Part 14

There was “half a gale,” as seamen would have called it, with the wind at sixty miles an hour, and to the amazement of the spectators, who had given up all hopes of watching a flight that day, an aviator mounted into the fury of the storm. It was Latham, the most dare-devil of the early adventurers of flight, the most passionate and ill-tempered of them. I think it was a kind of rage which made him go up that afternoon. He was “fed up” with waiting for moderate weather, and with the little ladies who surrounded him with adulation and rivalry, as many of those aviators were surrounded by girls who were their hero worshipers and their harpies. It was the most astounding flight that had been seen up to that time. Latham’s machine was like a frail craft in a rough sea. The wind furies shrieked, and tried to tear this thing to pieces. It staggered and strained, and seemed to be tossed like a bit of paper in that wild wind. At times the power of the engine seemed to be exactly equaled by the force of the wind, and it remained aloft, making no progress but shuddering, as it were, until Latham wrenched it round and evaded the direct blast. He flew at a terrific speed, with the wind behind him, rising and dipping with tilted wings, like a sea gull in a storm. The correspondents on the press stand went a little mad at the sight and rose and cheered hoarsely, with a sense of fear, because this man seemed to be courting death. We expected him to crash at any moment. One voice rose above all the others, and roared out words which I have never forgotten. “You splendid fool! Come down! Come down!”

It was Barzini, the Italian correspondent, the most brilliant descriptive writer in the world. Like an Italian of the Medici family, with long nose and olive skin and dark liquid eyes, Latham’s heroic exploit stirred him to a passion of emotion, and tears poured down his face. His description of that flight was one of the finest things I have ever read.

One of the most exciting episodes of those early days of record making was when Graham White competed with Paulhan in a race from London to Manchester. With Ernest Perris, the news editor of _The Daily Chronicle_, and Rowan, one of the correspondents, I set out in a powerful motor car to follow the flight, which began shortly before dark. Graham White’s plan was to fly by night--the first time such an exploit had been attempted--and he thought that our headlights might help as some guide outside London. We lost him almost at once, and after a wild motor ride at a breakneck pace in the darkness, decided that we should never see him again. He had probably hit a tree, and was lying dead in some field. Many other correspondents had motored out, but we lost them all, and halted at the side of a lonely road where we heard voices shouting to each other in French.

“Perhaps they are Graham White’s mechanics,” I said to Perris.

This guess proved to be right, and upon inquiry from the men, we found that Graham White had had engine trouble, and had alighted in some garden not far from where we stood.

It was a little country village, though I cannot recollect its name or whereabouts, and after tramping across fields, we saw a house with lights shining from all its windows. It was the village rectory, remote from the world and all the excitements of life, until, out of the darkness, a great bird had dropped into the garden, with the noise of a dragon. From the wings of the bird a young man, dirty, half-dazed, freezing cold, and drunk with fatigue, staggered out, banged at the door, and asked for food and a place to sleep. The clergyman’s wife and the clergyman’s daughter rose to the occasion, as Englishwomen do in times of crisis. They dressed themselves, made some coffee, cooked some boiled eggs, lighted big fires, and unfroze the bird man. He was already abed, after a plea to be called at the first gleam of dawn, when we arrived. Presently other motorists arrived, all cold and hungry and muddy. The country rectory was invaded by these wild-looking people and the clergyman’s pretty daughter, with shining eyes, served us all with coffee and eggs, and seemed to enjoy the excitement as the greatest thing that had happened in her life. I have no recollection of the clergyman. I dare say the poor man was bewildered by the sudden tumult in his house of peace, and left everything to his capable wife and the swift grace of his little daughter.

Before the dawn Graham White was down from his bed, thoroughly bad-tempered and abominably rude, for which there was ample excuse, as word was brought that Paulhan was well ahead, although he, too, had dropped into a field. Perris and I urged him not to fly again before daybreak, but he told us to go to the devil, and insisted on getting away in the darkness. We took to the car again, waited until we heard the roar of Graham White’s engines, and saw him pass overhead like a great black bat. Then we chased him again, and lost him again. He came to earth with more engine trouble in a ploughed field not long after dawn. A little crowd of people gathered round him, and I saw some of the correspondents who had started from London at the same time as ourselves--now disheveled, pale, and dirty in the bleak dawn. One young man, belonging to the old _Morning Leader_, I think, carried a red silk cushion. His car lay overturned in a ditch, but he still clung to the cushion, he told me, as his one hold on the actuality of life, which seemed nothing but a mad dream.

