After the downfall of _The Tribune_ there was a period of suffering,
anxiety, and in some cases despair, for many of the men who had held
positions on that paper. One good fellow committed suicide. Others fell
into grievous debt while waiting like Mr. Micawber for something to
turn up. Fleet Street is a cruel highway for out-of-work journalists,
and as so many were turned out into the street together it was
impossible for all of them to be absorbed by other newspapers, already
fully staffed.
There were rendezvous of disconsolate comrades in the Press Club
or Anderton’s Hotel, where they greeted each other with the gloomy
inquiry, “Got anything yet?” and then, smoking innumerable cigarettes,
in lieu, sometimes, of more substantial nourishment, cursed the
cruelty of life, the abominable insecurity of journalism, and their
own particular folly in entering that ridiculous, heartbreaking,
soul-destroying career.... One by one, in course of time, they found
other jobs down the same old street.
I determined to abandon regular journalism altogether, and to become
a “literary gent” in the noblest meaning of the words, and anyhow a
free lance. I have always regarded journalism as merely a novitiate
for real literature, a training school for life and character, from
which I might gain knowledge and inspiration for great novels, as
Charles Dickens had done. My ambition, at that time, was limitless,
and I expected genius to break out in me at any moment. Oh, Youth!
Here, then, was my chance, now that I was free from the fetters of the
journalistic prison house.
With a wealth of confidence and hope, but very little capital of a
more material kind, I took a cottage at the seashore for a month and
departed there with my wife and small boy. It was a coast-guard’s
cottage at Littlehampton, looking on to the sea and sand, and
surrounded by a fence one foot high, like the doll’s house it was.
There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the
vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my novel, _The Street of
Adventure_, in which I told, in the guise of fiction, the history
of _The Tribune_ newspaper, and gave a picture of the squalor,
disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship
of Fleet Street.
It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should be a success.
Even my wife’s humorous contentment with poverty, which has always been
a saving grace in my life, did not eliminate the need of a certain
amount of ready money. _The Street of Adventure_, my most successful
novel, cost me more than I earned. In the first place, it narrowly
escaped total oblivion, which would have saved me great anxiety and
considerable expense. After leaving the coast-guard’s cottage at
Littlehampton, with my manuscript complete--150,000 words in one
month--I had to change trains at Guildford to get to London from some
other place. My thoughts were so busy with the story I had written,
and with the fortune that awaited me by its success, that I left the
manuscript on the mantelpiece in the waiting room of Guildford Station,
and did not discover my loss until I had been in London some hours. It
seemed--for five minutes of despair--like the loss of my soul. Never
should I have had the courage to rewrite that novel which had cost so
much labor and so much nervous emotion. Despairingly I telegraphed
to the station master, and my joy was great when, two hours later, I
received his answer: “Papers found.” Little did I then know that if he
had used them to brighten his fire I should have been saved sleepless
nights and unpleasant apprehensions.
It was accepted and published by William Heinemann, on a royalty basis,
and it was gloriously reviewed. But almost immediately I received
a writ of libel from one of my friends and colleagues on the late
_Tribune_, and sinister rumors reached me that Franklin Thomasson, the
proprietor, and six other members of the staff were consulting their
solicitors on the advisability of taking action against me. I saw
ruin staring me in the face. My fanciful narrative had not disguised
carefully enough the actuality of the _Tribune_ and its staff. My fancy
portraits and amiable caricatures had been identified, and could not be
denied. Fortunately only one writ was actually presented and proceeded
with, against myself and Heinemann, but the book was withdrawn from
circulation at a time when the reviews were giving it columns of
publicity, and it was killed stone dead--though later it had a merry
resurrection.
The man who took a libel action against me was the character who in
my book is called Christopher Codrington, the same young man who had
lifted his hat when the lights went out and said, “Dead! Dead!” He and
I had been good friends, and I believed, and still believe, that my
portrait of him was a very agreeable and fanciful study of his amiable
peculiarities--his Georgian style of dress, his gravity of speech,
his Bohemianism. But he resented that portrait, and was convinced
that I had grossly maligned him. The solicitors employed by myself
and Heinemann to prepare the defense piled up the usual bill of costs
(and I had to pay the publisher’s share as well as my own), so that
by the time the case was ready to come into court I knew that, win or
lose, I should have some pretty fees to pay. It never came into court.
A few days before the case was due, I met “Christopher Codrington” in
Fleet Street! We paused, hesitated, raised our hats solemnly, and then
laughed (we had always been much amused with each other).
“What about some lunch together?” I suggested.
“It would never do,” he answered. “In a few days we shall be engaged in
a legal duel.”
“Meanwhile one must eat,” I remarked casually.
He agreed.
We had a good luncheon at The Cock in Fleet Street. I had the honor
of paying for it. We discussed our chances in the libel action.
Christopher Codrington said he had a “clear case.” He emphasized the
damnably incriminating passages. I argued that he would only make
himself ridiculous by identifying himself with my pleasantries and
giving them a sinister twist. We parted in a friendly, courteous way,
as two gentlemen who would cross swords later in the week.
