 236.png
.pn +1
After being, as it were, the hero of a hundred
first nights in London, this audience
at Clapham appeared piffling; but as the
performance was for a charitable institution,
many came actuated by philanthropic
emotions and, of course, in a perfectly uncritical
spirit. I, however, being there in
the course of business, felt that I must
not let any considerations of the charitable
institution come between me and my duty.
The moment arrived, and I entered and
presented my ticket with an air of patient
and long-suffering indifference.
“Press!” said the man in the ticket-office,
and marked a number on my ticket
and handed it to another man. It was
distinctly a moment to remember, and I
forgot my hired clothes and everything,
but just felt that I stood there as a representative
of that glorious institution—the
London Press!
My seat was in the second row and comfortable
enough, without being sumptuous.
.bn 237.png
.pn +1
I had a good view of the stage and I leisurely
divested myself of my overcoat, saw
that my dress shirt and tie were all right,
pulled down my cuffs, and cast my eyes
round the house. An amateur band, consisting
chiefly of ladies, was playing, and a
certain amount of verve and vivacity,
though not much, filled the auditorium.
Clapham had by no means turned out in
its thousands; in fact, it was quite easy
to count the house, and I should be exaggerating
if I suggested that there were
more than two hundred and fifty persons
in it. Subtract fifty for biased friends of
the performers and take off another fifty
for pure philanthropists, and that left not
more than a hundred and fifty at the outside
who could be supposed to have come
in a critical or artistic spirit.
The critics did not reveal their personality
or sun themselves in the front of the
stalls, as I had seen them do in proper
theatres on a first night. They may have
.bn 238.png
.pn +1
been there by stealth and in disguise; but
more likely they had sent substitutes.
An official in evening dress came to
speak to me presently. He evidently knew
that I wielded my pen for Thespis, and I
could see that knowledge inspired his
friendship. He hoped I was comfortable,
and said that, after the second act, there
would be whisky and soda and sandwiches
going in the gentlemen’s cloak-room. He
added that they had all been in fear that
the leading lady would lose her mother and
be unable to act. But by good chance her
mother was spared and she was going to
play.
“Of course we had an understudy,” explained
the official, who proved to be the
assistant acting manager; “but no doubt
you know, better than I do, what a bore
it is for everybody concerned to have to
fall back upon the understudies.”
“For everybody but the understudies,”
I answered in a knowing sort of way, and
.bn 239.png
.pn +1
the assistant acting manager said it was
deuced good, and left me.
Of course the whisky and soda and
sandwiches were a bribe, and I decided not
to touch them, because you couldn’t be unprejudiced
about people who thrust whisky
and soda upon you; besides, I didn’t drink
whisky. Every critic worthy of the name
snatches a glass of champagne between the
acts of a new play, and then comes back
to his seat licking the ends of his mustache;
but the management doesn’t pay for the
sparkling beverage—far from it: the critic
pays himself and so preserves his right of
judgment untarnished.
As a matter of fact, after the second act
I did stroll round to see the other critics
and hear if others agreed with my views of
the performance. There were four obvious
critics in the cloak-room, all eating and
drinking with complete abandon and not
saying a word about the play; and there
were several other people of both sexes also
.bn 240.png
.pn +1
eating and drinking, who might, or might
not, have been critics.
Somehow I found a plate of sardine
sandwiches under my hand, so just ate
perhaps six or eight, without, however,
surrendering my right of judgment. There
was no sparkling wine going, but siphons
of soda-water and two bottles of whisky.
I drank about a pennyworth of pure soda-water,
smoked half a cigarette, and then
returned to the auditorium. No official
spoke a word to me during this interlude.
They may have felt it was better taste
not to.
The play which was submitted to my
attention was not in any literary sense a
novelty, though there were several new
readings in it, of which the least said the
soonest mended, in my opinion. The
drama in question was adapted from the
French of that famous dramatist, M. Victorien
Sardou, and it had taken two Englishmen
to do it, both called Rowe, namely,
.bn 241.png
.pn +1
Mr. Saville Rowe and Mr. Bolton Rowe.
Diplomacy was the English name of the
famous play, and there were seven men in
it and five women. I knew the play, having
seen it performed to perfection by Mr.
and Mrs. Bancroft and their company;
and the come-down from them to the Clapham
Macreadies was, of course, tragically
abrupt. But, as a critic, I naturally made
allowance for the gulf that was fixed between
professional and amateur acting,
combined with the differences between an
Assembly Room and a proper theatre.
There was much to praise; and no doubt
if you are beginning to be an actor yourself
and just finding out the fearful difficulties
of the stage, it makes you more
merciful than if you are a critic who has
never himself tried it, or knows in the
least what it feels like. After the third
act, the assistant acting manager came to
me again, on his way to others, and said in
a hopeful voice:
.bn 242.png
.pn +1
“Going strong—eh?”
“D’you mean me, or the play?” I
asked, not in the least intending a joke;
but he took it for such and evinced considerable
amusement.
“You’ll be the death of me,” he said.
“You’re a born humourist. I expect I
should be surprised if I knew your
name.”
“Very likely you would,” I replied
guardedly. But of course I kept hidden
under the critical veil and preferred to
remain anonymous; because, to have told
him that my name was merely Corkey,
and that I was a clerk in a fire insurance
office, would have made him under-value
my criticism; whereas, in reality, some of
the greatest critics of the drama the world
has ever known, such as Charles Lamb,
have pursued the avocation of clerk with
great lustre and great honour to themselves
and their employers.
The assistant acting manager asked me
.bn 243.png
.pn +1
to come behind after it was over and be
introduced to some of the actors and actresses.
He evidently observed that I was
still in my first youth and might be dazzled;
but though I should very much have liked
to fall in with this suggestion, I felt that
my critical faculty might be nipped in the
bud, so to speak, if I approached the amateur
histrion in the flesh on terms of
equality.
Therefore I declined, and he hoped I
would “let them all down gently,” to use
his own expression, and I saw no more of
him.
