IV

In spite of my long and fairly successful career as a journalist, I

have rarely achieved what is known as a “scoop,” that is to say, an

exclusive story of sensational interest. On the whole, I don’t much

believe in the editor or reporter who sets his soul on “scoops,”

because they create an unhealthy rivalry for sensation at any

price--even that of truth--and the “faker” generally triumphs over the

truthteller, until both he and the editor who encouraged him come a

cropper by being found out.

That is not to say that a man should not follow an advantage to the

utmost and his luck where it leads him. It is nearly always luck

that is one of the essential elements in journalistic success, and

sometimes, as in a game of cards, it deals a surprisingly fine hand.

The skill is in making the best use of this chance and keeping one’s

nerve in a game of high stakes.

The only important “scoop” that I can claim, as far as I remember,

was my discovery of Doctor Cook after his pretended discovery of the

North Pole. That was due to a lucky sequence of events which led me

by the hand from first to last. The story is amusing for that reason,

and this is the first time I have written the narrative of my strange

experiences in that affair.

My first stroke of luck, strange as it may seem, was my starting

twenty-four hours later than forty other correspondents in search of

the explorer at Copenhagen. If I had started at the same time, I should

have done what they did, and perhaps taken the same line as they did.

As it was, I had to play a lone hand and form my own judgment.

I had arrived at the _Daily Chronicle_ office from some country place

when E. A. Perris, the news editor, now the managing editor, said in a

casual way:

“There’s a fellow named Doctor Cook who has discovered the North Pole.

He may arrive at Copenhagen to-morrow. Lots of other men have the start

of you, but see if you can get some kind of a story.”

I uttered the usual groan, obtained a bag of gold from the cashier, and

set out for Copenhagen by way of the North Sea. On a long and tiresome

journey I repeated the name “Doctor Cook,” lest I should forget it,

wondered if I knew anything about Arctic exploration, and decided I

didn’t, and accepted the probability that I should be too late to find

the great explorer, and shouldn’t know what to ask him if I found him.

I arrived in Copenhagen dirty, tired, and headachy in the evening. I

wanted above all things a cup of strong coffee, and with the German

language, communicated my desire to a taxi driver. He took me to a

rather low-looking café, filled with men and women and tobacco smoke.

That was my second stroke of luck, for if I had not gone to that

particular café I should never have met Doctor Cook in the way that

happened.

Over my cup of coffee I looked at the Danish paper, and could read only

two words, “Doctor Cook.” A young waiter served me, and when I found

that he spoke English, I asked him if Doctor Cook, the explorer, had

arrived in Copenhagen.

“No,” said the waiter. “He ought to have been here at midday. But

there’s a fog in the Cattegat, and his boat will not come in until

to-morrow morning. All Denmark is waiting for him.”

So he had not arrived! Well, I might be in time, after all. I looked

round for any journalist I might know, but did not see a familiar face.

Presently, as I sat smoking a cigarette, I perceived a suddenly

awakened interest among the people in the café. It was due to the

arrival of a very pretty lady in a white fur toque, with a white

fox-skin round her neck, accompanied by another young lady, and a tall

Danish fellow with tousled hair. They took their seats at the far end

of the café.

The young waiter came up to me and whispered with some excitement:

“Did you see that beautiful lady? That is Mrs. Rasmussen!”

The name meant nothing to me, and when I told him so, he was shocked.

“She’s the wife of Knud Rasmussen, the famous explorer. It was he who

provided Doctor Cook with his dogs before he set out for the North

Pole. They are great friends.”

I was aware that luck was befriending me. From that lady, if I had the

pluck to speak to her, I could at least find out something about the

mysterious Doctor Cook, and perhaps get a good story about him, whether

I could meet him or not.

I struggled with my timidity, and then went across the café and made

my bow to the pretty lady, explaining that I was a newspaper man from

London, who had come all the way to interview Doctor Cook, who was, I

understood, a friend of her distinguished husband. Could she tell me

how to find him?

Mrs. Rasmussen who was highly educated and extremely handsome, spoke a

little French, a little German, and a very little English. In a mixture

of these three tongues we understood each other, helped out by the

young Dane, who was Peter Freuchen, a well-known traveler in the Arctic

regions, and a very good linguist.

Mrs. Rasmussen was friendly and amused. She told me it was true her

husband was a great friend of Doctor Cook, and that he was the last

man who had seen him before he went toward the North Pole. For that

reason she wanted to be one of the first to greet him. A launch, or

tug, belonging to the director of the Danish-Greenland Company, had

made ready to go down the Cattegat to meet the _Hans Egede_ with Doctor

Cook on board, and she had hoped to make that journey. But the fog had

spoiled everything, and the launch would leave in the morning instead

at a very early hour. It was very disappointing!

“Surely,” I said, “if you really want to go, it would be excellent to

travel to Elsinore to-night, put up at a hotel, and get on board the

launch at dawn. If you would allow me to accompany you----”

Mrs. Rasmussen laughed at my adventurous plan.

According to her, the last train had gone to Elsinore.

“Let us have a taxi and drive there!”

