MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS
CONSIDERING the number of years which I have devoted to travel, I have
not met a great many explorers, certainly nothing like so many as I
should have met if I had been a regular attendant at the meetings of the
Royal Geographical Society. These interest me extremely, but I have an
unfortunate habit of going to sleep at lectures, however interesting I
find them, so I shrink from going to them. Otherwise I should have
joined the society long ago, and been a regular attendant.
The last time I went there was many years ago, when a great explorer and
mighty hunter had just returned from Mashonaland. He read an immensely
interesting paper; I quite forgot to go to sleep. Among the speakers who
followed was a pompous old gentleman, who scourged the lecturer with the
most inane platitudes, winding up with the question, “May I ask the
lecturer what he thinks of the climate of Mashonaland?” and the explorer
replied, “There’s nothing wrong with the climate of Mashonaland, but it
isn’t the sort of place where you could get drunk and lie all night in
the gutter, without knowing about it the next morning.”
The old gentleman gasped, and so, I think, did the audience, but the
lecturer seemed quite unconscious that he had done anything beyond
giving sound advice.
My friendship with the famous Dr. George Ernest Morrison, of Peking, I
have described in the chapter on Australians. When I was living in
Melbourne, I saw a good deal at the Melbourne Club of Augustus Gregory,
one of the doyens of Australian exploration, actually the first, I
believe, to accomplish the transcontinental journey successfully. He
told me that when their supplies ran short, the things they missed most
in the terrific heat were fat and sugar. When their water ran short,
they more than once refilled their water-bottles by wringing the dew out
of their blankets.
Curiously enough, fat and sugar were the things equally most missed by a
party of Canadian explorers who were engaged one winter in finding the
pass by which the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Rocky Mountains.
Their leader, who was running a small steamer up from Golden City to the
source of the Columbia in Lake Windermere, told me so, when I was a
passenger with him. I had just shot a wild goose on a shoal with my
Winchester rifle from the deck of the steamer, and he had come out of
his cabin to see what the matter was.
I had a unique experience at that Canadian Lake Windermere. I was lying
flat on my back in the reedy shallows at its edge, enjoying a bath in
water above human temperature, when a deputation of ranchers waited on
me to ask if I would act as judge in the annual horse-races for Red
Indians, which were to be held that afternoon. They had heard that an
author had come up with the steamer from Golden City, and wished to pay
me this unique compliment. I protested my inexperience in the matter,
but dressed and accompanied them to a sort of pulpit made of fresh
lumber, which I occupied while half-a-dozen races were run on little
barebacked horses (I wondered if these were _mustangs_, but did not dare
to show my ignorance by inquiring) by naked braves and squaws in
trousers with a feather trimming down the seam. As I escaped uninjured,
I suppose that my judgments were accepted. Colonel Baker, a brother of
Valentine and Sir Samuel, was one of the deputation.
In the time of which I am writing, when people came back from the wilds,
it was the fashion to fête them at the literary clubs. In this way I met
Captain Lugard, who was fresh back from his strenuous efforts in Uganda,
and Mr. F. C. Selous, when he came back from his pioneer expedition to
Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which led to their annexation, and the
foundation of Rhodesia. Selous was the greatest hunter that England ever
sent to South Africa. For twenty years he made his living as an
elephant-hunter and collector of rare natural history specimens, and
took the chief part in bringing about the annexation of Matabeleland. In
later days he has taken a great part in the measures for preserving the
wild animals of Africa by a splendid system of game laws, far stricter
than our own.
Of all the author-explorers who came to Addison Mansions, I have known
none so well as Arnold Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet Walter
Savage Landor. I first met Landor at Louise Chandler Moulton’s house in
Boston, on one Sunday night in 1888, when he was twenty years old, and I
have seen him constantly ever since. While we were at Washington, as I
have said elsewhere, he was my guest for a week. We were at Montreal
together one winter season, and saw each other nearly every day, and
when we got to Japan, almost the first person we saw there was Landor.
We stayed in the same hotel there for months.
When we first met Landor, he was an artist, who made a considerable
income by portrait-painting. It was not until after we had met in Japan
that he went upon his first exploring expedition among the Hairy Ainu in
the North Island of Yezo and the Kuriles.
