the invitation to “Sir” William Le Queux, and as such I appeared in
all the newspapers, much to the amusement of my friends and also to
that of the ex-Prime Minister.
I have met so many famous folk, and heard so many stories told, that
I hardly know where to commence.
A dear friend of mine who often kindly invited me to her delightful
house, “Inchmery,” is Constance Lady de la Warr, who is a most
charming hostess of the old school; she is extremely well versed in
literature, and knows innumerable literary people. Her son, the late
Earl, was a great friend of mine in the days when he was developing
Bexhill and when all the financiers who helped him took their “pound
of flesh,” much to the dear, but rather erratic, Earl’s detriment.
One winter evening, his lordship met me at a railway station on the
border of the New Forest, and drove me to his mother’s house so
furiously in the dark that I never thought I should live to enter the
well-lighted stone hall. But I did, and there found Eveleigh Nash
awaiting me, for he has been for many years a great friend of the de
la Warrs.
That night at dinner I remember he told us an amusing story. He said:
“I once knew well a wonderful old lady, Mrs. Herbert of Llanover (the
mother of Lord Treowen). She was nearly ninety when she died, but to
the end her brain was clear, and her memory amazing; and, when I used
to stay with her at Llanover, she told me many good stories, of which
the following is a sample.
“She married, in the early reign of Queen Victoria, Mr. John Arthur
Jones of Llanarth Court, Monmouth, but she had not long been Mrs.
Jones before she hated the name and asked her husband whether he
could arrange to take the surname of Herbert, which he was quite
entitled to do, as his family had inter-married with the Herberts.
Being a very punctilious gentleman, Mr. Jones decided, before taking
any definite steps in the matter, that he would write to Lord
Pembroke, the head of the Herbert family, to ask whether he had any
objection to his taking the name of Herbert. To this inquiry Pembroke
replied, ‘I have not the slightest objection to your assuming the
name of Herbert, provided in turn you don’t ask me to take the name
of Jones.’”
I can recall two more amusing stories Nash told before the
smoking-room fire at the Devonshire Club, with Lewis Edmunds, K.C.,
the chairman of the committee, standing astride on the hearthrug, and
Noel Mobbs, Lord Blyth, and Lord Cowdray listening.
He said:
“General Sir John Brabazon, who died recently, was a well-known
figure in town. Among his friends he was called ‘Brab,’ but as he
never could sound the letter ‘r’ he was more familiarly referred
to as Bwab. He was once talking to a lady in the drawing-room of a
house where he had been invited to dinner, when an ugly-looking man
with a large blue patch on his cheek and nose came into the room.
Brab, who hadn’t caught the lady’s name, turned to her and said
in a horrified accent, ‘What a dreadful looking fellow!’ ‘Excuse
me, General Brabazon,’ replied the lady frigidly, ‘but that is my
husband.’ ‘Oh, really,’ said Brab, who was not in the least perturbed
by his blunder, ‘how very interesting that I should have met you this
evening, because very likely you can tell me--_is he like that all
over_?’”
We all laughed, whereupon Nash went on:
“Dr. W. A. Chapple, who was Liberal M.P. for Stirlingshire for
several years, told me an amusing story about Sir Robert Horne, the
ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sir Robert was the Conservative
candidate who opposed him, and having heard that Dr. Chapple was
a native of New Zealand, he determined to make the best of the
information. One evening Sir Robert was addressing a meeting in the
parish of Slamanan, where he was born, and remarked, ‘I see around me
many old friends with whom I have played on the green as a boy, and I
venture to think that you would rather have the home-bred stock than
New Zealand mutton.’ This was received with cheers and much laughter,
but, unfortunately, its effect was spoilt by an old Scotsman, who
shouted from the back of the hall, ‘We can do fine wi’ the mutton;
it’s the horns we dinna want.’ Sir Robert Horne was not returned at
that election.”
* * * * *
Basil Tozer, whose newly-published volume, _Recollections of a
Rolling Stone_, has been so much talked about, I have known for many
years, and among amusing stories that he has not included in his book
is one that he told me in Boodle’s recently.
For some months during the war he was billeted in a little
cosmopolitan hotel in Rouen, and on going up to his bedroom rather
late one night he found that his heavy earthenware hand basin had not
been emptied. Deciding on a course habitual to the aborigines of the
town, he opened his bedroom window, meaning to empty his basin out
of it, when to his horror the basin slipped from his hands and fell
with a crash on to a glass roof on the ground beneath, and on to the
table where a lot of Canadian N.C.O.’s were playing jack-pot.
