A STEPSON OF 
 
 HENRY MURRAY 
 
> 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
Photo. 
 
 Elliott- ami Fry. 
 
 HENRY MURRAY, 
 
A STEPSON OF 
 FORTUNE 
 
 THE MEMORIES, CONFESSIONS, AND OPINIONS 
 
 OF 
 
 HENRY MURRAY 
 
 " All, the plain saw me gather, I garland — 
 The flowers and the weeds." 
 
 Browning. 
 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 1910 
 
f? 
 
 
 
TO 
 
 MY WIFE— 
 
 IN FAME, MEA TABERNA, 
 IN NOCTE, MEA LUCERNA, 
 RECTA ME SEMPER GUBERNA— 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS IMPERFECT RECORD 
 OF A MOST IMPERFECT LIFE 
 
 London ; March, igog. 
 
 ^ 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaced one of his earlier 
 volumes by the statement that it was the work of 
 the obscurest man of letters in America. I will 
 preface this volume by saying that it is the work 
 of the unluckiest scribbler — regarded merely as a 
 scribbler — on which the all-beholding eye of day 
 has ever looked. That is the one statement this 
 book will contain to which I will suffer no challenge. 
 It is my one point of pride — perhaps, of vanity — on 
 which I would quarrel with my dearest friend or the 
 wife of my bosom. You and I will come to no good 
 of each other's society unless that fact is accepted 
 as a fact. 
 
 Many quite intelligent people will tell us that 
 there is no such factor as luck in human affairs, 
 and a scientist of very distinguished ability. Lord 
 Avebury, once wrote a whole book to prove that 
 belief the correct one. I have not read the book, 
 but I am quite certain that his lordship might have 
 put his ink to better uses. So far from there 
 being no such force in human affairs as luck, it is 
 an absolute fact that luck is the one force that 
 directs them. Since a man does not choose the 
 race he shall be born of, it is a matter of luck 
 whether he comes into the world a white man or 
 a nigger. Since he does not select his parents it 
 
 B 
 
2 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 is luck whether his father is a duke or a dustman, 
 and whether he is the product of well-fed, well- 
 aerated, healthy people, or of the refuse of humanity, 
 rotten with accumulations of inherited disease. It 
 is luck whether he is born with the intellectual 
 equipment which makes the man of genius or the 
 absolute lack of such equipment, which makes the 
 microcephalous idiot. It is luck whether, being a 
 man of genius, he is born in circumstances which 
 will encourage, or even permit, the development of 
 his genius, whether, to start with, he is, or is not, 
 taught to read and write. That superior intelligence 
 will make itself obvious in some direction or other 
 is pretty certain, but it is luck which decides the 
 direction. The circumstances of their birth and 
 training made Shakespeare a great poet and Raffael 
 a great painter. Born in and surrounded by other 
 circumstances they might have been highly adroit 
 pickpockets or burglars. When the chance of 
 administering his famous " whiff of grapeshot " came 
 to Napoleon, he was bargaining for the purchase of 
 a furniture shop in the Rue St. Honore ; had the 
 chance not come, the conqueror of Europe might 
 have made a successful tradesman and an excellent 
 Maire of Paris, and have long since been forgotten. 
 In all his battles he was only twice slightly wounded, 
 but where is our certainty that, while he kept his 
 legs, men as able as he did not leave their bones 
 under the waters of the Beresina or the sands of 
 Syria ? Looking on the prodigious prodigal waste of 
 Nature, remembering that — 
 
 " Of fifty seeds 
 She often brings but one to bear," 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 3 
 
 and that she has no more care for the individual 
 human than for the individual herb or insect, what 
 surety can we have that she has not flung as rubbish 
 to the void treasures of potential genius a thousand 
 times as great as those she has suffered to reveal 
 themselves ? 
 
 I will produce the proofs of the vainglorious 
 assertion made above in their proper place and time. 
 Meanwhile, let me begin my autobiography in 
 correct fashion — at the beginning. 
 
 I do not willingly approach the history of my 
 childhood, nor shall I dwell long upon it. For many 
 years past it has been my habit, when any childish 
 memory has intruded itself upon my mind, to 
 dismiss the entire period and all connected with it 
 with the heartiest curse in my repertory, and make 
 haste to think of something else. From this the 
 reader will conclude that my childhood was not a 
 happy time, and he will be right in so concluding. 
 But it is only of late years that I have come to 
 recognise how unhappy it really was. 
 
 I am the youngest born of a family of twelve or 
 thirteen — I don't really know which, and it doesn't 
 greatly matter. Now, to be the Benjamin of a big 
 family is popularly supposed to be an enviable lot. 
 So, in given circumstances, it may be, but such 
 circumstances were not those into which I was 
 born. My parents were getting elderly, my father 
 was then fifty-seven, and my mother some years 
 younger, and they had reached those ages through 
 a long and dreary pilgrimage of failure and poverty 
 which had soured their tempers and embittered 
 
4 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 their natures. In common justice to their 
 memories I must make the admission that I am the 
 only one of their surviving children who does not 
 remember them with affection and respect. Whether 
 or not, at about the period of my birth, the family 
 circumstances had undergone some peculiar change 
 for the worse I do not know enough of the family 
 history to say. But the fact as I know it is, that 
 when I made my appearance, whatever may have 
 been the condition of the real, objective larder, the 
 spiritual cupboard from which the spiritual milk and 
 bread had been — I suppose — copiously administered 
 to my brothers and sisters, was bare. I do not 
 remember any time of my childhood when a sense 
 of wrong, oppression, and injustice was not a part 
 of my being. I do not know what age I may have 
 had when it became a determined and indisputable 
 dogma with my parents that I was an altogether 
 lost and abandoned criminal, but I do know that 
 that was the hypothesis on which they acted 
 towards me. I do not remember that, on the occa- 
 sion of any one of those innumerable little squabbles 
 which inevitably happen among all children, an 
 appeal to parental authority ever resulted in any- 
 thing but my getting the worst of it, and pretty 
 generally a hiding into the bargain. On one occa- 
 sion, my father being in a brown study, and I sitting 
 reading beside him, a plate fell off a shelf, and my 
 father eave me a cuff on the side of the head which 
 left me stunned and dazed for an hour after. The 
 proceeding looks perhaps a little arbitrary and 
 illogical, but it was really beautifully simple. My 
 father was annoyed, he did not pause to inquire 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 5 
 
 into the nature of the annoyance, I, the incarnate 
 principle of evil, being there in actual presence 
 beside him, must have caused the annoyance. Thus 
 we see that what we are rashly apt to call illogicality 
 is often really our ignorance of the premisses of the 
 case and of our neighbour's mental process. Also, 
 it must be remembered that my father was a 
 Scotsman and a Calvinist, and therefore had a fixed 
 belief in the efficacy of pain as a panacea for all 
 moral disease. He would have scorned mercy to a 
 peccant child as the most contemptible of all forms 
 of moral cowardice. Of the two, to administer a 
 severe beating to a child for a fault he had not 
 committed would have been to him a much smaller 
 injustice than to have spared the same child a 
 thrashing for an offence of which he was really 
 guilty. Of the latter crime I can conscientiously 
 exonerate him. 
 
 It is, I have remarked, a common thing for the 
 female members of a family not merely to imitate, 
 but to exaggerate to the verge of caricature, any 
 moral kink displayed by the head of the family. 
 My father holding that I was possessed of a legion 
 of devils only to be held in check by frequent 
 castigation, my mother and my two younger sisters, 
 a few years my seniors, quite naturally became 
 imbued with the same belief. My mother had been 
 bred in the tenets of the Church of England, but in 
 marrying my father she had espoused his form of 
 faith, and found herself quite at home in it. She 
 was a born scold and tyrant, and to a temperament 
 of that kind it must be a soul-satisfying joy to 
 discover a religion which sanctions its prevailing 
 
6 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 attributes, and sanctifies what was merely a luxurious 
 indulgence into a sacred duty. Since every child 
 born into the world is a bundle of original sin, since 
 its every desire and appetite is prompted of the devil, 
 it is the plain duty of the Christian parent to mortify 
 those desires and appetites, and to curb and correct 
 the lusts which persuade unto damnation. So, as, 
 in common with every other normal child that ever 
 lived or will live, I loathed fat and loved sugar, I was 
 stinted of sugar and stuffed with fat — to the manifest 
 improvement of both my health and my temper. 
 If I showed symptoms of particular liveliness of an 
 evening my mother dispatched me to bed ; if I was 
 too tired to hold my eyes open she kept me up an 
 hour or two after my usual time. By feigning 
 extreme weariness of any occupation I liked or of 
 any book which interested me I could always extract 
 from her a prompt order to go on with it, and such 
 pretences were common resorts of mine — to the 
 obvious advantage of my morals. I loved to draw, 
 and had some slight natural talent in that direction. 
 Sunday being the only day on which I got a real 
 chance to follow that pursuit, my mother issued a 
 ukase that drawing on that day was sinful. To 
 show the least interest or amusement over any book 
 on that day was to have it straightway confiscated — 
 which, of course, greatly fortified my respect and 
 affection for the Sabbath. I never knew her 
 religion to inspire her to walk a mile or to spend 
 a sixpence for the relief or comfort of any living 
 being, but it was a most efficient and adaptable 
 instrument for the annoyance of everybody about 
 her. And this, I have been led to believe by 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 7 
 
 such knowledge of history as I possess and such 
 scrutiny of my neighbours as I have been able 
 to make, is true of most that passes by the name 
 of religion. It is like the lost articles one sees 
 advertised in the newspapers, "of no use to any- 
 body but the owner." My sisters were remarkable 
 for their early piety, and that piety, in relation to 
 myself, took the form of what I considered, and 
 still consider, an over- weening fear that my mother's 
 righteous wrath, but for their constant aid and 
 encouragement, might cool towards me, and I 
 should consequently be less frequently flogged than 
 was good for me. Their method of obviating that 
 disastrous consummation was simple in the extreme. 
 They had only to allege some cause of complaint 
 against me, and there was not the least need for them 
 to strain their powers of invention either — any little 
 thing would do. Though, for the matter of that, 
 they might have outsoared Baron Munchausen in 
 the ether of romance at my expense, and have 
 accused me of stealing the sun out of heaven, so 
 long as they laid their complaint before my mother. 
 For me to be accused before her tribunal was to be 
 condemned — and thrashed. Indeed, so eager was 
 she for my moral regeneration that I can remember 
 many occasions on which she did not even wait to 
 hear the charge against me. My sisters invariably 
 prefaced their accusations with the chastely 
 euphemistic formula : '* Mother, I wish you'd speak 
 to Harry." So adjured, my parent never failed to 
 speak, and though her utterance was mostly confined 
 to pantomime I never failed to understand it. I 
 entertain a fixed conviction that if the filthiest tramp 
 
8 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 on the highroad had met my mother on any day of 
 the year, and had accused me of any conceivable 
 offence, she would have made a bee-line for me and 
 have flogged me without one single word of inquiry. 
 My father did occasionally institute some preliminary 
 inquisition before proceeding to execution — my 
 mother never. That I could be innocent of any 
 offence laid to my charge was to her unthinkable. 
 On one occasion she discovered that a big earthen 
 vessel, covered inside with blue glaze, and locally 
 known as a "jowl," part of the baking outfit of the 
 house, had been broken. The slavey of the period, 
 a dirty, snivelling little trull from the local work- 
 house, accused me of having broken it, and gave a 
 circumstantial account, every word of which was 
 a lie, of how I had done it. I denied the charge, 
 quite vainly, and received at my mother's hands one 
 of the severest floggings I ever had. She was a 
 devout Christian, and I remember one day hearing 
 her inveigh with great eloquence about the wicked- 
 ness of some " atheist " who denied the existence of 
 Hell. I sincerely hope — as I sincerely believe — that 
 the atheist was right. For, if the Eternal Judgment 
 Bar is a reality, the most friendly and kindly witness 
 will find it quite in vain to attempt any mercifully 
 intended perjury before that all-knowing Tribunal, 
 and I shall have to speak the truth there that I have 
 written here. In that consideration I write " R.I.P." 
 on my mother's tombstone with a full heart. 
 
 Since, during childhood and early youth, a boy's 
 mother and sisters are, as a rule, the only specimens 
 of womanhood of which he has opportunity of 
 intimate study, his ideas of them will inevitably 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 9 
 
 colour his view of their sex. It was not the least 
 abominable influence upon my character of that 
 Temple of Naggery and House of Children's Tears, 
 my early " home," that when I arrived at puberty 
 the philosophical problem which most exercised my 
 young intelligence was why God had created women. 
 The period of the awakening of sex brought me 
 the solution of that problem, and made my views of 
 women a mixture of contempt for their hearts and 
 brains with a crude desire of the physical pleasure 
 they are capable of affording — a radically debasing 
 conception which for years coloured my life, and has 
 left indelible stains on my individuality. 
 
 Before passing to a justification — so sorely 
 needed — of this sordid narrative, let me pay here a 
 debt of gratitude to certain influences without which 
 my childhood would have been more wretched 
 even than it was. My sister Mary, the eldest of 
 the family, was invariably kind, patient, and sisterly, 
 and her marriage when I was ten years of age, 
 necessitating her leaving home, was an unfortunate 
 business for me. Two visits I paid her at her new 
 home in Liverpool are among the few really bright 
 spots of my early life, and her death two years 
 ago, in pain and poverty as undeserved as they 
 were bravely and sweetly borne, is a grief yet 
 unassuaged. Of my brother Christie I shall speak 
 in his place. Of two other brothers still living I 
 remember nothing that was not kindly, and many 
 acts and words of true affection. 
 
 If what I have hitherto had to say concerning 
 my father has given a purely unpleasant idea of his 
 personality the fault is none of mine, but such an 
 
10 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 impression, left uncorrected, would be none the less 
 a grave injustice to his memory. He was indubit- 
 ably a good man, and the errors — which were 
 nothing less in my view than frightful — of his treat- 
 ment of me as a child do not blind me to his merits. 
 He had fine qualities. He was far and away the 
 honestest man I have ever met — " of an incorrigible 
 and losing honesty," in Charles Lamb's phrase. 
 He is the one man I have ever known of whom I 
 can say that I do not believe that he ever told a lie 
 in his life. I simply cannot imagine him paltering 
 with the truth, and he had the instinctive moral 
 purity of the finest type of woman, which shrinks 
 from any foulness of thought as the ermine from 
 a physical defilement. And, incongruous as the 
 declaration may seem with what I have already 
 written regarding him, he was emphatically just in 
 intention. The one serious flaw in a character 
 otherwise intrinsically noble was his contempt of the 
 softer emotions, and that I believe to have been less 
 an innate quality than the outcome of that filthy 
 and abominable blasphemy against human nature, 
 the Calvinist creed in which he had been bred. I 
 cannot fancy that he had ever, even to my eldest 
 brothers and sisters, been of the soft or doting type 
 of parent. He had been stern even to the children 
 who came to him in the first flush of hopeful man- 
 hood and wedded happiness, and if a man is stern 
 with his first children, what is he likely to be to 
 those who come after the exercise of twenty years 
 of unchecked severity have indurated his contempt 
 for childish suffering ? Christie is remembered to 
 this day among his contemporaries as ** Tiger " 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 11 
 
 Murray, from the variegated appearance his skin 
 never failed to present when stripped for bathing. 
 The instrument of domestic torture in his day was 
 the Scottish "tawse," a broad leathern thong like 
 the window-strap of a third-class carriage, cut into 
 fingers at one end, and toughened in the fire. This 
 delectable apparatus had, in my time, given place 
 to the cane. Which of the two is the most efficient 
 pain-producer I do not know, never having sampled 
 the " tawse," but the cane is, as Christopher Sly 
 might say, "a good commonty." My father was 
 wont to preface his severer executions with a 
 formula to the effect that it hurt him as much to 
 inflict the punishment as it hurt me to receive it. 
 Twenty years earlier the statement had probably 
 been true, but in my day it was nothing more and 
 nothinof less than an obvious catchword, which 
 simply added insult of my infant discernment to 
 the physical injury of the hiding, and I heartily 
 wish nowadays that I had found the pluck to tell 
 him so. 
 
 I find no pleasure in writing these things, and 
 cannot conceive the human creature who could find 
 pleasure in reading them, but I justify the record by 
 the warning it enables me to offer to such of my 
 readers as may happen to be parents. Beware how 
 you let the devil of wrath against your child enter 
 your heart. There is no vice more insidious, none 
 of rapider growth, none more deadly, than the 
 cruelty which believes itself to be based on duty — 
 see the religious history of the world, passim. I 
 write it deliberately, as the best thought I have to 
 offer you, that to beat a little child is a cowardly 
 
12 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 and inhuman crime, which no offence of which that 
 child could by any possibility be guilty could justify. 
 It brutalises and degrades you in the exact ratio in 
 which it wounds the innate dignity of the child. I 
 am no humanitarian crank. I have met more than 
 one unendurable bounder who, had he received 
 a solid, scientifically administered kicking at the 
 psychological moment — say, on his twenty-first 
 birthday — might have been improved by it into a 
 passable imitation of a gentleman. I know quite 
 well what to think of the man who lays his hand 
 upon a woman, save etcetera, but I know also 
 specimens of that truly awful creature, the cad in 
 petticoats, who might be converted into quite 
 decent women by the stern medicament of a sound 
 thrashing. I regard the abolition of the Prize 
 Ring as a national misfortune, and I am so far 
 from deprecating the use of the cat in cases of 
 cowardly violence that I would gladly apply it with 
 my own hand. But I would no more think of 
 beating a small child than I would of burning him, 
 and I do not desire the acquaintance of any man 
 capable of an act at once so brutal and so stupid. 
 
 That my father was capable of such cruel folly 
 is merely the strangest of the many paradoxes of 
 which his nature was composed. Since I formed 
 the intention of writing this book I have passed 
 many hours in reviewing my memories and im- 
 pressions regarding him, and in trying to arrive at 
 some literary formula by which I might make him 
 intelligible to my readers — "to sum him up to 
 a satisfactory total," in Dickens's phrase. I quite 
 despair of accomplishing such a task. I can but set 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 13 
 
 on my paper a lot of dots and dashes to serve for 
 the lineaments of a personality, striking in nearly 
 all respects, in many, admirable ; in some, genuinely 
 lovable. To children who were not his own, and 
 towards whom consequently his natural sentiments 
 were unwarped by that foolishly twisted sense of 
 duty inculcated by his Calvinist upbringing, he was 
 gentleness and beneficence incarnate. He loved 
 animals, and had that intuitive understanding of 
 their mental processes which I have always found 
 to be one of the traits most distinctive of a really 
 fine nature. His love of cats amounted to a passion, 
 and the attractive power he exercised over them 
 was almost uncanny. I have seen him returning 
 from a morning walk followed by a perfect pro- 
 cession of the creatures. Yet he would flog his 
 own child till he drew blood on the strength of an 
 unfavourable report from his schoolmaster ! This 
 curious topsyturviness ran through his entire nature. 
 He was a furious radical in politics, and his radi- 
 calism was the direct outcome of a strong personal 
 pride and an overweening sense of personal dignity 
 — he would have met the Kaiser face to face with 
 an unshrinking sense of absolute personal equality. 
 Few can have been the people he had known so 
 ill-advised as ever to have attempted to take the 
 smallest personal liberty with him, and fear of any 
 sort was a sensation I am quite certain he had never 
 known. Yet he inculcated servility and cowardice 
 in his children : insisted on them : and as bitterly 
 resented any token of independence or assertion of 
 equality in them as he would have repudiated an 
 insult to himself. On one occasion I was present 
 
14 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 when an old friend of the family repeated the 
 encomiums passed on one of my elder brothers by 
 his employer, a man in a large way of business in 
 the town. "If the boy goes on as he is going now," 
 said the friend, " I shouldn't be surprised if the old 
 man were to take him on as a partner one of these 
 fine days." I have seldom seen my father so 
 violently angry. '' Hoots, man ! " he barked. " I'll 
 just thank ye to put none o' that kind o' rubbish in 
 the head o' a son o' mine, unsettling the boy and 
 giving him ridiculous ideas of his own importance. 
 The lad'll just do his wark and take his wages, and 
 there an end." Had there been anything of the 
 domestic bully about him this attitude would have 
 been readily understandable, but that explanation 
 is impossible — his was a nature quite infinitely 
 removed from any such pettiness. His social con- 
 ception was absolutely static, completely that of 
 the catechism which teaches us to do our duty in 
 that state of life into which it has pleased God 
 to call us. He had been poorly born and Spar- 
 tanly bred in that atmosphere of close, hard, self- 
 respecting, utterly unambitious Scottish poverty 
 which the average Englishman can scarcely con- 
 ceive. He had kept his stern honesty and tetchy 
 independence intact through it all — why could not 
 his children be content to do the same ? With as 
 good natural brains as any but the very ablest men 
 I have ever met, and with a literary culture really 
 remarkable considering the straitened circumstances 
 in which his life had been passed, he would have 
 repudiated as a suggestion of the devil the idea 
 of bettering his own condition or of lifting his 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 15 
 
 children a rung higher on the social ladder. To 
 cherish the social outlook of a pauper a little over 
 the actual workhouse-grade, to marry another pauper, 
 and to beget a baker's dozen of equally poor-spirited 
 contributions to the ensuing generation, was the 
 entire Science of Life as taught to his own children 
 by the most fiercely and fearlessly independent 
 man I have ever known. I shall never forget 
 what a vivid flash of light fell on my father's 
 personality — and on many other things — when I first 
 read the agonised cry of Browning's Paracelsus — 
 
 "God's children! 
 And yet He takes no pride in us — none, none ! " 
 
 What the God of the Calvinist is to those who 
 believe in Him, that my father was to me. 
 