After we left Japan, he went across to China, and went very far afield
in it. But he did not achieve world-wide fame until he made his
expedition into the Forbidden Land. Every one has read of the tortures
to which he was subjected there, but it is not every one who met him on
his way back, as we did, when his spine was so injured that he could not
sit down, and his eyes still had a white film over them from being
bleared with fire. I knew of his endurance, because I had seen him go
out in Montreal in an ordinary English overcoat and bowler when the
thermometer was twenty-five below zero; and I knew of his courage from
the fracas he had with the New York police when they were breaking the
queue at the Centenary Ball for people who gave them money to get in out
of their place, in which he came within an ace of being clubbed.
Landor is always witty. I heard him say to a man who was bragging to him
about the size of everything in his country, “You see, I am so small
that I have to come into a room twice before any one can see me.”
He is also extremely courageous. I once heard a dispute between him and
a man of six feet two, whose portrait he was painting. While he was
painting it, he did a small commission for this man’s partner, who
wanted it in a great hurry as a wedding-present.
“If you work for other people, I won’t have the portrait,” said the
giant.
“You must have it,” said Landor.
“Upon my word as a gentleman, _nothing_ can make me have it,” said the
giant, whose name was B——.
“Mr. B——,” said Landor, “nothing could make you behave like a
gentleman.”
And his courage in taking other risks is just as great.
Undismayed by his experiences in Thibet, he was back in the Himalayas
two years afterwards, and reached an altitude of 23,490 ft. He was with
the Allied troops on their march to Peking, and was the first European
to enter the Forbidden City. He visited four hundred islands in the
Philippines in a Government steamer, lent him by the United States for
the purpose. He crossed Africa in the widest part, marching 8,500 miles
to do it, and he crossed South America from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to
Lima in Peru, over the great central plateau, across the swamps of the
Amazon and the heights of the Andes, with followers selected from the
most desperate criminals in the gaols, because they were the only
Brazilians who would undertake the risk. That last journey alone cost
him seven thousand pounds. All Mr. Landor’s books are illustrated with
his own paintings and photographs. It must be remembered that he was an
artist before he was an explorer or an author.
Though he is contemptuous of hardships and semi-starvation in his
explorations, and travels with a lighter equipment than any other
explorer, he likes luxurious surroundings when he is back in
civilisation, and lives in a charming flat in one of our most luxurious
hotels.
He also has a large estate in Italy, near Empoli and Vinci, where he has
carried on the wine-growing business very successfully. Landor’s mother
is an Italian, and he himself was born and educated at Florence, where
his father, a younger son of the celebrated Walter Savage Landor, has
always lived, and amassed a magnificent collection of works of art.
It is not generally known that Landor was one of the first to take up
the invention of aeroplanes. He began long before the Wrights, as long
ago as 1893, when he succeeded in flying a hundred yards, and later he
built a more perfected machine not unlike the ordinary aeroplanes. But
he was away, making his celebrated journeys across Africa and South
America while the invention advanced with such leaps and bounds, and he
abandoned aviation.
Landor speaks many languages. He has lectured in English, Italian,
French, and German, before learned societies, and he can speak several
other European and Oriental languages and many savage dialects. For he
has travelled all over the world, although the attention of the public
has been concentrated on the big journeys of exploration which have
formed the subjects of his books.
Sir H. M. Stanley I only knew after he had retired from exploring, and
was living at Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. I met him through having been
a friend of his wife, who, as Dorothy Tennant, was a leading figure in
the most brilliant set in London Society, and in so many altruistic
movements. I had met her brother, Charles Combe Tennant, when we were
both at Oxford—he at Balliol and I at Trinity. He either proposed me or
seconded me, I forget which, for the Apollo, my other sponsor being J.
E. C. Bodley, who was both at Harrow and Balliol with Tennant. Bodley
has since become a very distinguished literary man. He is perhaps the
best writer we have upon French Constitutional questions, and he was
selected by the late King Edward VII to write the book on the
coronation, which involved a very wide knowledge of the British
Constitution.
