“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,Families by tens and dozens....”
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,Families by tens and dozens....”
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,Families by tens and dozens....”
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens....”
Every night when the city folk had left their chop-houses or their warehouses, this mysterious fellow with the greenish eyes went in quietly with four big wire cages, some netting, and a long willow wand. The nets, which had pouched pockets, he put up against the passages and doorways. Then, in the absolute darkness, he stood motionless for an hour. Presently there came a patter of tiny feet, a squeaking, a glint of ravenous little eyes. They were all round him, searching for the crumbs, ravenously. Suddenly he uttered a strange beastlike cry, in his throat, like yodeling, and whipped the floor with his long white wand. The rats were mesmerized, stupefied. They tried to make their way back to their holes, but fell into the poacher’s nets, dozens and scores, on a good hunting night. He emptied them into the cages, covered them with white cloths, stood motionless again, waited again, made a second bag. At dawn he departed with his sack well loaded, to sell to “fancy gents” at four-pence each, in the suburbs of London.
The foreign element in London was, on the whole, very law abiding. For centuries London had been the sanctuary of political refugees from many countries of persecution, and it was a tradition, and a good tradition, of England, that no questions should be asked as to the political faith of those who desired shelter from their own rulers. Even the revolutionaries of Europe, and the “intellectual” anarchists, had the good sense, for a long time, not to stir up trouble or attack the laws of the land in which they found such generous exile. This rule, however, was abruptly broken by a gang of foreign bandits who carried out a series of alarming robberies, and, when tracked down at last, shot a police inspector and wounded others.
One of their own men was mortally wounded in the affray and carried bleeding to a house in Grove Street, Whitechapel, one of the worst streets in London, wherehe died. He was a young Russian, as handsome as a Greek god, in the opinion of the surgeons of the London Hospital, with whom I happened to be lunching when one of the juniors rushed in with the news that the corpse had been secured, against all competitors, by the “London.”
It was the death of this Russian which gave the clue to the habits and whereabouts of the gang with whom he had been connected. Their women were caught, and “blew the gaff,” and it was discovered that the leader of the gang was another young Russian called Peter the Painter. Scores of Scotland Yard detectives set out on the trail, and another police inspector lost his life in the endeavor to arrest three of the bandits at a house in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, where they defied all attempts at capture by a ruthless use of automatic pistols. Siege was laid to the house by the police and detectives, armed with revolvers, and an astounding episode happened in the heart of London.
For some reason, which I have forgotten, I went very early that morning to theChronicleoffice, and was greeted by the news editor with the statement that a hell of a battle was raging in Sidney Street. He advised me to go and look at it.
I took a taxi, and drove to the corner of that street, where I found a dense crowd observing the affair as far as they dared peer round the angle of the walls from adjoining streets. Heedless at the moment of danger, which seemed to me ridiculous, I stood boldly opposite Sidney Street and looked down its length of houses. Immediately in front of me four soldiers of one of the Guards’ regiments lay on their stomachs, protected from the dirt of the road by newspaper “sandwich” boards, firing their rifles at a house halfway down the street. Another young Guardsman, leaning against a wall, took random shots at intervals while he smoked a woodbine. As I stood near him, he winked and said, “What a game!”
It was something more than a game. Bullets were flicking off the wall like peas, plugging holes into the dirty yellow brick, and ricocheting fantastically. One of them took a neat chip out of a policeman’s helmet, and he said, “Well, I’ll be blowed!” and laughed in a foolish way. It was before the war, when we learned to know more about the meaning of bullets. Another struck a stick on which a journalistic friend of mine was leaning in an easy, graceful way. His support and his dignity suddenly departed from him.
“That’s funny!” he said, seriously, as he saw his stick neatly cut in half at his feet.
A cinematograph operator, standing well inside Sidney Street, was winding his handle vigorously, quite oblivious of the whiz of bullets which were being fired at a slanting angle from the house, which seemed to be the target of the prostrate Guardsmen.
A large police inspector, of high authority, shouted a command to his men.
“What’s all that nonsense? Clear the people back! Clear ’em right back! We don’t want a lot of silly corpses lying round.”
A cordon of police pushed back the dense crowd, treading on the toes of those who would not move fast enough.
I found myself in a group of journalists.
“Get back there!” shouted the police.
But we were determined to see the drama out. It was more sensational than any “movie” show. Immediately opposite was a tall gin palace—“The Rising Sun.” Some strategist said, “That’s the place for us!” We raced across before the police could outflank us.
A Jew publican stood in the doorway, sullenly.
“Whatcher want?” he asked.
“Your roof,” said one of the journalists.
“A quid each, and worth it,” said the Jew.
At that time, before the era of paper money, some of uscarried golden sovereigns in our pockets, one to a “quid.” Most of the others did, but, as usual, I had not more than eighteenpence. A friend lent me the necessary coin, which the Jew slipped into his pocket as he let me pass. Twenty of us, at least, gained access to the roof of “The Rising Sun.”
It was a good vantage point, or O.P., as we should have called it later in history. It looked right across to the house in Sidney Street in which Peter the Painter and his friends were defending themselves to the death—a tall, thin house of three stories, with dirty window blinds. In the house immediately opposite were some more Guardsmen, with pillows and mattresses stuffed into the windows in the nature of sandbags as used in trench warfare. We could not see the soldiers, but we could see the effect of their intermittent fire, which had smashed every pane of glass and kept chipping off bits of brick in the anarchists’ abode.
The street had been cleared of all onlookers, but a group of detectives slunk along the walls on the anarchists’ side of the street at such an angle that they were safe from the slanting fire of the enemy. They had to keep very close to the wall, because Peter and his pals were dead shots and maintained something like a barrage fire with their automatics. Any detective or policeman who showed himself would have been sniped in a second, and these men were out to kill.
The thing became a bore as I watched it for an hour or more, during which time Mr. Winston Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, came to take command of active operations, thereby causing an immense amount of ridicule in next day’s papers. With a bowler hat pushed firmly down on his bulging brow, and one hand in his breast pocket, like Napoleon on the field of battle, he peered round the corner of the street, and afterward, as we learned, ordered up some field guns to blow the house to bits.
That never happened, for a reason which we on “The Rising Sun” were quick to see.
In the top-floor room of the anarchists’ house we observed a gas jet burning, and presently some of us noticed the white ash of burnt paper fluttering out of a chimney pot.
“They’re burning documents,” said one of my friends.
They were burning more than that. They were setting fire to the house, upstairs and downstairs. The window curtains were first to catch alight, then volumes of black smoke, through which little tongues of flame licked up, poured through the empty window frames. They must have used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the whole house was burning with amazing rapidity.
“Did you ever see such a game in London!” exclaimed the man next to me on the roof of the public house.
For a moment I thought I saw one of the murderers standing on the window sill. But it was a blackened curtain which suddenly blew outside the window frame and dangled on the sill.
