“O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable!Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show,Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell,Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go.These lives are counted, the Avenger waits,His feet are heard already at the gates.”
And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an “n” for a “v,” and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that “these lines” were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the printer's reader who passed his abominable blunder. The most indurated professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all about it.
Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr Edmund Yates, who was at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then writing for theBirmingham Morning News, under the title of “A Bad Lot,” to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, “Are there no troubles now?” and the lady of his heart responded, “Not one, dear Frank, not one.” And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, “White Line,” a professional instruction to leave the space of one line blank between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the “comp.” who was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus, as if it had been a line of verse:
“Not one, dear Frank, not one white line.”
I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal, and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, “We turn to the words of this immortal writer,” had a “t” knocked out for him, and was represented as having spoken of “this immoral writer.” I was with the dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpassed himself. The offending “reader” was a married man with a family, and a hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the instant of discovery.
For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, theBirmingham Morning News, and, as I have already said, I was employed by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands of people. I reckon him to have been, upon the whole, potentially the greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide, though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception, the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the worship of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified; but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to the community, and that it was a man's duty to button up his pocket at the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted, big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a trail behind him.
I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board which has ground the lower middle class of England and its labouring population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. “Shoon” and “housen,” for example, and now and then a double plural—a compromise between the ancient manner and the new—would creep into their speech; “eysen” was the plural of “eye,” “peasen” the plural for “pea;” and the patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to be quoted as “Americanisms,” although, as a matter of fact, the “Americanisms” are no more than the survival of the early English form.
If I had only had the brains to know it, there lay before me as fine a field as any craftsman in the art of fiction ever had a chance to glean in. It is an impertinence for a man to speak of his own work, but I have often thought in my own story ofAunt Rachel, there is at least an adumbration of what a man aimed with real sympathy and humour might have done with the people of that place and time. When I say that the characters inAunt Rachelare all real, I do not mean to make the foolish boast that they are all alive. I mean simply to say that they are all sketches from the life and are as true to their own lineaments as my hand could make them. The old musical enthusiast who, having heard Paganini, laid down his bow for ever because he could be content with nothing less than the great virtuoso's perfections, was a maternal great-uncle of mine, and the pathetic little story of the manner in which the life-long severance between himself and his sweetheart was brought about is literally true. “Aunt Rachel” herself in her extremely starched and dignified old age was a constant visitor at my mother's house. She had, for a space of something like forty years, had charge of successive generations of children in a stately country house in Worcestershire, and when she was honourably pensioned and retired, she used to boast, in her prim way, that she was not unacquainted with the airs and graces of the higher powers. She must at least have reached the age of fourscore when on one occasion she had lingered at my mother's house until darkness fell. The cottage she lived in was a mile away and was approached by a somewhat lonely road. My brother Tom, at that time a stalwart lad of eighteen, was suggested to her as an escort. The little old lady drew herself up to the full height of her dignity. It was a saying of hers that she could not by any loyal person be described as a female of inferior stature, since she was but one barleycorn less in height than Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. She rebuked my mother with a solemnity which laid a heavy tax on our politeness. “No, Mary, my dear,” she said, “I will go alone; I have my reputation to consider.”
One meets rarely at this time the example of the attached old school of servants, who used to identify themselves with the household to which they ministered. The faithful servant of the antique world is dead, but I remember dozens of instances in my childhood where even in establishments as humble as our own, a domestic who had entered into service in early childhood had stayed on until age or a by no means premature marriage put an end to the association. One of my mother's maids stayed with her for a matter of some thirty years and finally left her to share the destinies of a working mason. The honest fellow had just fulfilled a profitable, small contract in so satisfactory a manner that he was offered something bigger which, in due time, was followed by a something bigger yet. In a while, Jane was keeping her carriage, but on her frequent visits to her old mistress her demeanour never changed, unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected little draggle-tail from the workhouse and to turn her into an efficient maid-of-all-work. When this self-imposed duty was accomplished, the maid invariably went elsewhere in search of higher wages, so that my mother was rarely without some slatternly little pupil whom she was drilling into ways of household order. Jane came one day in her rustling silks and streamers to announce a discovery. “The very girl you want, ma'am; I am sure you could turn her into a perfect treasure.” “Well, Jane,” said my mother, “you know what I want. I want three qualities in a girl and if she has them, I can make a good servant of her. I want her to be honest and willing and clean. Is she honest?” “As the day, ma'am,” says Jane. “And is she willing?” “Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am.” “And is she clean?” “Clean, ma'am,” says Jane, raising her black gloved hands to emphasise the affirmation, “she'sscrofulouslyclean!”