Lady Stanley wrote a book on London Street Arabs and put together and
edited an admirable autobiography of her famous first husband, whose
name she retains. Her sister married Frederick Myers of Psychical fame,
the greatest Cambridge scholar of his generation.
But it is not only the books she has written, and the brilliant
intellectual people whom she has gathered around her, which constitute
her claim to being remembered, for she has taken a leading part in the
betterment of London. She has naturally worked hardest in Lambeth, where
she became acquainted with the swarming thousands of Surrey when Stanley
was member for one of the Lambeth Divisions, and it was from Lambeth
that she drew most of her boy-models to make studies for her book
illustrations of London ragamuffins.
Isabella Bird—Mrs. Bishop—one of the most famous travellers in the East,
I met once near Hakone in Japan. She was a curious-looking old lady,
dressed like a native woman, with nothing but rope-sandals, which cost
three-halfpence a pair, on her feet. We came upon her very suddenly,
because Norma Lorimer and I had gone in to examine the interior of a
pretty building made of some light-coloured, unpainted wood, into which
people seemed to go as they pleased. As Miss Lorimer was then not long
out of her teens, and the building proved to contain naked men and women
bathing together, only separated by a bamboo floating on the top of the
steaming pool, we came out much quicker than we went in, and almost fell
upon Isabella Bird and her attendant.
When we were at Khartum, the Sirdar, Sir Reginald Wingate, introduced me
to the famous Father Ohrwalder, the good old Austrian priest who had
made the sensational escape from Omdurman twenty years before, and wrote
the extraordinarily vivid account of his captivity which is one of our
principal sources of knowledge of life in Omdurman. He was then a
venerable old man, with a patriarchal beard, very frail, and exhausted
by conversing for a few minutes, but the Austrian Bishop, who spoke
excellent English, took his place, and we had an interesting
conversation. He was not, he informed me, allowed to make converts in
the northern part of the Sudan, where the inhabitants are chiefly
Mohammedan. I asked him if he made many converts among the pagans in the
southern part. He said not as many as he ought, but I elicited from him
that he set his face sternly against polygamy, and the Sirdar’s
Intelligence officer had informed us that one of the favourite forms of
investment in those provinces was to buy as many wives as you could and
make them work for you.
Wingate himself was most kind to us during our visit to the Sudan. He
placed his three steamers or yachts at our disposal, and deputed his
Intelligence officer to accompany us, whenever he had no actual need of
him.
The late John Ward, F.S.A., I never met on any of his journeys to Egypt
or the Sudan or Sicily, though we corresponded for some years. I have
found his books most valuable. He had a perfect genius for collecting
indispensable illustrations, and his books are encyclopædias of local
colour.
The late George Warrington Steevens, the finest correspondent the _Daily
Mail_ ever had—it is said that they paid him five thousand a year—a
small, pale, delicate-looking man, with double eye-glasses, and an
alert, rather humorous expression, used to come to us at Addison
Mansions with his wife. She was a good deal older than he was, but he
always said that she had been the making of his career, which came to an
untimely end while he was besieged in Ladysmith.
His conversation was as sparkling as his journalism. I remember when we
were discussing Kitchener’s conquest of the Sudan at the Authors’ Club
one night, telling him that Maxwell (now Sir John Maxwell, late
commanding the Army of Occupation in Egypt), who was one of Kitchener’s
most trusted officers, had been at Cheltenham College with me.
“What sort of man is Maxwell now?” I asked; and he answered, “The sort
of man you put in charge of a conquered town.”
Arthur Weigall, who was Inspector of Monuments in Upper Egypt when we
were there, came to see us several times at Addison Mansions. One hardly
expected to find a member of the great Kent cricketing family one of the
chief experts in deciphering Egyptian inscriptions and judging their
antiquities. Weigall was rather superstitious for so great an
Egyptologist, though I confess that I should not have liked to outrage
the dignity of the tomb of a queen at Thebes, as he and a house-party he
had at his fine mansion on the river near Luxor, proposed to do. They
got up a sort of comedy to be performed in the tomb, and the performance
was blocked by a series of accidents—sudden illness, the breaking of a
leg, and so on.
