First Fiction--_A Life's Atonement_--The Casual Tramp--Poor
Law Relief--Charles Reade--_The Cloister and the Hearth_--
Wilkie Collins--The Figure in Mediaeval Costume--_Joseph's
Coat_--At Rochefort--_Rainbow Gold_--The Anarchist--The
Police--The Text of Scripture.
Whilst I was still engaged on the staff of the _Birmingham Morning
News_, as I have mentioned previously, Mr Edmund Yates was running
through its columns a novel which he entitled _A Bad Lot_. He was
lecturing in America at the time, and must have been living a hand to
mouth life with his story, for he brought it to an abrupt and rather
disastrous conclusion. When the final instalment of copy was received
there was a momentary consternation in the office. New arrangements were
pending, but we had supposed ourselves to have at least two months
in hand. In these circumstances my chief came to me and asked me if I
thought that I could fill the gap. I was simply burning for a chance to
try my hand at fiction, and I leapt eagerly at the opportunity. I began
that very day and I wrote a chapter which I am quite sure must have led
my readers to expect a tolerable weekly entertainment for some time, but
I had no plot in mind and I had not the remotest notion as to whither I
was going. I struggled on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe,
in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction
which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to
the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked
all my characters into such a tangle that, with the exception of the
hero and heroine and a few subordinates, whose fate it was not necessary
to particularise, I sent them all into a coal-mine, flooded the workings
and drowned the lot of them.
A very able and kindly critic told me that this amorphous first attempt
at fiction had flesh and blood but no bones, and I have learned
since that in writing a work of imagination as in much more serious
enterprises, the first essential is to be aware of your own purpose. For
some years afterwards I tried my hand on the short story, but before I
left England for the Russo-Turkish campaign, I had embarked upon a more
ambitious work, which finally took shape in _A Life's Atonement_. In the
hurry of departure I forgot my manuscript and left it at my lodgings. I
had quite resigned myself to think it lost, but when I received my
first commission for a three-volume story, it occurred to me that the
manuscript was worth inquiring after, and it surprised me agreeably to
find that it had been preserved. It was finished, sent in and accepted,
and achieved more than a commonplace success. New commissions came in,
and I found myself fairly launched as a novelist.
There is one queer thing about that first book which no critic ever
noticed so far as I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly
unconscious plagiarism of _David Copperfield_. Had there been no
Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no
Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the
fable and nearly all the characters I owed to Dickens, and yet I can
aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years
afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in the
book, in any case, was real. I sent my tragic hero wandering about the
country, finding shelter in all manner of low lodging-houses, and living
generally the life of a tramp. Before I put him to that experience I
went through it religiously myself, and for a whole seven weeks in the
summer, after my return from Turkey, I was “on the road” as a casual
tramp. It was my purpose to prove in my own person what I knew very well
already, namely, that it was, as most unhappily it still is, actually
impossible for a poor man honestly in search of work, to make his way
through England and to hold body and soul together without infringing
the law in one way or another.
I found that it was not possible. Well, I had seven weeks of it. I
went under the name of “David Vane, compositor,” as of course, I knew
something about the printing trade. My clothes were shabby at the
outset, but were utterly in rags when I had done. “David Vane” had many
strange adventures, but the funniest was reserved for the close. I may
say that I took a ten-pound note with me, and through the Post Office
sent portions of it on before me and walked towards it.
When I got to the “George” at Hereford I had £7, 13s. 6d. left out of
the £10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term
for the former is the “spike,” for the latter the “skipper.” I went on
“spike” and “skipper” both. I had sent a little portmanteau on before me
to the “George” at Hereford, with the initials “D.C.M.” at the side. In
it I had a change of clothes and a shaving kit. When I got into Hereford
I had had no shave for three or four weeks, my boots were absolutely
worn out, my clothes were rags and tatters, and exposure to the sun
had tanned my face. I drew my money at the Post Office at Hereford, and
carrying it in my hand, for all my pockets were worn out, I reached the
“George,” a good old-fashioned county hotel.
A set of steps reached up to the main entrance, where stood a waiter
with a professional napkin. He looked up the street, down the street,
and across the street, smiling all the time--a proprietorial sort of
smile. I talked to him from below--one always speaks from below with a
sense of disadvantage--and said, “I want a room.” He gave a wave of his
napkin in answer, and said, “Go away, go away.” But I did not go away.