A moment later I had one quick glimpse of a man’s arm with a pistol in his hand. He fired and there was a quick flash. At the same moment a volley of shots rang out from the Guardsmen opposite. It is certain that they killed the man who had shown himself, for afterward they found his body (or a bit of it) with a bullet through the skull. It was not long afterward that the roof fell in with an upward rush of flame and sparks. The inside of the house from top to bottom was a furnace.
The detectives, with revolvers ready, now advanced in Indian file. One of them ran forward and kicked at the front door. It fell in, and a sheet of flame leaped out.... No other shot was fired from within. Peter the Painter and his fellow bandits were charred cinders in the bonfire they had made.
So ended the “Battle of Sidney Street,” which createdintense excitement and indignation throughout England, and threw a glare of publicity on to the secret haunts of the foreign anarchists in London.
I was one of those who directed the searchlight, for the very next day, with Eddy, my colleague, I took up residence at 62 Sidney Street, and explored the underworld of Whitechapel and the Anarchist clubs of the Russian and German Jews, who were the leading spirits of a philosophy which is now known as Bolshevism. And in that quest I had some strange adventures, and met some very queer folk.
Before taking lodgings in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, to study the haunts of Peter the Painter and his fellow “thugs,” I tried to get a room in the house in Grove Street to which the handsome young Russian had been carried when he was mortally wounded by the police.
With my companion Eddy, I knocked at the door of this dark little dwelling place, in a sinister street with a railed sidewalk, where foreign-looking men lounged about in doorways, and young drabs with painted faces started out at dusk for the lighted highways. Eddy and I believed ourselves to be disguised adequately for East End life. We had put on our oldest clothes and cloth caps, but we were both aware that our appearance in Grove Street aroused immediate suspicion. After three knocks, the door was opened on a chain, and a frowsy woman spoke to me in Yiddish. I answered in German, which she seemed to understand. Upon my asking for a room, she undid the chain and opened the door a little way, so that I could see the crooked wooden stairs up which the man’s body had been carried by two of those men who now lay burned to death in Sidney Street.
The woman asked us to wait, and then went down a stinking passage and spoke to a man, as I could hear by the voices. While we waited, shadows crept up out of the dark street about us, and I saw that we were surrounded by the foreign-looking men who had been lounging in the doorways. The woman came back with a tall, bearded man who spoke English.
“What do you want?”
“A room for the night.”
“What the hell for?” he asked. “Do you know there’s been a murder in this house?”
“That makes no difference,” I said, casually. “It’s late and raining, and we want to sleep.”
“Not here. We don’t want no narks in this house. We’re honest people.”
“All right,” said Eddy. “We’ll go somewhere else.”
He was moving off, when the man took hold of his arm.
“Perhaps you won’t,” he snarled. “I may get into trouble about this, with the cops. You’ll stay here till I send a word round to the station.”
He gave a whistle, and the men lurking in the darkness about us pressed closer. They were young Jews of Russian type, anæmic and white-faced.
He shoved the man off, and pushed his way through the crowd. They jabbered in a foreign tongue, and followed a little way, but did not touch us.
“Let go of my arm, or I’ll hit you,” said Eddy.
The rain fell faster, and we were splashed with mud. With good warm houses in the West of London, it was ridiculous to be tramping about the East like this, homeless and cold. We knocked at many doors in other streets, and every answer we had was a rough refusal in Yiddish or German to take us in. Not even when we offered as much as a sovereign for a night’s shelter.
“These people don’t like the look of us,” said Eddy. “What’s the matter with our money?”
The truth was, I think, that the affair in Sidney Street had thoroughly scared the foreign element in the East End, and these people to whom we applied for rooms were on their guard at once against two strangers who might be police spies or criminals in search of a hiding place. They were not accepting trouble either way.
It was late at night when at last we persuaded an Israelite, and master tailor, to rent us a room in SidneyStreet, next door to the house in which Peter the Painter and his friends had defied the armed police of London, and escaped capture by dying in the flames.
From that address Eddy and I wrote a series of articles describing our experiences in the East End, among anarchists, criminals, and costers. The anarchists were the most interesting, and we visited them in their night clubs.
We went, I remember, to a Russian hotel in Whitechapel, where the chief anarchist club in London had established its headquarters through fear of a police raid at its old address. Certainly they took no precautions to ensure secrecy, for even outside the hotel, down a side street, Eddy and I could hear the stentorian voice of one of their orators, and see the shadows of his audience on the window blinds. We went into the hotel and found the stairs leading to the club room densely packed by young men and women, for the most part respectably, and even smartly, dressed, of obviously foreign race—Russian, German, and Jewish.
Eddy and I wormed our way upstairs by slow degrees, sufficiently close to hear the long, excited speech that was being made in German. Here and there at least I heard snatches of it, and such phrases as “the tyranny of the police,” “the fear of thebourgeoisie,” “the dictatorship of the people,” “the liberty of speech,” and “the rights of labor to absolute self-government.” Such phrases as these were loudly applauded whenever the speaker paused.
“Who is speaking?” I asked of a good-looking young fellow sitting on the stairs.
He answered sullenly:
“Rocca. What’s that to you?”
Presently there was a whispering about us. Sullen faces under bowler hats held close consultation. Then there was a movement on the stairs, jamming Eddy and myself against the banisters.
“What do you want here?” asked one of the young men, aggressively. “If you’re police narks, we’ll turn you out!”
“Yes, or do you in!” said another.
“We don’t want any bleeding spies here,” said a woman.
Other expressions of hostility were uttered, and there was an ugly look on the faces of these foreign youths.
I thought it best to tell them frankly that I was merely a newspaper reporter onThe Daily Chronicle, finding a little descriptive material. I should be interested to hear the speech upstairs, if they had no objection.
This candor disarmed them, or most of them, though a few raised the cry of “Turn them out!”
But an elderly man who seemed to have some authority raised his hand, and took me under his protection.
“That’s all right. We’ve nothing to hide. IfThe Daily Chroniclewants our views, it can have them. Better come and see Mrs. Rocca.”
The crowd made way for us on the stairs and my companion and I were led to a narrow landing outside the room, where the orator still bellowed in German to a packed audience, and then into a little slip of a room which I found to be an ordinary bathroom.
On the edge of the bath sat a well-dressed, rather good-looking and pleasant-eyed lady, to whom I was introduced, and who was introduced to me as Mrs. Rocca. She was the wife of the orator in the next room, and, like himself, German.
She spoke English perfectly, and in the presence of half a dozen men who crowded in to listen, we had an argument lasting at least an hour, on the subject of anarchy. She began by disclaiming, for the anarchists in London, all knowledge of and responsibility for the affair of Peter the Painter and his associates. They were merely common thieves. But it was laughable, shethought, what a panic fear had been caused in middle-class London by the killing of a policeman or two. It filled columns of the newspapers, with enormous headlines. It seemed to startle them as something too horrible and monstrous for imagination. Why all that agitation over the deaths of two guardians of property, when there was no agitation at all, no public outcry, no fierce clamor for vengeance, because every night men and women of the toiling classes were being killed by the inhuman conditions of their lives, in foul slums, in overcrowded bedrooms, in poisonous trades, in sweated industries, as the helpless slaves of that capitalistic system which protected itself by armies of police. The English people were the world’s worst hypocrites. They hid a putrid mass of suffering, corruption, and disease, caused by modern industrialism, and pretended that it did not exist.