We had a delightful expedition with him to some of the less-known tombs
at Thebes. At his house I saw a couple of articles he had published in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ on Aknaton, the heretic Pharaoh, and I think
Queen Ti. I saw at a glance that, like Sir Frederick Treves, he was a
born writer, with quite a Pierre Loti feeling for style, and learned, to
my surprise, that he had not been able to find a publisher for two books
which he had ready. I gave him a letter of introduction to my literary
agent, setting forth the circumstances, which resulted in the instant
acceptance of both books by leading publishers. One of them was his
admirable _Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt_.
Edward Ayrton, a most brilliant young Egyptologist, who discovered the
famous gold treasure in the tombs of the Kings at Thebes, and has since
been Government Archæologist in Ceylon, we met at his lonely hut among
the tombs of the Kings. We came upon him the first time, dressed in
immaculate flannels, as if he was just starting off for a tennis match,
and playing _diavolo_. He is young enough to have been at St. Paul’s
with my son. It required a man of strong nerve to live where he lived,
surrounded by the spirits of so many Egyptian monarchs and their great
officers, and practically at the mercy of any evilly-disposed Arabs. The
spirits of bygone Egyptians have, above all others, in the history of
psychical science, manifested their sustained interest in human affairs.
Ayrton was acting then, not for the Government, but for a rich American.
John Foster Fraser, who was my colleague on _To-day_, though he is so
much younger than I am, a remarkably able and energetic man, who once
went a bicycle tour of nearly twenty thousand miles round the earth, and
would have gone farther if the land had not come to an end, has made
many long and adventurous journeys through dangerous countries, and has
written notable books. The story I liked best about his wanderings was
that he always used the public tooth-brush, provided by a civilised Shah
who had been to Europe, in the rest-houses of Persia. He certainly added
that no previous visitor to these rest-houses had ever known what the
brushes were used for.
Speaking of teeth, I once knew a dentist who visited Persia. Knowing the
prestige of the royal family there, he thought that his fortune was
made, when the Shah and his mother ordered sets of false teeth—the
Shah’s made of pearls, I think, and his mother’s of diamonds. But next
day he was overtaken by a crushing blow. The Shah, to prevent false
teeth from becoming too common, confined their use to the royal family,
and the poor dentist had to fall back on writing novels—it was C. J.
Wills.
This Shah, or another, on his return from a visit to Europe, made his
entire harem adopt British ballet-girls’ skirts.
This same Shah, when he visited London, asked the Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs to recommend some one to show him round the gilded hells
of London. The man, whose accomplishments thus received official
recognition, gave great satisfaction, I believe, but as he is still
alive, I shall not divulge his name, lest he should be overwhelmed with
overtures from publishers. His mother was a famous Society hostess.
I have known some Arctic and Antarctic explorers. I was, as I have
mentioned elsewhere, in the chair at the Savage Club on the night that
we entertained Nansen. Trevor-Battye, who afterwards conducted an
expedition to Kolguev in the Barents Sea, himself, came up to me, asking
me to introduce him to Nansen. Of course, I had great pleasure in doing
so. Nansen, who was a tall, wiry man, and looked much less at home in
his dress-clothes and his Orders than in his Arctic furs, looked my
friend up and down. The latter was a remarkably smart-looking man, and
was very well dressed. Nansen was not to know that he came of a family
famed for their strength and endurance in Indian frontier warfare, so he
said with a smile, which showed the wide openings between his teeth in
his lower jaw, “If you come with me, remember that you won’t be able to
wash for three years”—he meant, of course, after they had got to the
Arctic regions. Battye, who is a most distinguished naturalist, and a
well-known author, was not deterred, but Nansen’s list was already
really full. Battye was editor-in-chief of Natural History in the
Victoria History of the Counties of England. At the Authors’ Club, where
he was a habitué in those days, we used to ask him why he had not gone
to the North Pole whenever we wanted to get a rise out of him. He was a
frequent visitor to our house.