Another historic event was the All-round-England race, which became a duel between two famous Frenchmen, Vedrennes and Beaumont. The first named was a rough, brutal, foul-mouthed mechanic, with immense courage and skill. The second was a naval officer of most charming and gallant personality. Beaumont came back to Brooklands after his successful and wonderful flight, only a few minutes ahead of Vedrennes. A great crowd of men and women, in which there were a number of pretty ladies who had motored out early from London, had assembled at Brooklands to cheer the winner, but, as always among English crowds, their sympathy was excited by the man who had just missed the first prize. When Vedrennes appeared in sight, there was a rush to meet him. He stepped out of his machine, and looked fiercely around. When some one told him that Beaumont had arrived first, he raised both his clenched fists and cried out a foul and frightful oath--fortunately in French. Then he burst into tears, and, looking round in a dazed way, asked if there was any woman who would kiss him. A little Frenchwoman in the crowd stepped shyly out, and Vedrennes flung his greasy arms about her and kissed her emotionally. It was characteristic of the French soul that in the moment of his tragic disappointment he should have sought a woman’s arms, like a boy who goes to his mother in distress. I have never forgotten that little episode, and I have seen similar things in time of war.

It was Alfred Harmsworth and _The Daily Mail_ which put up all the prizes for these record-making flights, and the man who was afterward Lord Northcliffe deserved all the honor he gained for his generous and farseeing encouragement of aviation. It was he who offered a big prize for a cross-Channel flight, which then sounded almost beyond the bounds of possibility. Latham was the first favorite for that prize, and was determined to gain it. His first attempt was a failure, and he fell into the sea, and was picked up smoking a cigarette as he clung to the wreckage of his plane. After that, he established himself at the other side of the Channel, at a little place called Sangatte, near Calais, and waited for some improvements to his engine, and favorable weather.

Another competitor and pioneer, named Blériot, was tinkering about with a monoplane on the same strip of coast, but nobody seemed to think much of his chances.

_The Daily Mail_ had an immense staff of correspondents on both sides of the Channel, and a wireless installation by which they could signal to each other. Without any assistance of that kind, I had to keep my eye on both sides of the Channel, which I crossed almost every day for about a fortnight. Latham was vague about the possibilities of his start. He might go any morning at dawn. But morning after morning passed, and the French destroyers which had been lent by the French government to patrol the Channel, in case he fell in again, prepared to steam away. Several correspondents--English and French--used to spend the night on a Calais tugboat lying off Sangatte, and I joined them there the night before Latham assured us all that he would go next day. Something happened at that time to Latham--I think his nerve gave way temporarily, owing to the strain of waiting and continued engine trouble. He went about looking depressed and wretched, and he was as white as a sheet after an interview with the commander of a French destroyer, who informed him that he could wait no longer.

I crossed over to Dover, deciding that the English side might be the best place to wait, after all, especially as nobody seemed likely to cross. That very morning Blériot came over in his aëroplane like a bird, and there was not a soul to see him come. _The Daily Mail_ staff were in bed and asleep, and I and other men of other papers were, by a lucky fluke, first on the scene to greet the man who had done the worst thing that has ever been done to England--though we did not guess it at the time. For, by flying across the Channel, he robbed us for all time of our island security and made that “silver streak,” which has been our safeguard from foreign foes, no more than a puddle which might be crossed in a few minutes along the highway of the air. After Blériot came the bombing Gothas of the German army, and now, without air defense, we lie open to any enemy as an easy target for his bombs and poison gas.

It was in the war that I completed my studies of aviation and its conquest. On mornings of great slaughter, scores of times, hundreds of times, I saw our boys fly out as heralds of a battle. Day after day, year after year, I saw that war in the air which became more intense, which crowded the sky with single combats and great tourneys, as the numbers of squadrons were increased by the Germans and ourselves. I saw the enemy’s planes and our own shot down, so that the battlefields were littered with their wreckage.

In fair weather and foul they went out on reconnaissance, signaled to the guns, fought each other to the death. The mere mechanical side of flight had no more secrets, it seemed. The little “stunts” of the pioneer days, the records of speed and height, were made ridiculous by the audacities and exploits of aviation in war. Our young men were masters of the machine, and flight seemed as natural and easy to them as to the birds who were scared at their swift rush of wings. They flew through storms of shrapnel, skimmed low above enemy trenches, dropped flaming death into cities and camps. The enemy was not behindhand in courage and skill, not less lucky in human target practice, rather more ruthless in bomb dropping over civilian populations whose women and babes were killed in their beds. After tax collecting by bombing aëroplanes in Mesopotamia, we cannot be self-righteous now. The beauty and the power of flight came very quickly to mankind after Cody went up in that old homemade ’bus, and crashed after a few moments of ecstasy. And mankind has used it as a devil’s gift.

XIV

During one of those periods when I deliberately broke the chains of regular journalism in order to enjoy the dangerous liberty of a free lance, I made a bid for fortune by writing some one-act plays, and one three-act play.

