It was at least as agreeable to starve on the non-proceeds of landscape painting as on those of journalism, and when nothing in the way of meat and drink was to be got out of either, it was only a choice as to the form of euthanasia. I guessed I could make no money out of painting; but I knew by practical experience that there was nothing to be made by journalism.
I was daubing in a friend's chambers when the angel of opportunity came. He appeared in the form of an American gentleman with a fur collar and an astonishing Massachusetts accent. War had been actually declared between Russia and Turkey a week or two before. The Russians were already at Giurgevo, building a bridge of boats with intent to cross the Danube, and the Turks were gathered in force at Rustchuk and Schumla. So much I knew from I the newspapers, but no further intelligence of the opening campaign had reached me.
My visitors card announced him as Colonel ———, and he bore a letter of introduction from the representative of a leading New York journal. He was himself in London as the representative of a newspaper published in Chicago, and in the course of a five minutes' conversation he told me that he was in search of a young, healthy, and enterprising journalist who was willing to risk his life for the honour of his craft, and a rather considerable sum per column for copy delivered at the office of the newspaper of which he made himself the flying herald, The only engagement I had in the world was to breakfast with a man on Sunday morning, and that I waived instantly. An immediate 40L. was put into my hands; an arrangement was made that on calling at the American Embassy at Vienna I should receive more, and that at the bank at Constantinople I should find a sum of two hundred sterling on arrival. With this understanding I started for the seat of war at seven o'clock on the following morning, and in due course found myself at Vienna. There I tried, in pursuance of instructions, for an interview with the Turkish Ambassador, who steadfastly declined to see me. I made certain necessary preparations, and called at the bank half a dozen times over. There was no hint or sign of my Chicago friend; and possibly if I had been more experienced than I was I might have at once taken warning and returned home. As things were at the time no such idea entered my head; and when, after a delay of two days, half the promised money reached me, I took ticket gladly for Trieste, and embarked on a Messageries Maritimes boat for Constantinople.
It was the twelfth of May of that year when we set sail down the Adriatic, and I had never seen anything so heavenly beautiful as the coast and sea. We were five days on our journey; and now, when I have travelled the wide world over, have seen most of its show places, and have made myself familiar with exotic beauties of the landscape and seascape sort, I can recall nothing like that five days' dream of heaven. Perhaps the fact that I was going to look at war for the first time, and had some premonition of its horrors, made the placid loveliness of the Mediterranean more charming and exquisite by a kind of foreseen contrast. But I do not remember to have beheld (and I do not think I shall fail to remember it all till the day I die) anything so beautiful as the far-off islands that lifted their purple heads as we steamed through the Piraeus, and the long-drawn wonderful panoramic splendours of the Mediterranean sunsets. I have travelled in many ships since then, and have never missed the inevitable fool. There is always a fool aboard ship; and I remember one day when we were within sight of Corfu that the fool who was our local property for the moment touched me on the shoulder as I hung over the bows, and pointed to the island.
'They say that's land,' said he, 'but you d think it was a sweetmeat. Looks good to eat, doesn't it? It's like them biled violet things in sugar that they sell in Paris.'
I was all on fire to see the interior of my first Eastern city, and when I saw the domes and minarets of Constantinople actually before me, the traveller's instinct was quickened to a passion. We got in at sundown, and behind the picturesque roofs of the town lay an amber and crimson mystery of light, which was half-obscured by the smoke and steam of a score or two of vessels. The whole scene looked like a smeared landscape from the hand of Turner. He, at least, would have seen to it that the colour was clear; but Nature is very often behind the artist, and the effect was grossly muddy and untransparent.
In common with the rest of the world I had heard of baksheesh, but until then I never understood its magic power. A huge functionary took charge of my trunk and portmanteau, and impounded them so decisively in the name of the law that I had made up my mind to see neither of them any more. The captain of the boat whispered in my ear that a mejidieh would do it, I tried a French five-franc piece! which proved instantly efficacious; and a minute or two later I was on shore at Galata, astride a donkey whose tail was industriously twisted round by his driver, and who was followed by an unequally laden brother ass, who bore my portmanteau on one flank and my trunk upon another.
We scrambled up the stony road towards the main street of Pera. The city had looked like a Turneresque dream from the outside, but known from within it was the home of ugliness, and of stinks innumerable. The yellow dogs tripped the feet as often as the abominable pavement, and seemed as immovable and as much a part of the road itself. Now and again in the side streets a whole horde howled like a phalanx of advancing wolves; but they were outside the parish of the brutes who encumbered the roadway I had to travel, and though the noise of war was near, the canine regiment not actually called to fight rested immobile, its members suffering themselves to be kicked by foot passengers, trodden on by cattle, and rolled over by wheels with an astonishing stolidity.