And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten miles round but had its own acknowledged bard. There were continual tragedies happening in the coal mines. Men were much more careless in the handling of naked lights than they are now, and the beneficent gift of the Davy lamp was looked on with mistrust. The machinery by which the men were lowered to their work was often inadequate. There was nothing like a scientific system of ventilation and fatalities were appallingly frequent. Whenever one happened, the local bard was ready with his threnody and the little black-bordered, thick leaflets were sold at one penny apiece for the benefit of the survivors. The prince of the poetic throng in my day was one Alfred Randall whom I used to encounter on Sunday mornings on his way to chapel dressed in black broadcloth, with huge, overlapping, rhinocerine folds in it—for, as I have remarked elsewhere, a Black Country tailor who had supplied the customer with merely cloth enough to fit him, would have been thought unpardonably stingy—a very high false collar tied at the back of the neck by a foot or two of white tape which as often as not trailed out behind, a woollen comforter dangling almost to his toes whatever might be the season of year, and the hardest looking and shiniest silk hat to be had for love or money—these were Mr Randall's Sabbath wear, and it always struck me as a child that he had very much of the aspect of a cockatoo in mourning. He was a preternaturally solemn man and when I felt that I could command my features, I used to like to talk with him about his Art, and hear in what manner his inspirations occurred to him. “It's no credit to me,” he used to say, with a sort of proud humility, “it's a gift, that's what it is.” Mr Randall's views were not always engaged on tragic themes, and I have the most delightful recollections of a pastoral of his entitled:—“Lines on a Walk I once took on a Day in May into the Country.” It began thus:—
“It was upon a day in May,When through the fields I took my way.It was delightful for to seeThe sheep and lambs they did agree.And as I walked forth on that dayI met a stile within my way;That stile which did give rest to meAgain I may not no more see.”
I had the pleasure to put this effusion into type with my own hands. My father was generally his own proof reader, and when I went to him with the first impression and began to read to him from the manuscript, I was really very terribly afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would break me down.
“As on my way I then did trodThe lark did roar his song to God.”
I had to laugh, whatever might happen, but to my relief my father laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side in the mine in which he worked:—
“John Williams was a godly manWhose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan,He rose one morning and kissed his wifeAnd promised to be home at night.But ah! he met the fatal flameAnd never he went home again.”
The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old Staffordshire ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it. I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger, who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just cocked his eye towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of débris, and saying, “That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer,” went on quite composedly with his meal.
George Dawson as Editor—Birmingham Politicians—JohnBlight's Nervousness—The Black Lake Rescue—The PelsallHall Colliery Disaster—Archibald Forbes—Out of Work—Edmund Yates andThe World—The Hangman-Human Oddities—A Mislaid Cheque—Hero Worship—Three Stories of Carlyle—Journalism.
For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fashion. In his unclerical suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fashion he would make his daily leader. “Now,” he would say, “take that to your own room and get as much as you can of it into a column.” I made no notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap. But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation. I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said: “The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact.” Of another person whom I will not name, he said: “You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket. You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured. He is a sort ofHalf Hours with the Best Authors, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea.”
But he could be as generous in praise as savage in condemnation, and his occasional lapses into tenderness of mood were very sweet and touching. I recall one night at the Church of the Saviour, after his return from a holiday in Rome, when he told us how he had purposely lost himself in the viler quarters of the city. The noon-day sun beat down, eliciting abominable stenches and revealing, without compromise, the ugly squalors of the region. He walked on right into the country, strolled on the Campagna, and at night-fall regained the city by something like the same route he had chosen in leaving it. The garish sun was down. The evening dews had laid the foul odours. The moon was at the full. Every ugliness was turned to beauty. Vile things were transfigured in that softening light. “Christianity,” he said, “is the moonlight of the soul.” It was note a complete saying, but Dawson was a creature of intimations. He startled one sometimes by an intellectual crudity, but he had always reserve.
