A curious incident recalled itself to me whilst I was writing the story with which my last chapter ends. I tell it here as much to symbolise the change of atmosphere which will now come over this book as to enforce a moral. The moral has none the less its value. It enjoins, if a little invertedly, the lesson to be learned of the fable of the mouse and the lion.
I had been then to the empire to see Miss Génée dance, at a time when seeing Miss Génée dance was one of the great pleasures of my life. There used to be, next door to the old Café Royal, a German beer house called Gambrinius’. There I always went after the theatre, at least when – as I usually was – I was alone. It was vast, decorated with antlers, helmets, morgensterns, owls the light of whose eyes went in and out, and the usual decorations that made for a simple Teutonic atmosphere. There was an end, giving on Glasshouse Street, that was rather smart and an end towards Regent Street that was rather Bohemian. When I was in one mood I would go to one end, at other times to the other.
I was sitting then towards the Regent Street end about one in the morning. Towards the other end of the place there was a group of perhaps six or seven waiters and the proprietor, Mr Oddenino, and a member of the public. They were moving chairs, displacing guests and looking carefully on the floor. I observed near my feet what looked like a large fragment of a beer mug – a dull piece of glass in the sawdust. Then I saw, after I had poked it with my stick, that it was faceted. I picked it up. It seemed duller in my hand than on the ground. It seemed too large to be valuable. I had two regular waiters under whom I sat in that place, the one at one end, the other at the other. The one on the Regent Street side was old, North German and extremely ugly, the one towards Glasshouse Street was young, Austrian and cherubic. I asked the old man what the group at the far end were looking for. He said:
‘The gentleman has lost a diamond out of his tie-pin.’
I got up and strolled over to that civilian. I say ‘civilian’ because waiters always impress me as being military overlords of their domains. I held my open hand towards him. I said I supposed that what was in my palm was what he had lost. He jumped at it, as it were, and for a moment was too excited, showing it to the waiters. His tie-pin was noticeable as being, on top of its stick, a large, empty circlet of gold. At last he said to me, quite inoffensively:
‘I suppose I could not offer you anything for finding it?’
I said he could not. Then he asked me to sit down and have a drink with him. I said I would prefer not to. I do not think I ever took a drink with a stranger. Then he said:
‘You must have a drink with me. Do you know what that stone is? It is the … diamond.’
It comes back to me as having been the Hope diamond but I daresay it wasn’t. It was at any rate one of the famous diamonds of the world of that day. I said that having held the – diamond in my hand was sufficient reward for having strolled across the café to restore it to him. He said:
‘Then come back to Claridge’s with me and taste my champagne. I’ve got some …’ He named some fabulous brand and vintage year.
When I still refused he said:
‘But I’m Harriman.’ He added: ‘T. E. Harriman.’… I think those were the initials. At any rate they were those of the then railway king of the United States. I said I was as glad to have seen him as to have seen his diamond but that champagne disagreed with me. As a matter of fact I dislike champagne almost more than any other fluid.
I strolled back to my place. But here is the point: I was not half across the café when my little Austrian waiter ran after me and said:
‘How could you do it? How could you do it? How could you?’
I expressed astonishment. He said, almost crying:
‘Why did you give him the diamond? Of course you could not take a reward. But if you had given it to me to give him he must have given me three – four – five hundred pounds, by law. Then I could have opened my café in Wien and married and been happy for ever.’
I was never so ashamed of myself. I have not got over being ashamed of it. Since then I have eaten I suppose the majority of my meals at restaurants – and that lesson I have never forgotten. Waiters, I mean, are human beings and the wise man remembers it.
It is good to attach yourself to one waiter in a place in which you are settled and to one in every place to which you go frequently. Then – if you remember that he is not only a military dictator but a human being – you will have a most valuable friend and mentor. In the town near which I am living I have been attended by a chief waiter at intervals for eight or ten years. I go to him for advice as to every imaginable contingency – as to where to buy hens, rubber piping, clocks, as to the real characters of servants, lawyers, bank managers, as to the most ornate church services, as to the dates of birth of great men, as to which paper has the best account of such and such a case, as to postage on parcels to the United States, as to the foibles of the tax collector in my district. But from time to time I give him little presents – or accept them from him: a bunch of carnations from his or my garden, a duck’s egg or so, once one of my own books that had pictures in it.
I once gave a waiter – but a head, head-waiter – advice. He was the incredibly all-knowing, bearded, inscrutable maître d’hôtel of the Carlton Grill Room. He positively came to me one day when I was lunching and asked me if I could give him advice how to find the house in which Casanova lived in London. Even the bibliophile Jacob had not known where it was except that it was in Soho. He wanted the information for some American clients who were making a pilgrimage to all the places dwelt in by Casanova – and if possible to the very houses. I happened to have the information so he was saved further trouble. He was suavely grateful.
Later he came back to my table and leaning one hand on the cloth said:
‘Why do you ever lunch anywhere else but here? This is the best grill-room in the most famous hotel in the world. It should be good enough for you.’ I used the word: ‘Expensive.’
He looked down sardonically at my couvert.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what do you want with a lunch like that? Half a dozen oysters, that alone is enough for a lunch for a young man like you. But you follow it by pâté de Périgord and quails stewed with grapes. And you drink a half Berncastler and a half Pontet Canet 1906 … What sort of lunch is that and can you grumble if it costs you the eyes out of your head?’
