Kitabı oku: «My Life», sayfa 11
CHAPTER XII
A VISIT TO LONDON
In the autumn of 1892 my university days were interrupted by a visit to London. Political economy, as taught and written in German, was becoming more and more of a puzzle to me, in spite of the fact that I had made valuable progress in picking up and using German colloquial expressions. I could berate a cabby, for instance, very forcefully, but somehow I could not accustom my ear to the academic language of Professors Schmoller and Wagner. I finally persuaded my people that if I was to continue to explore political economy I ought to be allowed to come to terms with it in my own vernacular, at least until I knew something about it separate from German, which, at that time, was quite as much a study to me as political economy itself. My arguments in this matter eventually prevailed, and I was sent off to London to read up on the subject in the British Museum. That this reading was a good thing in its way is doubtless true, and the six months spent in London at that time I have always counted among the Streber months of my career. Perhaps I devoted more time than was right to geography and the books of travelers and explorers, but I pegged away at my major too, after a fashion, at times covering my desk with books on the subject. If many volumes stacked up in front of a reader make a savant in the British Museum, then I deserved a place in the front rank.
But with all my good intentions, reading and note-taking, the main good that London did for me, was accomplished outside of the somber pile in Bloomsbury. The Museum was principally a place in which to retreat when the life in the streets seemed likely to unduly excite my Wanderlust. There I could also read about many of the things that interested me in London itself.
Colonization was the special subject I was supposed to be looking into, but Dr. Richard Garnett, the official at the Museum who gave me my reader's ticket, could never get over the notion that I meant "composition," when telling him the subject I was to take up. Three times I insisted that it was colonization, but whether the good man was deaf, or determined that I should tackle composition, I never found out. My friend, Arthur Symons, introduced me to him and distinctly heard me say colonization, but this did not help matters. The good doctor insisted on showing me about the reading room, pointing out the general reference books which he thought would facilitate my acquaintance with composition. We frequently greeted each other in the corridors afterwards, but the doctor kindly refrained from quizzing me concerning my reading, and probably had quite forgotten what it was all about anyhow – a matter of conjecture in my own mind on occasions.
My most intimate friend during this first visit to London was Symons, and I have to thank him for putting me on the track of many interesting people and experiences. I went to him with an introduction from Berlin, where he visited me later on. In 1892 he was living in Fentin Court in The Temple, Mr. George Moore being a close neighbor in Pump Court, I think. Both men took hold of my imagination very much, being the first English writers that I learned to know. With Moore I had only slight conversations, but I remember now that he evinced considerable interest in my "tramp material." Indeed, ten years after our first meeting he reminded me of an adventure which I, at one time, had related to him.
Symons, on the other hand, I saw very frequently, and I might as well accuse him right away of being my literary god-father, if I may be said to deserve one. Whether he realized it at the time or not, it was the writer's atmosphere which he let me into, that made me ambitious to scribble on my own account.
One day he told me that he had received fifteen pounds for an article for The Fortnightly.
"Fifteen pounds!" I mumbled to myself on the way back to my lodgings. "Why, that sum would keep me here in London over a month." Later, in Berlin, I experimented for the first time with the effects of an article by me in a magazine. Symons' wonderful fifteen pounds were to blame. I sent the paper, a short account of the American tramp, to The Contemporary. It was accepted. In a few days I received page proofs of the article, and in the next number it was published. No youthful writer ever had his horizon more ambitiously widened than mine was when that article was printed and paid for. I assured the editor instanter that my tramp lore was inexhaustible, and begged him to consider other submissive efforts on my part. He intimated in his reply that submission was a fine quality, but that The Contemporary did not confine its pages to trampology, and that his readers had had enough of that subject for the time being.
The little back room in the Crown Tavern, near Leicester Square, where a number of the young writers in London congregated at night, in my time, has given way to much more pretentious quarters. Symons and I had got into the habit of taking nightly walks about town, leading nowhere in particular at the start, but interrupted usually, for an hour at least, about half-past eleven at "The Crown." The place itself never meant much to me as a rendezvous because I have never been able to get enjoyment out of a back-parlor pushed up against a bar. Separate, each institution has its amenities but Englishmen seem fond of a combination of the sort mentioned.