We reached the hotel in time for an admirable dinner—the precursor of many admirable meals, whose only fault was that they were built too much on one pattern. We were served, as I recall too well, with tomato soup, red mullet, quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet. Next morning at breakfast came red mullet, quail, and tomato farcie. At luncheon came red mullet, quail, tomato farcie, and cutlet At dinner came tomato soup, red mullet, tomato farcie, quail, and cutlet. It was a charming menu—for once: but when we had gone on with it for a week my travelling companions and myself grew a little weary of it, and would fain have found a change. Poor Campbell—Schipka Campbell we called him afterwards—had arrived with an earlier boatload of adventurers and was staying at the Hôtel de Misserie. Captain Tiburce Morrisot, of the Troisième Chasseurs, stayed at the Byzance; and we three made a party together to dine at Valori's and to escape the eternal red mullet, tomato farcie, and quail.
We found there an astonishing German waiter who seemed, more or less, to speak every language under heaven. There were in the café Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, Turks, Bulgars, Germans, Frenchmen, and Englishmen, and people, for aught I know, of half a dozen other nationalities; and the head waiter addressed each and all of these in turn in any language which might be addressed to him. One of us asked him with how many tongues he was familiar, and he answered, with an apologetic aspect, 'Onily twelf.' What could we have for dinner? 'Fery good dinner, gentlemen. There is red mullet, there is tomato farcie, there is qvail,' We elected finally to dine on something which was announced as roast beef and looked suspiciously like horse. Anything was better than that eternal round of delicacies which had grown to be so tiresome. The city was in a state of siege, and every ramble along the street was productive of interest and amusement—sometimes of a rather striking sort. I had only been there some three or four days when, in the course of a morning stroll, I found myself in front of the Wallach Serai. The footpaths were lined pretty thickly with loungers who had stood to watch the march-past of a regiment of Zeibecks. The bare-legged ruffians, with their amazing beehive hats and their swagging belly-bands crammed with the antique weapons with which their ancestors had stormed Genoa, straggled past in any kind of order they chose to adopt and made their way towards the Sweet Waters of Europe, by whose shores they were destined to encamp. When they were all gone and the stagnant tide of passage was revived there came by an old Hoja, a holy man, dressed in green robe and caftan and wearing yellow slippers—self-proclaimed as one who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was followed by a very small donkey laden with panniers. By my side on the footwalk stood a Circassian who had been flourishing in the air, whilst the troops went by, a formidable-looking yataghan, and had been cheering in some language of which I did not understand a syllable.
This man was now standing, with an admiring crowd about him, licking the back of his wrist and shaving off the hair that grew there by way of showing the edge and temper of his weapon. It must have been set as finely as a razor, and, like a razor, it was broad-backed and finely bevelled. Just as the old Hoja went by, and the placid little donkey followed at his heels, the Circassian stepped into the horse-road, gave the weapon a braggadocio swing, and at a single blow divided the head of the poor little ass from the body as cleanly as any dandy swordsman of the Guards will sever a hanging sheep. The head fell plump; but for a second or two the body stood, spouting a vivid streak of scarlet from the neck, and then toppled over. The old green-clad Hoja turned at the noise made by the crowd, saw the blood-stained sword waving behind him, understood at a glance what had happened, and shuffled on as fast as his yellow pantoufles would carry him.
It is probable that there never was in the history of the world a city so crammed with every sample of the tribes of rascaldom as Constantinople at this epoch. I saw, from the carriage gateway at the Hôtel de Byzance, three coffee-coloured scoundrels pause at the place of custom held by an itinerant moneychanger. The man sat with his little glazed box of Turkish and foreign coins before him on the pavement, his whole financial stock-in-trade amounting to perhaps twenty or thirty pounds. One of the passing rascals offered for his inspection a diminutive gold coin, and the grey-bearded, venerable-looking money-merchant, having examined it, opened his case and took out a handful of coins to give change for it. The glass lid was no sooner lifted, than each one of the trio dipped in a coffee-coloured paw and took out a handful of money. The man who had shown the small gold coin pouched it again and walked on. The poor old money-changer rose to his feet and made a motion as if he would follow; but one of the ruffians half drew the sword which hung at his side, and turned upon him with a sudden snarl. The old man sat down to his loss, and made no further attempt to recover his stolen belongings.
Wandering up and down the city I was witness to a score of acts of equal lawlessness, and in point of fact the whole place was a prey to a restless terror. Between the city and the Sweet Waters of Europe there was an encampment of perhaps the most remarkable and varied assortment of blackguards that ever got together in the history of civilised warfare. Until they were known, the curious citizens used to ride out to look at them and wander about the camp; but one or two days' experience cured the people of Constantinople of this habit A Greek lady and her daughter were hideously done to death by the encamped ruffians, and the coachman who strove to rescue them had his throat cut Two or three events of this kind set the Christian part of Constantinople in a panic, and no white man ventured abroad after nightfall without carrying arms.