Another Arctic explorer who often came to see us after he had got back
from his three years in the Arctic circle, was Fred Jackson, who
conducted the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition. Jackson was a very
adventurous man. He had made an expedition across the Great Tundra
Desert, and another across Australia, before he went to Franz Josef
Land. With his swarthy face, bright dark eyes, and general air of _joie
de vive_, Fred Jackson looks much more like the manager of some great
English business concern in the Tropics than an Arctic explorer. Yet he
was an Arctic explorer, and a very hardy one. Everybody remembers the
photograph of the meeting of Nansen and Jackson in the Arctic
circle—Nansen swaddled to the chin in the fur clothes of his kind,
Jackson showing a starched English collar, a proper tie, and a triangle
of shirt-front.
Back from the Arctic circle, Jackson volunteered for South Africa,
distinguished himself, won medals, and became a captain in the
Manchester Regiment—_Hac arte Pollux_.
We often had with us I. N. Ford, whose advent to England as
correspondent of the _New York Tribune_ was practically the beginning of
the _entente cordiale_ between Great Britain and the United States. His
predecessor, the well-known G. W. Smalley, had been very much spoiled in
English society, but he never set himself whole-heartedly to produce
hearty relations between the two countries any more than Harold Frederic
did in his correspondenting in the _New York Times_. _The Tribune_, had,
in fact, been frequently in open hostility to England—so open that I
heard the following conversation at a dinner-party in Washington in the
year 1889 at Colonel John Hay’s. General Harrison had just been elected
President of the United States, and the moderate Republicans made no
secret of the fact that they would have liked to see Colonel John Hay,
who had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, Harrison’s Secretary
of State. His character stood as high as any one’s in America; no man
since George Washington had been so fit to be President of the United
States; for he was as clear-headed and able and unwavering as he was
honourable, and his immense private wealth set him above temptation. But
it was that very wealth which prevented him from being nominated.
Americans are determined that wealth shall not command the Presidency as
it has the Senate.
Well, that night Savage Landor and I and a number of leading American
politicians—the men who were to form Harrison’s Cabinet were most of
them there—were dining with Hay at his palatial mansion, built in a
heavy-browed sort of Spanish-Moresco style by the celebrated Richardson.
The new President’s private secretary, a commercialish little
Englishman, had promised to come, and he kept us waiting so long that
finally we went in to dinner without him, half-an-hour late.
At last he made his appearance, breathless, and, upsetting a
water-bottle as he took his seat, blurted out, “Whitelaw Reid” (then
editor and proprietor of the _Tribune_) “has been moving heaven and
earth to get the Court of St. James’” (_i. e._ the post of American
Minister to England), “but the President won’t give it him. He’s afraid
that England will refuse to receive him because of the way in which the
_Tribune_ has behaved.”
A good many years later he achieved the goal of his ambition, for I. N.
Ford had come to England in the interval, and had made the _Tribune_ to
America what the London _Times_ is to England in the matter of foreign
politics. Ford had won distinction earlier as an author writing on
travel in Central America.
Another man who did a lot of spade-work in promoting the _entente
cordiale_ was John Morgan Richards, who has lived in England for many
years, and has more than once been President of the American Society of
London. American from his backbone to his finger-tips, John Richards had
a fine Quaker sense of justice and peace on earth which made the eagle
lie down with the lion like a couple of lambs wherever he was present.
His brilliant daughter, Mrs. Craigie—better known in literature as John
Oliver Hobbes—was a potent link between the two countries.
Both he and his converse, G. R. Parkin, the Canadian, who was the real
father of Imperial Federation, and who is now usefully and congenially
employed in managing the Rhodes Scholarship Fund, were often at our
house. G. R. Parkin and Gilbert Parker, another Canadian, were sometimes
confused with each other in those days, by people who did not know them
personally.
Canada has sent us a lot of good men. Beckles Willson, who lives in the
old mansion in Kent which was the birthplace of General Wolfe, the
conqueror of Canada, has poured out a stream of information about Canada
in a most attractive form. Who does not remember the elder Pitt asking
Wolfe, a boy of thirty-three, to dinner just after he had appointed him
to command the military in Canada? Wolfe got very drunk, and for a
moment Pitt feared that he had made a mistake. But he remembered how the
boy had behaved under fire in that descent on the Breton coast, and let
him go to Canada without misgivings.