When my solicitors heard that we two had lunched together, they threw
up their hands in amazement.
“The two principals in a libel action! And the one who alleges libel
allows the other to pay for his lunch! The case collapses!”
They were shocked that the law should be treated with such levity. It
almost amounted to contempt.
That evening I called on “Christopher Codrington” and explained the
grievous lapse of etiquette we had both committed. He was disconcerted.
He was also magnanimous. I obtained his signature to a document
withdrawing the action, and we shook hands in token of mutual affection
and esteem.... But all my royalties on the sales of the novel,
afterward reissued in cheap form, went to pay Heinemann’s bill and
mine, and my most successful novel earned for me the sum of £25 until
it had a second birth in the United States, after the war.
I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial
uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune,
when those mocking will-o’-the-wisps lead him through the ditches of
disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of times
did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking the plot
of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would not fit
into my combination of circumstances, ending at four thousand words
with a dramatic climax! How many hours I have spent glued to a seat
in Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband
and wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a
man, and finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such
times one’s nerves get “edgy” and one’s imagination becomes feverish
with effort, so that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more
resolutely it eludes one. It is like the disease of sleeplessness. The
more one tries to sleep, the more wakeful one becomes. Then the free
lance, having at last captured a good idea, having lived with it and
shaped it with what sense of truth and beauty is in his heart, carries
it like a precious gem to the market place. Alas, there is no bidder!
Or the price offered insults his sensitive pride, and mocks at his
butcher’s bill. It is “too good,” writes a kindly editor. “It is hardly
in our style,” writes a courteous one. It is “not quite convincing,”
writes a critical one.... It is bad to be a free lance in this period,
when fortune hides. It is worse to be the free lance’s wife. His
absent-mindedness becomes a disease.
(I remember posting twenty-two letters with twenty-two stamps, but
separately, letters first and stamps next, in the red mouth of the
pillar box!)
His moods of despair when his pen won’t write a single lucky word give
an atmosphere of neurasthenia to the house. He becomes irritable,
uncourteous, unkind, because, poor devil, he believes that he has lost
his touch and his talent, upon which this woman’s life depends, as well
as his own.
My life as a free lance was not devoid of those periods of morbid
depression, and yet, on the whole, I was immensely lucky, compared with
many other beggars of my craft. It was seldom that I couldn’t find
some kind of a market for my wares, and I had an industry--I can at
least boast of that, whatever the quality of my pen--which astonishes
myself when I look back upon those days. I was also gifted to this
extent--that I had the journalistic instinct of writing “brightly” on
almost any subject in which I could grab at a few facts, and I could
turn my pen to many different aspects of life and letters, which held
for me always fresh and enthusiastic interest. Not high qualities, but
useful to a young man in the capture of the fleeting guinea.
I worked hard, and I enjoyed my toil. While earning bread and butter by
special articles and short stories, I devoted much time and infinite
labor to the most unprofitable branch of literature, which is history,
and my first love. Goodness knows how many books I read in order to
produce my _Men and Women of the French Revolution_, published in
magnificent style, with a superb set of plates from contemporary
prints, and almost profitless to me.
It was by casual acquaintance with one of the queer old characters of
London that I obtained the use of those plates. He was a dear, dirty
old gentleman, who had devoted his whole life to print collecting and
had one of the finest collections in England. He lived in an old house
near Clerkenwell, which was just a storehouse for these engravings,
mezzotints, woodcuts, and colored prints of the eighteenth century.
He kept them in bundles, in boxes, in portfolios, wherever there was
floor space, chair space, and table space. To reach his desk, where
he sat curled up in a swivel chair, one had to step over a barricade
of those bundles. At meal times he threw crumbs to the mice who were
his only companions, except an old housekeeper, and whenever the need
of money became pressing, as it did in his latter years, he used to
take out a print, sigh over it as at the parting of an old friend, and
trot round to one of the London print sellers who would “cash it” like
a cheque.... I think I made £150 out of _Men and Women of the French
Revolution_, and my best reward was to see it, years later, in the
windows of the Paris bookshops. That gave me a real thrill of pride and
pleasure....
I made less than £150 by my life of George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, one of the most romantic characters in English history,
and strangely unknown, except for Scott’s portrait in _The Fortunes of
Nigel_, and the splendid figure drawn by Alexandre Dumas in _The Three
Musketeers_, until, with prodigious labor, which was truly a labor of
love, I extracted from old papers and old letters the real life story
of this man, and the very secrets of his heart, more romantic, and more
fascinating, in actual fact, than the fiction regarding him by those
two great masters.
I think it was £80 that I was paid for _King’s Favorite_, in which
again I searched the folios of the past for light on one of the most
astounding mysteries in English history--the murder of Sir Thomas
Overbury by the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex--and
discovered a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies,
bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cutthroats and poets, as
hideously wicked as in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I was immensely
interested in this work. I gained gratifying praise from scholars and
critics. But I kept myself poor for knowledge sake. History does not
pay--unless it is a world history by H. G. Wells. Never mind! I had a
good time in writing it, and do not begrudge the labor.