There are many still living who remember the truly astonishing eloquence and devotion of those improvised prayers of his at the Church of the Saviour. Old mouthing George Gilfillan, by the way, author of theBards of the Bibleand other deservedly neglected works, wrote to Dawson when his congregation built this church for him: “You have started the Church of the Saviour, but you will never be a saviour to the church.” To which the other George fittingly responded “that the Church had its Saviour already and it was a plain man's business to preach His plain meaning.” But those prayers! They were the mere breathing of a strong, sane soul towards an infinite hope, an infinite possible good, a great half-revealed Fatherhood. Doubt faltered there, hope exulted. I have not heard from other mortal lips—I do not hope to hear again—such an expression of humble hope and doubt, such a tone of complete abasement before the Divine Ideal, such a final triumphant note of praise in the far-off haven to which creation moves.
The best result of the life of my dear old chief was the effect he had upon the municipal spirit of that town of Birmingham. It was not then a city in those days to which he devoted so large a portion of his many gifts and his great energies. Such men are the salt of great communities. Not so endowed as to command the armies of the world, missing something of the ambition, or the vanity, or the push of potential greatness in its wider spheres, they gain in force by the very limits of the current to which they commit their powers. Many a generation will go by before the capital of the Midlands wholly forgets the influence of the man whose character I have so feebly indicated here, who was to its teeming thousands the lighthouse of honesty, and who still seems to me, after the lapse of all these years, the bravest, the sincerest and the most eloquent soul it has been my fortune to encounter. I owed to him a personal acquaintance with the leading politicians of the town. John Skirrow Wright—of whom Dawson always spoke as the “great Liberal party”—a big, noisy, vehement, jovial man, whom the phrase accurately fitted; Dr R. W. Dale, the Archbishop of the Nonconformists of his day and many others.
On one memorable afternoon, he introduced me to John Bright. I do not think I ventured to take any share in the conversation between the two, but I recall one interesting passage of it “Tell me, friend George,” said Bright, “you have, I suppose, as large an experience in public speaking as any man in England. Have you any acquaintance with the old nervous tremor still?” “No,” said Dawson, “or if I have, it is a mere momentary qualm which is gone before I can realise it.” “Now, for my part,” said the great Tribune, “I have had practice enough but I have never risen to address an audience, large or small, without experiencing a shaking at the knees and the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.”
When I enlisted under Dawson's banner, on theBirmingham Morning News, I was the junior reporter, but in the course of a month or two, I was promoted and became the recognised descriptive writer on the staff. Throughout my journalistic experience I have been fortunate in one respect. The men under whom I have worked have, for the most part, had the knack of extorting one's best, and one of the ways of extorting the best of an enthusiastic youngster is to let him know cordially when he has done well. I shall never forget the flush of resolve which came over me when Dawson first laid his hand upon my shoulder with a cheery “Bravo, my lad,” in acknowledgment of a piece of work of mine. It was the first really great chance I had had. I was just newly married at the time and supposing my work to be over for the day I was taking my way homeward, when the printer's “devil” overtook me after a breathless run and told me that I was wanted at the office. I went back to learn that there was a mine on fire at Black Lake, some seven miles away, and I was bidden to go and see what was to be seen there.
A hasty search through the time-table showed that there was no train running in that direction for an hour or two and so I was bidden to take a hansom and to use all despatch. The scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The mine was situated in the midst of an open field and there was a great surging crowd about it which made way for me at a word. Round about the bed shafts of the mine, the downcast and the upcast, a little space was held voluntarily clear and half a dozen men in coaly flannels were standing there. A little tin pot of an engine in a miniature of an engine-house was labouring and panting at a little distance, and almost as I arrived upon the scene, the great iron bucket capable of containing as I should judge some five or six hundred gallons, was brought from the upcast, lowered there, set upon a trolley and then run along the rails until it could be emptied into the shaft in which the fire was raging.
This poor attempt to extinguish the flames was continued for perhaps a quarter of an hour, but at last one of the little band said, “This is no good, lads, we might as well stand round in a ring and spit at it. We shall have to get the 'Stinktors' out. A man or two will have to go down.” The coal-smeared men were all standing close together and they looked at each other with faces pale beneath the grime. For a second or two none of them spoke, but at last one said, “Will you make one?” and the first man answered with a mere nod and a sullen-sounding growl. The others were appealed to each in turn, and each gave the same sulky seeming acquiescence. I had at the moment no idea as to what it was actually proposed to do, but the plan was soon made clear. What the first speaker had called “stinktors” turned out to be little barrel-shaped objects about one foot by two.