She told me that no motor car was allowed to drive at night beyond

a certain distance from Copenhagen. It would mean a fine, or

imprisonment, for the driver without special license.

It seemed incredible.

I summoned my friendly young waiter, and asked him to bring in a taxi

driver. In less than a minute a burly fellow stood before me, cap in

hand. Through the waiter I asked him how much he wanted to drive a

party that night to Elsinore. He shook his head, and, according to the

waiter, replied that he could not risk the journey, as he might be

heavily fined.

“How much, including the fine?” I asked.

If he had demanded fifty pounds, I should have paid it--with _Daily

Chronicle_ money.

To my amazement, he asked the modest sum of five pounds, including the

fine.

I turned to Mrs. Rasmussen, Peter Freuchen, and the other lady, and

invited them all to make the journey in “my” motor car.

They hesitated, laughed, whispered to each other, and were, as I could

see, tempted by the lure of the adventure.

“But,” said Mrs. Rasmussen, “when we get there, supposing you were not

allowed on the launch by the Director of the Danish-Greenland Company?

He is our friend. But you are, after all, a stranger!”

“I should have had an amusing drive,” I said. “It would be worth while.

Perhaps you would tell me what Doctor Cook says, when you return.”

They laughed again, hesitated quite a time, then accepted the

invitation. It was arranged that we should start at ten o’clock, when

few people would be abroad outside the city, where we should have to

travel with lights out to avoid the police. There still remained an

hour or so. We had dinner, talked of Doctor Cook, and at ten o’clock

started out in the taxi, and I thought how incredible it was that I

should be sitting there, opposite a beautiful lady with a silver fox

round her throat, with a laughing girl by her side, and a young Danish

explorer next to the driver, riding through Denmark with lights out,

to meet a man who had discovered the North Pole, and whose name I had

never heard two days before. These things happen only in journalism and

romance.

We had not gone very far when, driving through a village, we knocked

over a man on a bicycle. People came running up through the darkness.

Peter Freuchen leaped down from his seat to pick up the man, who

seemed to be uninjured, and there was a great chatter in the Danish

tongue, while I kept on shouting to Freuchen, “How much to pay?” After

a while he resumed his seat and said, “Nodings to pay!” So we went on

again, and after a long, cold drive without further incident, reached

Elsinore, where Hamlet saw his father’s ghost.

At the hotel there we had something hot to drink, and then Mrs.

Rasmussen caught sight of a dapper little man who was the Director of

the Danish-Greenland Company and the owner of the launch which was to

meet Doctor Cook.

I was left in the background while my three companions entered into

conversation with him. From the expression on their faces, I soon saw

that they were disappointed, and I resigned myself to the thought that

I had the poorest chance of meeting the explorer’s ship at sea.

Presently Mrs. Rasmussen came back.

“He won’t take us,” she said.

“Hard luck!”

“But,” she added, “he will take you!”

That sounded ridiculous, but it was true. The pompous little man,

it seemed, had had applications from half the ladies of Copenhagen,

including his own wife, perhaps, to take them on his tug to meet the

hero of the North Pole. He had refused them all, in order to favor

none at the expense of others. It was impossible for him to take Mrs.

Rasmussen and her friends. He very much regretted that. But when they

told him that I was an English journalist, he said there would be a

place for me with two or three Danish correspondents.

Amazing chance! But hard on the little party I had brought to Elsinore!

They were very generous about the matter, and wished me good luck when

I embarked on the small tug which was to steam out to a lightship in

the Cattegat and at dawn go out to meet the _Hans Egede_, as Cook’s

ship was called. Like a fool, I left my overcoat behind and nearly

perished of cold, until an hour later I had climbed up an iron ladder

to the lightship in a turbulent sea and descended into the skipper’s

cabin, where there was a joyous “fugg” and some hot cocoa spiced with a

touch of paraffin.

At dawn we saw, far away up the Cattegat, a little ship all gay with

bunting. It was the _Hans Egede_. We steamed toward it, lay alongside,

and climbed to its top deck up a rope ladder. There I saw a sturdy,

handsome Anglo-Saxon-looking man, in furs, surrounded by a group of

hairy and furry men, Europeans and Eskimos, and some Arctic dogs. There

was no journalistic rival of mine aboard, except the young Danes with

us.

I went up to the central figure, whom I guessed to be Doctor Cook,

introduced myself as an English press man, shook hands with him, and

congratulated him on his heroic achievement.

He took my arm in a friendly way, and said, “Come and have some

breakfast, young man.”

I sat next to him in the dining saloon of the _Hans Egede_, which was

crowded with a strange-looking company of men and women, mostly in furs

and oilskins, with their faces burned by sunlight on snow. The women

were missionaries and the wives of missionaries, and their men folk

wore unkempt beards.

I studied the appearance of Doctor Cook. He was not bearded, but had

a well-shaven chin. He had a powerful face, with a rather heavy nose

and wonderfully blue eyes. There was something queer about his eyes,

I thought. They avoided a direct gaze. He seemed excited, laughed a

good deal, talked volubly, and was restless with his hands, strong

seaman’s hands. But I liked the look of him. He seemed to me typical of

Anglo-Saxon explorers, hard, simple, true.

