Campaigns Of A Non-Combatant, And His Romaunt Abroad During The War Part 23

I often hear it again when, here in my own country, I would speak bitterly of Englishmen, and it softens the harshness of my condemnation.

But I now addressed myself feverishly to my task, and my disgrace made me vehement and combative. I glared upon the individual in the monkey-jacket as if he had been Mr. Jefferson Davis himself, and read him a scathing indictment. The man in the monkey-jacket was not to be scathed. He retorted more frequently than before; he was guilty of the most hardy contempt of court. He was determined not to agree with me, and said so.

"Sir," I exclaimed at last, "pray reserve your remarks till the end of the lecture, and you shall have the platform."

"I shall be quite willing, I am sure," said the man in the monkey-jacket with imperturbable effrontery.

Then, as I continued, the contest grew interesting; explosions of "No, no," were interrupted with volleys of "Ay, ay," from my adherents.

Hipp, who had squared accounts, made all the applause in his power, standing in the main threshold, and the little auditory became a ringing arena, where we fought without flinching, standing foot to foot and drawing fire for fire. The man in the monkey-jacket broke his word: silence was not his forte; he hurled denials and counter-charges vociferously; he was full of gall and bitterness, and when I closed the last page and resumed my chair, he sprang from his place to claim the platform.

"Stop," cried Hipp, in his hard nasal tone, striding forward; "you have interrupted the lecturer after giving your parole; we recall our promise, as you have not stood by yours. Janitor, put out the lights!"

The bald old gentleman quietly rose. "In England," he said, "we give everybody fair play; tokens of a.s.sent and dissent are commonly made in all our public meetings; let us have a hearing for our townsman."

"Certainly," I replied, giving him my hand at the top of the stairs, "nothing would afford me more pleasure."

The man in the monkey-jacket then made a sweeping speech, full of loose charges against the Americans, and expressive of sympathy with the Rebellion; but, at the finis.h.i.+ng, he proposed, as the sentiment of the meeting, a vote of thanks to me, which was amended by another to include himself. Many of the people shook hands with me at the door, and the bald old gentleman led me to his wife and daughter, whose benignities were almost parental.

"Poor young man!" said the old lady; "a must take care of 'is 'ealth; will a come hoom wi' Tummas and me and drink a bit o' tea?"

I strolled about the place for twenty-four hours on good terms with many townsmen, while Hipp, full of pluck and business, was posting me against all the dead walls of a farther village. Again and again I sketched the war-episodes I had followed, gaining fluency and confidence as by degrees my itinerant profession lost its novelty, but we as steadily lost money. The houses were invariably bad; we had the same fiery discussions every evening, but the same meagre receipts, and in every market town of northwestern Lancas.h.i.+re we buried a portion of our little capital, till once, after talking myself hoa.r.s.e to a respectable audience of empty benches, Hipp and I looked blankly into each other's faces and silently put our last gold pieces upon the table. We were three thousand miles from home, and the possessors of ten sovereigns apiece. I reached out my hand with a pale smile:--

"Old fellow," I said, "let us comfort ourselves by the a.s.surance that we have deserved success. The time has come to say good by."

"As you will," said Hipp: "it is all the fault of this pig-headed nation. Now I dare say if we had brought a panorama of the war along, it would have been a stunning success; but standing upon high literary and forensic ground, of course they can't appreciate us. Confound 'em!"

I think that Hipp has since had but two notions,--the exhibition of that panorama, or, in the event of its failure, a declaration of war against the British people. He followed me to Liverpool, and bade me adieu at Birkenhead, I going Londonward with scarcely enough money to pay my pa.s.sage, and he to start next day for Belfast, to lecture upon his own hook, or, failing (as he afterward did), to recross the Atlantic in the steerage of a s.h.i.+p.

My feelings, as the train bore me steadily through the Welsh border, by the cl.u.s.tering smoke-stacks of Birmingham, by the castled tower of Warwick, and along the head waters of the Thames and Avon, were not of the most enthusiastic description. I had no money and no friends; I had sent to America for a remittance, but in the interval of six weeks required for a reply, must eat and drink and lodge, and London was wide and pitiless, even if I dared stoop to beg a.s.sistance.

Let no young man be tempted to put the sea between his home and himself, how seductive soever be the experiences of book-makers and poetic pedestrians. One hour's contemplation of poverty in foreign lands will line the boy's face with the wrinkles of years, and burn into his soul that withering dependency which will rankle long after his privations are forgotten.