At the end of the play there was much
applause and cheering, and the ladies received
bouquets of choice flowers handed
up by frenzied admirers; but all this was,
of course, nothing to me. I left the Assembly
Room and passed out among the
audience, like one of themselves. Then
I walked all the way home, in order that
I might collect my thoughts and reach a
.bn 244.png
.pn +1
judicial and impartial frame of mind. Of
course one must sometimes be cruel to be
kind, and so on; but I felt in this case that
it was possible, allowing for the low artistic
plane on which amateurs are accustomed
to move, to say some friendly and
encouraging thing, accompanied, of course,
by the practical advice for which these
Clapham Macreadies would naturally look
in the pages of Thespis when next they
purchased it.
My review occupied an entire Sunday in
writing, and I don’t think I overlooked
anything or anybody. I began by touching
lightly on the veteran French dramatist
who was responsible for the play; I then
alluded to the translation, and the Bancrofts,
and their reading of the parts, and
so on. Then, slowly but surely, I came to
the Macreadies and their production.
I began with some hearty praise of the
general performance and the courageous
spirit that had inspired the company to
.bn 245.png
.pn +1
attempt so ambitious an achievement. I
censured some of the scenery, but indicated
how it might have been made better
with a little more forethought. The music
between the acts I examined very thoroughly
and considered it not well
chosen.
I may quote a passage or two, in
order to show the general nature of the
critique:—
“To Mr. Frank Tottenham fell the part
of Count Orloff, and we may say at once
that his rendition left little to be desired.
His conception was subtle and vigorous;
he managed his limbs with a sound knowledge
of stage deportment, and though his
elocution was faulty, his voice appeared
well in keeping with the character. His
make-up, however, left much to be desired.
There was a lack of permanence about it,
and it changed perceptibly during the
course of the play.”
Again I submit another passage:—
.bn 246.png
.pn +1
“Baron Stein requires an actor in every
way out of the common for his adequate
rendition, and if Mr. Rupert B. Somervail
did not plumb the character to the core
and betray the secret springs that inspire
it, he none the less submitted a consistent
and highly intelligent, if rather tame, reading.
He has considerable promise, in our
opinion; and we shall watch his future
progress with acute attention.”
I took each character in turn in this
way, and found that, to do real justice to
the production, almost a whole number of
Thespis would be necessary. However,
that, of course, was not my affair. I had
undertaken to do a thing for Mr. Bulger,
and I did it as well as I could. The rest
I left to him.
Much to my regret, he took a very high-handed
course with my review, and of
all the twelve pages of carefully written
foolscap (not to mention that I copied it
three times) he only availed himself of
.bn 247.png
.pn +1
twelve lines. The analytic part he remorselessly
cut out, and the advice to the
Clapham Macreadies, and most of the adverse
criticism. In fact, all you would
have gathered from the few commonplace
paragraphs that finally appeared was this:
that the Clapham Macreadies had produced
Diplomacy, in the interests of a
Cottage Hospital somewhere, and that
they had given a painstaking and capable
performance before a distinguished and enthusiastic
audience. The usual finish and
style inseparable from a Clapham Macready
production was apparent, the ladies’
band excelled itself, and the Club was to
be congratulated on adding another wreath
to its laurels.
Of course, I had said all these things,
but not in this bald and silly way. In
fact, I was a good deal annoyed, and
asked Brightwin rather bitterly what Mr.
Bulger supposed I had hired a suit of
dress clothes for, and gone down to Clap-ham,
.bn 248.png
.pn +1
and racked my brain for twelve hours
on Sunday, and so on; but he assured me
that Mr. Bulger had been tremendously
taken by my review and considered that I
was a born critic and had really been far
too conscientious in the matter.
It was my first glimpse behind the
scenes of the press world, and I found
that all that is written, even by critics,
by no means gets into print.
I felt in the first pangs of disappointment
that I would never put my pen to
paper again, and so be lost to Mr. Bulger
and Thespis forever; but when a week
or two later he actually published “The
Witches’ Sabbath” on the last page, under
the title of “Original Poetry,” I forgave
him all. He had undoubtedly tampered
with “The Witches’ Sabbath” and
reduced the number of the stanzas; but all
the best of it was still there; and in print
it looked decidedly literary. A great many
mistakes had unfortunately crept into it;
.bn 249.png
.pn +1
and Mr. Bulger had rather tampered with
the terror in one or two of the most fearful
verses. Still, it was mine, and as I passed
home through London that day, with a
copy of Thespis in my pocket, sent from
the editor, I could not help wondering
how little the hurrying thousands guessed
that, as they carelessly elbowed me, they
were touching a man who had written
original poetry which had been accepted
and printed in a public newspaper, and
might be bought at any bookstall in London.
It was rather a solemn thought in
its way, and I stopped at a bookstall near
Regent’s Circus to prove it, and threw
down a penny and asked for Thespis.
Much to my surprise, however, the man
did not keep it in stock.
“We could get it for you, no doubt;
but I thought it was dead,” he said.
“I can get it for myself, if it comes to
that,” I answered, picking up the penny
again. “You ought to stock it. All
.bn 250.png
.pn +1
theatrical people buy it, and if you thought
it was dead, you thought utterly wrong.
It’s much more alive than you are.”
I then left him hastily, before he had
time to think of a repartee.
.bn 251.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XIII
.sp 2
My efforts at the L.A.C. threw
rather a cloud on my career at
this season, for they continued to
be crowned with failure; in fact, the bitter
truth was slowly brought home to me that
I was not a good runner. I won a heat
in two handicaps, after repeated losses;
but when it came to the semi-finals, in both
cases my performance was quite beneath
consideration. I was very unequal, and
Nat Perry said that my running was rather
“in and out,” and Dicky Travers said that
it might be misunderstood and count against
me, though, of course, he knew it was not
intentional, but just according to the sort
of spirits I was in. For instance, if Mr.
Westonshaugh had praised me at the office,
or Mr. Montgomery Merridew had
said I was getting on at the Dramatic
.bn 252.png
.pn +1
School, then, curiously enough, I ran better;
but if Mr. Westonshaugh had frowned,
or Mr. Merridew had exhibited impatience
about my deportment or voice production,
then my legs seemed to feel it, and sulk,
and go slower, just when I most wanted
them to go faster. Such, no doubt, is life.