My book on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, brought me the
friendship of the very noble and charming family of the Earl and
Countess of Denbigh. Lord Denbigh is the descendant of Susan
Villiers--the sister of George Villiers--who married the first Earl of
Denbigh, and he has in his possession the original letters written by
the Duke of Buckingham to his devoted wife, and her beautiful letters
to him, as well as a mass of other correspondence of great historical
value. Lord Denbigh invited me down to Newnham Paddox, his lovely
Warwickshire home, founded by his ancestors in the reign of James I,
and in the long gallery I saw the famous VanDyck portraits of the
Duke of Buckingham, the “hero” of my book, which have now been sold,
with other priceless treasures, when war and after-war taxation have
impoverished this old family, like so many others in England to-day.
I always look back to those visits I paid to Newnham Paddox as to a
picture of English life, before so much of its sunshine was eclipsed
by the cost and sacrifice of that great tragedy. They were a large
and happy family in that old house, with three sons and a crowd of
beautiful girls, as frank and merry and healthy in body and soul as
Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Katherine, Rosamond and Celia. I remember
them playing tennis below the broad terrace with its climbing flowers,
and the sound of their laughter that came ringing across the court
when Lady Dorothy leapt the net, or Lady Marjorie took a flying jump
at a high ball. On a Sunday afternoon they captured some tremendous
cart horses, grazing on the day of rest, mounted them without reins
or bridle, rode them astride, charged each other like knights at a
tourney, fearless and free, while Lady Denbigh laughed joyously at
the sight of their romps. There was an exciting rat hunt in an old
barn, which was nearly pulled down to get at the rats.... No one saw
a shadow creeping close to those sunlit lawns, to touch the lives of
this English family and all others. They played the good game of life
in pre-war England. They played the game of life and death with equal
courage when war turned Newnham Paddox into a hospital and called upon
those boys and girls for service and sacrifice. The eldest son, Lord
Feilding, was an officer in the Guards, and badly wounded. Two of the
boys were killed, one in the Army, one in the Navy. Lady Dorothy led
an ambulance convoy in Belgium, and I met her there when she was under
fire, constantly, in ruined towns and along sinister, shell-broken
roads, injecting morphia into muddy, bloody men, just picked up from
the fields and ditches, crying aloud in agony. Lady Denbigh herself
wore out her health and spirit, and died soon after the Armistice. It
was the record of many families like that, who gave all they had for
England’s sake.
During that time of free lancing I enlarged my list of acquaintances
by friendly encounter with some of the great ones of the world, its
passing notorieties, and its pleasant and unpleasant people.
In the first class was that curious old gentleman, the Duke of Argyll,
husband of Princess Louise. As poor as a church mouse, he was given
house-room in Kensington Palace, where I used to take tea with him now
and then, and discuss literature, politics, and history, of which he
had a roving knowledge. I was a neighbor of his, living at that time
in what I verily believe was the smallest house in London, at Holland
Street, Kensington, and it used to amuse me to step out of my doll’s
house, with or without eighteenpence in my pocket, and walk five
hundred yards to the white portico on the west side of the old red
brick palace, to take tea with a Royal duke. The poor old gentleman
was so bored with himself that I think he would have invited a tramp
to tea, for the sake of a little conversation, but for the austere
supervision of Princess Louise, of whom he stood in awe. As the Marquis
of Lorne, and one of the handsomest young men in England, he had gained
something of a reputation as a poet and essayist. His poetry in later
years was ponderously bad, but he wrote idealistic essays which had
some touch of style and revealed a mind above the average in nobility
of purpose.
As an editor I had bought some of his literary productions, and had put
a number of useful guineas into the old man’s pockets, so that he had a
high esteem for me, as a man with immense power in the press, though,
as a free lance, I had none.
This acquaintanceship startled some of my brother journalists on the
day of King Edward’s funeral at Windsor Castle. The Duke of Argyll
was a grand figure that day, in a magnificent uniform, with the Order
of the Garter, decorations thick upon his breast, and a great plumed
hat. After the ceremony, standing among a crowd of princes, he hailed
me, and walked arm in arm with me along the ramparts. I felt somewhat
embarrassed at this distinction, especially as I was in the full gaze
of my comrades of Fleet Street, who stood at a little distance. They
saw the humor of the situation when I gave them a friendly wink, but
afterward accused me of unholy “swank.”
It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm Tree, in many ways
the greatest, and in more ways the worst, of our English actors. He was
playing Caliban in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him on
the subject of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare!... Shakespeare!” he said, leering at me with a beastlike
face, according to the part he was playing, and clawing himself with
apelike hands. “I seem to have heard that name. Is there anything I can
say about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know a thousand
times, and more than I know more times than that.”
He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, but suggested that
I should run away and write what I liked. I did, and it was at least
a year before the article was published in a series of provincial
papers, a long article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought
to say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own passion.
One evening I received a long telegram from him.
“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His Majesty’s and kindly
call on me between the acts.”
I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. When I called
on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped my hand as though he loved
me.
