Another hobby of Perris’s was amateur boxing, and I had an office reputation of knowing something of the science of that art, as I had a young brother who boxed for Oxford.
Perris, after various sparring bouts in which he had given bloody noses to sub-editors and others, challenged in mortal combat my friend Eddy, whom I have already introduced in this narrative. There had been some temperamental passages between the news editor and this young writer, so that, if the conflict took place, it would be lively. I acted as Eddy’s second in the matter, and assuming immense scientific knowledge, coached him as to the right methods of attack. At least I urged upon him the necessity of aggressive action in the first round, because if he once gave Perris a chance of hitting out, Eddy would certainly be severely damaged, for Perrisis a big man with a clean-shaven face of a somewhat pugilistic type, and with a large-sized fist.
This little meeting between the news editor and his chief reporter aroused considerable interest in the office, and some betting. Quite a little crowd had collected in the sub-editorial room for the event. It was not of long duration. At the words, “Time, gentlemen,” Eddy, heroic as any man inspired by anxiety, made an immediate assault upon Perris, like a swift over-arm bowler, and by a fluke of chance, landed the news editor a fearful blow on the head. It dazed him, but Eddy was not to be denied, and continued his attack with the ferocity of a man-eating tiger, until Perris collapsed.... After that, with greedy appetite for blood, he made mincemeat of a young man named “Boy” Jones, who asked for trouble and got it.
These little episodes behind the scenes of life in Fleet Street kept up the spirits and humor of men who, as a rule, worked hard and long each day, and were always at the mercy of the world’s news, which sent them off upon strange errands in the Street of Adventure, or tied them to the desk, like slaves of the galleys.
My next experience in editorship was when I was appointed literary editor of a new daily paper calledThe Tribune, the history of which is one of the romantic tragedies of Fleet Street.
Its founder and proprietor was a very tall, handsome, and melancholy young man named Franklin Thomasson, who came from that city of Bolton in the Black Country where I had been managing editor of the Tillotson Syndicate. He had the misfortune of being one of the richest young men in England, as the son of an old cotton spinner who had built up the largest cotton mills in Lancashire. It was, I believe, a condition of his will that his son should establish a London journal in the Liberal interest. Anyhow, Franklin Thomasson, who was an idealist ofthat faith, startedThe Tribuneas a kind of sacred duty which he had inherited with his money. He appointed as his editor-in-chief a worthy old journalist of an old-fashioned type, named William Hill, who had previously been a news editor ofThe Westminster Gazette, an excellent evening paper with only one defect—it did not publish news. At least, it was not for any kind of news that people bought it, but entirely for the political philosophy of its editor, J. A. Spender, who was the High Priest of the Liberal Faith, and for the brilliant cartoons of “F.C.G.,” who did more to kill Chamberlain and tariffs than any other power in England.
There were many people of knowledge and experience who warned Franklin Thomasson of the costly adventure of a new daily paper in London. Augustine Birrell, disastrous failure as Chief Secretary for Ireland, but distinguished for all time as a genial scholar and essayist, was one of them. I went to see him with William Hill, and toward the end of the interview, in which he was asked to become a kind of literary godfather to the new venture, he said to Franklin Thomasson, with a twinkle in his eyes,
“My dear Thomasson, I knew your father, and had a high respect for him. For his sake I advise you that if you pay £100,000 into my bank as a free gift, and donotstartThe Tribune, you will save a great deal of money!”
It was a prophecy that was only too truly fulfilled, for before Thomasson was through his troubles, he had lost £300,000.
A very brilliant staff of assistant editors and reporters was engaged by William Hill—many of the most brilliant journalists in England, and some of the worst. Among them (I will not say in which category) was myself, but at the first assembly of editors before the publication of the paper, I received a moral shock.
I encountered a next-door-neighbor of mine, namedHawke, who had been a colleague of mine onThe Daily Chronicle.
I greeted him with pleasure, and surprise.
“Hullo, Hawke, what are you doing here?”
“I’m literary editor,” he said. “What are you?”
“That’s funny!” I replied. “I happen to be literary editor of this paper!”
William Hill had appointed two literary editors, to be perfectly on the safe side. He had also appointed two news editors. Whether the two news editors settled the dispute by assassination, I do not know. Only one functioned. But Hawke and I agreed to divide the job, which we did in the friendliest way, Hawke controlling the reviews of books, and I editing the special articles, stories, and other literary contents of the paper.
It was started with a tremendous flourish of trumpets in the way of advance publicity. On the first day of publication, London was startled by the appearance of all the omnibus horses and cart horses caparisoned in white sheets bearing the legend “ReadThe Tribune.” Unfortunately it was a wet and stormy day, and before an hour or two had passed, the white mantles were splashed with many gobs of mud, and waved wildly as dirty rags above the backs of the unfortunate animals, or dangled dejectedly about their legs. A night or two before publication, a grand reception was given, regardless of expense, to an immense gathering of political and literary personalities. The walls ofThe Tribuneoffice were entirely covered with hothouse flowers, and baskets of orchids hung from the ceilings. Wine flowed like water, and historical truth compels me to confess that some members of the new staff were overcome by enthusiasm for this rich baptism of the new paper. One young gentleman, very tall and eloquent, fell as gracefully as a lily at the feet of Augustine Birrell. Another, when the guests were gone, resented some fancied impertinencefrom the commissionaire, and knocked him through the telephone box. One of the office boys, unaccustomed to champagne, collapsed in a state of coma and was put in the lift for metal plates and carried aloft to the machine room. Long after all the guests had gone, and Franklin Thomasson himself had returned home, another gentleman in high authority on the organizing side was so melted with the happy influences of the evening that his heart expanded with human brotherly love for the night wanderers of London who had been attracted by the lights and music inThe Tribuneoffice, and he invited them to carry off the baskets of orchids in the hall, as a slight token of his affection and sympathy. Indeed, his generosity was so unbounded that he made them a gift of the hall clock—a magnificent timepiece with chimes like St. Paul’s Cathedral—and they were about to depart with it, praising God for this benevolence, when Franklin Thomasson, who had been summoned back by telephone, arrived on the scene to save his property and restore discipline.
It was, of course, only a few Bohemian souls who were carried away by the excitement of that baptismal night. Generally speaking, the staff ofThe Tribunewas made up of men of high and serious character, whose chief fault, indeed, was to err rather much on the side of abstract idealism and the gravity of philosophical faith.