I said I was very busy and needed sustaining. He said:
‘A lunch like that will not sustain you. After it you will be sleepy and your business will be a battle. Do you suppose I could do my work if I lunched like that? No, take my advice. Lunch here every day. We do not ask you to spend enormous sums but to have a good lunch. You will take a chump chop, or a steak, or some kidney or any other thing of the grill. You will have some Stilton or Cheshire cheese, butter and the choice of twelve different sorts of bread and cheese biscuits. You will drink iced water or a half bottle of Perrier or, if you like, a half bottle of our vin ordinaire rouge which I drink myself. It costs one and ninepence. If you have mineral water you will save a shilling. So your lunch will cost you two or three and ninepence. The chop and the cheese cost two shillings. You will have the same seat and the same waiter whom I will choose for you myself. You will tip him fifteen shillings on the first of every month. You will be troubled by no tiresome suggestions to take more costly food and you will be under no sense of obligation. I have several of the richest and most distinguished men in London amongst my regular clients and they never spend or tip more.’
It was kind and valuable advice to give a younger man. I suppose I was thirty-three or four then. But you have to be older before you can dispense with a maître d’hôtel’s or even a waiter’s advice. I should think you would have to be a hundred.
You are to think of me then as rather a dandy. I was going through that phase. It lasted perhaps eight years – until Armageddon made one dress otherwise. Every morning about eleven you would see me issue from the door of my apartment. I should be wearing a very long morning coat, a perfectly immaculate high hat, lavender trousers, a near-Gladstone collar and a black satin stock. As often as not, at one period, I should be followed by a Great Dane. The dog actually belonged to Stephen Reynolds but he disliked exercising it in London because he was nervous at crossings. But a policeman will always stop the traffic for a Great Dane to cross. I carried a malacca cane with a gold knob.
I would walk up Holland Park Avenue as far as the entrance to Kensington Gardens, diagonally across them to Rotten Row where I would chat with the riders, leaning on the rails. I would cross to St. James’s Park and the Green Park, cross them and reach one or other of my clubs about half past twelve, read the papers and my letters until one. Then I would lunch at the club or the Carlton and take a hansom – later a taxi – back to my apartment which I would reach about half past two. At five I would go to or give a tea-party. Before dinner I would take a bath and a barber would come in and shave me. I dined out every day, but very occasionally, for someone special I would cook a dinner myself in my own flat, putting a chef’s coat over my evening things. I had two boasts, the one that no one had ever seen me work, the other that I walked four miles every day on grass. That was in crossing the parks. In Central Park New York I had been apostrophised by a policeman who said:
‘Get off the grass, same as you would in any other civilised country.’ I used my second boast usually on New Yorkers, of whom I saw a good many.
My father used to say that he was the laziest man in the world, yet he had done more work than any man living. I could almost say as much of myself. I fancy that for ten years – say from 1904 to 1914 – I never took a complete day’s rest. I worked even on the trains in America at a time when that was less usual than it is today. My record in the British Museum Catalogue fills me with shame; it occupies page on page with the mere titles of my printed work. Even at that it is not a complete record; it omits several books published only in America. I do not imagine that anyone not a daily journalist has written as much as I have and I imagine that few daily journalists have written more.
I do not say that I am proud of the record. If I had written less I should no doubt have written better. Of the fifty-two odd separate books there catalogued probably forty are out of print. There is only one of those forty that I should care to re-publish and of the remaining twelve there are not more than six of which I should much regret the disappearance.
This great body of work was produced without any feeling of fatigue. At the time of which I am writing I used to work with great regularity from nine to eleven when I went out to lunch and from half past two to half past four when I would go out to tea. After I was eighteen I never wrote at night and except for a week or so before the publication of the first number of the English Review I never did any work at all – even editing or proof correcting – after dinner. In the four hours of work I turned out exactly two thousand words. Of these I would condemn about half. This left about a thousand words for the day. A thousand words a day is 365,000 for the year – enough to make over four novels. Of course I never published four novels in any one year. Only twice indeed have I published as many as two. The usual tale was one novel and one book of the type called in England ‘serious’. There the novel can never be heralded as ‘serious’. It would give the public cause to think the writer was in earnest which to the Englishman is insupportable. In the United States books that are not novels are classed as ‘nonfiction’. The classification is perhaps not accurate but it is more complimentary to the novelist. That I suppose is why I have latterly published more books to the West than to the East of the Atlantic. Earnestness will come creeping into what I write.
But by far the greater bulk of what I wrote from, say, 1905 until the war went into ephemeral organs – mostly into the Saturday editions of daily papers, into the editorial columns of monthlies that I owned or edited, or into weekly papers. At the time of the Suffragette agitations I wrote a great deal that Miss Pankhurst published where and how she liked. Apart from that most of my periodical writing was critical and mostly about the work of young writers, though I was always given a free hand and wrote a good deal about the then more revolutionary painting and sculpture. Latterly I wrote a weekly causerie about anything I liked to write about for the Outlook whose editor, Mr Oliver was very sympathetic to me. He let me write whatever I liked about any subject under the sun and, as I was never a very good conversationalist, I enjoyed getting my say without interruptions.
I went on writing for him until well into the war. A suggestion of mine in one of those causeries that the reports of German atrocities were probably a good deal exaggerated, and that if we could fight the war in terms of the ‘gallant enemy’ it would be better for all parties, caused the paper to lose some readers but Mr Oliver neither asked me to resign nor to change my note. That was an act of rare courage at that date. I continued writing Government propaganda in his paper till I went to the front.
I wrote a great deal of propaganda during the first year of the war. What I wrote was certainly the mildest in tone as it was probably the most instructed that was written for the allies. I read the great bulk of it through the other day and saw nothing that I should now wish to alter. I had the rare honour of receiving sheafs of anonymous letters from both English and German patriots who all said they desired to murder me.