They were called “l'extincteur,” and they contained some gas which in combination with water was fatal to fire. But when I reflected that in a confined space like that into which they proposed to venture, any gas which was fatal to fire would in all probability be fatal to human life, I almost wondered if the men were mad. Mad or no, they made their preparations with a deliberate swiftness which showed that they knew perfectly well what they were about. The man who had first proposed the venture was the first to set out upon it. The large iron bucket, technically called “bowk,” was attached to the steel wire rope which hung about the smouldering shaft. The man stepped into this, the chain was passed about his waist, he was smothered in heavy flannels which were tied about him with cords; the end of a long coil of dirty, oily, coaly, three-ply twine was fastened round his right wrist, and he was swung into the smoke. The word was passed to the engine-room, the little tin pot of an engine began to pant and snort 30 or 40 yards away and the man dropped out of sight. The coal-smeared comrade who had charge of the twine paid it out delicately fathom by fathom. It was the only link between the adventurer down below and the chance of life, and the merest tug at it would have caused an immediate reversal of the engine and would have brought him back to bank. But no signal came, and for anything that anybody there could have told, the man below might have been suffocated by the smoke. There was not a sound to be heard but the creaking of the wheel as it revolved above the shaft and the hoarse panting of the little engine, and the crowd which had by this time grown to vast dimensions waited in so tense a silence that there was something awful in it.
How long we waited I cannot tell, but at last the signal came. The word was flashed to the engine room and the rope came gliding swiftly upwards. The hero was comatose and was hanging all limp and loose by the chain which had been passed about his waist. He was seized, swung to one side and lowered and landed and one great fiery flake of flannel as big as a man's hand fell from the rough garments in which he was swathed from head to foot. A bottle of whisky came from somewhere and was put to his lips and in a while he recovered consciousness though he was still gasping and choking and his eyes were streaming. In the meantime another man, as good as he, was ready, and he came back, as it turned out afterwards, blinded for life, but neither that nor anything that fear could urge could stay the rest, and man after man went down and faced that lurid smoke and hell of darkness undismayed, until at last their valour won the day and they brought out every man and boy and beast. One coaly giant yelled, “That's the lot,” when the last batch came up, and then the crowd went mad, weeping, cheering, dancing mad. I have seen many deeds of valour in my time, both in peace and war, but I have never seen anything to match the Black Lake rescue for deliberate courage.
I feel inclined to say less about the courage displayed by the members of the next rescue party whose work I saw, for the very sufficient reason that I was a member of it To tell the honest truth, I had not the remotest idea that I was courting any sort of danger. At the Pelsall Hall colliery, which lay two or three miles from Walsall, there had been an inrush of water from some old deserted workings near at hand, and twenty-two miners were imprisoned. The water filled the shaft to a depth of sixty feet, and so the rescuers were really hopeless of being able to pump the mine clear before the prisoners had been reduced to a state of absolute starvation. There was always the certainty that the inrush of water would be followed by an influx of poisonous gases. This, in fact, proved to be the case, and every man had been dead a week before the first body was recovered.
I began my friendship with Archibald Forbes at Pelsall, and I began it in a rather curious fashion. The place was a wretched little mining village with a solitary beer shop in it, and there was only one house in which it was possible to secure decent accommodation. I bargained with its tenant for a bed, and agreed to pay him half-a-crown a night for the accommodation. Forbes had made a precisely similar arrangement with the woman of the house, and there was but a single bedroom to be disposed of. Neither of us knew anything of the other's bargain until the following morning. Forbes was under the belief that an attempt at descent was intended to be made that night, and that it was to break into an old abandoned air-way which had long been bricked up at the side of the shaft, and was believed to lead to the stables of the mine which were situated at a point above the level of the flood.