“Little do you know the service you have done me,” he said. “My
secretary told me the other night that I was booked for a lecture on
Shakespeare at the Regent Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had
nothing prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t go.’ He
said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ ... Two minutes later a bundle of press
cuttings was brought to me. It contained your interview with me on the
subject of Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I had
said all those things. What a memory you must have! I took the paper to
the Polytechnic, and delivered my lecture, by reading it word for word.”
After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot that little
service. In return he invited me to the Garrick Club, or to his great
room at the top of His Majesty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes
which were vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and told
them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which revealed him at his
best. His acting was marred by affectations that became exasperating,
and sometimes by loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him
actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the part of Fagin
in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he had to sit crouched below a
bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, he dozed off, wakened with a start, and
missed his cue.
Tree’s egotism was almost a disease, and in his last years his
vanity and pretentiousness obscured his real genius. He was a great
old showman, and at rehearsals it was remarkable how he could pull
a crowd together and build up a big picture or intensify a dramatic
moment by some touch of “business.” But he played to the gallery all
the time, and made a pantomime of Shakespeare--to the horror of the
Germans when he appeared in Berlin! They would not tolerate him, and
were scandalized that such liberties should be taken with Shakespearian
drama, which they have adopted as their own.
Another great figure of the stage whom I met behind the scenes was
Sarah Bernhardt, when she appeared at the Coliseum in London. She took
the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, in which she was an unconscionable
time a-dying, after storms of agony and mad passion. I had an
appointment to meet her in her room after the play, and slipped round
behind the scenes before she left the stage. Her exit was astonishing
and touching. The whole company of the Coliseum and its variety
show--acrobats, jugglers, “funny” men, dancing girls, “star turns”--had
lined up in a double row to await this Queen of Tragedy, with homage.
As she came off the stage, George Robey, with his red nose and
ridiculous little hat, gravely offered his arm, with the air of Walter
Raleigh in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She leaned heavily on his
arm, and almost collapsed in the chair to which he led her. She was
panting after her prolonged display of agony before the footlights, and
for a moment I thought she was really dying.
I bent over her and said in French that I regretted she was so much
fatigued. My words angered her instantly, as though they reflected upon
her age.
“Sir,” she said harshly, “I was as much fatigued when I first played
that scene--was it thirty years ago, or forty?--I have forgotten. It is
the exhaustion of art, and not of nature.”
X
As a special correspondent of _The Daily Chronicle_ (after a spell of
free-lance work) I went abroad a good deal on various missions, and
occasionally took charge of the Paris office in the absence of Martin
Donohue who held that post but was frequently away on some adventure in
other countries.
I came to know and to love Paris, by day and night, on both sides of
the Seine, and in all its quarters, rich and poor. To me it is still
the most attractive city in the world, and I have an abiding passion
for its ghosts, its beauty, and its people. To “feel” Paris one must
be steeped in the history and literature of France, so that one walks,
not lonely, but as a haunted man along the rue St. Honoré, where Danton
lived, and where Robespierre closed his shutters when Marie Antoinette
passed on her tumbril; in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins
plucked leaves from the trees and stuck them in his hat as a green
cockade; in the great nave of Notre Dame, where a thousand years of
faith, passion, tragedy, glory, touch one’s spirit, closely, as one’s
hand touches its old stones; across the Pont Neuf, where Henry met his
murderer, and where all Paris passed, with its heroes, cutthroats,
and fair women; on the left bank, by the bookstalls, where poets
and scholars roved, with hungry stomachs and eager minds; up in the
Quartier Latin, where centuries of student life have paced by the old
gray walls, and where wild youth has lived its short dream of love,
quaffed its heady wine, laughed at life and death; up the mountain of
Montmartre where _apaches_ used to lurk in the darkness, and Vice wore
the false livery of Joy; in the Luxembourg Gardens, where a world of
lovers have walked, hand in hand, while children played, and birds
twittered, and green buds grew to leaf, which faded and fell as love
grew old and died.
Paris is nothing but an exhibition of architecture and a good shopping
place, unless one has walked arm in arm with D’Artagnan, seen the great
Cardinal pass in his robes, stood behind the arras when Marguérite
de Valois supped with her lover, wandered the cold streets o’ nights
with François Villon, listened to the songs of Ronsard, passed across
the centuries to the salons of Madame de Deffand and Madame Geoffrin,
supped with the Encyclopædists, and heard the hoarse laughter of the
mobs when the head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a pike,
and the fairest heads of France fell under the knife into the basket of
the guillotine. It was Dumas, Victor Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Eugène
Sue, Murger, Guy de Maupassant, Michelet’s “France,” and odd bits of
reading in French history, fiction, and poetry, which gave me the
atmosphere of Paris, and revealed in its modernity, even in its most
squalid aspects, a background of romance.
So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris is an enchanted
city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance to get behind the scenes
of life in Paris, and to put romance to the test of reality.
One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I went there for a
fortnight with my wife, in the first year of our marriage, on savings
from my majestic income of £120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel
called the Hôtel du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch--where Napoleon fired
his “whiff of grapeshot”--and explored the city and all its museums
with untiring delight, although at that time, during the Dreyfus trial
and the Fashoda crisis, England was so unpopular that we--obviously
English--were actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the
Entente Cordiale!)