In response to my request for his “story,” he evaded a direct reply,

until, later in the morning, the Danes and I pressed him to give us an

hour in his cabin.

It was in the saloon, however, that he delivered himself, unwillingly,

I thought, into our hands. As the two or three young Danes knew but

little English, the interview became mainly a dialogue between Doctor

Cook and myself. I had no suspicion of him, no faint shadow of a

thought that all was not straightforward. Being vastly ignorant of

Arctic exploration, I asked a number of simple questions to extract his

narrative; and, to save myself trouble and get good “copy,” I asked

very soon whether he would allow me to see his diary.

To my surprise, he replied with a strange defensive look that he had

no diary. His papers had been put on a yacht belonging to a man named

Whitney, who would take them to New York.

“When will he get there?” I asked.

“Next year,” said Doctor Cook.

“But surely,” I said, still without suspicion, “you have brought your

journal with you? The essential papers?”

“I have no papers,” he said, and his mouth hardened.

“Perhaps I could see your astronomical observations?” I said, and was

rather pleased with that suggestion.

“Haven’t I told you that I have brought no papers?” he said.

He spoke with a sudden violence of anger which startled me. Then he

said something which made suspicion leap into my brain.

“You believed Nansen,” he said, “and Amundsen, and Sverdrup. They had

only their story to tell. Why don’t you believe me?”

I had believed him. But at that strange, excited protest and some

uneasy, almost guilty, look about the man, I thought, “Hullo! What’s

wrong? This man protests too much.”

From that moment I had grave doubts of him. I pressed him several

times about his papers. Surely he was not coming to Europe, to claim

the greatest prize of exploration, without a scrap of his notes, or

any of his observations? He became more and more angry with me, until

for the sake of getting some narrative from him, I abandoned that

interrogation, and asked him for his personal adventures, the manner of

his journey, the weights of his sledges, the number of his dogs, and

so on. As I scribbled down his answers, the story appeared to me more

and more fantastic. And he contradicted himself several times, and

hesitated over many of his answers, like a man building up a delicate

case of self-defense. By intuition, rather than evidence, by some quick

instinct of facial expression, by some sensibility to mental and moral

dishonesty, I was convinced, absolutely, at the end of an hour, that

this man had not been to the North Pole, but was attempting to bluff

the world. I need not deal here with the points in his narrative, and

the gaps he left, which served to confirm my belief....

In sight of Copenhagen the _Hans Egede_ was received by marvelous

demonstrations of enthusiasm. The water was crowded with craft of every

size and type, from steam yachts to rowing boats, tugs to pinnaces,

with flags aflutter. Cheers came in gusts, unceasingly. Sirens shrieked

a wailing homage, whistles blew. Bands on pleasure steamers played “See

the Conquering Hero Comes.”

Doctor Cook, the hero, was hiding in his cabin. He had to be almost

dragged out by a tall and splendid Dane named Norman Hansen, poet and

explorer, who afterward constituted himself Doctor Cook’s champion and

declared himself my enemy, because of my accusations against this man.

Doctor Cook came out of his cabin with a livid look, almost green. I

never saw guilt and fear more clearly written on any human face. He

could hardly pull himself together when the Crown Prince of Denmark

boarded his ship and offered the homage of Denmark to his glorious

achievement.

But that was the only time in which I saw Cook lose his nerve.

Landing on the quayside, I had to fight my way through an immense

surging crowd, which almost killed the object of their adoration by the

terrific pressure of their mass, in which each individual struggled

to get near him. I heard afterward that W. T. Stead, the famous old

journalist of the _Review of Reviews_, which afterward I edited, flung

his arms round Doctor Cook, and called upon fellow journalists to form

his bodyguard, lest he should be crushed to death.

On the edge of the crowd I met the first English journalist I had seen.

It was Alphonse Courlander, a very brilliant and amusing fellow, with

whom I had a close friendship. When he heard that I had been on Cook’s

ship and had interviewed him for a couple of hours, he had a wistful

look which I knew was a plea for me to impart my story. But this was

one of the few times when I played a lone hand, and I ran from him, and

jumped on a taxi in order to avoid the call of comradeship. I knew that

I had the story of the world.

In a small hotel, distant from the center of the city, I wrote it to

the extent of seven columns, and the whole of it amounted to a case

of libel, making a definite challenge to Cook’s claim and ridiculing

the narrative which I set forth as he had told it to me. When I had

handed it into the telegraph office I knew that I had burned my boats,

and that my whole journalistic career would be made or marred by this

message.

During the time I had been writing, Doctor Cook had been interviewed by

forty journalists in one assembly. W. T. Stead, as doyen of the press,

asked the questions, and at the end of the session spoke on behalf

of the whole body of journalists in paying his tribute of admiration

and homage to the discoverer of the North Pole. Spellbound by Stead’s

enthusiasm, and not having had my advantage of that experience on

the _Hans Egede_, there was not a man among that forty who suggested

a single word of doubt about the achievement claimed by Cook. By a

supreme chance of luck, I was alone in my attack.