But, to compensate for these reverses,
most extraordinary success attended my
cricket, and at the end of the season it was
found on calculation that I headed the
batting list with an average of forty, decimal
something, for eight completed innings.
We were the champion insurance office
that season, thanks in a measure to me
and another much better man called Finlay,
who bowled at a great pace and was
also a steady run-getter. Then came the
striking news that there was a bat given
annually for the best average. It was
bestowed publicly, in the Board Room, and
the Secretary presented it in the name of
the directors.
.bn 253.png
.pn +1
For an instant I regretted my achievement;
then I told myself that as a man
destined to take his place on the public
stage and be in the public eye, a trifling
matter like a presentation-bat was all in the
day’s work. So I took the matter in a
light spirit, and, though doubtless many
felt very envious of my amazing luck, for
there were five “not outs” in my average,
I none the less treated it with great apparent
coolness.
“You’ll have to make a speech,” said
Mr. Blades, and I merely answered:
“Of course. You always have to in
these cases”—just as though receiving
testimonials was as common a thing with
me as registering policies.
Behind the scenes, however, the case
was very different, and, as the time drew
nearer for the presentation of the bat, I
found, rather to my surprise, that my pulse
quickened when the thought came into my
mind.
.bn 254.png
.pn +1
To quiet this effect, which was entirely
owing to the fact of being unprepared, I
planned a speech. Of course, a written
speech was out of the question, as only
monarchs read their speeches, which they
take from the hand of a courtier at the
critical moment; but there is no objection
to writing a speech first and then learning
it by heart and delivering it in a slightly
halting manner, as though it was an impromptu.
This can be done, and with my
histrionic attainments and increasing command
of deportment and voice production,
I felt hopeful that I should make a good
impression. I felt my future official career
might depend to some extent on this speech,
and I spent several evenings at home,
writing it and touching it up, so that it
should be worthy of the Apollo Fire Office,
and of the occasion, and of me.
I never polished anything so much in
my life, and after it was completed to my
satisfaction I tried it on Aunt Augusta,
.bn 255.png
.pn +1
to see how it struck her, as an unprejudiced
person, ignorant of cricket and so on.
“You are to imagine the Board Room
of the Apollo full of a seething and serried
flood of officials,” I said. “The Secretary,
the famous Mr. Septimus Trott, rises in his
chair and addresses the meeting. The affairs
of the cricket club are discussed, and
its great success during the past season;
then he mentions me by name, and very
likely a few of my best friends will raise
a cheer. This cheer may possibly spread
to men from the other departments, until
the whole assemblage honours me with congratulations.
I don’t say it will, of course,
but it may. Then I step out and go up to
the secretarial chair, and Mr. Septimus
Trott, doubtless with a passing thought of
how very different was the last time I
came before him, smiles genially, picks up
the presentation-bat, which I have already
chosen, and hands it to me. He bows; I
bow. Then I accept the bat in the true
.bn 256.png
.pn +1
spirit of sportsmanship, and speak as follows.”
After that I read my aunt the speech,
which was cast in these memorable words:
“Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, it would
be no exaggeration to say that I was
amazed at my performance as a wielder of
the willow during our past season on the
tented field. In my earlier days, Mr. Secretary
and gentlemen, such little success
as I may claim for my efforts was with the
leather; but I never thought that, even
helped with such phenomenal luck as has
fallen to my share, I should top our averages
and find myself standing before you
in this honourable and invidious position.”
“Surely not ‘invidious,’” said Aunt
Augusta; but I held up my hand for
silence, in the style of Mr. Merridew
when interrupted, and proceeded with the
speech.
“The game of cricket, Mr. Secretary
and gentlemen, is of surpassing antiquity;
.bn 257.png
.pn +1
but it is subject to those famous laws of
evolution discovered by Mr. Darwin, and
it has vastly changed for the better during
the last half-century. We can hardly
imagine that first-class cricket is capable
of further development; yet we are wrong.
It is. And though I may not be here to
see it, I have no hesitation in saying that
some of you collected here to-day may
live to observe vast changes in this historic,
manly, and essentially English pastime.
“Much has already been done since the
days of Captain Fellowes and Fuller Pilch
to improve the national game; and though
it is not possible to us of the Apollo Fire
Office, owing to the many calls upon our
time in this hive of industry, to acquire
what you might consider perfection at what
has been well called ‘the King of Games,’
still, we have already shown ourselves to
be no mean foemen in the fifth or sixth-class
cricket, which we practise so ably, as
many a victory over our formidable antagonists
.bn 258.png
.pn +1
in other insurance offices so clearly
shows.
“That it has been my great good fortune,
Mr. Secretary and gentlemen, to advance
our prosperity to the flood-tide of
success will ever be a source of proud gratification
to me and my family in days to
come; and I have no hesitation in saying
that, among my possessions, be they great
or small, in after life, I shall cherish this
bat as a jewel in my crown, so to say, and
never relinquish it as long as my powers
enable me to participate in our national
pastime.
“In conclusion, Mr. Secretary and—--”
Here my Aunt Augusta interposed
again—definitely and sternly:
“Really—really—I do think it’s too
long, my dear boy,” she said. “It’s awfully
good and interesting, and flows beautifully,
and if I was a clerk in your office
I should love to hear you say it; but—but—--”
.bn 259.png
.pn +1
“You miss the elocution and the pauses
and effects,” I explained. “I’m merely
reading it now; but when I deliver it,
everything will be quite different.”
“It may be so,” she said, “but I have
a firm conviction that it is far too long
for the occasion. You see, after the office
hours are over, the men will all be wanting
to hurry off to catch trains, and so on;
and it would be a fearfully disappointing
thing for you, in the midst of your speech,
if people began going out. Suppose, as
an extreme case, that the Secretary himself,
who is a very important and busy man,
had to go before you had finished? Think
what a cloud it would cast, and how you
would feel.”