 I have spoken of his literary ability. He was 
 content to let it rust almost entirely, and for many 
 years never put pen to paper save to write a business 
 letter ; yet at near seventy years of age he could 
 produce such verse as the following, which is all 
 I can remember hearing him read of a rhymed 
 letter to an old schoolfellow in Scotland to whom 
 he anticipated making a visit : — 
 
 " Friend o' my youth, my auldest crony ! 
 My benison be on ye, Johnnie ! 
 Your honest pow was black and bonnie 
 
 When first we met : 
 But noo your lyart cockernoney 
 
 Has tint the jet, 
 ***** 
 ' Queer pliskies, whiles, my fancy plays 
 In thinkin' o' the lang-gone days 
 
16 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 When we gaed brattlin' ower the braes 
 
 At oor auld callin', 
 Makin' and mendin' farmers' claes 
 
 In mony a dwallin'. 
 
 ' We vverena braw in Sunday claes, 
 And whiles the stanes wad hurt oor taes, 
 And little fruit but hips and haes 
 
 Fell till i oor share; 
 Yet we were rich in mony ways 
 
 And had nae care. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " noo and then 
 
 The thrifty wife wad ask us ben, 
 To hae a game at catch-the-ten,* 
 
 Or hear a sang, 
 Or whiles the fiddle spak\ and then 
 
 Nae nicht seemed lang. 
 ***** 
 *' And noo we're dune wi' youthfu' capers, 
 We still enjoy oor bulks and papers. 
 And wise men's thoughts, like weel-trimmed tapers, 
 
 Can cheer the way, 
 And light us on thro' mists and vapours 
 
 To endless day. 
 
 •' My willyard thochts gang yon and hither — 
 But I maun end this rhymin' blether — 
 We'll hae a crack wi' ane anither 
 
 When there's nae hurry. 
 For ye hae lang been like a brither 
 
 To auld Will Murray." 
 
 That, it seems to me, is not bad verse for an un- 
 practised amateur who had not attempted to pen a 
 stanza for more than the length of an average 
 human life. 
 
 * Scottish whist. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 17 
 
 My father's literary tastes were oddly circum- 
 scribed, the gods of his youth held sway in his 
 heart to the end. English poetry had died with 
 Byron. For Tennyson he had a half-contemptuous 
 toleration ; Browning and Mrs. Browning he dis- 
 missed as scribblers of obscure and pretentious 
 rubbish ; Mr. Swinburne he whole-heartedly con- 
 temned and abhorred as "a jingling, lustful, seducer 
 of youth." Dickens he loved with the love of 
 his generation, the generation which had waited 
 eagerly from month to month for the shilling 
 numbers of " Pickwick." 
 
 The one real passion of his life was chess, which 
 he played sufficiently well to establish himself as 
 champion over a pretty wide local area. He had 
 taught my elder brothers to play, but as they grew 
 up and went out into the world he found himself 
 without a playmate. With something of an heroic 
 sense of self-sacrifice — for I loathe the so-called 
 " game " as heartily as Mrs. Sarah Battle herself — 
 I offered to supply their place, but the offer was 
 declined on altruistic grounds. He would not, he 
 said, do me so ill a turn ; adding that, had he other- 
 wise employed the hours he had wasted over the 
 board, he might have made himself an excellent 
 linguist and a first-class mathematician. 
 
 To complete these inchoate and scrambling 
 jottings, which are the best substitute for a portrait 
 my poor skill can furnish, I should add that for 
 years before I was born and to the day of his 
 death my father probably never passed a waking 
 hour quite free from pain. He was a martyr to a 
 peculiarly virulent form of asthma. He suffered, 
 
 c 
 
18 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 too, from hernia, acquired by a vain effort to save 
 from death an unfortunate young fellow who, 
 maddened by an unjust accusation of theft, had 
 hanged himself. The strain of lowering the body 
 to the ground had ruptured him severely, and his 
 paroxysmal cough frequently shook the intestine 
 out of place. He bore his physical inflictions with 
 a really splendid courage, never himself referring to 
 them, and showing marked impatience of any 
 proffered sympathy. I have heard of natures 
 which seem to be sweetened by incessant pain, and 
 for all I know to the contrary such natures may 
 veritably exist, but my father's was not of them, and 
 much testiness and irritability must be pardoned to 
 a man so sorely plagued. 
 
 I cannot believe, nor do I think it probable that 
 my reader will very strongly disagree with my 
 views in this respect, that such a regimen as my 
 father's, administered by such a man as he, was 
 quite the best possible. I have had occasion, like 
 most other people, now and then to smile over that 
 insanity of paternal pride which converts a dullard 
 into a genius, and a goose of a rather poor breed 
 into a swan of impossible perfection, but such an 
 error is not merely more comforting to its object 
 than that opposed error from which I suffered, it is 
 vastly better for the moral being of both parent and 
 child, and especially for the latter. I am with 
 Alfred de Musset in this matter — " C'est toujours 
 mon avis de gater les enfants " — and I hold it far 
 better to spoil the child than to spoil the rod 
 by over-use. A happy childhood is not merely in 
 itself a beautiful thing, its memory is an abiding 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 19 
 
 possession, a jewel of great price, which any subse- 
 quent cruelty the world may wreak upon us can only 
 burnish to a brighter lustre. Friends, make friends 
 of your children. Where else than in a child's 
 heart shall you look for so pure and passionate a 
 love ? Remember that the day will inevitably 
 come when the lisping babe whose character and 
 fate are in your hands as the clay of the potter will 
 deliver the final and irrevocable judgment which 
 will set you on the right hand or the left, among 
 the sheep or with the goats. So long as your 
 children live, you will live, no breach of that 
 spiritual continuity is possible. I am growing grey, 
 and a few years will bend my head to the earth 
 wherein my parents have been lying so long, but to 
 me they are living presences, and I shall tread to 
 the end the path in which they set my feet. I 
 remember that moment in my early manhood when 
 my father said to me that he hoped I should give 
 him my confidence, should regard him as my closest 
 friend, a present help in trouble. " Is it not a little 
 late for that ? " I asked ; and I can yet see the 
 stricken look upon the sad old face, and wish with 
 all my heart that the words, just as they were, had 
 gone unspoken. Though, perhaps, they helped to 
 clear the atmosphere between us, and to establish 
 a basis for such reconciliation as was possible. 
 Certainly, we were better friends during the last 
 five years I spent with him than ever before. My 
 mother died when I was fifteen, and approximately 
 at about the same time, my sisters went their 
 respective ways into the world, and he and I being 
 left together with no third person to blow the coal 
 
20 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 of dissension between us, the fire died down, and 
 we arrived at least at toleration of each other. 
 
 That my father was essentially a good man was 
 proved, to my thinking, by the fashion in which he 
 died. Feeling, on the morning of his last day of 
 life, that the final summons was near at hand, he 
 insisted on being taken out of bed and completely 
 dressed. One of his earliest acquaintances had 
 been an old blind piper, one Donald MacEchran, 
 who was piloted about the countryside by a dog. 
 My father, in a boyish prank, had stolen the dog, 
 and the old man had uttered the grim prophecy, 
 " Wully Murray, ye'll die in your boots " — meaning 
 thereby, of course, that he would come to be 
 hanged. " If all tales are true," remarked my 
 father, " auld Donald and I will have a laugh ower 
 that or the day be out." A man who could affront 
 death with so serene a courage must have been a 
 good man. Whatever his errors, he had certainly 
 never gravely sinned against his own interior light. 
 My father's end was peace. Peace be with him. 
 
 Perhaps the habit, recently alluded to, and for 
 many years carefully cultivated, of banishing the 
 period of childhood from my mind, has resulted in 
 obliterating many memories I might otherwise 
 have clearly retained. I remember certain insig- 
 nificant incidents wuth an almost startling clearness, 
 but the general impression is blurred and in- 
 decipherable. I can recall with photographic dis- 
 tinctness what must have been one of my earliest 
 attempts to walk. I see myself and the attendant 
 details as in a picture. I am clad in a tartan frock 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 21 
 
 of red and black stripes, and a grey cloth jacket 
 ornamented with black velvet, I wear a '' pork-pie " 
 hat decorated with a red feather, and shining shoes 
 fastened round the ankle by leathern straps fixed by 
 buttons of blue glass. I am voyaging, very un- 
 steadily, across the hearthrug between the extended 
 arms of my sister Mary and my father. The latter 
 is dressed in grey tweed, he has a newspaper 
 doubled over his right knee, and his spectacles 
 are pushed up over his forehead among his bushy, 
 opinionated-looking shock of grey hair. As I can 
 see the flames of a fire brilliantly reflected in his 
 glasses I conclude that the incident takes place on 
 a winter afternoon. 
 
 Another little scene, sharply defined as an 
 etching. I am sitting in a tub of warm water, by 
 the side of the kitchen fire. Behind me, ticking 
 solemnly, is an old eight-day grandfather's clock. 
 Seated beside the table under the window, smoking 
 a big curved wooden pipe with a bright metal 
 cover, is my sailor-brother, John, who died when 
 I was three. I am blowing the soap-bubbles off 
 my lips into the face of my sister Mary, who kneels 
 beside me swathed from chin to knees in a coarse 
 herden apron, and with bare soapy arms, and 
 laughing as she tries to evade them. It is Saturday 
 night, though how I know that I should be puzzled 
 now to say. But I do know it perfectly well, and 
 also that it is market-night, and that the long street 
 outside, its blackness broken by shop-window lights 
 and flaring naphtha-lamps on hucksters' stalls, is 
 thronged with people, for whom I feel a sort of 
 pity as I watch the whirling snow-flakes visible 
 
22 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 through the window, and feel the contrast between 
 the warmth and snugness about me and the raw 
 discomfort out of doors. I see myself, a little 
 flaxen-haired figure in a white nightgown, like a 
 diminutive edition of the conventional angel, being 
 carried up to bed in Mary's arms, and can catch a 
 dim echo of the song she croons to me. 
 
 It would probably be a year or two later that I 
 made what I still remember as my Great Dis- 
 covery. I had been left alone in the garden one 
 afternoon an hour or so before my customary bed- 
 time. It being rather early or rather late — I have 
 forgotten which — in the year, I had not long been 
 left to myself before the twilight began to close in. 
 To be abroad and alone at that hour was a most 
 wonderful and pride-inspiring experience, quite 
 untinctured, so far as I can remember, by any fear 
 of the gathering gloom. Indeed, I was so far from 
 being afraid of the darkness that I conceived the 
 idea of passing the entire night in the open-air, and 
 to accomplish that end scaled the wall of the garden 
 at its lowest height, and hid myself behind an 
 outhouse in the neighbouring field. I cannot re- 
 member with what sensations I watched the gradual 
 dying of the light ; all feelings experienced between 
 the moment of my escape from the garden and that 
 in which the Great Discovery dawned upon me 
 have faded from my recollection. Whatever they 
 may have been they merged into a transport of 
 wonder, admiration, delight, for which my pen can 
 find no words, as first in single spies, and then in 
 splendid, glittering battalions, the stars shone out 
 upon the glooming sky. My little heart expanded 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 23 
 
 well-nigh to bursting with some such nameless 
 rapture as that which filled the breast of Cortes 
 when, with eagle eye, he stared at the Pacific. 
 Like Cortes at that moment ; like Franklin when 
 the javelin of the lightning stabbed his silken kite ; 
 like the Marquis of Worcester when the heated 
 water split the shaft of his cannon ; like Newton 
 when the apple rapped him on the pate ; like the 
 mediaeval monk when his mixture of charcoal, 
 sulphur, and saltpetre sent his pestle, his mortar, 
 and himself flying triivious, I had made my Great 
 Discovery. There was a favourite girl-cousin of 
 mine in the house at that moment, and no delight 
 she did not share was perfect. Oblivious of the 
 bricks which scratched my hands and barked my 
 shins, not even remembering that my appearance 
 in the family circle would be the certain signal for 
 my dismissal to bed, I tumbled over the wall and 
 tore into the house. " Alice ! Alice ! Come and 
 see what I've found ! " She came, and saw, 
 and laughed ! — a laugh which, for the moment, 
 stung me with a pain which even her kisses could 
 not heal all at once. I had indeed made a great 
 " find." I had discovered the Solar System, not in 
 the piecemeal, retail fashion of Copernicus and 
 Galileo, but in one lot, and with immediate complete 
 possession. 
 
 My childish self, at that supreme moment of 
 wonder and delight, has become to me a standing 
 simile, an ever true and faithful type, both of my 
 later self and of humanity at large. I have made 
 many discoveries since then, but none so big or so 
 beautiful — none indeed at all closely resembling it 
 
24 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 except in its pathetico-ludicrous absence of origi- 
 nality, and have been laughed at for proclaiming 
 them. There was a moment when, in the firmament 
 of my own soul, I discovered a galaxy of vivid 
 splendours, stars and planets and constellations of 
 idea and emotion, and summoned the world, as erst 
 I had summoned Cousin Alice, to behold the glories 
 I had found. And again I was laughed at — by no 
 means this time for the obviousness of my discovery. 
 I could have borne that well enough. No, I was 
 told either that the wonders I proclaimed did not 
 exist at all, or that they were at best but Jack-o'- 
 Lantern exhalations of a barren and swampy in- 
 telligence. Nor can gentle Cousin Alice stand as 
 a type of those who derided my later discovery. 
 Would that she might ! In her laughter there had 
 been no malice, no sense of petty superiority in the 
 destruction of a vain and foolish vision — nothing 
 but the clean mirth of girlhood and the tender pity 
 which even an experience so small as hers could 
 feel for the illusion of a baby who counted only 
 one-fifth of her brief tale of years. The world 
 laughs at the innocent and pompous proclamations 
 of our adult illusions, which is well ; but it palliates 
 its wounding scorn with no anodyne of pity, which 
 is well also, perhaps, but surely not so well. The 
 disillusionments of childhood leave no final sense of 
 loss ; the bubbles blown by a baby are but of soap 
 and water ; but in our later years they are streaked 
 and stained to beauty by our heart's blood, and the 
 breaking of each in turn is something of a cataclysm. 
 
 It is curious that, although I have no faintest 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 25 
 
 memory of being taught my letters, I have a clear 
 recollection of the shame I suffered because a little 
 blue-eyed mite of a girl possessed that accomplish- 
 ment, and I did not. I remember, too, producing a 
 double effect on the mind of an elderly gentleman, 
 a manufacturing chemist of the neighbourhood, by 
 stoutly proclaiming that I could read, and proving 
 the same by repeating to him by rote the words of 
 a picture book of " Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," 
 turning the pages accurately in the right places. I 
 can see the old gentleman's amazed face, and hear 
 him ejaculate, " Astonishing ! Astonishing ! " My 
 father explained that I was not reading, but merely 
 reciting from memory, whereon the other replied, 
 " More astonishing still. My dear Murray, that 
 boy will make a remarkable man." A nice old 
 gentleman, but no prophet. 
 
 From the moment at which I conquered the 
 mystery of reading I did as little of anything else 
 as my seniors would let me. I devoured anything 
 in print that came my way, and the verbal memory 
 which has always been by far the strongest of my 
 faculties enabled me to store my mind with hundreds 
 of passages of verse and prose the meaning of which 
 only dawned on me years later. My memory, by 
 the way, is in some respects curiously erratic and 
 undependable. For words, and especially for words 
 cast into the form of verse, I have encountered few 
 which could compete with it, but for certain matters 
 much more important in the everyday business of 
 life it is abnormally and irritatingly bad. I have 
 no memory of places, and my lack of the sense of 
 locality is so complete as almost to amount to a 
 
26 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 positive, instead of a negative, quality. After thirty 
 years of acquaintance with London, I am constantly 
 amazed at finding that two given places I had 
 thought to be miles apart are really close together, 
 or that two neighbourhoods I had believed to be 
 closely contiguous are in reality wide asunder. 
 Like Mr. Kipling's camel, " I lose myself forever if 
 you let me stray a mile." The most careful system 
 of mnemonics and the closest study of maps have 
 been powerless to remedy this defect. And figures 
 are almost absolutely devoid of meaning to me. 
 For many years the only date of which I was quite 
 certain was that conveyed in the jingling rhyme — 
 
 " In the year ten hundred and sixty-six 
 William the Conqueror in England did fix — " 
 
 and I could have memorised the whole of Paradise 
 Lost with less trouble than it has taken me to 
 supplement that slender store by the score or so 
 of dates which are absolutely necessary to a 
 student of history. To this day I have a sort of 
 sense of personal obligation to Chaucer for having 
 died in 1400, and to Charles V. and our Charles L 
 for having been so obliging as to have been 
 born in 1500 and 1600 respectively. On one 
 occasion my schoolmaster wrote to my father 
 stating that, although a good pupil in most re- 
 spects and an excellent one in some, I seemed 
 incapable of making the smallest improvement in 
 arithmetic. My father, of course, on his invariable 
 theory, set down this shortcoming to sheer per- 
 versity. He presented me on the first day of the 
 summer holiday with a book of tables, and gave 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 27 
 
 me to understand that if I could not, before return- 
 ing to school, repeat to him the multiplication table 
 up to twelve times twelve I might prepare myself 
 for painful consequences. I passed a month of 
 unmitigated misery over the task, and had at last 
 to confess that I knew no more about it than I had 
 known at starting. My father had the justice to 
 credit me with good intention. He spared me the 
 threatened castigation, and wrote to the master to 
 the effect that, since I should obviously never shine 
 as an arithmetician, he had better let me concentrate 
 on other subjects. 
 
 It was when I was about five years of age that, 
 walking one morning along Paradise Street, I was 
 accosted by a grey-haired, hideous old hag of a 
 woman, who hailed me as " her pretty little gentle- 
 man," and asked me if I could read. On my reply- 
 ing in the affirmative, she begged me, with many 
 honeyed phrases, to accompany her to a house a 
 few doors off, to read a letter which had come for 
 her daughter that morning. I consented, and she 
 led me to a two-storeyed cottage, one of a row, 
 whose lower floor was approached by a descent 
 by four or five steps of worn and broken brick, 
 and into a room lit by a window with diamond 
 panes framed in strips of lead. The walls of 
 the room were almost hidden by funeral cards, 
 each separately contained in a skimpy frame of 
 black wood, and looking curiously out of keeping 
 with one or two gaudy lithographs. Sitting at a 
 little round table, with a letter in her hand, was a 
 girl of about twenty years of age. At the elder 
 
28 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 woman's request she gave me the letter, and I 
 began to read it. I remember absolutely nothing 
 of its contents — I was probably too much occupied 
 with the task of deciphering it to pay much atten- 
 tion to its gist — but suddenly the old woman set up 
 a strident howl of grief, and the girl, dropping her 
 head on to the table between her extended arms, 
 and writhing her body as if in an ecstasy of anguish, 
 sobbed bitterly. And there the memory comes 
 sharply to an edge. I do not even remember how 
 I left the place. I must have passed it hundreds of 
 times thereafter, but I never saw either the old or 
 the young woman — either of whom I should at 
 once have recognised, and whose faces I can recall 
 with perfect clearness at this moment — again. Nor 
 did I ever, so far as my memory goes, speak a 
 word about the occurrence to any other person. 
 
 I have another memory connected with that 
 odd custom of collecting funeral cards. It is, or 
 was, universal among the poorer class in the Black 
 Country, and an unusually large assortment of these 
 lugubrious memorials gave to its possessor some- 
 thing of that aristocracy bestowed in other circles 
 by a Vinegar Bible or " a Grignon with the 
 Regent's crest." They were handed on as heir- 
 looms from parent to child, and I have heard of 
 them as items of testamentary bequest. Once, 
 when taking a country walk, I sought refuge against 
 a rainstorm in a solitary wayside cottage. The 
 little front room, which served the family as 
 kitchen, parlour, dining-room, and one member 
 at least as a bedchamber, was quite papered with 
 them from wainscot to ceiling. In the place of 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 29 
 
 honour over the mantel, with a little clear space 
 all round it, was one of larger size than ordinary, 
 set in an incongruous gilt frame. The central 
 space which accommodated the letterpress was sur- 
 rounded by dropsical cherubs in filigree, hovering 
 round a couple of impossibly constructed angels 
 weeping into a pot-bellied funeral urn, and beneath 
 the name and date of death of the person com- 
 memorated were printed the following lines : — 
 
 " When I am dead and in my grave, 
 
 And all my bones are rotten. 
 
 Dear mother you will think of me 
 
 When I am quite forgotten." 
 
 There are moments — and rather frequent moments 
 too — when a dose of literary culture is a perilous 
 possession, and I have seldom been nearer to 
 laughing without doing it than I was at that 
 moment. The quiet, decent old body, who was for 
 the moment my hostess, saved me from committing 
 that outrage. " Ah ! " she said, in a quavering old 
 voice in which grief and pride were touchingly 
 blended, "my poor George, as died in that very 
 bed a year come next Saturday, maade that poetry 
 out of his own yed on'y a wik afore he died, an' 
 wrote it down wi' his own hand." I wonder if 
 there is any passage in ^schylus or Shakespeare 
 or Milton which has ever brought so much comfort 
 to any stricken human heart as that bit of appalling 
 doggerel brought to that poor old woman ? 
 