“The howls of execration and outburst of frightful language that
followed I shall never forget as long as I live,” Tozer said to me.
To avoid discovery he at once switched off the light and jumped into
bed, and next day he had the satisfaction of hearing the Canadian
N.C.O.’s declaring to each other the awful things they would do to
the owner of that basin if they only could lay hands on him.
But they never did lay hands on him!
The eccentric Dr. Cann, who, as Tozer tells us in his book, used to
walk about the London streets in his shirt-sleeves in the height
of the season, had a great iron safe full of sixpences that he had
collected. He thought that it was “insanitary” to wear a tie, and
therefore never wore one; and though himself abstemious, he carried
in his pocket a flask of port and a flask of sherry from which
he would give drinks to anybody he met in Oxford Street or any
neighbourhood that took his fancy. He was at one time the leading
physician in Dawlish. He died a year or two ago.
But Tozer does not tell us that when Dr. Cann owned steeplechase
horses, he, Tozer, used to train and ride them for him. One of these
animals was, I well remember, a big raking chestnut, called Kaiser,
which Tozer rode at Torquay races, Totnes races, and elsewhere.
It was at a Torquay meeting that, happening to be standing by when a
horse fell at a bank, throwing and stunning its rider, Tozer jumped
on to the animal’s back and finished the race, coming in second! And
the most curious thing was that when he went to weigh in he exactly
tipped the scale at the weight of the rider who had been thrown, so
that had he won the race it would have been awarded to the animal’s
owner!
A racing friend tells me that the rule is that if a horse falls,
anybody who is a qualified rider, as Basil Tozer was, is at liberty
to get up and finish the race, if the horse be in the field where he
fell, namely that he had not jumped another fence.
* * * * *
Stanley Austin of the _Daily Mirror_, who is so well-known in
literary and Bohemian circles, related a story to me lately, while
we were dining together at the Arts Club. Sir William Orpen, K.B.E.,
R.A., the famous portrait painter was, he told me, staying at a
well-known country house and incidentally painting the portrait of
the wealthy owner. One morning Sir William came down before breakfast
to work on the portrait and was met in the hall by the butler, who
said, “You’re a painter, aren’t you?” “Certainly,” said Orpen. “Well,
I wish you’d do a little job for me. That infernal fool, my young
footman, has kicked some paint off the drawing-room floor, and there
will be a devil of a row if the master sees it; will you touch it up
a bit?” “Of course I will,” said Orpen, and fetched his palette and
did the job, thoroughly enjoying the humour of the situation as did
also the “master” when Orpen told him some time afterwards.
The other day, while I was walking with a well-known member of
the Wellington Club up St. James’s Street, an elegantly-dressed
foreign-looking man in tall hat, morning coat and monocle, suddenly
passed us. They nodded, and I asked who he was.
“Oh! Don’t you know? That’s Count Glaxo,” was my friend’s reply,
“they call him that because he is the father of so many bonnie
babies.”
* * * * *
Miss May Edgington, the well-known novelist and dramatist, who is
one of the prettiest and most charming of all our lady writers, one
afternoon, with her husband, motored out to see me at Guildford. Her
husband is Mr. F. E. Baily, editor of the _Royal Magazine_.
We were sitting together on the lawn discussing the sharp practices
of the kinema trade and how the importation of German-made films was
proving detrimental to our own products, when she told me a good
story concerning the foreign kinema idea of English sport.
“One of my stories has been recently filmed,” she said, “and I was
asked to the trade show and to be guest of honour at the lunch
afterwards. Although I hate films, I went to the trade show and saw
that they had kept faithfully to the story, except that they had put
in an extra scene at the beginning, depicting a lovely country house,
with its lawns, gardens, and flowers, with beautiful women walking
about in beautiful frocks. One or two of the women were leading
petted greyhounds. The men were mostly in silk hats and morning
coats, apparently proposing marriage to anyone they met under the
rose arches. It was altogether a pretty scene.
“So when the film people asked me afterwards what I thought of my
picture, I said it seemed very nice and that they had kept pretty
closely to the story, except for the addition of the garden-party
with which it opened. Whereupon the producer replied somewhat coldly:
‘That isn’t a garden-party, Miss Edgington; that’s a British coursing
match!’”
