Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred—by chance, I
am ashamed to say—to Mrs. Scott’s letter of introduction to her
brother. The address read “Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines,
Jermyn Street.” Why, it was but two or three blocks away, and being so
near I called, not knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be.
I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me
was exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially
and we had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife
and I were invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There
was no one to tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be
connected with the School of Mines.
It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of
Tyndall and another by the name of Mill—of neither I had ever heard—but
there was still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be
a literary man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on
Education some four years agone by a writer of that name; a certain
Herbert Spencer, whom I rightly judged might he be.
The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed—the Huxleys, I took
it, must be well to do—the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however,
I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and
wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow’s Rainy Day,
and left the others of us—Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself—at table.
Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well as American
affairs, I set them right as to both with much particularity and a
great deal of satisfaction to myself.
Whatever Huxley’s occupation, it turned out that he had at least one
book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he
introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel—the great
American romance—too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or
Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States,
to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was
actually accepted. It was held for final revision.
We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me
suddenly home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and
the novel—it was entitled “One Story’s Good Till Another Is Told”—was
laid by and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when
I was being lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:
“Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature.” She had
preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.
“Fetch it,” I said.
She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a
gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write—I had been
writing for the English market—perpendicular! The Lord has surely been
good to me. If the “boys” had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been
lost indeed!