“What is your philosophy?” I asked. “How do you propose to remedy our present state?”
“I am an intellectual Nihilist,” said the lady very calmly. “I believe in the ultimate abolition of all law, all government, all police, and in a free society with perfect liberty to the individual, educated in self-discipline, love for others, and moral purpose.”
I need not here repeat her arguments, nor their fantastic disregard of human nature and the stark realities of life. She was well read, and quoted all manner of writers from Plato to Bernard Shaw, and I marveled that such a woman should be living in the squalor of Whitechapel as a preacher of the destructive gospel. We had a vehement argument, in which Eddy joined, and though we waxed hot, and disagreed with each other on all issues, we maintained the courtesies of debate, in which, beyond any mock modesty, I was hopelessly out-argued by this brilliant, extraordinary, and dangerous woman.
It was from acquaintances made in that club that we were led into other byways of Whitechapel and heard strange and terrible tales of Russian revolutionaries, who showed me the sores of fetters and chains about their wrists and legs, and swore eternal hatred of the Russian Czardom, which crushed the souls of men and women and tortured their bodies. They were, doubtless, true tales, and it was with the remembrance of those horrors that the Russian Revolution was made, in all its cruelty and terror, until the autocracy of the Czars was replaced by the tyranny of Lenin and the Soviet State, when the dream of Russian liberty was killed, for a generation at least, in the ruin and famine and pestilence of the people.
Eddy and I dined in the kosher restaurants of the East End, went to the Jewish theater, and explored the haunts of the Russian and Oriental Jews of London.
In our wanderings we discovered the most Oriental place this side of Constantinople. It was Hessell Street Market, in a deep sunken road, reached by flights of steep steps through blocks of buildings in the Commercial Road, and quite unknown to most Londoners. On each side of the sunken street were wooden booths which looked as though they had been there since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at night, when we went, they were lit, luridly, by naptha flares. In these booths sat, cross-legged, old bearded men with hooked noses, who looked as though they were contemporaries of Moses and the Prophets. They were selling cheap Oriental rugs, colored cottons and silks, sham jewelery, rabbit skins, kosher meat, skinny fowls, and embroidered slippers. The crowd marketing in this place, chaffering, quarreling, picking over the wares, with the noise of a Turkish bazaar, were mostly of Oriental types. Some of the men wore fur caps, or astrakhan caps, like the Persians who cross the Galata bridge at Constantinople. Others wore fur coats reaching to their heels, and top hats ofancient architecture. It was the market of the London Ghetto, and thronged with flashy young Jews and Jewesses, starved-looking men of Slav aspect, and shifty-eyed boys who were professional pickpockets and sold the harvest of their day’s toil to the old villains in the booths.
It was a young thief who acted as our guide to some of these places, and he performed a delicate operation in the way of housebreaking for our benefit. We were eager to get a photograph of Peter the Painter, and he told us that he knew of the only one in existence. It belonged to a “young lady” who had been Peter’s friend, and naturally wished to keep secret her association with this bandit. It stood on her bedroom mantelpiece, and if we would give him half an hour, he would “pinch” it for us. But he would have to replace it after we had made use of it. At the end of an hour he returned with the photograph of a good-looking young Russian, and told us that it had been an “easy job.” This photograph was reproduced as the only authentic portrait of Peter the Painter, but I have grave doubts about it.
With this lad, who was an intelligent fellow and vowed that henceforth he was going to lead an honest life, as burglary was a mug’s game, he went into the cellars below a certain restaurant which were used as a library of anarchist literature. Doubtless there was more high explosive here, in the way of destructive philosophy, than one might find in Woolwich Arsenal, but we did not examine those dangerous little pamphlets and books which preached the gospel of revolution. At that time, before the advent of Bolshevism in the history of the world, that propaganda seemed to have no bearing upon the ordinary facts of life, and did not interest us. It was at a later period that the international anarchist in London translated his textbooks and touted them outside the gates of English factories, and slipped them into the hands of unemployed men.
In those pre-war days, the foreign revolutionaries in London kept themselves aloof from English life and, as I have said, generally avoided unpleasant contact with the English law. Living in the foulest lodgings—I sicken still at the memory of the stench we encountered in some of their tenement houses—many of these young tailors, cigarette makers, and factory hands dressed themselves up in the evening and came down West with their girl friends to the music halls and night clubs in the neighborhood of Piccadilly, leaving the older folk to their squalor and the children to the playground of the streets and courts. Now and again they stabbed each other, or cut each other’s throats, but, as a rule, such incidents were hushed up by their neighbors, and the London police were not invited to inquire into affrays between these aliens.... The war made a great clearance of these foreigners, and many of their old haunts have disappeared.
By the merest chance I saw the disappearance of one of the oldest and most historic haunts of London lawbreakers. It was the abandonment of the Old Bailey, before its grim and ancient structure was pulled down to make way for the new and imposing building where Justice again pursues its relentless way with those who fall into its grip. Ever since Roman days there has been a prison on the site of the Old Bailey, and for hundreds of years men and women have languished there in dark cells, rattled their chains behind its bars, rotted with jail fever, and died on the gallows tree within its walls. The dark cruelties of English justice which, in the old days, was merciless with all who broke its penal laws, however young and innocent till then, belong to forgotten history, for the most part, but as time is counted in history, it is not long since the judges of the Old Bailey condemned young girls to death for stealing a few ribbons or handkerchiefs, and my own grandfather saw their executions, in batches.
But on the last day of the Old Bailey, when the police were withdrawn from its courtroom and corridors, before its furniture and fittings were to be put up for public auction, the crowd I met there did not remember those old ruthless days. They were the criminals of a later generation who had been put in the cells as “drunks and disorderlies,” as pickpockets and “petty larcenies,” brought up for judgment with the knowledge that short sentences would be inflicted on them.
It was one of the most remarkable crowds I have ever seen. Some queer sentiment had brought all these crooks and jailbirds to see the last of their old “home.” Frowzy women and “flash” girls, old scamps of the casual ward and doss house, habitual drunkards, and young thieves, sporting touts and burglars of the Bill Sikes brand, had gathered together, as though by special invitation, to the “private view.” Laughing, excited, full of loquacious reminiscences, they wandered through the charge room and the cells where they had been “lagged,” pointed out the cell from which Jack Sheppard had escaped, and other cells once inhabited by famous murderers and criminals, and surged into the great court where they had stood in the dock facing the scarlet-robed judge and all the majesty of law. They stood in the dock again, lots of them, jeering, with bursts of hoarse laughter at the merry jest.