With all this the streets had never been bare. Every night the Grande Rue de Péra swarmed with passengers; the restaurants and hotels were full; and you could hear the raucous voices of the vocal failures of a dozen countries shrieking and bellowing through the open windows of thecafés-chantantsalong the street The one place that we frequented was the Concert Flamm. It was kept by one Napoléon Flamm, who in those days was known to almost every Englishman in Constantinople. He had a little silver hell beside the concert-room, and the swindling roulette-table there was presided over by a fat oily Greek, who might from his aspect, had some friend taken the trouble to wash him, have been supposed to be a diplomat of high rank. The table, as I very well remember, had but twenty-four numbers and at either end a zero. Had the game been fair, and had all the players been skilled, the proprietor of this contrivance must have taken by mathematical law a penny out of every shilling which was laid against the bank. I make no pretence to an extraordinary credulity; but I still believe that the fat Greek had a dodge by means of which it was possible to arrest the action of the wheel at the most profitable moment.
There was a Dutchman in the silver hell one night—a gentleman who told us that he was known in South Africa as the King of Diamonds. We learned later on, from independent sources, that though he had kept the suit he had changed the card. From Kim-berley to Table Bay the fame of the Knave of Diamonds had travelled, and if only one-half we heard of the man was true he had earned his title. For something like an hour and a half this gentleman and myself stood side by side at the roulette-table, and noticed unfailingly that whenever black was most heavily backed red won, and whenever the major part of the money was on red black turned up. We formed our own conclusions, and in our sober hours at least declined to play at that particular table.
There was a tremendous fight in these rooms one evening, which was begun in a comic way enough by Captain Georg von A———, of the 4th Kônig's Dragoons—a handsome, dashing young giant of a cavalry officer, who had done excellent service against the French at Gravelotte, and who was now bent on joining that ill-fated Polish Legion which was for a while the receptacle into which was swept half the scoundreldom and half the honest adventurous spirit of young Europe.
Poor dear old Campbell, dead these many years now (he fell under Wolseley leading the black contingent on Secocoeni's Height), the young German captain, and myself, had dined together, and Von A——— had dined not wisely, but too well. He had learned a word or two of Turkish, and, supposing that the inhabitants of the Grande Rue and the frequenters of the Concert Flamm were Turks, he rose and uttered a patriotic phrase, 'Chokularishah Padishah!' which means, as I am informed on credible authority, 'May the Sultan live for ever!' All the befezzed and bearded gentry, hook-nosed, sloe-eyed and greasy of complexion, who frequented the café of Monsieur Napoléon Flamm were Greeks and Armenians, and whether the Sultan lived for ever or died next day they did not care one jot They stared somewhat impolitely at the handsome fair-haired young German, but said nothing. He carried on his parable in Turkish: 'Muscov dormous,' and illustrated his meaning by drawing his thumb with Masonic vigour across his windpipe.
The words and the action together were meant to signify that the Russian was a hog and ought to have his throat cut Straightway up stood a little Greek with a 'Je suis Muscov, monsieur,' and the captain promptly knocked him down. He had not meant to do anything of the sort, but the mere windy buffet of his big hand toppled the little Levantine on to the floor. There was an immediate shindy. A coffee-cup was hurled by some indignant compatriot of the man assaulted and sent a splendid looking-glass, seven or eight feet high, to irremediable ruin< A coffee-cup in a Constantinople café is made of porcelain as thick as a lady's little finger, and weighs something like a quarter of a pound. In less time than it takes to tell it the nationalities were mixed and sorted again. Gaul, Briton, and Teuton—there were seven of us from the north-western end of Europe—got shoulder to shoulder, and every man of us had half a score to tackle. I never saw so funny a fight in all my life, and certainly never enjoyed myself at less personal risk. The room was clear in something under five minutes, and England, France, and Germany stood triumphant. The little Levantine crowd streamed down the winding stair, and Campbell added insult to injury and injury to insult by picking up the hindmost small man and dropping him on to the heads of those who had gone before him. We all laughed heroically; but when we got downstairs, after the outgoing crowd, the aspect of affairs was changed considerably.
I am talking of many years ago, and I am not quite certain of local names at any moment People who know Constantinople can correct me if I mistake the name of the place; but I think it is the Rue Yildijé which stands nearly opposite the entrance to the old Café Flamm and leads, or led, to the low Greek quarter. Anyhow, there is a sloping street there which runs down by a flight of rough stone steps towards the Galata district, and from this a fierce crowd came swarming, armed with broom-handles, knives, pokers, tongs—any weapon snatched up in the vengeful tide of the moment. Poor Campbell took command of our party, formed us in line, and made us draw our revolvers. The entrance to the café was wide enough to allow us to issue shoulder to shoulder in a sort of bow. We ranged ourselves along the wall, flanked the crowd, and took up a position across the pavement. Amongst our enemies those behind cried 'Forward!' and those in front cried 'Back!' We paced backward until we reached the Byzance Hotel, some fifty or sixty yards away, and there, once within the gateway, we put up our weapons, entered the hotel, and called for drinks. In a better-regulated city we might have heard something more about it; but, as it was, nothing happened, and the Chief Constable of the Consulate—from whom, by the way, I had bought the Irish Constabulary revolver which enabled me to make my show against the crowd—joined us in the course of the evening and laughed heartily at the tale.