 I was sent to my first school at about nine years 
 of age. It was kept by two partners, one of whom 
 
30 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 was an excellent linguist. He disappeared some- 
 what mysteriously soon after I left his control, and 
 I have a dim recollection of having heard it stated 
 that he served as a German spy in the war which 
 broke out a year or two later, and that he had been 
 caught and summarily shot by the French. The 
 school was one of some pretension, and the wearing 
 of a college-cap, vulgarly known as a " mortar- 
 board," was enforced on the pupils. This mark of 
 distinction was resented by the youthful democrats 
 of the neighbourhood, and was the occasion of much 
 persecution of the smaller fry of the school at their 
 hands. One of them — I never knew his name, or 
 anything about him — made himself peculiarly offen- 
 sive to me, but I noticed that, unless he was 
 accompanied by others of his own kidney, or if I 
 was in the society of comrades, he was careful to 
 avoid me. He was older, and considerably bigger 
 and stronger than myself, but this prudence on his 
 part inspired me with doubts concerning his courage, 
 which, as the sequel showed, were well founded. 
 I, alone, met him, solitary, one evening at the corner 
 of Hargate Lane, leading off the High Street. At 
 sight of him I uttered a squeal of terror, and bolted 
 as if from a vision of sudden death. He followed 
 me with whoops of triumph and contempt. I lured 
 him to a deserted spot, and there paid off old scores 
 in a fashion which made him yelp for mercy like a 
 whipped puppy. I have seldom enjoyed myself 
 more, and went home inflated with a great opinion 
 of my merits, less as a combatant than as a 
 strategist. 
 
 I passed a couple of years at my first school, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 31 
 
 and then, owing I suppose to a fluctuation in the 
 family fortunes, was transferred to a cheaper one, 
 where the college-cap was unknown. It was kept 
 by a middle-aged man, the very model of a lower 
 middle-class pedagogue of the old type, with that 
 prim, picked, precise method of speech which is 
 almost invariably the peculiarity of the man self- 
 educated rather late in life. There was a belief in 
 my family that he had at one time, some few years 
 earlier, cherished matrimonial intentions towards 
 my eldest sister, Mary. He had at all events paid 
 sundry visits to our house, and, finding himself on 
 one occasion alone with my sister for a few minutes, 
 had suddenly inquired, after several abortive at- 
 tempts at articulation, " What are your ideas 
 regarding furniture, Miss Murray .'*" Mary was far 
 too kind-hearted a girl willingly to have wounded 
 anybody's feelings, even those of the least welcome 
 wooer, but she had a rather acute sense of humour, 
 and the struggle between politeness and an hyste- 
 rical desire to laugh had ended in her bolting into 
 the garden, leaving the question unanswered. The 
 schoolmaster had never again crossed our threshold, 
 but had obviously found consolation elsewhere, for 
 at the time of my passing under his care he was a 
 married man. 
 
 I do not remember that at either of these 
 schools I learned anything worth the knowing, and 
 but for my own private reading should have entered 
 life a monument of ignorance. What little I know 
 — and I am painfully ignorant of much which the 
 great majority of educated people take for granted 
 — I have picked up in my own haphazard fashion. 
 
32 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 I look back on the time spent at school as, educa- 
 tionally considered, so much sheer waste. Had my 
 father kept me at home, let me follow my own bent 
 in reading, supplied me with a good encyclopaedia, 
 atlas, and etymological dictionary, and insisted on a 
 thorough use of them, I should have been a vastly 
 better-informed man than I can now ever hope to 
 be. For most boys — perhaps for the great majority 
 — a school course is the best means of education, 
 but to me it was no good at all. 
 
 In one respect my father was supremely wise. 
 He let me read what I would. I shall never forget 
 the wrath and amazement of my mother when, 
 after perusing some pages of the " Decameron," 
 she discovered my name written on the title-page. 
 (I was then about twelve.) My father let her fluent 
 objurgations run to an end, and made no reply, 
 except to forbid her to burn the book, as she had 
 proposed to do. Later on, when I was a young 
 man, I recalled the incident to his mind, and 
 expressed some surprise that he, so stern a moralist, 
 should have winked at my study, not merely of the 
 " Decameron," but of books even less decent. 
 
 "It was best," he answered. " The evil of such 
 books did not then exist for you, and they did you 
 no such harm as they would do if you read them 
 for the first time now, when your passions have 
 awakened. And, if I had taken them from you, you 
 would have read them in secret, and I did not 
 choose that you should be more of a liar than 
 nature had made you." Toujours poli, vous saves, 
 monsieur mon pere. 
 
 I fancy, looking back upon my school-days, that 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 33 
 
 I must have been a rather reticent and self-centred 
 sort of boy, without much capacity for the making 
 of friendships. I do not remember any other boy 
 who played Jonathan to my David, or Pythias to 
 my Damon. Two only of my classmates stand out 
 with any marked distinction in my memory. One 
 
 was J , a curly-headed, lively, mischievous 
 
 young demon, from whose freckled, snub-nosed face 
 gaiety, pluck, and impudence radiated as light from 
 a candle. I have a vivid remembrance of finding 
 myself one sweltering Saturday afternoon half- 
 holiday in the open country in his society, penni- 
 less, choked with thirst, and with the mockery of an 
 empty ginger-beer bottle in my pocket. We came 
 
 across a cow browsing in a field, and J , always 
 
 full of resource, hit upon what then seemed to me 
 the magnificently practical idea of milking the cow 
 into the bottle. The result of this experiment was 
 that he got badly kicked in the stomach by the cow, 
 and vindictively chased for a considerable distance 
 by a yokel armed with a pitchfork. On another 
 occasion it was discovered that the books and 
 papers contained in the desk of an extremely un- 
 popular boy who had earned a double infamy by 
 playing the dual part of the sneak and bully of the 
 school had been kneaded into a mass of wet clay 
 which entirely filled the desk. The deed was 
 
 clearly traced to J , whose hands and garments 
 
 were loud in testimony against him. The master 
 was already giving the cane the deadly preliminary 
 switch when J was inspired to deprecate judg- 
 ment by the amazing plea that "he didn't know 
 there was any rule against it." The Homeric laugh 
 
 D 
 
34 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 with which the statement was received I hope 
 mitigated the severity of the flogging, but flogged 
 he was. 
 
 C was another boy of whom my memory 
 
 remains pretty much intact. He was incredibly lean, 
 with a face of ghastly pallor, extremely prominent 
 grey eyes, and hair of a startling tint of vermilion. 
 As an imaginative liar he still stands pre-eminent 
 in my experience. He was wont to spend his 
 holidays with some relations who dwelt in a little 
 fishing village on the east coast, which he repre- 
 sented to myself and other greenhorns of the same 
 age as a resort of pirates of the most desperate and 
 sanguinary description. On the opening day of one 
 term he curdled my young blood by a narrative of 
 how, stung to madness by the brutality of a detested 
 uncle — himself a pirate, but of a poor, degenerate 
 type of maritime bandit — who had applied to him 
 the degrading appellation of " a beardless stripling," 
 he had slain the said uncle, and interred his en- 
 sanguined corpse in a quicksand. How, finding 
 suspicion thickening about him, he had fled to the 
 quay, and had there found a steamer, the captain 
 of which, clad in a gold-embroidered uniform and a 
 cocked-hat, was ringing a bell and calling out 
 " Hurry up ! Any more for India ?" The captain 
 had listened to his story, had thanked him in the 
 name of the mariners of England for the assassina- 
 tion of that " black-hearted swab," his uncle, whose 
 nefarious character had been known to all, and had 
 engaged him as cabin-boy and first lieutenant. All 
 had gone well for a time, but in the neighbour- 
 hood of the Hebrides it was discovered that the 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 35 
 
 detrimental uncle was not only not dead, but was 
 actually concealed as a stowaway upon that identical 
 ship. I have forgotten the subsequent details of 
 the story, but I remember that I believed every 
 
 word of it implicitly, and thought C the most 
 
 marvellous of created beings. 
 
 I was, as I have said, ten years of age when my 
 sister Mary married. Her husband was a sailor, 
 
 and my schoolfellow C 's wildest legends paled 
 
 in interest beside his narratives of dry fact. Within 
 a year of his marriage I was invited to spend my 
 summer holiday at his house in Liverpool, and later 
 on I made a much longer stay with him. During 
 my first visit he lived in a house in Great Homer 
 Street, and then in a villa in the immediate neigh- 
 bourhood of West Derby Road, close to Shiel Park. 
 Years later I made a special pilgrimage to find the 
 place, but it had disappeared as absolutely as my 
 vanished self, who had been so happy there. Had 
 I then formed any conscious intention of taking to 
 the literary life I might have garnered a golden 
 harvest of event from the talk of the old salts who 
 night after night yarned to each other over their 
 steaming tumblers in the little room my brother-in- 
 law called his "cuddy." They were the denizens 
 of a world then fast vanishing, and now quite gone. 
 The man who conned and steered the first steam- 
 ship out of the port of Liverpool was among them, 
 another had been concerned with the laying of the 
 first transatlantic cable. I remember most clearly 
 Captain H , a vast, bush-bearded, beetle- 
 browed, old Viking of a man, six feet six inches in 
 his stocking-feet, and more than proportionately 
 
36 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 broad and thick, who was the father of eighteen 
 sons. He had never had a daughter, which was 
 really a grief to him, hidden under his growling 
 
 formula, " The H s don't breed bitches." It 
 
 was a grand sight to see this superb old heathen 
 accompanied by any half-dozen of his boys who 
 happened to be at home — they were all sailors — 
 going to church of a Sunday morning. I have a 
 notion that he was one of the wickedest old villains 
 that ever trod a deck, but amorous peccadilloes and 
 Bacchanalian orgies had left him a staunch Church- 
 man. The eighteen sons, born in triple honourable 
 wedlock, were by no means his only contributions 
 to the manhood of the rising generation, and it was 
 his boast that he had not, on shore, gone to bed 
 sober for over fifty years. I can see him now, his 
 huge bulk towering amid the smoke-wreaths in the 
 cuddy, and hear the succession of short, sharp 
 barks in which he spoke. As thus : " This morn- 
 ing — reading the paper — shadow falls across it. 
 Look up and see — great big devil of a chap — size 
 of a house — beard as broad as a shovel. * How 
 are ye, Cap'n ? ' says he. Says I, * Who the hell — 
 are you ? ' ' I'm Alexander.' * Alexander what ? ' 
 
 — says I. ' Alexander H ,' says he. * D'ye 
 
 mean as you're — a son o' mine?' 'Yes.* 'D'ye 
 know your way — to your bedroom ? ' * Yes.' 
 ' Then go there — be damned to you.' And 
 there he is — this present minute — eating my 
 victuals — drinking my rum. Suppose it's all right. 
 But I don't know. Seems to me there's a chance 
 — any damned beach-comber — in the port — o' 
 Liverpool — can't get a ship — coming to me — saying 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 37 
 
 he's a son o' mine." I should say that the chances 
 of the old gentleman suffering from such an im- 
 position were small enough. His sons were all 
 indubitable chips of the old block, as big and as 
 handsome as himself. 
 
 Naturally and inevitably, these second-hand 
 glimpses of sea-life and first-hand impressions of 
 marine character inspired me with a burning desire 
 for the life of a sailor. That desire was vetoed by 
 my father. My brother John, to whom I have 
 already alluded, had died in consequence of ex- 
 posure aboard ship, aggravated by the cruelty of a 
 drunken and brutal skipper. I still regret my 
 father's decision. I believe travel to be the finest 
 and most valuable part of education, and a few 
 years spent in that way, under the care of a kindly 
 superior of ripe experience and considerable in- 
 telligence, who was actually at hand in the person 
 of my brother-in-law, would have been of great 
 service to me. I should probably have known a 
 little less about books than I actually know, but 
 vastly more of men and things, and I should have 
 been under salutary discipline, the greatest need 
 of a weak and drifting nature, and the influence 
 which has been most conspicuously absent from 
 my life. 
 
 I left school at fourteen, and, in accordance 
 with my father's idea — sensible enough — that every 
 man not born to independent means should begin 
 life with a working knowledge of some trade or 
 handicraft, spent a couple of years in his printing- 
 office, as my elder brothers had done before me. 
 Having by this time definitely made up my mind 
 
38 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 that literature was my vocation, and being more- 
 over as idle a youngster as ever drew breath, I did 
 as little work as I could manage. I had grown 
 too big to thrash, and had indeed issued a forth- 
 right manifesto to the effect that the reign of what 
 Walter Besant called "the first legislator — good 
 old Father Stick" — must be considered definitely 
 over. So when, a town library having been 
 voted by the Town Council, one of the Councillors 
 proposed to my father that I should apply for the 
 post of sub-librarian, he was probably as glad to 
 get rid of me as I was to go. I spent three years 
 in that berth, beginning by helping my chief to 
 catalogue the books, and having the run of my 
 intellectual teeth among them. They were by no 
 means a bad collection, for one or two of the book- 
 buying committee were men of genuine culture, 
 and the time I spent among them gave me the 
 greater part of such knowledge of the solider 
 English classics as I possess. 
 
 I left the library at seventeen in order to join 
 Christie in London. Contrary to my expectations, 
 I had rather a dreary time of it. Christie was then 
 working in the Press Gallery of the House of 
 Commons, and frequently did not get home until 
 two or three o'clock in the morning. Naturally he 
 spent a good part of the daylight hours in bed. I 
 was too young and too raw to be his companion, or 
 to see much of his friends, and I was a good deal 
 alone. So, when, for some reason or other, he went 
 abroad, I went back home with less reluctance than 
 I might otherwise have felt. For a time I pre- 
 tended to work in the printing-office, and after 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 39 
 
 a while found a berth, through the suggestion of a 
 friend of my father, in the office of the local gas- 
 works. I had practically nothing to do there, but 
 on the strength of copying an occasional letter for 
 the chief engineer I called myself his secretary. 
 He called me an idle young devil. This period, 
 which lasted for three years, had one good effect. 
 I came into close daily contact with some four 
 hundred members of the proletariat, some skilled 
 and many unskilled workers, and so acquired an 
 intimate knowledge of them which has given me an 
 abiding liking and respect for that thoroughly good 
 fellow, the English working man. 
 
 Most of my time at the gasworks was passed in 
 the " rodney-house," as the men called the building 
 in which they spent the intervals between their 
 shifts of labour, eating, drinking, playing cards, and 
 swapping stories. Pretty nearly every local accent 
 from Northumberland to Cornwall was represented 
 among them, and there was a strong dash of the 
 Irish element, but I never met a gas-stoker who 
 was a Scotsman. The matters in which they were 
 disadvantageously differentiated from their social 
 superiors were mostly things of the surface, and the 
 grisly expletives with which they seasoned their 
 talk had no real significance. Taking them in the 
 lump, I have never met a better crowd, nor do I 
 desire to. The labouring man, in my experience of 
 him, has a certain clear, direct simplicity of outlook 
 on the world ; a comradeship, so to speak, with the 
 bed-rock facts of existence, which is extremely 
 healthy and tonic to men of other kinds when they 
 have the good luck to meet it and the common 
 
40 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 sense to value it. There is a sort of person, often 
 quite unwitting of any snobbery in his mental 
 attitude, who takes it for granted that social virtue 
 ceases to exist at some indeterminate point down 
 the social scale. It would be a sufficiently silly 
 libel on human nature to say that it ceases at any 
 point up the scale, but the latter statement would 
 be greatly nearer the truth. Hopefulness, tolerance, 
 charity, pluck, and the robuster virtues generally 
 are necessities of existence to the class who live, 
 marry, and rear a family on thirty shillings a week. 
 Individual character abounded among the men, 
 of course — there is no sort of society in which it 
 does not, to an observant eye. One of the stokers 
 was a man named St. Clair. He was proud of his 
 name, insisted on it being correctly pronounced, 
 and would not suffer anybody of his own rank to 
 plebeianise it into the commoner form of " Sinclair." 
 As he was extremely strong, a more than fair 
 amateur pugilist, and perennially ready to take to 
 his fists, he had his way in that as in most other 
 matters. He was among the half-dozen handsomest 
 men I have ever seen in my life, and decidedly 
 superior in education to most of his mates. I asked 
 him on one occasion why he had never tried to 
 better himself, and to rise above mere manual 
 labour. " Why should I ? " he asked in return. 
 " There are only two things in life worth troubling 
 about, the two W's — whisky and women, and I can 
 get all I want of them as I am." I am afraid the 
 time came when one-half of that statement ceased 
 to be true. Another stoker, a blackavized, fierce, 
 ugly little man named Green, had somehow become 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 41 
 
 possessed of a very pretty little wife, of whom he 
 was inordinately fond and jealous. I was present 
 one day when a violent quarrel exploded between 
 him and St. Clair, the former accusing his mate of 
 evil intent against his domestic peace. The two were 
 held apart, and nothing happened for the moment ; 
 but a night or two later Green met his rival and his 
 wife together in what he chose to consider suspicious 
 circumstances, and with a slash of his pocket-knife 
 laid St. Clair's cheek open from the corner of the 
 lip to the base of the ear. Green received a 
 sentence of imprisonment, and St. Clair carried his 
 ruined beauty elsewhere, and was no more seen in 
 those parts. 
 
 Another of the men I most clearly remember 
 was a ganger known about the works by the 
 sobriquet of " Softy " — much as Mark Twain's 
 astute hero was known as *' Pudd'nhead." He 
 was a loosely-built, apple-faced, slouching man of 
 late middle-age, with tow-coloured hair which fell 
 in a disorderly fringe over his forehead ; prominent, 
 sleepy brown eyes ; a pendulous nether lip, and a 
 general air of good-natured fatuity. He kept his 
 coals in a disused pigstye under the party-wall 
 which separated his little strip of garden-ground 
 from that of a neighbour. It occurred to him that 
 his stock melted with unnatural rapidity. He held 
 his own counsel, but one night as he sat at supper 
 the noise of a terrific explosion was heard next 
 door, and his neighbour's family rushed into the 
 street shouting for help. " Softy " was prompt in 
 offering assistance, and it was soon perceived that 
 no real damage had been done. 
 
42 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 " How did it come about, 'Zekiel ? " asked an 
 acquaintance. 
 
 " Goramighty knows — / don't," replied the 
 sufferer. " I was asettin' by the hob, areadin' the 
 paaper to the missus, w'en the fire went off wi' 
 a bang as flyted we welly out of we'r wits." 
 
 " Ah ! " said " Softy," " it's a rum happennin', 
 trewly. If I didn't know what a honest chap thee 
 bist, 'Zekiel, I mought ha' thowt as yo'd been 
 astealin' my coal. I drilled a hole in a loomp last 
 night, an' put a bounce o' blastin* powder in it." 
 
 A grim little incident of this period may be 
 added here. Wandering about the works one 
 winter evening I came across an old watchman 
 apparently asleep in a little hut built of rough 
 planking. There was a brazier of coal burning 
 beside him, and I gently smeared his nose and 
 cheeks with soot collected from the rafters over- 
 head. In the morning I heard that the old fellow 
 had been found, so decorated, and stone dead. 
 
 I am not — so far as I understand my own 
 character — by any means an unfriendly sort of 
 person, and in the last thirty years of my life have 
 made and kept a very respectable body of friends. 
 But in the surroundings amid which my first twenty 
 years were passed the more genial side of my 
 nature would seem to have been frozen. I hated 
 the place I lived in — how much, I really had no 
 idea until I finally got away from it and among the 
 kind of people in whose society I could expand — 
 the people who loved the things I loved, whose life 
 was passed in reading, writing, talking, thinking 
 books. I was not altogether bereft of this species 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 43 
 
 of companionship. Spencer Leigh Hughes, now 
 known to many thousands of readers all over the 
 face of England through the columns of keen and 
 trenchant comment on current event printed over 
 the signature *' Sub Rosa," was at that time in 
 the employment of a business house in the High 
 Street. He and J. P., the son of a local trades- 
 man, who had a passion for the classics, kept me in 
 countenance, and their company afforded me most 
 of the not too many happy hours I spent during 
 this portion of my life. But I heartily disliked 
 most of the people with whom I came into contact, 
 unlike Christie, who was thoroughly at home among 
 them, and studied them with a relishing interest 
 which inspired, in "Joseph's Coat," "Aunt Rachel," 
 and " Old Blazer's Hero," many of his best pages. 
 My sentiment towards my surroundings came out 
 in one rather queer form. Between seventeen and 
 twenty I was, I believe, as much in love as any boy 
 of those years ever has been since love first came on 
 earth. I can see her now with absolute distinctness 
 as she was then, and she was a singularly pretty little 
 person. I have an idea — I suppose I may say so 
 at this time of day without risk of being thought 
 too much of a coxcomb — that she was not altogether 
 averse or indifferent to me, but, sincere as my 
 passion was, I sedulously kept out of her way, for 
 the simple reason that any tie established between 
 us would have been also a link between me and the 
 place in which we both lived. I had two conflict- 
 ing and tormenting desires regarding her — to look 
 at her and to avoid her. In the hideous little 
 Independent chapel to which both our families 
 
44 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 resorted on Sundays her father's pew was slightly 
 in front of ours, and she habitually sat in the broad 
 shaft of light falling through a large window of 
 plain glass, her graceful head silhouetted against 
 the panes, and her wonderful mass of hair, of the 
 colour of ripe corn, shining in the sunlight. The 
 place had been a Gehenna to me until I was old 
 enough successfully to revolt against my enforced 
 attendance, but a little while after I had gained 
 that victory I renounced its fruits and went with 
 perfect regularity twice every Sunday, undeterred 
 by the droning oratory of the black-gowned ex- 
 cheesemonger who, in the pulpit, wrestled with the 
 Spirit — and his h's — for the privilege of feasting 
 my eyes on the figure of a girl I would not have 
 married for her weight in diamonds. I hung at 
 night about the street in which she lived, and 
 walked incalculable miles to meet her by appa- 
 rent accident, but I do not remember that I 
 ever spoke twenty consecutive words to her, or 
 wanted to. 
 