Of course the vision of the Secretary
slipping away, and the clerks stealing out
one by one, was a very painful vision; and
my mind seemed to take hold of this gloomy
idea of Aunt Augusta’s and elaborate it,
until I pictured a scene where I and my
.bn 260.png
.pn +1
bat were finally left in the midst of the
Board Room in solitary state, addressing
the empty air!
“I hadn’t looked at it in that manner,”
I told Aunt Augusta, “and yet it seems a
frightful shame that this thing should all
go for nothing.”
“Couldn’t you shorten it by about
three-quarters?” she suggested; but I felt,
somehow, that this was out of the question.
“It is a case of all or none, as we say,”
I replied, “and I am afraid it had better
be a case of none. I should like to have
delivered the speech, and I may tell you
that what is called the ‘per-oration’ was
the best part of it. I worked up to a sort
of a pitch in it—a pitch of true feeling.
In fact, it was poetry; and if I had done
it properly, they’d have forgotten all about
their trains and even felt it was worth
missing them. But all is now over. I
expect you are right, though, of course,
it is impossible to be certain.”
.bn 261.png
.pn +1
With these words, I made a quick movement
and dramatically cast the manuscript
of the speech upon the fire. I thought
that Aunt Augusta, womanlike, would
have leapt forward, smitten with remorse
before the spectacle, and dashed at the
grate and very likely burned herself in unavailing
efforts to rescue my words. But
she made no such effort, and expressed no
remorse whatever. I could not help showing
a little irritation.
“Hang it all,” I said, “you might have
asked to hear the peroration!”
She put her hand on my arm.
“I’m an artist too,” she said, in her quiet
voice, “but I’m old, compared to you,
and my sense of humour has been sharpened
through a good many sorrows as well
as joys. My dearest boy, it wasn’t any
good—honestly—honestly. You can do
a million times better than that. Just say
what comes into your head, and you’ll
cover yourself with glory.”
.bn 262.png
.pn +1
Of course the female sex is famous for
a sort of intuition, and they often get clever
and correct ideas without working for them
like we men have to do. They have flashes
of sense, as it were, and though sometimes
the flashes are right bang off, to use a slang
phrase, still, there is no doubt that often
the things they utter on the spur of the
moment will be found to hit the right nail
on the head. Aunt Augusta had sense,
though the worlds of the City and of
sport were, naturally, sealed books to her.
I allowed her hand to stay on my arm,
which I did not always do, and granted
that I honestly believed she was very likely
right.
“And if you’ve had a good many sorrows
in your time, Aunt Augusta, I’m
very sorry, and don’t wish to add to them,”
I said. “In fact, really, in cold blood,
looking back at my idea of a speech, with
stage deportment, and elocution, and so
on—and pathos at the end, it may have
.bn 263.png
.pn +1
been infernal cheek to think of such a
thing from a junior clerk to a crowd of
grown-up men. They might have given
me ‘the bird,’ which is theatrical parlance
for hissing; they might have got right-down
annoyed, and thought I was making
game of them; they might even have taken
away the bat!”
“No,” she said, “they would never have
done anything like that; but I’m sure
they would have thought you were making
too much of the whole affair; and that
would have hurt your feelings.”
So we left it in that way, and I not
merely forgave Aunt Augusta, but thanked
her for saving me from what might have
been a considerable peril and very likely
damaged my future prospects in the
Apollo.
When the great evening actually did
come, only about a dozen sporting clerks,
including Mr. Blades and Dicky Travers,
dropped in to see the presentation, and
.bn 264.png
.pn +1
Mr. Septimus Trott, in about six well-chosen
words, handed me my bat and congratulated
me on winning it. In return
I merely said: “Thank you, sir. I’m
very glad to have had such luck.”
It was like those rather dreadful accounts
of hangings, when you read that
from the moment of pinioning till the drop
fell was a period of less than two minutes.
Not one of the meagre handful of clerks
who attended the ceremony need have
feared to miss his train; and doubtless they
were well aware of this before they came
to the ceremonial.
On the whole, I wasted a good deal of
valuable time and thought on this subject,
and shall never regard it as one of the most
satisfactory things that happened to me
during my first year in London. In fact,
it was rather sad in a way, though very
satisfactory from a purely sporting point
of view.
.bn 265.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XIV
.sp 2
Just as my first year in London was
drawing to a close I received the
gratifying news from Mr. Westonshaugh
that I might take a holiday of a
week’s duration. Naturally, my first idea
was to go out of town, and Aunt Augusta
reminded me that Doctor Dunston had
said he would like to entertain me as a
guest at Merivale when the opportunity
offered.
But, strangely enough, I did not feel
drawn to Merivale, because it so happened
that I had seen the Doctor during the
previous spring, when he came to London
to buy prizes and attend one or two of
the May meetings, which were his solitary
annual relaxation. In fact, he had asked
me to dine with him at his hotel, “The
Bishop’s Keys,” not far from Exeter Hall,
.bn 266.png
.pn +1
and I had gone, and found the Doctor
changed. I couldn’t tell how he had
changed exactly, for he was still the same
man, of course, and still took the same
majestic view of life; but somehow he had
shrunk, and seeing him at “The Bishop’s
Keys” was quite different from seeing him
in his study at Merivale, surrounded by all
the implements of the scholastic profession.
His voice was the same, and his rich
vocabulary, and his way of examining a
question in all its bearings; but still, he
had shrunk, and, a good deal to my surprise
and uneasiness, I found myself
actually disagreeing with him! He did
not thoroughly realise what I had become;
but that was my own fault to some extent,
because the old fascination under the
Doctor’s spell had not entirely perished,
and I found myself feeling before him just
as I used to feel. Of course I ought to
have talked freely to him and described
the life I led and the various things of
.bn 267.png
.pn +1
interest that had happened to me in London;
but I did not. Instead, I listened to
him wandering on about Merivale, and the
new boys, and the leak in the swimming-bath,
and the scholarship his daughter had
got for Girton, and his wife’s neuralgia,
and his detection of the gardener’s boy in
a series of thefts from the boot-room, and
so on. He didn’t like London, and had to
take lozenges for his throat every half-hour.