I have told how I went out as 'special correspondent' to an American paper in the Russo-Turkish war. From the hour at which we said good-bye to each other on the platform of Charing Cross railway station, some seventeen years ago, until now, I have never seen the military gentleman from Chicago at whose instance I went out to watch the events of the Russo-Turkish war. When I got home again, a month after the fall of Plevna, I made inquiries about him, and learned that he had exceeded his instructions, and that if he had followed the directions laid upon him by his proprietors he himself would have gone out to the seat of war. What object he proposed to himself in shirking that duty, and in sending out a man whose salary he could not pay, I never definitely learned.
For quite a considerable time I used to call day by day at the Ottoman Bank to ask if remittances had arrived, and so long as my funds lasted I used to bombard that recalcitrant Yankee colonel with telegrams insisting on the fulfilment of his contract. He took no notice of my messages, and in a very little while things began to look desperate. It was a great thing to be on the spot, however, and after some three weeks of fruitless anger and bitter anxiety I found casual work to do under a gentleman who had constituted himself the agent of an old-fashioned London weekly. I wrote an article for this journal, entitled 'In a State of Siege,' got money down for it, and lived carefully on it for some ten days. At the end of that time, I was strolling rather disconsolately round the Concordia Gardens at night-time, when I came upon a group of men with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. They were seated round a little table, drinking vishnap and lemonade, and chattering gaily amongst themselves. One of them called me to join the party, and another, whom I knew to be acting as agent for theScotsman, was reading a newspaper. We talked indifferently for a while; and the reader, laying down his journal on the table, set his hand upon it with a solid emphasis and said, 'If I could find the man who wrote that article, I should ask him to go to the front at once.'
I glanced at the open sheet, and, lo! the article was mine. I said so, and in ten minutes I had made a bargain. I was to go up country at the earliest possible moment; and received instructions as to how to proceed in application for the necessaryteskerai, a form of passport or safeguard without which no stranger was allowed to enter the interior. The search after that abominabletesteraidelayed me for many days, and I danced attendance on Said Pasha (English Said as he was called) until I was weary and heartsick.
At last I determined to go without the passport, and did so; but the delay I experienced brought me into contact with as queer a body of adventurers as I ever encountered in my life. At the head of these gentlemen was a Mr. Montague Edie, or Edie Montague (for he wrote the name both ways)—a young fellow of apparently four or five and twenty, who gave himself out, I think, as a lieutenant in the English navy, and who professed to have authority from the Turkish Government to sail a war-ship under letters of marque and to harry Russian commerce in the Black Sea.
Constantinople at this time was full of hare-brained adventurers, and Mr. Montague Edie was not long in gathering about him a band of officers. The business of the expedition was supposed to be a profound secret; but it was talked about with a childishnaïvetéin all manner of public places. The chieftain laid in uniforms of his own designing, and strolled about the Grande Rue de Péra, gaudy in a Turkish military fez, white ducks and gloves, and a blue coat beplastered with gold lace. One or two of his lieutenants followed his example; and the unfortunate tailor who had provided these sartorial splendours held the Hôtel Misserie and the Hôtel Byzance in siege for days in the vain hope of extracting payment for his labours.
A droller set for the management of a ship of war was never seen anywhere. The second lieutenant, I remember, was fresh from St. John's College, Oxford. He had left his native shores for the first time on this journey, and his whole experience of the sea had been acquired in the passage of the Channel and the voyage from Marseilles to Constantinople. Poor Schipka Campbell put him under examination one evening at abrasseriein the Grande Rue, and elicited the fact that he supposed port and starboard to mean the same thing, and larboard to be the antithesis of the two. I forget the first lieutenant; but a subordinate officer was a fat City clerk who had been a volunteer in some London corps, and who on the strength of his military experiences had come out with intent to seek a commission in the Polish Legion.
The peculiarity of that contingent was that, so far as I know, not a solitary Pole ever attempted to join its ranks. The City clerk was seduced from his original purpose by die splendour of Mr. Edie's uniform. He was himself rigged out at the expense of the same unfortunate tailor who had supplied his fellow-officers; but he only wore the uniform once, having been caught and mercilessly chaffed by a contingent of British officers who were waiting for the formation of the Turkish gendarmerie under Colonel Valentine Baker. Associated with this crowd of silly and inexperienced boys was an old grey-bearded American doctor, who believed in the whole cock-and-bull story as if it had been gospel, and had undertaken to act as surgeon aboard that visionary craft. He was a delightful old fellow, and, for all his simplicity, had a vein of humour in him. Odd as it may sound, he was a man of some distinction, and had served with conspicuous honour in the Civil War, He had money of his own, and Heaven only knows how many generous things he did amongst the crowd of stranded foreigners at that time in the city.