I will not disguise my sense of anxiety. I had a deep conviction that

my judgment was right, but whether I should be able to maintain my

position by direct evidence and proof, was not so certain in my mind.

I knew, next day, that my dispatch had been published by my paper, for

great extracts from it were cabled back to the Danish press and they

caused an immense sensation in Copenhagen, and as the days passed in an

astounding fortnight, when I continued my attack by further and damning

accusations against Cook, I was the subject of hostile demonstrations

in the restaurants and cafés, and the Danish newspaper _Politiken_

published a murderous-looking portrait of me and described me as “the

liar Gibbs”--a designation which afterward they withdrew with handsome

apologies.

The details of the coil of evidence I wove about the feet of Cook need

not be told in full. He claimed that he had told his full story to

Sverdrup, a famous explorer in Copenhagen, and that Sverdrup pledged

his own honor in proof of his achievement.

Afterward I interviewed Sverdrup and obtained a statement from him that

Cook had given no proof whatever of his claim.

He professed to have handed his written narrative and astronomical

observations to the University of Copenhagen, and it was claimed on

his behalf by the Danish press that these papers had been examined by

astronomical and geographical experts who were absolutely satisfied

that Cook had reached the North Pole.

From the head of the University I obtained a statement that Cook had

submitted no such papers and had advanced no scientific proof.

Using his own narrative to me, which I had scribbled down as he talked,

I enlisted the help of Peter Freuchen and other Arctic travelers, to

analyze his statements about his distances, his sledge weights, the

amount of food drawn by his dogs, and his time-table. They proved to be

absurd, and when he contradicted himself to other interviewers, I was

able, with further expert advice, to contradict his contradictions. It

was a great game, which I thoroughly enjoyed, though I worked day and

night, with only snatches of rest for food and sleep.

But I had some nasty moments.

One was when a statement was published in every newspaper of the world

that the Rector of the Copenhagen University had flatly denied my

interview with him and reiterated his satisfaction with the proofs

submitted by Doctor Cook.

_The Daily Chronicle_ telegraphed this denial to me and said, “Please

explain.”

I remember receiving that telegram shortly after reading the same

denial in the Danish newspapers, brought to me by Mr. Oscar Hansen, the

Danish correspondent of my own paper, who was immensely helpful to me.

I was thunderstruck and dismayed, for if the Rector of the University

denied what he had told me, and maintained a belief in the _bona fides_

of Cook, I was utterly undone.

At that moment W. T. Stead approached me and put his hand on my

shoulder. He, too--still the ardent champion of Cook--had read that

denial.

“Young man,” he cried, in his sonorous voice, “you have not only ruined

yourself, which does not matter very much, but you have also ruined

_The Daily Chronicle_, for which I have a great esteem.”

“Mr. Stead,” I said, “I am a young and obscure man, compared with you,

and I appeal to your chivalry. Will you come with me to the Rector of

Copenhagen University and act as my witness to the questions I shall

put to him, and to the answers he gives?”

“By all means,” he said, “and to make things quite beyond doubt,

we will take two other witnesses--the correspondent who issued the

statement about the denial, and another of established character.”

The two other witnesses were a French count, acting as the

correspondent of a great French newspaper and the representative of a

news agency who had issued the university statement, and believed in

its truth.

It was a strange and exciting interview with that Rector. For a long

time he refused to open his lips to say a single word one way or the

other about the Cook case. He relented slowly when W. T. Stead made an

eloquent plea on my behalf, and said that my honor was at stake on his

word.

The correspondent who had published the denial of my interview tried

to intervene, speaking in rapid German which I could hardly follow,

endeavoring to persuade the Rector to uphold the statement issued with

regard to the University. But the Frenchman, acting as my second, as

it were, sternly bade him speak in English or French which all could

understand, and to give me the right of putting my questions. This was

upheld by Stead.

I put my questions exactly word for word as I had done in the first

interview.

Had Doctor Cook submitted any journal of his travels to the University?

Had he submitted any astronomical observations?

Had he presented any proof at all of his claim to have reached the Pole?

The Rector hesitated long before answering each question in the

negative. The man was profoundly disturbed. Undoubtedly, as I knew

later, the University, with the King as its President, had deeply

involved itself by offering an honorary degree to Cook. As its chief

representative, this man was in a difficult and dangerous position, if

he turned down Cook’s claim. It was at least five minutes before he

answered the last question. Then, as an honest man, he answered, as he

had done before when I saw him alone, “No!”

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. If he had been a dishonest man, my

reputation and career would have been utterly ruined.

I asked him to sign the questions and answers as I had written them

down, but for a long time he refused to put his signature. Then he

signed, but as he handed me the paper, he said: “Of course that must

not be published in the newspapers.”

I protested that in that case it was useless, and both Stead and the

French correspondent argued on my behalf. I had the paper in my breast

pocket, and when the Rector gave a timorous consent to its publication,

I left the room with deep words of thanks, and fairly ran out of the

gate of the University lest he should change his mind, or the paper

should be taken from me. It was published in _The Daily Chronicle_, and

in hundreds of other papers.