They crowded up to the judge’s throne. One young coster, with a gift of mimicry, put on a judicial manner, wagged his head solemnly, and sentenced his pals to death. Shrieks of laughter greeted his pantomime. An old ruffian with a legal-looking face, sodden with drink, played the part of prosecuting counsel, addressed an imaginary judge as “M’lud,” the crowd as “gentlemen of the jury,” and asserted that the evidence was overwhelming as to the guilt of the prisoner, who was indeed “a naughty, naughty man.”
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but thetruth!” screamed a girl with big feathers in her hat, and she laughed hysterically at her own humor.
There was something grim and tragic beneath the comedy of the scene. This travesty of the law by those who had been in its clutches revealed a vicious psychology lost to all shame and decency, but was also a condemnation of society which produced such types of men and women, for the most part victims of slum life, foul surroundings, and evil upbringing, tolerated, and indeed created, by the social system of England. It needed the pen of Dickens to describe this scene, and truly it was a hark-back to the days of Dickens himself. I was astounded that such characters as Bill Sikes, Old Fagin and Nancy, and Charley Bates should still remain in the London of Edward VII, as they appeared in the living image that day in the Old Bailey.
I wandered upstairs into deserted rooms. They were strewn with papers ankle-deep, and on the table I saw a bulky volume, bound in iron, which was the old charge book, dating from 1730. To this day I regret that I did not “pinch” it, for it was an historic relic which, with scandalous carelessness, was thrown away. But I was afraid of carrying off such a big thing, lest I should find myself on a more modern charge-sheet at another court. I did, however, stuff a number of papers into my pockets, and when I reached home and examined them, I found that they were also historical documents of great interest.
One of them, for instance, was a list of eighty convicts, or so, condemned to penal servitude and transportation to Botany Bay. Many of them—boys and girls—had been sentenced to death for the crime of stealing a few potatoes, a pinafore, some yards of cotton, or, in one case, for breaking a threshing machine, and had been “graciously reprieved by His Majesty King William IV” and condemned to that ferocious punishment of penal servitude in the convict settlements of Australia, whichto many of them was a living death, until by flogging, and insanitary conditions, and disease, death itself released them. That was but a few years before the reign of Queen Victoria!
It was in the new Old Bailey, very handsomely paneled, nicely warmed, lighted with delicate effects of color through high windows—doubtless the clerks of the court thought it quite a privilege for the criminals to be judged in such a place—that I saw the trial of that famous and astonishing little murderer, Doctor Crippen.
It will be remembered that he was captured on a ship bound for Halifax, with a girl named Ethel le Neve, dressed up in boy’s clothes, with whom he had eloped after killing his wife and dissecting her body for burial in his cellar.
Crippen looked a respectable little man, with weak, watery eyes and a drooping moustache, so ordinary a type of middle-class business man in London that quite a number of people, including one of my own friends, were arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went forth.
I was at Bournemouth at that time, in one of the aviation meetings which were held in the early days of flying. It was celebrated by fancy fêtes, open-air carnivals, fancy-dress balls, and all kinds of diversions. The most respectable town in England, inhabited mostly by retired colonels, well-to-do spinsters, and invalids, seemed to take leave of its senses in a wild outburst of frivolity. Even the Mayor was to be seen in the broad glare of sunshine, wearing a false nose. Into that atmosphere of false noses and fancy frocks came telegrams to several newspaper correspondents from their editors.
“Scotland Yard believes Crippen at Bournemouth. Please get busy.”
That was the tenor of the telegram sent to me, and I saw by the pink envelopes received by friends at tablein the Grand Hotel one night that they had received similar messages. One by one they stole out, looking mightily secretive—in search of Crippen, who, by that time was nearing Halifax.
With a friend named Harold Ashton, a well-known “crime sleuth,” I went into the hall, and after a slight discussion decided that if Crippen was in Bournemouth it was not our job to find him. We were, for the time, experts in aviation, and couldn’t be put off by foolish murders.
As we went upstairs, Ashton put his head over the banisters, and then uttered an exclamation.
“Scotland Yard!”
Looking over the stair rail, I saw a pair of boots, belonging to a man sitting in the hall. True enough, they had come from Scotland Yard, according to the tradition which enables any detective to be recognized at a glance by any criminal. One of those detectives had been sent down on the false rumor, and probably hoped to find Doctor Crippen and Ethel le Neve disguised as Pierrot and Columbine on the pier.
Ashton and I decided to have a game with the man. We wrote a note in block letters, as follows:
“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR DOCTOR CRIPPEN? IF SO, BEWARE!”
By a small bribe, we hired a boy to deliver it to the detective, and then depart quickly.
The effect was obviously disconcerting to the man, for he looked most uneasy, and then hurried out of the hotel. Doubtless he could not understand how anybody in Bournemouth could know of his mission. Ashton and I followed him, and he was immediately aware that he was being shadowed. He went into a public house and ordered a glass of beer which he did not drink. Ashton and I did the same, and were quick on his heels when heslipped out by a side door. We kept up this game for quite a time, until we tired of it, and to this day the detective must wonder who shadowed him so closely in Bournemouth, and for what fell purpose.
Curiously, by the absurd chances of journalistic life, I became mixed up in the Crippen case, not only by having to describe the trial, but by having to write the life story of Ethel le Neve. That girl, who had been Crippen’s typist, was quite a pretty and attractive little creature, and in spite of her flight with him in boy’s clothes, the police were satisfied that she was entirely innocent of the murder. Anyhow, she was not charged, and upon her liberation she was immediately captured at a price, byThe Daily Chronicle, who saw that her narrative would make an enormous sensation. They provided her with a furnished flat, under an assumed name, and for weeksThe Daily Chronicleoffice was swarming with her sister’s family, while office boys fetched the milk for the baby, and sub-editors paid the outstanding debts of the brother-in-law, in order that Ethel le Neve should reserve her tale exclusively to the nice, kind paper! Such is the dignity of modern journalism, desperate for a “scoop.”
Eddy and I were again associated in the extraction of Ethel le Neve’s tale. Eddy, as a young barrister, now well-known and prosperous at the Bar, cross-examined her artfully, and persistently, with the firm belief that she knew all about the murder. Never once, however, did he trap her into any admission.
From my point of view, the psychology of the girl was extremely interesting. Just a little Cockney girl, from a family of humble class and means, she had astonishing and unusual qualities. It is characteristic of her that when she was staying in Brussels with Crippen, disguised as a boy—and a remarkably good-looking boy she appeared—because she knew that Crippen was wanted by the law for “some old thing or other,” which she didn’tbother to find out, she spent most of her time visiting the art galleries and museums of the Belgian capital. She had regarded the whole episode as a great “lark,” until at Halifax detectives came aboard and arrested the fugitives on a charge of murder. She admitted to me that, putting two and two together, little incidents that had seemed trivial at the time, and remembering queer words spoken by Crippen—“the doctor,” as she called him—she had no doubt now of his guilt. But, as she also admitted, that made no difference to her love for him. “He was mad when he did it,” she said, “and he was mad for me.” That was the extraordinary thing—that deep, sincere, and passionate love between the little weak-eyed, middle-aged quack doctor, and this common, pretty little Cockney girl.