'I don't lay out to know much,' he said to me one day; 'but I have made one discovery. Civilisation and the paper collar air ttwrterminous. Turkey is a civilised country. I bought half a gross of paper collars at the Bon Marché this morning. So long as I can purchase a paper collar I know I am in a civilised country, and when I cayn't, I ain't.'
I met the doctor a day or two after the publication of this memorable discovery, He was talking with one of the officers of the expedition, and suddenly he threw the walking-stick he carried high into the air.
'That lets me out!' he said, in a very loud and decided tone; and, quitting his companion, he beckoned to me to follow him. The old gentleman's face and gesture were so urgent that I joined him at once. He told his story in a vernacular racier than I dare to copy; but it came to this. The Government had got wind of the precious scheme (to which it had, of course, never given a moment's sanction), and had come down with an intimation that the originator of it and his subordinates would do well immediately to leave the country.
The chieftain was not thus easily to be balked, however. He called a council of war, and proposed to his astonished satellites that they should steal a gun-boat and turn pirates against the Russians on their own account. This delectable scheme was instantly rejected by the gentlemen to whom it was submitted, and it was the news of it which let the doctor out. He took steamer that afternoon for Syra, and I have never since heard of him. The officers of the letter of marque surrendered their uniforms to the tailor whom they had blessed with their patronage, and the chieftain went for a day or two to the lock-up at the British Consulate.
Sir John Fawcett—Mr. Fawcett he was in those days—chose rather to laugh at the whole business than to treat it seriously, and the adventurous young gentleman was released on a promise to leave the country. I myself was offered a post of honour in this remarkable contingent. The secret at which all Constantinople had been laughing for a week was confided to me in whispers at the Concert Flamm. I think—but at this distance of time I am not quite sure—that the post offered to me was that of Captain of Marines. I don't mind confessing, in justice to my own unwisdom at that time of day, that if there had been a boat and a marine I might have thought twice before refusing the offer. As it was, of course it was simply a matter for laughter.
I hardly like to leave Constantinople without a memory of the Polish Legion. I took a journey by the Shooting Star Railway with a chance companion, to see him sworn in and receive his commission as an officer of that regiment The place of assignation was a loft over an untenanted stable, for the time being the head-quarters of the corps. I never heard of their having any others; and I remember with unusual distinctness an interview one of the officers had with Said Pasha, who told him, with a perfect absence of reserve, that the Legion 'would be sent to the front and would be dissipated.' As a matter of fact, it never got really into form. I believe that there was never at any moment a solitary private in its ranks. So long as it lasted it consisted entirely of officers of various grades. Many of these, seeing how hopeless the whole enterprise had grown to be, abandoned it openly; others quietly slipped away without warning; and a good many willingly allowed themselves to be drafted into other regiments, where some of them did good service.
The English journalists in Turkey were divided by faction. We were mainly Philo-Turkish or Philo-Russian, according to the political colours of the journals we represented; and I know now very well that I was, for my own part, so impressed by the Bulgarian atrocities scare that I hardly knew how to look for mercy or right feeling in a Turk. The plain truth was very hard to get at, but now, through the far perspective of the years that lie between, it is easier to see with a judicial eye. If there is to be found anywhere in the world a gentler, a more hospitable, a more sober, a more chaste, truthful, and loyal creature than the citizen Turk, I confess that I should like to meet him. If there is anywhere to be found a man more devoted to duty, braver, simpler, gentler than the common soldier of the Turkish army, I would walk a long way to find him.
While the war went on, half of the men who sent the news of it out to the civilised world found the Turkanathema maranatha, and the other half were persuaded that the Bulgarian was a beast altogether despicable and cowardly. Since the Bulgarians have had a chance to govern themselves they have amply disproved that unfavourable theory, and 'the unspeakable Turk,' of whom we heard so much in those days, was in the main as good a sort of fellow as might be found in Europe.
The atrocities which shocked the world were, without exception, the work of the auxiliaries—the Tchircasse, the Bashi-Bazouk, the Zeibeck, the Smyrniote and Tripolite. I claim to know something of the doings of these gentry, for Mr. Francis Francis (then representing theTimes) and myself were for six weeks the only Englishmen in what was known as the 'Roumelian atrocity district.' Day after day we lived among the Christian dead, night after night we saw the incendiary fires. From the heights of the lower Balkans—as at Sopot—we could see the horizon red. The deserted villages stank with the unburied bodies of men and animals. About them in the night-time hordes of vagabond dogs howled lugubriously in the dark.