The dialect of the Black Country, when spoken at its broadest, is not easy for a stranger to understand. I, as a native of the district, was of course familiar with it, but Forbes was out of his element altogether, and might almost have tried talking chockjaw. I, knowing perfectly well that the intended attempt could not be made for at least twenty-four hours, went away with a comfortable mind and slept in Bailey's cottage. When I left the door next morning I saw striding towards me through the mud a very begrimed and unprepossessing-looking figure. It was, after all, a man with a two days' beard, a very dirty face, a collarless, grimy shirt, who wore heavy ankle Jack-boots, and had his trousers rolled above his ankles. This person accosted me brusquely. “What are you doing in that cottage there?” he asked me, and I asked in turn, “what business of his that might be.” He told me he had hired and paid for the only available bed in the house from the landlady, and I told him that I had hired and paid for the same accommodation through the landlord. The stranger claimed precedence, and was good enough to tell me that if he found me attempting to infringe upon his privileges he would take the liberty of throwing me out of the window. I was five-and-twenty at this time, stood five feet eleven in my socks, and reckoned myself a pretty good man with my hands, as a pupil of the old Slasher had a right to be, and in considerable wrath at the stranger's insolence, I drew myself up shoulder to shoulder with him, and told him hotly that that was a game that two might play at. There came a quiet humorous gleam into his eye, and when he looked at me for half a minute he burst into a great roar of laughter. “Newspaper man?” he asked me. I answered in the affirmative, and he stretched out an unwashed hand. “I am Forbes,” he said. “I am here for theDaily News; if I can't bully a man I make friends with him.”
Now Forbes for years had been one of my heroes and I was simply delighted to meet him. We struck up an immediate friendship but in an hour he turned into bed and I saw him no more until the following morning when I believed that I had made of him an enemy for life. I learned at the mine head the hour at which the rescue party was to descend and I made arrangements to join it. Then I walked in to Walsall and there hired a saddle horse which I bestowed in the stables of the beer shop. This done, I made my way back to the mine and found the party just in readiness to make the descent. There were six of us, all told, and the little contingent was captained by Mr Walter Neas, who, partly as a reward for gallantry as I believe, was afterwards appointed manager of Her Majesty's mines in Warora, Central India. We were all lowered in a skip together and the position of the air-way having been precisely ascertained one man lay face downwards on the skip's bottom and broke through the brickwork with a pick. The sullen waters of the pool were only some eight or ten feet beneath us. The bricks splashed in one after the other until there was a space large enough for a man to whirl himself into it, and one by one we entered the passage. It was a tremendous scramble, and here and there the roof of the place had sunk so low that we had hard work to squeeze through on our hands and knees. In places we had almost space to walk upright. We came at last upon a face of brick, the wall of the stable for which we were bound and beyond which there was some faint hope of finding the imprisoned men. The sound of our picks elicited no response though we paused more than once to listen, but the wall being at length broken down, we entered the stable and I was the first of the party to perceive the dead body of a man who sat leaning against the wall of coal looking for all the world like a wax-work figure.
I was holding a candle to the dead man's face and we were all gathered round when the light went out suddenly as if it had been quenched in water. In a second we were in pitch darkness and our leader called out “Choke damp—back for your lives,” and in the pitchy darkness back we struggled. I have forgotten to say that water was running down the air-way like a little mill-stream, though it was barely over shoe-tops. We scrambled on with the deadly gas following us, sucked and drawn along by the draught of air. I was last but one and was saved many of the bruises and excoriations which befell the leader. The warning voice would come out of the darkness, “duck here,” or “hands and knees,” and on we toiled, panting and perspiring, until we reached the shaft and were all drawn up again. I dried myself roughly before a roaring fire in the hovel of the mine and then made all haste to the beer shop where I mounted my horse and rode full tilt into Birmingham. The paper had gone to press early that night and the press was already clanking when I rode into Pinfold Street and sat down, all muddy and dishevelled as I was, to dictate my copy to a shorthand writer. What I had to say filled two large type columns and with the copy of the paper in my pocket, I rode back to Pelsall. There I found Forbes at breakfast—he asked where I had been and I produced the paper and showed my work in silence. He read it through without a word of comment, good, bad or indifferent, laid it down upon the table and left the room. I heard him rummaging about in the chamber overhead and by and by he came down with a portmanteau in his hand and without a word or a look left the house. I thought that he was galled to feel that he had been beaten by a novice.
Two years had elapsed when I met him again. I found him by hazard in the Ludgate Bar, which was then a great resort of the bigger men among the London journalists. As I entered he sat among a knot of his companions. Tom Hood was there as I remember, and Henry Sampson, founder of theRefereewith Major Henty, the famous writer of books for boys, and poor brilliant young Evelyn Jerrold. Forbes greeted me boisterously, and, springing from his seat, clapped me upon the back. He took me to his friends and introduced me with words that put me to the blush. “Here,” said he, “is a man who writes English, and here is the only man who ever beat me on my own ground.” “No,” I answered, “it was my ground, Mr Forbes, and I should not have beaten you if you had spoken the language of the natives.” I never had a better or more generous friend than Forbes.