In truth, my circ.u.mstances were so awkward that my very desperation kept me calm. I had a formal letter to one English publisher, but not any friendly line whatever to anybody; and as the possibilities of sickness, debt, enemies, came to mind, I felt that I was no longer the hero of a romance, but face to face with a hard, practical, terrible reality. It was night when I landed at the Paddington Station, and taking an omnibus for Charing Cross, watched the long lines of lamps on Oxford Street, and the glitter of the Haymarket theatres, and at last the hard plash of the fountains in Trafalgar Square, with the stony statues grouped so rigidly about the column to Nelson.

I walked down Strand with my carpet-bag in my hands, through Fleet Street and under Temple Bar, till, weary at last from sheer exercise, I dropped into a little ale-house under a great, grinning lantern, which said, in the crisp tone of patronage, the one word, "beds." They put me under the tiles, with the chimney-stacks for my neighbors, and I lay awake all night meditating expedients for the morrow: so far from regret or foreboding, I longed for the daylight to come that I might commence my task, confident that I could not fail where so many had succeeded.

They were, indeed, inspirations which looked in upon me at the dawn. The dome of St. Paul's guarding Paternoster Row, with Milton's school in the background, and hard by the Player's Court, where, in lieu of Shakespeare's company, the American presses of the _Times_ shook the kingdom and the continent. I thought of Johnson, as I pa.s.sed Bolt Alley, of Chatterton at Shoe Lane, of Goldsmith as I put my foot upon his grave under the eaves of the Temple.

The public has nothing to do with the sacrifices by which my private embarra.s.sment received temporary relief. Though half the race of authors had been in similar straits, I would not, for all their success, undergo again such self-humiliation. It is enough to say that I obtained lodgings in Islington, close to the home of Charles Lamb, and near Irving's Canterbury tower; and that between writing articles on the American war, and strategic efforts to pay my board, two weeks of feverish loneliness drifted away.

I made but one friend; a young Englishman of radical proclivities, who had pa.s.sed some years in America among books and newspapers, and was now editing the foreign column of the _Ill.u.s.trated London News_. He was a brave, needy fellow, full of heart, but burdened with a wife and children, and too honestly impolitic to gain money with his fine abilities by writing down his own unpopular sentiments. He helped me with advice and otherwise.

"If you mean to work for the journals," he said, "I fear you will be disappointed. I have tried six years to get upon some daily London paper. The editorial positions are always filled; you know too little of the geography and society of the town to be a reporter, and such miscellaneous recollections of the war as you possess will not be available for a mere newspaper. But the magazines are always ready to purchase, if you can get access to them. In that quarter you might do well."

I found that the serials to which my friend recommended me shared his own advanced sentiments, but were unfortunately without money. So I made my way to the counter of the Messrs. Chambers, and left for its junior partner an introductory note. The reply was to this effect. I violate no confidence, I think, in reproducing it:--

"SIR,--I shall be glad to see any friend of----, and may be found," etc., etc. "I fear that articles upon the American war, written by an American, will not, however, be acceptable in this journal, as the public here take a widely different view of the contest from that entertained in your own country, and the feeling of horror is deepening fast."

Undeterred by this frank avowal, I waited upon the publisher at the appointed time,--a fine, athletic, white-haired Scotchman, whose name is known where that of greater authors cannot reach, and who has written with his own hand as much as Dumas _pere_. He met me with warm cordiality, rare to Englishmen, and when I said--

"Sir, I do not wish the use of your paper to circulate my opinions,--only my experiences," he took me at once to his editor, and gave me a personal introduction. Fortunately I had brought with me a paper which I submitted on the spot; it was ent.i.tled, "Literature of the American War," collated from such campaign ballads as I could remember, eked out with my own, and strung together with explanatory and critical paragraphs. The third day following, I received this announcement in shockingly bad handwriting:--

"D'r S'r, "Y'r article will suit us.

"The ed. C. J."

For every word in this communication, I afterward obtained a guinea. The money not being due till after the appearance of the article, I antic.i.p.ated it with various sketches, stories, etc., all of which were largely fanciful or descriptive, and contained no paragraph which I wish to recall. In other directions, I was less successful. Of two daily journals to which I offered my services, one declined to answer my letter, and the other demanded a quarto of credentials.

So I lived a fugitive existence, a practical ill.u.s.tration of Irving's "Poor Devil Author," looking as often into pastry-shop windows, testing all manner of cheap Pickwickian veal-pies, breakfasting upon a chop, and supping upon a herring in my suburban residence, but keeping up pluck and _chique_ so deceptively, that n.o.body in the place suspected me of poverty.