It was wonderful and terrible to see how the old savage Eastern spirit could revive itself in these modern days—'Kill, slay! leave not one stone standing upon another.' In Kalofer, where there had been a busy and thriving population a fortnight before our arrival, there was not a creature left, and scarcely a wall on the summit of which one might not have laid one's hand. The town still sent up a melancholy smoke to heaven as we entered it late in the evening, and the last torch of war shone from a thatched roof at the uttermost limit of the place against the lowering darkness of the sky. The arabajee who drove the lumbering little vehicle in which our few belongings were stored fell upon his knees in the middle of the stony desert street, and delivered to mean impassioned address of which I could not make out one syllable. My dragoman translated for my benefit 'Man with the two sweet eyes,' said the kneeling orator, in possible tribute to my spectacles, 'why did we enter upon this disastrous journey? Allah has forgotten us. Let us return.' We were in two minds about it already, for the place was weird to look at and the air was a slow poison; but the horses were tired, and we ourselves had had almost enough of the day s march.
Suddenly I sighted a domestic rooster, walking with a certain air of pensive reflection down the street. I rested my revolver on my left arm, took careful aim and fired. The bird towered madly, executed a wild waltz, and went round the corner. The noise of the shot disturbed some members of his harem, and a hen fluttered into the branches of a tree close by. Francis potted her, and she fell at our feet. Here, at least, was supper; but at the first corner we turned, in search of a place in which to camp for the night, we found the rest of the feathered brood feeding on the carcase of a pig which literally heaved in waves of vermin life. We were very hungry; but there was a good two to one chance that our bird had enjoyed that uninviting diet, and we threw her over the nearest wall into the cinders of a smoking cottage.
We were resigned to remain supperless, when, with a prodigious clatter on the stony street, and a wild calling of voices, came down three Turkish Cossacks, detached, to call us back, from a party of regular troops which we had passed that morning. The news they brought was, that the country was alive with every species of unconscionable blackguard known to the time and region; and at their urgent advice we mounted our tired beasts once more, and rode until a journey of some half-dozen miles brought us to the camp. There we fed royally, and slept in safety.
There is a theory to the effect that every man or woman in the world could write at least one readable and instructive novel out of his or her own actual experience. There is a very apparent disposition to put this idea to the test of practice, though, happily, not more than half the world's population has been so far animated by it. An equally sage idea is that anybody, and everybody, can take a part upon the stage. To write a novel or to turn actor—to astonish the world with a new Waverley, Esmond, or Copperfield, or to dazzle the mimic scene with a novel Hamlet, Falstaff, Richelieu, or Othello—would seem the simplest thing in the world to the apprehension of a good many excellent people.
Charles Dickens observed a great many years ago that to 'come out' in a great part is one of the easiest things in the world; while to avoid going in again is one of the most difficult. In my time I have both come out and gone in again; and though I am not disposed to tax my modesty for defences, or to offer prophecies for the future, it is not improbable that I may repeat the experience in its completeness. I suppose that the pursuit of the successful actor is the most fascinating in the world. Here and there one learns that it has been distasteful in an individual instance; but these cases are only the exceptions which prove themselves and nothing else.
A great many people have been good enough to tell the story of my first appearance on the stage; and they have told it in ways so diverse, and yet so circumstantially, that I have been sometimes tempted to doubt the genuineness of my own recollections. Here, however, for what it is worth, is my belief about the matter.
I was in New Zealand some three years ago, when a travelling manager whom I ran across in the course of my wanderings asked me if I happened to have such a thing as a new and original drama about me. I confessed that I had a scheme for a drama in my mind (the manager confessed himself to be singularly anxious to produce it), and I undertook to finish it and to see it through rehearsal. It will be observed that none of the usual difficulties which lie in the way of the ordinary pretender to dramatic fame obstructed my progress. There was no question of suitability—no thought of excellence or the reverse. The travelling manager had anything to gain and nothing to lose by the production of a piece from my hand. It meant no more than the trouble of rehearsing; and if the thing failed, it failed and there an end; and if it succeeded, the manager stipulated for half profits wherever the piece might be produced. He has not, so far, retired from business. In the innocence of my heart I promised that the piece should be ready for rehearsal in three weeks' time, and I set to work with the greatest vigour, burying myself for the first week at Gisborne, a weird and lonely seaside town where there has as yet been no whisper of a railway, and where the steamers which ply along the coast may or may not call for the traveller, according to the weather.
If I may say so of myself without immodesty, I am a rapid and assured workman.
All my best work has been done at a tremendous pace. I turned out 'Joseph's Coat' in thirty-six sittings, a chapter at a sitting. 'Val Strange,' a work of equal length or nearly, was written in as many consecutive days. 'Aunt Rachel,' the one work of mine which may outlive me by a score of years, was written at such a pace that a copying clerk would have some ado to transcribe it in the time. Its three last chapters were written between sunset and sunrise in the midst of as tragic interruptions as ever befell the writing of comedy anywhere.
