CHAPTER XXIII

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART III

HENRY HARLAND, who justly made such a prodigious hit with that exquisite book, _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, I knew well in America. Stedman introduced us at one of his at-homes. He wrote then under the pseudonym of “Sidney Luska,” and was best known for some big action he had had with some firm of publishers in New York, the American Cassells, I think. He was a very opinionated man, and I did not at the time believe that he would ever write so fine a book as _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, which breathes the very air of Italy, and is the most exquisite idyll of Italian life which we have in the language. But it is only just to him to say that Stedman, in introducing him, spoke of him in terms which should have made me believe this. He was born in St. Petersburg, and looked rather like a Russian. He would have been fifty-two if he had been alive. Lane always believed in him, and made him editor of the _Yellow Book_. He and his pretty little wife had a flat in Cromwell Road, and were popular in the “precious” section of literary society. His early death was a great loss to literature.

Frank Bullen is one of the most interesting personalities I have met in literature. He is so many-sided in his abilities and his experiences. After being an errand-boy, and everything up to chief officer on a sailing-ship, and a clerk in the meteorological office at Greenwich, he became a writer, an orator and a philanthropist. No one has done more for the men of the Merchant Service, for while he did all that man could for them practically, he enlisted the sympathies of the world for them in his books. A small, dark man, with very bright eyes, and a sympathetic manner, except when he is moved to indignation, he was born to dominate great audiences, especially when he is telling them of wrongs which need practical redress. The wonders of the Lord which he saw when he went down to the sea in ships, made such a profound impression on his imagination that they fill the pages of his books with eloquence and knowledge. With the exception of Joseph Conrad, he has no rival among living writers as a sea-novelist. I think I met him at the Idler first. I know that we became friends from the first day.

Dion Clayton Calthrop, that prince of light novelists, who is always finding fame by some new stroke of genius, was our neighbour for several years at Addison Mansions. He is such a distinguished-looking man that I used to watch him and wonder who he was, until one night I met him through a mutual friend. It is not surprising that he is so brilliant, because he is the son of John Clayton, the actor, and grandson of Dion Boucicault.

When I asked Calthrop, who started as an artist, what made him take up writing, he said—

“I really took up writing owing to a bout of insomnia when I was living in Paris, and as I was painting in the schools all day, I tried to write at night. I read the sketches to Norman Angell, a friend of mine (who wrote _The Great Illusion_), and through him met Manuel, the artist, and through him they were published in _The Butterfly_.

“I believe in many irons in the fire; people specialise too much, so I have books, plays, dress designs, or scene models, and a picture or two, all going at once, and it is a great cause for regret to me that I cannot write music. In the great days of Art, artists were so interested in life that they tried everything—why shouldn’t we? I even have a rock-garden full of Alpine flowers on my writing desk—true, it is only four feet by one—but it is very interesting to see flowers grow as you work. As a matter of fact, I am writing against an Alpine crocus, trying to finish a book as it comes into bloom.”

Desmond Coke, one of the most brilliant of our younger novelists, I met in 1904 through his mother, Mrs. Talbot Coke, who had been my colleague on the _Queen_, the wife of one of our generals in the Boer War. Mrs. Talbot Coke was at the time—as she is still—one of the principal contributors to _Hearth and Home_, a paper which served as a literary cradle to Robert Hichens, whilst it was sub-edited by no less a personage than Arnold Bennett, who was just beginning to write his series of great novels about the pottery towns.

Desmond Coke, who, under the pseudonym of “Charbon,” wrote the reviews in a lively strain, possibly sometimes more welcome to his readers than to the novelist reviewed, was at the time I speak of fresh from Oxford, which he had made his own in fiction with that delirious skit on feminine fiction, _Sandford of Merton_. Since then he has written a number of novels, distinguished for their original ideas. He has long been a keen collector, as his chambers in a backwater off Oxford Street show, and has of late turned his collecting to good account by writing the classic on _The Art of Silhouette_. He is very accomplished, and is one of the chief pillars of Chapman & Hall’s publishing house. The announcement, however, that Mr. H. B. Irving has secured his three-act play, _One Hour of Life_, proves that here is yet another novelist who, given the opportunity, would gladly exchange the quiet covers of Bookland for the more adventurous and hectic boards of Theatredom!