* * * * *
Coulson Kernahan, a friend of Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, has been my
friend ever since the days of long ago when he was “reader” to Ward
& Lock, the publishers, and recommended them to publish some of my
earlier works. To him quite recently a well-known novelist with no
small idea of himself, but who had had, in the _Daily Chronicle_, a
bad review of his latest book, said:
“I don’t care what the _Chronicle_ says, or what any other infernal
paper says about my work--I have a public behind me.”
“Have you?” remarked “C.K.,” as he is known to his friends, with a
smile. “That accounts, of course, for the odour of bad whiskey that
pervades you, and gives some of us the idea that you very often have
a head.”
“I might have said swelled head,” remarked Kernahan, as he told me
the story. But instead he went on:
“You’re lucky, my dear old fellow, to have a public behind you. My
nearest ‘pub’ at Fairlight is half-a-mile away.”
Mr. J. A. Craig, editor of _Great Thoughts_, remarked one day to
Kernahan that a friend of his, the Rev. Principal Griffith-Jones, was
busy writing a book on “Providence,” a subject he had studied for
thirty years.
“Oh, that’s nothing!” said Kernahan. “I have studied and practised
improvidence for more than sixty.”
One day in the Savage Club I asked Kernahan what he thought of a
certain man.
“Oh, well,” he replied, “He’s the sort of man whose chief interest
in life would, I could well believe, be in his collection of
postage-stamps.”
A few months ago I was lunching with him and Mrs. Coulson Kernahan,
whose novels are so well known, at their pretty country house at
Fairlight, near Hastings, where the windows command a magnificent
view of the Sussex Downs and of the sea.
Among the guests was a very popular clergyman, the Rev. Halbert Boyd,
author of that clever book _Men and Marvels_, with whom we are both
on terms of intimate friendship.
While chaffing Boyd across the table Kernahan remarked, “There
are four creatures entirely without conscience--cats, spiders,
journalists, and--clergymen.”
I added publishers to the list, and it was unanimously accepted.
Another story told of him is that while lecturing at Norwich one
night a dog in the audience started barking furiously, so that he
could hardly be heard. When the dog had been unceremoniously hustled
out, Kernahan, having stopped, said: “Now, if I were speaking in
Parliament instead of lecturing here in Norwich, the papers to-morrow
morning would punctuate its report with (in brackets) ‘Interrupted by
the Member for Barking.’”
During a railway journey from London one night he told me a story
about a man who lived in the same east coast town where he once
was living. The man, whose name was Dickson, began life as a small
barber, then turned into a money-lender and advanced on mortgages,
which he foreclosed as soon as he found that his clients were pressed
for money. He then started to develop a building estate, and built a
number of small detached villas in what he called Dickson’s Avenue.
Kernahan happened to be walking with a local friend when the name was
being affixed to the end of the new road.
“Ah! Quite so,” he remarked to his friend, who had sadly suffered at
Dickson’s hands. “Dickson’s been ’aving you all his life!”
While writing this book, I had an amusing experience with my friend
and neighbour, Sir Rider Haggard. He had been asked to take the chair
at the Gaiety Theatre at Hastings in aid of a fund for the starving
children in Eastern Europe. Lady Paget, the organizer, spoke at some
length, and after she had concluded a speaker rose from the row of
the novelist’s supporters on the platform and began to address the
meeting volubly on behalf of the League of Nations Union.
Now the League of Nations Union is like a red rag to a bull to the
famous author of _She_. He had not noticed that the meeting was held
under the auspices of the Union, so he writhed in his chair for some
moments, and then rose to protest against “this gentleman addressing
the meeting.”
The speaker apologized, and was about to sit down, when somebody
shouted, “Go on! Go on!”
Another speaker explained humbly that the meeting had been called by
the League of Nations Union, at which Sir Rider’s countenance was a
study.
He withdrew his protest and sat it out to the end, but as he and I
went back to St. Leonards his anger knew no bounds, and he declared
that he would never again take the chair at a charity meeting.
Sir Rider Haggard’s business acumen is well shown in the following.
A certain well-known book of his, written years ago, was not
copyrighted in the United States, and an enterprising film firm at
Los Angeles, on discovering this, resolved to make a screen-play of
it. They did so, and it was a huge success. It was brought to England
and shown everywhere up and down the country, the company making huge
profits, while its author waited patiently. Then, when it was all
over, Sir Rider Haggard descended heavily on the offending pirates
and compelled them to disgorge all the profits they had made in
England and other countries where the story had been copyrighted.