A second blow befell me.

I had resumed acquaintanceship with Peter Freuchen and Mrs. Rasmussen,

and at lunch one day she showed me a long letter which she had received

from her husband, the explorer who, as I have told, had been Cook’s

best friend, and had provided his dogs and Eskimos.

Mrs. Rasmussen, smiling, said: “You, of all men, would like to read

that letter.”

“Alas that I do not know Danish!” I answered.

She marked one paragraph with a pencil, and said, “Perhaps I will let

you copy out those words.”

It was Peter Freuchen who copied out the words in Danish, and Oscar

Hansen who translated them into English, on a bit of paper which I tore

out of my notebook.

They were a repudiation by Knud Rasmussen of his faith in Cook, and a

direct suggestion that he was a knave and a liar.

These words were, of course, vitally interesting to me, and, indeed,

to the world, for the fame and honor of Rasmussen were high, and his

name had been used as the best guarantee of Cook’s claim. With Mrs.

Rasmussen’s permission, I telegraphed her husband’s words in my

message that day. They were immediately reproduced in all the Danish

papers, and made a new sensation.

But my private sensation was far more emotional when, in crossing a

square the following evening, a Danish journalist showed me a paper and

said, “Have you seen this?”

It was a formal denial by Mrs. Rasmussen that she had ever shown me a

letter from her husband, or that he had ever written the words I had

published.

That was a severe shock to me. I could not understand it, or indeed

believe it. That very day Peter Freuchen and Mrs. Rasmussen had been my

guests at lunch, and as friendly as possible. Probably some malicious

journalist had invented the letter....

It was late at night, and I could not find either Peter Freuchen or

Mrs. Rasmussen, nor did I ever see the lady again, because, on account

of certain high influences, she disappeared from Copenhagen.

I remembered the bit of paper on which the words had been written

down in Danish by Peter Freuchen and translated into English by Oscar

Hansen. That document was very precious, and my only proof, but I

couldn’t find it in my pockets or my room. My room at the hotel was a

wreck of papers, but that one scrap evaded all search. At last, down on

my hands and knees, I found it screwed up under the bed, and gave a cry

of triumph.

My old friend and true comrade, Oscar Hansen, made an affidavit that he

had translated Freuchen’s words, the editor of a news agency swore to

Freuchen’s handwriting, and I issued an invitation to Mrs. Rasmussen to

submit her husband’s letter to a committee of six, half appointed by

herself and half by me. If they denied that the letter contained the

words I had published, I would pay a certain heavy sum, which I named,

to Danish charities. That invitation was not accepted, and my words

were believed.

I have already described in a previous column of these memories the

banquet to Doctor Cook which I attended in the dress clothes of my

young friend the waiter. It was an historic evening, for, in the middle

of that dinner came the famous message from Peary in which he announced

his own arrival at the Pole and repudiated Cook’s claim.

I stood close to Doctor Cook when that message was handed to him, and I

am bound to pay a tribute to his cool nerve. He read the message on the

bit of flimsy, handed it back, and said, “If Peary says he reached the

Pole, I believe him!”

His manner at all times, after that temporary breakdown on the _Hans

Egede_ was convincing. It was marvelous on the day when the doctor’s

degree--the highest honor of the University--was conferred upon him,

and before all the learned men there he ascended the pulpit of the

University chapel and in a solemn oration stretched out his arms and

said, “I show you my hands--they are clean!”

At that moment I was tempted to believe that Cook believed he had been

to the North Pole. Sometimes, remembering the manner of the man, I am

tempted to think so still--though now there is no doubt that he never

went anywhere near his goal.

I used to meet him on neutral ground at the American Minister’s house

in Copenhagen, where I handed round Miss Egan’s tea cakes. Doctor Cook

would never accept any cake from me! Maurice Egan, the Minister, was

immensely courteous and kind, and Miss Egan confided to me that if I

proved to be right about Doctor Cook, in whom she believed, she would

lose her faith in human nature. Since then, though I was proved right,

she has regained her faith in human nature, as I know from her happy

marriage in the United States.

One other slight shock disturbed my mental poise in this fortnight of

sensation. It was when I read in the _Politiken_ a challenge to a duel,

publicly addressed to me by Norman Hansen, the poet and explorer. He

was a tall man, six foot three or so in his socks, and very powerful. I

am five-foot-six or so in my boots. If we met, I should die. I did not

answer that challenge! But on the day when Doctor Cook left Copenhagen,

with a wreath of roses round his bowler hat, and when I had done my job

with him, the crowd which had gone down to the quayside to see the last

of him, parted, and I found myself face to face with Norman Hansen.

Some one in the crowd said:

“When is that duel to be fought?”

Norman Hansen came toward me, and held out his hand, with a great jolly

laugh.

“We will never fight with the sword,” he said, “but only with the pen!”

We didn’t even fight with the pen, for he lost all faith in Cook, and

sometimes from northern altitudes I get kind and generous messages from

him.