E. H. Cooper was a very dear friend of mine, who came near being one of the conspicuous figures of his time. He had a short life and a merry one—merry, at all events, for his friends. He was, perhaps, too cynical ever to be quite merry himself, except with children. His father was a Staffordshire country gentleman, with an estate adjoining the Duke of Sutherland’s, and the Duchess and her children and her nephews and nieces were much attached to that wayward genius. While he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, he contracted the taste for gambling on horse-races, which kept him a poor man, but enabled him to write one of the best racing novels of the language—_Mr. Blake of Newmarket_. That did not prevent him from writing delightful children’s books, inspired by the Duchess’s children. He was a very handsome and romantic-looking man, with wonderful iron-grey eyes, but, like Byron, was born lame. For a brief time he edited the _Daily Mail_, as a _locum tenens_, I believe, and for a long time he was Paris correspondent of the _New York World_. Once, during that period, he made a big coup at Chantilly, and for some days pressed me with letters and telegrams to go and stay with him for a week at Paris and “paint the town absolutely red” at his expense. We were to stay at the Ritz. He said he was going to be really rich for a week, and it would supply me with the material for a whole novel. But if he was determined to waste his one stroke of luck, I was not going to be a party to it, and I not only refused, but did my utmost to wean him from the idea—unsuccessfully, I think. If Cooper had really given his mind to novel-writing and journalism, he might have made a great name, for he was brilliantly clever, and his distinction of manner made him an impressive figure in society.

We were drawing near the end of our time at Addison Mansions when I met Jeffery Farnol. Farnol, who is still young, is as likely as any one to rank among the foremost novelists of his time. His _Broad Highway_ is one of the best books produced by the generation, and _The Amateur Gentleman_ was a good successor to it. He is an Englishman born, but lived some time in America, where he made his living as a scene-painter. There he wrote his great novel, and after disappointments in searching for a publisher he sent it to Shirley Byron Jevons, at that time editor of the _Sportsman_, a relative of the celebrated Professor Stanley Jevons, the Political Economist, and brother of Dr. Frank Jevons, Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, he himself being now connected with literary journalism. Shirley Jevons at once recognised it as something like a work of genius, and taking it to the old firm of Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., told them that they must publish it. It made its way a little slowly at first, but then the public, led by the strong convictions of one man, swept him on to fame on an irresistible tide. Farnol was born in Birmingham thirty-five years ago. His parents came to London when he was seven, and he has made a suburb of it, Lee, in Kent, his permanent home, though business may take him to the United States for months at a time.

He married in his early twenties the daughter of Hawley, the scenic and architectural artist, an Englishman living in America. She was on a visit to relatives in England, and the rash young couple, soon after the birth of a daughter, their only child, resolved to try their fortunes on the other side of the Atlantic, the plucky and fascinating little wife sharing there his bad fortune as now she shares his good. The struggle was hard enough for a time, and, if Farnol cared to relate all that he went through in those years, the story would be a human document of great interest. At my house he met Yoshio Markino. I was about to introduce the already famous Jap to the coming young Englishman, when the impulsive Markino rushed at and fondled him, crying out in delight, “Why, it’s Jacky!” They had been fellow-students at the Goldsmiths’ Institute when both were younger, and both unknown to fame. There Farnol had shown welcome little kindnesses to the lonely, warm-hearted stranger from Nippon. Their ways had parted, neither thinking to see the other again, and least of all in this dramatic fashion and in these brighter circumstances. _The Broad Highway_ has been dramatised for America, and is to be staged in England. _The Amateur Gentleman_ is also to be adapted to the stage. His third important story—he has done many shorter things—is likely to be of modern times.