But at other times I wrote about English or foreign writers who did not appear to me to be receiving the attention they deserved or about curious points in the civilisation of the day. The only time I wrote about anything political was during the Marconi case. Of that I attended the hearings fairly regularly and I was shocked at the deterioration that appeared to have begun in English public life since the Boer War and the death of Queen Victoria. Before that time a Minister of the Crown was expected to – and usually did – lay down office a poorer man than when he entered public life. That was true too of Germany. Both Bismarck and Gladstone had died poorer than they had been on coming into their inherited wealth. A number of ministers of the first Asquith administration did not however see why a minister should not use government information when making their investments. They did not indeed see why they should not let their friends in on a good thing. I mean that they really did not see it. Nor did they see any necessity for concealment. Their relatives and intimates called inside financial information one to the other up the very staircases of their clubs.
There was nothing very wonderful in that. After the South African War a wave of financial gambling overcame the country. The great houses in Park Lane fell into the hands of the Randlords as South African speculators who had made good were called. They were received familiarly at Court, became intimates of the highest in the land, won classic races and became national heroes.
I suppose it was no affair of mine. But perhaps the certainty that the poor old Queen was turning in her grave got on my nerves. At any rate I wrote some impassioned articles backing up Mr F. W. Wilson, the financial editor of the Outlook. It was he who really brought about the exposure of the Marconi Affair.
The Postmaster-General was at that date negotiating with the Marconi Company to make a network of Marconi Stations connecting the dominions of the Empire. That much was known to the public and the shares of the Marconi Company rose sympathetically or fell according as the negotiations progressed or stood still. When therefore the relatives and intimates of the Postmaster-General put it about with very little caution among their relatives and intimates that the Chancellor of the Exchequer – who ought to be a financial expert – was buying shares in a company subsidiary to the Marconi Company proper the shares of everything connected with wireless telegraphy began extraordinarily to boom and Mr Wilson began his attacks on the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Postmaster-General and a number of their relatives. The Government at first pooh-poohed the matter. But the agitation spread to other papers and quarters. It became so intense that they had to appoint a Royal Commission to enquire into the whole matter of the sales of Marconi shares.
As I have said, I attended a number of the sittings of this body. I had before then attended, usually as a witness, a few Royal Commissions. They were non-political and seemed to be conducted with decorum and a fairly efficient if somnolent desire to obtain information. But the Marconi Commission must have been one of the most farcical bodies that ever met. There were seven Liberals and five Tories who voted with the unanimity of the clockwork soldiers of the Russian ballet, each party against the other. The Tories voted that any evidence that could be helpful to the Ministers concerned should not be heard, the Liberals that it should. When evidence unfavourable to the Ministers was being heard all the Liberals went to sleep in a body; when anything that could be dug up to be favourable to them all the Tories seemed to have been drugged. In addition, Lord Robert Cecil, who presumably suffered from a bad throat, constantly took out an atomiser and opened his mouth extraordinarily wide. The noise of the spray and his vocal garglings would extremely disconcert any ministerial witness.
The evidence was extraordinarily prolix, the repetitions interminable. Gentleman after gentleman swore that he had heard ministerial relatives shouting financial information up the marble staircase of the National Liberal Club; gentleman after gentleman swore that he had not. Financial experts deposed that the shares of companies subsidiary to the parent company would be advantaged by the Postmaster-General’s giving a contract to that parent company; financial experts deposed that they would not be in the least advantaged. Everyone in London or New York who had ever heard of anyone else purchasing anything called after Marconi was examined by one side or the other.
At last came the turn of the editor of, I think, the Financial News, the journal and its editor having the greatest possible weight in the City. His evidence was not immensely important, mainly because he had been in South America during the greater part of the time when the case had been brewing. When he had finished, the President of the Commission put to him the formal question: Had he anywhere, at any time or in any circumstances heard the name of any other Minister who was said to have bought shares in any company connected with Marconi? The editor said that he had not. The chairman who was bald, white-headed and stout, repeated with extraordinary solemnity, whilst all the Tories snored:
‘You have never – at any time, in any circumstances, in any place heard mention of any Minister except those whose conduct is here under enquiry as having purchased any shares in any company in any remotest way connected with Marconi’s?’
The editor said that he had of course heard idle gossip naming one Minister. But he had means of knowing the names of all purchasers of such stock and knew the gossip was absolutely untrue. All the Liberal members became at once as if galvanised. They insisted on having the name of the accused Minister.
The editor energetically refused to give it. The gossip was perfectly irresistible. He had heard it in a bar in Buenos Aires from a person who in the nature of events could not have private information about the case. And he repeated that he knew the allegation was absolutely untrue.
The Liberals went on pressing him. A Conservative, Mr Amory, made a pointed and impassioned remark about the waste of the Commission’s time. The editor refused still. He said he could not as a gentleman be asked to give currency to gossip that he regarded as pestilential lying by the worst type of bar-loafer. His emotion was impressive. The Liberals continued to press him, the Tories to protest. At last the room was cleared for the Commission to put the matter to the vote. The seven Liberals voted for the evidence, the five Tories against its being heard.