One little show was unusual in its character. A fool named Jules
Guérin, wanted by the police for not paying his rates, or something of
the kind, fortified his house in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole
armed might of Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street
affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and fired at any
policeman who approached. M. Lépine, the prefect, decided to besiege
him and starve him out, and when my wife and I wedged our way through
vast crowds, we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army of
gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to the great annoyance
of my wife, who desired to see Jules Guérin.
While we were talking together, a woman plucked my wife’s sleeve and
said in French, “You want to see Guérin?... Come with me.”
She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond the police cordon
until, suddenly, we came into the very center of the deserted street.
“Voilà!” said the woman. “Vous voyez l’imbécile!”
She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure enough, was the
“imbecile,” Guérin, a sinister-looking fellow with a black beard, with
a large revolver very much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he
looked very much annoyed.... It was a full week before he surrendered
to the law.
One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was when the
Confédération Générale de Travail, under the leadership of Jean Jaurès,
declared a general strike against the government of Aristide Briand.
It was a trial of strength between those two men, who had once been
comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. Both of them were
men of outstanding character. Jaurès was much more than a hot-headed
demagogue, of the new Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization
in revenge against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in every
fiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian qualities,
including kindness and charity and personal morality, in spite of
religious scepticism. He saw with clear vision the approaching danger
of war with Germany, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf
of antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could be won over
to international peace, if French democracy would link up with them.
It was for that reason that he attacked the three years’ system of
military service, and denounced the increasing expenditure of France on
military preparations. But to attain his ideal of international peace,
he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, and defended many of
its violent methods, including “direct action.” It was with Aristide
Briand that he had drawn up the plans of a general strike in which
every trade union or syndicate in France would join at the appointed
hour, in order to demonstrate the power of “Labor” and to overthrow the
autocracy of “Capital.”
When Briand deserted the Left Wing, modified his views for the sake of
office, and finally became Premier of France, Jaurès, who had taunted
him as a renegade, put into operation against him the weapon he had
helped to forge. A general strike was declared.
There were astonishing scenes in Paris. The machinery of social life
came to a dead stop. No railway trains arrived or departed, and I had
a sensational journey from Calais to Paris in the last train through,
driven by an amateur who had not mastered the mystery of the brakes, so
that the few passengers, with the last supply of milk for Paris, were
bumped and jolted with terrifying shocks.
Food from the rural districts was held up on wayside stations, and
Paris was like a besieged city, living on rapidly diminishing stocks.
The “Metro” ceased work, and armies of clerks, shopgirls, and business
men had to walk to their work from suburbs or distant quarters. They
made a joke of it, and laughed and sang on their way, as though it was
the greatest jest in the world. But it became beyond a jest after the
first day or two, especially at night, when Paris was plunged into
abysmal darkness because the electricians had joined the railway men
and all other branches of labor.
The restaurants and cafés along the great boulevards were dimly lighted
by candles stuck into wine and beer bottles, and bands of students from
the Latin Quarter paraded with paper lanterns, singing the Funeral
March and other doleful ditties, not without a sense of romance and
adventure in that city of darkness. The _apaches_, who love not the
light, came out of their lairs, beyond Clichy, and fell upon wanderers
in the gloom, robbing them of their watches and ready money, and
clubbing them if they put up any resistance. No milk could be had for
love or money, no butter, eggs, fish, or fresh meat, except by the rich
hotels which cornered the markets with their small supplies brought in
by farm carts, hand carts, or babies’ perambulators.
On the whole there was very little violence, for, in spite of their
excitability, Parisian crowds are good-natured and law-abiding.
But there was one section which gave trouble. It was the union of
_terrassiers_ or day laborers. They knocked off work and strolled down
toward the center of Paris in strong bodies, looking dangerous and
picturesque in their great loose breeches tucked into their boots,
short jackets, and flat bonnets pulled over the right eye. Most of them
carried knives or cheap pistols, and they had ancient, traditional
grudges against the _agents de police_.
Those simple and admirable men were remarkably polite to them, and
generally contrived to keep at a safe distance when they appeared in
force. But the mounted police of the Garde Républicaine tried to herd
them back from the shopping centers of the city which they threatened
to loot, and came into immediate conflict with them. As an observer
interested in the drama of life, I several times became unpleasantly
mixed up with _terrassiers_ and other rash onlookers when the Garde
Républicaine rode among them, and I had some narrow escapes from being
trampled down.
A hot affair took place round a scaffolding which had been put up for
some new building up by Montmartre. The _terrassiers_, driven back by
the mounted men who used the flat of their swords, made a stronghold
of this place, and loosed off their pistols or flung brickbats at the
“enemy,” inflicting several casualties. Orders were given to clear out
this hornets’ nest, and the Garde Républicaine charged right up to the
scaffolding and hauled out the ruffians, who were escorted as prisoners
through hooting mobs. It was all very exciting, and Paris was beginning
to lose its temper.
Jaurès had called a great meeting of _cheminots_--the railway
workers--in the _Salle de Manège_, or riding school, down the rue St.