I went up the steps, showed him my money, and told him not to play the
fool. I said, “I want a room.” He looked at me stolidly, but suddenly I
discovered my portmanteau in a corner. I claimed it at once and mounted
the stairs, the waiter following with his curiously feline footsteps,
and murmuring at intervals, “Well, I am------!” He said it with great
conviction, but he took me to the bath room nevertheless. I got a shave,
changed my suit, and, as I was something of a dandy at the time, I
affected certain airs as to the arrangement of my watch-chain and
the like. I came out cleanshaven and with an eye-glass, and generally
looking as different from the man who went in as it was possible to
imagine. On the stairs I found my waiter ready, and when he saw me he
said most emphatically that _he was_ ----. He took me to the coffee
room, where I had a meal. He stood behind my chair, and by means of a
mirror opposite I _saw_ him keep saying to himself that _he was_ ----.
I stayed in Hereford for some time, both to rest and to write articles
about my experiences, which appeared in _Mayfair_, a society paper, long
since dead. I took a private room, and this particular waiter seemed to
be told off to attend me in all my doings. Everything seemed to surprise
him; he could not measure me up at all, and he was continually saying
that _he was_ ----, although I knew quite well that he wasn't. One day
his worship the Mayor of Hereford called to see me. When I asked the
waiter to show his worship up he said that _he was_ ----. The mayor was
a flamboyant sort of individual, and said, “Now, Mr Christie Murray,
Lord Lyttelton is in Hereford, and is most par-tic-ular-ly interested in
the subject of which you are treating in _Mayfair_. He will be delighted
to meet you, and I have arranged with his lordship that you shall meet
him at my house (the mayor's house) at 7.30 on Friday. You will not fail
his lordship?” I said that I would not for the world, and I escorted his
worship to his carriage. At the door he turned and said, “Half-past
seven on Friday, Mr Christie Murray, at my house, to meet Lord
Lyttelton. Profoundly disappointed if you don't turn out. His lordship
will be grieved, Mr Murray.” The mayor having gone I turned round--to
encounter my waiter, and for the last time he said that _he was_ ----.
And although I had known that he was not, he said it with such sincerity
that I more than half believed him.
Either the man must beg, which in itself is, of course, a misdemeanour,
or he must starve. To sleep out of doors is a crime, and for a man to
appeal for shelter at the workhouse means that he will be detained until
every chance of obtaining employment is lost. I remember an unfortunate
fellow, whom I overtook near Tewkesbury, a man of about sixty as I
should judge, who was sitting by the roadside cooling his blistered
heels in a little runnel of clear water, and crying quietly to himself
as he tried to rid his fingers of the tar which stuck to them after his
workhouse morning's experience of oakum picking. I sat down beside him
and offered him a fill of tobacco, and by and by got into talk with him.
He was a man of some intelligence and education, and had begun life as
a journeyman watchmaker. He had risen to be an employer, and had kept a
small workshop in Coventry, but misfortune had overtaken him and he had
failed in business. The immediate cause of his distress was that he had
received notification that employment at his trade of watchmaker was
open to him at Evesham. The poor fellow was quite penniless and had been
compelled to walk; his strength had failed him by the way, and he had
had to take refuge in the workhouse. In payment for his lodging, his
two chunks of dry bread and his pint of skilly, he had been compelled
to pick his quantum of oakum. The man's fingers were, of course, as
delicate as a lady's, and in the course of our talk he held them out to
me, showing the tips all raw and bleeding and thick with tar. He sobbed
bitterly as he told me that he would be unable to do a hand-stroke
at his trade for at least a fortnight. He carried with him letters of
recommendation which ought to have guaranteed him from any such usage
as that to which he had been condemned. He had tried to show them to the
labour master, but he had been waved contemptuously aside, and had been
forced by threats of being imprisoned as a refractory pauper to betake
himself to the task imposed upon him.
It need hardly be said that all the men one encountered were not of this
type. I met one engaging ruffian who unbosomed himself to me with the
utmost frankness. “Oi meets genelmen on the road,” he said, “as arsks me
why Oi don't gaow to wurk; a great big upstandin' chap loike you, they
sez, loafin' abaht and doin' nothin'--why it's disgraiceful! Well, I
sez, guv'nor, I sez, 'ow can Oi go to wurk? Oi'm a skilled wurkman, I
sez, in me own trade, but Oi'm froze aht by modern machinery. Oi'm a
'and comb-maker, I sez, and the trade's bin killed this dozen years.
Oi'm too hold a dawg to learn new tricks, I sez, Oi'm a middle-aged man
and what ham Oi to do to yearn my means of loiveli'ood.” He added with
a wink that there was only one hand comb-maker in business in that wide
district of England and Wales over which he wandered. “And,” said he,
“you can bet your sweet loife Oi don't go nigh 'im.” This cadging rascal
would very rarely have occasion to present himself as a casual pauper
at the Union workhouse, but had he done so, he and the unfortunate
watchmaker would have been treated on perfectly equal terms.
The whole system of casual poor law relief is about as rotten and as
stupid as it can be, and its administration is in itself a scandal.