We produced a paper which was almost too good for a public educated in the new journalism of the Harmsworth school, with its daily sensations, its snippety articles, its “stunt” stories. We were long, and serious, and “high-brow,” and—to tell the truth—dull. The public utterly refused to buyThe Tribune. Nothing that we could do would tempt them to buy it. As literary editor of special articles and stories, I bought some of the most brilliant work of the best writers in England. I published one of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories—agem—but it did not increase the circulation ofThe Tribuneby a single copy. I published five chapters of autobiography by Joseph Conrad—a literary masterpiece—but it did not move the sales. I persuaded G. K. Chesterton to contribute a regular article; I published the work of many great novelists, and encouraged the talent of the younger school; but entirely without success. It was desperately disappointing, and I am convinced that the main cause of our failure was the surfeit of reading matter we gave each day to a public which had no leisure for such a mass of print, however good its quality. The appearance of the paper, owing to the lack of advertisements, was heavy and dull, and any bright and light little articles were overshadowed among the long, bleak columns.
A new editor, belonging to the Harmsworth school, a charming little man named S. G. Pryor, succeeded William Hill, but his attempts to convertThe Tribuneinto a kind ofDaily Mailoffended our small clientele of serious readers, without attracting the great public.
After two years of disastrous failure, Franklin Thomasson, who by that time had lost something like £300,000, decided to cut his losses, and the news leaked out among his staff of over eight hundred men that the ship was sinking. It was a real tragedy for those men who had left good jobs to joinThe Tribune, and who saw themselves faced with unemployment, and even ruin and starvation for their wives and families. Some of us made desperate endeavors to postpone the sentence of death by introducing new capital.
One of my colleagues journeyed to Dublin in the hope of persuading Augustine Birrell to obtain government support for this Liberal organ.
He sent a somewhat startling telegram to Birrell at Dublin Castle.
“The lives of eight hundred men with their wives andchildren depend on the interview which I beg you to grant me to-day.”
Birrell was surprised, and granted the interview.
“Mr. Birrell,” said my grave and melancholy friend, placing a hat of high and noble architecture on the great man’s desk, “isThe Tribunegoing to die?”
“Sir,” said Mr. Birrell, twinkling through his eyeglasses, “mayThe Tribunedie that death it so richly deserves.”
I succeeded in holding up the sentence of doom for another fortnight, by the sportsmanship of a gallant old lady named the Countess of Carlisle. We had been conducting a temperance crusade which had earned her warm approval, and for the sake of that cause and her Liberal idealism, she offered to guarantee the men’s wages until the paper might be sold.
But it was never sold. The fatal night came when Franklin Thomasson, white and distressed, but resolute, faced his staff with the dreadful announcement that that was the last night. One man fainted. Several wept. Outside the printers waited in the hope that at this twelfth hour some stroke of luck would avert this great misfortune. To them it was a question of bread and butter for wives and babes.
That luck stroke did not happen.
With several colleagues I waited, smoking and talking, after the sentence had been pronounced. It seemed impossible to believe thatThe Tribunewas dead. It was more than the death of an abstract thing, more than the collapse of a business enterprise. Something of ourselves had died with it, our hopes and endeavors, our work of brain and heart. A newspaper is a living organism, threaded through with the nerves of men and women, inspired by their spirit, animated by their ideals and thought, the living vehicle of their own adventure of life. SoThe Tribuneseemed to us then, in that lasthour, when we looked back on our labor and comradeship, our laughter, our good times together on “the rag,” as we had called it.
Long after midnight I left the office for the last time, with that friend of mine who had gone to Augustine Birrell, a tall, melancholy-mannered, Georgian-looking man, whose tall hat was a noble specimen of old-fashioned type.
The brilliant lights outside the office suddenly went out. It was like the sinking of the ship. My friend said, “Dead! Dead!” and lifted his hat as in the presence of death.
After the downfall ofThe Tribunethere was a period of suffering, anxiety, and in some cases despair, for many of the men who had held positions on that paper. One good fellow committed suicide. Others fell into grievous debt while waiting like Mr. Micawber for something to turn up. Fleet Street is a cruel highway for out-of-work journalists, and as so many were turned out into the street together it was impossible for all of them to be absorbed by other newspapers, already fully staffed.
There were rendezvous of disconsolate comrades in the Press Club or Anderton’s Hotel, where they greeted each other with the gloomy inquiry, “Got anything yet?” and then, smoking innumerable cigarettes, in lieu, sometimes, of more substantial nourishment, cursed the cruelty of life, the abominable insecurity of journalism, and their own particular folly in entering that ridiculous, heartbreaking, soul-destroying career.... One by one, in course of time, they found other jobs down the same old street.
I determined to abandon regular journalism altogether, and to become a “literary gent” in the noblest meaning of the words, and anyhow a free lance. I have always regarded journalism as merely a novitiate for real literature, a training school for life and character, from which I might gain knowledge and inspiration for great novels, as Charles Dickens had done. My ambition, at that time, was limitless, and I expected genius to break out in me at any moment. Oh, Youth! Here, then, was my chance, now that I was free from the fetters of the journalistic prison house.
With a wealth of confidence and hope, but very little capital of a more material kind, I took a cottage at the seashore for a month and departed there with my wife and small boy. It was a coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, looking on to the sea and sand, and surrounded by a fence one foot high, like the doll’s house it was. There, in a tiny room, filled with the murmur of the sea, and the vulgar songs of seaside Pierrots, I wrote my novel,The Street of Adventure, in which I told, in the guise of fiction, the history ofThe Tribunenewspaper, and gave a picture of the squalor, disappointment, adventure, insecurity, futility, and good comradeship of Fleet Street.
It was much to be desired that this novel of mine should be a success. Even my wife’s humorous contentment with poverty, which has always been a saving grace in my life, did not eliminate the need of a certain amount of ready money.The Street of Adventure, my most successful novel, cost me more than I earned. In the first place, it narrowly escaped total oblivion, which would have saved me great anxiety and considerable expense. After leaving the coast-guard’s cottage at Littlehampton, with my manuscript complete—150,000 words in one month—I had to change trains at Guildford to get to London from some other place. My thoughts were so busy with the story I had written, and with the fortune that awaited me by its success, that I left the manuscript on the mantelpiece in the waiting room of Guildford Station, and did not discover my loss until I had been in London some hours. It seemed—for five minutes of despair—like the loss of my soul. Never should I have had the courage to rewrite that novel which had cost so much labor and so much nervous emotion. Despairingly I telegraphed to the station master, and my joy was great when, two hours later, I received his answer: “Papers found.” Little did I then know that if he hadused them to brighten his fire I should have been saved sleepless nights and unpleasant apprehensions.