Denis. In the interests of _The Daily Chronicle_ I decided to attend
it. It was in a low quarter of the city, and vast crowds of factory
workers and young hooligans surged up and down the street, jeering at
the police, and asking for trouble. Far away, above their heads, I
could see the steel helmets with their long black plumes of the Garde
Républicaine.
A narrow passage led to the _Salle de Manège_, where Jaurès had
begun his meeting with an assembly of two thousand railway workers,
packed tight, as I could see when the door was opened an inch to
give them air. It was guarded by a group of strikers who told me in
rough language to clear off, when I asked for admission. One of them,
however, caught my remark that I belonged to _The Daily Chronicle_. It
impressed him favorably. “I used to read it when I was a hairdresser in
Soho,” he told me. He opened the door enough for me to step inside.
Presently I was sorry he did. The atmosphere was hellish in its heat
and stench, arising from the wet sawdust of the riding school and the
greasy clothes of this great crowd of men, densely massed. Jaurès was
on the tribune, speaking with a powerful, sonorous voice, I forget his
words, but remember his appeal to the men to reveal the nobility of
labor by their loyalty and their discipline. He was scornful of the
renegade Briand who had sold his soul for office and was ready to use
bayonets against the liberties of men whose cause he had once defended
with passionate hypocrisy.... After an hour of this, I thought I should
die of suffocation, and managed to escape.
It was out of the frying pan into the fire, for the crowds in the rue
St. Denis were being forced back by the Republican Guard, and I was
carried off my feet in the stampede, until I became wedged against
the wall of a corner café, with a surging crowd in front. Some one
flung a wine bottle at one of the Republican Guards, and unseated him.
Immediately the mounted troops rode their horses at the throng outside
the café. Tables fell over, chairs were smashed, and a score of men
and women fell in a heap through the plate glass windows. There were
shrieks of terror, mingled with yells of mirth. I decided to watch
the drama, if possible, from a more comfortable observation post, and
knocked at the door of one of the tall tenement houses near by. It was
opened by a villainous-looking man, shielding the flame of a candle
with a filthy hand.
“What do you want?” he asked in French.
“A view from your top window,” I said.
He bargained with me sullenly, and I agreed to five francs for a place
on his roof. It was worth that money, to me, to see how the poor of
Paris sleep in their cheap lodging houses. I went through the rooms
on each floor, by way of rickety old stairs, and in each room were
fifteen to twenty people, sitting or lying on iron bedsteads, men in
some rooms, women in others. Some of them were sleeping and snoring,
others lay half-dressed, reading scraps of newspaper by flickering
gas light. Others were undressing, careless of the publicity given
to their rags. It was astonishing to me that hardly any of them paid
the slightest attention to the scenes in the street below, which were
becoming riotous, as I could hear by gusts of noise, in which the
shrieks of women mingled with hoarse groans and yells and a kind of
sullen chant with the words, “_Hue! Hue! Hue! A bas la police. A bas la
police! Hue! Hue! Hue!_”
This house was older than the French Revolution, and I couldn’t help
thinking that perhaps when the tumbrils were passing on their way to
the guillotine, men and women like this were lying abed, or yawning
and combing their matted hair, or playing cards by candlelight, as two
fellows here, not bothering to glance beyond the windows at such a
common sight as another batch of aristocrats going to their death.
From the roof I looked down on the turbulent crowd, charged again and
again by the Republican Guards until the street was clear. Presently
the _cheminots_ came surging out of the _Salle de Manège_, with Jaurès
at their head, walking very slowly. The police let Jaurès get past, and
then broke up the procession behind him, with needless brutality, as it
seemed to me. Many men were knocked down, and fell under the horses’
hoofs. Others were beaten by blunt swords.
Not only Paris was in the throes of the general strike, but all
France. It was a serious threat to the French government and to the
social life of the people. Briand, who had played with revolutionary
ideas as a younger man, showed now that he had the wisdom that comes
from responsibility, and the courage to apply it. He called certain
classes to the colors. If they disobeyed, it would be treason to the
Flag, punishable by death. If they obeyed, it would break the general
strike, as they would be ordered, as soldiers, to run the trains, and
distribute supplies. It was a great risk to take, threatening civil
war, but he took it, believing that few men would refuse obedience to
military discipline. He was right, and by this means he crushed the
general strike and broke the power of the trade unions.
I interviewed him at that time, and remember my first meeting with
that man who afterward, when the World War had ended in the defeat of
Germany, held the office of Premier again and endeavored vainly to save
France from the ruin which followed victory.
I waited for him, by appointment, in a great salon furnished in the
style of Louis XV, with gilded chairs and a marble-topped table at
which Napoleon had once sat as Emperor. I was chatting with one of
his secretaries, when the door opened, and a tall, heavily built man
with large, dark, melancholy eyes, came into the room. He looked at
me somberly, and I stared back, not realizing that it was the Prime
Minister of France. Then the secretary whispered “Monsieur Briand,” and
he held out his hand to me. We had a long talk, or, rather, he talked
and I listened, impressed by the apparent frankness and simplicity and
courage of the man.