I had gained some knowledge of stage technique and of that high mystery known as “construction,” as a dramatic critic, when, for six months, I acted for William Archer, the master critic, during his absence in the United States. This knowledge, I may say at once, was not of the slightest use to me, because technique cannot take the place of inspiration--Barrie and others have exploded its traditions--and I suffered the usual disappointments of the novice in that most difficult art.

To some extent I had the wires greased for me by my brother, Cosmo Hamilton, and it was his influence, and his expert touches to my little drama “Menders of Nets,” which caused it to be produced at the Royalty Theater, with a distinguished cast, including the beautiful Beryl Faber and that great actor Arthur Holmes-Gore. It was well received, and I had visions of motor cars and other fruits of success, which suddenly withered when the announcement was made that the play was to be withdrawn after a few performances. What had happened was an ultimatum presented to Otho Stuart, the manager of the Royalty Theater, by Albert Chevalier who, in the same bill, was playing another one-act drama, called “The House.” My “Menders of Nets” played for something over an hour, and ended in a tragic scene in a fisherman’s cottage. When the curtain rang up again for Albert Chevalier, the second play began with gloom and tragedy in the same key as mine, and the audience had had enough of this kind of atmosphere. “Either ‘Menders of Nets’ must be changed,” said Chevalier, “or I withdraw ‘The House.’” That, anyhow, was the explanation given to me, and off came my piece.

This blow was followed by another, more amazing. Three other one-act plays of mine were accepted by a gentleman reputed to be enormously rich, who took one of the London theaters for a “triple bill” season. Unfortunately, before the production of my little plays, he was overwhelmed in debt, abandoned his theatrical schemes, and departed for the Continent with the only copies of my three efforts, which I have not seen or heard of from that day to this.

Drama seemed to me too hazardous an adventure for a man who has to pay the current expenses of life, and I turned to other forms of writing to keep the little old pot boiling on the domestic hearth. I became for a time a literary “ghost.”

It is ironical and amusing that three books of mine which achieved considerable financial success and obtained great and favorable publicity were published under another man’s name. He wanted _kudos_, and I wanted a certain amount of ready cash, in order to pay the rent and other necessities of life. I agreed readily to write a book for him--and afterward two more--for a certain fixed sum. As it happened, I think he not only obtained the _kudos_, but a fair profit as well. As I had been well paid, I was perfectly content.

Some friends of mine, to whom I have mentioned this secret, without giving away the name of the man who assumed the title of author, charge me with having been guilty of an immoral and scandalous transaction. My conscience does not prick me very sharply. As far as I was concerned, I was guilty of no deceit, and no dishonesty. I provided a certain amount of work, for which I was adequately paid, on condition that my name was not attached to it. Journalists do the same thing day by day, and the editor of the journal gets the credit. It is the other man who must have felt uneasy and conscience-stricken, sometimes, because he was a masquerader. But his sense of humor, his charm of personality, and his generosity, made me take a lenient view of his literary camouflage.

I wrote another book, for another man, but in that case he was far more entitled to the credit, because it was actually his narrative, and the record of his own amazing adventures told to me, partly in French and partly in broken English. This was a story of the sea, called _Fifteen Thousand Miles in a Ketch_, by Captain Raymond Rallier du Baty, published in England by Nelson’s.

This young Frenchman is one of the most charming and courageous souls I have ever met, and I look back with pleasure to the days when we used to motor out to Windsor Forest and there, under the old oaks, he used to spread out his charts and describe his amazing voyage in a little fishing ketch, with his brother and a crew of six, from Boulogne-sur-mer to Sidney, in Australia, stopping six months on the way at the desert island of Kerguelen in the South Pacific, where they lived like primitive men of the Paleolithic age, fighting sea lions with clubs, to obtain their blubbers, and having strange and desperate adventures in their exploration of this mountainous island. The narrative I wrote from his spoken story was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and I remember _The Spectator_ went so far as to say that “it was worthy to have a place on the bookshelf by the side of Robinson Crusoe.”

Raymond du Baty, that handsome, brown-eyed, quiet, and noble young seaman of France, felt the call of the wild again after my acquaintance with him, and returned to the desert island for further exploration. After six months of solitude cut off from all the world and its news, a steamer came to the island and brought with it tidings of a world gone mad. It was Armageddon. Germany and Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria were at war with France, Great Britain, and Russia. Other nations were getting dragged in. The fields of Europe were drenched in the blood of the world’s youth. France was sorely stricken, but holding out with heroic endurance....

Imagine the effect of that news on a young Frenchman who had heard no whisper of it, until its horror burst with full force upon him in his island of eternal peace! He abandoned Kerguelen and went back to France. Within a fortnight he had gained his pilot’s certificate as an aviator, and was flying over the German lines with shrapnel bursting about his wings.