He was, in fact, not to put too fine
a point upon it, a bore, and though my
conscience stung me for ingratitude, I
could not throw myself into the leak in the
swimming-bath, or feel that the gardener’s
boy or the scholarship at Girton really
mattered an atom. It was base on my
part, but I could not help it, and, curiously
enough, my conversation had the same
effect on the Doctor that his had on me.
The only difference was that he very soon
stopped me when I began saying things
he didn’t like, whereas I could not, of
.bn 268.png
.pn +1
course, stop him. Without saying it unkindly,
I found that the Doctor had become
rather piffling in his interests. He
gave me a bottle of ginger beer with my
dinner, while he drank a half-bottle of
burgundy, and he showed in a good many
little ways that he still regarded me merely
as Corkey Major, and expected me to regard
him as Dr. Dunston. But one must
give and take in these matters, and when
he began talking about what his old pupils
had done in the world, and left me entirely
out of the list of those who had made their
mark, I began to feel fairly full up with
the Doctor, as they say, and knew only too
well that in future I should manage to
struggle on without seeing any more of
him. Because living in London readjusts
your perspective, so to speak, and it was
rather sad in a way to see such a grand
old scholar and large-minded man filling
up his fine brain with such gew-gaws and
fribbles as the affairs of Merivale. He
.bn 269.png
.pn +1
was, moreover, more Conservative than
ever, and I felt really ashamed to find
anybody with such wrong ideas on demand
and supply and the rights of man. But to
have corrected his opinions on these subjects
would have been an impossible task;
because, as Mr. Blades once neatly said
on another subject, you can’t bring a back-number
up to date, and the Doctor, while
he might have appeared to the old advantage
in the scholastic and venerable
atmosphere of Merivale, was distinctly of
the ancient and honourable order of back-numbers
as he appeared at “The Bishop’s
Keys” in London.
There was great unrest among the working
classes at this time, and Dr. Dunston
was very angry with the proletariat. “The
sons of labour,” he said, “will soon be the
sons of perdition, for, at the rate they are
going, they will inevitably dislocate forever
the relations between Capital and Labour—with
disastrous results to themselves,
.bn 270.png
.pn +1
Corkey; with disastrous results to themselves!”
Of course, to one saturated in the sayings
of Mr. Bright and Mr. Walter, these
views appeared erroneous; but it would not
have done to tell the Doctor that I was
now a Radical. He must have felt it as
a personal slight in his scheme of education.
Still, I had to assert myself to some
extent and didn’t hesitate to smoke a
cigarette with my coffee. It may be added
that the Doctor didn’t hesitate to resent it.
“A stupid habit, even in the adult,
Corkey,” he said; “and I regret that you
have allowed yourself to acquire it at your
tender age. To suck into the system a
deadening smoke from the conflagration of
a poisonous vegetable has always seemed to
me unworthy of a gentleman and a Christian.
No doubt your companions have seduced
you, but I am sorry the armour of
Merivale was not proof against their
temptation.”
.bn 271.png
.pn +1
After this I hid my secret flights toward
literature and the boards. His view of the
theatre appeared to be that the Greek
drama was worthy of all praise, but that
the English drama was not. I asked him
if he was going to see Hamlet, as performed
by Mr. Irving and Miss Ellen
Terry, and he said, “No, Corkey. The
modern theatre is no place for a preceptor
of the young. Shakespeare, in fact, is
far too sacred a subject for the modern
stage. The spirit evaporates, the poet
takes wing, and what is left is not worth
going to see. I read my Shakespeare in
the privacy of my own chamber, Corkey;
and I do not expect that the modern generation
of actors can teach me anything
I do not already know of the Swan of
Avon, either from a poetic or philosophical
standpoint.”
To argue with this sort of thing was, of
course, no work for me. I listened in silence,
and concealed the pity combined
.bn 272.png
.pn +1
with annoyance that was surging in my
breast. I hated hiding from this religious-minded
but parochial man that I was going
on the stage, for it seemed mean to do
so; but I also felt it was no good putting
him to needless pain and very likely spoiling
the effect of the May Meetings and
doing him harm. So I changed the subject
and asked him about the prizes. He
had been to the Army and Navy Stores
for these, and had bought Longfellow’s
Poems, and Robinson Crusoe, and St.
Winifred’s, and Masterman Ready, and
Hours with a Microscope and Hours with
a Telescope, and Eyes and no Eyes, and
many another fine, old, crusted work,
familiar enough to me in the past. In
fact, I realised with interest that the Doctor’s
mind was standing still, and though
there was something grand in a small way
to see this steadfast attitude, like a light-house,
to use a poetical simile, casting its
unchanging beam over the tumultuous seas
.bn 273.png
.pn +1
of Merivale, yet, somehow, in the atmosphere
of the Strand, London (for “The
Bishop’s Keys” were merely round a corner
from the main thoroughfare), the beam
of the Doctor was reduced to a mere
night-light.
By good luck he was going to an evening
May Meeting at nine o’clock, and he
invited me to accompany him to hear an
eminent Colonial Bishop on the Spread of
Christianity in the Frigid Zone; but with
unexpected courage I withstood him,
pleaded an engagement, which was true,
as it was a Dramatic School night, and
left him at the threshold of Exeter Hall.
Our parting was marked by a cordiality
that both of us were far from feeling; for
I knew that I had disappointed the Doctor;
and though, of course, he little knew
that he had disappointed me, he had; and
I felt an overpowering wish not to see him
again. I had, in fact, now broken definitely
with my past, and when, therefore,
.bn 274.png
.pn +1
Aunt Augusta suggested that my week’s
holiday should be spent at Merivale, I
negatived the idea without a division, as
they say.
Aunt Augusta then rose to the occasion,
with her usual kindness and generosity, and
proposed a few days at a place familiar to
her in Brittany.
“It is wild and lonely,” she said, “but
it is very beautiful, and I can do
some sketching if the weather permits,
and you can practise elocution among
the sand dunes and shout yourself
hoarse.”