With this lifelong habit of swift workmanship upon me, I thought that all I needed was to see my theme before me, and to go at it with my whole heart as I would have done at a new novel. In writing a novel you want a live place and live people; and these being provided, your book is as good as finished when you are half-way through with it. But I shall never forget in what a quagmire I landed myself when I began to write 'Chums' upon this principle. I have always, since I can remember, been a student of the acted drama. I acted for some years as dramatic critic in the provinces and in London. I knew as much about the exigencies of stage construction as the average man, and found that that meant a little less than nothing. The very method of work looked curiously bare and bald. My study for years has been to me a theatre in which I have acted many scores of different parts, often enough before a mirror to assure myself of nature. Yet I no sooner began to write consciously for the stage than this useful faculty abandoned me entirely. I no longer saw my living people; but in their stead the members of the travelling company obtruded themselves upon me.
My leading lady was before me in the place of Lucy Draycott. She was and is a most excellent and charming actress; but she was only playing at being Lucy Draycott, and she stood in between me and my own conception in a way which filled me with a cold embarrassment. Then, again, Square Jack Furlong, a rustic rascal, who, as I boldly hoped, was to make quite a new type of stage villain, was to be impersonated by a heavy man of quite the conventional sort—a man who (small blame to him) would have no idea of the accent my scoundrel was to speak in (a vital point to me) and not a conception of the inner workings of his mind. In this way all the real people who supposed they were to interpret my shadows into flesh and blood converted my flesh and blood into shadow. Understand that I am not apologizing for a bad play or a failure. It was not counted either one or the other, though I must do something different to touch the mark I am in quest of. I am only trying to show in what fashion I was embarrassed by new conditions. My travelling manager nearly broke his heart because I would not at first consent to allow my villain to shoot little Harold, and at last in desperation I took his advice and killed an idyll with a single grain of melodrama.
The piece was somehow written in the time prescribed, and was produced 'under the direct supervision of the author,' by which fact it gained perhaps as much as might have been expected. It was produced at Auckland, and achieved a success which it was not destined to repeat in its fulness. It was admirably, and in one respect originally, staged. The second act was laid in the New Zealand bush: and since at Auckland folks know what a New Zealand bush-scene is like, it was needful to be a little truer to nature than we found it easily possible to be when the play was produced for a single experimental night at the Globe, or when it ran its twelvemonth course in the English and Scotch provinces later on.
Sir George Grey was interested in the production; and in Auckland Sir George Grey does pretty much as he likes, as he has a right to do when one remembers what the city, and indeed the whole colony, owes to his patriotism, his statesmanship, and his personal generosity. Without his aid the stage-manager's proposal could not possibly have been carried out; but, armed with his authority, I presented myself to the curator of the park, and from him obtained leafage enough to dress the whole scene without the help of the scene-painter's art. We had a backcloth, to be sure, and an artificial waterfall (which flooded the cellars, by-the-by), but for everything else we were indebted to Sir George Grey and pure nature. The live bush, the wounds of the woodman's axe concealed by heaps of vari-coloured mosses, bloomed and rustled under the limelight as I suppose it never bloomed and rustled elsewhere in the history of the theatre, and the stage was ankle-deep in withered leaves; the scent of the forest actually getting beyond the footlights for once in a way.
I have never in my life seen any theatrical spectacle one-half as lovely; and this one scene had a great deal to do with the success of the piece. It was frantically applauded, and the scene-painter walked in front and bowed as if he had been responsible for its beauties. I overheard from a sun-tanned gentleman in the dress circle near whom I sat one useful trifle in the way of criticism. When Mr. Stuart Willoughby entered with his swag on his shoulder my neighbour whispered tohisneighbour thatthatfellow had never learned to hump his bluey in Otago. 'I'll bet my head,' he added, 'that chap's an Australian.' And so he was. The future Stuart Willoughbys were instructed in this particular, and the most critical New Zealander could have found no fault with the style in which Mr. David James, junior, carried his belongings in the Otago bushland of the Globe Theatre, London.
'Chums' hit the New Zealand fancy, and the little play was kindly received in many places. I had begun to write another drama of a much more serious sort, and was working pretty busily as well at a revised edition of my first effort, when a serious accident befell us. My manager and I were travelling together to Dunedin (for we had formed a definite scheme of partnership, and had arranged to spend a year or two in the preparation of arepertoireof pieces which might be fit to face the lights of London by the time we got there), when a telegram found us at a railway stationen route. It told us that an important member of the company had seceded. I know now the story of his secession; but I have some slight acquaintance with the law of libel, and the history is of no particular interest to anybody.
We were announced to open in Dunedin in 'Jim the Penman,' and our missing man was to have played the part of Baron Hardfeldt The town was billed, seats were booked; there was no going back from the engagement without disaster. Then I had a goodly number of friends in Dunedin who were coming to see my own play, and there was a financial loss to be encountered into the bargain. Personally I experienced a keen sense of disappointment; but the manager was in despair. There was no filling the place of the recalcitrant for love or money—there was very little capital behind the concern; and, in short, it looked as if we had found a finish for our enterprise. Then it was that I bethought me, 'Why the dickens shouldn't I play Baron Hardfeldt?'