That, however, is later history, and takes me away from that second period of free lancing in London when I did many different kinds of work, and, on the whole, enjoyed the game.

One little enterprise at this time which interested me a good deal and enabled me to earn a considerable sum of money with hardly any labor--a rare achievement!--was an idea which I proposed to _The Daily Graphic_--for their correspondence column. My suggestion was to obtain from well-known people their views and ideals on the subject of “The Simple Life.” A further part of my amiable suggestion was that I should be paid a certain fee for every column of the kind which I obtained for the paper. The proposal was accepted, and my wife and I made a careful selection of names, including princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, famous actors and actresses, society beauties, and, indeed, celebrities of all kinds. I then drafted a letter in which I suggested, in all sincerity, that our modern civilization had become too complex and too materialistic, and expressed the hope that I might be favored with an opinion on the possibility and advantages of a return to “The Simple Life.”

The response to these letters was amazing. Instinctively I had struck a little note which caused a lively vibration of emotion and sympathy in many minds. It was before the war or the shadow of war had fallen over Europe, and when great numbers of people were alarmed by the lack of idealism, the gross materialism, the frivolity, the decadence of our social state. There was also a revolt of the spirit against the artificiality of city life, a yearning for that “return to nature” which was so strong a sentiment in France before the Revolution, especially among the aristocratic and intellectual classes.

Something of the sort was acting like yeast in the imagination of similar classes in England and other countries. I received an immense number of answers to my inquiry, and many of them were extremely interesting and valuable as the revelation of that craving for simplicity in ideals and conduct of life, and for a closer touch with primitive nature and the beauty of eternal things. It was characteristic, I think, that people of high rank and easy circumstances were the warmest advocates of “The Simple Life.” The correspondence continued for weeks and months, and my title became a catchword on the stage, in _Punch_, and in private society. One of the most beautiful letters I received--it contained more than three thousand words--was from “Carmen Sylva,” describing a day in her life as Queen of Roumania. Afterward a selection of the letters was published in book form, and had a great success.

Another task I undertook more for love than lucre (I received only a nominal fee) was to help in the organization of the Shakespeare Memorial Committee. A considerable sum of money had been bequeathed by certain philanthropists for the purpose of honoring the memory of Shakespeare and encouraging the study of his works, by some national memorial worthy of his genius, as the world’s tribute to his immortal spirit. The honorary secretary and most ardent promoter of this scheme was Israel Gollancz--since knighted--a little professor at Oxford and London, with an immense range of scholarship in Anglo-Saxon and mediæval literature, and an insatiable capacity for organizing committees, societies, academies, and other groups devoted to the advancement of learning, and, anyhow, to agreeable social intercourse and intellectual rendezvous. Meeting the professor in a bun shop, I became enthusiastic with the idea of the Shakespeare Memorial, and willingly offered to help him get his first General Committee and organize a great public meeting at the Mansion House, to place the idea of the Memorial before the nation with an appeal for funds.

This work brought me into touch with many interesting people, apart from Sir Israel himself, for whom I have always had an affectionate regard, and among them I remember one of the grand old men of England--Doctor Furnivall, editor of the Leopold Shakespeare. He was over eighty years of age when I first met him, but he had the heart of a boy, the gayety of D’Artagnan, the Musketeer, and the debonnair look of an ancient cavalier. Every Sunday he used, even at that age, to take out an eight of shopgirls on old Father Thames, and once every week he held a reception at the top of a tea shop in Oxford Street, when scholars old and young, journalists, and pretty ladies used to crowd round him, enamored by his silvery grace, his exquisite courtesy, the wit that played about his words like the mellow sunshine of an autumn day. He was always very kind to me, and I loved the sight of him.

I came to know another grand old man--of another type--in connection with that work for the Shakespeare Committee. The first time I met Lord Roberts, that little white falcon of England, whom often I had seen riding in royal processions through the streets of London, with a roar of cheers following him, was in his house in Portland Place when I “touched” him for a donation to the Shakespeare Fund and persuaded him to join the General Committee. He was going to a reception that evening, and I remember him now, as he stood before me, a little old soldier, in full uniform, with rows and rows of medals and stars, all a-glitter, but not brighter than his keen eyes beneath their shaggy brows. After listening to my explanation, he spoke of his love of Shakespeare as a man might speak of his best comrade, and declared his willingness to do any service for his sake.

The next time I saw Lord Roberts was at one of those early aviation meetings which I have described. I stood by his side, and he chatted to me about the marvel of this coming conquest of the air. As he spoke an aëroplane danced over the turf and rose and soared away, and the little old man, cheering like a schoolboy, ran after it a little way with the rest of the crowd, as young in spirit as any man there, sixty years his junior.