There is no general rule throughout the country as to dietary or as to
the nature of the labour executed, or as to the hours over which that
labour shall be extended. The habitual loafer knows perfectly well the
places where life is made easy to him, and as a matter of course avoids
those in which the fare is poorest and the work most arduous. The honest
seeker after work knows nothing of these things and the whole iniquitous
and idiotic system is at once a direct bribe to the inveterate
work-shirker and a scourge to the honest and industrious poor. I
published the result of my own researches into it in the columns of
_Mayfair_ now nearly thirty years ago, and suggested a very simple and
easy remedy for its defects. I had some hope that I might be attended
to. The late Lord Lyttelton, Mr Gladstone's friend, was at one time
disposed to take the matter up, but his melancholy death put an end to
that, and recent inquiries assure me that the old intolerable methods of
casual relief are still unreformed.
Looking back now, I can see how very large a part that seven weeks'
experience played in my life as a novelist. For years afterwards it
cropped up as inevitably in my work as King Charles's head in Mr Dick's
Memorial, but at least it has enabled me to feel that few writers of
fiction in my time have gone nearer to reality in their studies than
myself. I certainly worked the little mine that I had opened for all
that it was worth, and readers of mine who give themselves the trouble
to remember will recall the wanderings of the hero of _Skeleton Keys_,
of Frank Fairholt, of Hiram Search and of young George Bushell. Speaking
of Hiram Search naturally reminds me of Charles Reade. I dedicated the
book in which Hiram appears to that great writer and sent a copy of
it to him with what I daresay was a somewhat boyish letter. I have the
terms of my dedication in mind still, and I remember that I wrote of a
great genius which has always been put to lofty uses. Reade's letter
in response has always held a place amongst my treasures. “It is no
discredit,” he wrote, “for a young man to appreciate his seniors beyond
their merits.” I have always thought that very noble and modest and
well-said. Reade is the only one of the writers who in my own boyhood
were already reckoned great with whom it was my happiness to come into
personal contact.
I have met with but four men in my experience who have been
distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought
to express the acme of high breeding. Charles Reade was one of them. I
never knew him intimately enough to get beyond it, but that he
himself could break through it upon occasion was known to everybody. A
beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he
could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery or
oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright
vitriolic. Hardly anything could have excused the retort he flung at
some unhappy disputant who had called one of his facts in question.
“You have dared,” he wrote, “to contradict me on a subject in which I am
profoundly learned, while you are ignorant as dirt.” It was true enough,
but perhaps it was hardly worth while to say it in that fashion. Nearly
all his life he was embroiled in controversy of one sort or another. He
spent himself in the exposure of abuses and the people whom he exposed
assailed him rashly. He took prodigious pains to be accurate, and before
he assaulted the prison system in _It's Never Too Late to Mend_, or the
conduct of private lunatic asylums in _Hard Cash_, he had gathered and
indexed huge volumes of information culled from every available source.
These memoranda he called _nigri loci_. His system of indexing was so
precise that he could lay an instant finger on any fact of which he was
in search, and nobody who ventured to impugn his facts escaped from him
unmutilated. In one instance, a barrister was so misguided as to tell
him publicly that a legal incident in one of the two books I have
mentioned was obviously impossible and absurd.
Reade was down upon him like a hammer: “The impossibility in question
disguised itself as fact and went through the hollow form of taking
place” on such and such a date, in such and such a court, and the
proceedings were recorded in volume so and so, on certain pages of the
official Law Reports for a given year. His adversary was left with no
better resource than to charge him with hurling undigested lumps
of official documents at the head of the public; and this left his
equanimity undisturbed.
But it was when they charged him with plagiarism that his critics hit
him on the raw. About the time when I first knew him somebody started a
controversy with respect to his story of _The Wandering Heir_, and the
accusation was made that he had lifted a page or two out of Swift's
_Polite Conversations_. “Of course I did,” said Reade to me, “but the
essence of a plagiarism is that it shall have some chance of going
undetected; it is the appropriation to one's self of the property of
another with the intent to display it as one's own, and to me it was
impossible to suppose that a writer like Dean Swift was so obscure that
I could play a trick like that with him with impunity. A recognisable
quotation is not a plagiarism. They brought the same charge against me
because I translated the etchings of Corot into accurate English. The
sources I tapped for _The Cloister and the Hearth_ are open to anybody,
and any man who chooses may study them and make a romance out of them if
he can. It is perfectly true that I milked three hundred cows into that
bucket, but the butter I churned was my own.” It seems scarcely fair to
have brought such an accusation against a writer who not only made
no disguise of his literary methods, but who so openly proclaimed and
defended them.