TheWorldJournal, founded by Edmund Yates, was just then entering into its first dawn of success. Forbes had been asked to write a series of articles for it on a subject which, as he confessed, had no particular charm for him. He handed it over to me and that gave me my first chance in the higher journalism of London. But I am running far ahead now and there is much to tell before my narrative arrives legitimately at this point.
TheBirmingham Morning Newswas a financial failure from the first, and towards the end of its second year its proprietors determined to reconstruct it. How or by whom they were advised I never knew, but a person who had no acquaintance either with finance or with journalism was entrusted with the command and Dawson threw up his post in dudgeon. I had fully intended to resign with him, but I had no time given me in which to do it, and in the space of a few weeks after the arrival of the newcomer, I was free to seek my fortune in London. By the good offices of the late Charles Williams, war correspondent on the staff of theMorning Advertiser, I was introduced to Colonel Richards, the editor of that journal, and did actually secure a berth as gallery reporter, but I was suddenly called back to the country by a grave domestic trouble, no less than the illness of my wife, which terminated fatally eight or nine weeks g 97 Recollections later. When I returned to London my place was filled and for a while the outlook was extremely desolate. My funds were very limited to begin with, and in spite of all the care I could exercise they dwindled at an appalling rate. I abode in a shabby little back bedroom in a lodging off the Gray's Inn Road and sat at my table wrapped in an ulster to prevent myself from freezing, whilst I wrote, and sent broadcast prose and verse, essays, short stories, journalistic trifles of every kind. All were ignored or returned.
Where the handsome offices of theDaily Newsnow stand in Bouverie Street, there was at that time a doleful place of resort for life's failures. It was called the Sussex Hotel. Thehabituésof the place were for the most part broken journalists and barristers, some of whom were men of considerable native talent and attainment. They were mostly given to drink, but they contrived to maintain at least such an outward semblance of respectability as enabled them to loaf about the Fleet Street offices and bars without being actually the objects of derision. I do not suppose that there is anywhere at this time such a contingent to be found in London. I went to live amongst them for economy's sake. We each paid sixpence a night in advance for a bed, the linen of which had a look of having been washed in tobacco juice and dried up a chimney. When a guest had paid his money, he was supplied with a key and about an inch of thin candle, which was affixed by its own grease to a broken shard of pottery. I spent about six weeks there and during the latter part of the time at least, my one daily meal consisted of a hard-rinded roll and thick chocolate. My belongings had all dwindled away, and at last I found myself penniless and homeless in the midst of London.
It is not, when all is said and done, a very dreadful thing for a healthy man to be without food for a few days, nor is it such a hardship as the fastidious might fancy to snatch one's nightly rest on the benches of the Embankment. I passed four nights there, chivied with the rest of the abject crowd by the ubiquitous policeman with his eternal “Wake up, move on there!” and for four days I was entirely without food. I can quite honestly say that I cared very little for these things in themselves, but where the iron enters into a man's soul in such conditions is when he feels that his degradation is unmerited and knows that he has powers within him which, if he could find a vent for them, might lead him on to fame and fortune. The exasperating raging bitterness of this, the grudging envy with which he looks at those more fortunate than himself, whose intellectual equipment he despises, these are the things which sear the heart.
I had resolved—let come what might come—that I would never go home to confess myself a failure. The thing, of course, might have had a tragic ending; there have been thousands of tragic endings to such enterprises as that in which I was engaged, but in my case, fate ordered otherwise, I have told the tale elsewhere, but it will bear re-telling. I was drifting about Fleet Street, mournfully conscious of the extent to which my appearance had deteriorated, of the unblacked boots and the yellow linen, and the general air of being unkempt and unwashed, when I found myself standing in front of the window of a filter-maker's shop, close by old Temple Bar. In this window were displayed a number of glass domes, under each of which a little jet of water tossed about a cork ball. The ball would soar sometimes to the roof of the dome and would then topple over, sometimes to be caught midway upon the jet and sometimes to fall to the bottom, but always to be kept drenched and dancing in a melancholy futile way. I was comparing it with myself when a hand was clapped upon my shoulder and a jolly voice accosted me. The speaker was John Lovell, the president of the Press Association, which had its offices in Wine Office Court hard by. He could not have failed to be aware of my condition, but he gave no sign of having observed it and asked me if I could spare the time to earn a couple of guineas, by writing “a good, sea-salt, tarry British article about Christopher Columbus.” Time pressed, he told me, and he was too busy to undertake the article himself. If I would accompany him to the office, he would supply me with the necessary materials and would pay money down for the work. On to the office I went with him, with a sudden bright confidence that here at last the lane of ill-luck had found a turning. I was ushered into a little private room, and writing materials were set before me. In a couple of hours I sent in my copy, and there came back to me at once a pill-box, on the lid of which was inscribed in a very delicate handwriting, “The prescription to be taken immediately.” The box being opened was found to contain two sovereigns and two shillings, wrapped in cotton wool, and I went away to break a fast which was then entering on its fifth day. My next proceeding, after having somewhat refurbished myself, was to go back to the dingy old hole in Bouverie Street and to write an article on “Impecunious Life in London.”
