I
Only a day or two ago I found myself arrested on my eastward way along
the Strand by the hand of a friend upon my shoulder. We chatted for a
minute or two, and I found that I was in front of Lipscombe's window.
A ball of cork, which has had a restless time of it for many years,
was dodging up and down the limits of a glass shade, tossed by a jet of
water. The sight of it carried me back twenty years in a flash. 'In
the year 1872 I came to London, as many young men had done before me,
without funds, without friends, and without employment, trusting, with
the happy-go-lucky disposition of youth, to the chapter of accidents.
For some time the accidents were all unfavourable, and there came a
morning when I owned nothing in the world but the clothes I stood in.
I found myself that morning very tired, very hungry, very down in the
mouth, staring at the cork ball on the jet of water under the glass
shade, and drearily likening it to my own mental condition, flung hither
and thither, drenched, rolled over, lifted and dropped by a caprice
beyond the power of resistance. It was at this mournful moment that I
found my first friend in London. The story of that event shall be told
hereafter. What I want to say now is that the sight of that permanent
show in Lipscombe's window made me younger for a minute by a score
of years, and opened my mind to such a rush of recollections that I
determined then and there to put my memories on paper.
I am not such an egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether
unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising.
Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the
adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found
enough to stock the lives of a thousand stay-at-homes. At the first
blush it would not appear to the outside observer that the literary
life is likely to be fruitful in adventure; but in the circle of my own
acquaintance there are a good many men who have found it so.
In the city of Prague the most astonishing encounters pass for every-day
incidents. In these days of universal enlightenment nobody needs to be
told that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note that rings
false in the very name of that happy country now. Its traditions have
been vulgarised by people who have never passed its borders. All sorts
of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use, and the
very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of
gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than
they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the
place itself is as real as ever it was. I have lived in it for a quarter
of a century, and, without vanity, may claim to know it as well as any
man alive.
Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company
of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London
daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own
career.
'I do not suppose,' he said, 'that any man in my present position has
experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I
went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I
slept in the Park.'