In the last page of _The Cloister and the Hearth_ he acknowledges his
debt to the great Erasmus, for example, in these very noble and eloquent
phrases:--“Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his
mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of
a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon
mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower
of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal
race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they
bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed from generation to generation,
and from age to age.” The professional critics have never been just to
Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the
craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It
has long seemed to me that _The Cloister and the Hearth_ is, in fiction,
the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative
literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the
United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he
said one thing about that immortal book which I have ever since thought
memorable. “To read _The Cloister and the Hearth_” he declared, “is
like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern.” And indeed the
criticism is true. You travel from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome
and every man and woman you encounter on the way is indisputably
alive, though there is no he or she amongst them all who has a touch
of modernity. They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the
Princess Clælia, from the _mijaurée_ of the Tête D'Or to the tired
and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the
destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty
for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the
author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a
mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his
contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent,
placed over him.
He was always fighting against some legal oppression. In the latest case
in which I knew him to be engaged, an attempt had been made by a wealthy
ground landlord to squeeze an unprotected widow lady out of her rights
and to compel her to surrender the house and grounds which had belonged
to her deceased husband. With the impetuosity which distinguished him in
such matters, Reade flung himself into the conflict. It was enough for
him to know that an injustice was being done or attempted to fire him at
the centre. He caused to be inscribed on the outer wall of the garden
of the mansion in dispute the words, “Naboth's Vineyard,” and he used to
relate with great glee how a Jew old clothesman one day translated this
into “Naboth's Vinegar,” and after a wondering reading of it, said:
“Good Lord! I should have taken it for a gentlemanth houth.” “From
which,” said Reade, quaintly, “you may conclude that Houndsditch thumbs
not the annals of Samaria!”
That shapeless production _Grace Forbeach_ had one idea in it which I
was able to use later on to some advantage. In those days a writer of
fiction expended much more care upon the actual mechanism of his plot
than seems to be thought necessary nowadays. Even a man of the genius of
Charles Dickens did not feel himself at liberty to work untrammelled by
the exigencies of some intricate and harassing framework of invention on
which he made it his business to hang all his splendours of description
and his observation of human character. The power of the plot in English
fiction found its culmination in the work of Wilkie Collins, whose
_Moonstone_ is probably the finest piece of mere literary cabinet-making
in the world. All the younger writers of his time were strongly under
his domination and it was quite a necessity for us to have some merely
mechanical central idea round which we could evolve a story which, in
its serial form, should keep the reader perpetually upon the tenterhooks
of expectation. Such an idea I had stumbled on in _Grace Forbeach_ where
one of the characters was made feloniously to possess himself of his
own property and thereby rendered himself liable to penal servitude. I
elaborated this notion in _Joseph's Coat_ and made the development of
the whole fable dependent on it.
Leaving forgotten _Grace Forbeach_ out of the reckoning, _Joseph's Coat_
was my third novel in the order of writing and the second in order of
publication. The second half of _A Life's Atonement_ was written under
difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had
not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly
little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over
an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and
I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was
entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd
fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the doormat,
except on Saturdays, when three were left there, one for the needs
of the day and a double allowance for the Sunday. A loaf and a tin of
Chicago beef stocked the larder, and that being once attended to, the
remnant of my income served for such necessaries of life as beer and
tobacco, and pen and ink and paper. The bargain I had made with Messrs
Chambers was that I should receive one-half payment for the book--one
hundred and twenty-five pounds--on delivery and acceptance, and the
other half on the conclusion of the serial publication of the story in
their journal. This left an interval of twelve months between the two
payments, and the first was all but exhausted when my second commission
from the firm reached me. It was then drawing towards the close of the
year, and Mr Robert Chambers wrote me to say that the writer with whom
he had bargained to follow _A Life's Atonement_ had broken down in
health, and asking if I were in a position to supply her place. I went
off post-haste to Edinburgh and saw him there, and it was arranged
between us that I should deliver to him six chapters of an original
novel per week, that I should remain in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh
in order to give him opportunity for consultation from time to time, and
that whilst the book was being written I should receive a living wage.
He recommended me to locate myself in Portobello, and there in the dead
season I had no difficulty in finding lodgings.