The editor was pallid. He protested against being coerced into dishonouring himself. It was no good. He was threatened with the Speaker’s writ committing him to the Clock Tower. The whole room hung on his lips in an intense silence. Lord Robert Cecil’s spray sounded like artillery; his hanging open jaw gave him the appearance of being about to die. At last the witness said:
‘The name was that of Mr Winston Churchill. But I protest…’
That Committee Room at once became like pandemonium. At last the Chairman could be heard to say:
‘Mr Churchill must be written to to attend before us,’ and we all adjourned to lunch. When we came back there was a long pause, some minutes being inaudibly read. Suddenly there was a roar like that of a charging wild boar. Mr Churchill was pushing aside the people in the doorway as if he had been a forward in a game of football and near the goal. His top hat was pressed down over his ears, his face was as pallid as wax: whiter than the paper on which this is written. His features were so distorted that he was almost unrecognisable. He dashed himself at the chair that was in the horseshoe shaped space before the Commissioners. He shouted:
‘If any man has dared to say that I would do such a damned swinish thing as to buy any share in any filthy company in any way connected with any Governmental action … If any man has dared…’
The chairman said:
‘There, there Mr Winston we all know your admirable record.’ The Tories hissed in unison: ‘An outrage…’
Mr Churchill slammed his fist violently on the table before him and began again:
‘If I could get my hands on his throat … To say that I could be capable of such infamy …’
Mr Lloyd George’s private secretary dashed up behind him and whispered in his ear. Mr Churchill said:
‘I don’t care… Infamy! …’ Other minister’s secretaries had a try at him, the humour of the scene being added to by the fact that there was a tangle of acrimonious divorce cases going on among the ministers’ secretaries. Mr Asquith was having a great deal of trouble and putting himself to some expense in order to prevent charges and cross-charges making a very pretty scandal and to provide incomes denied to erring partners by recalcitrant and disagreeable parties. I had not considered till then that it was part of the Prime Minister’s duties to provide for the lame ducks and divorced wives of his more immediate supporters. But apparently Mr Asquith took the view that it was and behaved with great generosity and kindness. I know this because I was engaged to persuade one of the more unreasonable parties to one of the cases to behave with some moderation.
The final comic relief to the situation was provided by one of the Liberal members who, having begun life by pushing a costermonger’s barrow, had lately been ennobled. This knight, who was very handsome in a dark and bearded way, had a singularly sentimental manner and a singular accent. He leaned romantically over the table towards Mr Churchill and made an elaborate oratorical effort. He begged Mr Churchill to be sure that no one in that assembly could so much as most distantly suspect Mr Churchill of financial irregularity. How, he said, could any suspicion of dishonour attach to one descended from the heroic John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and one of the greatest generals the world had ever seen?
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, had to the common knowledge been one of the greatest eighteenth century exponents of the art of what is today called grafting. So the handsome knight’s speech proved too much for the gravity of the meeting and the sitting broke up in some disorder after Mr Churchill with tremendous emphasis had assured the members that, since his taking the smallest office under the Crown, he had not bought a single share in any company whose destinies could be affected by government and before taking such office he had disposed of every such share as happened to be in his possession.
Mr George’s speech of exculpation was one of the most marvellous feats of oratorical pathos that could be imagined. Certainly I have never heard on the stage or read in any book anything much more moving. He made no attempt to deny having purchased shares that he ought strictly speaking not to have bought, but he said he had bought them in the usual course of investment and on the advice of his usual financial adviser. He had had nothing to do with any attempts to influence the market. And was, he said, a career of sedulous devotion to the service of his country, to be broken because of a mistake that any one not born to opportunities of great experience in the manipulations of shares might easily make?
As he went on he moved the House to deep emotion. A great many of the members – Mr Balfour was one – were moved to tears. I know that I came very near crying myself and in that matter I was as bitter an opponent as Mr George ever had. After the first five minutes of the speech there could be no doubt that the division would be a triumph for him. And it was. He carried practically the whole House with him.
The Marconi Commission had been a grotesque affair and after the sitting which I have described it was summarily brought to an end. But it did undoubtedly have the effect of restoring English public standards to their earlier strictness. I do not believe that any Minister of the Crown has since bought any shares which could in any way be questioned. The horror of having such a body sit interminably on one’s case must be enough to deter you from the most minute of irregularities.
With such preoccupations and employments I passed my working hours. The second reverse of my medal – if a medal can have two reverses or a lump of amber contain two flies – presented itself when I took my morning walks abroad. When I left my doorstep I would perceive bearing down on me from opposite directions Mrs Gwendolen Bishop and Mr Ezra Pound. Mrs Bishop was a lady of striking appearance – of great beauty, indeed. I think she danced snake dances and made pottery. Mr Bernard Shaw broke up the City Socialist League because he drank champagne from one of her shoes on the premises of that body. But no one could have drunk anything from her shoes in those days for she habitually wore sandals on bare feet. In addition she wore a very short blue skirt. It would be entirely covered by a leopard skin that descended from her shoulders; her head would be bare and she carried a string bag filled with onions. I had as a matter of the merest courtesy to take the string bag. Ezra on the other hand would approach with the step of a dancer, making passes with a cane at an imaginary opponent. He would wear trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.
Mrs Bishop would fall in on my right, Ezra on my left, and the great Dane would adjust its nose so as just not to touch my heel. So arranged we would proceed up Holland Park Avenue towards Bond Street. I did not mind … much. Sometimes I used to wonder why Mrs Bishop should want to carry – or want me to carry – exposed onions to that fashionable thoroughfare. Indeed I used to wonder why she carried onions away from rather than towards her home which was in the other direction, though I never quite knew where it was. In any case we went on the way in concord, discussing vers libre, the metre of Arnaut Daniel or the villainy of contributors to the front page of the Times Literary Supplement.