* * * * *
As I write these lines I note with deepest regret the death of my old
“bull-dog” friend “Klondike” Boyle. A big, blue-eyed man with a hard,
bitter look, he was a son of the Canadian prairie, and a man whose
adventures in the “back of beyond” would fill volumes. His baptismal
name was Colonel Joseph Wentworth Boyle, D.S.O. At one time he was
manager to Slavin, the pugilist, but on the outbreak of war he was on
the Yukon, 10,000 miles from England, where he raised a machine-gun
corps, which was later trained at Witley camp, in Surrey.
He was known to everyone as “The King of the Klondike,” and while at
Witley was invited by my popular friend, Mrs. George Pinckard, to
stay at Coombe Court, George Pinckard’s beautiful place close by, and
I dined with them one night. While there Mrs. Pinckard’s charming
little daughter, Coral, became greatly attached to the big, bluff
fellow, and he gave her several small nuggets of Klondike gold. One
day Coral came up to him and said: “You are a king, aren’t you?”
Boyle smiled at the child, and replied: “They call me a king, but I’m
not really one.”
“Ah!” replied the little child, “I thought not, because you don’t
wear a crown.”
One day I was his fellow guest at Coombe, and with his hostess, Mrs.
Pinckard, we were walking across the park to see the remounts, when
the conversation turned on his great fortune. He described, how
during the gold rush, he and his seven companions did their thrilling
400-mile forced march from Dawson City to the Yukon. The party
reached the Yukon more dead than alive. There were rumours that gold
was to be found in that area, and, with Frank Slavin as his partner,
Boyle staked out a claim, the boundaries of which were determined
only by the limit of view.
“Yes,” said Boyle, as we crossed the beautiful park, “we picked out a
bend of the river as far as the eye could reach, and soon proved our
claim, and struck it square.”
The fact was that, after the claim had proved to be the greatest
placer (alluvial) gold mine in the world, Boyle and his associates
took out £3,000,000 worth of gold.
Harry de Windt and his friend Tony Safe were up there at the time,
and though they were both lucky, Boyle took the honours.
Immediately after the Armistice I again met Boyle at the house of
a well-known actress, and our conversation chanced to turn on the
Near East. He became interested, especially about things I told him
concerning Roumania. It apparently fired his ambition to go there,
for a few weeks later he went to Bucharest, and within a couple of
months had become the hero of the Roumanians. A dare-devil to his
finger-tips, he was absolutely without fear. It was he who, when the
Bolshevists refused to hand over sixty Roumanian prisoners, flew into
the Bolshevist camp by French aeroplane, leaped into the same boat
as the prisoners, and made the Russians take him with the prisoners
to the Crimea. There he persuaded the Bolshevists to keep their word
and returned with the prisoners to Bucharest.
The King and Queen of Roumania took a great fancy to him, so much so
that our Foreign Office regarded him with considerable annoyance,
for he became one of the leading men in that country. It was he who
prevented one of the Roumanian princes from eloping. Subsequently
he became food-controller and also reorganized the Roumanian
railway service. He always appealed to me as one of the most daring
adventurers I have ever met. He had the spirit of a lion and the
heart of a child.
Boyle latterly went everywhere with the King and Queen of Roumania,
and the last time I saw him was last summer, when he was bathing in
the sea at Deauville accompanied by the Queen, with the King of Spain
watching. I afterwards had a chat with him in the palm-court of the
Normandy, when he told me that he had fallen foul of the British
Government, who suspected him of espionage!
I have just mentioned Mrs. George Pinckard. She is one of the most
witty and popular women in London, and has an enormous circle of
friends, whom at her charming house in Chesterfield Street she so
constantly entertains.
When a certain man who began life as a small grocer had married his
cook, and had waxed wealthy during the war, was made a baronet, Ruby
Pinckard is credited with inventing a conundrum, which went the
rounds of Society:
“What has the King accomplished that the Almighty was unable to do?”
was the question.
The answer was: “He’s made Mrs. X a ‘lady’!”
George Pinckard her husband, who is equally popular in Society, is
Lord of the Manor of Witley, and was for some years Master of the
Chiddingfold Hounds.
One day during the war George, on being told that a lady with a
foreign name had changed it to Nelson, at once remarked:
“Why Nelson? Why isn’t she up to date and call herself Jellicoe at
once?”