I had scarcely deposited my portmanteau when I set to work. I began to
write without the faintest idea of a plan, and for the first day or
two I swam boldly enough along the stream of chance. The first chapters
pleased Robert Chambers greatly and he was wise and generous enough to
say so. For six tremendous weeks I wrote, beginning punctually every
morning at eight o'clock and pretty generally bringing the day's work to
a finish in the neighbourhood of midnight. I gave myself two half-hours
for exercise and rambled in all sorts of weather about the sands and the
deserted promenade. I was approaching the end of the work when a very
curious experience befell me. I was sitting towards the end of the day's
labour at my table when I felt suddenly that somebody was standing just
behind me. The impression was so strong that I turned round hastily and
made a survey of the little room. There was nobody there and I went back
to work again. The feeling returned so often that I repeatedly found
myself turning round in the middle of a sentence, but in an hour at most
I was able to dismiss the fancy for the time. I got to bed too excited
and too tired to sleep, and whilst I was lying there in the dark, the
idea of that fancied presence came back again. It was standing at
my bed-head in the darkness, and though I knew that to be a physical
impossibility because the bed and the wall were close together, I found
myself no longer able to dismiss the image. I went to sleep in spite of
it at last, but at the instant at which I sat down at my table to take
up the thread of last night's work, it was there again. Little by little
it assumed shape and colour in my imagination, until at last it was as
clearly present to me as if I had seen it with my bodily eyes. I have
it before me at this instant; it was the figure of a man in mediaeval
costume, in trunk and hose and doublet, and his clothing was red on one
side and yellow on the other. The face, so far as it could be seen, was
cadaverous and cruel, but half of it was concealed by a black vizor of
velvet, through which lamped a pair of dark, unwinking eyes. The figure
was there all day and every minute of the day, but I pegged stolidly on
and gave as little heed as I could to it. But that night when I had
got to bed, a development occurred. The figure took up that impossible
position at my head, and I became aware that it had, balanced over its
shoulder, an axe with a broad back and an edge like a razor, with which
it stood in act to strike.
I got out of bed and re-lit the lamp, refilled my pipe and sat down to
think things over. Wherever I went, the figure was behind me and always
in the same threatening attitude. I began to talk to it at last in
set phrases: “I know perfectly well what you are,” I said; “you are
an inhabitant of the land of Mental Overwork. I'm going to hold you at
arm's length, because if I allowed you to take liberties, you might grow
dangerous. We will travel together if you will insist upon it until
this book is finished and then I will take you into some quiet, rural,
restful place and lose you.” I did not lose him when the work was over;
he went about with me for a week or two. He travelled with me from
Edinburgh to London, then from London by the long sea-route to Antwerp;
from Antwerp to tranquil little Roche-fort in the Belgian Ardennes; and
it was not until I found myself one day with my easel and my paintbox
sketching some quaint bulbous old trees in the Avenue des Tilleuls, that
I woke up to the fact that I had lost him. He came back to me once more
and once only. I think it was owing to the fact that a fire had occurred
at the printing premises of Messrs Grant & Co. in Turnmill Street, in
which the manuscript of a work of fiction had been destroyed, that I was
asked by my old friend Gowing to put extra pressure upon myself for the
completion of a story on which I was engaged for him. It was a question
of days and almost of hours, and I remember that at the last, from
Friday morning until late on Sunday night, I wrote almost incessantly,
snatching an hour or two's sleep in an armchair, only when Nature
imperatively demanded it. I delivered the manuscript in person on Monday
morning and as I was walking home along Holborn, I suddenly became aware
of the presence of my old unpleasant comrade. I gibed at him with a
feeling of perfect security, but I was brought to a halt by a sudden
horrible discovery--the paving-stone in front of me was not a real
paving-stone at all but a mere paper imitation, with an actually
measureless gulf below it. The delusion was so real and convincing that
I was able to pursue my way only by the most desperate resolution, and
all the way to Fitzroy Square, where I was living at the time, the fear
clung to me. I took a liberal dose of whisky, went to bed and slept the
clock round, and woke to find the whole thing vanished.
I spent five happy years at Rochefort, and although when I first went
there I had no idea of staying for more than three or four weeks' rest
and quiet, it was actually eighteen months before I left the place at
all.
In dealing with my experiences in the Press gallery of the House of
Commons, I had occasion to speak of the curious premonition which
assailed me at the instant at which the unfortunate Dr Kenealy made use
of the rhetorical symbol of the dewdrops and the lion's mane. I do
not know that I have any right to claim the possession of any psychic
faculty which goes beyond the ordinary, but I do know that that sort
of premonition of a coming circumstance has not been at all rare in
my experience. Something very like it befell me whilst I was living at
Rochefort, and in that instance it proved of signal service to me, I
wrote the final scene of _Joseph's Coat_ on a certain wintry day and was
within a page or two of the conclusion of the story when I was called to
luncheon. In the ardour of work I had allowed the fire to die out in my
bedroom stove, and encountering on the stairs a certain lout, whose
name was Victor, who did duty about the stables of the hotel, I gave
him instructions to see to it. Ten minutes later a dreadful inspiration
occurred to me, and I dashed upstairs. The man was kneeling before
the stove and was in the very act of striking a lucifer match when I
arrived. A glance at my writing-table showed me that the impulse on
which I had acted was only too well-founded. The man had taken a dozen
pages of my manuscript, and an instant later he would have set them
blazing. In those days I wrote on an unruled large quarto, and since
it was my habit to crowd sixteen hundred words into a page, the loss of
time and labour would have been, at least, considerable. I recovered my
MS. all crumpled and dirty, and I applied to that ostler pretty nearly
all the opprobrious names in his language with which I was acquainted.