 It was on the day preceding my twentieth 
 birthday that I left my native town to begin my 
 literary life as my brother Christie's amanuensis. 
 I had done what was perhaps an unusual amount 
 of reading for a boy of those years, but next to no 
 thinking, and my knowledge of the world outside 
 the little place in which my childhood and youth 
 had been passed was practically nil. Christie was 
 at that time living at Thames Ditton, in a cottage 
 facing the Common, and for the first few months of 
 my time with him I did no work at all. He had 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 45 
 
 a consuming itch, without any great amount of 
 talent, for landscape painting, and for many years 
 it was his wont, on the completion of any bit of 
 literary work, to devote its proceeds to as long a 
 spell of unremunerative canvas-spoiling as they 
 would run to, and only to return to labour when 
 the wolf was actually at the door. He had recently 
 returned from Turkey, whither he had gone as 
 special correspondent for the Times during the 
 war with Russia, and the funds were already running 
 low, but he daubed away with undisturbed placidity, 
 and was full to the brim with that sort of splendid 
 project which is, compared with accomplished work, 
 what apple blossom is to cider. He was the god 
 of my youthful idolatry, and I believed in his 
 visions as implicitly as he himself, and in my mind's 
 eye complacently beheld the pair of us ascending 
 rung after rung of the ladder of success towards 
 a bright and radiant paradise of literary immortality. 
 It is a fine thing to have the capacity of hero- 
 worship, but like so many other fine things in this 
 exasperating life of ours, it has its drawbacks. To 
 model, out of any poor substitute for gold your 
 nature may furnish, a glorious statue of perfection 
 with the features of some beloved individual is 
 the most delightful of occupations to the mind of 
 ardently worshipping youth, but when the ungilded 
 original will persist in walking into the Holy of 
 Holies and knocking whole chunks at a time off 
 his counterfeit presentment — your cherished handi- 
 work, in which you have much of the pride of a 
 creator — it is a saddening experience. 
 
 Very certainly, no man who ever wore the 
 
46 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 burden of our mortal flesh could have realised my 
 boyish conception of my brother : to say in cold 
 type at this time of day how far he fell short of 
 that foolish and impossible ideal would be as useless 
 as it would be painful. Ex parte statements of 
 misunderstandings with people who are no longer 
 here to present their aspect of the case must always 
 be futile. So, although Christie was for some years 
 the dominating factor of my life, and although his 
 influence will remain indelibly impressed upon my 
 career and character so long as I remain alive, I 
 shall have little to say regarding him. The noble 
 counsel Charles Dickens left to his children is, 
 I have long thought, almost as beautiful, and far 
 more practicable, than the Golden Rule itself — 
 " Be patient with all things which are not coldly 
 and deliberately wrong." Of that sort of wrong 
 my brother did perhaps as little as any man I 
 have ever intimately known. He was kindly — as 
 he understood kindliness : generous — as he under- 
 stood generosity. His faults were rather those of 
 omission than of commission, and, had I been made 
 other than I am, might have affected me scarcely 
 at all. I am a creature of circumstance, a moral 
 chameleon taking the colour of my surroundings, 
 and having — so far as I understand the complexities 
 of my own nature — very little either of positive 
 good or positive evil in me. Christie regarded life, 
 not as a task to be performed, not as a discipline 
 for any higher experience, not as a stricken field 
 wherein to exhibit courage, not as a hospital for the 
 practice of philanthropy and unselfishness, not from 
 any one of the many usually accepted view-points, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 47 
 
 but as a sort of gigantic Exhibition to whose side- 
 shows the management had somehow unaccountably 
 and inexcusably neglected to furnish him with a 
 complimentary ticket. He was, so to speak, a moral 
 deadhead. Had he been a duke and a millionaire 
 he would have left a splendid reputation. That 
 men who were neither dukes nor millionaires must 
 work for their share of the good things of life, and 
 must be content even so to forego the richest viands 
 of the feast, he would have admitted as a general 
 rule. But it was not a rule which applied to him. 
 He had a prescriptive right to anything enjoyable 
 that happened to be going, and the rest of the 
 world — of his particular world — had a right to such 
 scraps of the feast as he chose to leave to them. 
 Did he possess five pounds, anybody who wanted 
 it was welcome to five — or even ten — shillings. Had 
 he found himself alone with any other human creature 
 on a rock in mid-ocean, with one loaf of bread and 
 one jug of water between them, he would have 
 eaten the last crumb of the loaf, drunk the last 
 drop of the water, and would have wondered — 
 quite honestly wondered — at the unconscionable 
 selfishness of the other person had he dared to 
 object. He spoke generously of all men. He 
 was ready at any moment to do anybody any 
 service which cost him nothing; and ready also to 
 accept the sacrifice of anybody else's life-blood 
 with perfect good humour and ingratitude. People 
 dependent on such a man are likely to have a 
 somewhat mixed and frequently rocky time of 
 it, and such a man is not likely to make a 
 good guide, philosopher, and friend to a boy of 
 
48 A STEPSON^ OF FORTUNE 
 
 twenty, ignorant of the world, vacant of any high 
 ideal, with a strong body, strong appetites, and 
 a feeble will. I owe him one debt, which I grate- 
 fully acknowledge. He was, at his best, a quite 
 admirable literary craftsman, and any small literary 
 ability I may possess received at his hands such 
 forming and polishing as it was competent to take. 
 
 The funds resulting from Christie's Turkish 
 expedition at last giving out, we shifted our camp 
 to London, and settled for awhile in rooms situated 
 near the southern end of the Hampstead Road. 
 I have a sort of affection for that quarter of London 
 to this day, for grimy Tottenham Court Road and 
 the semi-squalor of its adjacent streets, whose stones 
 are eloquent of many memories of the hours in 
 which I first trod them in the flush of untried hope 
 and untested courage. It was all Paradise to me 
 then, for it was London, and Christie was there, 
 and Christie's friends, wonderful people who wrote 
 books and contributed to newspapers and composed 
 music and painted pictures and acted in theatres, 
 men who spoke familiarly of people great in all 
 those ways of life, and who were all going one day 
 to be great themselves. Many of them were members 
 of a society known as " The Cousinhood of the 
 Oasis," a club which met once a week during the 
 winter months in a private room of some hotel to 
 dine and pass the evening in song and conversation. 
 They were a more than averagely clever crowd. 
 T. P. O'Connor, then newly famous for his " Life 
 of Beaconsfield," and recently elected to Parliament 
 as a member for one of the divisions of the Borough 
 of Liverpool, was one of us. Julian Hawthorne, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 49 
 
 physically the living reproduction of the great prose- 
 poet whose name he bears and something of whose 
 magical glamour has descended to him, was another. 
 Justin McCarthy was a rare but ever-welcome visitor. 
 Robert Francillon, then in the full tide of his literary 
 productivity ; Richard Gowing, the secretary of the 
 Cobden Club ; Rudolf Blind ; Archibald MacNeil, 
 the clever young journalist who died so tragically 
 and so mysteriously a few years later at Boulogne ; 
 Frederick Cowen ; " The Great Twin Brethren," 
 Reginald and Eugene Barnett, sons of John Bar- 
 nett, composer of " The Mountain Sylph," respec- 
 tively the song-writer and music-maker of the 
 Club, the first an able journalist, the second the 
 inheritor of no mean portion of his father's gift 
 of melody; Joseph Williams, one of the finest 
 pianists it has ever been my good fortune to listen 
 to, and others whose names have since become 
 famous, were among them. I was elected a member, 
 and found in that circumstance a swelling pride of 
 which to-day I might experience a feeble repro- 
 duction if I were made a Fellow of the Royal 
 Society or a Privy Councillor. 
 
 Another interesting group were the war corre- 
 spondents and doctors whom Christie had known in 
 Turkey, with marvellous reminiscences of battles 
 and sieges and Bulgarian massacres — men who, like 
 Tennyson's Ulysses, were a part of all that they 
 had seen. Of these, I remember most clearly Dick 
 Clancy, whose appearance in the circle was hailed 
 with as much astonishment as pleasure, for he had 
 been mourned for many months as dead. He had 
 been one of the surgeons attached to the army 
 
 E 
 
50 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 commanded by Mehemet Ali, and had gone through 
 a queer experience since his friends had last seen 
 him. At some place in Roumelia he had inadver- 
 tently strayed beyond the Turkish lines, and had, as 
 he himself quaintly expressed it, been " culled " by 
 a Russian patrol, and taken before the General in 
 command. The General was drunk, which appears 
 to have been his perennial condition, and, although 
 Clancy's papers had been perfectly satisfactory, had 
 sentenced him to be shot as a Turkish spy. Sub- 
 ordinate officers had so strongly represented the 
 unwisdom of shooting a British subject on so flimsy 
 a pretext that the General had repented of that first 
 intention, but had ordered poor Clancy to be taken 
 at the tail of a bullock-cart to St. Petersburg, and 
 months after his luckier colleagues had returned 
 to the joys of home he had been still performing 
 that interminable journey, at an average rate of 
 progress of three miles or so a day, on a diet 
 of unsalted mutton and water. He was supposed 
 to be negotiating for vast compensation from the 
 Russian Government, but I never heard that he 
 got any. 
 
 Then there was Daniel O'Brien, also a doctor, 
 who had, on the strength of a recent legacy, bought 
 a high-class practice and taken a handsome house 
 in the neighbourhood of Regent's Park, having to 
 that end abandoned his former practice in the 
 purlieus of Euston Road, where he had been wont 
 to go his rounds among his patients clad in a flat 
 tweed cap, a pea-jacket, and Blucher boots, with a 
 clay pipe in his mouth, and a bull-dog of abnormal 
 ugliness at his heels. He had discarded the pipe 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 51 
 
 and the bull-dog, and had replaced his sartorial 
 vagaries by the silk hat, frock-coat, and patent 
 leather shoes more commonly worn by reputable 
 practitioners. He had an assistant, a compatriot 
 answering to the name of Mulligan, who was one of 
 the most remarkable-looking people I have ever 
 beheld. He had a head which looked precisely as 
 if it had been carved out of a gigantic cocoa-nut. 
 It was of that colour, and the wiry hair and whiskers 
 with which it was decorated were exactly of the tint 
 and general appearance of cocoa-nut fibre. His face 
 was absolutely incapable of any play of expression, 
 you could never know from it whether he was glad 
 or sorry, angry or pleased, drunk or sober ; and he 
 had a squint of such curious duplicity that it was 
 impossible to say not merely at what object, but 
 even in what direction, he might be looking. This 
 does not read like the description of a successful 
 libertine, but that Mulligan had had his triumphs — 
 or at least one triumph — in the lists of love was 
 evidenced by the appearance several days in succes- 
 sion outside his employer's house of a Milesian lady 
 of poverty-stricken appearance, who dandled in her 
 arms an infant replica of Mulligan, squint included, 
 and rent the air with a strident, tuneless chant of 
 " Drunken Doctor Mulligan, come out and own 
 your bastard." It says much for O'Brien's kind- 
 ness of heart, if little for his capacity of maintaining 
 his newly acquired respectability, that Mulligan 
 was allowed to retain his place as his friend's 
 assistant. The conduct of the betrayed lady might 
 not perhaps altogether account for the failure of 
 O'Brien's attempt at professional regeneration, but 
 
52 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 soon after her advent the practice was abandoned 
 and O'Brien and Mulligan went together to 
 Argentina, where I last heard of them, several 
 years ago, as prospering greatly. 
 
 To know one Irishman intimately pretty 
 generally means to know many others. Calling 
 on O'Brien one evening at his house I was shown 
 into the surgery, and found him seated in an arm- 
 chair on one side of the fireplace, confronting 
 another person seated in another armchair on the 
 other side of the hearth. This second person 
 arrested my attention at once, the more so that 
 for quite a while O'Brien took no notice of him 
 whatsoever, but entered on the business which had 
 occasioned my visit as openly as if we had been 
 alone. The stranger was a man of about thirty, 
 dressed with conspicuous shabbiness, unshaven 
 for at least three days past, and with broken boots 
 and dingy linen. He carried in his mouth, up- 
 side down, a short wooden pipe, from which little 
 streams of tobacco ash trickled over his waistcoat. 
 His eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, and a 
 second glance told me that he was all but comatose 
 with drink. O'Brien presently addressed him. 
 " Wake up now, Terence, and be inthrojuiced " 
 — enforcing the adjuration by sticking the point 
 of his boot into the man's ribs and working it 
 vigorously about. Thus addressed, the stranger 
 made a paralytic attempt to straighten himself, 
 a momentary gleam of intelligence lighted his face, 
 and he murmured that he was " very happy." I 
 supposed him to be one of O'Brien's innumerable 
 eleemosynary patients, and after leaving the house 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 53 
 
 thought no more about him. A day or two later 
 I called at the house again, and met O'Brien in the 
 act of descending the steps. He was accompanied 
 by a good-looking, glossily-dressed individual, 
 neatly gloved, booted, and hatted, clean shaven, 
 and entirely reputable, " Ye know Macartney," 
 said O'Brien. I replied that I had not previously 
 had that pleasure, but was delighted to make his 
 acquaintance. " Sure, ye made it the other night," 
 said O'Brien. ** I inthrojuiced ye in the surgery." 
 The mental struggle with which I recognised the 
 identity of the well-groomed, gentlemanly person 
 now before me with the squalid spectre whose 
 memory was evoked by O'Brien's words must have 
 been clearly visible in my face, but Macartney gave 
 me his hand with a smile. He had a particularly 
 charming smile, as gentle as that of a very sweet- 
 tempered and very tired baby, with a hint of 
 humorous deprecation somehow lurking in it. 
 A word or two settled my business with O'Brien, 
 who then started off on his daily round, leaving my 
 new acquaintance and myself together. "If ye're 
 walking," said Macartney, " we might go together." 
 We had not gone far when Macartney proposed a 
 drink. We entered a bar, and were served with 
 our respective beverages, Macartney laying two 
 sovereigns on the counter, which the attendant 
 barmaid took up with a nod of intelligence. As is 
 de rigueur on such occasions, I requited Macartney's 
 hospitality at a bar a little further on, and here 
 again Macartney gave the barmaid two sovereigns, 
 also received and acknowledged with the same 
 masonic nod. Macartney was the kind of person 
 
54 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 one knows as well in an hour as after the acquaint- 
 ance of a lifetime, and when this mysterious busi- 
 ness had occurred a third time I inquired how it 
 happened that he owed precisely the same sum 
 at every house we entered. " Owe ! " replied 
 Macartney. " Sure I don't owe a penny in all 
 London. 'Tis my way of banking, and mighty 
 convenient. Ye see, I hardly ever go outside 
 this beat, and so I'm never far from my money, 
 and when it's gone my credit's good till I draw 
 my next instalment." He had been left a com- 
 petency by his father, paid to him with rigid 
 regularity at the rate of ^^30 on the first of every 
 calendar month by a lawyer who punctiliously 
 performed the provisions of his deceased client's 
 will, and never suffered Macartney to anticipate 
 his pension — "not by an hour or a ha'penny," as 
 Macartney expressed it. " I keep two sets of 
 clothes," he explained, "and when I outrun the 
 constable before the end of the month I wear the 
 togs you met me in the other night, and send these 
 I'm wearing now to the pawnbroker." He seemed 
 to see nothing in the least degree odd or out of the 
 way in this curious method of life. He was a 
 gentleman to the tips of his fingers, in any and 
 every stage of alcoholism or sobriety, with a delight- 
 ful, spontaneous charm of manner, and he was 
 extremely well-connected, a maternal uncle being 
 a high dignitary of the Roman Church. His one 
 weak spot was his insatiable craving for alcohol. 
 He must have had a superb physique, for he told 
 me, in a fashion as far removed from braggadocio 
 as from shame, merely as a casual statement, that he 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 55 
 
 had not gone to bed sober since he had left school ; 
 but, except when actually intoxicated, he showed 
 not the slightest symptom of this ruinous enslave- 
 ment. He had no hopes, no ambitions, no regrets, 
 but carried himself with a quiet, even, modest cheer- 
 fulness. The one thing he cared for in the world 
 except brandy was O'Brien, and when the latter 
 migrated, as already said, to Argentina with 
 Mulligan, Macartney went also. The last I heard 
 of him was contained in a phrase of a letter of 
 O'Brien's — "Terence is doing splendidly, and will 
 do better yet, if I can only persuade him that 
 Martell's Three Star, taken neat by the tumbler, 
 is not the best temperance beverage for a tropical 
 climate." 
 
 Macartney is associated in my mind with one 
 curious reminiscence. We were strolling in the 
 promenade of the Alhambra one evening, when we 
 came face to face with a woman who was obviously 
 an habitu6e of the place. I might have passed her 
 unregarded had it not been so evident from the 
 manner of both that she and Macartney knew each 
 other, and that there was in common between them 
 some sentiment or emotion of no common kind. 
 She was a handsome woman, with a thin, haggard 
 face and an unhealthy, unnatural glitter in her eyes. 
 As her glance fell on my companion she started 
 violently, and seemed for a moment on the point of 
 addressing him, but suddenly averted her face and 
 hurried past. " That's devilish odd," said Macart- 
 ney to himself; *' a queer coincidence entirely. It's 
 six months and more since I've seen that woman," 
 he continued, •' and 'twas on this very spot I saw 
 
56 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 her last. Do you remember," he asked, after a 
 pause, "a young CathoHc priest attached to the 
 
 chapel in Street, that cut his throat, leaving a 
 
 confession behind him saying why he'd done it?" 
 I remembered the case perfectly. It had been a 
 tragedy with which all London had rung for a day 
 or two a few months previously. The poor young 
 priest, little more than a boy in years, had stated in 
 his confession that he had been false to his priestly 
 vow, and was no longer fit to live, and had added a 
 passionate prayer that the woman who had ruined 
 him here and hereafter might be pardoned her 
 atrocious sin. " That was the woman," said 
 Macartney. " The night it happened she came in 
 here, and 'twas on this very spot where we're now 
 standing, that she told me — gloating over her 
 triumph, the hell-cat — that she'd * got round ' poor 
 
 at last. I told her — well, never mind what I 
 
 said to her. I was bred a Catholic, whatever I may 
 be now, which perhaps is a point I'm not altogether 
 clear on. I told her what I thought of her, any- 
 how, and she went away laughing at me and calling 
 
 me a spooney and a milksop. Poor 's suicide 
 
 was in the papers next night, and his blood is on 
 that woman's head. She knows it, too — she's just 
 withering with remorse, and she's drinking like a 
 fish — don't I know the symptoms ? " I never saw 
 the woman again, but I shall remember her face 
 as she recognised Macartney as long as I remember 
 anything. 
 
 It was at a somewhat later period that I made 
 the acquaintance of another Irishman. He had no 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 57 
 
 connection with the little band of eccentrics with 
 whom I have just been dealing, nor, indeed, with 
 any set of people, but was one of the most solitary- 
 creatures I have ever known. He was curiously 
 diminutive in figure, with a disproportionately large 
 head. His features in youth must have been 
 markedly handsome. They still expressed a keen 
 intellectuality, and his eyes, in moments of interest, 
 were as lambent as a dog's. His general ex- 
 pression was one of intense but patient suffering. 
 We had been indifferent acquaintances for many 
 months when I got my first glimpse into his history 
 and real character. I went one night, a minute or 
 two before twelve o'clock, into a bar in New Oxford 
 Street — the place is a second-hand book-shop now 
 — and found him sitting on a high stool, his right 
 hand curled round a tumbler of whisky, and in his 
 left a watch, which he was regarding with an intense 
 
 and hungry stare. " Hullo, D ," I exclaimed. 
 