It was accepted and published by William Heinemann, on a royalty basis, and it was gloriously reviewed. But almost immediately I received a writ of libel from one of my friends and colleagues on the lateTribune, and sinister rumors reached me that Franklin Thomasson, the proprietor, and six other members of the staff were consulting their solicitors on the advisability of taking action against me. I saw ruin staring me in the face. My fanciful narrative had not disguised carefully enough the actuality of theTribuneand its staff. My fancy portraits and amiable caricatures had been identified, and could not be denied. Fortunately only one writ was actually presented and proceeded with, against myself and Heinemann, but the book was withdrawn from circulation at a time when the reviews were giving it columns of publicity, and it was killed stone dead—though later it had a merry resurrection.
The man who took a libel action against me was the character who in my book is called Christopher Codrington, the same young man who had lifted his hat when the lights went out and said, “Dead! Dead!” He and I had been good friends, and I believed, and still believe, that my portrait of him was a very agreeable and fanciful study of his amiable peculiarities—his Georgian style of dress, his gravity of speech, his Bohemianism. But he resented that portrait, and was convinced that I had grossly maligned him. The solicitors employed by myself and Heinemann to prepare the defense piled up the usual bill of costs (and I had to pay the publisher’s share as well as my own), so that by the time the case was ready to come into court I knew that, win or lose, I should have some pretty fees to pay. It never came into court. A few days before the case was due, I met “Christopher Codrington” in Fleet Street! We paused,hesitated, raised our hats solemnly, and then laughed (we had always been much amused with each other).
“What about some lunch together?” I suggested.
“It would never do,” he answered. “In a few days we shall be engaged in a legal duel.”
“Meanwhile one must eat,” I remarked casually.
He agreed.
We had a good luncheon at The Cock in Fleet Street. I had the honor of paying for it. We discussed our chances in the libel action. Christopher Codrington said he had a “clear case.” He emphasized the damnably incriminating passages. I argued that he would only make himself ridiculous by identifying himself with my pleasantries and giving them a sinister twist. We parted in a friendly, courteous way, as two gentlemen who would cross swords later in the week.
When my solicitors heard that we two had lunched together, they threw up their hands in amazement.
“The two principals in a libel action! And the one who alleges libel allows the other to pay for his lunch! The case collapses!”
They were shocked that the law should be treated with such levity. It almost amounted to contempt.
That evening I called on “Christopher Codrington” and explained the grievous lapse of etiquette we had both committed. He was disconcerted. He was also magnanimous. I obtained his signature to a document withdrawing the action, and we shook hands in token of mutual affection and esteem.... But all my royalties on the sales of the novel, afterward reissued in cheap form, went to pay Heinemann’s bill and mine, and my most successful novel earned for me the sum of £25 until it had a second birth in the United States, after the war.
I knew after that the wear and tear, the mental distress, the financial uncertainty that befell a free lance in search of fame and fortune, when those mocking will-o’-the-wispslead him through the ditches of disappointment and the thickets of ill luck. How many hundreds of times did I pace the streets of London in those days, vainly seeking the plot of a short story, and haunted by elusive characters who would not fit into my combination of circumstances, ending at four thousand words with a dramatic climax! How many hours I have spent glued to a seat in Kensington Gardens, working out literary triangles with a husband and wife and the third party, two men and a woman, two women and a man, and finding only a vicious circle of hopeless imbecility! At such times one’s nerves get “edgy” and one’s imagination becomes feverish with effort, so that the more desperately one chases an idea, the more resolutely it eludes one. It is like the disease of sleeplessness. The more one tries to sleep, the more wakeful one becomes. Then the free lance, having at last captured a good idea, having lived with it and shaped it with what sense of truth and beauty is in his heart, carries it like a precious gem to the market place. Alas, there is no bidder! Or the price offered insults his sensitive pride, and mocks at his butcher’s bill. It is “too good,” writes a kindly editor. “It is hardly in our style,” writes a courteous one. It is “not quite convincing,” writes a critical one.... It is bad to be a free lance in this period, when fortune hides. It is worse to be the free lance’s wife. His absent-mindedness becomes a disease.
(I remember posting twenty-two letters with twenty-two stamps, but separately, letters first and stamps next, in the red mouth of the pillar box!)
His moods of despair when his pen won’t write a single lucky word give an atmosphere of neurasthenia to the house. He becomes irritable, uncourteous, unkind, because, poor devil, he believes that he has lost his touch and his talent, upon which this woman’s life depends, as well as his own.
My life as a free lance was not devoid of those periodsof morbid depression, and yet, on the whole, I was immensely lucky, compared with many other beggars of my craft. It was seldom that I couldn’t find some kind of a market for my wares, and I had an industry—I can at least boast of that, whatever the quality of my pen—which astonishes myself when I look back upon those days. I was also gifted to this extent—that I had the journalistic instinct of writing “brightly” on almost any subject in which I could grab at a few facts, and I could turn my pen to many different aspects of life and letters, which held for me always fresh and enthusiastic interest. Not high qualities, but useful to a young man in the capture of the fleeting guinea.
I worked hard, and I enjoyed my toil. While earning bread and butter by special articles and short stories, I devoted much time and infinite labor to the most unprofitable branch of literature, which is history, and my first love. Goodness knows how many books I read in order to produce myMen and Women of the French Revolution, published in magnificent style, with a superb set of plates from contemporary prints, and almost profitless to me.
It was by casual acquaintance with one of the queer old characters of London that I obtained the use of those plates. He was a dear, dirty old gentleman, who had devoted his whole life to print collecting and had one of the finest collections in England. He lived in an old house near Clerkenwell, which was just a storehouse for these engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and colored prints of the eighteenth century. He kept them in bundles, in boxes, in portfolios, wherever there was floor space, chair space, and table space. To reach his desk, where he sat curled up in a swivel chair, one had to step over a barricade of those bundles. At meal times he threw crumbs to the mice who were his only companions, except an old housekeeper, and whenever the need ofmoney became pressing, as it did in his latter years, he used to take out a print, sigh over it as at the parting of an old friend, and trot round to one of the London print sellers who would “cash it” like a cheque.... I think I made £150 out ofMen and Women of the French Revolution, and my best reward was to see it, years later, in the windows of the Paris bookshops. That gave me a real thrill of pride and pleasure....