I have known Seton Watson, the Perthshire Laird who has done so much for
the Slav population of Hungary, since he was a small boy. When at New
College, Oxford, he showed his future bent by winning the Stanhope—the
University Prize for an historical essay. His first work, after he went
down, was to translate Gregorovius’s _Tombs of the Popes_. But he soon
began to give his attention to Hungary, where he has travelled a great
deal, and took up the cause of the Slav races who are being oppressed by
the Magyars. He held a successful exhibition of their art in London a
year or two ago.
Another friend of mine who has done similar good work is Campbell
Mackellar. He, however, has chiefly devoted himself to the Balkans, and
in Montenegro no Englishman is so well known and beloved. At his
hospitable table I have met some of the leading representatives of the
Balkan States who came to England during the war.
Connected both by property and family with Australia, his book-writing
has been chiefly about Australia, and it was he who wrote the
description of the Adam Lindsay Gordon country in South Australia which
appears in the book I wrote with Miss Humphris about _Adam Lindsay
Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia_. Mackellar has likewise
done a good deal for the recognition of Australian Art in London—a fact
commemorated in an album of original sketches presented to him by the
Australian artists who are over here.
It was no mere accident which made Miss Humphris and myself collaborate
in _Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia_. It
was true that we were strangers when she wrote to ask me to collaborate,
but we brought common traditions to bear on the book. In Cheltenham,
where Gordon spent his boyhood, Miss Humphris lives, and I was six years
at the College. Gordon was a College boy, and his father was a College
master. Miss Humphris could not be at the College, as I was, but her
grandfather was the architect who built its principal buildings. Like
Gordon, both Miss Humphris and I went to Australia, and we spent years
there, though not so many as he did, and as a connection of one of
Australia’s greatest racing men—the famous Etienne de Mestre—it was
natural that she should take an absorbing interest in the steeplechasing
exploits of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
[Illustration:
SIR GILBERT PARKER
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
Edith Humphris has an extraordinary power of collecting and sifting
materials for a book. Off her own bat, she collected all the facts of
Gordon’s early life at Cheltenham and Prestbury. The grist which I
brought to the mill, besides a study of Gordon’s life in Australia and
his poems, which I had blocked out more than thirty years before, when I
tried to get Cassell’s to undertake its publication, was the mass of
material put at my disposal by people who had known him in the flesh,
and treasured remembrances and keepsakes of him. Miss Humphris knew that
the letters to Charley Walker existed; I tracked their owner down and
got permission to reproduce them. Henry Gyles Turner, who gave me leave
to use all the materials in _Turner and Sutherland_, was a friend of
mine in Australia. George Riddoch, who gave us all the Riddoch poems and
reminiscences, is a friend of mine, introduced by old friends in
Australia. Lambton Mount, Gordon’s partner on the West Australian
Station (brother of Harry Mount), is a friend of mine, and gave me all
his information orally. General Strange, who was Gordon’s friend at
Woolwich, and wrote about him in _Gunner Jingo’s Jubilee_, is an old,
old friend of mine. Frederick Vaughan and Sir Frank Madden and Mrs.
Lauder wrote their reminiscences for me, as did Campbell Mackellar of
the Gordon country in South Australia. And John Bulloch, the editor of
the _Graphic_, who wrote the wonderfully interesting pedigrees and
chapters about Gordon’s family, wrote them for me.
But Miss Humphris wrote all her part of the book, including a great deal
about Gordon in Australia, herself, from studies which she had been
making since she was a child.
Talking of Australia, at one time I saw a good deal of Basil Thomson,
the son of the great Archbishop of York, who in those days was an
author, but is now secretary of the Prison Commission, after having been
governor of Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubbs prisons.
Thomson, when I first knew him, had just come back from being Prime
Minister of the Tonga Islands. I asked why he gave it up. He said that
things were no longer what they had been in Government circles in Tonga;
when he was there, even the Government could only raise the wind by
having fresh issues of postage stamps manufactured for them by
stamp-dealers in England, who paid for the privilege of selling the
stamps in England without accounting for them to the Government of
Tonga. But in the palmy days of Tonga it was very different. Then, a
Prime Minister, who was also a Nonconformist missionary, procured the
monopoly of selling trousers from the King of Tonga, before he induced
the king to make the whole population turn Christian, and make it
illegal to appear without trousers.