Two of the young men who forgathered at "The Crown" in 1892 have passed on for keeps – Lionel Johnson, the author of "The Art of Thomas Hardy," and the personal statement to me that he knew every inch of Wales; and Ernest Dowson, a man who lived in a queer, rambling old storehouse on the docks – a possession of his own, and who knew much about London that he should have been allowed to tell.
The gatherings in the back parlor were comparatively innocent little intentions upon life and literature. I got good out of them in a number of ways, and might have benefited by them more had my intentions been more distinctly literary. What Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, Verlaine and others were doing and saying was not half so interesting to me as what some haphazard pick-up might say to me and Symons, during our stroll after the Crown meeting was over. On one occasion, however, an Irish journalist, who was present, succeeded in getting me patriotically indignant. He had spent the afternoon in Westminster Abbey, happening, among other things, upon Longfellow's bust.
"I can't see," he said, at the end of his account of his afternoon, unmistakably referring to the Longfellow bust, "why the Americans can't bury their dead at home." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why the Irish couldn't keep their alive at home, when some one said: "Soda, please," and the difficulty was both watered and bridged over.
I suppose that "The Crown" meetings were mutual admiration parties of a kind, but of an innocent kind. I recall a callow youth (who had squandered his patrimony in Paris), with a slender volume of reminiscent verse, button-holing me and saying: "Really, you know – (a member of the company) is a genius. His command over vocables is something stupendous." Blank has since made a name for himself, but I remember looking at him at the time, innocently wondering whether he was a genius, and, if so, what vocables were.
But in spite of the ready assistance offered to all hands to think well of themselves, the gatherings usually netted one something worth while in the end, either in criticism or incident. They call to mind now a series of gatherings held a number of years later in New York among a collection of American writers. And this thinking of the two combinations reminds me of what George Augustus Sala once said to me in Rome. I had gone to him, according to agreement, to ask him what he had to say to a young man, anxious to do well in journalism, about writing in general. He was sitting at breakfast when I dropped in at his hotel, very much surrounded by macaroni and the local newspapers.
"And what are your pleasures?" Sala began without warning, as if I had gone to him for medical advice.
I was so upset by this beginning of things that, for the life of me, I could not think for a second or two what my pleasures were. I finally managed to say that I enjoyed whist.
"Stop it," said Sala, his Portuguese eyes fairly boring through me. "Stop it. Whist means cards, and cards mean gambling. Stop it."
After a pause, "What are the other pleasures?" If whist meant gambling, I reasoned that tobacco must premise opium. However, I admitted that I liked tobacco.
"Not strange – not strange," said Sala. "One who writes needs a smoke. What else? Are you a woman-hater?"
"No, sir, I'm not," I replied most emphatically. Sala looked at me queerly, but did not pursue the subject. I had been introduced to him by a man who, wrongly or rightly, had the reputation of saying cross things about women.
"Do you drink?" Sala continued in a moment.
"Yes, when I feel like it."
"Stop it, stop it. Drinking means boozing, boozing means busting, and busting means hell – hell, young man, remember that."
There was a pause, during which Sala looked out of the window as if he had taken my pulse and was deciding how much faster it could beat before I must die. Pretty soon he turned my way, and, after some general advice about coming to an early decision as to whether I meant to be a purely descriptive writer or not, delivered himself to this statement: "If you settle in London as a journalist, you'll be a drudge. If you try New York, you'll be a boozer —unless," and again the Portuguese eyes shot at me, "you keep out of the rut."
In reviewing my past experiences I have often thought of this talk with Sala when comparing the two different sets of writers I learned to know in London and New York. Offhand I should say that honors were even between them as regards the virtues, any advantage in this particular falling, if there was any, to the Englishmen on account of the early closing hours in England.
It was after the celebrated closing hours that Symons and I often had some of our most entertaining strolls. Symons was inveterately on the scent for "impressions and sensations," while I found happiness merely in roving. I suppose that I received impressions and sensations of their kind just as well as Symons did, but somehow when I began to describe them they did not seem to have enough literary dignity to belong in the same class with those that Symons could tell about and later describe in print.
One night, we separated, each to wander as long as he was interested, and in the morning to compare reports. It so happened that neither of us on this particular occasion saw enough that we had not enjoyed together on other jaunts, to make the undertaking very amusing. But we both agreed that such explorations could be made uncommonly entertaining by a literary artist, if he would honestly tell what he had stumbled upon.