“Mais, monsieur,” the criminal responded, “le papier était déjà gâté;
vous avez écrit là-dessus.” If this had been intended as a literary
criticism, it might possibly have been justified, but seeing that it was
offered by a man who could not read, there was something in the frank
imbecility of it which disarmed me, and I daresay that the shout of
laughter with which I received it was just as incomprehensible to the
man as the rage with which I had fallen upon him only a moment earlier.
When I first took up my residence in that little Belgian village, I
mistook it for an Arcadia, but a more intimate knowledge of it and the
acquaintanceship I formed with the village doctor and the _doyen_ of the
little local cathedral served to undeceive me. It was full of poverty
and of all the more sordid forms of vice which everywhere seem
inseparable from physical distress and overcrowding. I taught both the
medico and the cleric to appreciate the flavour of Scotch whisky, and
on many a score of winter nights I used to sit and listen to them whilst
they engaged in long discussions on the Christian faith. The venerable
_doyen_ laboured hard to convince the doctor, who was an Agnostic of the
aggressive type. “La religion,” said the latter, on one occasion, “est
une bonne et belle chose pour les femmes, les enfants et les imbeciles,”
but in spite of their antagonism in this respect, they worked together
with a devotion which was beyond praise amongst their poor. The priest
used to tell the doctor that he would have been the best of Christians
if he had only known it, and the doctor used to assure him in return
that he would have been the best of men if only his mind had never been
distorted by the fables of the Church. They met on the common ground
of benevolence and scholarship and I think they were a pair of the
most lovable old fossils I have ever known. The doctor was a man of
prodigious attainment and I often used to wonder what had induced such a
man to bury himself in such a place, until I learned that the genial old
bachelor bookworm had known a day of romance long before, and that the
lady of his choice had, on the very eve of marriage, resigned herself,
like Carlyle's Blumine, to wed someone richer. The romance spoiled his
career, but it was a godsend for his native village, where he laboured
till the day of his death, expending the whole of his professional
income in works of charity. He has no place in this simple record apart
from my affectionate remembrance of him and these remembrances may be
taken simply as a flower laid in passing on the burial mound of an old
friend.
The hunting lodge of Leopold, King of the Belgians--the Château des
Ardennes, as it is called--is situate some half a dozen miles from
Rochefort, on the road to Dinan on the Meuse. It was a favourite
relaxation of mine when I found myself in want of exercise and a
holiday, to mount a knapsack and to stroll to Dinan, which is only
a score of English miles away. On one of these jaunts I had my only
interview with a reigning monarch. I was sauntering homeward in the dusk
of a summer's evening when I saw at the gate of the château, a tall,
gaunt figure with a long, peaked beard, a pheasant's feather stuck in
the ribbon of a bowler hat, and trousers very disreputably trodden into
rags behind. As I passed him he raised his hat and gave me a courteous
“Bon soir, monsieur.” I returned his salute and answered “Bon soir,
sire.” “Ah, ha!” said His Majesty, like a pleased child, “vous me
connaissez alors?” I responded that everybody knew the King of the
Belgians and I added that I had never ventured to enter His Majesty's
dominions without carrying his portrait with me. “Comment donc!” said
His Majesty, and when I produced a brand new five-franc piece, the jest
enjoyed a greater prosperity than it deserved. We got into conversation
on the strength of it and he stood for perhaps five minutes chatting not
unintelligently about English books and authors.