I read Crippen’s love letters, written to Ethel le Neve from prison, immensely long letters, written on prison paper in a neat little writing, without a blot or a fault. All told, there were forty thousand words of them—as long as a novel—and they were surprising in their good style, their beauty of expression, their resignation to death. These two people from the squalor of a London suburb, might have been mediæval lovers in Italy of Boccaccio’s time, when murder for love’s sake was lightly done.
In a little restaurant in Soho I sat with Ethel le Neve, day after day, while all the journalists of England were searching for her. Many times she was so gay that it was impossible to believe that she had escaped the hangman’s rope by no great distance, and that her lover was a little blear-eyed man lying under sentence of death. Yet that gayety of hers was not affected or forced. It bubbled out of her because of a quick and childish sense of humor, which had not been killed by the frightful thing that overshadowed her. When that shadow fell upon her spirit again, she used to weep, but never forlong. Her last request to me was that I should have Doctor Crippen’s photograph made into a miniature which she could wear concealed upon her breast. On the morning of his execution she put on black for him, and wished that she might have died with him on the scaffold.
I am certain, as the police were, that she was guiltless of all knowledge and participation in the murder of Mrs. Crippen, but she seemed as careless of that crime as any woman of the Borgias when a rival was removed from her path of love. Some old strain of passionate blood had thrust up again in this London typist girl, whose name of le Neve might hold the clue, if we knew her family history, to this secret of her personality.
I was glad to see the last of her, having written down her tale, because that was not the kind of journalism which appealed to my instincts or ideals, and I sickened at the squalor of the whole story of love and murder, as I sat with Ethel le Neve in friendly discourse, not without pity for this girl whose life had been ruined by her folly, and who would be forever haunted by the grim tragedy of Crippen’s crime.
Although my reminiscences hitherto have dealt with my adventures as a special correspondent, I have from time to time sat with assumed dignity in the editorial chair. Indeed, I was an editor before I was twenty-one, and I may say that I began life very high up in the world and have been climbing down steadily ever since.
I was at least very high up—on the top floor of the House of Cassell, in La Belle Sauvage Yard—when I assumed, at the age of nineteen, the enormous title of Educational Editor, and gained the microscopic salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year.
With five pounds capital and that income, I married, with an audacity which I now find superb. I was so young, and looked so much younger, that I did not dare to confess my married state to my official chief, who was the Right Honorable H. O. Arnold-Forster, in whose room I sat, and one day when my wife popped her head through the door and said “Hullo!” I made signs to her to depart.
“Who’s that pretty girl?” asked Arnold-Forster, and with shame I must confess that I hid the secret of our relationship.
That first chief of mine was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met, and quite the rudest to all people of superior rank to himself.
As Secretary to the Admiralty, and afterward Minister of War, many important visitors used to call on him in his big room at the top of Cassell’s, where he was one of the Directors. I sat opposite, correcting proofs ofschool books and advertisements, writing fairy tales in spare moments, and listening to Arnold-Forster’s conversation. He treated distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels as though they were office boys, so that they perspired in his presence, and were sometimes deeply affronted, but, on the other hand, as a proof of chivalry, he treated office boys and printers’ devils as though they were distinguished admirals, generals, and colonels, with a most particular courtesy.
I saw him achieve the almost incredible feat of dictating a complete history of England as he paced up and down his room, with hardly a note. It is true that his patient secretary had to fill in the dates afterward, and verify the “facts,” which were often wrong, but the result was certainly the most vivid and illuminating history of England ever written for young people, and Rudyard Kipling wrote to him that it was one of the few books that had kept him out of bed all night.
To me Arnold-Forster was the soul of kindness, and encouraged me to write my first book, “Founders of the Empire,” which is still selling in English schools, after twenty years, though I make no profit thereby.
At twenty-three years of age, I heard of a new job, and applied for it. It was the position of managing editor of the Tillotsons’ Literary Syndicate, in the North of England. The audacity of my application alarmed me as I wrote the letter, and I excused myself, as I remember, in the final sentence. “As Pitt said,” I wrote, “I am guilty of the damnable crime of being a Young Man.”
That sentence gained me the position, as I afterward heard. The Tillotsons were three young brothers who believed in youth. They were amused and captured by that phrase of mine. So I went North for a time, with my young wife.
It was a great experience in the market of literary wares. My task was to buy fiction and articles forsyndicating in the provincial and colonial press, and my judgment was put to test of the sales list.
I “spotted” some winners who are now famous. Among them I remember was Arnold Bennett. He sent in a story called “The Grand Babylon Hotel”—his first romance—and I read it with the conviction that it was first-class melodrama. He asked a paltry price, which I accepted, and then I asked him to lunch in London—the joy of seeing London again!—and made him an offer for the book rights. He agreed to that fee, but afterward, when the book was immensely successful, he grieved over his bad bargain, and in one of his later books he warned all authors against a pale-faced young man, with his third finger deeply stained by nicotine, who had a habit of asking authors to lunch and robbing them over the coffee cups. Later in life he forgave me.
Although I had hard work as editor in Bolton of the Black Country—the city was ugly, but the people kind—it was there that I found my pen, and whatever quality it has.
I wrote an immense number of articles on every kind of subject, to be syndicated in the provincial press, and I made a surprising success with a weekly essay called “Knowledge is Power.” Like Francis Bacon, “I took all knowledge for my province” by “swotting up” the great masters of drama, poetry, novels, essays, philosophy, and art. It was my own education, condensed into short essays, written with the simplicity, sincerity, and enthusiasm of youth, for people with less chances than myself. I began to get letters from all parts of the earth, partly for the reason that the articles appeared inThe Weekly Scotsman, among other papers, which goes wherever a Scottish heart beats. Correspondents confided in me, as in an old wise man—the secrets of their lives, their hopes and ambitions, their desire to know the strangest and quaintest things. Old ladies sent me cakes, flowers, andinnumerable verses. Young men asked me how they could become the Lord Mayor’s coachman (that was an actual question!), or find the way to Heaven.
Meanwhile Fleet Street called to me with an alluring voice. Kind as the people were to me in Bolton—beyond all words kind—I sickened for London. One night I wrote a letter to Alfred Harmsworth, founder ofThe Daily Mail, and afterward Lord Northcliffe. Almost by return post he asked me to call on him, and I took the chance.