At another time we undertook a more audacious exploit – a 'bus ride to the city limits, or into the country as far as the schedule allowed, and then a tramp into the Beyond, as long as we could hold out. We took the first 'bus we saw bound well into the country. It started from Liverpool Street Station; Symons thought that it was headed east, but neither of us was sure, the road twisted and turned so. Nightfall found us pushing on bravely afoot, Symons glorying in the beautiful moonlight and "sensation" of being "at sea" on land, while I got pleasure out of Symons' romantic appreciation of a trip which reminded me very mundanely of other nocturnal tramps at home. Midnight stopped us at an inn. One of Symons' shoes was giving him trouble, and the romance of the adventure was growing a little dim. We were dusty, tired and, I suppose, suspicious-looking. The innkeeper hesitated before he would let us in, and we had to explain how simple and innocent we were. In the morning, having found our bearings to the extent that we learned we were headed toward the North Sea – we refused to listen to anything more minute than this – we went blithely on our way once more, happy in the consciousness that, for the moment we were care-free, and bound for "any old place" that took our fancy. But, alas! Symons' shoe got to annoying him again, and his spirits began to droop. By ten o'clock they were plainly at half-mast. His foot had become very painful, forcing him to sit down by the side of the road. The jolly adventurer of the night before and early morning had suddenly changed into an irascible literary man "on the road." He said nothing about art, sentences or vocables. He said nothing about anything but the pain in his foot was giving him. Blind travels into the countryside took on a different aspect. It was The Temple for Symons, and just as soon as a train could take him there. That fine indefiniteness of the evening in the moonlight – that joyous keeping in step with Die Ferne– the temptress into the Beyond – that dreamy, happy, careless chatting about the great city left behind – these things had vanished; our stroll to the North Sea or the North Pole, or wherever it was that we dreamed we might get to, was at an end. I have seldom known innocent bucolic intentions – we thought ours were bucolic – dissipate into thin air so unconcernedly. But as Symons said about many of our trips together, "the best part of them comes when you look back over them in front of a good fire," and so he will probably smile and look pleasantly reminiscent when he comes across this reminder of our aimless jaunt into Essex.
I think he will also smile on reading my version of the Berlin-Havre expedition. He had spent a month with me in my home in Berlin, where, as usual, he dug all over the city for impressions and sensations – "impreshuns and sensashuns" was the way they were finally called in my household. When it came time for him to return to London, he decided to accompany my sister and me as far as Havre on our sail from Hamburg to New York. He had never been on an ocean liner, and thought that the new experience would recompense him for the "sensashuns" he failed to gather in Berlin. Besides, as we figured it out, he could get to London a little cheaper this way. We were all pretty poor at the time, and economy counted for a great deal in "sensation" researches. I was bound for America to see if I could not interest some publisher in printing articles and stories about tramps.
Down the Elbe from Hamburg, in fact all of the first day we were at sea, Symons thought he had seldom had a more enjoyable time. The sea was quiet, the weather was balmy, and there was a great deal to eat. The next morning the sea had kicked up somewhat. I found Symons at breakfast time on deck, holding fast to a railing running around the smoking room. His face was wan and colorless, and he plainly showed that he had had his fill of "sensashuns" for the time being.
"Strange motion, isn't it?" he murmured, gripping the railing afresh. "Never fancied anything like this. I shall be glad to see Havre."
We made that port the following day. Symons was to ship from Havre to Southampton, after having a look at Havre. I learned that our boat was going to be delayed for twenty-four hours on account of repairs – she seemed to be repairing all the way to New York – and that all three of us could go ashore for a stroll. Symons' exchequer had, by this time, got perilously low – he had the price of his ticket to London and, perhaps, two francs over. All of us found some forgotten German coins of small denominations in our pockets, and proceeded to an exchange office. No transaction at the Bank of England ever seemed more important than did this one with the French money dealer. Symons was to be the beneficiary, and we higgled and haggled over the values of our groschen and sechser as if millions were at stake. In the end we managed to increase his holdings by two francs – that was all, and it was absolutely all that we could afford. Symons was so glad to be in the right mood for terra firma sensations again that the two francs looked like two hundred to him. At any rate he did not seem to care how large or small the sum was – he thanked the gods prodigiously that he was strong enough merely to walk.