The years I spent in Rochefort were, I think, the happiest and most
fruitful of my life, but the last piece of work I did there came very
near to landing me in a contretemps which might, for a time at least,
have had an uncomfortable result. At that time Mr James Payn had just
taken over the editorship of the _Cornhill_ magazine, the price of which
he had reduced to 6d. My story--_By the Gate of the Sea_--had been the
last to appear in the original series founded by Thackeray, and I was
invited by Mr Payn to inaugurate the new and cheaper issue. With this
purpose I wrote _Rainbow Gold_, and since it was Mr Payn's unbreakable
editorial rule not to take any work into consideration until its last
line was in his hands, and he at this time was in a mighty hurry about
his literary supplies, I had to undertake again pretty much such a
spell of work as I had undertaken with _Val Strange_, and with an almost
equally unfortunate result. My methods of work have often brought me
near a nervous breakdown, and by the time at which _Rainbow Gold_ was
finished, I was all but a wreck. It had been arranged between the editor
of the _Cornhill_ and myself that the completed copy of my book should
be in his hands on a given date, and for some reason I was afraid to
trust it to the post, and determined to carry it to London and deliver
it with my own hands. For this purpose it was necessary that I should
catch the Malle Des Indes early on the Sunday morning at Jemelle two
miles away. I had a little leather case constructed, in which to carry
my manuscript, and this I had seen more than half completed on the
Thursday afternoon. I strolled into the shop of the village _cordonnier_
on Saturday morning to ask why it had not been delivered, and I found
the man busy on a duplicate of it which he promised to deliver before
the evening. It came out on inquiry that he had sold the case I had
ordered to a person who described himself as a commercial traveller,
and who was staying at the Chevaux Blancs, a little hotel in the village
which was frequented by people of his class. I satisfied myself that the
work would be done in time, and when it was delivered in the course of
the evening, I naturally supposed that there was an end of the matter. I
met the purchaser of my box on the platform at Jemelle, and we travelled
by the same train as far as Lille. There I got another momentary glimpse
of him and thenceforth saw him no more.
I travelled on to Dover without adventure, but there, as I was quitting
the boat, I was encountered by a man who, although he was in plain
clothes, was immediately recognisable as a member of the police force.
He laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: “I beg your pardon, but I
must ask you to accompany me to the Captain's cabin.” I not unnaturally
asked him why. He pointed to the box I held and asked if that were my
property. I answered of course in the affirmative and he said in quite
the official manner that he must trouble me to go with him, and made
a motion to relieve me of my burden. I handed the box to him and he
conducted me, still with a hand upon my shoulder, to the companion-way.
In the captain's cabin I found two or three men who were all very grave,
and all very suave and polite. One of them asked me my name, and another
whether I had not left the village of Rochefort by such and such a train
in the morning. I answered both questions without hesitation, and I
noticed that my interlocutor looked a little puzzled. I was asked next
what I was carrying in that leathern case, and, by way of answer,
I unlocked the box and produced my manuscript. There was a curious
restraint visible in the manner of my examiners when I performed this
simple action, and I could not in the least understand it at the time,
although its reason became clear enough a minute later. “I beg your
pardon, Mr Murray,” said the man who had first laid a detaining hand
upon me, “there has been a mistake, but we were compelled to do our
duty.” He intimated that I was at liberty to go, which in some heat I
declined to do, until I had received some explanation of this arrest of
a private citizen bound on legitimate affairs. I had missed the tidal
train, and I represented that this had caused me some inconvenience.
Then the truth came out The hotel des Chevaux Blancs, in innocent
seeming little Roche-fort, had been for some months past a hot-bed of
European anarchy. The people who went and came there were surrounded
by spies, and the police of Dover had been advised by telegraph, of the
departure of a noted anarchist, who was carrying precisely such a box
as that in which I had bestowed my manuscript. Before I left Dover, it
transpired that a man had been arrested in Folkestone who was carrying
with him enough of Atlas dynamite to have wrecked a whole square. The
movements of each of us had been watched by the continental police,
and had been wired to England. There had been a moment at which the two
boxes had been laid on the same bench on the platform at Jemelle, and
I have often since pictured to myself the imbroglio which might have
ensued if they had been accidentally exchanged. It could not have lasted
long in the nature of things, but it would certainly have afforded me a
new experience.
I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working
journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if
I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have
been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an
officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard.
The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently
dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place
was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the _Birmingham
Morning News_. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries
of “help” and “murder,” and behind her staggered a drunken ruffian
brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to
have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It
was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it
would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head
it had come in contact. I was encumbered with a heavy ulster which was
buttoned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too
late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within
striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the
murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single
blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair
of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the
point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street
police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper
went to bed.
I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd
circumstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying
on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he
received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which
he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of
W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening
and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either
of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose
establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking
at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.
“There's something uncommonly queer about this,” he said, “and I don't
know that I ought to go on with it; it strikes me very forcibly that an
attempt is being made to forge a Russian note and that this is a part of
the process.” The lines on the paper made a sort of hieroglyphic puzzle
which it was quite impossible to decipher. I asked him what he intended
to do with it and he answered that he would fulfil his order and set
the police upon the track of the people who had given it. I went on to
Messrs Hunt's printing works in New Street and there I found one of the
partners poring over what at first sight looked like a replica of the
impression I had just seen. I said nothing about the matter and nothing
was said to me, but when I had transacted my business and had got out
into the street again the first man I encountered was my plain-clothes
policeman. I told him that I thought I was on the track of a little
bit of business in his line and I took him back into the office of the
copperplate printer and introduced him. It had just occurred to me that
if the two plates I had seen were accurately registered they might
fit into each other and make out a consecutive document, and so in the
sequel it proved to be. A gang of Polish forgers had conceived the
idea that in a foreign country it would be possible to get two separate
engravers to imitate each a portion of a fifty-rouble note and they had
made arrangements to do their own printing when they had secured the
plates. I made arrangements with my detective that he should bring me
first hand and exclusive information with respect to the development of
the case and within eight and forty hours he had effected his arrest and
I was the only journalist in the town who was allowed to know anything
about it. Had I stayed on in Birmingham I might have developed a sort of
specialism in this direction, but circumstances drifted me away and it
was not until some years later that I met my friend again and found him
to be occupying a position on the detective staff at Scotland Yard.