W. T. Stead maintained his belief in Cook until the University of

Copenhagen formally rejected Cook’s claim and canceled his honorary

degree, when the evidence of his own papers, which afterward arrived,

and the story of his own Eskimos, left no shred of doubt in his favor.

Then I had a note from the great old journalist.

“I have lost and you have won,” he wrote, and after that used generous

words which I need not publish.

Truly it was a queer, exciting incident in my journalistic life, and

looking back upon it, I marvel at my luck.

V

By a young journalist, or an old one, there is always an adventure

to be found in London, as in any great city of the world where the

passions of men and women, the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes

of human nature, its dreams, its madness, and its faith, are but thinly

masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern streets, and beneath the

drab cloak of dullness of modern civilization.

It was my hobby in those early Fleet Street days to explore the

underworld of London and to get behind the scenes of its monstrous

puppet show. I sought out the queer characters not yet “standardized”

by the discipline of compulsory education or the conventions of

middle-class manners.

I dived into the foreign quarters of London and found that most nations

of Europe, and the races of the East, had their special sanctuaries in

the great old city, in which they preserved their own speech and habits

and faith.

In the Russian quarter I met victims of the tyranny of Czardom, who

had escaped from Siberian prisons and still bore the marks of their

chains and lashes; and the Russian Jews, too, who had come to England

to save themselves from the pogroms of Riga and other cities. I found

many of them working as tailors and seamstresses in back rooms of

tenement houses, Whitechapel way, abominably overcrowded, but earning

high wages. It was a revelation to me that they did most of the “black”

work for great West End firms, so that Mayfair received its garments

from the East End, with any diseases that might be carried with them

from those fœtid little factories. Thousands of them were employed

in cigarette factories, and spent their days filling little spills of

paper with the yellow weed, incredibly fast. According to the tradition

of not muzzling the ox that treads the corn, they were allowed to smoke

as much as they liked, and both men and women smoked continually.

I made a study of German London, which, at that time, before something

happened like an earthquake, had as many German clubs as any good-sized

city of the Fatherland, and several German churches, workers’ unions,

theatrical and musical societies.

In Soho I poked about French London, lunched at the _Petit Riche_

or dined at the Gourmet, and between Wardour Street and Old Compton

Street met the French girls who made artificial flowers for the ballets

and pantomimes, silk tights for the fairies of the footlights, and

embroidered shoes which twinkled on the boards.

Italy in London was one of my earliest discoveries as a young writer in

search of the picturesque. It was but a ten minutes’ walk from my first

office, and often in lunch time I used to saunter that way, stopping to

listen to the English cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, on the other side

of Holborn, and then plunging into a labyrinth of narrow lanes and

courtyards entirely inhabited by Italians.

It was a little Naples, in its color, its smells, its dirt. Across the

courtyards Italian women stretched their “washing”; and blue petticoats

and scarlet bodices, and silk scarves for women’s hair gave vivid color

to these London alleys. The women, as beautiful as Raphael’s Madonnas,

sang at their washtubs, surrounded by swarms of _bambini_.

Here, under a baker’s shop kept by an Italian _padrone_, slept o’

nights the little organ grinders and hurdy-gurdy boys, who used to

wander through the London suburbs and far into the countryside, to

the delight of English nurseries from which coppers were flung down

to these grubby, dark-eyed urchins with little shivering monkeys in

their coat pockets or on their music boxes. They were the slaves of

the _padrone_ and had to bring him all their earnings and get beaten

if they did not bring enough, before they slept in the cellars of this

London slum, among the black beetles and the rats.

In one back yard lived a gray bear, belonging to two wanderers from the

mountains of Savoy, and I used to hear the rattle of his chains before

they led him out on his hind legs with a big pole between his paws.

Above a big yard crowded with piano organs sat, in a little room at

the top of a high ladder, a fat old Italian who put the music on the

streets. He sat before an open organ case with a roll of cartridge

paper into which he stabbed little holes, which afterward made the

notes played by a spiked cylinder when the organ grinder turned his

handle. It was he who selected the tunes, thus conferring immortality

on many poor devils of musicians who heard their melodies whistled

by the errand boys to this music of the streets, and became famous

thereby. But it was the fat old Italian at the top of the tall ladder

who was the interpreter of their genius to the popular ear of the

great public of the streets and slums. He put in the trills, and the

“twiddley bits,” stabbing with his bradawl on the cartridge roll,

as though inspired by the divine afflatus, while his hair, above a

massive face and three chins, was all curls and corkscrews, as though

crotchets, and quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers, arpeggios

and chromatics were thrusting through his brain.

In other yards were men all white from head to heel, who made the

plaster casts of Napoleon and Nelson, Queen Victoria and General

Gordon, Venus and Mercury, and other favorite characters of history,

sold by hawkers in Ludgate Hill and other haunts of high art at low

prices. They also made the casts of classical figures for art schools

and museums.