I made less than £150 by my life of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, one of the most romantic characters in English history, and strangely unknown, except for Scott’s portrait inThe Fortunes of Nigel, and the splendid figure drawn by Alexandre Dumas inThe Three Musketeers, until, with prodigious labor, which was truly a labor of love, I extracted from old papers and old letters the real life story of this man, and the very secrets of his heart, more romantic, and more fascinating, in actual fact, than the fiction regarding him by those two great masters.
I think it was £80 that I was paid forKing’s Favorite, in which again I searched the folios of the past for light on one of the most astounding mysteries in English history—the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by the Earl of Somerset and the Countess of Essex—and discovered a plot with kings and princes, great lords and ladies, bishops and judges, poisoners, witch doctors, cutthroats and poets, as hideously wicked as in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies. I was immensely interested in this work. I gained gratifying praise from scholars and critics. But I kept myself poor for knowledge sake. History does not pay—unless it is a world history by H. G. Wells. Never mind! I had a good time in writing it, and do not begrudge the labor.
My book on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, brought me the friendship of the very noble and charming family of the Earl and Countess of Denbigh. LordDenbigh is the descendant of Susan Villiers—the sister of George Villiers—who married the first Earl of Denbigh, and he has in his possession the original letters written by the Duke of Buckingham to his devoted wife, and her beautiful letters to him, as well as a mass of other correspondence of great historical value. Lord Denbigh invited me down to Newnham Paddox, his lovely Warwickshire home, founded by his ancestors in the reign of James I, and in the long gallery I saw the famous VanDyck portraits of the Duke of Buckingham, the “hero” of my book, which have now been sold, with other priceless treasures, when war and after-war taxation have impoverished this old family, like so many others in England to-day. I always look back to those visits I paid to Newnham Paddox as to a picture of English life, before so much of its sunshine was eclipsed by the cost and sacrifice of that great tragedy. They were a large and happy family in that old house, with three sons and a crowd of beautiful girls, as frank and merry and healthy in body and soul as Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Katherine, Rosamond and Celia. I remember them playing tennis below the broad terrace with its climbing flowers, and the sound of their laughter that came ringing across the court when Lady Dorothy leapt the net, or Lady Marjorie took a flying jump at a high ball. On a Sunday afternoon they captured some tremendous cart horses, grazing on the day of rest, mounted them without reins or bridle, rode them astride, charged each other like knights at a tourney, fearless and free, while Lady Denbigh laughed joyously at the sight of their romps. There was an exciting rat hunt in an old barn, which was nearly pulled down to get at the rats.... No one saw a shadow creeping close to those sunlit lawns, to touch the lives of this English family and all others. They played the good game of life in pre-war England. They played the game of life and death with equal couragewhen war turned Newnham Paddox into a hospital and called upon those boys and girls for service and sacrifice. The eldest son, Lord Feilding, was an officer in the Guards, and badly wounded. Two of the boys were killed, one in the Army, one in the Navy. Lady Dorothy led an ambulance convoy in Belgium, and I met her there when she was under fire, constantly, in ruined towns and along sinister, shell-broken roads, injecting morphia into muddy, bloody men, just picked up from the fields and ditches, crying aloud in agony. Lady Denbigh herself wore out her health and spirit, and died soon after the Armistice. It was the record of many families like that, who gave all they had for England’s sake.
During that time of free lancing I enlarged my list of acquaintances by friendly encounter with some of the great ones of the world, its passing notorieties, and its pleasant and unpleasant people.
In the first class was that curious old gentleman, the Duke of Argyll, husband of Princess Louise. As poor as a church mouse, he was given house-room in Kensington Palace, where I used to take tea with him now and then, and discuss literature, politics, and history, of which he had a roving knowledge. I was a neighbor of his, living at that time in what I verily believe was the smallest house in London, at Holland Street, Kensington, and it used to amuse me to step out of my doll’s house, with or without eighteenpence in my pocket, and walk five hundred yards to the white portico on the west side of the old red brick palace, to take tea with a Royal duke. The poor old gentleman was so bored with himself that I think he would have invited a tramp to tea, for the sake of a little conversation, but for the austere supervision of Princess Louise, of whom he stood in awe. As the Marquis of Lorne, and one of the handsomest young men in England, he had gained something of a reputation as a poet and essayist. His poetry in later years wasponderously bad, but he wrote idealistic essays which had some touch of style and revealed a mind above the average in nobility of purpose.
As an editor I had bought some of his literary productions, and had put a number of useful guineas into the old man’s pockets, so that he had a high esteem for me, as a man with immense power in the press, though, as a free lance, I had none.
This acquaintanceship startled some of my brother journalists on the day of King Edward’s funeral at Windsor Castle. The Duke of Argyll was a grand figure that day, in a magnificent uniform, with the Order of the Garter, decorations thick upon his breast, and a great plumed hat. After the ceremony, standing among a crowd of princes, he hailed me, and walked arm in arm with me along the ramparts. I felt somewhat embarrassed at this distinction, especially as I was in the full gaze of my comrades of Fleet Street, who stood at a little distance. They saw the humor of the situation when I gave them a friendly wink, but afterward accused me of unholy “swank.”
It was about this time that I came to know Beerbohm Tree, in many ways the greatest, and in more ways the worst, of our English actors. He was playing Caliban in “The Tempest” when I sought an interview with him on the subject of Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare!... Shakespeare!” he said, leering at me with a beastlike face, according to the part he was playing, and clawing himself with apelike hands. “I seem to have heard that name. Is there anything I can say about him? No, there is nothing. I’ve said all I know a thousand times, and more than I know more times than that.”
He could think of nothing to say about Shakespeare, but suggested that I should run away and write what I liked. I did, and it was at least a year before the articlewas published in a series of provincial papers, a long article in which I wrote all that I thought Tree ought to say, if he loved Shakespeare with anything like my own passion.
One evening I received a long telegram from him.
“Honor me by accepting two stalls any night at His Majesty’s and kindly call on me between the acts.”
I accepted the invitation, wondering at its effusiveness. When I called on him, he was playing Brutus, and clasped my hand as though he loved me.