Francis Gribble is a very old friend of mine; we belonged to the same literary clubs, and met constantly at them, and he and his charming Dutch wife were often at Addison Mansions. Gribble, who is an Oxford First Class man, besides his very able novels and his biographies, which are recognised as classics on their subject, has made a neglected aspect of Switzerland his particular province. He is the authority on the Swiss towns, like Geneva and Lauzanne, where so much of the scenes of some of his biographies had necessarily to be laid. He now spends a good deal of his time in Continental travel. I remember his telling me that it was through his study of Swiss towns that he was led on to write biography. The connecting link was his accidental perusal of that wonderful book, _Benjamin Constant’s Journal Intime_. He saw from it that the life of Madame de Staël needed to be written from a new point of view, then he was led on to cover the whole ground of the romantic movement in French literature from Rousseau to Victor Hugo.

Frank Hird I have known many years. I met him first as editor of some important journal—I forget what—with which I was arranging a contribution, just as I met C. N. Williamson first as sub-editor of the _Graphic_. I was astonished to find myself in the presence of a person who was hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, very well-bred, very well dressed. Since then I have met him repeatedly, and enjoyed the friendship of one who fully came up to my first prepossession. I have met him most, I think, at the hospitable villa of the Joseph Whitakers’ in Palermo, where he frequently stayed, and showed himself as good in private theatricals as he is as an author. The place where he seemed most in his element was when he was correspondent to one of the chief London newspapers in Rome, and I used to meet him in salons like the Countess Lovatelli’s. The Countess was the sister of the Duke of Sermoneta, one of the highest of the Roman nobility, who has a similar position to our Duke of Norfolk. The Sermoneta family have a proud record in Italian archæology; the Countess herself is an author, and, as a centre of public and literary life, the Lady St. Helier of Rome. Her “salon” is said to be the only one in which the “Whites” and the “Blacks” habitually meet. He was always the diplomatist, more than the correspondent, though he was so excellent at his own work, and would have risen high in diplomacy if he had made it his career.

Edgar Jepson and his wife were often at Addison Mansions, and I used to meet him constantly at the Authors’ Club as I now meet him at the Dilettanti. He is a man in whom his friends believed from the first, and the quality of his books and his speaking have amply justified them. Intellectually he is a typical Balliol man, but that does not prevent his being one of the delights of Bohemia, where his popularity is unbounded. Experts are agreed that on his day, he is the second best, if not the best, auction-bridge player in England. He says of himself, that he is a walking warning against writing fiction, since from his first book he made 0, from his second six pounds nineteen and nine, and from his third nine pounds ten and fivepence.

William le Queux has been an intimate friend of mine for many years. A Frenchman by birth, he is a strongly Imperialist Englishman by naturalisation, and in his writings and politics. He has led a most interesting life. He was once an artist in the Quartier Latin, but he deserted this for journalism, and was sent by _The Times_ as a special correspondent to Russia, using the opportunity to acquire an extraordinary knowledge of the secret workings of the Nihilists, just as he has in recent years been very much behind the scenes in the Balkans and Turkey. For a while he was sub-editor of the _Globe_, which post he resigned as soon as his success as a novelist justified it. Since then he has travelled continually, and acquired a unique knowledge of the secret service of the Continental Powers. He is one of the most popular novelists of the day, the secret of his popularity lying in his brilliant handling of mysteries, and the use he makes of his knowledge behind the scenes in Continental politics. His books dealing with supposed invasions of England are masterpieces in their way, showing an extraordinary grasp of military details. A member of the Athenæum Club told me once that judges and bishops almost quarrelled with each other when a new William le Queux book came into the Club. His affable face, with bright, dark eyes, behind _pince-nez_, and an inscrutable expression, is familiar to frequenters of the Devonshire Club and the Hotel Cecil. The curious thing is that, though we have been such friends, and have been frequent visitors to the same places on the Continent, from the little republic of San Marino, of which he is Consul-General, upwards, we have never, so far as I remember, met out of England.

Bertram Mitford lived side by side with myself and “Adrian Ross” at Addison Mansions for years. He belongs to one of the oldest families in England. His father, the late E. L. Osbaldeston Mitford, of Mitford in Northumberland, which has been in the possession of his family since Saxon times, appearing in Doomsday Book, was a wonderful old gentleman; he lived to be more than a hundred years old, and, till a few years before his death, used to come up to London for first nights at his favourite theatres.

Bertram Mitford is a good sportsman, who has travelled and shot in the back parts of South Africa, and the wild lands bordering on India and Afghanistan. His travels have inspired novels which are splendid books of adventure. He has also been in Italy a good deal.