This offer of seeing a foreign country
was far too good to refuse, and though
financially such a thing was beyond my
private resources, I had now made an arrangement
with Aunt Augusta by which
it was definitely understood that any advances
which she might be good enough
to make for the moment should be amply
recognised at a later period in my career,
.bn 275.png
.pn +1
when money ceased to be the vital object
it was at present.
She had not much, but still, far more
than I, having made a niche for herself
on the pinnacle of fame, and often selling
a work of creative art for eight or even ten
pounds. She promised, therefore, that
when the time came for me to earn money
on the boards and draw a salary in keeping
with the dignity of a London actor, she
would let me take the financial lead, so to
speak, and richly reward her for her generosity
of the past. In fact, it was understood
that if Aunt Augusta cast her bread
upon the waters, in scriptural language,
it would return to her after many days—not
like the talent hidden in the napkin,
but more like the widow’s cruse of oil, that
increased a thousand-fold. I knew of
course that this must happen, and I think
she felt there was more than an off-chance
of it. At any rate, she went on hopefully
casting.
.bn 276.png
.pn +1
So we visited Brittany, and I enjoyed
the interesting experience of a foreign
land and a foreign language in my ears,
together with foreign food and foreign
money. A volume, of course, might be
written about Brittany, and, as a matter
of fact, many volumes have been; but it is
not my intention to say anything on the
subject here; because, upon my return to
London, much happened of a very abnormal
character, and my recollection of the
peaceful days, when I practised elocution
in the sand dunes and Aunt Augusta
painted pictures of the rather tame scenery,
was speedily swept away to limbo.
Moreover, I had now reached within a
week of my eighteenth birthday and, by
a rather curious coincidence, the dreadful
events now convulsing the metropolis culminated
on that anniversary. But I must
not anticipate. Though the proletariat
was getting a good deal out of hand when
I came back from France, no actual collision
.bn 277.png
.pn +1
had taken place with Law and Order;
but, to use a well-known figure of
speech, the lion was aroused and roaring,
though he had not yet emerged from his
den. To drop metaphor, I may say that
Labour was up in arms against Capital,
and Political Economy was at the last
gasp.
At this grave crisis I found myself
summoned once again to assist our West-End
Branch, and then discovered, to my
astonishment, that the proletariat had selected
Trafalgar Square as a sort of rallying-ground
for their forces. Indeed, scenes
of great unrest were daily enacted in that
famous centre of civilisation.
Needless to say, the staff at our West-End
Branch was deeply excited at the
turn of affairs, and Mr. Bright seemed to
think the problem the most serious that
had arisen in politics for fifty years. He
was not, however, entirely on the side of
the masses, but felt rather doubtful of their
.bn 278.png
.pn +1
leaders were guiding them aright. Mr.
Walter never found much time to devote
to politics, though a sound Liberal at heart;
but what interested him was the artistic and
dramatic aspect of Trafalgar Square when
the horny-handed masses swept through it.
As for Mr. Bewes, he went on eating his
daily chop as though we were not on the
edge of a volcano. Of course, as a stern
Roman Catholic he was bound to believe
that all that happens is for the best. This
enabled him to keep his nerve in a way
that was a lesson to us.
Mr. Harrison, our esteemed chief, was a
Conservative, and he by no means believed
that everything that happens is for the
best. He heartily disliked the crowds in
the Square and was always glad when the
time came to close the office and pull down
the iron shutters. The directors also, who
dropped in as of yore to sign policies, took
a very unfavourable view of the situation
and spoke harshly of the proletariat. They
.bn 279.png
.pn +1
had a theory that the leaders of the people
ought to be hung for sedition, privy conspiracy,
and other crimes; and the newly
made lord, known as Corrievairacktown,
said he would like to see the Guards called
out to send the vermin back to their holes
at the point of the bayonet. He was a
very unbending man in the matter of
Capital versus Labour, and seemed to
think that soldiers was really the last word
on every subject.
Then, after a period of undoubted danger,
there came the terrible day when Mr.
John Burns felt it his duty to climb up between
the Trafalgar Square lions and wave
the republican flag of blood red above a
sea of upturned faces. The air was dark
and murky; Nature wept, so to speak, and
heavy clouds hung low above the unnumbered
thousands who listened with panting
bosoms to the impassioned utterances
of their leader. Like trumpet notes his
fiery syllables rent the welkin, and there
.bn 280.png
.pn +1
was a movement in the masses of the assembled
hosts, like billows driven by the
wind over the sea. Their white faces were
as foam on the darkness of dirty waves.
Fired to the fiercest enthusiasm by Mr.
Burns, the proletariat now began to shout
and yell with the accumulated hunger and
frenzy of centuries of repression, and it
was evident to the unprejudiced eye that
they meant to make themselves respected
and get back a little of their own, as the
saying is. A hoarse and savage growl rent
the air, and like hail the speaker, whose
glittering eyes and black beard were distinctly
visible from the windows of the
Apollo, lashed his audience into a seething
whirlpool of anarchical fury. Here and
there the populace seemed to start forward
on predatory thoughts intent; then they
stood their ground again; and there were
momentary intervals of silence in the riot,
like the moments of silence in a thunderstorm.
During one of these we distinctly
.bn 281.png
.pn +1
heard a harsh and grating sound three
doors down the street. It was a jeweler
putting up his shutters. In that sound you
might say was an allegory, for it typified
the idea of Capital funking Labour.
A few moments afterwards, Mr. Harrison
himself stepped from his private chamber,
walked to the outer door, and gravely and
fearlessly surveyed the ominous scene.
The masses were now out of hand, and
their leaders, probably much to their own
surprise and regret, had awakened a storm
of unreasoning ferocity which threatened
to plunge the West End into the horrors
of civil war. At any rate Mr. Harrison
appeared to think so, for after studying
the temper of the crowd, he returned to
us and uttered these memorable words:
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is revolution!
Pull down the shutters!”
Messengers hastened to obey his orders,
and when iron curtains had crashed down
between us and the stage of this stupendous
.bn 282.png
.pn +1
spectacle, we took it in turn to look out
through the letter-box.