He told me how great had been the danger to France from the forces of
anarchy let loose by the Confédération Générale de Travail by their
action of the general strike, and he defended the policy by which he
had broken that threat against the authority of government. He did not
disguise from me that he had risked not only his political life and
reputation, but even the very peace and stability of France. But that
risk had been necessary, because the alternative would have been a weak
and shameful surrender to anarchy and revolution.
Jaurès was beaten, as he deserved to be, on that issue. His worst
defeat was not then, but in August of 1914, when those German
Socialists, in whose pacifism and brotherhood of man he had believed,
supported the challenge of their war lords against France and Russia,
and marched with all the rest toward the French frontier. The whole
of Jaurès’s life struggle for international peace was made vain by
the beating of drums for the greatest war in history. Among his own
people there were many, once spellbound by his oratory and loyal to his
leadership, who now abused him as the man who had weakened the defenses
of France by his antimilitarist influence. There were some, even, who
said “Jaurès betrayed us to the Enemy!”
On that night when many nations of Europe answered the call to arms,
stupefied, conscious of enormous terrors approaching all human life,
hearing already, in imagination, the thunder of a world of guns that
had not yet opened fire, I paced the streets of Paris with a friend,
wondering how soon he and I would be caught up in that death struggle.
“Let us turn in at the _Croissant_,” he said. “We must eat, though the
world goes mad.”
It was late, and when we arrived at the restaurant in the rue
Montmartre, it was closed and guarded by police.
“What has happened?” I asked, and some one in the crowd answered with
intense emotion:
“Jaurès is assassinated! He was shot there, as he sat at dinner.”
He was shot from behind a curtain, in a plush-covered seat where often
I had sat, by some young man who believed that, in killing Jaurès, he
was helping to secure the victory of France.
I saw his funeral _cortège_. They gave him a great funeral. Ministers
of France, men of all parties, dignitaries of the Church, marched
behind his coffin, and behind the red flags which were blown by a
strong wind. It was not love for him, but fear of the people which
caused that demonstration at his burial. It was an appeal for that
_Union Sacrée_ of all classes by which alone the menace to the life
of France might be resisted. There need have been no fear. There
was hardly a man in France who did not offer his life as a willing
sacrifice, in that war which seemed not only against France and her
friends, but against civilization itself and all humanity. So the
_poilus_ believed, with simple faith, unshaken by any doubt--in the
peaceful policy of France and the unprovoked aggression of Germany.
The restaurant in which Jaurès was killed--the _Croissant_, with the
sign of the Turkish Crescent--was one of the few in Paris open all
night for the use of journalists who slept by day. Needless to say,
other night birds, even more disreputable, found this place a pleasant
sanctuary in the wee sma’ hours. I went there often for some meal which
might have been dinner, lunch, or breakfast, any time between 2 and 5
A.M. I was with my colleague, Henri Bourdin, during the Italian war in
Tripoli.
Our job was to receive long dispatches over the telephone, from
Italian correspondents, and transmit them by telephone to London. It
was a maddening task, because after very few minutes of conversation,
the telephone cut us off from one of the Italian cities, or from
London, and only by curses and prayers and passionate pleading to lady
operators could we establish contact again.
Though the war in Tripoli was a trivial episode, wiped out in our
memory by another kind of war, the Italian correspondents wrote
millions of words about every affair of outposts--all of which streamed
over the telephone in florid Italian. I had a Sicilian who translated
that Italian into frightful French, which I, in turn, translated into
somewhat less frightful English, and conveyed by telephone to London.
It went on hour after hour, day after day, and night after night,
especially from a man named Bevione. I hated his eloquence so much that
I made a solemn vow to kill him, if ever I met him in the flesh.... I
met him in Bulgaria, during another war, but he was so charming that
I forgave him straightway for all the agony he had inflicted on me.
Besides, undoubtedly, he would have killed me first.
The Sicilian was a marvel. Between the telephone calls he narrated
all his love affairs since the age of fourteen, and they were
innumerable. During the telephone calls, it was he who pleaded with
the lady operators not to cut him off, or to get his call again. He
punctuated every sentence with a kiss. “Madonna!... Bacio!... Bacio!”
He gave these unknown beauties (perhaps they were as ugly as sin!) a
million kisses over the telephone wires, and by this frenzy of amorous
demonstration seriously disturbed the Paris exchange, and held up all
our rivals.
Henri Bourdin, in intervals of waiting, used to make the time pass by
acting all the most famous dramas of the modern French stage, and I vow
that this single man used to give me the illusion of having seen the
entire company of the Comédie Française, so vivid were his character
studies and descriptions.
Abandoning the Sicilian to any opportunities of love he might find
beyond the telephone receiver, Bourdin and I used to leave the office
on the Boulevard des Capucines just as the light of dawn was creeping
into the streets of Paris, when the _chiffonniers_ picked at the rags
in the dustbins, and pale ladies of the night passed like ghosts to
their lodgings in mean streets.
We made our way sometimes to the markets--_Les Halles_--where the women
of the Revolution used to gather with their knitting and their gossip
of the latest heads to fall in the basket of the guillotine. Many of
the houses round about belong to that period, and Bourdin and I used
to take coffee in old eating and drinking houses like the “_Chien qui
Fume_” (The Dog Who Smokes), which still have on their walls the iron
brackets for the lanterns on which French aristocrats were hanged by
infuriated mobs, in 1793.