You sometimes hear people say, “What would you do if you were on a
desert island?” I once came very near seeing life on a desert island—it
was in a little settlement of less than a dozen families, on an island
adjoining the mainland on a desolate coast of Asia. It had a Consul.
“It seems an awfully dead and alive hole,” I said to him.
“It is not so bad as it looks,” he replied. “We have a splendid rule
here; as there is no kind of amusement in the place, except making love,
we passed a resolution that no one should get in a temper over the
infidelity of a spouse. We manage our loves like other people manage
their friendships—if a woman likes to have an affair with another
woman’s husband, it is nobody’s concern but hers and his. Since we have
made this arrangement, this has been the happiest place in the world,
though we live on a mud bank, without even a tennis-court. Before this
golden age began, the quarrelling was awful. Two men simply could not
get out of each other’s way, and they felt obliged to resort to violence
to maintain their self-respect, though they might not value the
affection they were losing so much as an old glove.” I forget the
profession of the Solon to whom the community owed this up-to-date
method of law-giving.
Fred Villiers, the war-correspondent, was making his way across Canada
at the same time as we were, on a lecture tour. He had a number of
wonderful battle-slides, and he looked highly picturesque in his service
kit. He had also a splendid advance agent, whom I will only call by his
Christian name, because he was the son of an English bishop, and had
very distinguished connections. Henry never forgot his dignity, and even
in the wilds of the North-West always wore a tall silk hat, with its fur
worn thin by constant brushing, because he was Villiers’ agent.
We had run across him at many C.P.R. capitals before he came to our
rescue at a woe-begone place called Kamloops in British Columbia. We
arrived there after midnight, and proceeded to the hotel, which should
have been expecting us, as it was the only train in the day from
Montreal. We found the hotel open, but absolutely deserted. We could
have helped ourselves to anything we liked in the bar, and taken our
choice of the bedrooms. At that moment appeared Henry, who asked us what
we would like to drink, and told us the Kamloops charges for it. He then
took us round, and gave us our choice of bedrooms, and when we wanted to
know why he had suddenly become landlord, told us that the landlord had
just died, and the Irish servants were afraid to be in the house with a
corpse.
We slept the night there, and paid our bills to Henry in the morning.
Norma Lorimer, who was with us, had a room which smelt horribly of
disinfectants. Henry said that the dentist, who came up once a week from
Seattle, had used that room as his surgery the day before, but the
inhabitants said that the corpse was there.
This was nothing to an experience of Lewis Clarke, a son of the
celebrated Marcus Clarke, who wrote _For the Term of his Natural Life_,
and edited the first complete edition of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems—a
man who has had an extraordinarily adventurous life. This happened to
him, I think, in the wilds of New Guinea. He had gone to sleep under a
tree. During the night there came on a violent wind, and he was awakened
by something cold and heavy, which kept brushing his face. Whatever it
was, it only just touched him, and when he brushed it away, yielded
lightly to his touch. After pushing it away for a while, he came to the
conclusion that it did not matter, and got to sleep again. In the
morning he was awakened by an awful stench, and when he opened his eyes
to see what it was, found the bare toes of a dead Chinaman, who had
hanged himself, knocking against his nose.
When I was at Canton, I went to visit our Consul-General there. I was
with him in his office one day when he was trying a case. An Englishman
had gone out shooting, and a Chinaman had sent his children after him,
with instructions to get into the line of fire and be shot, which duly
happened. The affectionate father then brought an action against the
Englishman for damages occasioned to him by the injuries to his
children. It was perfectly plain that the children had had themselves
shot on purpose, but to my utter surprise the Consul made the Englishman
pay.
When the parties had left the room, I reproached him with the
miscarriage of justice. His only reply was, “I know it, my dear fellow,
as well as you do; but I have been Consul here for thirty years (I
forget exactly how many he said), and it is impossible for me to
conceive any circumstances under which the British Government would
support me.”
I may add that he was much loved and respected by the British community,
whom he was unable to protect.
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