The late Viscount Midleton was extremely near-sighted--indeed, almost
blind. One day he and George Pinckard were travelling together from
Waterloo to Guildford, when, after chatting a few moments, both
settled themselves and began to read. Suddenly Lord Midleton thought
he had a bundle of rugs at his side, got up, and began to lift them
up on to the rack. There was a loud shriek, for the bundle proved
to be a diminutive old lady wrapped in furs. Lord Midleton was most
profuse in his apologies, and George Pinckard had to begin a merry
conversation in order to clear the atmosphere.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Adventures in Clubland--The Last Bohemian in Paris--“Uncle
Smith” and the Junior Garrick Club--A Night Drive with
W. S. Penley and its Result--We Sell Up the Junior
Garrick--The Crichton--Our “Lions” of the Savage--Society
Establishes the Lyric Club--I Dine with La Belle Otero
before Her Début--A Tragedy of Leicester Square--Earl
Roberts at My Suggestion becomes President of the New
Vagabonds--The Argonauts--Tales of the Lyric Club--The
Devonshire Club, and Once Crockford’s in the Days of
the Dandies--The Exclusive Crimes Club and What We Do
There--Mysteries of the Ham-Bone Club.
I have known a good many clubs, and more clubmen of various social
standing.
My earliest club was a little congregation that used to meet every
night, in my student days, in Paris, at a table in the Café Vachette,
in the Boul’ Mich’. Paul Deschanel, my fellow student who afterwards
became President of the Republic, Spiridion--the great painter
whose “Sappho” is so well known--and Revillion, who is Préfet of
Basses-Alpes, were members, with a dozen others. We called ourselves
the Beggars Club, and dined frugally each night, the meal usually
ending in some “rag” or other. We drank nothing more intoxicating
than a _framboise_, an _orgeat_, or a _café-cognac_, known as a _jus
de chapeau_, when funds permitted. We were beggars because we begged
francs from one another.
Often on my visiting Paris nowadays I eat a meal alone in that same
well-remembered corner, where I used to sit when a fellow-student of
so many who have since made their mark. Some are dead, while others
occupy high positions in literature, art, politics, and medicine. My
thoughts wander back to the Bohemia in Paris that has long ago been
a thing of the past--the world where a man is judged neither by his
pocket nor his coat, but only by his real worth as a sterling good
fellow.
It is perhaps not more than seven years ago when, one summer’s
evening, while passing along the Boulevard de Clichy, I came across
a tall, cadaverous old friend of my youth, Georges Brandenbourg,
the famous journalist of the _Figaro_. He was dressed in his
old-fashioned flat-brimmed silk hat, much worn, a frock-coat green
with age, very baggy trousers, and a flowing black cravat.
“Ah! _mon cher_ Le Queux!” he cried, patting me on the back. “Welcome
to Paris again! Let’s have a drink!”
I was compelled to have a glass of absinthe with him, and then, while
we were gossiping about the Beggars Club of the old days, he suddenly
said:
“But you must dine with me to-night. Oh, you must, my dear fellow! I
will accept no excuse. I have to do my _Figaro_ article afterwards,
but we must dine first. Yes, you must dine with me.”
So we went forth again into the Boulevard, where my dear old Bohemian
friend stopped at a butcher’s, bought half a kilo of “biftek,” which
we roasted together over the gas-stove in his carpetless high-up room.
And it tasted sweeter to me, Bohemian that I am, than the very best
dinner at the Ritz.
Two months later he died of septic pneumonia, and with him passed the
last of the old-fashioned Paris Bohemians familiar to readers of Du
Maurier’s _Trilby_. His biographical notice was excellently written
by my friend Ernest Daudet.
After “The Beggars” in Paris, the next club of which I became a
member after coming to London as a journalist was the Junior
Garrick, the premises of which were on the eastern corner of Adelphi
Terrace. In the centre was the Savage, which still exists, and on the
western corner the Crichton. I was a member of all three of them.
In those days of comparative poverty, before I joined the _Globe_,
I went mostly to the Junior Garrick, because if I had no money with
which to pay for my dinner--as was often the case--the accommodating
hall-porter would lend me a small sum on my cheap watch-and-chain.
How many times that watch-and-chain went backwards and forwards I
could not count. But I could always rely on a good square club meal
at the Junior Garrick.