I went for some American inventors, to a rifle ground, and explained to the Lords of the Admiralty the merits of a new projectile; wrote letters to all the Continental sovereigns for an itinerant and independent emba.s.sador, and was at last so poor that my only writing papers were a druggist's waste bill-heads. An article with no other "backing" than this was fortunate enough to stray into the _Cornhill Magazine_. I found that its proprietor kept a banking-house in Pall Mall, and doubtful of my welcome on Cornhill, ventured one day in my unique American costume,--slouched hat, wide garments, and squared-toed boots,--to send to him directly my card. He probably thought from its face that a relative of Mr. Mason's was about to open an extensive account with him.

As it was, once admitted to his presence, he could not escape me. The ma.n.u.script lay in his hands before he fully comprehended my purpose. He was a fine specimen of the English publisher,--robust, ruddy, good-naturedly acute,--and as he said with a smile that he would waive routine and take charge of my copy, I knew that the same hands had fastened upon the crude pages of Jane Eyre, and the best labors of Hazlitt, Ruskin, Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray.

Two more weary weeks elapsed; I found it pleasant to work, but very trying to wait. At the end my courage very nearly failed. I reached the era of self-accusation; to make myself forget myself I took long, ardent marches into the open country; followed the authors I had wors.h.i.+pped through the localities they had made reverend; lost myself in dreaminesses,--those precursors of death in the snow,--and wished myself back in the ranks of the North, to go down in the frenzy, rather than thus drag out a life of civil indigence, robbing at once my brains and my stomach.

One morning, as I sat in my little Islington parlor, wis.h.i.+ng that the chop I had just eaten had gone farther, and taking a melancholy inventory of the threadbare carpet and rheumatic chairs, the door-knocker fell; there were steps in the hall; my name was mentioned.

A tall young gentleman approached me with a letter: I received him with a strange nervousness; was there any crime in my record, I asked fitfully, for which I had been traced to this obscure suburb for condign arrest and decapitation? Ha! ha! it was my heart, not my lips, that laughed. I could have cried out like Enoch Arden in his dying apostrophe:--

"A sail! a sail!

I am saved!"

for the note, in the publisher's own handwriting, said this, and more:--

"DEAR SIR,--I shall be glad to send you fifteen guineas immediately, in return for your article on General Pope's Campaign, if the price will suit you."

But I suppressed my enthusiasm. I spoke patronizingly to the young gentleman. Dr. Johnson, at the brewer's vendue, could not have been more learnedly sonorous.

"You may say in return, sir, that the sum named will remunerate me."

At the same time the instinct was intense to seize the youth by the throat, and tell him that if the remittance was delayed beyond the morning, I would have his heart's-blood! I should have liked to thrust him into the coal-hole as a hostage for its prompt arrival, or send one of his ears to the publis.h.i.+ng house with a warning, after the manner of the Neapolitan brigands.

That afternoon I walked all the way to Edmonton, over John Gilpin's route, and boldly invested two-pence in beer at the time-honored Bell Inn. I disdained to ride back upon the omnibus for the sum of threepence, but returned on foot the entire eight miles, and thought it only a league. Next day my check came duly to hand,--a very formidable check, with two pen-marks drawn across its face. I carried it to Threadneedle Street by the unfrequented routes, to avoid having my pockets picked, and presented it to the cas.h.i.+er, wondering if he knew me to be a foreign gentleman who had written for the _Cornhill Magazine_.

The cas.h.i.+er looked rather contemptuous, I thought, being evidently a soulless character with no literary affinities.

"Sir," he said, curtly, "this check is crossed."

"Sir!"

"We can't cash the check; it is crossed."

"What do you mean by crossed?"

"Just present it where you got it, and you will find out."

The cas.h.i.+er regarded me as if I had offered a ticket of leave rather than an order for the considerable amount of seventy-five dollars. I left that banking-house a broken man, and stopped with a long, long face at a broker's to ask for an explanation.

"Yesh, yesh," said the little man, whose German silver spectacles sat upon a bulbously Oriental nose; "ze monish ish never paid on a crossed shequc. If one hash a bank-account, you know, zat ish different. Ze gentleman who gif you dis shequc had no bishness to crosh it if you have no banker."

I was too vain to go back to Cornhill and confess that I had neither purse nor purser; so I satisfied the broker that the affair was correct, and he cashed the bill for five s.h.i.+llings.