Mr. Harrison, with all the courageous
instinct of a British sea-captain, decided
not to leave the Apollo that night unless
a great change should come over the spirit
of the scene, but for my own part I was
panting to rush out and join the revolution—not
with a view to assist it in any
nefarious project, but to study it from the
artistic standpoint. Before I could start,
however, the ferocious crowds had split
up and swept in different directions. They
went towards the west chiefly, and bursting
in upon defenseless streets, that had not
heard what was going on, surprised them
painfully and helped themselves from the
shops before their proprietors could arrest
their onslaught. I came upon the people
presently—to find them very far removed
from what you might call a conciliatory
attitude.
.bn 283.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XV
.sp 2
There is nothing like personal
contact with a thing to make you
understand its reality, and when
the revolution knocked my hat off into the
road I felt myself faced with no idle
dream. There was something about the
top-hat of the common or garden clerk
that angered the revolutionists, and they
did not seem to recognise in me a toiler
like themselves. Yet the only difference was
that I worked a jolly sight harder than most
of them, and they little knew that at that
moment I was hurrying about among them
simply to take mental notes in a highly
sympathetic and artistic spirit. Mine was
not the only top-hat that roused their ire;
in fact, they regarded this hateful but honourable
head-covering as an embodiment of
Capital; therefore they knocked it off
.bn 284.png
.pn +1
whenever they saw it among them. Legally
this was assault, if not battery,
but they cared nothing for that, and in
another and more ferocious sort of upheaval,
no doubt, they would have knocked
off the heads under the hats as well as the
hats themselves. This, however, they did
not do; in fact, the revolution, taken
piecemeal, which is the only way a single
pedestrian can take it, was an utter coward,
for at the word “copper,” whole gangs of
twenty or thirty men would evaporate,
only to form again as soon as the guardians
of the peace had disappeared. Such,
indeed, was the celerity of the revolution
when threatened with the law, that again
and again the police charged thin air.
Doubtless this was the result of hunger,
for had the people been well fed, they
would have been braver. But, of course,
if they had been well fed, they would not
have revolted. In fact, a revolution is a
very good example of cause and effect.
.bn 285.png
.pn +1
My top-hat was knocked off for the
third time in Oxford Street, and at the
same moment somebody grabbed at my
watch-chain and tried to possess themselves
of my “Waterbury.” In fact, the top-hat
was really a source of danger, and, at
the third loss, I ignored the hat, now much
the worse for wear, and left it for the
younger members of the revolution to play
football with. I then went on bareheaded,
until reaching a small shop in a back street
that had not been penetrated by the mob.
Here I purchased a cloth cap of dingy
appearance and a brown muffler, and, thus
accoutered, I plunged into the fray once
more.
The men in Oxford Street were armed
with stones, and when a private carriage
passed down the way, they broke the windows.
The hansom, the harmless four-wheeler,
and the groaning omnibus they
did not molest; but a private carriage
awoke their worst passions, and they
.bn 286.png
.pn +1
smashed the windows, utterly regardless of
the harm they might be doing to the occupant—fair
or otherwise.
Disguised as one of themselves with the
cap and muffler, I was no further molested,
and spent an hour or two among the people,
to find that, as the day advanced, they
began to cool down. It seemed as if the
fever of battle was burning itself out, and
when there rose a rumour that the troops
had been called into the streets to help
the police, a great change came o’er the
spirit of the scene. The revolution hated
to hear about the soldiers, because, of
course, it was by no means ready for any
such violent measures. In fact, so far as
I was concerned, the incident was now at
an end, and I returned home to Aunt
Augusta full of my great intelligence. She
had been painting rather industriously all
day and had heard nothing of the peril that
had threatened the metropolis. We talked
a great deal about it, and she much regretted
.bn 287.png
.pn +1
my top-hat and the events that had
led to its destruction; but, womanlike, a
little personal trifle interested her far more
than the calamity that promised to shake
the forces of Capital and Labour to the
core, and very likely convulse the civilised
world; and this was the trifling accident of
my birthday.
I was, in fact, eighteen, and Aunt Augusta
had already wished me many happy
returns of the day and given me a present
of an original and very beautiful water-colour
drawing of the Thames at Westminster.
But now she returned to the
subject, though I tried to choke her off it
and explained that after one reaches man’s
estate these accidental anniversaries are
better forgotten.
“If you don’t remember anything that
doesn’t matter,” I said to her, “then you
have all the more room in your memory
for everything that does.”
But she insisted on making a stir about
.bn 288.png
.pn +1
my natal day, and since London was too
unsettled, in her opinion, to go to a theatre,
she decided to have a lively evening at
home, beginning with a dinner of unusual
variety and style. She was rather a classy
cook and had learned the science when an
art student in Paris; so she sent out Jane
to get supplies, and asked me if I thought
I could venture out, too, and buy a bottle
of champagne. I felt secretly that, owing
to the hunger and so on of the masses,
one ought not to be drinking champagne
on a night like this. It was that sort of
callous indifference that caused the French
Revolution, and I told Aunt Augusta that
if the proletariat knew what she and I
were up to, they might very likely swoop
upon her flat and ransack it, or set it on
fire. But she answered, very truly, that
the proletariat would not know, and as to
have argued further would have laid me
under suspicion of cowardice, I went out
to buy the sparkling beverage and bring
.bn 289.png
.pn +1
it home. Luckily for the banquet, Aunt
Augusta had received rather a swagger
commission for four of her etchings the day
before, and so she was out of sympathy
with the sufferings of the people and in
sympathy with the anniversary of my
birth.
We had a great time in a gastronomic
sense. The meal embraced mock-turtle
soup, an omelette with herbs chopped up
in it, a pheasant and chipped potatoes, an
apple tart and tinned apricots, anchovies
on toast, pears, and a pineapple—all, of
course, washed down with the juice of the
grape and coffee.
Champagne is a most hopeful wine, which
you can have sweet or dry, and after drinking
a full glass, I began to suggest plans
for improving the state of the proletariat,
accompanied by a suspicion that their condition
was not so bad as they wanted
us to think. I talked a great deal to
Aunt Augusta, and smoked a whole
.bn 290.png
.pn +1
packet of cigarettes. She also smoked
and drank her coffee and listened to me
intently.