“Little do you know the service you have done me,” he said. “My secretary told me the other night that I was booked for a lecture on Shakespeare at the Regent Street Polytechnic. I had forgotten it. I had nothing prepared. It was a dreadful nuisance. I said ‘I won’t go.’ He said, ‘I’m afraid you must.’ ... Two minutes later a bundle of press cuttings was brought to me. It contained your interview with me on the subject of Shakespeare. I read it with delight. I had no idea I had said all those things. What a memory you must have! I took the paper to the Polytechnic, and delivered my lecture, by reading it word for word.”
After that I met Tree many times and he never forgot that little service. In return he invited me to the Garrick Club, or to his great room at the top of His Majesty’s, and told me innumerable anecdotes which were vastly entertaining. He had a rich store of them, and told them with a ripe humor and dramatic genius which revealed him at his best. His acting was marred by affectations that became exasperating, and sometimes by loss of memory and sheer carelessness. I have seen him actually asleep on the stage. It was when he played the part of Fagin in “Oliver Twist,” and in a scene where he had to sit crouched below a bridge, waiting for Bill Sikes, he dozed off, wakened with a start, and missed his cue.
Tree’s egotism was almost a disease, and in his lastyears his vanity and pretentiousness obscured his real genius. He was a great old showman, and at rehearsals it was remarkable how he could pull a crowd together and build up a big picture or intensify a dramatic moment by some touch of “business.” But he played to the gallery all the time, and made a pantomime of Shakespeare—to the horror of the Germans when he appeared in Berlin! They would not tolerate him, and were scandalized that such liberties should be taken with Shakespearian drama, which they have adopted as their own.
Another great figure of the stage whom I met behind the scenes was Sarah Bernhardt, when she appeared at the Coliseum in London. She took the part of Adrienne Lecouvreur, in which she was an unconscionable time a-dying, after storms of agony and mad passion. I had an appointment to meet her in her room after the play, and slipped round behind the scenes before she left the stage. Her exit was astonishing and touching. The whole company of the Coliseum and its variety show—acrobats, jugglers, “funny” men, dancing girls, “star turns”—had lined up in a double row to await this Queen of Tragedy, with homage. As she came off the stage, George Robey, with his red nose and ridiculous little hat, gravely offered his arm, with the air of Walter Raleigh in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. She leaned heavily on his arm, and almost collapsed in the chair to which he led her. She was panting after her prolonged display of agony before the footlights, and for a moment I thought she was really dying.
I bent over her and said in French that I regretted she was so much fatigued. My words angered her instantly, as though they reflected upon her age.
“Sir,” she said harshly, “I was as much fatigued when I first played that scene—was it thirty years ago, or forty?—I have forgotten. It is the exhaustion of art, and not of nature.”
As a special correspondent ofThe Daily Chronicle(after a spell of free-lance work) I went abroad a good deal on various missions, and occasionally took charge of the Paris office in the absence of Martin Donohue who held that post but was frequently away on some adventure in other countries.
I came to know and to love Paris, by day and night, on both sides of the Seine, and in all its quarters, rich and poor. To me it is still the most attractive city in the world, and I have an abiding passion for its ghosts, its beauty, and its people. To “feel” Paris one must be steeped in the history and literature of France, so that one walks, not lonely, but as a haunted man along the rue St. Honoré, where Danton lived, and where Robespierre closed his shutters when Marie Antoinette passed on her tumbril; in the Palais Royal, where Camille Desmoulins plucked leaves from the trees and stuck them in his hat as a green cockade; in the great nave of Notre Dame, where a thousand years of faith, passion, tragedy, glory, touch one’s spirit, closely, as one’s hand touches its old stones; across the Pont Neuf, where Henry met his murderer, and where all Paris passed, with its heroes, cutthroats, and fair women; on the left bank, by the bookstalls, where poets and scholars roved, with hungry stomachs and eager minds; up in the Quartier Latin, where centuries of student life have paced by the old gray walls, and where wild youth has lived its short dream of love, quaffed its heady wine, laughed at life and death; up the mountain of Montmartre whereapachesused to lurk in the darkness, and Vice wore the false livery of Joy; inthe Luxembourg Gardens, where a world of lovers have walked, hand in hand, while children played, and birds twittered, and green buds grew to leaf, which faded and fell as love grew old and died.
Paris is nothing but an exhibition of architecture and a good shopping place, unless one has walked arm in arm with D’Artagnan, seen the great Cardinal pass in his robes, stood behind the arras when Marguérite de Valois supped with her lover, wandered the cold streets o’ nights with François Villon, listened to the songs of Ronsard, passed across the centuries to the salons of Madame de Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, supped with the Encyclopædists, and heard the hoarse laughter of the mobs when the head of the Princesse de Lamballe was paraded on a pike, and the fairest heads of France fell under the knife into the basket of the guillotine. It was Dumas, Victor Hugo, Erckmann-Chatrian, Eugène Sue, Murger, Guy de Maupassant, Michelet’s “France,” and odd bits of reading in French history, fiction, and poetry, which gave me the atmosphere of Paris, and revealed in its modernity, even in its most squalid aspects, a background of romance.
So it has been with millions of others to whom Paris is an enchanted city. But, as a journalist, I had the chance to get behind the scenes of life in Paris, and to put romance to the test of reality.
One of my earliest recollections of Paris was when I went there for a fortnight with my wife, in the first year of our marriage, on savings from my majestic income of £120 a year. We stayed in a little hotel called the Hôtel du Dauphin, in the rue St. Roch—where Napoleon fired his “whiff of grapeshot”—and explored the city and all its museums with untiring delight, although at that time, during the Dreyfus trial and the Fashoda crisis, England was so unpopular that we—obviously English—were actually insulted in the streets. (It was before the Entente Cordiale!)
One little show was unusual in its character. A fool named Jules Guérin, wanted by the police for not paying his rates, or something of the kind, fortified his house in the rue Chabrol, and defied the whole armed might of Paris to fetch him out. It was a kind of Sidney Street affair, for he was armed with an automatic pistol and fired at any policeman who approached. M. Lépine, the prefect, decided to besiege him and starve him out, and when my wife and I wedged our way through vast crowds, we found the rue Chabrol surrounded by a veritable army of gendarmes. No one was allowed down the street, to the great annoyance of my wife, who desired to see Jules Guérin.
While we were talking together, a woman plucked my wife’s sleeve and said in French, “You want to see Guérin?... Come with me.”
She led us down a number of narrow passages beyond the police cordon until, suddenly, we came into the very center of the deserted street.