 " How are you ? " " Hould your whisht ! " he 
 growled in answer, still with his gaze riveted on 
 the dial. The finger crawled slowly to the hour, 
 the watch slid into his pocket, and the contents of 
 the tumbler were transferred to his stomach with a 
 horrible avidity. " Give me another of those," he 
 said to the attendant. " Look here," he continued 
 
 to me, "my address is . Just remember that, 
 
 and see me into a cab when this place closes." I 
 had no need to ask an explanation of this curious 
 conduct, he volunteered it in the intervals of 
 swallowing glass on glass of spirit with incredible 
 rapidity. The liquor he was now drinking was the 
 first he had tasted for two years, "all owing," he 
 
58 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 said, " to the Cyardinal," by which disrespect- 
 ful term he meant to indicate Henry Edward 
 Manning, who, it appeared, was his Hfe-long friend. 
 Manning, as all the world knows, was a fervent 
 public advocate of temperance, and, as all the world 
 is far from knowing, gave himself an infinity of 
 trouble to redeem victims of the drink habit in 
 
 whom he took an especial private interest. D 
 
 was one of those unfortunates, and for years past 
 his fanatical love and admiration of the great prelate 
 had been the one anchor which had kept him from 
 drifting to irremediable ruin. From time to time 
 he gave the Cardinal a six months' pledge, binding 
 himself to take no alcohol whatsoever during that 
 period, and he had given a perpetual promise that 
 he would keep none about him, that no sort of 
 intoxicant should ever enter the rooms in which he 
 lived. This was the explanation of his furious 
 eagerness to take advantage of the half-hour now 
 at his disposal. " That blasted ould black vulture," 
 — which was D.'s way of referring to the Cardinal's 
 clerical secretary. Father , would be at his bed- 
 side next morning with another pledge for him to 
 sign, and this was the first time in two whole years 
 he had been able to dodge him, either he or the 
 Cardinal having succeeded four successive times in 
 anticipating, by at least a day, the expiry of the 
 agreement. D had been originally, like Man- 
 ning himself, a Protestant, and had followed his 
 great idol into the Roman fold. He told me that 
 he owed all that he possessed, and life itself, to the 
 Cardinal, who had kept him from the drink and 
 found him employment in a dozen ways, mainly as 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 59 
 
 a contributor to Roman Catholic journals and in 
 historical research. He was a man of great natural 
 talent and of really remarkable learning, especially 
 in the classics, the Fathers of the Church, and Italian 
 literature. I remember that one night he challenged 
 me to read a line from the " Divina Commedia," to 
 which he could not provide the context, and after 
 trying for half an hour I did not find him once at 
 fault. How old he was, I never knew, but he 
 spoke familiarly of famous people who had been 
 dead for many years. He had known Coleridge — 
 not, alas ! the Coleridge Shelley described in his 
 letter to Maria Gisborne — 
 
 " he who sat obscure 
 In the exceeding lustre and the pure 
 Intense irradiation of a mind. 
 Which, with its own internal lustre blind, 
 Flagged wearily through darkness and despair — 
 A cloud-encircled meteor of the air, 
 A hooded eagle among blinking owls" — 
 
 but an obese, grey-haired, unvenerable old figure, 
 writing journalistic slip-slop for a daily paper, 
 shuffling about the Strand in shapeless list slippers, 
 and pouring out his marvellous accumulations of 
 thought and scholarship on anybody who would 
 stand him twopenn'orth of gin. 
 
 It is extremely curious to note how exactly, in 
 many important particulars, a man's life is the result 
 of physical peculiarities which might, to a careless 
 observer, pass as absolutely negligible. My own 
 career has, I am convinced, been deeply influenced 
 by the fact that I have practically no sense of smell, 
 
60 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 and, consequently, only a faint sense of taste. I 
 know men to whom a delicate dish or a high-class 
 wine are what a sonorous verse was to Keats, what 
 a flush of sunset colour was to Turner, what the 
 exquisitely flowing line of a shapely woman's bust 
 and shoulder must have been to Praxiteles or 
 Canova. To me, it is nothing. I eat only to 
 satisfy hunger, and drink merely to quench thirst, 
 or for the enjoyment of the quickened pulse and 
 brightened fancy alcohol has the power to give. 
 My conception of a good dinner is a well-cooked 
 steak and a pot of stout, and I prefer American 
 cigarettes at ten for twopence-ha'penny to the 
 choicest nicotian product of Asia Minor. Early 
 training may very likely have indurated this plebeian 
 coarseness of palate. There was always plenty to 
 eat at home, but the menu was almost as simple as 
 that of Pope's cockney tradesman — 
 
 " One solid dish his week-day meal affords, 
 An added pudding solemnised the Lord's." 
 
 Another physical peculiarity of mine — or so I have 
 been assured by a high scientific authority — is that 
 my heart is slightly too big for my body. The 
 result is that I am — or rather was, for increasing 
 years have made a difference — much less pervious 
 to cold than most other people. I never had the 
 dandy instinct, and never, in my most prosperous 
 times, cared to be anything more than physically 
 clean and sartorially unremarkable. Now, it is the 
 most obvious of economic truisms that a solitary 
 man works only for the ability to satisfy his personal 
 needs, and the more Nature diminishes the number 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 61 
 
 or the intensity of those needs the less work he will 
 do, unless he is affected by that curious sporadic 
 imbecility which finds delight in labour for its own 
 sake. And that is not one of my many weaknesses. 
 I loathe labour, and love idleness. I have known 
 spells of furious effort in my time, but that was when 
 I have been so obsessed by some idea that life was 
 a torment until I had managed to get my inspiration 
 fixed on paper. Bereft of that spur to effort I work, 
 as my immortal compatriot joked, "wi' deefficulty." 
 A poor man to whom delicate food is a necessity 
 will work harder than one to whom it is indifferent. 
 A poor man to whom thick underclothing and a 
 well-lined overcoat are necessities of existence, or 
 who yearns to shine in splendid raiment, must 
 work to satisfy his needs or his tastes. (Balzac 
 wrote the tragedy of the over-educated palate 
 in " Cousin Pons." An equal genius might per- 
 haps find as great a book in the life of a 
 poverty-stricken dandy.) I have had neither of 
 these incentives to labour. Had I had them I 
 might have worked harder — I might even have 
 beaten my luck, and arrived at a measure of 
 wealth and consideration I can now never hope 
 to know. 
 
 Physical needs are, of course, by no means the 
 only spurs to intellectual effort. The love of money 
 and the desire of fame are frequent and potent 
 incentives. But they also have failed me. My 
 carelessness of money — I might almost call it a sort 
 of chemical antipathy between myself and the 
 medium of exchange, I have so flung away and 
 spurned the precious metals whenever I have had 
 
62 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the opportunity — is ineradicable. I have tried 
 many methods of self-cure, but in vain. One 
 means seemed for a time to have succeeded. I 
 took to hoarding coins, a heterogenous mixture 
 of bronze, silver, and gold, in a drawer, hoping 
 thereby to arouse in myself the miserly instinct 
 which gloats over such accumulations. I denied 
 myself even books and tobacco for the pleasure 
 of adding to my secret pile, and began to flatter 
 myself that the true spirit of Harpagon was enter- 
 ing into me. But the moment inevitably came 
 when some sudden temptation triumphed over my 
 acquired miserliness. My incapacity either to make 
 or to hold money is congenital. My father had, as 
 I never had, the means of acquiring wealth actually 
 under his hand, but, after a life of work and worry 
 he only just shaved the Insolvent Court. For years 
 he had the only printing-office in a rapidly-growing 
 town, but his one preoccupation as a tradesman was 
 to fulfil any order he received at the lowest possible 
 price. This curious ineptness in business was, even 
 more curiously, accompanied by a genuine talent 
 for finance on the great scale. I have heard him at 
 a political meeting criticise the Imperial Budget of 
 the year in a speech of over an hour's duration, in 
 the course of which he reviewed the fluctuations of 
 taxation and revenue, and the expenditure of pre- 
 vious governments, quoting dates and figures with 
 marvellous fluency and accuracy, and without so 
 much as a note to help him. The needs of a swarm 
 of children forced him to industry, but he was 
 temperamentally the idlest of men — so idle that he 
 would rather sit for hours chewing the stem of an 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 63 
 
 empty pipe than take the trouble to fill it. Of 
 ambition he had not a particle. I am his true son 
 in that respect also, with a slight difference. In 
 my early days I did most strongly desire what still 
 seems to me by far the sweetest morsel success has 
 to offer — the recognition of the best and greatest of 
 my fellow-craftsmen. To have been hailed as a 
 brother by the artists I loved and honoured, to 
 have been received as the peer of Tennyson and 
 Browning, of Meredith and Zola, I would have 
 given and suffered much. That dream faded very 
 early, not long after the date at which I began to 
 work really in earnest, and it can seem hardly more 
 hopeless to my most unfriendly critic than it does to 
 myself at this time of day. I fancy I know my own 
 intellectual stature fairly well. I stand almost as 
 high as the underside of Zola's ankle-bone, and am 
 at least as tall as the sole of Meredith's shoe is 
 thick. And for *' fame " as it is ordinarily under- 
 stood, to be talked about by people whose faces I 
 shall never see, to be a household word within the 
 arctic circle and under the tropics, was an idea 
 which never quickened my pulse by a single beat 
 per minute. 
 
 I have had during my life one luxury which to 
 me was a necessity, and without which life would 
 not be worth living at all — books. And books are 
 nowadays — thank the kindly Fates — the cheapest 
 of all luxuries. To dine with Apicius or to be 
 seen in the Park with Alcibiades are costly plea- 
 sures. You must repay the hospitality of Apicius 
 with dinners as good, or nearly as good, as his 
 own ; you must dress up to, or within measurable 
 
64 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 distance of, the Prince of Dandies ere he will 
 tolerate your society. But for a few shillings you 
 can gather together in one glorious company the 
 poets and sages and humorists of all time under 
 the poorest roof that ever failed to keep out the 
 rain. It was Gibbon who said that he would not 
 barter his love of reading for the wealth of India, 
 and I think it was also Gibbon who declared that 
 he had never known a trouble he could not forget 
 over a book. I can heartily repeat and endorse 
 both statements. 
 
 With such a temperament, and cast, a raw 
 young yokel of twenty, into the vortex of Bohemian 
 life with no wise hand to guide me, it is less matter 
 for surprise than for regret that the first years of 
 my time in London were absolutely fooled away, at 
 some cost to health, and at a much greater cost to 
 possessions even better worth preserving. I am 
 not going to pull a long face and preach a sermon, 
 or to deny that I look back on that wasted time 
 with a good deal of pleasure. I hurt nobody but 
 myself, and myself not very much. In the twenties, 
 wine — or such cheaper substitutes as came my 
 way — was sweet, women were kissable, and ginger 
 of many flavours and qualities was hot in the 
 mouth. I hunted pleasure as and how I could, 
 and youth, in that market, is current coin, and 
 buys vastly more than gold can command. The 
 youngster who can only get a bottle or a kiss by 
 paying money down for it is a dull dog. I wish, 
 not that I had taken less pleasure, but that I had 
 done more work. I regret, not that I have loved 
 many women, but that I did not earlier find the one 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 65 
 
 woman I could love sufficiently to take her for a 
 life-companion, and, with her beside me, face the 
 realities of existence as the wiser among my con- 
 temporaries did. My memories of the Primrose 
 Path are pleasant, and if I lingered in it longer 
 than was wise, the gods were good to me, in that 
 they turned my steps to safer ways before I had 
 arrived at the precipice in which, for so many, it 
 ends. They were good to me also in my least 
 regenerate days, for they sent me women-friends of 
 another sort than those with whom perhaps too 
 much of my time was spent, and gave me at least 
 the grace to appreciate their quieter charm. Good 
 feminine society — once again, thank the kindly 
 Fates — is not a costly luxury. The society of the 
 women best worth knowing certainly costs next 
 to nothing at all. A weekly expenditure of a few 
 shillings on a laundress and a few coppers on a 
 bootblack will ensure any young man of passable 
 manners and appearance the entree to the circle of 
 as many amiable and clever women as he can need 
 to know, even if his coat be a little — or more than 
 a little — shabby. I was poor indeed if I could not 
 manage a clean shirt and a street-corner shine on 
 Sunday, and so fortified could feel myself the 
 welcome guest of more than one lady whom it was 
 a dear privilege to know, and especially of one. It 
 is more than twenty years since I have seen her 
 face, since a cruel caprice of Fate broke the happy 
 circle of which she was the centre, since I entered 
 the neat room, with its little rosewood piano, its 
 sober rows of books, its pretty trifles of ivory and 
 glass and bronze, its good, incommunicable odour of 
 
 F 
 
66 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 peace, and quiet, and honest friendliness, in which 
 she held her little court. Others than the happy 
 band I knew there tenant the little room now, the 
 last echo of the music she made for us has died 
 away, the kind faces are scattered, some of the 
 friendly voices have passed into the eternal silence, 
 and the Lady sits, with Grief for a companion, in 
 other places that I shall not know. 
 
 Among other memories of feminine friendship 
 which were entirely for good in their influence on 
 my undeveloped character, let that of Marie Ponce- 
 let find a place. (That was not her real name.) 
 Marie takes rank as one of the prettiest girls it was 
 ever my good luck to meet, and I see her now as I 
 saw her first, standing beside the piano set in the 
 light of the big window of E. B.'s sitting-room on 
 the first-floor of a house in South Crescent, Store 
 Street, Tottenham Court Road — a vanished land- 
 mark. Set on her mass of jet-black curls, and 
 heightening the fire of her big black eyes, is a 
 scarlet velvet Tam-o'-Shanter, and her figure, 
 suggesting a statuette fresh from the hand of some 
 consummate artist, shows its perfect lines under a 
 jersey of navy blue. She is trilling, in a sweet, 
 reedy thread of a voice, like the evening song of an 
 immature throstle, the pretty French ballad, '' La 
 Premiere Feuille," to E. B.'s accompaniment, and 
 nine-and-twenty years have rolled away from my 
 shoulders, and I am young again. 
 
 Marie owed to Providence certain good and 
 enviable gifts, her beauty, which was her stock- 
 in-trade as an artists' model and figurante, her 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 67 
 
 touching little thread of a voice, an unconquerable 
 merry courage which I never saw for one moment 
 depressed, and very little else. To know her 
 parents was to wonder what kindly freak of atavism 
 had produced so lovely a flower from so unpromising 
 a soil. Her father was a Dutchman of French 
 extraction, and by trade a cobbler. He was also 
 a furious drunkard. Out of his cups there was not 
 much the matter with him except an invincible 
 aversion to soap : in them, his most marked charac- 
 teristic was a horrible desire to kill or mutilate his 
 daughter. On one occasion he had awaited her 
 home-coming, hidden behind the street door armed 
 with his lapstone. A fellow-lodger in the house 
 was a young brazier, well known later in sporting 
 circles as a middle-weight pugilist, and at that date 
 fast rising into fame as a brilliant amateur. The 
 fond father made the grievous error of mistaking 
 this person for Marie, and landed him on the top 
 of his hat — fortunately a hard and high one — with 
 the lapstone. I am happy to record that the rising 
 young pugilist damaged the nice old gentleman 
 rather severely, and sorry to say that Marie nursed 
 him with the tenderest care through his consequent 
 dilapidations. On another occasion years earlier, 
 while Marie was the most popular child-model in 
 London, her father had held her down on the sofa 
 with the expressed intention of picking out her eyes 
 with a steel fork. He was restrained from that 
 enterprise by Marie's mother, whose outraged 
 maternity found vent in these remarkable words — 
 
 "You old fool, if you spoil the girl's looks, 
 
 where's our living coming from.-*" The artless 
 
68 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 appeal went straight home to the paternal heart, 
 and Marie's sight was spared. 
 
 Such were Marie's parents, and for them the 
 good, brave child worked with perfect cheerfulness, 
 giving them by far the greater part of her earnings 
 as model and ballet-girl, and keeping the two rooms 
 she shared with them on the top-floor of the squalid 
 house in Windmill Street as neat as hands could 
 make them. She could at any moment have left 
 their horrible society and their sordid surroundings 
 for comfort and affluence, but at a price which 
 neither gold nor love could pay. It was Marie's 
 quaint and pathetic ambition " to marry a gentle- 
 man," and to do that she held that she must " go 
 straight" — she pronounced it " strite," for although 
 she spoke French very prettily her English was the 
 English of the quasi-slum in which her life had been 
 passed. It was a simple ambition, and a simple 
 ethic, but it sufficed, and I do not believe that all 
 the gold ever coined could have bought Marie's 
 virtue. And I have met loads of women who 
 wouldn't have known her who have not done nearly 
 so much to cleanse my ideal of womanhood and 
 fortify my faith in human nature as Marie Poncelet, 
 the Dutch-cockney artists' model and ballet-girl. 
 
 Marie and I became sweethearts. If my young 
 and ardent imagination had ever pictured us in a 
 less moral relationship her forthright plainness of 
 speech soon corrected my delusion. Kisses there 
 were in plenty — Marie frankly confessed that she 
 loved kissing — but it stopped at that. Together 
 we haunted the Thames steamers and Kew Gardens 
 and the Parks and Hampstead Heath and the pits 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 69 
 
 and galleries of many theatres and music halls. We 
 held cheap revel, when my funds permitted, at the 
 "Welsh Harp" which is " 'Endon way," as my 
 friend Albert Chevalier tells us in his delightful 
 ballad, of which bards of loftier name might well 
 envy the mirth and tenderness, and at the " Bull 
 and Bush." How juicy were the chops, how good 
 the beer, how verdant the watercresses, of those 
 humble feasts in the green arbours of those suburban 
 hostelries. 
 
 Marie was a clever girl, and knew a good deal 
 of human nature — especially of masculine human 
 nature. Rigidly virtuous as she was, she yet recog- 
 nised that a pretty woman's capital is not entirely 
 expressed by the number of the pence in her purse. 
 I remember a little incident illustrative of her 
 harmless impudence and innocent guile. We 
 were returning to Town together, dog-tired after a 
 long day's ramble in the country between the 
 Heath and Harrow-on-the-Hill, when, outside the 
 Spaniard's, we saw an empty four-wheeled cab. As 
 we approached, the cabman issued from the bar, 
 drawing the back of his hand across his mouth, like 
 a man refreshed. " We'll take that cab," said 
 Marie. I pointed out that our common funds 
 amounted to a poor fourteen-pence. " All right," 
 said Marie. " Stay 'ere a minute in the shadder." 
 I obeyed, and she advanced, with exaggerated 
 symptoms of fatigue. The cabman had mounted 
 the box and gathered up the reins. "Are you 
 going back into Town ? " asked Marie. " Yes, 
 Missie," said the cabman. '* Oh, I wonder if you'd 
 give me a lift ? I am so tired." " Why, o' course 
 
70 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 I will," said the cabman. " You look fit to drop. 
 Jump in, an' welcome." " And you won't mind my 
 friend coming too, will you ? " asked the abominable 
 little serpent, producing me from the shadow. I 
 can see them now, Marie and the cabman, she look- 
 ing up at him with big, trustful eyes, he looking 
 down at us with surprise and disgust slowly giving 
 way on his broad, red face before his honest appre- 
 ciation of her clever impudence. "Well, may I 
 
 " he began, and then grinned outright. " You 
 
 little snike in the grarss ! " he chuckled. " You've 
 copped me fair. Skip in, the pair of you." And 
 Marie, with her tired head drooping on my shoulder, 
 laughed softly to herself until she fell asleep. 
 
 The ever-rolling, silent hours, whose furtive 
 flight have made an elderly man of me, and — how 
 much more cruel ! — an old woman of Marie, parted 
 us, and since those bright days I have only twice 
 seen her. On the first of those occasions she was 
 brilliantly happy, for she had accomplished the 
 dream of her life. She had married a gentleman, 
 and the world had nothing more to yield her — 
 except the "linked sweetness, long drawn out," of 
 slaving herself to the bone to maintain him and his 
 children. He was indubitably a gendeman, the 
 younger son of a landless baronet of ancient family, 
 and the most placidly incompetent and amiably 
 selfish person that ever drew breath. " You can't 
 think 'ow good he is," she told me. Twelve years 
 later, when Robert Buchanan and myself had taken 
 the Opera Comique and were rehearsing The 
 Society Butterfly, the stage-door keeper one morn- 
 ing brought to me a slip of paper, bearing in 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 71 
 
 pencil the one word " Marie." I ran up to the hall, 
 and found there a little, elderly woman, a monument 
 of shabbiness, faded, wrinkled, with threads of grey 
 in her hair. I know that my amazement and dis- 
 appointment were readable in my face, and have 
 often wanted to get outside my own body and kick 
 myself for it. " I saw your name in the paper," 
 said Marie, " and I thought you wouldn't mind me 
 callin'." It was like holding parley with a ghost. 
 It was the same clear, birdlike voice, but all the old 
 fresh, frank gaiety had gone. " Is there any chance 
 for me in the piece, 'Arry ?" I could only say, as 
 was indeed the case, that there was absolutely 
 nothing for her. " Well, better luck next time," 
 said Marie. " I 'ope you'll 'ave a real big success. 
 You 'aven't forgot the old times. I can see that in 
 your face." " You have been ill, I am afraid," I 
 said. She nodded. "Typhoid. Just out of the 
 'ospital — the Middlesex. They thought as I was 
 goin' under, the doctor told me, mais ne claque pas 
 qui veut — though I shouldn't say that. There's the 
 kids. Six of 'em." " And your husband ? " " Dead, 
 two years ago." " Don't let us lose sight of each 
 other now we have met again," I said. " Write to 
 me here." She promised, and so we parted. She 
 never wrote, and I have never seen her since. 
 
 To a little later period belong my memories of 
 Captain Talbot — which is neither the real name nor 
 the real rank in the army of the person of whom I 
 speak. I met him through my brother, who had 
 made his acquaintance in Turkey, where Talbot 
 had occupied a post as officer of the gendarmerie. 
 He was a grey, mild-mannered, careworn looking 
 
72 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 man, obese, slow of speech, and diffident of manner, 
 as little like the conventional military hero as one 
 could easily imagine. Yet he was a V.C., and had 
 accomplished many deeds of quiet and desperate 
 valour. Christie having gone abroad, I was left in 
 London on my own resources, and Talbot being as 
 hard up as myself we made a menage of it, and took 
 a double-bedded room in Euston Street. Talbot 
 had a small pension, and I earned an occasional 
 guinea or two by a short story or a set of verses, 
 and we got along somehow, although on more than 
 one occasion we had only one coat and waistcoat 
 between us. Since Talbot was much the bigger 
 man that coat and waistcoat were of course his, and 
 when I wore them it was a case of David in Saul's 
 armour. 
 