I communicated my idea to my companion, who grasped at it as a drowning man grips a straw. We consulted together. We found it possible to begin to study at midnight, and we arranged for a rehearsal on the morrow. I had seen the piece once, and recalled its general tenor, and began to construct a Hardfeldt. One of my dearest friends is a Zliricher, and I felt certain of his accent. That was a point gained, for the rascally Baron might as well have come from Zurich as from anywhere else in the world. I recalled, with no twinge of inward apology, every tone of my old friend's voice, every trick of facial expression, and every little touch of Swiss gesture which helps his breezy and warm-hearted talk. I determined to dower Sir Charles Young's admirable scoundrel with all my dear old J—— G——'s tricks and manners; and I was the less remorseful in copying his cheerful and childlikebonhomiebecause our recalcitrant had been in the habit of giving the Baron away at his very entrance, and had stamped him from the first as a ruffian of the deepest dye, whereas I was disposed to think that a really successful adventurer would be likely to have an honest and engaging manner.
At midnight I began to study; and at three o'clock in the morning I went away to bed, carrying with me the words and business of the part and a pretty bad headache. We rehearsed at eleven; and I was 'letter-perfect,' as actors say, and was always to be found on the very nail of the stage on which I was wanted. I have always boasted a verbal memory like a steel rat-trap. It never lets anything go upon which it once seizes. So far excellent. 'But Linden saw another sight' at night-time. I knew platform fright as well as anybody. I have thrice been physically sick before addressing a strange audience, though I have been hardened by nearly a quarter of a century of practice. John Bright once said in my hearing that he never arose to speak in public without a feeling of insecurity at the knees and 'the sense of a scientific vacuum behind the waistcoat.' But this first appearance on the boards took me beyond anything I had hitherto experienced. I recalled the phrase about the 'scientific vacuum' which had fallen from the lips of England's greatest orator, and tried to console myself with the hope that I might not play so very vilely in spite of the fact that I had forgotten every line and word. I was bathed in a coward sweat whilst I stood near the central doors of the stage-chamber into which I was shortly to walk like a sheep to the slaughter. The cue came, and I entered mechanically crushing an opera-hat against my shirt-front. I know that if the audience could have seen the face below the grease-paint and the powder, they would have seen something very like the face of a corpse.
Luckily I am very short-sighted, and the space beyond the yellow glare of the footlights was no more than a black and empty gulf to me. The Penman, my miserable sin-steeped confederate, took me by the hand and introduced me cordially to Mrs. Ralston. Until he had ceased to speak I had no remotest idea of what I had to say; but the words came somehow, and I half fancied that my old friend J—— G—— had spoken them.
There was a scattered round of applause at the end of the simple words I had to speak; for some of my friends in front had recognised me, as they might easily do, since I wore my own hair and beard. I did not think of this, but wondered dimly that I should have begun to make an impression so very early in the evening. I could see my breath rising like steam against the darkness of the auditorium, for it was cold weather and there was a touch of frost thus early even in the theatre. I sat and talked in dumb-show with Lady Duns-combe, was fittingly snubbed by Lord Dre-lincourt, and at length found myself alone with my confederate. The scene before me I knew to be one of the strongest of its class in the whole range of modern drama. I knew, impotent as I was, that Icouldplay it—I could feel the sense of power tingling through my own impuissance. But the first essential was to know the words, and never a word knew I. Luckily Jim the Penman was an old stager, had played the part some two or three hundred times, and so knew most of the Baron's lines.
Whilst we were having our dumb talk with Percival I had told him that my head was as empty as a blown egg-shell, and had fairly frightened him into taking care of me. He gave me my first words in a guarded whisper at the close of every speech of his own, and shepherded me with the utmost care through the whole scene. I shall never forget the well-meaning feeble villain, stricken down by remorse and impending terror, and the dominative Baron bullying him the while, with words supplied piecemeal by the sufferer.
'And vot haf you to do vith shame?' inquired the Baron, and there stuck. 'Wife you cherish,' whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached 'Wife you cherish,' stuck again. 'Children you adore,' whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at his tyrant with filmy eyes of suffering.
'And the children you adore,' echoed the Baron in a tone which spoke his unrelenting nature. At last came one intolerable, awful moment, when the hopeless Jim could prompt no longer. The prompter was at his post, but took no earthly notice of the scene. He had witnessed the rehearsal and was taking things easily. There was nothing else for it. I walked across to him and asked him for the line, received it, and spoke it with a biting scorn which nipped my confederate to the quick. I was congratulated on that unwilling walk across the stage afterwards by an old hand who was present at this first appearance of mine. He told me that the pause, the walk, the turn, and the indignant scorn with which the words were spoken had impressed him greatly, and had assured him that I was a born actor. But by that time I had found the courage of desperation, and all my fears had melted into thin air. The words of the subsequent acts came readily, and before the last curtain fell I was as much at home as I had ever found myself on the lecture platform.