“Voilà!” said the woman. “Vous voyez l’imbécile!”
She pointed to an upper window, and there, sure enough, was the “imbecile,” Guérin, a sinister-looking fellow with a black beard, with a large revolver very much in evidence. My wife laughed at him, and he looked very much annoyed.... It was a full week before he surrendered to the law.
One of the most interesting times I had in Paris was when the Confédération Générale de Travail, under the leadership of Jean Jaurès, declared a general strike against the government of Aristide Briand. It was a trial of strength between those two men, who had once been comrades in the extreme Left of revolutionary labor. Both of them were men of outstanding character. Jaurès was much more than a hot-headed demagogue, of the new Bolshevik type, eager to destroy civilization in revenge against “Capital.” He was a lover of France in everyfiber of his body and brain, and a man of many Christian qualities, including kindness and charity and personal morality, in spite of religious scepticism. He saw with clear vision the approaching danger of war with Germany, and he devoted his life, and lost it, on behalf of antimilitarism, believing that German democracy could be won over to international peace, if French democracy would link up with them. It was for that reason that he attacked the three years’ system of military service, and denounced the increasing expenditure of France on military preparations. But to attain his ideal of international peace, he played into the hands of revolutionary labor, and defended many of its violent methods, including “direct action.” It was with Aristide Briand that he had drawn up the plans of a general strike in which every trade union or syndicate in France would join at the appointed hour, in order to demonstrate the power of “Labor” and to overthrow the autocracy of “Capital.”
When Briand deserted the Left Wing, modified his views for the sake of office, and finally became Premier of France, Jaurès, who had taunted him as a renegade, put into operation against him the weapon he had helped to forge. A general strike was declared.
There were astonishing scenes in Paris. The machinery of social life came to a dead stop. No railway trains arrived or departed, and I had a sensational journey from Calais to Paris in the last train through, driven by an amateur who had not mastered the mystery of the brakes, so that the few passengers, with the last supply of milk for Paris, were bumped and jolted with terrifying shocks.
Food from the rural districts was held up on wayside stations, and Paris was like a besieged city, living on rapidly diminishing stocks. The “Metro” ceased work, and armies of clerks, shopgirls, and business men had to walk to their work from suburbs or distant quarters.They made a joke of it, and laughed and sang on their way, as though it was the greatest jest in the world. But it became beyond a jest after the first day or two, especially at night, when Paris was plunged into abysmal darkness because the electricians had joined the railway men and all other branches of labor.
The restaurants and cafés along the great boulevards were dimly lighted by candles stuck into wine and beer bottles, and bands of students from the Latin Quarter paraded with paper lanterns, singing the Funeral March and other doleful ditties, not without a sense of romance and adventure in that city of darkness. Theapaches, who love not the light, came out of their lairs, beyond Clichy, and fell upon wanderers in the gloom, robbing them of their watches and ready money, and clubbing them if they put up any resistance. No milk could be had for love or money, no butter, eggs, fish, or fresh meat, except by the rich hotels which cornered the markets with their small supplies brought in by farm carts, hand carts, or babies’ perambulators.
On the whole there was very little violence, for, in spite of their excitability, Parisian crowds are good-natured and law-abiding. But there was one section which gave trouble. It was the union ofterrassiersor day laborers. They knocked off work and strolled down toward the center of Paris in strong bodies, looking dangerous and picturesque in their great loose breeches tucked into their boots, short jackets, and flat bonnets pulled over the right eye. Most of them carried knives or cheap pistols, and they had ancient, traditional grudges against theagents de police.
Those simple and admirable men were remarkably polite to them, and generally contrived to keep at a safe distance when they appeared in force. But the mounted police of the Garde Républicaine tried to herd them back from the shopping centers of the city which theythreatened to loot, and came into immediate conflict with them. As an observer interested in the drama of life, I several times became unpleasantly mixed up withterrassiersand other rash onlookers when the Garde Républicaine rode among them, and I had some narrow escapes from being trampled down.
A hot affair took place round a scaffolding which had been put up for some new building up by Montmartre. Theterrassiers, driven back by the mounted men who used the flat of their swords, made a stronghold of this place, and loosed off their pistols or flung brickbats at the “enemy,” inflicting several casualties. Orders were given to clear out this hornets’ nest, and the Garde Républicaine charged right up to the scaffolding and hauled out the ruffians, who were escorted as prisoners through hooting mobs. It was all very exciting, and Paris was beginning to lose its temper.
Jaurès had called a great meeting ofcheminots—the railway workers—in theSalle de Manège, or riding school, down the rue St. Denis. In the interests ofThe Daily ChronicleI decided to attend it. It was in a low quarter of the city, and vast crowds of factory workers and young hooligans surged up and down the street, jeering at the police, and asking for trouble. Far away, above their heads, I could see the steel helmets with their long black plumes of the Garde Républicaine.
A narrow passage led to theSalle de Manège, where Jaurès had begun his meeting with an assembly of two thousand railway workers, packed tight, as I could see when the door was opened an inch to give them air. It was guarded by a group of strikers who told me in rough language to clear off, when I asked for admission. One of them, however, caught my remark that I belonged toThe Daily Chronicle. It impressed him favorably. “I used to read it when I was a hairdresser in Soho,” he told me. He opened the door enough for me to step inside.
Presently I was sorry he did. The atmosphere was hellish in its heat and stench, arising from the wet sawdust of the riding school and the greasy clothes of this great crowd of men, densely massed. Jaurès was on the tribune, speaking with a powerful, sonorous voice, I forget his words, but remember his appeal to the men to reveal the nobility of labor by their loyalty and their discipline. He was scornful of the renegade Briand who had sold his soul for office and was ready to use bayonets against the liberties of men whose cause he had once defended with passionate hypocrisy.... After an hour of this, I thought I should die of suffocation, and managed to escape.
It was out of the frying pan into the fire, for the crowds in the rue St. Denis were being forced back by the Republican Guard, and I was carried off my feet in the stampede, until I became wedged against the wall of a corner café, with a surging crowd in front. Some one flung a wine bottle at one of the Republican Guards, and unseated him. Immediately the mounted troops rode their horses at the throng outside the café. Tables fell over, chairs were smashed, and a score of men and women fell in a heap through the plate glass windows. There were shrieks of terror, mingled with yells of mirth. I decided to watch the drama, if possible, from a more comfortable observation post, and knocked at the door of one of the tall tenement houses near by. It was opened by a villainous-looking man, shielding the flame of a candle with a filthy hand.