We smuggled him on board for supper, and finally left him, as we thought, until we should again be in England, as our boat was to sail early the next morning, the repairs having been accelerated, so we were told. Symons was to spend the night and next day ashore, waiting for the Southampton boat. The next morning found our ship still tied up. We were free to go ashore again, and have another "last" meal in a restaurant. As we strolled up the main street, whom should we meet striding proudly down the thoroughfare but Symons, his brown gossamer sailing merrily after him.
"Fancy this!" he exclaimed on seeing us. "How jolly! But do you think your boat ever will get started again."
Then he told us of the wonderful impressionistic night he had spent.
"After bidding you good-by," he explained, "I strolled back to Frascati's. The moon was up, and I felt like strolling. When Frascati's closed I walked along the beach for a while – it was a perfect night for 'sensations.'
"At last I got sleepy. There was a bathing machine near-by, and I thought it would be a jolly adventure to spend the rest of the night in it. Besides, I wanted to economize.
"I don't know how long I had been dozing, but toward morning I was awakened by footfalls near-by. I peaked out. It was a guard – at least he looked like one. I crept out of the bathing machine and dodged around it conveniently until the man had passed. Then I went down on the beach, and later up to the convent or monastery on the hill. The sun was just creeping up over the horizon and there was a wonderful early morning hush over everything. I sat down and wrote some verses. Really, the impressionistic appeal was so overwhelming I could not help it. I've never had such a jolly night."
We breakfasted together, took one more short stroll and then separated again. Later, after seventeen days at sea, we learned that Symons had made London without further accident.
CHAPTER XIII
THE BLOOMSBURY GUARDS
Another circle of friends during my British Museum days, which I found entertaining, was the "Bloomsbury Guards," as they call themselves. This company of men, or "cla-ass," is apparently organized to stay on earth permanently in Bloomsbury. Some of the members die off now and then, but that does not matter. The generous museum flings wide its doors and out come new recruits.
The late George Gissing had considerable to report about the gentlemen in question in his book, "New Grub Street." I have purposely never read his account of them, because I have preferred to keep them in mind as I knew them myself.
Imagine a pretty threadbare, stoop-shouldered, but generally clean individual, anywhere between forty and sixty. Think of him as sitting at a desk in the great reading room, books piled up in front of him, pen and paper at hand, and a very longing, thirsty look tightly fitted to his face like a plaster, or, still better, like an "Es ist erreicht" mustache regulator to help one look like Kaiser Wilhelm. Whisper in his ear: "Let's be off to 'The Plough.'" Watch the set countenance relax.
If you will do these things you will get acquainted with one of the Bloomsbury Guards.
I made their acquaintance at the tavern opposite the museum. Political economy absolutely refused to interest me at times, and every now and then I would drop in at "The Plough," or "The Tavern." The exclusive saloon bar was the recreative room of the Guards in both cases. It took me some time to find out why the saloon bar was exclusive, but eventually a young barrister took me aside and explained.
"Don't be na-asty," he cautioned. "It's merely a matter of cla-ass, you know. Really, you must understand."
I feigned enlightenment instanter, and have always had a "cla-ass" feeling in London, from that day to this. I make no doubt that the cabby who frequents the public bar has a "cla-ass" feeling just as important.
The Guards that I knew best were "Mengy," "Q," and the "Swordsman," as I insisted on calling him on account of his special knowledge in pig-sticking. (He told me that he had spent two solid weeks on this subject in order to write an authoritative review for The Times.) These three men, "Mengy" in the middle as "Little Billie," would have taken the prize in a "Trilby" interpretation of side-street trios.
"Mengy" was a doctor of philosophy in general, and lecturer on mummies in particular. Germany gave him his start, and London his pause. Academically, he intended to be wise in Egyptology; humanely, simply one of the guards.
"Q" – good old "Q" – had a gentleman's instincts unsupported financially. He dreamed about music, wrote articles, reviews, and poems about it, hummed it and buzzed it, but "Q" was no musician. Like "Mengy," he had quite resigned himself inwardly to the post of a "Guard."