Ezra, the most erudite of poetic beings and the most poetic amongst the erudite, danced, fought and swash-buckled his way into my friendship through the medium of the English Review. He once challenged a Times reviewer to a duel because the reviewer had too high an opinion of Milton. I cannot imagine any better reason. The Times at least ought not to be kind to Nonconformists. And he gave a good deal of pain to many worthy and pompous people. But the only thing I have against him is that he never once offered to carry Mrs Bishop’s string bag. And since that is the only thing I have against him during a friendship that has lasted nearly a quarter of a century it may well pass for very little. Ezra was brought to my office by Miss May Sinclair who said she wanted to introduce the greatest poet to the greatest editor in the world. She could invent these courtesies when she wanted to. She must by then have forgiven me for the fireman’s helmet. But she afterwards wrote a book whose villain was a striking likeness of myself, so perhaps she really had not.
There are three people in whose deaths I have never been able to believe. They are Conrad and Arthur Marwood and Mrs H. G. Wells. It seems to me impossible that I shall never drive over to the Pent and ask Conrad some question, or never listen to Marwood encyclopaedically and brilliantly laying down the English Tory law on something or other. And though I shall never again take tea with Mrs Wells I cannot believe it and I should not thank you if you proved the fact to me. I will pay to her my little tribute before going on to Marwood and the English Review.
She had an extraordinarily delicate talent and contributed to both the English and the Transatlantic Reviews while I edited them. I still occasionally meet someone who remembers those stories as standing out from those periodicals. I used to urge her to write more and I still possess a number of pages of her sketches for poems or stories. But she felt that her star rose to be obscured. The little she wrote was exquisite but it was very little indeed. Her achievements as a hostess were as extraordinary as they appeared to be effortless. There can have been very few men or women of talent or distinction in England for whom she had not at one time or another provided delicate and charming entertainment and the number of the unfortunate who had cause to bless her for her care was legion. Her domesticity was conducted with a fierceness of conscience that can never have been surpassed. How she achieved what in one field or the other she contrived to achieve was incomprehensible. Yet she seemed to be always at leisure and always full of humour. I remember that the first time I stopped at Spade House I was sent to take a walk with Mrs Wells whilst Mr Wells wrote. We got as far as Folkestone post-office. Here she purchased a number of stamps, postcards and stamped envelopes that would have seemed to be excessive had she been purchasing a week’s supply for the house of Rothschild. Her other purchases were on a similarly impressive scale. Years after – twenty perhaps – I reminded her of that walk in what was, I should imagine, the last of the few letters I ever wrote her. She replied, yes, she remembered. She had been told that I was a very haughty and ostentatious, disagreeable sort of person. She had therefore made a list of things that could be bought in bulk without deteriorating and had taken me out for the sole purpose of disgruntling me whilst she bought a whole year’s supply of articles necessary in the household. She wrote that she rejoiced to think that she had impressed me. Ah, but indeed she had.
At Winchelsea a little later I had noticed for some time a powerfully built, leisurely man who sauntered about the town and the circumjacent marshes with a lady and, I think, a dog. I do not remember the dog at all so it must have been either non-existent or a fox-terrier, a breed that I dislike for its restlessness. How we became acquainted I do not remember but I do remember very vividly interminable conversations that we had almost immediately after we did meet. There was nothing under the sun that we did not discuss and no topic on which he could not in some minute particular at least correct my assertions. He would wait for a long time and then rather jestingly drop his correction into the middle of a quite unrelated topic. The first time he did this he filled me with a confusion that I can still feel. By a feat of mixing up names of which I am at all times capable I assigned Laura to Ariosto and spoke of Valence instead of Vaucluse as Petrarch’s place of exile. Marwood made no immediate protest, but a long time after we were talking of some parliamentary candidate who had written an extraordinary number of addresses to the electors of the Cleveland Division of Durham. Marwood said:
‘They were about as useful as the stuff Petrarch wrote to Laura in Vaucluse,’ as it were underlining the names a very little.
He possessed the clear, eighteenth century English mind which has disappeared from the earth, leaving the earth very much the poorer. It was not merely that his mind was encyclopaedic, it was that his information was all arranged. I knew Valence and Vaucluse as well as I know most places that I have not inhabited and I knew and disliked the Petrarchan sonnet as well as I know and dislike any literary form. But nothing can prevent my mixing up names. I suppose I inherit the characteristic from my grandfather, who had it to a dangerous degree. I would come in and say to him:
‘Grandpa, I met Lord Leighton in the Park and he sent his regards to you.’ He would exclaim with violence: ‘Leighton! How dare you be seen talking to him? And how dare he presume to send messages to me? He is the scoundrel who …’ I would interrupt:
‘But, Grandpa, he is the President of the Royal Academy…’ He would interrupt in turn: ‘Nonsense. I tell you he is the fellow who got seven years for …’ A few minutes after he would exclaim:
‘Leighton? Oh, Leighton? Why didn’t you say Leighton if you meant Leighton. I thought you said Fothergill-Bovey Haines. Of course there is no reason why you should not be civil to Leighton.’
Marwood’s mind connoted and arranged names, verb sounds and cyphers with such accuracy that it was impossible for him to make a slip. I got over my confusion about the Laura affair next day. The Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had just appeared and he had borrowed a copy of the first volume from the village library and covered it with a newspaper jacket so that no one should know that the objectionable volume was in the house. I found him going through the first page with a pencil and note-book. He had discovered thirty-seven errors in that page. In the paragraph about Arminianism alone he had found seven slips, misstatements and inaccuracies in terminology.