“What do you want?” he asked in French.
“A view from your top window,” I said.
He bargained with me sullenly, and I agreed to five francs for a place on his roof. It was worth that money, to me, to see how the poor of Paris sleep in their cheap lodging houses. I went through the rooms on each floor, by way of rickety old stairs, and in each room werefifteen to twenty people, sitting or lying on iron bedsteads, men in some rooms, women in others. Some of them were sleeping and snoring, others lay half-dressed, reading scraps of newspaper by flickering gas light. Others were undressing, careless of the publicity given to their rags. It was astonishing to me that hardly any of them paid the slightest attention to the scenes in the street below, which were becoming riotous, as I could hear by gusts of noise, in which the shrieks of women mingled with hoarse groans and yells and a kind of sullen chant with the words, “Hue! Hue! Hue! A bas la police. A bas la police! Hue! Hue! Hue!”
This house was older than the French Revolution, and I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps when the tumbrils were passing on their way to the guillotine, men and women like this were lying abed, or yawning and combing their matted hair, or playing cards by candlelight, as two fellows here, not bothering to glance beyond the windows at such a common sight as another batch of aristocrats going to their death.
From the roof I looked down on the turbulent crowd, charged again and again by the Republican Guards until the street was clear. Presently thecheminotscame surging out of theSalle de Manège, with Jaurès at their head, walking very slowly. The police let Jaurès get past, and then broke up the procession behind him, with needless brutality, as it seemed to me. Many men were knocked down, and fell under the horses’ hoofs. Others were beaten by blunt swords.
Not only Paris was in the throes of the general strike, but all France. It was a serious threat to the French government and to the social life of the people. Briand, who had played with revolutionary ideas as a younger man, showed now that he had the wisdom that comes from responsibility, and the courage to apply it. He called certain classes to the colors. If they disobeyed,it would be treason to the Flag, punishable by death. If they obeyed, it would break the general strike, as they would be ordered, as soldiers, to run the trains, and distribute supplies. It was a great risk to take, threatening civil war, but he took it, believing that few men would refuse obedience to military discipline. He was right, and by this means he crushed the general strike and broke the power of the trade unions.
I interviewed him at that time, and remember my first meeting with that man who afterward, when the World War had ended in the defeat of Germany, held the office of Premier again and endeavored vainly to save France from the ruin which followed victory.
I waited for him, by appointment, in a great salon furnished in the style of Louis XV, with gilded chairs and a marble-topped table at which Napoleon had once sat as Emperor. I was chatting with one of his secretaries, when the door opened, and a tall, heavily built man with large, dark, melancholy eyes, came into the room. He looked at me somberly, and I stared back, not realizing that it was the Prime Minister of France. Then the secretary whispered “Monsieur Briand,” and he held out his hand to me. We had a long talk, or, rather, he talked and I listened, impressed by the apparent frankness and simplicity and courage of the man.
He told me how great had been the danger to France from the forces of anarchy let loose by the Confédération Générale de Travail by their action of the general strike, and he defended the policy by which he had broken that threat against the authority of government. He did not disguise from me that he had risked not only his political life and reputation, but even the very peace and stability of France. But that risk had been necessary, because the alternative would have been a weak and shameful surrender to anarchy and revolution.
Jaurès was beaten, as he deserved to be, on that issue.His worst defeat was not then, but in August of 1914, when those German Socialists, in whose pacifism and brotherhood of man he had believed, supported the challenge of their war lords against France and Russia, and marched with all the rest toward the French frontier. The whole of Jaurès’s life struggle for international peace was made vain by the beating of drums for the greatest war in history. Among his own people there were many, once spellbound by his oratory and loyal to his leadership, who now abused him as the man who had weakened the defenses of France by his antimilitarist influence. There were some, even, who said “Jaurès betrayed us to the Enemy!”
On that night when many nations of Europe answered the call to arms, stupefied, conscious of enormous terrors approaching all human life, hearing already, in imagination, the thunder of a world of guns that had not yet opened fire, I paced the streets of Paris with a friend, wondering how soon he and I would be caught up in that death struggle.
“Let us turn in at theCroissant,” he said. “We must eat, though the world goes mad.”
It was late, and when we arrived at the restaurant in the rue Montmartre, it was closed and guarded by police.
“What has happened?” I asked, and some one in the crowd answered with intense emotion:
“Jaurès is assassinated! He was shot there, as he sat at dinner.”
He was shot from behind a curtain, in a plush-covered seat where often I had sat, by some young man who believed that, in killing Jaurès, he was helping to secure the victory of France.
I saw his funeralcortège. They gave him a great funeral. Ministers of France, men of all parties, dignitaries of the Church, marched behind his coffin, andbehind the red flags which were blown by a strong wind. It was not love for him, but fear of the people which caused that demonstration at his burial. It was an appeal for thatUnion Sacréeof all classes by which alone the menace to the life of France might be resisted. There need have been no fear. There was hardly a man in France who did not offer his life as a willing sacrifice, in that war which seemed not only against France and her friends, but against civilization itself and all humanity. So thepoilusbelieved, with simple faith, unshaken by any doubt—in the peaceful policy of France and the unprovoked aggression of Germany.
The restaurant in which Jaurès was killed—theCroissant, with the sign of the Turkish Crescent—was one of the few in Paris open all night for the use of journalists who slept by day. Needless to say, other night birds, even more disreputable, found this place a pleasant sanctuary in the wee sma’ hours. I went there often for some meal which might have been dinner, lunch, or breakfast, any time between 2 and 5A.M.I was with my colleague, Henri Bourdin, during the Italian war in Tripoli.
Our job was to receive long dispatches over the telephone, from Italian correspondents, and transmit them by telephone to London. It was a maddening task, because after very few minutes of conversation, the telephone cut us off from one of the Italian cities, or from London, and only by curses and prayers and passionate pleading to lady operators could we establish contact again.
Though the war in Tripoli was a trivial episode, wiped out in our memory by another kind of war, the Italian correspondents wrote millions of words about every affair of outposts—all of which streamed over the telephone in florid Italian. I had a Sicilian who translated that Italian into frightful French, which I, in turn, translated intosomewhat less frightful English, and conveyed by telephone to London.