 Talbot, the most friendly of men, was also one 
 of the most reticent, and we had lived together for 
 some months before I learned the details of a story 
 as sad as any I have ever heard or read. Return- 
 ing home one evening, I saw, standing at the corner 
 of Euston Street, a lady. Ladies on foot are not 
 common objects in that neighbourhood, and I 
 looked at her with some interest in passing. The 
 house in which I lived with Talbot was only a few 
 yards from the spot on which she stood, and as I 
 inserted my latchkey, I saw that she was watching 
 me with obvious interest. I thought for a moment 
 that she was about to address me, and turned 
 towards her, but she wheeled abruptly and passed 
 out of sight. The little incident had quite left my 
 mind when, on a night a week or so later, on 
 entering our room, I found Talbot sitting at the 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 73 
 
 table with his head between his hands, so absorbed 
 that he took no note of my entrance. The cheap 
 oil-lamp was alight, and I saw, lying on the table, a 
 large panel photograph — a portrait of the lady I 
 had seen at the corner of the street. I could not 
 repress an exclamation of surprise. It roused him. 
 ** Ah, young 'un," he said. ** You are back again. 
 I was just looking at my wife*s portrait, and think- 
 ing. Thinking of old times." I had known 
 vaguely that he was a married man, but he had 
 never spoken of his married life to me before, and 
 I, of course, had respected his silence. " A pretty 
 woman, isn't she ? " With some natural doubt and 
 trepidation, I told him of the glimpse I had recently 
 had of the original of the portrait in the street 
 outside. He nodded calmly, and taking the 
 photograph from my hand, put it into the chest-of- 
 drawers, and lay down on his bed. It was a full 
 half-hour before he spoke again. " I'll tell you 
 about it, if you'd care to hear," he said then ; and 
 the story he told me was as follows : — 
 
 He had married, at three-and-twenty, the daugh- 
 ter of a General Officer. Fifteen months later, a 
 child, a boy, was born, and a month after that 
 event Talbot had been ordered abroad, to India. 
 Circumstances not merely prevented his wife 
 accompanying him, but again and again intervened 
 to prevent her joining him. They were apart for 
 nearly four years, and then, to the indescribable joy 
 of both, he was ordered home again. He assured 
 me that during the whole of that time he was abso- 
 lutely faithful to his marriage vow. I believe the 
 statement implicitly, for I have seldom known a 
 
74 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 more truthful man. On his way home he touched 
 at Brindisi. There, in the hotel at which he put 
 up, he met a certain woman. He did not mention 
 her name, but spoke of her simply as an old 
 acquaintance with whom, previous to his marriage, 
 he had had intimate amatory relations. His wife 
 arrived in Brindisi early on the following morning. 
 She had come without warning him, in order to 
 give him a joyful surprise. She saw him and the 
 other woman together in circumstances which could 
 leave no doubt as to their momentary relation, and 
 she then and there repudiated and cast him off. He 
 had pleaded with her as a coward might plead for 
 life. He had sworn to her that the cruelty of cir- 
 cumstance had betrayed him in the one moment of 
 weakness he had known in four long, dreary years 
 of solitude, but all in vain. They had met since 
 some half-dozen times in the presence of witnesses 
 — never alone — to discuss business in the interests 
 of their boy, but that was all the communication 
 they had had together. She had sent him various 
 sums of money anonymously from time to time — 
 her people were wealthy — but he had sent them 
 back, and as she never repudiated the gifts, he was 
 certain they had come from her. 
 
 I took heart of grace to try if matters were not 
 mendable. I pointed out that the anonymous gifts, 
 and her presence in the street on the night I had 
 seen her — he had caught sight of her himself on 
 more than one occasion hovering near other places 
 in which he had lived — were hopeful signs that she 
 had repented of her harshness. Rather than that 
 two people who loved each other should drag out 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 75 
 
 their lives so miserably apart, would it not be well 
 for him — was it not his duty as having first offended 
 — to make some overture towards reconciliation ? 
 " No," he said, with a quiet sternness which I felt to 
 be unshakeable. He neither denied nor extenuated 
 his offence, but the first step must be made by his 
 wife. It never was made by either. 
 
 I have other memories, less tragic, associated 
 with poor Talbot, one of which shall be set down 
 here. As I have already stated, he had a pension, 
 which was paid quarterly. For some days before 
 one of those payments was due, our funds had 
 fallen to zero, and a little bread-shop, which some- 
 times permitted us to run a very small credit- 
 account, refused further supplies. On the last day 
 our diet was atmospheric air, au naturel, and water. 
 On the long-expected and much wished-for morning 
 Talbot assumed *' the reliever," as we called the one 
 coat we had between us, and sallied out to touch 
 his money, promising to return with supplies of 
 provender before one o'clock. One o'clock came, 
 but brought no Talbot, and the afternoon and even- 
 ing dragged their interminable length along until, 
 clean worn out with hunger and hope deferred, I 
 lay down on my bed and went to sleep. I was 
 wakened by a shock of sound, and, lighting the 
 lamp — it had grown quite dark by this time — dis- 
 covered Talbot lying on the floor in a condition of 
 hopeless collapse. Assisting him to undress, I got 
 him into bed, and then went through his clothes, 
 but there was not a coin in his pockets. On my 
 demanding an explanation he would say nothing 
 but that it was " all ri' — qui' ri' — " and that " the 
 
76 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 money was in the wall." He repeated this amazing 
 statement several times with an air of ereat 
 triumph, and finally fell asleep. 
 
 In the morning, the mystery — or rather the two 
 mysteries, for that so good a fellow and so loyal 
 a chum as Talbot should have gone on a burst with 
 a hungry friend waiting for him at home was in 
 itself a most mysterious thing — was explained. 
 While drawing his pension, he had met an old 
 fellow-campaigner, who had offered him a glass of 
 wine. Poor Talbot, who had no more head for 
 liquor at the best of times than a baby, had accepted, 
 and from the moment the wine had fallen into his 
 poor empty stomach remembered nothing at all. 
 " What did you mean," I asked him, " by saying 
 that the money was * in the wall ' ? " My query lit 
 a partial gleam of memory. " Yes," he said feebly. 
 *'I remember now. I came across a wall somewhere 
 or other, and there was a big crack in it, and I put 
 the money in the crack." "But where is the wall ?" 
 I asked. " I'll be shot if I know," he said, clutch- 
 ing his hair helplessly, and there for some time the 
 matter rested. 
 
 Readers of Wilkie CoUins's clever story, " The 
 Moonstone," will remember the fashion in which 
 a mystery regarding the hiding-place of a great 
 jewel is solved. The stone has been hidden by a 
 man in an over-wrought nervous condition, and 
 under the influence of a narcotic. Months after, 
 having induced precisely similar circumstances, he 
 remembers where he hid the missing gem. It 
 occurred to me that if I could get Talbot into the 
 same state of mind as that in which he had hidden 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 77 
 
 his pension-money he might remember the situation 
 of the wall to which he had confided it. So, next 
 time we possessed the necessary funds, I took him 
 out and made him drunk. But the psychological 
 experiment was an utter failure. I have not often 
 seen a more comically doleful exhibition than was 
 presented by Talbot, shaking the tears of maudlin 
 desperation off his nose, and singing, in a kind of 
 plaintive chant, " I can see the damned wall, but I 
 do' no where it is ! " 
 
 Life is made up of meetings and partings, and 
 Talbot and I ceased to be companions, although we 
 remained close friends. He was unlucky to the 
 end, and unluckiest of all at the very end. An old 
 comrade who had started a military cramming 
 establishment took him as assistant. The school 
 throve exceedingly, and Talbot's friend, who was 
 a childless widower without a relative in the world, 
 promised Talbot that he should succeed to the 
 business. And then, after a brief glimpse of at 
 least a spell of ease and comfort to atone for so long 
 a time of poverty and heart-break so bravely borne, 
 poor Talbot died. 
 
 The incident of Talbot hiding his pension- 
 money in the wall reminds me of two other little 
 occurrences of a similar sort, which happened years 
 earlier, when, as a boy of seventeen, I first lived in 
 London for a brief time with Christie. His house- 
 chum at that period was the clever and genial 
 young Irish artist who figures in his novel, "A 
 Model Father," as " Bill Cassidy," a name which 
 may also do service here. The common stock of 
 tobacco had given out, when Cassidy bethought 
 
78 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 him of an old lidless jar of terra-cotta, stowed away 
 on the top shelf of a cupboard in his bedroom. " I 
 believe I left half-a-dozen pipefuls in it," he said as 
 he mounted a chair to take down the jar. The 
 half-dozen pipefuls were there, sure enough, and 
 under the layer of tobacco were four sovereigns. 
 On another occasion, when we could barely muster a 
 sixpence between us, we made an inventory of our 
 properties to determine which among them should 
 go to the pawnbroker. The article best spareable 
 — it was hot summer weather — was a heavy ulster 
 belonging to Christie. Going over it in search of 
 any odd trifles its pockets might contain, he found 
 in the little ticket-pocket in the cuff of the left 
 sleeve, a five-pound note. 
 
 Certain acquaintances I made at about this time 
 are worthy at least of a passing mention here. One 
 of the most interesting among them was a certain 
 Anatole Cheriere — that was not his name, nor in 
 the least degree like it. He was of mixed nation- 
 ality, his father having been a French artist of 
 considerable reputation, and his mother an Irish 
 lady. He spoke both languages with perfect ease 
 and grammatical correctness, and wrote both suffi- 
 ciently well to contribute to leading French and 
 English journals, but his pronunciation of English 
 was a curious mingling of Gallic and Hibernian 
 accents. At the time I first met him he was acting 
 as London correspondent of an important Paris 
 paper. He was a thoroughly charming and a 
 thoroughly good fellow, with no vice worse than an 
 unconquerable idleness, but for which his really 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 79 
 
 considerable talents might have carried him far. 
 His appointment as correspondent had rescued him 
 from a long spell of unremunerative poverty, and 
 had inspired him with a momentary love of labour 
 and desire for respectability. He had taken a 
 house in Acacia Road, Brixton, and I have often 
 wondered, and wonder still, what the ultra-British 
 bourgeois who forms the staple of the inhabitants 
 of that region must have thought of him and his 
 family, who might have been transported bodily out 
 of the pages of Henri Murger or Paul de Kock. 
 His wife, who, like his mother, was Irish, was that 
 curious and rare phenomenon, an extraordinarily 
 pretty woman minus that moderate dose of healthy 
 vanity which makes most of her sex careful to 
 supplement their charms by the legitimate artifices 
 of the toilet. She had a mass of splendid hair, 
 which generally looked as if it had recently served 
 as a substitute for a hearth-broom. She had a fine 
 bust, of which the beholder was advertised by a 
 constant lack of hooks and eyes or buttons on 
 the upper part of her dress. She was the sort of 
 woman a shy man would have shunned to go abroad 
 with on a windy day for fear of seeing every stitch 
 of clothing blown off her. She had two children, a 
 little girl of three, as beautiful as a baby angel, and 
 a noble little boy of five. When I first made their 
 acquaintance, at four o'clock p.m. of a nipping day 
 in early spring, they were making mud-pies in the 
 middle of the horse-road in their nightgowns. The 
 house was of a piece with its inhabitants. There 
 was a common red-legged deal kitchen-table in 
 the drawing-room, and a handsome sculptured 
 
80 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 oak ditto in the kitchen, but as most of the 
 cooking was done in the first-named apartment, 
 that arrangement was really less eccentric than it 
 might otherwise have seemed. There was a brass 
 coal-scuttle on the hearthrug, but it was full of 
 water, on which were floating the wrecks of some 
 paper boats, and the coals were contained in 
 Anatole's waste-paper basket. The room was full 
 of smoke, owing to some defect in the chimney, 
 and the window by which it escaped — which was 
 broken — was propped open by a handsomely framed 
 engraving of Meissonier's picture, " La Rixe." To 
 have used any article merely for the purpose for 
 which the manufacturer had intended it would have 
 seemed a pitiable subterfuge to the soaring genius 
 of Madame Anatole. At her hospitable board I 
 have helped myself to butter from a coffee-cup and 
 to salt from a soap-dish, and I have seen her, within 
 the space of one minute, exact service as a paper- 
 cutter and a toothpick from an insignificant bit of 
 metal which the ordinary woman would have re- 
 garded only as a hair-pin. I have seen her stir a 
 potful of soup, boiling on the drawing-room fire, 
 with a shoe-horn, and I have eaten my share of 
 that same soup out of a pie-dish, what time the 
 maid-of-all-work was sent out to fetch a quart of 
 bitter beer from the neighbouring public-house in 
 a celery-glass. Just as Anatole was occasionally 
 assailed by passing spasms of industry, Madame 
 would be suddenly inspired to dress herself with 
 more or less propriety, and I met her one afternoon 
 in Regent Street so beautifully got up that you 
 might have taken her for a Duchess, if only her 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 81 
 
 gloves had been of the same colour and she hadn't 
 been eating a banana. 
 
 Not long after my introduction to this quaint 
 and delightful household Anatole's mother died, 
 and he mourned her with the passionate regret 
 natural to an affectionate heart belonsfinof to so 
 typical a Frenchman. She had left him a little 
 hoard of ready money, which went to the winds in 
 no time, and several personal mementoes, which he 
 clung to ardently, and only parted with at the pinch 
 of dire necessity. Among them was a collection of 
 Sevres and Dresden china figures, of which sort 
 of bric-a-brac the old lady had been an admirable 
 judge. Whereby hangs a tale. The Parisian 
 journal had given Anatole the sack, the only 
 wonder about that being that he had not received 
 it months earlier. The sluttish plenty in which his 
 regular salary and the windfall of his mother's 
 legacy had enabled him and Madame Anatole to 
 live was seriously curtailed before he could make up 
 his mind to part with any relic of " la mere," but 
 needs must, and one morning he came into Town 
 with a beautiful little Louis Quinze shepherdess in 
 his pocket. He took it to a famous pawnbroker's 
 establishment in the Strand, and laid it on the 
 counter. " How much ? " asked the clerk. " Three 
 pounds," replied Anatole. The clerk, who was the 
 mere average cockney, and no judge of any kind of 
 object of art, thought Anatole was " guying " him, 
 and declined to consider the proposition. "If you 
 don't know your business," said Anatole, " ask 
 
 Mr. ," naming the head of the establishment. 
 
 Mr. being called, examined the statuette and 
 
 G 
 
82 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 ordered the clerk to make out the ticket at the sum 
 demanded. The rest of the pretty little figures 
 speedily followed in the same direction, and after 
 several squabbles, all ended by the personally 
 
 delivered verdict of Mr. , it at last got beaten 
 
 into the clerk's head that the insignificant little 
 articles proffered from time to time by the " furrin 
 gent " were really valuable. Then came the day 
 on which the last of the cherished relics of maternal 
 affection had followed the rest, and the money, save 
 one solitary sixpence, had all been spent. Anatole 
 and I were wandering disconsolate along the 
 Strand, when we came to a shop — it stood almost 
 exactly opposite the great pawnbroking establish- 
 ment — which had its window full of all sorts of 
 trumpery trifles, with a card bearing in large letters 
 the legend, " All at 6^." Anatole's eye dwelt, 
 vacantly wistful, on this inscription, and immediately 
 lightened with a flash of genius. " Nom de noin de 
 nom de nom de Dieu, mon amiy quelle inspiration ! 
 Viens done ! " He plunged into the shop, selected 
 from among the heterogeneous trash on the counter 
 the least shapeless lump of porcelain, daubed with 
 the least hideously discordant colours, and paid his 
 sixpence. Then he darted across the street, dis- 
 appeared into the pawnshop, and emerged radiant 
 two minutes later. " How much ? " I asked, faint 
 with admiration of his splendid audacity. " Three 
 pounds," he answered. It is a terrible confession, no 
 doubt, but it is a fact that I made myself particeps 
 eriminis to this particularly impudent specimen of 
 the confidence trick to the extent of lunching on 
 the proceeds of the fraud. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 83 
 
 Anatole's end was as tragic as his life was merry. 
 He went out to the States as acting-manager of a 
 troupe of French comedians, and for a time I heard 
 of him now and then as doing extremely well, and 
 at last as running a company of his own in a piece 
 of his own writing. Then he vanished altogether 
 from my ken, and many years passed before I again 
 heard his name. He had wandered to some semi- 
 civilised region of California, and had somehow fallen 
 into desperate feud with a well-known dangerous 
 character who publicly proclaimed his intention 
 of "finishing" him on the earliest opportunity. 
 Anatole was not a man to be easily frightened. He 
 had proved his contempt of death in fashions which 
 had won him more than one military decoration dur- 
 ing the Franco-German War of 1870. He bought 
 a revolver, and, save for that precaution, took no 
 overt note of his enemy's threats. They came face 
 to face one night unexpectedly in a saloon. The 
 enemy drew his pistol, Anatole drew his ; they fired 
 simultaneously, and fell dead each across the body 
 of the other. 
 
 It was at some time about this period that a 
 certain sombre little incident, of which I have often 
 thought since, and which I shall never forget, 
 occurred. It was the depth of a severe winter, 
 not long before the New Year. I had taken a 
 room on the ground-floor of a house situated in one 
 of the innumerable shabby streets off the eastern 
 side of Tottenham Court Road. The house was 
 full of other lodgers of whom I knew nothing, and 
 saw almost as little, the basement was tenanted by 
 
84 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the landlord and his wife. The former was a huge 
 giant of a man, standing well over six feet in height, 
 a veritable colossus, with a face hard as if hewn out 
 of granite, and with one unchanging expression, of 
 a sort of cold and bitter rage against things in 
 general. His wife was a timid, shrinking, almost 
 voiceless creature, who glided about the house like 
 a shadow. My stay under their roof was a very 
 brief one, but it was long enough for me to learn 
 that their strongest idiosyncrasy — or rather his, 
 for the woman had no proper existence of her own, 
 and was merely a dumb echo of her husband, if the 
 phrase be permissible- — was a sour, narrow, fierce 
 religiosity. There was a Baptist chapel near at 
 hand, of which they were constant attendants, and 
 whose minister was their frequent visitor. Every 
 night and morning the floor of my room used to 
 shake in harmony with a continuous, hollow, thun- 
 derous growl, in which the giant poured out his 
 matinal and nocturnal supplications at what he 
 probably called the Throne of Grace, tenanted, I 
 fear, by some Being as ungracious as ever lent 
 ear to the petitions of a South Sea islander or a 
 Calvinist Scot. 
 
 I had been in the house about a month when, 
 towards two o'clock one morning, I was making my 
 way homeward through as heavy a snowstorm as 
 ever fell on London. The soundless streets were 
 muffled to deadest silence, and the huge, persistent 
 flakes were so thick that they blotted out the gas- 
 lamps at only a few yards distance. As I came to 
 the corner of the street in which I lived I almost 
 ran against the figure of a woman standing there. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 85 
 
 She was as moveless, and as white from head 
 to foot, as the pillar of salt which had once 
 been Lot's wife; and Lot's wife herself, standing 
 alone in the desert after her transformation, could 
 hardly have looked more forlorn or desolate. 
 She started so violently at my appearance that 
 the flakes with which she was coated made a sort 
 of miniature snowstorm of their own about her. 
 I murmured a word of apology, and had made a 
 dozen steps upon my homeward way when I was 
 arrested by the woman's voice. " Sir, oh, sir ! " 
 Few as the words were there was a world of 
 meaning in them, and in the desperate, eager gasp 
 in which they were spoken, and I knew that they 
 had risen many times to her lips that night before 
 they had at last got themselves addressed to me. 
 Conversation in such conditions is apt to be brief, 
 pregnant, and to the point. The woman was there 
 in the deserted street and in that blinding snow- 
 storm because she had nowhere else to go. She 
 had been very ill, she said, and she might have 
 spoken in the actual tense, as the pinched cheeks, 
 the unnaturally bright eyes, ringed with bistrous 
 circles, and the raucous, broken voice, all went to 
 prove. I had no money about me, and even had I 
 possessed any, of what immediate use could it have 
 been ? But I remembered that I had in a cupboard 
 in my room part of a tin of corned beef, a fragment 
 of a loaf, and a bottle of beer. I told her the 
 condition of affairs, and after a moment's hesitation 
 she decided to accompany me. I opened the door 
 of the house with my latchkey, and she followed me 
 into my room, treading so lightly, at my whispered 
 
86 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 request, that I was scarcely conscious of her 
 presence. I spread the simple viands before her, 
 and she attacked them with the very rage of hunger. 
 As I watched her, I heard the thunderous murmur 
 of the landlord's voice below, and stepping quickly 
 to the door locked it as quietly as I could. As I 
 turned again towards my guest, I saw in her face a 
 most horrible and abject fear, a fear which had 
 swallowed up fatigue, hunger, and all other name- 
 able sensations. A muffled, heavy tread came up 
 the wooden stairs leading from the basement, and 
 I could see the girl's heart beating with frantic 
 terror as the steps approached — her body shaking 
 with short, sharp vibrations. The door was tried, 
 an^ of course resisted. " Who's in there with 
 you ? " asked the landlord's voice, and the stricken 
 figure in the chair beside the table seemed to 
 shrink in stature at the vibrant, menacing sound. 
 I replied that I was alone. " You're a liar," the 
 voice throbbed back to me. " You've got a woman 
 with you. Open the door, or I'll break it in." 
 The woman's aspect was abject beyond all language 
 to describe, and I was not free of fear on my own 
 account, for the huge man could have broken me 
 like a biscuit. I made no answer, and with no 
 more ado he set his shoulder to the panel. The 
 flimsy lock broke at the pressure, and the landlord 
 stalked into the room. His gaze fell upon the 
 woman, and he stopped short. How long, as he 
 stood and she sat, both still as figures of carven 
 stone, their eyes dwelt on each other, his with their 
 unchanging, damnatory scowl, hers with a world of 
 terror and amazement and supplication in them, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 87 
 
 I do not know. There are brief flashes of time 
 which seem to fill eternity. Without a word, he 
 raised his hand and waved her to the door. With- 
 out a word she rose and obeyed the gesture, 
 passing him with bent head. He followed. I 
 heard the quick flutter of her feet and his massive 
 tread pass along the hall. The door opened and 
 closed. The heavy tread returned alone, passed 
 my room, and descended the stairs. And there 
 the story ends. I left the house that morning, and 
 have never since set foot in the street in which it 
 stands. 
 