They were still frequented by strange and sinister-looking characters.
I remember one group, certainly as queer as any I have seen. Bourdin
and I were seated at table when they came in excitedly--about thirty
men and women, all laughing and jabbering. The men wore long hair,
very wild and unkempt, with flowing black ties of “La Vallière” style.
The women had short hair, cut with straight fringes. Presently another
man appeared, astoundingly like Ary Scheffer’s study of Our Lord, with
long pale hair, and straw-colored beard, and watery blue eyes. At his
coming, the company became delirious with enthusiasm, while he went
gravely round the circle and kissed each man and woman on the lips.
It was Bourdin who explained to me the mystery of these fantastic
creatures. They belonged to the most advanced Anarchist society in
Paris. The man who appeared last had just been acquitted by the French
courts on a charge of kidnapping and locking up one of his fellow
anarchists, who had betrayed the society to the police.
The only time in which I myself have been in the hands of the French
police was in the early days of the war, while I was waiting in Paris
for my papers as accredited war correspondent with the British Armies
in the field. This unpleasant experience was due to my ceaseless
curiosity in life and the rash acceptance of a casual invitation.
A friend of mine had become acquainted with two ladies who sang at
“Olympia,” and I happened to be in a taxicab with him when they
approached the door of his vehicle as we alighted.
It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was murmured by the two ladies
that they were going to a “reception” at some apartment near the
Étoile--a most aristocratic neighborhood. They would be delighted if we
accompanied them. I was tired, and did not wish to go, but my friend
Brown, always fresh at midnight, saw amusement ahead, and begged me to
come.
“For an hour, then,” I said.
In the cab on the way to the Étoile, Brown sang mock Italian opera with
one of the ladies, who had an excellent voice and a sense of humor. I
exchanged a few remarks with the other lady, and was slightly disturbed
by the somewhat German accent with which she spoke French.
Certainly, the apartment in which presently we found ourselves, in an
avenue by the Étoile, was extremely elegant, and crowded with men and
women in evening dress, who looked highly respectable. Among them were
a few French officers in uniform and one English officer. The hostess
was a charming-looking lady, with snow-white hair. There was a little
music, a little dancing, and polite conversation. It was decorous and
dull.
At the end of an hour I spoke to Brown.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”
He informed me in a whisper that if I went I should be losing something
very good in the way of an adventure.
“This is, undoubtedly, one of the most criminal haunts in Paris,” he
said. “I can smell abomination! Something melodramatic will happen
before long, or I’ll eat my hat.”
I was surprised, and alarmed. I had no desire to be at home in a
criminal haunt in time of war. I decided even more firmly to go, and
went to take leave of the charming lady with the snow-white hair.
She seemed vexed that I should desire to go so soon, but seeing that I
was decided, made a somewhat curious request.
“Do you mind going out by the garden entrance--through the French
windows? We do not care to show lights through the front door. _C’est
la guerre!_”
I went out through the garden entrance, followed by Brown, who said I
was missing the fun.
It was dark in the garden, and I stumbled on the way to a little garden
gate, twenty yards away from the house.
As I put my hand on the latch of the gate, I was aware of a large
number of black shadows coming toward me out of the bushes beyond.
Instinctively I beat a hasty retreat back to the house. Something had
happened to it. Where the French windows had been was now a steel door.
Brown was doing something mysterious, bending low and making pencil
marks on a white slab of the wall.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’m identifying the house, in case of future need,” he answered.
I made a tattoo with my stick against the steel door. My one foolish
desire was to get back into the house, away from those black figures
outside the garden gate. It was too late. Directly I knocked on the
door, a score of them rushed into the garden, and I was seized and
carried in strong arms until, at a considerable distance, I was dumped
down under the Eiffel Tower, in charge of a dozen _agents de police_.
Groups of men and women in evening dress, some of whom I recognized
as visitors at the reception of the charming lady with the snow-white
hair, were also in charge of strong bodies of police. My friend Brown
was a prisoner some twenty yards away. It was a cold night, but,
philosophically, to the amazement of the French police, he lay down on
the grass and went to sleep.
We were kept under the Eiffel Tower for two hours, at the end of which
time a motor car drew up, with a gentleman wearing the tricolor sash
of a French prefect. It was for him that we had been waiting. Strangely
enough, we were all taken back to the apartment from which we had come,
and there each person was subjected to an examination by the prefect
and his assistants. There was evident terror among the men and women
who had passed the evening in the house of mystery.
Brown and I were liberated after an inspection of our passports. On the
way home I asked Brown for a little explanation, for I could understand
nothing of the business.
He understood perfectly.
“That place was a gambling den. The police were looking for German
spies, as well as French officers absent without leave. I told you we
should see something worth while!”
I confess I did not think it worth while. I had had a nasty fright,
caught a bad cold, and missed a good night’s sleep.
But it was certainly a little bit of melodrama, which one may find in
Paris more easily than in any city in the world.