He had other and singular gifts: how many I never fathomed. He was a higher mathematician of considerable renown at his University. He was determined not to be Senior Wrangler because he disliked the idea of having a title that he considered ridiculous. The betting at Cambridge was five to one that he would be. He had to sit for that distinction. He deliberately set down five cyphers wrong, wrote them down on a piece of paper apart, and, as he came out tossed it contemptuously to his principal backer, saying:
‘Sorry, old fellow. I’ll shew you how to get what you’ve lost back at roulette.’ He was most interested in the theory of waves which I think occupied the greater part of his mind. But in an off moment he had invented a modification of the martingale that he said was infallible at Monte Carlo. He communicated it to me but warned me not to use it. It needed so much application for its proper working that you were certain to get impatient and plunge, losing all your small gains. I tried it when I was in the Red Cross Hospital at Mentone in 1917. We had leave to go into the Principality after lunch and, if we changed into mufti, might play at the tables as long as we were back in hospital at seven. I played for a great many afternoons from about three till about half past six – and always with the result that Marwood predicted. By a quarter to six I had always won anything from five to thirty pounds. At a quarter past the hour I would be sick to death of the system and would plunge. The atmosphere was stuffy, the occupation too monotonous. One said the equivalent of today’s ‘To hell with it!’ and plumped all one’s winnings on a number. If one won one plumped it all on another number. It went.
It was whilst I was thus passing my time that it occurred to me to wonder what Marwood would have thought about the war and the way it was conducted. In the attempt to realise that problem for myself I wrote several novels with a projection of him as a central character. Of course they were no sort of biography of Marwood. He died several years before the war, though, as I have said, that is a fact that I never realise.
It was the peculiar, scornful, acute quality of his mind that did that for me. I do not know that I ever consulted him over any of my personal difficulties as I invariably consulted Conrad – and indeed, rather often, Mrs Wells. It was much more as if I ‘set’ my mind by his. If I had personal problems I would go and talk to him about anything else. Then the clarity of the working of his mind had an effect on mine that made me see if not what was best to do then what would be most true to myself. In much the same way when I was at Walton Heath during the first days of the war in attendance on Masterman I played a daily round of golf with George Duncan – for a fortnight or so. I was not taking lessons. Duncan paid no attention to me and gave me no hints. I merely paid him for his time. But I played really extraordinary golf for me – with disastrous results for Masterman or any other member of the Cabinet who played against Masterman and myself in the afternoon.
I do not believe that Marwood had much sense of humour, but his dry statements of essential facts were so strange to the greater part of English humanity of his day that he could keep a roomful of men laughing as long as he was in it. He said one afternoon at Rye Golf Club to the Conservative member for that borough:
‘You know,’ – he was speaking as a Tory – ‘We ought to have had Lloyd George to do our dirty work. We have always had to have someone to do our dirty jobs. We had Disraeli and we had Chamberlain. We ought to have had Lloyd George.’ The Conservative member laughed as if he thought Marwood an amiable lunatic. His mind was incapable of making the jump of seeing Mr George as anything but a Radical devil with hoofs and tail.
From the beginning of the period of which I am talking – from 1907 to 1914 – I worried myself with the idea that I ought to have a periodical of my own. Lord Northcliffe had wanted me to run one under him. That had not impressed me so much. But, when the Transatlantic press Napoleon urged me to adopt the same position under himself, I had had serious thoughts of doing something of the sort. S. S. McClure had sketched out a programme for a journal that should consist as to half of pure literature and criticism and as to half of muck-raking. If he had suggested giving me the opportunity of doing something of the sort in the United States I daresay that I should have stayed there for good. But I could not see that the employment of the muck-rake could do any good in political England and there were a number of monthlies in America all devoted to imaginative literature and technical criticism. I cared nothing about politics. If McClure had proposed to set me up in a periodical that was half political of either camp and half aesthetico-critical – in England – I daresay that I should have accepted his offer. But he said that English party politics meant nothing to him and that he did not, as a foreigner, think himself justified in taking part in them.
There entered then into me the itch of trying to meddle in English literary affairs. The old literary gang of the Athenaeum-Spectator-Heavy Artillery order was slowly decaying. Younger lions were not only roaring but making carnage of their predecessors. Mr Wells was then growing a formidable mane, Arnold Bennett if not widely known was at least known to and admired by me. Mr Wells had given me Bennett’s first novel – A Man From The North. Experimenting in forms kept Conrad still young. Henry James was still ‘young James’ for my uncle William Rossetti and hardly known of by the general public. George Meredith and Thomas Hardy had come into their own only very little before, Mr George Moore was being forgotten as he was always being forgotten, Mr Yeats was known as having written the ‘Isle of Innisfree’. It seemed to me that if that nucleus of writers could be got together with what of undiscovered talent the country might hold a Movement might be started. I had one or two things I wanted to say. They were about the technical side of novel writing. But mostly I desired to give the writers of whom I have spoken as it were a rostrum. It was with that idea that I had returned from America. England, I knew, would always regard me as, rather comically and a little suspiciously – too damn in earnest. The others it might listen to and I might slip a word in now and then.
The nature of the periodical to be started gave me a good deal of thought. To imagine that a magazine devoted to imaginative literature and technical criticism alone would find more than a hundred readers in the United Kingdom was a delusion that I in no way had. It must therefore of necessity be a hybrid, giving at least half its space to current affairs. Those I did not consider myself fit to deal with. I knew either nothing about them or I knew so much that I could not form any opinions. The only public matter as to which I was determined to take a line was that of female suffrage.
I dallied with the idea for some time. Then I came across the politician who had insisted on telling me his life history. I do not remember if he approached me or I him. At any rate we quickly came to an agreement. He was a virulent Tory of the new school and he wanted an organ of his own. He was to provide half of the capital necessary which we agreed was to be £5,000, I the other half. He was to edit half the magazine which was to be a monthly, I the other half. Being a business man as well as a politician he was to manage the business affairs of the concern, I to see to its make up, proof-reading and other details of publication. It was a good arrangement. I liked him very much. He was too brilliant to like me extremely but he tolerated me more than he tolerated most people. He had an exaggerated idea of my omniscience and political influence.