Guise Mitford, who has written one or two good novels, is his cousin, as is the stately Lord Redesdale, the head of a cadet branch of his family, who wrote the famous _Tales of Old Japan_. Miss Mitford, too, a once most popular authoress, was of the clan.

Mitford and I used to see each other constantly in Addison Mansions, and frequently at two or three clubs to which we both belonged, but I don’t remember ever doing the journey between together, between them and our flats. He often walked both ways for the exercise.

K. J. Key, the great cricketer, who for many years held the record for the Oxford and Cambridge match, with his 130, and was afterwards Captain of the Surrey Eleven for years, one of my most valued friends, introduced me to Charles Marriott, of whose novels he was an immense admirer. Key is a great reader. Unlike most cricketers, who prefer to watch the game intently until they go in to bat, as if they were playing whist or bridge, and wanted to see what cards were out, he used to read a book or a newspaper till it was his turn to go in, and I have no doubt that he saved a good deal of nerve energy by doing so. I think he met Marriott in Cornwall, to which they are both devoted. Certainly, they are both fond of photography. Marriott made a considerable _succès d’estime_ with his first novel, _The Column_. He is, or was until recently, the Art critic of one of the great London dailies, and is a most accomplished man, of wide knowledge, and one of the best novelists of the day. Living at Brook Green, he was a near neighbour of ours, and from the time that Key introduced us to the time that we left Addison Mansions, we saw a good deal of him. Key’s wife has recently published a novel with a cricketer (not her husband) for its hero—_A Daughter of Love_. She is a sister of Lascelles Abercombie.

Compton Mackenzie first came to Addison Mansions as a small boy at St. Paul’s School, where he was a friend of my son. They began to be men very early in my son’s little cupboard of a study, overlooking Lyon’s cake-factory. I did not see him after he made his fame as a novelist till we came to live at Richmond. He has, like myself, a passion for gardening. He is, of course, a son of Edward Compton, the actor, and Virginia Bateman, and his great-grandmother was a Symonds, aunt of John Addington Symonds, so there is one of the best strains of literary ability in the family. The famous Sir Morell Mackenzie was Edward Compton’s cousin.

When I wrote to ask Compton Mackenzie, who is now indulging his passion for gardening by living in Capri and making landscapes round his house, what first impelled him to write novels, he said—

“I can remember shooting peas at your guests as they came in, and throwing cake, etc. I don’t suppose we did it always, but I distinctly remember doing it once or twice. It is difficult to extract anything from the past and account for my writing novels. Yet I always had a passion for writing. In the Upper Sixth in 1896, I, with two other boys, ran a paper called _The Hectona_, of which, so far as I know, only two numbers are in existence. It was printed on gelatine, and all the contributions were copied out by myself in my execrable handwriting. Like many magazines since, it expired of illegibility. Later, at Oxford, I ran another paper called _The Oxford Point of View_.

“Gardening I took up to console myself for not being able to find a publisher for my first book. It toured round London for nearly two years, and I did not sit down and write _The Carnival_ until _The Passionate Elopement_ lay bound upon my table. This was according to a vow I had made. I started very early. _The Passionate Elopement_ was printed just after I was twenty-five. It was originally—or some of it—a play which I wrote to console my father for having got married without warning or expectation. That was when I was twenty-two.

“_The Carnival_, I suppose, may be called the result of helping my brother-in-law, poor Harry Pelissier, with his Alhambra Revue. I used to rehearse the Corps de Ballet, and, I suppose, naturally made use of such an opportunity to make a book.”

Lord Monkswell, who wrote a single novel, and whose sister, the Contessa Arturo di Cadilhac, born Margaret Collier, has written some valuable books about life in Italy, I met constantly as one of the directors of the Authors’ Club. He was also my sponsor for another club. He was very regular in his attendances at the Board Meetings of the Authors’ Club, which he occasionally illuminated with a naïve outbreak, as in his dictum about the National Liberal Club. At one of our Board Meetings, I was advocating some change in the financial arrangements of the billiard-room, and quoted as an example to be followed the rule at the National Liberal Club.