 In that part of the Strand, now demolished, 
 upon which abuts the southern end of Kingsway, 
 stood a little tavern known as the " Spotted Dog." 
 At the back of the ground-floor was a small, ill-lit, 
 ill-ventilated room, where, originally on Saturday 
 afternoons and later on most evenings of the week, 
 a little society of people, mostly journalists, used to 
 come together to talk and smoke. The little band 
 did not, at the moment, include anybody of especial 
 importance, but a rather infrequent visitor there has 
 since become a very great personage indeed. He 
 was a slim-built, eager-looking, quick-eyed, hand- 
 some young fellow, who answered to the name of 
 Alfred Harms worth. My acquaintance with him 
 was only of the slightest, and did not last long, but 
 three-and-twenty years later, when he had become 
 a multi-millionaire, a peer of the realm, and the 
 proprietor of innumerable newspapers, and I was 
 very glad to accept a berth as journalistic odd-job 
 man on the Daily Mirror^ we met again, and had 
 
88 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 a long hour's talk over our common reminiscences. 
 Having eaten his bread for nearly two years — for 
 which, however, I hope I gave a fair and sufficient 
 equivalent in work done — and being able to bear 
 testimony — as I gladly do — that his marvellous 
 success has left him as modest and frank a 
 companion as I ever spent an hour's talk withal, 
 it is with some reluctance that I enter on the 
 expression of my views regarding him as what he 
 verily is — one of the most potent living influences 
 of the day. In his public capacity I believe him 
 to be the incarnation of an evil already great, and 
 one which threatens to develop into as serious 
 a menace to the commonweal as has been seen in 
 England since we kicked James the Second across 
 the Straits of Dover. In exactly how many news- 
 papers he holds a paramount interest I do not 
 know. I have heard the number stated as high as 
 fifty. That is very likely an exaggeration, but it is 
 pretty certain that, if it be so, the exaggeration is 
 merely prophetic. A man in the prime of life, 
 gifted with his ambitious and acquisitive tempera- 
 ment and his business genius, and backed by the 
 capital Lord Northcliffe is able to command, will 
 very certainly not be content to rest and be thankful 
 after the feats of conquest he has already performed. 
 It is matter of common knowledge that he is the 
 sole proprietor or the dominant power of several 
 London daily and weekly journals, including the 
 Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the 
 Globe, the Evening News, the Observer, the Weekly 
 Dispatch, and the World, not to mention such 
 (intellectually) negligible little sheets as Answers, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 89 
 
 Home Chat, and the like ; and that his mandate is 
 law in the editorial offices of a large number of 
 locally-important provincial papers. It will certainly 
 be no great exaggeration to say that Lord North- 
 cliffe can control the utterance of twenty journals 
 of wide circulation, and consequently of considerable 
 authority. When one says that it is of common 
 knowledge that he wields so enormous a power, the 
 statement must be understood as subject to a vast 
 reservation. The common knowledge extends only 
 to journalistic, political, and financial circles, which 
 means that it is matter of common ignorance to 
 at least ninety-five per cent, of the population in 
 general. That means that any item of the great 
 bulk of the British public might find repeated in 
 a dozen or a score of apparently individual and 
 independent newspapers identically the same 
 opinion, differing only in its verbal expression, on 
 any subject of vital importance which might be 
 occupying the public attention at a given moment. 
 If it be urged that the majority of people read only 
 one newspaper — which is true — it may be pointed 
 out in rejoinder — and this is equally true — that the 
 great majority of that majority implicitly adopt the 
 political and sociological views urged by the one 
 journal they read. The number of people who 
 think so or so regarding public questions because 
 the Times, the Telegraph, or the Standard says so 
 or so is enormous, and that one man should be able 
 to convert a score of journals into a poly-megaphone 
 for the blaring forth of his individual opinion over 
 the entire face of England is a grave public danger. 
 It is no less than a contradiction of the vital 
 
90 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 principle on which the only possible utility of a 
 public Press to the community can be based. I am 
 not, and never could have been, an expert on the 
 business side of journalism, and for a man who has 
 passed so much of his life in and about newspaper 
 offices, I am absurdly ignorant of recent journalistic 
 developments. But such common-sense and such 
 knowledge of commercial history as I possess are 
 sufficient to convince me of the frightful peril to 
 which the free expression of free thought in 
 England is exposed by the success of Lord North- 
 cliffe's line of campaign. I take it for granted that 
 that success will have the inevitable result of all 
 similar successes, that other men possessing a larger 
 or smaller modicum of his genius and temperament 
 will imitate his methods, that other corporations 
 similar to that he controls will arise, that, after 
 passing through a prefatory period of internecine 
 warfare, they will combine for their common interest, 
 and that in a very few years from now the entire 
 Press of Great Britain will be merely the mouth- 
 piece of a handful of colossal capitalists, who will 
 dictate to the nation, with none to say them nay, 
 on every conceivable subject, from the tremendous 
 choice of peace or war with other Powers to the 
 price of the morning egg and rasher. That such 
 a corporation would wield its power in the interest 
 of the nation, or in any interest but its own, is an 
 inconceivability I shall waste no time in discussing, 
 since I am not writing this book in order to insult 
 the common-sense of my readers. When Henry 
 Thomas Buckle said that the only possible means 
 of preventing any man, or body of men, from 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 91 
 
 abusing power, was to prevent them from acquiring 
 power, he uttered one of the few absolute and 
 unshakeable verities regarding human nature that 
 have ever been put on paper. I find myself here 
 in the position of a doctor whose skill, sufficient to 
 diagnose a malady, is incompetent to prescribe the 
 remedy. But about my diagnosis I am absolutely 
 certain. Another twenty years of uncontrolled 
 exploitation of the Press on the lines followed by 
 Lord Northcliffe will deliver the British Empire 
 hand and foot, body and soul, to the tender mercies 
 of a journalistic Trust, will make our Sovereign its 
 powerless pensioner, our Lords and Commons the 
 registrars of its ipse dixity and our proletariat a flock 
 of sheep to be fleeced and flayed at its sweet will. 
 
 (I am not writing this book on any fixed plan. 
 Reminiscences and reflections will fall upon the 
 page pretty much in the order in which they occur to 
 me, with no necessary relation to each other in the 
 matter of chronological arrangement, an adjustment 
 which will, I believe, give them a characteristic 
 value higher than that to be attained by presenting 
 them in a less arbitrary order. As Anthony 
 Hamilton says in his " Memoires de Grammont," 
 it is of little importance with what feature of a face 
 a painter may begin if only the portrait, when com- 
 pleted, is a recognisable likeness of the subject who 
 sat for it. Such a method as I propose, carried out 
 in relation to a career so broken as my own, may 
 even not be without its biographical value.) 
 
 During most part of the four or five years from 
 
92 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 which the foregoing reminiscences are culled, my 
 staple income had been derived from the Sporting 
 Life, on the staff of which journal I had been 
 enrolled as dramatic critic through the introduction 
 of my old friend, Byron Webber, now retired from 
 the bustle of active journalistic life. He belonged 
 to a school of publicists now rapidly vanishing. 
 He was an all-round man, who touched life at many 
 points, and so fully that it was something of a 
 wonder how he had managed to acquire so much 
 information of so many and so divergent kinds. 
 His knowledge of English literature was both 
 wide and deep, he was an excellent critic of painting 
 and sculpture, a really learned virtuoso in furniture, 
 china, and domestic art generally, an encyclopaedia 
 of first-hand information regarding pretty nearly 
 every form of sport, and a living history of the 
 English theatre for many years past. 
 
 The first year of my time as a dramatic critic 
 was signalised by the phenomenon remembered in 
 theatrical circles as " the Matinee Rush." A quite 
 wonderful number of amateur playwrights produced 
 pieces at afternoon shows, given mainly at the 
 theatres in the Strand, and especially at the Gaiety. 
 I remember one week in especial, during which I 
 witnessed more or less of seventeen different 
 performances. Of all the pieces so produced 
 I recollect only one which found its way into 
 the regular evening bill, a really funny farce by 
 the late Joseph Derrick, entitled Cofifusiofi, but the 
 London stage was enriched to the extent of one 
 actor and one actress of genuine value. Alice 
 Lingard appeared one afternoon at the Gaiety in 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 93 
 
 " Adrienne Lecouvreur." The day was stiflingly 
 hot, and the curtain rose before a mere scattered 
 handful of spectators. When it rose a second time 
 the audience had markedly increased in number, and 
 at its final fall the house was very fairly full. People 
 had gone out in the intervals and brought in other 
 people, and the result was that, a month or two 
 later. Miss Lingard appeared at the Globe in the 
 leading female part of Sidney Grundy's brilliant 
 comedy The Glass of Fashion^ under the manage- 
 ment of Messrs. Hollingsheadand Shine, and there- 
 after until her death maintained a prominent place 
 amonof London actresses. The actor who was 
 made by the Matinee Rush was Mr. Beerbohm 
 Tree, whom I seem to remember as having played 
 in all the afternoon shows of the time — a physical 
 impossibility. But at that time Mr. Tree, like 
 Ariel, seemed "to divide, and burn in many places." 
 How he managed even to acquire the words of so 
 many parts, to say nothing of investing each part 
 he played — most of them poor, trashy, amateur 
 attempts at characterisation — with some semblance 
 of life and individuality, was in its way something 
 of a miracle. He, too, was given his first real 
 metropolitan chance in The Glass of Fashion, and 
 Prince Perowski was the first item of that long 
 gallery of masterly character studies on which his 
 fame reposes. 
 
 The life of a dramatic critic, when once the 
 novelty of the business has worn off, entails a good 
 deal of rather disgustful drudgery, but I remember 
 my experience in that capacity with pleasure as a 
 whole. It is a purple patch in the fabric of one's 
 
94 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 artistic life to have seen Salvini, incomparably the 
 greatest histrionic artist of his day, with whose 
 retirement from the stage Tragedy died out of 
 the European theatre. No other living actor will 
 ever tempt me from my fireside to see him in 
 certain pieces in which I saw Salvini — Othello^ 
 King Lear, La Morte Civile, or The Gladiator. 
 In the gifts of fire and animation, the Mounet- 
 Sully of twenty years ago and the Lewis Waller 
 of the present day may be said occasionally, in 
 their most inspired moments, to have approached 
 him, but the Titanic massiveness and grandeur of 
 his general style, the literally frightful, paroxysmal 
 quality of his moments of anger or despair, were 
 as far beyond emulation as they are beyond descrip- 
 tion. He was the only actor I have ever seen who 
 had, for long moments together, the power to 
 abolish the footlights, to inspire me to actual for- 
 getfulness of my physical surroundings, with the 
 sentiment of the scene he played, and that in 
 spite of the fact that I am but very indifferently 
 acquainted with the language in which he acted. 
 Language ceased to matter when Salvini crossed 
 the stage. Soul spoke to soul, unimpeded by any 
 such petty, accidental barrier. 
 
 It is time, my reader may perhaps begin to 
 think, that I came to Hecuba, and entered upon 
 the history of my professional misfortunes, about 
 which I made so big a brag in the opening para- 
 graph of this book. My merely literary woes 
 began when I was four-and-twenty. I was living 
 in the village of Rochefort, in the Belgian Ardenne, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 95 
 
 with my brother Christie, acting as his amanuensis. 
 A month or two earlier, in London, I had begun 
 a novel, and I continued to work at it in the 
 intervals of writing at Christie's dictation. It was 
 entitled ** Fooled by Fate," and it contained certain 
 incidents which, with my consent, were afterwards 
 embedded in my brother's novel, " Cynic Fortune." 
 When I had finished it, I sent it — unregistered, 
 which was foolish — to an English firm with a big 
 connection in the story-syndicating line of business. 
 When a month had elapsed without a word of 
 acknowledgment from the firm in question I wrote 
 a shy little note asking when I might hope to know 
 their verdict. I received a prompt reply to the 
 effect that no such volume had reached them. 
 And that was the last I ever heard of it. I do 
 not, looking back on what I can remember of the 
 book, think that the intellectual wealth of the world 
 was much diminished by the loss of " Fooled by 
 Fate." But it had cost me some six months of 
 hard and conscientious labour, the silly dreams of 
 fame and fortune I had known while writing it 
 had been very sweet to me, and their brusque 
 evanishment left my life a little bleak and colourless 
 for a time. 
 
 For quite a while after this misadventure, things 
 went well with me. I wrote a second novel, 
 " Monkey Mephisto," which was published by 
 Messrs. Dicks ^as a Christmas Number, and it 
 brought me my first and only commission, which 
 I fulfilled by writing "A Game of Bluff," published 
 in serial in the Penny Illustrated Paper, and sub- 
 sequently in book form by Messrs. Chatto & Windus. 
 
96 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 I got fair prices and even some small kudos for 
 these books, and began to think myself on my 
 way to become some day something of a personage. 
 Wherein I was as one deceived, and the truth was 
 not in me. 
 
 I began to take myself seriously — always a 
 ludicrous mistake for any writer who is less than 
 a man of indubitable genius. I had always had a 
 high and grave appreciation of the literary craft, 
 and had never regarded my first books as anything 
 more than educational exercises in the great art I 
 tremulously hoped one day to practise worthily. 
 While I was writing the last chapters of " A Game 
 of Bluff," I conceived the idea of a story I at first 
 entitled " A Page of Life," afterwards — long after- 
 wards — given to the world as " A Song of Sixpence." 
 Elderly people who write, or who have written, 
 will need no stale and tedious reminder of the 
 sensations, so intense, so bewildering, so inspiring, 
 so terrifying, which accompany the gestation of 
 their first Great Book. I sometimes wonder if 
 the first perception of the quickening of the actual 
 flesh-and-blood baby in the mother's womb can be 
 a more wonderful experience. 
 
 Christie and I had wandered to Paris. It was 
 the winter of 1886 — the severest winter, I have 
 heard many people say, since that of LAnnee 
 Terrible. Christie — as was frequently the case 
 with him — was behindhand with his work, and we 
 were slaving double tides to make up for lost time. 
 He composed with marvellous rapidity and fluency, 
 and for some weeks I set on paper to his dictation a 
 daily average of five thousand words. That, in itself. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 97 
 
 would have been no bad day's work, but when 
 it was done, and Christie was recreating himself 
 at the cafe or the theatre, I was sitting in my room, 
 grinding out, with a slow laboriousness in pathetic 
 contrast with his dexterous rapidity, the pages of 
 " A Song of Sixpence." By what strange process 
 of cerebration such a feat was feasible I cannot 
 say, but I know that, while my fingers were often 
 taxed to keep pace with my brother's fluent tongue, 
 and while one half my brain was keenly watching 
 and admiring what my fingers wrote, the other half 
 was elaborating touches of character and turns of 
 phrase to be duly set down in my solitary labour 
 later on. I know that, when, night after night I 
 stumbled, drunk with fatigue, into bed, the two sets 
 of imaginary people and the widely divergent worlds 
 in which they moved got themselves mixed up in 
 an imbecile and exasperating jumble which made 
 sleep a sort of ludicrous terror. I know that night 
 after night I left that unrestful slumber, to sit in 
 night-shirt and dressing-gown, with a foot of snow 
 on the window-sill outside, and to beat and blow 
 my chilled blue fingers to some faint consciousness 
 of the pen between them. I claim so much credit 
 in connection with that miserable book, doomed to 
 cost me months of hope deferred and bitter dis- 
 appointment, that it was written with a level passion 
 of resolute endeavour to touch the high-water mark 
 of all that 1 was then capable of in human know- 
 ledge and human sympathy and in artistry of 
 achievement. And I would willingly go through all, 
 and more than, the pain it was destined to cause 
 me, to hear hearty, kindly George Sims say of 
 
 H 
 
98 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 another book, as he said of " A Song of Sixpence," 
 that it was " the best bit of work he had read for 
 years ; " to hsten to the words of praise it drew 
 from great-hearted Robert Buchanan, the best and 
 dearest friend I ever had ; or to read, written 
 by the hand which had given the world " Richard 
 Feverel " and " Beauchamp's Career," that " in 
 George Murdoch I had created one of the few 
 living, breathing men in modern fiction." 
 
 For it did get pubhshed at last, three years and 
 nine months after, in a white-walled villa perched on 
 the heights of Montboron, with the salt smell of the 
 Mediterranean piercing the heavy odours of rose 
 and eucalyptus, and the lights of the Promenade des 
 Anglais twinkling along the Baie des Anges — a 
 wonderful change from sleet-riddled Paris — I laid 
 down my pen beside the final page of the manu- 
 script. I have never had any satisfactory assurance 
 that the sexual morality of England has shown 
 any marked decline since it appeared, but no fewer 
 than six-and-thirty publishers, moved by patriotic 
 dread of that result, refused to father it. Six- 
 and-thirty robust, well-nourished men shook and 
 paled over that poor little bundle of manuscript. 
 One of them read it three times and three times 
 recoiled from the dread responsibility. "Why?" 
 I asked in ever-growing wonder, and I ask it 
 still. One of the primmest old ladies I ever 
 knew, a very dragon of all the proprieties, said 
 to me regarding it, in her quaint, quavering old 
 voice, " I'm afraid you are not a good man, Mr. 
 Murray, but you have written a very good book." 
 I have had letters from people whose faces I never 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 99 
 
 saw, thanking me for having written " A Song of 
 Sixpence." I have never heard an unfriendly word 
 about it from man or woman. It was published 
 nineteen years ago, and it is selling still, and I got 
 ten pounds for it, and shall never see another 
 penny. I was glad enough to get that, or anything 
 at all, for it, and had offered it to half a score of 
 publishers as a free gift. 
 