During the brief run of theIllustrated Midlands News, to which I had been a frequent contributor of verse, the late Richard Gowing, then editor of theSchool Board Chronicle, had officiated as Mr Joseph Hatton's assistant editor. He had just acquired the copyright in theGentleman's Magazine, and I bethought me that here lay my opportunity. I took the article to him, and after turning the manuscript pages swiftly over, he decided to accept it. It ran, I think, to two and thirty pages, and I received his cheque for ten shillings and sixpence a page.
Thus armed, I felt more than fit to face the world again, and it was whilst I was yet in this new flush of fortune that I walked into the Ludgate Bar as already recorded, and for the second time encountered Archibald Forbes.
And now began a period of halcyon weather. A kinder, more discerning and more helpful chief than Edmund Yates no aspiring young journalist ever had. He was as genial and as quick to recognise honest effort as Dawson himself, and he knew ten times better what he wanted, and a thousand times more about the taste and temper of the public.
He had conceived the idea of a series of articles on our civilisation, in which the writer should deal with the sores and oddities of it, and into this work I plunged with all the splendid vigour and avidity of youth, I chose the hangman as my first theme, because I happened to have had an acquaintance with a gentleman of that profession, and to have been engaged in some personal dealings with him. His name was James Smith, and he lived about midway between Rowley Regis and Dudley. I held that property in trust for my infant daughter, and the rents were collected for me weekly by a little lame clockmaker named Chesson. At one time my business often led me along that road, and I was familiar with the figure of a great, sprawling, muscular-looking, idle fellow, who, whenever I passed him, was leaning across the garden-gate in his shirt sleeves and smoking. He seemed to have no sort of employment, and, though I did not notice it at the time, it occurred to me afterwards, when I knew the truth about him, that I had never seen him exchange so much as a passing salutation with a single human creature. The rents came in regularly for some time, and then it was reported to me that my idle tenant had not paid. Time went on, and the idle tenantneverpaid. I determined to look into the thing myself, and I set out with the lame clockmaker to interview the man. He was sprawling over the gate as usual when we reached his cottage, and, to my surprise, the little lame man lagged some yards behind and refused to approach him. I explained my errand to the idle tenant, and he lugged out a handful of half-crowns.
“That cove,” he said, indicating the clockmaker “'as never been a-nigh me this four months. The money's always bin 'ere for 'im if 'e'ed a-come for it. What d'you take me for?” he asked savagely. “I ain't a wild beast, am I? It's Government work, and somebody's got to do it.” It turned out upon inquiry that my collector had actually paid three or four weeks' instalment out of his own pocket, rather than face the hangman, after he had discovered the nature of his trade. I am not writing melodrama, but it is a simple fact that I have never seen a man more profoundly distressed. The hangman's speech was broken and obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint together.
His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes, has some sort of human feeling.
At the time at which I wrote this narrative, I had gone into lodgings at Barnsbury, and shared rooms with a struggling water-colour painter, who, for the most part, in default of patrons, worked for the pawn-broker—a harum-scarum, ripe-hearted Irishman; and on the Sunday on which I turned out my first contribution to theWorld, he sat painting and smoking close at hand, and I read out to him, paragraph after paragraph, as I wrote. Those days are gone, but the glow, the passion, the very rage of achievement, which possessed one's work, are not to be forgotten. The work took Yates's fancy mightily, and he had the good sense and generosity to let me know it. The Bentley Balladist wrote years ago: