Recollections Part 2

The contingent with which I was s.h.i.+pped from Bristol to Cork composed as ribald and foul-mouthed a crew as I remember to have seen, and long before I a.s.sumed Her Majesty's uniform, I was sickened of the enterprise on which I had embarked. I think I am justified in saying that I was instrumental in bringing about one great and much needed reform. In those days, the recruit on enlistment was supposed to receive a bounty and a free kit; as the thing was worked out by the regimental quartermaster, he never saw one or the other. He had served out to him on his arrival at his depot a set of obsolete garments which he was forbidden to wear and was compelled to return to stores, when a new outfit at his own cost had been supplied to him. My gorge rose at this bare-faced iniquity, and as a protest against it, I attired myself on my first Sunday in barracks in the clothes which had been fraudulently a.s.signed to me, and joined the regiment on church parade. I suppose no soldier had been so attired since Waterloo, and my appearance was the signal for a roar of laughter in which men and officers alike joined, and which was not extinguished until I had been ignominiously hustled back to quarters. In the Fourth Royal Irish Dragoon Guards at least, I know myself to have been the last man whom the wicked system attempted to pillage in that fas.h.i.+on. As a matter of course, I was marked from that moment.

People who have a practical knowledge of modern Army life tell me that things have changed altogether for the better since those far bygone days of 1865; and I am disposed to believe that no such shameless swindles as were then perpetrated could possibly continue for a week under existing conditions. A Press which makes us familiar with all sorts of grievances, and an inquiring Parliamentarian or two, would provide a short shrift and a long rope for the perpetrator of any such bare-faced robbery as I suffered under when I first joined the Fourth Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. The motive of my enlistment had no remotest connection with the bounty offered. I joined the Army simply out of that green-sickness of the mind from which so many young men suffer, and some nebulous notions of heroism in falling against a savage foe in some place not geographically defined. But in the printed terms of the agreement which I signed it was promised that I should receive a three pound bounty and a free kit. As a matter of fact, I received neither one nor the other. I was served out, as I have stated, with an absolutely obsolete uniform, which I was forbidden to wear, and my bounty was impounded to pay for regulation clothing.

This initial struggle made me from the first a personage of mark in the regiment; for when I was summoned to my first parade, I had deliberately donned the clothes which had been dealt out to me from the quartermaster's stores, and presented myself to public view in a uniform which had probably been seen on no parade ground in England since Her late Majesty's accession to the throne. It was a sufficiently solemn proceeding on my own part, for I was warned that I was being guilty of a military misdemeanour of the gravest sort But if the thing was serious to me, it was a matter of rejoicing comedy--or even, if you like, of screaming farce--to the troops who were paraded for church that Sunday morning. Men fairly shrieked with laughter at the sight of the old Kilmarnock cap, the ridiculous tailed jacket, and the rough shoddy trousers bagging at the seat. The officers made an attempt at decorum which was not too successful; and I was hustled from the ground, and escorted to the guard-room, for the high crime and misdemeanour of presuming to appear in the clothes which had officially been served out to me. I appeared at the orderly-room next morning, and underwent a severe wigging from the officer who was in temporary command of the regiment; but the incident was mercifully allowed to close with a mere reprimand. It did a little good, perhaps, for I never knew any other recruit to be served out with an utterly obsolete and useless kit so long as I remained with the regiment; but, until the hour at which my discharge was purchased, I was taught that it was not conducive to personal comfort to rebel against any form of tyranny and extortion which might be condoned by tradition in the Army.

Honestly, I do not think that I look with a jaundiced eye upon my remembrances of that most unhappy time, but, as I remember, to have had an education a little better than that of the average ploughman, and to show an inclination to be smart and quick at duty, was a certain pa.s.sport to the hostility of the non-commissioned officers of the time.

They regarded themselves, as I am now inclined to fancy, as a sort of close corporation, and I cannot help thinking that they felt it a kind of duty to themselves to repress the ambitions of any youngster who seemed likely to be marked for promotion. A mere recruit, who had not yet learned the simple mysteries of the goose-step, had registered an objection to being robbed at the outset of his career, and had thereby revealed himself as a person of dangerous ideas which, if pursued to their ultimate, would make an end of all manner of illegitimate profits; and I am not careful to suggest that any special apt.i.tude for a soldier's life on my own part was responsible for the dead set which was made at me by all the non-coms, of the regiment. There was one troop-sergeant-major, as already stated, who was currently known throughout the corps as The Pig. A furious and determined attempt was made upon his life by a man named Lovell, who was sent to a military convict prison for twelve years, if I remember rightly. Now, I have never heard of any ordinarily decent officer, commissioned or non-commissioned, being a.s.saulted by a subordinate; and the civilian observer of Army life may be a.s.sured that, almost without exception, whenever that kind of thing occurs, petty tyrannies and intermeddlings on the part of the superior are answerable for it. I met this particular man on one occasion only. I suppose that I had been pointed out to him as the young insubordinate who had dared to trespa.s.s on tradition by wearing the clothes served out to him. He stopped me in the middle of the barrack square at Cahir, and offered me a solemn warning: "You go on as you've begun, young man, and we'll make life h.e.l.l to you." I do not claim that I am in any special sense a lover of justice, but I know that my gorge rose less at the sense of personal injury, than against a scheme of organised robbery; but, luckily for myself, I refrained from answer, and pa.s.sed on.

Every man had his nickname in the regiment, and I was christened Oxford.

I was on stable sentry duty at some idle high noon of mid-summer, and a playful chum of mine, whose name was Barlow, laid a little trap for me. "Oxford," says he, "who do you think is the ugliest beggar in the regiment?" I answered, without hesitation, "Sergeant So-and-So;"

and Sergeant So-and-So was at that very moment coming--miching mallecho--through the stables. He heard both the question and the answer, and he was naturally displeased. From that hour whatever chance I might have had of a peaceful life in the regiment disappeared.

The non-coms, began to lay plots against me, and I recall one day in particular, after weeks of rain, during which the horses' legs had been thickening for want of exercise, we got out into a very muddy menage with what we called the "young horse ride." I was mounted on a most unmanageable, untrained beast, and before the work was over he was in a lather from nose to tail, and I was encased in mud from the spur to the chrome-yellowed b.u.t.ton on the top of my forage cap. It was the custom, after having unsaddled one's mount, to pa.s.s a hasty oil-rag over bit and bridoon and stirrups, and then to fall to upon the grooming of the horse. My ugly sergeant had found a collaborateur, who wanted to know what the blank blank I meant by leaving my horse to s.h.i.+ver in the cold whilst I loitered about this customary duty. I set to work upon the horse at once, and, as the collaborating sergeant disappeared at one stable door, my ugly friend turned up at the other, wanting to know why the blank blank I had not oiled my stirrup irons. I took up the discarded oil-rag with all activity; the ugly man vanished, and his collaborateur appeared at the door on the other side of the stables.

"Now, didn't I tell you not to let your horse catch cold?" said he.

"Haven't you the brains to go and groom him?" I had learned long since the wisdom of silence, and I began to groom with a will. When my ugly friend once more appeared with a command "to the stirrup irons;" back I went, forboding the disaster which swiftly came. The accommodating friend of the ugly man swooped down, and I was haled before the officer on duty on a charge of having thrice neglected to obey a given order.

But the colonel of our regiment, the late Sir Charles Cameron Shute, since then for many years Member for Brighton, was at headquarters. He was a good deal of a martinet, but he was justice incarnate. I told my story, and I offered him my witnesses. His word to me was a simple right-about-face and march; but, as I put on my forage cap in the anteroom, I heard him thundering at the accusing sergeants to the effect that he would not have his recruits bullied, that he would not endure to have plots laid against them, and that on any repet.i.tion of the manouvre now exposed, he would break the pair of them, and return them to the ranks.

And here occurs what is to me a very curious reminiscence. A dear old great-aunt of mine had purchased my discharge, and had furnished me with money to go home. We were then stationed at Ballincollig, in County Cork, and I had secured a suit of civilian toggery from a Cork tailor. I was waiting for the jaunting car which was to carry me to town, when my ugly friend heaved in sight, and, finding a man in civilian dress with the undeniable air of the barrack-yard upon him, and being, as I guess, a little short-sighted, he saluted me as he would have saluted an officer in pa.s.sing. Discovering his error, he was very angry, and he began to cite all the pains and penalties to which a man was liable who smoked a cigar within a given distance of some powder-magazine which then existed there. When I had pointed out to him the fact that I was twenty yards beyond the limit, I promised him, with all the sincerity of youth, that whenever and wherever I might meet him in civil life, I would do my honest best to give him a hiding for the twelve months of misery he had caused me. It was years before I saw him again, and he did not know me. I had grown a beard, and an increasing shortness of sight had forced me to the use of an eyegla.s.s. He was a commissionaire at some gla.s.sworks which stand opposite to the offices of a journal with which I have been now intimately concerned for some years. I hailed him by name, and asked him why he had left his old regiment He told me that he was suffering from hernia and pulmonary consumption; and when I left the place, after seeing the picture on gla.s.s which I had been invited to view, I enjoyed the sweetest vengeance of my lifetime in tipping the ex-sergeant half-a-crown, and in leaving him without any disclosure of my own ident.i.ty.

CHAPTER VI

Towards Journalism--Dr Kenealy as Parliamentary Candidate-- The _Wednesbury Advertiser_--George Dawson--The First Private Execution--Misprints--The Black Country Sixty Years Ago--_Aunt Rachael_--Old Servants--Local Poets--Mining Dangers.

I suppose that I should have gravitated into journalism in any case; but it was poor old Dr Kenealy, who was afterwards famous as the intrepid, if ill-tempered, counsel for the Tichborne Claimant, who gave me my first active impulse towards the business. The Borough of Wednesbury had just been created, and my own native parish was a part of it. The Liberals chose as their candidate one Brogden, who had been unseated for bribery at Yarmouth, a fact in his history which did much to enliven trade amongst the local fishmongers, the bloater becoming, as it were, the Tory ensign in all processions and in all public meetings at which the Liberal candidate addressed his future const.i.tuents. Two or three men, who afterwards became well known, nibbled at the const.i.tuency, and went away again. Among them were the late Samuel Waddy, Q.C., and Mr Commissioner Kerr, who issued an electioneering address of astonis.h.i.+ng prolixity, prefacing it with the statement that he had no time to be brief. But Brogden's only real opponent was poor old Kenealy. There was, of course, a Conservative candidate in the field; and, rightly or wrongly, it was said that Kenealy had been brought down in his interest to split the Liberal vote.

I found the doctor one night addressing a mere handful of people in a vast building which would have accommodated two or three hundred for every unit he had before him. That was the first occasion in my life on which I wore a dress suit; and amidst the unwashed, coally-flannelled handful, I daresay that my expanse of s.h.i.+rt front, and the flower in my b.u.t.tonhole, made me conspicuous. I was a red-hot Liberal in those days, for no better reason, probably, than that my father held that form of creed, and I was quite persuaded that Kenealy was a paid impostor. So when, in that raucous voice of his, he said, "I love the working man,"

I answered from below with a cry of "Bunk.u.m, doctor, bunk.u.m." The doctor paused and looked at me, but said nothing at the moment By and by he flowed on: "When I go to the poll with ten thousand of the working men of this const.i.tuency behind me," and I chimed in with a cry of "When, doctor, when?" This time the orator fixed my flint, as the Americans used to say. He surveyed me from top to toe, and he said quietly, and in a tone of deep commiseration: "I pity that drunken blackguard." My first impulse was to spring upon the platform, and to throw the speaker from it; but it was so obvious that I could not clear myself of the imputation cast upon me in that way that I surrendered the idea in the very instant in which it occurred to me. I searched in my own mind for a retort, but I searched in vain; and I spent a good part of that night in the invention of scorching phrases. But the exercise afforded me no relief, and on the following day I sat down and wrote my first newspaper article. We had in our new-made borough, in those days, one ineffective, inoffensive little weekly journal called the _Wednesbury Advertiser_, and I posted my article to the editor, who, as much to my surprise as my delight, printed it in all the glory of leaded type. I believe I was under the impression that it would kill Kenealy; but, as all the world knows, the poor man survived for years, and died from wholly different causes. That was the determining incident in my career, and for months afterwards I wrote the _Advertisers_ leaders without any sort of agreement, and without receipt or expectation of any kind of pay. It is not because I imagine my work to have been exceptionally brilliant that I am disposed to think that I must have seemed a sort of heaven-sent blessing to my editor (whom I do not remember, by the way, ever to have seen); but at least I did a good share of his work for nothing. I have addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in the art of administration.

I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling, seething cauldron called journalism. The working journalist is found everywhere. Is there a man to be hanged?--the working journalist is present. Exhibitions, processions, coronations, wars, whatever may be going on, wherever the interest of life is richest and the pulse beats fastest, there you find the working journalist. There is no experience in the world which really qualifies a man to take a broad, a sane, an equable view of life in such a degree as journalism.

When first I joined the Press, I took a berth as junior reporter at 25s.

per week. I went to George Dawson--one of the highest types of men I have ever known, but one who was a born idle man and loved to talk and talk, and so left no record of himself--I went to dear old Dawson and said, "You are starting a journal, and I want to be on it." What is the bottom rung of the ladder? Well, my work was to report police court cases and inquests. I do not know of a lower rung. I had ambitions and ideas of my own, but I went for whatever came in my way, and I have not repented it until this day, although a good opening into business life awaited me if I chose to accept it in preference.

Almost the first "big thing" I recall in my experience was the first private execution which took place in the English provinces. It was at Worcester, when a man named Edmund Hughes, plasterer's labourer, was hanged for the murder of his wife. I have often thought that if that man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of Oth.e.l.lo in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him. He left her, saying that he would see her once again. He borrowed a razor from a friend, went to the place, and nearly severed her head from her body.

Well, I went to see that man hanged. I had never seen anyone die before, and such a thing as death by violence was altogether strange to me. I was told to apply to the sheriff for permission to be present at the execution. I devoutly hoped that permission would be refused, but it was not. I shall not forget the sensation that overcame me as I left the gaol on the night before the man was to be hanged. It was wintry weather and a storm was breaking. The sky seemed, in fact, to be racked with the storm clouds. But through them there was one open s.p.a.ce with one bright star visible. That star seemed to carry a promise of something beyond, and I went away somewhat uplifted, though sick and sorry notwithstanding.

When I went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to the scaffold. I pray G.o.d I may never see such a sight again. The man was just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself rather too freely with brandy--it was his first experience of this duty--walked in front of the prisoner reciting the "Prayers for the Dead." The poor condemned wretch, who was gabbling one sentence without ceasing, and who was so terribly afraid as to be cognisant of nothing save the fact that he _was_ afraid, had nineteen creaking black steps, newly-tarred, to mount on reaching the scaffold. He turned to the warder and muttered "I can't get up," but the latter slapped him on the back with the utmost _bonhomie_, and said, "You'll get up all right." He did get up and they hanged him. On the evening of the same day I read the amazing proclamation in the evening papers that "the prisoner met his fate with fort.i.tude." Yet I never in my life saw anything so utterly abject as that man's terror. I have since then come to the belief that the average man has learned the measure of expression of emotion by what he sees in the theatre. In the theatre a man has to make his emotions visible and audible to a large number of people. But in real life deep emotion is silent--I have always found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story.

Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first ill.u.s.trated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called the _Ill.u.s.trated Midland News_, and its editor-in-chief was Mr Joseph Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of mere repet.i.tion it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.

I can recall now but a single verse of it, and that, I presume, is kept in mind only by the misprint which blistered every nerve of me for weeks. The verse ran thus:--

"O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable!

Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show, Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell, Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go.

These lives are counted, the Avenger waits, His feet are heard already at the gates."

And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an "n"

for a "v," and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that "these lines" were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the printer's reader who pa.s.sed his abominable blunder. The most indurated professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all about it.

Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr Edmund Yates, who was at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then writing for the _Birmingham Morning News_, under the t.i.tle of "A Bad Lot," to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, "Are there no troubles now?" and the lady of his heart responded, "Not one, dear Frank, not one." And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, "White Line," a professional instruction to leave the s.p.a.ce of one line blank between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the "comp." who was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus, as if it had been a line of verse:

"Not one, dear Frank, not one white line."

I think the error was repaired in time; but I remember that the author of it was forcibly invested by his comrades with a leather medal, and that the whole establishment below stairs revelled in beer at his expense. In the same journal appeared a report of a speech delivered by its own editor, who having said of Shakespeare, "We turn to the words of this immortal writer," had a "t" knocked out for him, and was represented as having spoken of "this immoral writer." I was with the dear old chief at the time at which the blunder was discovered and the most eloquent conversationalist at that time alive in England surpa.s.sed himself. The offending "reader" was a married man with a family, and a hard-working, conscientious creature, as a rule, and he escaped with the mildest wigging, though I should not like to have been responsible for the consequences which might have ensued had he been present at the instant of discovery.

For a good many years it had been my habit to tramp of a Sunday night some five or six miles out, and some five or six miles home, to hear George Dawson preach at the Church of the Saviour; and it was thus that I learned that he was to be the editor of a new daily newspaper, the _Birmingham Morning News_, and, as I have already said, I was employed by him at 25s. a week. He left little behind him to justify the belief I had in him, which was shared, by the way, by a good many thousands of people. I reckon him to have been, upon the whole, potentially the greatest man with whom I ever rubbed shoulders. He was a very wide, though possibly a somewhat shallow, student; he was, without exception, the best talker to whom I have ever listened. He possessed a certain magnetic quality which extorted in a really extraordinary degree the wors.h.i.+p of thinking young men; and there was no man in his own day who was more courageous in the expression of his beliefs, though they were often enough likely to cost him dear. I cannot think of him as ever having entertained an intellectual fear. He was honesty personified; but his heart had established a curious mastery over his mind. He was telling me one day in New Street that promiscuous charity was a curse to the community, and that it was a man's duty to b.u.t.ton up his pocket at the first sound of a beggar's whine. While he was still intent upon this moral lesson, he gave a half-crown to a mendicant Irishwoman, who did most certainly look as if she were in need of it. The great-hearted, big-brained, eloquent man has even yet his monument in the hearts of those whom he inspired; but he left next to nothing as a lasting memento of his own genius. The truth is that, when he took pen in hand, the genial current of his soul was frozen. In print he was curiously stiff and unimpressive; and it has been one of the wonders of my lifetime that a man so wise, so learned, and so original should have left so faint a trail behind him.

I suppose that really no greater stroke of luck could possibly have befallen a student of the oddities of human nature than to have been born in that desolate Black Country sixty years ago. Almost x everybody was an oddity in one way or another and that defacing School Board which has ground the lower middle cla.s.s of England and its labouring population into one common monotony had not yet laid a hand upon the people. They spoke a very beautiful old English there, full of the quaint plurals long since obsolete in most other places. "Shoon" and "housen," for example, and now and then a double plural--a compromise between the ancient manner and the new--would creep into their speech; "eysen" was the plural of "eye," "peasen" the plural for "pea;" and the patois was rich with many singularities which I have known often to be quoted as "Americanisms," although, as a matter of fact, the "Americanisms" are no more than the survival of the early English form.

If I had only had the brains to know it, there lay before me as fine a field as any craftsman in the art of fiction ever had a chance to glean in. It is an impertinence for a man to speak of his own work, but I have often thought in my own story of _Aunt Rachel_, there is at least an adumbration of what a man aimed with real sympathy and humour might have done with the people of that place and time. When I say that the characters in _Aunt Rachel_ are all real, I do not mean to make the foolish boast that they are all alive. I mean simply to say that they are all sketches from the life and are as true to their own lineaments as my hand could make them. The old musical enthusiast who, having heard Paganini, laid down his bow for ever because he could be content with nothing less than the great virtuoso's perfections, was a maternal great-uncle of mine, and the pathetic little story of the manner in which the life-long severance between himself and his sweetheart was brought about is literally true. "Aunt Rachel" herself in her extremely starched and dignified old age was a constant visitor at my mother's house. She had, for a s.p.a.ce of something like forty years, had charge of successive generations of children in a stately country house in Worcesters.h.i.+re, and when she was honourably pensioned and retired, she used to boast, in her prim way, that she was not unacquainted with the airs and graces of the higher powers. She must at least have reached the age of fourscore when on one occasion she had lingered at my mother's house until darkness fell. The cottage she lived in was a mile away and was approached by a somewhat lonely road. My brother Tom, at that time a stalwart lad of eighteen, was suggested to her as an escort. The little old lady drew herself up to the full height of her dignity. It was a saying of hers that she could not by any loyal person be described as a female of inferior stature, since she was but one barleycorn less in height than Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. She rebuked my mother with a solemnity which laid a heavy tax on our politeness. "No, Mary, my dear," she said, "I will go alone; I have my reputation to consider."

One meets rarely at this time the example of the attached old school of servants, who used to identify themselves with the household to which they ministered. The faithful servant of the antique world is dead, but I remember dozens of instances in my childhood where even in establishments as humble as our own, a domestic who had entered into service in early childhood had stayed on until age or a by no means premature marriage put an end to the a.s.sociation. One of my mother's maids stayed with her for a matter of some thirty years and finally left her to share the destinies of a working mason. The honest fellow had just fulfilled a profitable, small contract in so satisfactory a manner that he was offered something bigger which, in due time, was followed by a something bigger yet. In a while, Jane was keeping her carriage, but on her frequent visits to her old mistress her demeanour never changed, unless one could read into it a trifle of apology for her rustling silk dress and black kid gloves. She developed a love for long words which had not distinguished her in her earlier years, and this tendency betrayed her into occasional malapropisms, the best of which is perhaps worth preserving. My mother was a very notable housewife and trainer of domestic servants. It was her pet hobby to take some neglected little draggle-tail from the workhouse and to turn her into an efficient maid-of-all-work. When this self-imposed duty was accomplished, the maid invariably went elsewhere in search of higher wages, so that my mother was rarely without some slatternly little pupil whom she was drilling into ways of household order. Jane came one day in her rustling silks and streamers to announce a discovery. "The very girl you want, ma'am; I am sure you could turn her into a perfect treasure." "Well, Jane," said my mother, "you know what I want. I want three qualities in a girl and if she has them, I can make a good servant of her. I want her to be honest and willing and clean. Is she honest?" "As the day, ma'am," says Jane. "And is she willing?" "Oh, as willing as the rising sun, ma'am."

"And is she clean?" "Clean, ma'am," says Jane, raising her black gloved hands to emphasise the affirmation, "she's _scrofulously_ clean!"

And then the poets! there was not a parish or a hamlet for a good ten miles round but had its own acknowledged bard. There were continual tragedies happening in the coal mines. Men were much more careless in the handling of naked lights than they are now, and the beneficent gift of the Davy lamp was looked on with mistrust. The machinery by which the men were lowered to their work was often inadequate. There was nothing like a scientific system of ventilation and fatalities were appallingly frequent. Whenever one happened, the local bard was ready with his threnody and the little black-bordered, thick leaflets were sold at one penny apiece for the benefit of the survivors. The prince of the poetic throng in my day was one Alfred Randall whom I used to encounter on Sunday mornings on his way to chapel dressed in black broadcloth, with huge, overlapping, rhinocerine folds in it--for, as I have remarked elsewhere, a Black Country tailor who had supplied the customer with merely cloth enough to fit him, would have been thought unpardonably stingy--a very high false collar tied at the back of the neck by a foot or two of white tape which as often as not trailed out behind, a woollen comforter dangling almost to his toes whatever might be the season of year, and the hardest looking and s.h.i.+niest silk hat to be had for love or money--these were Mr Randall's Sabbath wear, and it always struck me as a child that he had very much of the aspect of a c.o.c.katoo in mourning. He was a preternaturally solemn man and when I felt that I could command my features, I used to like to talk with him about his Art, and hear in what manner his inspirations occurred to him. "It's no credit to me," he used to say, with a sort of proud humility, "it's a gift, that's what it is." Mr Randall's views were not always engaged on tragic themes, and I have the most delightful recollections of a pastoral of his ent.i.tled:--"Lines on a Walk I once took on a Day in May into the Country." It began thus:--

"It was upon a day in May, When through the fields I took my way.