Presently, I began to discuss myself and
my career, and thanked her very heartily
for helping it forward to the best of her
power, as she was doing.
She was kind enough to say that I had
brought a great deal of pleasure into her
life, and she didn’t know what she would
do without me when I started rooms on my
own account. I allayed her fears in this
matter and promised I would not leave her
for at least another year.
“From eighteen till nineteen you may
count upon me,” I said, “though after
another year has passed, I don’t know what
may happen, because life is so full of surprises.”
I then retraced the year, from the day
that Doctor Dunston had sent for me to
see him and I thought it was fireworks, up
to the present moment in the throes of the
.bn 291.png
.pn +1
revolution. It seemed almost impossible
that so much could happen in the time; and
as I smoked and indulged in a retrospect,
as the saying is, I felt that the battle of life
had been fought almost day and night. It
had not yet been won, exactly, but there
seemed fair reason to expect that with luck
it soon would be.
In fact, the champagne made me decidedly
too pleased with all I had done, and
I believe, if the truth could have been
known, that I talked rather big to Aunt
Augusta and was on better terms with myself
than the occasion demanded.
I began to sketch out my programme of
life for my eighteenth year, and there is no
doubt that it was too ambitious. At any
rate, Aunt Augusta evidently felt that I
was planning more than I could perform,
and she turned my thoughts into another
channel.
“Of course all sorts of delightful new
things will happen to you,” she said, “but
.bn 292.png
.pn +1
it would be a pity to forget the adventures
you have already had.”
“I shall never forget them,” I assured
her; but she told me that memory played
tricks with the wisest people, and strongly
advised me to spend some few spare evenings
in writing a diary of the past, while
it was fresh in mind.
“It would be of great help to your next
brother,” she told me. “He’ll be coming
to London from Merivale in another eighteen
months or so, and he’d love to hear all
that has happened to you.”
In fact, Aunt Augusta openly advised a
diary founded upon the past, and though
my feeling is always to let the past bury
the past and be pushing forward to fresh
fields and pastures new, as the poet has it,
still, there are many people—generally of
the female sex—who take a great interest
in looking back to the time when they were
younger, and mourning their golden prime—though
it probably wasn’t half as golden
.bn 293.png
.pn +1
really as it seems to them, looking back at
it. Therefore, solely to please my Aunt
Augusta, I fell in with this suggestion and
allowed myself to retrace my first wavering
steps in the worlds of art and finance.
I set down the bare, unvarnished tale and
told the simple truth as far as I could remember
it. I preserved the aloof attitude
of the born raconteur, and allowed my
dramatis personæ to flit across the page in
the habit in which they lived. I don’t think
I forgot anybody, and tried to deal impartially
with them all. I told of my dinner
with Mr. Pepys and his sister, of the official
life, enriched with the ripe humanity
of Mr. Westonshaugh, the generous friendship
of Mr. Blades and the various characteristics
of Dicky Travers, the hero of the
L.A.C.; Bassett, the martial; Wardle, the
musical; Tomlinson, the equine; and Bent,
the horticultural. I told of my experiences
with the shady customer, and on the cinder-path
and the cricket-field. I retraced my
.bn 294.png
.pn +1
approach to the drama, and the grey-eyed
girl, and Brightwin, and Mr. Smith, and
the others, crowned by the soaring figure of
Mr. Montgomery Merridew.
Then I chronicled the glad hour when I
repaired to our West-End Branch and was
lifted to the friendship of Mr. Walter and
Mr. Bright; and lastly, I set down my
earliest experience on the paths of literature,
in connection with tragic poetry and
dramatic criticism.
By a happy thought, I presented the
manuscript of this “crowded hour of glorious
life,” as the poet has it, to Aunt
Augusta on her own birthday. In fact,
the thirty-eighth anniversary of that auspicious
event was gladdened for her by the
gift of my diary.
I rejoice to say that it afforded her
pleasure, but regret to add that it was not
the sort of pleasure I intended.
“Life, from the angle of seventeen, is so
dreadfully funny—seen from the angle of
.bn 295.png
.pn +1
thirty-eight,” she assured me—though why
it should be “funny” she was not apparently
able to explain.
“It may be interesting, but I don’t see
anything particularly funny about it, Aunt
Augusta,” I answered, slightly hurt at the
adjective.
She did not attempt to argue, but continued:
“You must promise me to write your
eighteenth year, too,” she said. “It will
be something for your old aunt to look forward
to. You must promise faithfully.”
“That depends,” I answered rather
coldly. “Life is life, and I find it a serious
thing, though it may seem ‘dreadfully
funny’ to you, Aunt Augusta. Anyhow,
funny or not funny, I shall not butcher my
eighteenth year to make a Roman holiday,
as they say. Important things must happen
to me in my eighteenth year. Nobody
can get through their eighteenth year without
important events; but if you think—--”
.bn 296.png
.pn +1
“Forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t mean
it for a moment. It’s a lovely diary, and
I shall always treasure it, and I wouldn’t
have a word altered—and it’s my birthday,
so you mustn’t be cross.”
Well, I forgave her; because she’s really
a jolly old thing, and of the greatest assistance
to me behind the scenes, so to speak.
Besides, everybody knows that the feminine
sense of humour is merely dust and ashes.
No doubt, if I had written with badinage
or pleasantry, in a light and transient vein,
enlivened by sparks of persiflage and burlesque,
she would have taken it in a tearful
spirit and cried over it.
But only a woman can laugh at the
naked truth; men know it’s a jolly sight
too serious. To laugh at my diary was the
act of the same woman who drank champagne
on the night of the revolution. We
must remember that they are not as we are,
and treat them accordingly.
.ce
THE END
.pb
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.h2
Transcriber’s Note
Errors deemed most likely to be the printer’s have been corrected, and
are noted here. The references are to the page and line in the original.
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| careful [caligraphy] | sic
| He said that chiaro[ o]scuro | Removed.
| increasing satisfaction and happiness.[)] | Added.
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