I had arranged with the house of Duckworth to publish the review and had commissioned a number of stories, poems and critical articles. He came to me one day and said he could not supervise the business affairs of the concern. That was rather a heavy blow because I knew enough about business to know that I should make a muddle of that side of it. I sighed, cabled to Byles who was then in Japan to come back and take on the business of the review, and consented to continue the enterprise. A little later my friend came to me and said that he could not undertake to do half the editing. A General Election was in the offing; he had neglected his constituency; he would have to go perpetually into the North to kick off footballs, open flower shows, subscribe to fox-hounds and utter verbal coruscations. He suggested that I might find someone else of his school of thought to direct the political policy of the review; I sighed again and consented. For that Marwood was indicated. He was an Old, rather than a New Tory and he was incurably indolent. But he consented to suggest from Winchelsea the sort of article that should go into the review and in most cases to indicate the writers who should be invited to contribute. My political friend proposed in fairness that if so much of the labour was to fall on me he should increase the amount of capital that he found whilst I should retain my full half share of the control of the periodical. I was glad of that because I had lately had rather serious financial reverses.
The dummy of the first number approached completion; I had announced the name of the periodical, The English Review, in the press. It was Conrad who chose the title. He felt a certain sardonic pleasure in the choosing so national a name for a periodical that promised to be singularly international in tone, that was started mainly in his not very English interest and conducted by myself who was growing every day more and more alien to the normal English trend of thought, at any rate in matters of literary technique. And it was matters of literary technique that almost exclusively interested both him and myself. That was very un-English.
A couple of presumably needy journalists, both of very great ability, conceived the idea of making me, who was presumed to be rolling in wealth, pay for the use of that title. They registered it as soon as I had announced it in the press and then asked me to pay a prodigious sum for its use. I offered them half a sovereign a piece. They then published a single-sheet broad-sheet under the title of the English Review. Its letterpress consisted of virulent attacks on Lord Northcliffe and myself, promising extraordinary revelations as to both of us in their next number. I fancy they imagined that Lord Northcliffe was financing the review. The main allegation against myself was that I was a ‘multiple reviewer.’ The charge was true enough but only as far as one book was concerned. That was Charles Doughty’s Dawn in Britain – an epic poem in twelve books and four volumes. I had a great admiration for Doughty, who was the author also of Arabia Deserta, and I read his poem entirely through with a great deal of pleasure. No reviewer in London had leisure for that task. The book looked as if it might go unreviewed, so I asked a number of those gentlemen to let me review it for them. Others, hearing that I had volunteered to do it, also asked me to relieve them of the task. I do not remember how many reviews I wrote: it was a considerable number and some of them were quite long. I pleased myself by finding that I could do them all without once repeating a sentence or even an idea. At any rate I was quite unrepentant. I do not see why you should not write more than one review of a book for which you have a great admiration. I have written several times about Ulysses.
I continued to take no notice of the other English Review. My telephone became a constant worry because those two gentlemen rang me up at all hours of the night asking me to buy the title for sums that gradually descended from a thousand pounds to five. Lord Northcliffe on the other hand applied for an injunction against my rivals in one of the courts – I forget which. The injunction was granted and the other English Review disappeared. The real joke was that I had lent one of those lively persons the money with which he paid for his broad-sheet. At any rate, just before he printed it, I had met him looking very destitute in Fleet Street and had lent him exactly the sum with which he paid his printer’s and papermaker’s bill.
A little later I went to a Trench dinner. A Trench dinner was a Dutch treat presided over by Herbert Trench, the Irish poet. They were agreeable affairs and attended by most of the brilliant people in London. I was only asked to one. On this occasion I was set at a round table with Mr Hilaire Belloc, Mr Gilbert Chesterton, Mr Maurice Baring and Mr H. G. Wells. My politician was at another table with Mr Trench, the Marchioness of Londonderry and other notables.
Amongst all these celebrities I felt nervous. Celebrities are always rude to me. That has been the case from my tenderest years. I can hardly think of one that has not, at one time or another, said rude things to me. I ought to except politicians. I can hardly remember a politician who has not said nice things to me about my books – as soon as he heard that I was a writer. I suppose they learn that when canvassing for votes. Mr Balfour once asked me to send him my books as they came out. I did for years. He always wrote politely thanking me for the volume ‘from the reading of which he anticipated much pleasure.’ The letters were always marked: ‘Not for publication.’
I knew I should not get through that dinner without discomfort. It came. Mr Belloc was late. I had written an article about him a day or two before. It had been published that morning. I had classed him among the brilliant jeunes of the day and had expressed the really great admiration I felt for his wit, sincerity and learning. He hurried in, saw me, stopped as if he had been shot, thrust his hand through his forelock, gave one more maledictory glance at me with his baleful, pebble-blue eyes and then sank wearily into his chair next to Mr Maurice Baring. He looked anywhere but at me and began an impassioned monologue about the misfortunes of historians. They wore themselves out searching for matter in the British Museum Library and other stuffy places; they toiled till far into the night putting the results of their researches on paper. After infinite tribulation they published their books. Then along came the cold-eyed critic.