I remember as though it were yesterday my first interview with that genius of the new journalism. He kept me waiting for a while in an antechamber of Carmelite House. Young men, extremely well dressed, and obviously in a great hurry on business of enormous importance to themselves, kept coming and going. Messenger boys in neat little liveries bounced in and out of the “Chief’s” room, in answer to his bell. Presently one of them approached me and said, “Your turn.” I drew a deep breath, prayed for courage, and found myself face to face with a handsome, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, with a lock of brown hair falling over his broad forehead, and a friendly, quizzical look in his brown eyes.
Sitting back in a deep chair, smoking a cigar, he read some of the articles I had brought, and occasionally said “Not bad!” or “Rather amusing!” Once he looked up and said, “You look rather pale, young man. Better go to the South of France for a bit.”
But it was the air of Fleet Street I wanted.
Presently he gave me the chance of it.
“How would you like to edit Page Four, and write two articles a week?”
I went out of Carmelite House with that offer accepted, uplifted to the seventh heaven of hope, and yet a little scared by the dangerous and dazzling height which I had reached.
A month later, having uprooted my home in the North, brought a wife and babe to London, incurred heavy expenses with a mortgage on the future, I presented myself atThe Daily Mailagain, and awaited the leisure and pleasure of Alfred Harmsworth.
When I was shown into his room, he only dimly remembered my face.
“Let me see,” he said, groping back to the distant past, which was four weeks old.
When I told him my name, he seemed to have a glimmer of some half-forgotten compact.
“Oh, yes! The young man from the North.... Wasn’t there some talk of making a place for you inThe Daily Mail?”
My heart fell down a precipice.... I mentioned the offer that had been made and accepted. But Harmsworth looked a little doubtful.
“Page Four? Well, hardly that, perhaps. I’ve appointed another editor.”
I thought of my wife and babe, and unpaid bills.
“Do you mind touching the bell?” asked Harmsworth.
The usual boy came in, and was ordered to send down a certain gentleman whose name I did not hear. Presently the door opened, and a tall, thin, pale, handsome, and extremely haughty young gentleman sauntered in and said “Good afternoon,” icily.
Harmsworth presented me to Filson Young, whom afterward I came to know as one of the most brilliant writers in Fleet Street, as he still remains. Not then did I guess that we should meet as chroniclers of world war in the ravaged fields of France.
“Oh, Young,” said Harmsworth, in his suavest voice, “this is a newcomer, named Philip Gibbs. I half promised him the editorship of Page Four.”
Here he tapped Young on the shoulder, and added in a jocular way:
“And if you’re not very careful, young man, he may edit Page Four!”
Young offered me a cold hand, and there was not a benediction in his glance. I was put under his orders as a writer, as heir presumptive to his throne. As it happened, we became good friends, and he had no grudge against me when, some months later, he vacated the chair in my favor and went to Ireland forThe Daily Mail, to collect material for his brilliant essays on “Ireland at the Crossroads.”
So there I was, in the Harmsworthrégime, which has made many men, and broken others. It was the great school of the new journalism, which was very new in England of those days, and mainly inspired by the powerful, brilliant, erratic, and whimsical genius of Alfred Harmsworth himself.
I joined his staff at the end of the Boer War period, when there was a brilliant group of men onThe Daily Mail, such as Charles Hands, Edgar Wallace, H. W. Wilson, Holt White, and Filson Young. The editor was “Tom” Marlowe, still by a miracle in that position, which he kept through years of turbulence and change, by carrying out with unfaltering hesitation every wish and whimsey of The Chief, and by a sense of humor which never betrayed him into regarding any internal convulsion, revolution, or hysteria ofThe Daily Mailsystem as more than the latest phase in an ever-changing game. Men might come, and men might go, but Marlowe remained forever, bluff, smiling, imperturbable, and kind.
Above him in power of direction, dynamic energy, and financial authority, was Kennedy Jones, whom all men feared and many hated. He had a ruthless brutality of speech and action which Harmsworth, more human, more generous, and less cruel (though he had a strain of cruelty), found immensely helpful in running an organization which could not succeed on sentiment or brotherlylove. Kennedy Jones would break a man as soon as look at him, if he made a mistake “letting down” the paper, if he earned more money for a job which could be done for less by a younger man, if he showed signs of getting tired. That was his deliberate policy as a “strong man” out to win at any price, but, as in most men of the kind, there lay beneath his ruthlessness a substratum of human quality which occasionally revealed itself in friendly action. He had a cynical honesty of outlook on life, which gave his conversation at times the hard sparkle of wit and the bitter spice of truth. Beyond any doubt, the enormous success of the Northcliffe press, as it was afterward called, owed a great deal to the business genius of this man.
Alfred Harmsworth himself provided the ideas, the policy, the spirit of the machine. He was the enthusiast, the explorer, and the adventurer, with the world’s news as his uncharted seas. He had only one test of what was good to print, “Does this interest Me?” As he was interested, with the passionate curiosity of a small boy who asks continually “How?” and “Why?”, in all the elementary aspects of human life, in its romances and discoveries, its new toys and new fads, its tragedies and comedies of the more obvious kind, its melodramas and amusements and personalities, that test was not narrow or one-eyed. The legend grew that Harmsworth, afterward Northcliffe, had an uncanny sense of public opinion, and, with his ear to the ground, knew from afar what the people wanted, and gave it to them. But, in my judgment, he had none of that subtlety of mind and vision. He had a boyish simplicity, overlaid by a little cunning and craft. It was not what the public wanted that was his guiding rule. It was what he wanted. His luck and genius lay in the combination of qualities which made him typical to a supreme degree of the average man, as produced by the triviality, the restlessness, the craving forsensation, the desire to escape from boredom, the impatience with the length and dullness and difficulty of life and learning, the habit of taking short cuts to knowledge and judgment, which characterized that great middle-class public of the world before the war.
One method by which Harmsworth impressed his own views and character on the staff and paper was to hold a daily conference inThe Daily Mailoffice, which all editors, sub-editors, reporters, special correspondents, and glorified office boys were expected to attend. Freedom of speech was granted, and free discussion invited, without distinction of rank. The man who put a good idea into the pool was rewarded by Harmsworth’s enthusiastic approbation, while he himself criticized that day’s paper, pointed out its defects, praised some article which had caught his fancy, and discussed the leading matter for next day’s paper. Cigarettes and cigars lay ready to the hand. Tea was served, daintily. Laughter and jokes brightened this daily rendezvous, and Harmsworth, at these times, in those early days, was at his best—easy, boyish, captivating, to some extent inspiring. But it was an inspiration in the triviality of thought, in the lighter side of the Puppet Show. Never once did I hear Harmsworth utter one serious commentary on life, or any word approaching nobility of thought, or any hint of some deep purpose behind this engine which he was driving with such splendid zest in its power and efficiency. On the other hand, I never heard him say a base word or utter an unclean or vicious thought.
He was very generous at times to those who served him. I know one man who approached him for a loan of £100.
He was shocked at the idea.
“Certainly not! Don’t you know that I never lend money? I wouldn’t do it if you were starving in the gutter.”