The "Swordsman" was a great, canny Scot. But he had cannied and caddied in the wrong way, pecuniarily. Fifty odd years of "sax-pence" had slipped by him, and he had nary a one to show. But what a mine of useless facts he had got together over in the Reading Room! What a peripatetic gossiper about trifles he had become!
When these three men got together, and a liquidating friend was along, the "Tavern" or "Plough," as the case might be, became the scene of as doughty passages at arms at the bar as Bloomsbury has ever known. As guards of their beverages they were matchless, while, as "Pub" hunters, it is to be questioned whether Bloomsbury, until the Guards came to earth, ever knew how many public houses she had. Perhaps "Q" was the most inveterate explorer. When "Q" got a pound or two for a review, he slicked up in his finest manner and went forth alone to seek and find. Somehow the "Plough" and the "Tavern" did not appeal to him when he was in funds. But he would give you his shirt if you happened upon him in some new "Pub" which he had located, and was trying to impress with his spirit. Then was "Q" indeed in his glory. His high hat never had such a luster as on such occasions.
"Why, my dear fellow," he would say, "how fortunate to meet you here! What is it to be?"
Perhaps you wanted 'bus fare to Hampstead.
"Most assuredly. Have something to warm you up for the ride."
The other Guards did not like "Q's" running off when he felt flush – "Mengy," in particular; but "Mengy" ought to be very grateful to "Q." When "Mengy" got permission to lecture on mummies at the museum and sent out learned circulars about his accomplishments as an Egyptologist, who was it, "Mengy," that made up your audience at your first lecture? None other than poor, old, wayward "Q." If he hadn't exercised compassion, you would have had no hearers at all.
He paid, too, "Mengy."
In a way, "Mengy" was a whining man. One day, there had been too much tavern and too little museum, and "Mengy" was under the weather. I shall never forget the picture he made, as he lounged back in his chair after the last drink. His two soiled long coats enveloped his slender form like blankets around a lamp-post, and there was a forlorn, half-academic, half-nauseated look in his pale face that can often be seen at sea. His disgruntledness made him melancholy. Standing up during a pause in the conversation, he gathered the skirts of his coats about him, readjusted his shabby hat, and sobbed, as if his heart had been torn out of him, "Nobody likes 'Mengy' – Nobody!" Then, with tears tracing the grimaces in his face, he made for the museum to clean up his desk, and go home to his corpulent wife. She was the bread-winner in "Mengy's" outfit.
There is a story to the effect that "Q" at one time contemplated marriage and some one to look out for him. They say that he spruced up, and finally located a young lady of means. She was not unfriendly to his advances, and it looked like a match. But "Q" could not keep away from the comfortable quarters in the museum and the conferences at the "Tavern." The fair maid found this out, and went away to Edinburgh to think things over. One day, "Q" was in sore need of ten shillings. He could think of no one who would be so glad to let him have it as the fair one. He squandered sixpence on a telegram describing his distress. "If women but knew!" I have heard women sigh. Well, "Q's" girl knew. She wrote back by post: "Dear Q. – A shilling you will probably need for the evening; please find same enclosed. Yours, Janet." "Q" tells this story on himself to explain his continued singleness of purpose.
The Guards could not be referred to here without reference to "Bosky," although I never knew him as well as I did "Q" and "Mengy." "Bosky" probably had the greatest reputation of all as a learned man and writer. His writings on ancient men and things appear in our magazines at times. He once got me very much interested in what he knew about the art of burglary in Pharaoh's time, and I have often wondered why he did not write the article he had in mind. But, with all his knowledge of dead nations and languages, "Bosky" enjoyed his "Tavern" sittings quite as much as did "Q" and "Mengy." The last time I saw him I asked him to write me something in Chaldaic. He handed me some hieroglyphics on an envelope. "Meaning?" I said. "Bosky" smiled benevolently, and said: "I want a long drink from the Far West."
He then told me how a sixpence had disturbed his sleep the night before. He had got home late, he said, after a "Tavern" sitting, but he was sure on going to bed that he had managed to save the sixpence for his morning meal.
"My wife's right artful," he explained, "so I tucked the coin under the rug. I had a dream that I'd forgotten where I had hidden it, and from three o'clock on I couldn't sleep. I knew where it was afterwards all right, but I was afraid my wife might dream that she knew, too. Married life has its troubles, I can tell you."