He told me how he came there and, in its way, it is one of the most
remarkable little stories I remember to have heard.
There was a manufacturing jeweller in Camberwell whose name was
Whitehead, who had a showroom somewhere in the neighbourhood of St.
Paul's Cathedral. Seventeen years there had been in his employ a
commercial traveller in whom he reposed the completest confidence. This
traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs
in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In
his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck
and of coloured glass, which represented in duplicate a tray of real
jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the
showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray
was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in
the jeweller's safe and the real thing carried away by the commercial
traveller. The fact of the substitution was not discovered for some days
and by that time the traveller, following his ordinary route, should
have been in Manchester or Liverpool. He was wired to at both places but
no reply was received from him. Not a doubt of the man's probity entered
into his employer's mind, but when all efforts to trace him had
failed the jeweller became alarmed for the safety of his employé and
communicated with the police.
Now, as fortune would have it, the young Birmingham detective had been
sent up to London at this time and, calling at Scotland Yard, he had
put into his hands some copies of the document by which the police were
circulating the news of the traveller's disappearance, together with a
woodcut reproducing a photograph which had been taken some years before
and had willingly been surrendered to Mr. Whitehead by the traveller's
wife, who was naturally in great distress concerning him. It was
the general impression at the time that he had been decoyed away and
murdered for the sake of the valuable property he carried, which was
of such a nature that it might easily have been disposed of by the
criminal--the gold being melted down and the precious stones being
disposed of in the ordinary way of business. At Euston Station that
afternoon, on his way back to Birmingham, the provincial detective had
one fellow-traveller to whom, but for one singular little circumstance,
he would probably have paid no heed whatever. The fellow-traveller had
one article of luggage only, but he seemed to be unusually anxious about
it. It was a hat-box and when he had placed it on the rack overhead
he appeared to be unwilling to leave it out of sight for more than an
instant at a time. He arose a score of times to readjust it and when
he was not occupied in that way he kept a constant eye upon it. “I'm
no great Scripture reader,” said the detective to me, in telling me
the story, “but when I was a kid my mother used to read the Bible to me
every day and one text came into my mind when I saw that cove so anxious
about his hat-box: 'Where the treasure is, there will the heart be
also.' It kept coming back into my mind and somehow I got to thinking
that if it had not been for certain things about him the man in
the carriage would have been very like the man whose portrait and
description I had just been looking at. The man described had features
of a marked Jewish cast and so had the man in the carriage, but the man
described had red hair, thick red eyebrows and a beard and moustache of
the same colour. The man in the carriage was clean shaved and his hair
and eyebrows were as black as a crow's back, but I had got the idea in
my mind and I couldn't get it out again, and when he turned his face
sideways to look out of the window the light fell on his cheek and,
though the whisker had only just begun to sprout after his last shave,
I could see that by nature he was as rusty as a jot. I felt downright
certain of him from that very minute. He got out at Rugby, taking his
hat-box with him, and as I had no funds with me I was afraid I was going
to lose him, but he only went into the refreshment room for a glass of
beer and a sandwich and came back with me and travelled comfortably
on to Birmingham. There he engaged a room at the Queen's Hotel for the
night, and having locked up his hat-box in it he went away to order a
supply of clothes and linen, as I found out afterwards. I nipped down to
Moor Street and told them what I had to say. I got my authority to act,
and when my gentleman got back again, I was there all ready for him with
a fellow-officer and we nabbed him at his bedroom door. He nipped out a
revolver and tried to shoot himself, but we were too quick for him.
We made him give up the key of the hat-box and there, sure enough, was
every one of the missing jewels. He had torn the velvet lining out of
the case and had thrown everything into it pell-mell and wrapped it up
in two or three towels so, I suppose, that the contents of the hat-box
couldn't jingle. My getting him was just an accident from start to
finish, and if it had not been for that text of Scripture I should never
have given the man a second thought, but it was reckoned a smartish
capture and it ended in my promotion and my coming here.”