Then he wrote a cheque for £100, and said, “But I’ll give it to you, my dear fellow. Say no more about it.”
Now and again, when he saw one of his “young men” looking pale and run down, he would pack him off for a holiday in the South of France, with all his expenses paid. In later years he gave handsome pensions to many who had served him in the early days.
He had his court favorites, like the mediæval kings, generally one of the newcomers who had aroused his enthusiasm by some little “scoop,” or a brilliant bit of work. But he tired of them quickly, and it was a dangerous thing to occupy that position, because it was almost certain to mean a speedy fall.
For a little while I was one of his favorites. He used to chat with me in his room and say amusing, indiscreet things, about other members of the staff, or his numerous brothers.
I remember his looking up once from his desk where he sat in front of a bust of Napoleon, to whom he bore a physical resemblance, and upon whose character and methods with men he closely modeled himself.
“Gibbs,” he said, “whenever you see a man looking like a codfish walking about these passages, you’ll know my brother Cecil brought him in. Then he comes to me to hoik him out again!”
As temporary favorite, I was invited down to Sutton Court, a magnificent old mansion of Elizabethan days, in Surrey. It was in the early days of motoring, and I was taken down in a great car, and back in another, and felt like an emperor. Harmsworth was a delightful host, and kept open house during the week-ends, where one heard the latest newspaper “shop” under the high timbered roof and between the paneled walls, where the great ladies and gentlemen of England, in silks and brocades, had dined and danced by candlelight.
It was here, in the minstrels’ gallery, one afternoon,that Harmsworth asked me to tell him all about “syndicating,” according to my experience with the Tillotsons’ syndicate. I told him, and he became excited.
“Excellent! I tell you what to do. Go back toThe Daily Mailand say I’ve sacked you. Then go to the South of France with your wife, for three months. I’ll pay expenses. After that, return to Fleet Street, where you’ll find an office waiting for you, called ‘the British Empire Syndicate, Limited.’ Nobody must know that I’m behind it.... How’s that for a scheme?”
It seemed to me a pretty good scheme, although I was doubtful whether I could work it. I temporized, and suggested drawing out the scheme on paper, more in detail. That disappointed him. He wanted me to say, “Rather! The chance of a life time!” My hesitation put me into the class he called, “Yes, but——” I drew up the scheme, but he went for a visit to Germany, and on his return did not give another thought to the “British Empire Syndicate, Limited.” Other ideas had absorbed his interest.
At the end of a year I saw I was losing favor. An incident happened which forewarned me of approaching doom. He had returned from another visit to Germany, and was in a bad temper, believing, as he always did, thatThe Daily Mailhad gone to the dogs in his absence. He reproved me sharply for the miserable stuff I had been publishing in Page Four, and demanded to see what I had got in hand.
I took down some “plums”—special articles by brilliant and distinguished men. He glanced through them, and laid them down angrily.
“Dull as ditchwater! Send them all back!”
I protested that it was impossible to send them back, as they were all commissioned. My own honor and honesty were at stake.
“Send them all back!” he said, with increasing anger.
I did not send them back, but gave them “snappier” titles. The next day he sent for me again, and demanded to see what else I proposed to publish—“not that trash you showed me yesterday!”
I took down the same articles, with some others. He had more leisure, read them while he smoked a cigar, and at intervals said, “Good!” ... “Excellent!” ... “Why didn’t you show these to me yesterday?”
Needless to say, I did not enlighten him. I was saved that time, but a few months later I saw other signs of disfavor.
I remember that at that time I had to see General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, that grand old man for whose humanity and love I had a great respect, in spite of his methods of conversion, with scarlet coats and tambourines. He was angry with something I had written, and was violent in his wrath. But then he forgave me and talked very gently and wisely of the responsibilities of journalism, “the greatest power in the world for good or evil.”
Presently the old man seized me by the wrist with his skinny old hand, and thrust me down on to my knees.
“Now let us pray for Alfred Harmsworth,” he said, and offered up fervent prayer for his wisdom and light.
I don’t know what effect that prayer had on Harmsworth, but it seemed to have an immediate effect upon my own fate. I was “sacked” fromThe Daily Mail.
After my time onThe Daily Mail, I joinedThe Daily Expressfor a few months before becoming one of the literary editors ofThe Daily Chronicle.
OnThe ExpressI came to know Sir Arthur Pearson before the days of his blindness, and did not admire him so much then (though I liked him) as in those later years when, by his magnificent courage, and his devoted service to all the blinded men of the war, he was one of the truly heroic figures of the world.
As a newspaper proprietor he was a man of restless energy, but narrower in his outlook, at that time, than his great rival, Harmsworth, whose methods he imitated. He was a strong adherent of tariff reform, when Joseph Chamberlain stumped the country in favor of that policy, which divided friend from friend, wrecked the amenities of social life, and started passionate arguments at every dinner table, somewhat in the same manner that the personality and policy of President Wilson caused social uproar in the United States, during the Peace Conference.
Pearson conferred on me the privilege, as I think he considered it, of recording the progress of the Chamberlain campaign, and it was the hardest work, I think, apart from war correspondence, that I have ever done. I do not regret having done it, for it took me into the midst of one of the biggest political conflicts in English history, led by one of the most remarkable men.
My task was to write each night what is called “a descriptive report,” which means that I had to give the gist of each of Chamberlain’s long speeches, with their salient points, and at the same time describe the scenesin and around the hall, besieged everywhere by vast crowds of opponents and supporters who often came into conflict, Chamberlain’s methods with his interrupters, and the incidents of the evening. Pearson often had a place on the platform, near the man for whom he had a real hero worship, and sent down little notes to me when various points of importance occurred to him. Always my article had to be finished within a few minutes of Chamberlain’s peroration, in order to get it on to the wire for London.
It was at Newport, in Wales, I remember, that I nearly blighted my young life by over-sympathy with the sufferings of a fellow mortal. This was a correspondent ofThe Daily Mail, who had been a most convinced and passionate free trader. He had written, only a few weeks before, a series of powerful and crushing articles against tariff reform, which had duly appeared inThe Daily Mail, until Harmsworth announced one morning that he had been talking to his gardener, and had decided that tariff reform would be a good thing for England. It would be, therefore, the policy ofThe Daily Mail.
By a refinement of cruelty which I am sure he did not realize, his free trade agent was sent down to reveal the glories of tariffs, as expounded by Chamberlain. It went sorely to the conscience of this Scot, who asked me plaintively, “How can I resign—with wife and bairns?” At Newport his distress was acute, owing to the immense reception of Chamberlain by crowds so dense that one could have walked over their mass, which was one solid block along the line of route.
