Although my reminiscences hitherto have dealt with my adventures as
a special correspondent, I have from time to time sat with assumed
dignity in the editorial chair. Indeed, I was an editor before I was
twenty-one, and I may say that I began life very high up in the world
and have been climbing down steadily ever since.
I was at least very high up--on the top floor of the House of Cassell,
in La Belle Sauvage Yard--when I assumed, at the age of nineteen, the
enormous title of Educational Editor, and gained the microscopic salary
of a hundred and twenty pounds a year.
With five pounds capital and that income, I married, with an audacity
which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much younger,
that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official chief,
who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I sat,
and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said
“Hullo!” I made signs to her to depart.
“Who’s that pretty girl?” asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must
confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.
That first chief of mine was one of the most extraordinary men I ever
met, and quite the rudest to all people of superior rank to himself.
As Secretary to the Admiralty, and afterward Minister of War, many
important visitors used to call on him in his big room at the top
of Cassell’s, where he was one of the Directors. I sat opposite,
correcting proofs of school books and advertisements, writing fairy
tales in spare moments, and listening to Arnold-Forster’s conversation.
He treated distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels as though
they were office boys, so that they perspired in his presence, and
were sometimes deeply affronted, but, on the other hand, as a proof
of chivalry, he treated office boys and printers’ devils as though
they were distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels, with a most
particular courtesy.
I saw him achieve the almost incredible feat of dictating a complete
history of England as he paced up and down his room, with hardly a
note. It is true that his patient secretary had to fill in the dates
afterward, and verify the “facts,” which were often wrong, but the
result was certainly the most vivid and illuminating history of England
ever written for young people, and Rudyard Kipling wrote to him that it
was one of the few books that had kept him out of bed all night.
To me Arnold-Forster was the soul of kindness, and encouraged me to
write my first book, “Founders of the Empire,” which is still selling
in English schools, after twenty years, though I make no profit thereby.
At twenty-three years of age, I heard of a new job, and applied for
it. It was the position of managing editor of the Tillotsons’ Literary
Syndicate, in the North of England. The audacity of my application
alarmed me as I wrote the letter, and I excused myself, as I remember,
in the final sentence. “As Pitt said,” I wrote, “I am guilty of the
damnable crime of being a Young Man.”
That sentence gained me the position, as I afterward heard. The
Tillotsons were three young brothers who believed in youth. They were
amused and captured by that phrase of mine. So I went North for a time,
with my young wife.
It was a great experience in the market of literary wares. My task was
to buy fiction and articles for syndicating in the provincial and
colonial press, and my judgment was put to test of the sales list.
I “spotted” some winners who are now famous. Among them I remember
was Arnold Bennett. He sent in a story called “The Grand Babylon
Hotel”--his first romance--and I read it with the conviction that it
was first-class melodrama. He asked a paltry price, which I accepted,
and then I asked him to lunch in London--the joy of seeing London
again!--and made him an offer for the book rights. He agreed to that
fee, but afterward, when the book was immensely successful, he grieved
over his bad bargain, and in one of his later books he warned all
authors against a pale-faced young man, with his third finger deeply
stained by nicotine, who had a habit of asking authors to lunch and
robbing them over the coffee cups. Later in life he forgave me.
Although I had hard work as editor in Bolton of the Black Country--the
city was ugly, but the people kind--it was there that I found my pen,
and whatever quality it has.
I wrote an immense number of articles on every kind of subject, to be
syndicated in the provincial press, and I made a surprising success
with a weekly essay called “Knowledge is Power.” Like Francis Bacon, “I
took all knowledge for my province” by “swotting up” the great masters
of drama, poetry, novels, essays, philosophy, and art. It was my own
education, condensed into short essays, written with the simplicity,
sincerity, and enthusiasm of youth, for people with less chances than
myself. I began to get letters from all parts of the earth, partly
for the reason that the articles appeared in _The Weekly Scotsman_,
among other papers, which goes wherever a Scottish heart beats.
Correspondents confided in me, as in an old wise man--the secrets
of their lives, their hopes and ambitions, their desire to know the
strangest and quaintest things. Old ladies sent me cakes, flowers, and
innumerable verses. Young men asked me how they could become the Lord
Mayor’s coachman (that was an actual question!), or find the way to
Heaven.
Meanwhile Fleet Street called to me with an alluring voice. Kind as
the people were to me in Bolton--beyond all words kind--I sickened for
London. One night I wrote a letter to Alfred Harmsworth, founder of
_The Daily Mail_, and afterward Lord Northcliffe. Almost by return post
he asked me to call on him, and I took the chance.
I remember as though it were yesterday my first interview with that
genius of the new journalism. He kept me waiting for a while in an
antechamber of Carmelite House. Young men, extremely well dressed,
and obviously in a great hurry on business of enormous importance
to themselves, kept coming and going. Messenger boys in neat little
liveries bounced in and out of the “Chief’s” room, in answer to his
bell. Presently one of them approached me and said, “Your turn.” I drew
a deep breath, prayed for courage, and found myself face to face with
a handsome, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, with a lock of brown hair
falling over his broad forehead, and a friendly, quizzical look in his
brown eyes.
Sitting back in a deep chair, smoking a cigar, he read some of the
articles I had brought, and occasionally said “Not bad!” or “Rather
amusing!” Once he looked up and said, “You look rather pale, young man.
Better go to the South of France for a bit.”
But it was the air of Fleet Street I wanted.
Presently he gave me the chance of it.
“How would you like to edit Page Four, and write two articles a week?”
I went out of Carmelite House with that offer accepted, uplifted to the
seventh heaven of hope, and yet a little scared by the dangerous and
dazzling height which I had reached.
A month later, having uprooted my home in the North, brought a wife and
babe to London, incurred heavy expenses with a mortgage on the future,
I presented myself at _The Daily Mail_ again, and awaited the leisure
and pleasure of Alfred Harmsworth.
When I was shown into his room, he only dimly remembered my face.
“Let me see,” he said, groping back to the distant past, which was four
weeks old.
When I told him my name, he seemed to have a glimmer of some
half-forgotten compact.
“Oh, yes! The young man from the North.... Wasn’t there some talk of
making a place for you in _The Daily Mail_?”
My heart fell down a precipice.... I mentioned the offer that had been
made and accepted. But Harmsworth looked a little doubtful.
“Page Four? Well, hardly that, perhaps. I’ve appointed another editor.”