In the back yards, the basements and the slum kitchens was another

profitable form of industry which was a monopoly of Italians in London

in the pre-war days. That was the ice cream trundled through the

streets with that alluring call to youth, “Hokey-pokey penny a lump!”

From surroundings appallingly free from sanitary supervision came this

nectar and ambrosia which the urchins of the London streets found an

irresistible temptation.

It was a careless word on the subject of this lack of sanitation in the

ice-cream factories which nearly ended my career as a journalist before

it was fairly begun. Requiring some additional photographs for the

second instalment of some articles I was writing for a magazine--the

first, almost, that I ever wrote--I went one Sunday morning to Italy in

London with an amateur photographer. We went into one of the courtyards

where I had made friends with some of the pretty washerwomen, but I

was no sooner observed by a few of them than, as though by magic,

the courtyard was filled with a considerable crowd of those whom the

Americans call “Wops.”

They came up from the basements where they slept as many as forty in

a cellar--organ grinders, ice-cream vendors, bear leaders, waiters.

I was obviously the object of passionate dislike. They surrounded me

with violent gestures and torrential speech, not one word of which

did I understand. At first I was mildly curious to know what all this

noise was about, but I saw that things were serious when several young

men began to flash about their clasp-knives. Help came at a critical

moment. Three London “Bobbies” appeared on the scene, as they generally

do, in the nick of time.

“Now, what’s all this about?”

Seldom before had I heard such a friendly and comforting inquiry.

The crowd melted away. In the quietude that followed, one young waiter

who remained explained to me that my published article on the Italian

quarter had caused great offense, as my reference to the ice-cream

factories had been taken as an insult. I had used the phrase “dirty

places” and the Italian colony desired my death. They did not get it

that Sunday morning. But I was sorry to have hurt their feelings, as I

had an affectionate regard for those people.

I was abominably near a nasty accident, owing to a misplaced sense of

humor, when the Mohammedans in London celebrated the Feast of Ramadan,

as they do each year at the Holborn Restaurant. That is one of the most

unlikely places in which to meet Romance. On all the other days of

the year it is given over to public banquets of Odd Fellows and Good

Fellows, Masons, and Rotarians, and the business man of London when

he puts on a hard white shirt, and expands his manly bosom under the

influence of comradeship, and the sense of holding an honorable place

among his fellow men of the same social grade as himself. Yet, in the

Holborn Restaurant there is the mystery and the romance of the East, an

astonishing, and almost incredible, assembly of Oriental types, on that

day of Mohammedan rejoicing.

The first time I went, there were several Indian princes in richly

colored turbans and gold-embroidered coats, some Persians in white

robes, Turks wearing the scarlet fez, a number of Arabs, some

full-blooded African negroes, and a group of Indian students. White

tablecloths, used as a rule by business men at their banquets, were

spread on the floor, and these were used as kneeling mats by the

Mohammedans, who bowed to the East with their foreheads touching the

ground and joined in a chant, rising and falling in the Oriental

scale, with strange wailings, as one among them read extracts from the

Koran, and between whiles seemed to carry on a musical and melancholy

conversation with the Faithful.

My trouble was that I wanted to laugh. There was nothing to laugh at,

and much to admire in the intense faith of these Mohammedan worshipers,

but there are times, probably due to nervousness, when some little

demon tickles one into a desperate desire to relieve one’s emotion by

mirth. It is what schoolgirls call “the giggles.” I caught the eye of

an enormous negro, staring at me ferociously, and I failed to hide a

fatuous smile. It was the queer nasal lamentations of those kneeling

men, and this scene in the Holborn Restaurant, where I had dined the

very night before with business men in boiled shirts, which stirred

my sense of the ridiculous, against all my spirit of reverence and

decency. I was alarmed at myself, and hurriedly left the room.

Outside the door I leaned against the wall and laughed with my

handkerchief to my mouth, because of this Arabian Nights’ dream in the

ridiculous commonplace of the Holborn Restaurant. As I did so, the

tall negro who had been eying me appeared suddenly before me in the

darkness of the passage. His eyes seemed to blaze with rage, and all

the wrath of Islam was in him, and he crouched a little as though to

make a spring at me. My misplaced sense of humor left me immediately! I

was out of the Holborn Restaurant and on top of a ’bus bound for Oxford

Circus, with astonishing rapidity.

It was not only among the foreigners of London that I found strange

scenes and odd characters. The life of a journalist brings him into

touch with the eccentricities of human nature, and trains him to keep

his eyes open for rare birds, philosophers in back streets, odd volumes

in the bookshelf.

It was by accident that I discovered a very queer fellow who revealed

to me a romantic profession. I was calling on a Member of Parliament

in the old Queen Anne house behind Westminster Abbey, when I saw a

smart gig standing by the pavement, a well-dressed young man with a

clean-shaven face, long nose, and green eyes, and, up against the

wall, a sack. It was the sack which astonished me. Filled with some

bulky-looking material, it was not like an ordinary sack, but was

heaving in a most peculiar way. I ventured to address the young man

with the gig.

“What on earth’s the matter with that sack?”

He grinned, and said, “Want to know?”