Before the speech that night he stood me a bottle of wine, which we shared, and he wept over this red liquid at the abomination of tariffs, the iniquity ofThe Daily Mail, and the conscience of a correspondent. What that wine was, I cannot tell. It was certainly some dreadful kind of poison. I had drunk discreetly, but upon enteringthe hall, I felt a weight on my head like the dome of St. Paul’s, and saw the great audience spinning round like an immense revolving Face. For two hours’ agony I listened to Chamberlain’s speech on tin plates, wrote things I could not read, and at the end of the meeting, having thrust my stuff over the counter of the telegraph office, collapsed, and was very ill. I heard afterward that the free trade Scot was equally prostrate, but he survived, and in course of time became more easy in his conscience, and a Knight of the British Empire.
Toward the end of the campaign I saw that Joseph Chamberlain was breaking. I watched him closely, and saw signs of mental and physical paralysis creeping over him. Other people were watching him, with more anxiety. Mrs. Chamberlain was always on the platform, by his side, in every town, and her face revealed her own nervous strain. Chamberlain, “Our Joe,” as his followers called him, lost the wonderful lucidity of his speech. At times he hesitated, and fumbled over the thread of his thought. When he was heckled, instead of turning round in his old style with a rapid, knock-out retort, he paused, became embarrassed, or stood silent with a strange and tragic air of bewilderment. It was pitiful toward the end. The strongest force in England was spent and done. The knowledge that his campaign had failed, that his political career was broken, as well as the immense fatigue he had undergone, and the intense effort of his persuasive eloquence, snapped his nerve and vitality. He was stricken, like President Wilson, one night, and never recovered.
In that campaign Chamberlain converted me against himself on the subject of tariff reform, but I learned to admire the courage, and hard sledge-hammer oratory of this great Imperialist leader who represented the old jingo strain of Victorian England, in its narrow patriotism and rather brutal intolerance, ennobled, to someextent, by old loyalties and traditions belonging to the sentiment of the British folk. The very name of Joseph Chamberlain seems remote now in English history, and the mentality of the English people has outgrown that time when he was fired by that wave of Imperialism which overtook the country and produced the genius of Kipling, the aggressive idealism of Cecil Rhodes, and the Boer War, with its adventures, its Call of the Wild, its stupidity, its blatant vulgarity, its jolly good fellows, its immense revelation of military incompetence, and its waste of blood and treasure.
After that campaign, I displeased Arthur Pearson by a trivial difference of opinion. He believed firmly that Bacon wrote “Shakespeare.” I believed just as firmly that he didn’t. When he asked me to write up some new aspect of that argument, I flatly refused, and Pearson was very much annoyed. A little later I resigned my position, and for some time he did not forgive me. But years later we met again, and he was generous and kind in the words he spoke about my work. It was out in France, when he visited the war correspondents’ mess and went with us into Peronne after its capture by our troops. He was blind, but more cheerful than when I had known him in his sighted days. At least he had gained a miraculous victory over his tragic loss, and would not let it weaken him. That day in Peronne he walked into the burning ruins, touched the walls of shattered houses, listened to the silence there, broken by the sound of a gun or two, and the whirr of an aëroplane overhead. He saw more than I did, and his description afterward was full of detail and penetrating in its vision.
We met again, after the war, at a dinner in New York, when he spoke of the work of St. Dunstan’s, which he had founded for blinded men. It was one of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard—I think the mostbeautiful—and there was not one of us there, in a gathering of American journalists and business men, who did not give all the homage in his heart to this great leader of the blind.
As one of the literary editors ofThe Daily Chronicle, I had a good deal of experience of the inside of newspaper life, and, on the whole, some merry times. The hours were long, for I used to get to the office shortly after ten, and, more often than not, did not leave till midnight. Having charge of the magazine page, which at that time was illustrated by black and white drawings, I was responsible for the work of three artists, alleged to be tame, but with a strain of wildness at times, which was manifested by wrestling bouts, when all of us were found writhing on the floor in what looked like a death struggle, when the door was opened by the office boy or some less distinguished visitor. One of them was Edgar Lander, generally known as “Uncle” in the Press Club, and in Bohemian haunts down Chelsea way. Endowed with a cynical sense of humor, a gift for lightning repartee which dealt knock-out blows with the sure touch of Carpentier, and a prodigious memory for all the characters of fiction in modern and classical works, he gave a good lead to conversation in the large room over the clock in Fleet Street where we had our workshop. Another of the artists was Alfred Priest, afterward well known as a portrait painter, and three times infamous in the Royal Academy as the painter of “the picture of the year.” He was, and is, a philosophical and argumentative soul, and Lander and he used to trail their coats before each other, in a metaphorical way, with enormous conversational results, which sometimes ended in violence on both sides. The third artist, nominally under my control, but like the others, entirely out of it, was Stephen Reid, whom I have always regarded as a master craftsman of the black and white art, which he has nowabandoned for historical painting. A shrewd Scotsman also with a lively sense of humor, he kept the balance between his two colleagues, and roared with laughter at both of them.
We were demons for work, although we talked so much, and the page we produced day by day was, by general consensus of opinion, I think, the best of its kind in English journalism. We gave all our time and all our energy to the job, and I suppose there are few editors in the world, and few artists, who have ever been seen staggering down Fleet Street, as once Alfred Priest and myself might have been observed, one midnight, carrying a solid block of metal weighing something like half a hundredweight, in order that our page might appear next day. That was a full-page block with text and pictures, representing some great floods in England in which we had been wading all day. We were so late in getting back with our work that the only chance of getting it into the paper was to act as porters from the blockmakers toThe Daily Chroniclepress. We nearly broke our backs, but if it had been too late for the paper we should have broken our hearts. Such is the enthusiasm of youth—ill rewarded in this case, as in others, because the three artists were sacked when black and white drawings gave way to photography. Afterward Edgar Lander of my “three musketeers” lost the use of his best arm in the Great War, where, by his old name of “Uncle” and the rank of Captain, he served in France, and gave the gift of laughter to his crowd.
In those good old days ofThe Daily Chronicle, long before the war, there was a considerable sporting spirit, inspired by the news editor, Ernest Perris, who is now the managing editor, with greater gravity. Perris, undoubtedly the best news editor in London, was very human in quiet times, although utterly inhuman, or rather, superhuman, when there was a “world scoop” in progress.It was he who challenged Littlewood, the dramatic critic, to a forty-mile walk for a £10 bet, and afterward, at the same price, anybody who cared to join in. I was foolishly beguiled into that adventure, when six of us set out one morning at six o’clock, from the Marble Arch to Aylesbury—a measured forty miles. We were all utterly untrained, and “Robin” Littlewood, the dramatic critic, singularly like Will Shakespeare in form and figure, refused to let his usual hearty appetite interfere with his athletic contest. It was a stop for five-o’clock tea which proved his undoing, for although he arrived at Aylesbury, he was third in the race, so losing his £10, and was violently sick in the George Inn. Perris was an easy first, and I was a bad second. I remember that at the thirtieth mile I became dazed and silly, and was seen by people walking like a ghost and singing the nursery rhymes of childhood. That night when the six returned by train to London, they were like old, old men, and so crippled that I, for one, had to be carried up the steps of Baker Street Station.