“National Liberal Club!” cried Lord Monkswell, who was at that time Under-Secretary for War in a Liberal Government; “why, I don’t call that a club at all—I call it a railway station!”

Richard Orton Prowse has won admiration in high places with his work. One of his novels ran as a serial in the _Cornhill_, and he had a play produced by the “Stage Society.” He used to come to Addison Mansions because we were in the same small house at Cheltenham College—Gantillon’s, in Fauconberg Terrace. There were only about half-a-dozen boys in the house, but we used to knock up a game of football on a waste bit of ground at the back of the terrace, with two small day-boys who lived in an adjoining house. There were not more than eight of us all told—I think only seven, and of the seven, besides Prowse and myself, there were the two famous Renshaws, and the two famous Lambs. The Renshaws were very small boys in those days, but so absolutely certain in their catching, and their drop-kicking, that they counted in football games with boys three or four years older. When they grew up, their extraordinary scientificness in games was proved in the lawn-tennis courts, because for years, until one of them died by his own hand, they were undisputed champions. As it happened, I never met either of them after they left school, but one day I was driving through a remote Buckinghamshire village, White Waltham or something of the kind, with a friend, when we observed a crowd, in the street outside the village pound, of persons whom you would not have expected in such a place. We inquired what the trouble was, and found that it was an inquest on a suicide—one of the famous Renshaws.

Curiously enough, there was the same element of tragedy in the history of the brothers Lamb—Captain Thomas Lamb and Captain Edward Lamb, were for years the finest shots in the British army. Edward Lamb was the only boy who ever won the Spencer Cup twice; when he was at school, there had never been such a shot at a public school. Thomas Lamb, who had the finest nerve I ever remember in any one, broke down in a match when he went over to the United States to represent England, and was so mortified that he shot himself on the way home.

I shall always remember with pride that I was the first person who ever put a rifle into the hands of those two Lambs. I taught them how to shoot, and did most of the explaining in that house in Fauconberg Terrace, Cheltenham. I was at the time Captain of the school shooting eight, and I had won the Spencer Cup myself in the Public Schools matches at the preceding Wimbledon Meeting. I rather despaired about Tommy Lamb; he was not quick at taking things in, but I knew that if he could learn to shoot, his nerve and his doggedness might carry him to any heights of success. The houses of Fauconberg Terrace were very high, and there was a high parapet about a foot wide on the roof. I have seen Tommy Lamb run along that parapet from end to end. He said, “If it was only two or three feet from the ground, instead of two or three feet from the roof, it would be nothing. Why should it make any difference? It is all the same to me.”

Several feet from our study window, which had a storey underneath it, there was a railing of about the same width. He used to jump from our window on to that railing, and keep his balance. Anybody could do it, he said, if it was nearer the ground. Why should it make any difference?

And he was always ready to jump from a height of twenty or thirty feet, and never hurt himself.

The seventh boy in those football games was Frank Lamb, the youngest brother. I never heard if he did anything in after life, but we six, I am quite sure, had no thought beyond a football which bounced so unevenly on that piece of waste land.

Tommy Lamb was a very fine fellow, singularly modest about his achievements. Several years afterwards, when I first came back from Australia, I went down to Wimbledon to see the Public Schools Veterans’ Match, in which I had captained Cheltenham three or four times. Lamb, who was then in the flower of his shooting, was very anxious that I should take his place in that year’s team. He thought it so wrong that I should not be shooting. I had, fortunately, not fired off a rifle for at least three years, or I should have had great difficulty in dissuading him from effacing himself for me, and if I had been at my very best he would have been heavens above me in the form he showed. That was the sort of man he was. We were in the same house at Cheltenham for two or three years, so I knew him extremely well.

These chapters in no way exhaust the list of my novelist friends—they are merely reminiscences which I thought likely to interest readers about some of them. I have not mentioned, for instance, one of my greatest friends, that brilliant historical novelist, John Bloundelle-Burton; or Hornung, Doyle’s brother-in-law, whom I first met out in Australia thirty years ago; or Richard Pryce, that dainty novelist and playwright; and I have passed by many other well-known authors whom I knew equally well and saw very often.