Then, very cautiously, he opened the mouth of the sack, made a sharp

nip with forefinger and thumb, and brought out a big-sized rat.

“There are four hundred in that bag,” he remarked proudly, “and all

alive and kicking. One has to handle ’em carefully. They bite like

blazes.”

“What are they for?” I asked. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Sell ’em to fancy gents who like a little sport with their dogs on

Sunday, down Mitcham way. Care to have my card?”

He handed me a visiting card, and I read the inscription, which

notified that my new acquaintance was

“_Rat Catcher to the Lord Mayor and the City of London._”

I made an appointment with this dignitary, and found that he was the

modern Pied Piper, who spent his nights in luring the rats of London

from riverside warehouses, city restaurants, and other establishments

along the bed of the Thames where they swarmed by the thousand.

“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,

Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,

Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,

Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,

Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,

Families by tens and dozens....”

Every night when the city folk had left their chop-houses or their

warehouses, this mysterious fellow with the greenish eyes went in

quietly with four big wire cages, some netting, and a long willow wand.

The nets, which had pouched pockets, he put up against the passages and

doorways. Then, in the absolute darkness, he stood motionless for an

hour. Presently there came a patter of tiny feet, a squeaking, a glint

of ravenous little eyes. They were all round him, searching for the

crumbs, ravenously. Suddenly he uttered a strange beastlike cry, in his

throat, like yodeling, and whipped the floor with his long white wand.

The rats were mesmerized, stupefied. They tried to make their way back

to their holes, but fell into the poacher’s nets, dozens and scores, on

a good hunting night. He emptied them into the cages, covered them with

white cloths, stood motionless again, waited again, made a second bag.

At dawn he departed with his sack well loaded, to sell to “fancy gents”

at four-pence each, in the suburbs of London.

The foreign element in London was, on the whole, very law abiding. For

centuries London had been the sanctuary of political refugees from many

countries of persecution, and it was a tradition, and a good tradition,

of England, that no questions should be asked as to the political

faith of those who desired shelter from their own rulers. Even the

revolutionaries of Europe, and the “intellectual” anarchists, had the

good sense, for a long time, not to stir up trouble or attack the

laws of the land in which they found such generous exile. This rule,

however, was abruptly broken by a gang of foreign bandits who carried

out a series of alarming robberies, and, when tracked down at last,

shot a police inspector and wounded others.

One of their own men was mortally wounded in the affray and carried

bleeding to a house in Grove Street, Whitechapel, one of the worst

streets in London, where he died. He was a young Russian, as handsome

as a Greek god, in the opinion of the surgeons of the London Hospital,

with whom I happened to be lunching when one of the juniors rushed

in with the news that the corpse had been secured, against all

competitors, by the “London.”

It was the death of this Russian which gave the clue to the habits

and whereabouts of the gang with whom he had been connected. Their

women were caught, and “blew the gaff,” and it was discovered that the

leader of the gang was another young Russian called Peter the Painter.

Scores of Scotland Yard detectives set out on the trail, and another

police inspector lost his life in the endeavor to arrest three of the

bandits at a house in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, where they defied all

attempts at capture by a ruthless use of automatic pistols. Siege was

laid to the house by the police and detectives, armed with revolvers,

and an astounding episode happened in the heart of London.

For some reason, which I have forgotten, I went very early that morning

to the _Chronicle_ office, and was greeted by the news editor with

the statement that a hell of a battle was raging in Sidney Street. He

advised me to go and look at it.

I took a taxi, and drove to the corner of that street, where I found a

dense crowd observing the affair as far as they dared peer round the

angle of the walls from adjoining streets. Heedless at the moment of

danger, which seemed to me ridiculous, I stood boldly opposite Sidney

Street and looked down its length of houses. Immediately in front of me

four soldiers of one of the Guards’ regiments lay on their stomachs,

protected from the dirt of the road by newspaper “sandwich” boards,

firing their rifles at a house halfway down the street. Another young

Guardsman, leaning against a wall, took random shots at intervals while

he smoked a woodbine. As I stood near him, he winked and said, “What a

game!”

It was something more than a game. Bullets were flicking off the wall

like peas, plugging holes into the dirty yellow brick, and ricocheting

fantastically. One of them took a neat chip out of a policeman’s

helmet, and he said, “Well, I’ll be blowed!” and laughed in a foolish

way. It was before the war, when we learned to know more about the

meaning of bullets. Another struck a stick on which a journalistic

friend of mine was leaning in an easy, graceful way. His support and

his dignity suddenly departed from him.

“That’s funny!” he said, seriously, as he saw his stick neatly cut in

half at his feet.

A cinematograph operator, standing well inside Sidney Street, was

winding his handle vigorously, quite oblivious of the whiz of bullets

which were being fired at a slanting angle from the house, which seemed

to be the target of the prostrate Guardsmen.

A large police inspector, of high authority, shouted a command to his

men.

“What’s all that nonsense? Clear the people back! Clear ’em right back!

We don’t want a lot of silly corpses lying round.”

A cordon of police pushed back the dense crowd, treading on the toes of

those who would not move fast enough.