I forget what Mr Belloc said that the cold-eyed critic did to the historian but I realised that it was my eyes that were frigid in his. In my eulogy of him I had amiably found fault with some gigantic exaggeration in, I think, a book about the Cromwell family. What exactly Thomas Cromwell had done to our co-religionists or how Oliver had sinned against the Church of Rome I forget. Heaven forbid that I should set myself down as good a Papist as Mr Belloc, but I dislike to think of myself as a worse. I consider that there are only two human organisations that are nearly perfect for their disparate functions. They are the Church of Rome and His Britannic Majesty’s Army. I would cheerfully offer my life for either if it would do them any good and supposing them not to be arrayed the one against the other. But I could not see that the cause of the Church was advantaged by gigantically exaggerating the confiscations from which she has suffered any more than it would help the Old Contemptibles to represent them as having been without exception teachers in Sunday Schools. I had said this mildly in my article. As a matter of fact I wished that Mr Belloc would write novels and leave propaganda to the less gifted.
The affair ended dramatically in nothing, for before ending his monologue Mr Belloc suddenly burst out to someone whom I could not see at the chairman’s table beside us:
‘Our Lord! What do you know about Our Lord? Our Lord was a gentleman.’
After that I escaped notice in the shadow of Mr Chesterton. Mr Chesterton and Mr Belloc were one on each side of Mr Baring. They occupied themselves for some time in trying in vain to balance glasses of Rhine Wine on the skull of Mr Baring. That gentleman comes back to me as having been then only a little less bald than an egg. The floor and his shirt front received the wine in about equal quantities. But he did not seem to mind. Something I said about the two Russians of the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria set him corroborating their stories and telling amazing stories of his own about the Russian Court. He had been, I think, Secretary to the Embassy in St. Petersburg.
Suddenly Mr Belloc was at me again. He said that I would not dare to print in my review any article that he sent me just as it stood. I said I would. He repeated that I would not and I that I would. He was in those days almost as vigorous a muck-raker as S. S. McClure and hardly anyone had the courage to print him in his more coruscating moments. I may say that I did print his article but, since it contained the most amazing accusations against bishops, keepers of the Crown jewels, West Indian Governors and other apparently unoffending and unimportant beings, I made the printer black out the names and functions of everybody concerned. Those pages of the review startlingly resembled newspapers in Russia after they had received the attention of the censor. They startled Mr St. Loe Strachey, the Editor of the Spectator, to some purpose. He confused my English Review with the broad-sheet promoted by the two journalists and supposed that either I or Mr Belloc intended to threaten the owners of the blacked out names with exposure in another number if we were not bought off. Solemnly and weightily he protested against this growing tendency in British journals. He seemed to me to be a mild and doting old gentleman, so I wrote to him amiably and told him that he had accused me of being a blackmailer and would he kindly refute himself in the next number of his journal. He did so and wrote me a very agitated letter, saying that he had meant nothing of the sort. He did not say what he had meant.
That Trench dinner, different as it was from the Trench dinners that we afterwards ate, came also to an end. I was going towards the Piccadilly Tube. It was pouring and Mr Belloc was begging me not to believe that he was in fact the light-hearted being that he appeared. Actually he was filled with the woes of all the world.
I was beginning to assure him that from then on I would regard his as a figure of the deepest tragedy. We were just turning into the Tube Station when my politician, ex-fellow editor and business manager, came running up rather breathlessly and caught hold of the arm of mine that Mr Belloc was not imprisoning. He said:
‘Fordie, I’m very sorry. I can’t find my half share of the capital for the review.’
I said:
‘That will be all right.’ He disappeared and I went on assuring Mr Belloc of my appreciation of his pessimism.
It appeared subsequently that my friend was suffering from the same financial disaster that had hit hard not only myself but many other people. It was the case of a disappearance abroad with an expensive young woman of a man the bearer of a very honoured name in whose faith too many had reposed their trust. He subsequently committed suicide.
There seemed to be nothing to do but to close down that periodical, pay off the contributors whom I had already commissioned and realise my dream of retiring to a little farm in Provence. I had of course to tell Marwood who was by that time as enthusiastic about the review as he could be about anything.
He agreed with me. There was nothing to do but to shut it down. He made a good many caustic remarks about Young Tories in general and my friend in particular. I disagreed with him. That politician was no more guilty than I. Marwood, however, was certain that he had never intended to find the money.
I returned from Winchelsea to Aldington where I had by now bought a cottage. There remained, it seemed, nothing for it but to emigrate to Provence and there seemed to be nowhere else to emigrate to. As the world then appeared to me I could support living in London if I had the review. Without it, I couldn’t.
I was writing to a friend I had in Tarascon – a notaire – to ask about small farms that might be for sale in his neighbourhood. It was a Sunday. Marwood was suddenly on the terrace. He was pale with indignation and brandished a crumpled newspaper. He panted:
‘You’ve got to carry on that review.’
I had never seen him agitated before – and I never did again. He must have got up at four that morning to catch the train from Winchelsea to Aldington.
The newspaper announced that the Cornhill Magazine had refused to print, on the score of immorality, a poem of Thomas Hardy called ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’. All the other heavy and semi-heavy monthlies, all the weeklies, all the daily papers in England had similarly refused. Marwood said:
‘You must print it. We can’t have the country made a laughing stock.’ He was of opinion that the rest of the world must guffaw if it heard that Hardy could not find a publisher in England. Marwood was accustomed to say that nothing worth the attention of a grown man had been written in England since the eighteenth century. Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion and the Jacobean poets were his reading. He made a great concession to modernity when he read Maine’s Ancient Law and Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. Yet there he was mad to spend several thousand pounds in order to publish one poem by a modern poet who as poet was hardly known at all. For, of course, he found the money that hadn’t been found by my other friend.
That was my Sunday morning tragedy. But for that I should have been saved a great deal of labour, a number of enemies. I should have been, now, twenty years instead of only six months, a kitchen-gardener in Provence.