It was delightful for to see The sheep and lambs they did agree.

And as I walked forth on that day I met a stile within my way; That stile which did give rest to me Again I may not no more see."

I had the pleasure to put this effusion into type with my own hands. My father was generally his own proof reader, and when I went to him with the first impression and began to read to him from the ma.n.u.script, I was really very terribly afraid. My father was a man who hid a great deal of tenderness and humour under a very stern exterior, and I felt that it was my duty in his presence to go through my share of the proof-reading with a grave and business-like countenance. I approached one couplet with terror, for I knew beforehand that it would break me down.

"As on my way I then did trod The lark did roar his song to G.o.d."

I had to laugh, whatever might happen, but to my relief my father laughed also. I believe that was the first real, honest, human communion that he and I had ever known together, and Mr Randall's poem did more to make us friends and to break down the life-long shyness which had existed between us than anything else I can remember. I remember this gem from Randall's hand concerning a comrade who met death by his side in the mine in which he worked:--

"John Williams was a G.o.dly man Whose name was on Wesleyan Methodist plan, He rose one morning and kissed his wife And promised to be home at night.

But ah! he met the fatal flame And never he went home again."

The indifference with which these men lived in the face of danger was something truly remarkable. One would barely encounter a working miner at that time who had not, on face or hands, a deep blue mark like an irregular tattoo, branded where the blast of the exploding gas had driven the coal-dust into his skin, and every man thus marked had been in imminent peril of his life at least once, and had probably found himself in the midst of a dozen or a score of his dead comrades. After one of my own earliest descents into the underground region of the old Staffords.h.i.+re ten-yard coal, I found myself in a great dimly lighted hall, where the men were pursuing the dangerous task of cleaning out the pillars which had hitherto been left to support the roof. This was a common enough procedure at the time, and many a life was lost in it.

I was seated on an upturned wheel-barrow, talking to a doggy or ganger, who was taking his mid-day meal of bread and meat and cold tea. We were perhaps half a dozen yards apart when right between us from the invisible roof, thirty feet above, a cartload of rocky fragments fell without warning. A foot this way or that and one or other of us must inevitably have been crushed. It was the first close and immediate danger of which I had been conscious in my life, and I do not scruple to say that it set me trembling and shaking and left me with a curious sense of emptiness and nausea. But the old doggy just c.o.c.ked his eye towards the invisible roof and looked down at the heap of debris, and saying, "That stuck up till it couldn't stuck up no longer," went on quite composedly with his meal.

CHAPTER VII

George Dawson as Editor--Birmingham Politicians--John Blight's Nervousness--The Black Lake Rescue--The Pelsall Hall Colliery Disaster--Archibald Forbes--Out of Work-- Edmund Yates and _The World_--The Hangman-Human Oddities-- A Mislaid Cheque--Hero Wors.h.i.+p--Three Stories of Carlyle-- Journalism.

For two or three bright and happy months I acted as George Dawson's amanuensis after a rather curious and unusual fas.h.i.+on. In his unclerical suit of Irish homespun and his beaded slippers, with a well-blacked clay between his lips, he would roam up and down the Turkey carpet of the editorial room and talk about some topic of the day, and in that fas.h.i.+on he would make his daily leader. "Now," he would say, "take that to your own room and get as much as you can of it into a column." I made no notes, for I had a verbal memory in those days like a steel rat-trap.

But I used to go away charged sometimes with matter enough for a newspaper budget, or nearly, and it was my business to condense and select from this material that which seemed worthiest of preservation.

I offer here a fragment or two of the kind of thing he used to say at these times. Talking of Disraeli, whom he hated vehemently, he said: "The man has been writing all his life of the great Asian mystery without guessing that he is the greatest Asian mystery alive. His politics are romantic, his romances are political, and he himself is a fiction founded on fact." Of another person whom I will not name, he said: "You put the man into a book as you put a sponge into a bucket.

You take him out and squeeze him, and he returns the stream uncoloured.

He is a sort of _Half Hours with the Best Authors_, bound in man's skin; he is intellectually impotent, he never begot an idea."