It went on hour after hour, day after day, and night after night, especially from a man named Bevione. I hated his eloquence so much that I made a solemn vow to kill him, if ever I met him in the flesh.... I met him in Bulgaria, during another war, but he was so charming that I forgave him straightway for all the agony he had inflicted on me. Besides, undoubtedly, he would have killed me first.
The Sicilian was a marvel. Between the telephone calls he narrated all his love affairs since the age of fourteen, and they were innumerable. During the telephone calls, it was he who pleaded with the lady operators not to cut him off, or to get his call again. He punctuated every sentence with a kiss. “Madonna!... Bacio!... Bacio!” He gave these unknown beauties (perhaps they were as ugly as sin!) a million kisses over the telephone wires, and by this frenzy of amorous demonstration seriously disturbed the Paris exchange, and held up all our rivals.
Henri Bourdin, in intervals of waiting, used to make the time pass by acting all the most famous dramas of the modern French stage, and I vow that this single man used to give me the illusion of having seen the entire company of the Comédie Française, so vivid were his character studies and descriptions.
Abandoning the Sicilian to any opportunities of love he might find beyond the telephone receiver, Bourdin and I used to leave the office on the Boulevard des Capucines just as the light of dawn was creeping into the streets of Paris, when thechiffonnierspicked at the rags in the dustbins, and pale ladies of the night passed like ghosts to their lodgings in mean streets.
We made our way sometimes to the markets—Les Halles—where the women of the Revolution used togather with their knitting and their gossip of the latest heads to fall in the basket of the guillotine. Many of the houses round about belong to that period, and Bourdin and I used to take coffee in old eating and drinking houses like the “Chien qui Fume” (The Dog Who Smokes), which still have on their walls the iron brackets for the lanterns on which French aristocrats were hanged by infuriated mobs, in 1793.
They were still frequented by strange and sinister-looking characters. I remember one group, certainly as queer as any I have seen. Bourdin and I were seated at table when they came in excitedly—about thirty men and women, all laughing and jabbering. The men wore long hair, very wild and unkempt, with flowing black ties of “La Vallière” style. The women had short hair, cut with straight fringes. Presently another man appeared, astoundingly like Ary Scheffer’s study of Our Lord, with long pale hair, and straw-colored beard, and watery blue eyes. At his coming, the company became delirious with enthusiasm, while he went gravely round the circle and kissed each man and woman on the lips.
It was Bourdin who explained to me the mystery of these fantastic creatures. They belonged to the most advanced Anarchist society in Paris. The man who appeared last had just been acquitted by the French courts on a charge of kidnapping and locking up one of his fellow anarchists, who had betrayed the society to the police.
The only time in which I myself have been in the hands of the French police was in the early days of the war, while I was waiting in Paris for my papers as accredited war correspondent with the British Armies in the field. This unpleasant experience was due to my ceaseless curiosity in life and the rash acceptance of a casual invitation.
A friend of mine had become acquainted with two ladies who sang at “Olympia,” and I happened to be in ataxicab with him when they approached the door of his vehicle as we alighted.
It was eleven o’clock at night, and it was murmured by the two ladies that they were going to a “reception” at some apartment near the Étoile—a most aristocratic neighborhood. They would be delighted if we accompanied them. I was tired, and did not wish to go, but my friend Brown, always fresh at midnight, saw amusement ahead, and begged me to come.
“For an hour, then,” I said.
In the cab on the way to the Étoile, Brown sang mock Italian opera with one of the ladies, who had an excellent voice and a sense of humor. I exchanged a few remarks with the other lady, and was slightly disturbed by the somewhat German accent with which she spoke French.
Certainly, the apartment in which presently we found ourselves, in an avenue by the Étoile, was extremely elegant, and crowded with men and women in evening dress, who looked highly respectable. Among them were a few French officers in uniform and one English officer. The hostess was a charming-looking lady, with snow-white hair. There was a little music, a little dancing, and polite conversation. It was decorous and dull.
At the end of an hour I spoke to Brown.
“I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”
He informed me in a whisper that if I went I should be losing something very good in the way of an adventure.
“This is, undoubtedly, one of the most criminal haunts in Paris,” he said. “I can smell abomination! Something melodramatic will happen before long, or I’ll eat my hat.”
I was surprised, and alarmed. I had no desire to be at home in a criminal haunt in time of war. I decided even more firmly to go, and went to take leave of the charming lady with the snow-white hair.
She seemed vexed that I should desire to go so soon,but seeing that I was decided, made a somewhat curious request.
“Do you mind going out by the garden entrance—through the French windows? We do not care to show lights through the front door.C’est la guerre!”
I went out through the garden entrance, followed by Brown, who said I was missing the fun.
It was dark in the garden, and I stumbled on the way to a little garden gate, twenty yards away from the house.
As I put my hand on the latch of the gate, I was aware of a large number of black shadows coming toward me out of the bushes beyond. Instinctively I beat a hasty retreat back to the house. Something had happened to it. Where the French windows had been was now a steel door. Brown was doing something mysterious, bending low and making pencil marks on a white slab of the wall.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I’m identifying the house, in case of future need,” he answered.
I made a tattoo with my stick against the steel door. My one foolish desire was to get back into the house, away from those black figures outside the garden gate. It was too late. Directly I knocked on the door, a score of them rushed into the garden, and I was seized and carried in strong arms until, at a considerable distance, I was dumped down under the Eiffel Tower, in charge of a dozenagents de police. Groups of men and women in evening dress, some of whom I recognized as visitors at the reception of the charming lady with the snow-white hair, were also in charge of strong bodies of police. My friend Brown was a prisoner some twenty yards away. It was a cold night, but, philosophically, to the amazement of the French police, he lay down on the grass and went to sleep.
We were kept under the Eiffel Tower for two hours, at the end of which time a motor car drew up, with agentleman wearing the tricolor sash of a French prefect. It was for him that we had been waiting. Strangely enough, we were all taken back to the apartment from which we had come, and there each person was subjected to an examination by the prefect and his assistants. There was evident terror among the men and women who had passed the evening in the house of mystery.
Brown and I were liberated after an inspection of our passports. On the way home I asked Brown for a little explanation, for I could understand nothing of the business.
He understood perfectly.
“That place was a gambling den. The police were looking for German spies, as well as French officers absent without leave. I told you we should see something worth while!”
I confess I did not think it worth while. I had had a nasty fright, caught a bad cold, and missed a good night’s sleep.
But it was certainly a little bit of melodrama, which one may find in Paris more easily than in any city in the world.