 A circumstance which, perhaps, partially ex- 
 plained this cold reception of my literary bantling 
 was that, about this time, a clique of sexless 
 simpletons known as the National Vigilance Com- 
 mittee had prosecuted Mr. Henry Vizitelly for 
 publishing much-Bowdlerised versions of some of 
 Zola's ** Rougon-Macquart " series, and had suc- 
 ceeded in sending the veteran publisher and publicist 
 to prison for twelve months. Still, novels much 
 more questionable, both in incident and phraseology, 
 than " A Song of Sixpence " were appearing with 
 the imprimatur of London houses. When Chatto 
 & Windus at last made up their minds to publish 
 my book, they insisted on one excision. I had 
 spoken of " those members of the Sorrowful Sister- 
 hood who haunt the purlieus of the midnight 
 Haymarket." That not very rampant indecency 
 was ruthlessly suppressed, and from that fact the 
 reader who does not know " A Song of Sixpence " 
 may get a fair idea of its verbal chastity or coarse- 
 ness. I had, in fact, written the book with what I 
 thought — and think — an excess of reticence. And, 
 while it was still passing from hand to hand, a firm 
 which had shudderingly declined to publish it 
 brought out another novel, from which I cull one 
 
100 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 phrase, with sincere apologies for inflicting on my 
 readers anything so nasty. It describes the odours 
 of the ladies present at a ball, ending up with 
 " the stench, deep as the pedal-notes of an organ, 
 exhaled by the armpits of a corpulent dowager." 
 As I am a living man, the firm which declined to 
 publish me, published that ! I do not, and I will 
 not, believe that any circumstance at once so galling, 
 so futile, and so ludicrous, has ever happened to any 
 other man who has ever held a pen. I remember 
 telling James Whistler about it, and I shall never 
 forget his shriek of eldritch laughter nor the 
 characteristic comment which followed. " By gad, 
 sir, such a fool as that's wasted as a publisher. He 
 ought to have been an art critic. What ! " 
 
 Apropos of Whistler, let me set down here a 
 droll incident in which the great little artist was 
 concerned. Sitting one morning at breakfast in 
 Paris, I read in the Figaro that the Luxembourg 
 Gallery had acquired Whistler's famous " Portrait 
 of his Mother." I determined to see it, and to 
 utilise the luncheon hour for the purpose. Having 
 no time to lose in wandering about the Gallery 
 looking for the picture, I applied to one of the 
 attendants. '* Vous avez ici," I said, " un tableau 
 recemment acquis, le Portrait de sa Mere, par le 
 peintre americain, M. Whistler." Much to my sur- 
 prise, the functionary made me a low bow, and with 
 every sign of the most respectful solicitude, begged 
 me to do him the honour of accompanying him. 
 He took me to the portrait, expressed a hope that 
 I approved of the light and the place in which it 
 was hung, and of the company in which it found 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 101 
 
 itself upon the wall. Then I understood. The 
 man had noted my foreign-sounding French, and 
 had jumped to the conclusion that I was *' le peintre 
 americain " in person. I said nothing to indurate 
 that impression, but nothing to correct it, and on 
 leaving the place gave him a five-franc piece. A 
 little later I met Whistler in the Rue de Rivoli, and 
 told him of the adventure. " Oh ! Eh ? What ? 
 You are the confounded fellow, eh } Why, by 
 gad, sir, when I went to the Gallery yesterday, 
 they wouldn't believe I had painted my own 
 picture ! " 
 
 To return to my subject. I have suffered a 
 good deal at the hands of publishers, but I bear so 
 little malice that I will make them a present of a 
 bit of wisdom, at which, had I never been spurred 
 on to think on certain subjects by their dealings 
 with me, I might never have arrived. A quelque- 
 chose malheur est 6on. It is a sad fact that, as a 
 class, they are more ignorant of their business than 
 any other set of men I know or know of. They 
 are the helpless slaves of a little set of superstitions 
 and a little set of phrases. One of the most 
 cherished of their superstitions, and the most 
 fundamentally foolish of them all, is that there is 
 in actual, objective existence a certain body which 
 they call "the public." There is, as a matter of 
 fact, no such body. There is, in its place, a quite 
 innumerable lot of little bodies — the publics. There 
 are, for instance, Mr. George Meredith's public and 
 Miss Marie Corelli's public. There are Mr. J. M. 
 Barrie's public and Mr. Jerome K. Jeromes public. 
 There is a public which likes to laugh and a public 
 
102 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 that likes to cry, a public that welcomes thought 
 and a public which shuns thought as the universal 
 enemy shuns holy water. There is an already 
 great, and rapidly growing public, which is quite 
 emancipated from old-womanish terror of the new 
 or the unusual in ethics and social philosophy, a 
 public which is inclined rather to welcome original 
 absurdities in those directions, if they are only 
 cleverly expressed, than to turn from any serious 
 experiment in morals or idea. There is — and 
 perhaps always will be — a vast public which still 
 thinks it wise to tell their children that they were 
 found in wells and parsley beds, the sort of people 
 for whose behoof, a few years ago, an edition of 
 " David Copperfield," minus the episode of Steer- 
 forth and Little Em'ly, expunged as " unfit for 
 publication," was issued. There are points at 
 which some of these different publics overlap, like 
 the scales of a fish, but they are as absolutely 
 distinct one from another, and, as bodies, they have 
 no more inter-relation than the lovers of Wagner 
 and Berlioz have with the admirers of the gentlemen 
 who composed " Woa, Emma ! " or " Two Lovely 
 Black Eyes." Every writer of talent has his public 
 ready made, waiting and eager for him, whether he 
 deals in tears or laughter, in thought or in horse- 
 play, in idealism or in pickle-herring farce. To say 
 to any author regarding any book, as was said to 
 me by six-and-thirty different publishers regarding 
 " A Song of Sixpence," " It's very clever, but the 
 public does not want it," is to give utterance to as 
 flat and foolish a contradiction in terms as was 
 ever spoken by the lips of man. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 103 
 
 I have sometimes wondered whether the institu- 
 tion of a British Academy of Letters, for which 
 Matthew Arnold pleaded so insistently, might not 
 find its strongest justification in a direction regarding 
 which Arnold found nothing to say. It might be 
 within the power of such a body to render practically 
 impossible such stupid outrages on liberty and 
 thought as, for instance, the prosecution of Mr. 
 Vizitelly, to which I have already alluded, and, by 
 a timely protest, or even by its mere silence and 
 inaction, rescue the publisher and the public from 
 the fussy and incalculable action of cliques of well- 
 intentioned but uncultured busybodies. It is simply 
 because organised and drilled stupidity is stronger 
 than scattered and leaderless intelligence that such 
 corporations as the National Vigilance Society, which 
 do not count in their membership one name respect- 
 able in Letters or in Art, are able spasmodically to 
 impose their Sunday-school morality on the nation, 
 and — incidentally — to make England the laughing- 
 stock of Europe. An ordinary police magistrate, 
 however admirably he may discharge the general 
 run of his duties — and the stipendiary magistrates 
 of London are as valuable a set of public servants 
 as is possessed by any city in the world — certainly 
 does not form the ideal tribunal for the decision of 
 what is or is not expedient in either Art or Litera- 
 ture. This contention was proved to my mind 
 pretty conclusively by the late Mr. Vaughan, of 
 Bow Street (who sat in judgment on the Zola- 
 Vizitelly business), in regard to Mr. Rudolf Blind's 
 picture, " The World's Desire," prosecuted by one 
 or other of our irresponsible Bumble-cum-Podsnap 
 
104 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 societies for the Propagation of Prurient Prudery. 
 Mr. Blind was astute enough to call a body of 
 expert witnesses, among whom figured the late 
 Ford Madox Brown and Sir Alma Tadema, in his 
 defence. Mr. Vaughan, in his summing up, said 
 that, in his opinion, the picture stood condemned as 
 immoral and indecent, but he did not see his way to 
 impose that opinion against the contradictory view 
 expressed by such authorities as the witnesses for 
 the defence. It was the utterance of an honest 
 man, but it reduced to absurdity the position in 
 which Mr. Vaughan was placed by the law. It 
 was a case for the decision of the Royal Academy, 
 but that institution, having no legal status in the 
 matter, uttered no word. The Academy had been 
 silent also — to its indelible disgrace — in a much 
 graver affair which had happened a year or two 
 earlier. M. Garnier, a French artist of distinguished 
 talent, had painted a gallery of over a hundred 
 pictures illustrative of episodes from the adventures 
 of the immortal Pantagruel, perhaps the most remark- 
 able monument ever raised by the genius of a painter 
 to the genius of a writer. The paintings, after 
 attracting vast crowds in Paris, were transferred to 
 London. Some dozen of them were selected as a 
 casus belli between the National Vigilance Society 
 and the exhibitors ; the day went against the latter, 
 the pictures were ordered to be destoyed, and were 
 only saved from that fate by an indignant remon- 
 strance, delivered through the French Ambassador, 
 from the Ministry of Fine Arts in Paris, England 
 is surely the only country in Europe in which so 
 ignobly stupid an affair would have been possible. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 105 
 
 The national muddle-headedness regarding the 
 question of morality in Art, and the culpable supine- 
 ness of the men whose bounden duty it is to make 
 Art respected — the men who have succeeded greatly 
 in its practice — were illustrated with a quite curious 
 completeness by the selection of the present Licensor 
 of Plays, Mr. George Alexander Redford. At the 
 time of his appointment I wrote to the Westminster 
 Gazette a brief note, asking why, out of the forty 
 odd million nobodies who compose the population 
 of the British Islands, this especial person should 
 have been chosen for such a post. The Westminster 
 Gazette printed my query, but it passed unanswered 
 — as I suppose, because it was unanswerable. Mr. 
 Redford had, I am informed, spent a blameless 
 youth in the occupation of passing sovereigns over 
 a bank-counter in a copper shovel — an unquestion- 
 ably benevolent but not conspicuously intellectual 
 employment, and no more obviously " moral " than, 
 for example, weighing cheese or cutting out trousers. 
 Why such a person should have been installed as 
 guardian of the dramatic proprieties is certainly 
 something of a nut to crack. The introduction of 
 Mr. Robert Harcourt's Theatres Bill, which pro- 
 poses to transfer Mr. Redford's powers to the 
 County Council, gives warrant for a hope that his 
 official line may not stretch quite so far as Banquo's 
 progeny, but I cannot say that that hope greatly 
 comforts me. Legend tells us of a certain "old 
 woman of Syracuse," who fervently prayed for the 
 continued life of the Emperor Nero " lest the devil 
 should reign after him." I feel myself rather in the 
 position of that apocryphal old lady. I am strongly 
 
106 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 inclined to doubt whether the County Council will 
 much better Mr. Redford's instruction in the post 
 he occupies. I have never been able to see any 
 possible use at all in such a post. I have never 
 been able to understand why the freedom accorded 
 for generations past to the man who puts his ideas 
 into the form of a book or speaks them from the 
 pulpit or the platform should be denied to him who 
 prefers to express them in dialogue intended to be 
 delivered from the stage. To me, it is as marvellous 
 as it is disgusting — I can find no milder word — that 
 men of the intellectual status of those who provide 
 our drama should submit to so degrading a tutelage, 
 whatever may be the form it takes. Such a tute- 
 lage is an insult to every man and every woman 
 who writes in English matter intended for publica- 
 tion ; it is an especial insult to every man and every 
 woman who treads the stage ; and they stamp the 
 insult indelibly on their own foreheads so long as 
 they fail in their plain human duty to resent it. 
 
 It is not possible to compute how much England 
 loses by the nullification of native talent and in 
 the consideration of other cultured nations by this 
 stupid cowardice on the part of her leading artists 
 and literati. Let me here offer to anybody who 
 cares to avail himself of it an easy opportunity for a 
 bit of cheap sarcasm by recounting another of my 
 own experiences. Six years ago I compiled a 
 volume I entitled " The Pessimist's Birthday Book," 
 to which I wrote a preface in the form of an essay 
 on "The Necessity of Pessimism." The philosophy 
 of the essay can be summed up in two sentences I 
 proposed to print upon the title-page. The first is 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 107 
 
 from the pen of M. Museux, and runs as follows : 
 Le Pessimisnie progressiste, celui qui ne se contente 
 pas de ddplorer le mat, mais poursuit P amelioration 
 morale et sociale de ce qtd est, voila la philosophie 
 fortijiante dont nous avons besoin en cette ipoque 
 troubl^e. The second sentence is the work of the 
 Rev. Mr. G. M. Kaufman : "It is a sensible remark 
 of Malon's that our wisdom consists perhaps in 
 thinking en Pessimiste, for the nature of things is 
 cruel and bad, and to act en Optimiste^ for human 
 intervention is efficacious for moral and social im- 
 provement." In the course of the essay, I found 
 it necessary to express my views regarding super- 
 natural religion in general and Christianity in par- 
 ticular, and I compared the last-named faith, greatly 
 to its disadvantage, with Buddhism. After vainly 
 offering the book to several publishers I induced a 
 distinguished friend to forward the preface to the 
 editor of a leading Review, who returned it to him 
 with expressions of deep regret that he was unable 
 to use it on account of the strength of its attack 
 upon Christianity. Of the work, regarded merely 
 as literature, he spoke in the most cordial terms. 
 Now, I am not so unreasonable as to feel any ill- 
 will against the editor in question. In common 
 fairness I have to recognise the extremely ungrateful 
 position in which he found himself. As a man of 
 intelligence, with the intellectual prestige of his 
 Review at heart, he naturally wanted to publish a 
 piece of work of which he could speak in such 
 terms. But as a man of business in a position of 
 business trust it is his plain duty to consider the 
 feelings of the shareholders he represents, and in a 
 
108 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 battle between such interests it needs no prophet to 
 tell us which interest must win. But the question 
 will intrude itself — how often will a thoughtful 
 man so placed find himself in the course of any 
 given twelve months in a precisely similar position, 
 and how many thoughtful utterances regarding grave 
 problems will he be forced to reject because of the 
 pusillanimity of the power behind the editorial 
 chair ? And the further question follows inevitably 
 — how can a country in which discussion of social 
 and religious questions is so hampered hope intel- 
 lectually to compete with countries in which, as in 
 France and Germany, it is inconceivable that any 
 cleanly written expression of sane opinion on any 
 nameable topic could be so boycotted ? I say 
 deliberately that Englishmen of intelligence can 
 find no task more worthy or more cryingly demand- 
 ing their attention than to devise some means by 
 which the brains of England can be emancipated 
 from the intolerable bondage of the stupidest and 
 least-cultured section of the English public. 
 
 The hotel in which I invariably put up in Paris 
 was a comfortable little hostelry situated between 
 the Rue de Provence and the Place de I'Opera. 
 It was kept by an old gentleman whom I will call 
 M. Paulet, who was a good deal of a character. 
 He was a remarkably handsome old man, and one 
 of those people of whom Charles Lamb says that 
 cleanliness seems in them something more than a 
 mere absence of its opposite. He had the clean, 
 pink-and-white complexion of a healthy baby, and 
 a rich mass of pure white hair, which, like his 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 109 
 
 moustache and the obsolete long whiskers he 
 affected, shone like delicate filaments of frosted 
 silver wire. On one occasion I accompanied him 
 on a visit to the country. He was got up for the 
 occasion in a suit of white duck, with a white linen 
 hat and white shoes, and he sparkled so that it posi- 
 tively hurt one's eyes to look at him. We went to 
 visit an old friend of his, a M. Mauri, who had the 
 reputation of being the best laugher in France. 
 Fortune favoured him — and us — with an opportunity 
 for him to exhibit his powers in that direction. 
 M. Paulet was by way of being a naturalist, 
 and, like Ingoldsby's Sir Thomas, he went footling 
 about a weed-covered duck-pond in search of 
 specimens, and fell in. He emerged a ludicrous 
 object, with his hat, his long Dundreary whiskers, 
 his handsome Roman nose, and every angle of the 
 erst-spotless white ducks dripping strings of green 
 slime. We set out for the house, and, turning a 
 bend in the road, met M. Mauri face to face. The 
 latter dropped on to a bank by the roadside as if he 
 had been shot, and laughed, as Carlyle says con- 
 cerning a similar performance of Herr Teufelsdroch, 
 ** like the neighing of all Tattersall's." He howled 
 and yelled and screamed and bellowed and snorted, 
 spouting laughter as a whale spouts water. M. 
 Paulet stood calmly smiling till he had laughed 
 himself to quiet, and then said, with a beautiful 
 wave of the weed-bedraggled white hat, " Mauri, tu 
 ris ? Te salutant ! " — which I thought as good a 
 joke as could have been expected in the circum- 
 stances. 
 
 Paulet had, in early life, been a friend of Henri 
 
no A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Murger, and he and the great poet-historiographer 
 of Bohemia had once played the audacious trick of 
 running together an unlicensed cafe, a freak which 
 had cost them some months of exile, until the 
 offended authorities could be " squared " by friends 
 in high places. Another friend of his, and a one- 
 time inmate of his hotel, was M. Belmontet, now 
 long since forgotten, but at one time the laughing- 
 stock of literary Europe in his self-imposed style of 
 " le poete de I'Empire." M. Paulet promised me an 
 introduction to this gentleman — a promise which, 
 to my real regret, was never fulfilled. He seems 
 to have been a quite mild and blameless person, 
 whose brain had been turned — like that of many an 
 abler man — by the success of Napoleon the Third's 
 murderous coup d'etat. He expressed his admiration 
 of his idol in what were probably the most execrable 
 verses ever penned by mortal man, which he printed 
 and sedulously distributed at his proper cost. The 
 rumour that the Emperor had paid him a handsome 
 yearly pension out of his private pocket on condition 
 that he ceased those proceedings may have been 
 merely a calumny, but may also conceivably have 
 been the statement of a fact. To be cursed by 
 Victor Hugo was bad, no doubt ; but to be blessed 
 by Belmontet must have been even more painful to a 
 man who, poor creature as he was in most respects, 
 possessed real literary discrimination. Of the hun- 
 dreds of lines of incredible balderdash of Belmontet's 
 composition which M. Paulet repeated to me at odd 
 times 1 remember only three. Two form the pero- 
 ration of an Ode to the Emperor on the occasion 
 of the opening of the Halles Centrales — " Le 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 111 
 
 Ventre de Paris," as Zola called them — and ran 
 thus — 
 
 A 
 
 " O peuple de Pans, que belles sont tes Halles ! 
 Beni soit I'Empereur qui nous les fit Centrales ! " 
 
 The third was, according to M. Paulet, the verse 
 which won for its author the Imperial pension. It 
 was the closing line of a poem inspired by the 
 public rejoicings occasioned by the cessation of the 
 Crimean War — 
 
 '* Le vrai feu d' artifice est d'etre magnanime ! " 
 
 I asked what was supposed to have been the 
 amount of the pension which had induced the Poet 
 of the Empire to desert his Muse. "On dit," said 
 M. Paulet, with perfect gravity, "que c'etait un 
 million par an. Mais, mon ami, si j'avais ete capable 
 d'embeter Badinguet avec des vers comme 9a, ce 
 n'est pas une telle mesquinerie qui m'aurait clou^ le 
 bee." 
 
 In Paulet the French stage had lost a comedian 
 of exceptional power. He was a fun-maker of a 
 curious type, and nothing but his really captivating 
 personality and the genuine kindness of heart which 
 no eccentricity could long obscure could have saved 
 him from frequent assault and battery. On the 
 first occasion on which I dined at his table he 
 gave a specimen of his peculiar cast of humour. 
 There was a staid, portly, prosperous-looking 
 provincial gentleman present, whom I afterwards 
 learned to be an avoui in good practice in a 
 country town. M. Paulet offered him a dish of 
 mushrooms, which he politely refused, saying that 
 
112 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 he did not like them. Paulet's face flushed red, 
 and his steel-blue eyes flashed unspeakable wrath 
 and contempt. " You do not like them ! " he 
 thundered, in a voice like the clangour of a brazen 
 gong. ** No ! the simple fruits of the patient earth, 
 of the generous mother of us all, are not for such as 
 you, whose senses are depraved and whose souls 
 are spotted by such debaucheries as Nero and 
 Commodus would have blushed to perpetrate ! Ah ! 
 but I recognise you well, unworthy son of a desolate 
 motherland, too-worthy representative of the gene- 
 ration whose nameless and unheard-of vices brought 
 upon our once great and glorious France the ruinous 
 disasters of the year '70 ! " This, and a good deal 
 more in the same Ercles' vein, he poured out upon 
 the "amazed and indignant provincial, and he ended 
 up his denunciation by a truly frightful prophetic 
 picture of the poor gentleman's death upon the 
 guillotine, with a vivid touch about the devil 
 standing by to catch his soul at the moment it 
 jumped out of his neck. Then, with an absolute 
 change of manner, he said, addressing the rest of 
 his astonished auditory, " I ought to say that this 
 is the first time I have ever had the honour of 
 beholding this gentleman, who makes me the effect 
 of a most honest citizen and worthy person. A voire 
 sanUy Monsieur." Madame Paulet, who was a 
 woman of business, and did not approve of this 
 fashion of addressing solvent and respectable clients, 
 was fluent in apologies to the stranger and in angry 
 objurgations of her husband's folly and rudeness. 
 " Go, excellent but stupid female," replied Paulet, 
 with placid dignity. " Monsieur and I are Great 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 113 
 
 Souls, floating in an ether thou couldst not breathe, 
 and we comprehend one another. Go, thou, boil 
 thy pot, cherish thy children, and thank God for thy 
 husband." And that same night the worthy pro- 
 vincial, whom I came to know well, and who turned 
 out to be a very good fellow indeed, took M. and 
 Madame Paulet to the theatre, and to an excellent 
 supper afterwards. 
 
 In common with every other assortment of 
 human beings I have ever intimately known, the 
 society of M. Paulet's hotel was full of interest. 
 There was a poor fellow who lived in the garret, 
 and who, I fear, would not have lived even there 
 long had M. Paulet been a less patient and kindly 
 host. He called himself a journalist, and was one 
 of the thousand rath of the artistic life who swarm 
 in every great city. He wrote verse and fiction 
 indomitably, but had never succeeded in getting 
 any of his productions published, and the few francs 
 a week he managed to scrape together came mainly 
 from a small provincial journal for which he con- 
 cocted a hash of Parisian small-talk culled from the 
 columns of metropolitan newspapers. Shabby and 
 half-starved and fireless, it was his lot to describe 
 banquets at which he could never hope to sit, and 
 fetes and premieres and flower-shows, an invitation 
 to any one of which would probably have killed 
 him with sheer amazement. To this poor fellow a 
 curious little incident occurred. He was employed 
 to make a fair copy of a mass of documents which 
 had to be delivered at the Palais de Justice abso- 
 lutely without fail at a certain hour on a certain 
 morning. He toiled away at his task for a couple 
 
 I 
 
114 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 of days on end, and then, feeling that he must 
 either sleep or go mad, calculated how much — 
 or rather, how little — repose he could afford to 
 allow himself, and gave a few Ill-spared coppers to 
 Celestin, the boots of the hotel, to wake him at a 
 given moment. Celestin forgot the commission, 
 and the poor devil slept the sleep of complete 
 exhaustion until he awoke within an hour of the 
 time at which the delivery of the documents was 
 due. With tears and sobs of despair he reproached 
 the careless youth, but, his eye falling on the table 
 on which lay his work, he saw that It was finished. 
 He had completed it in his sleep. 
 
 Among the guests was one to whom I took a 
 strong liking, an old Spanish gentleman, whose 
 manner was beyond description winning and courtly. 
 He had amassed a moderate competence in trade, 
 and made no sort of pretence to be anything but 
 what he was, but no grandee of his nation could 
 have excelled the exquisite polish of his urbanity. 
 He was universally liked, but all the same was 
 regarded by most of his fellow-guests as something 
 of a bore, Inasmuch as almost his only conver- 
 sational topic was his son, who had succeeded him 
 In his former business as a fruit merchant at Lima. 
 Bets used to be made as to how long he would 
 remain In the salle-a-manger or the salon without 
 making mention of this son, as to how often he 
 would mention him In a given time, and so on. 
 The son fell ill. I do not know the cost of tele- 
 graphing from Lima to Paris, but during the week 
 or so after the old gentleman first knew of his son's 
 indisposition a little fortune must have been spent 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 115 
 
 on the bulletins which rained upon him from South 
 America. He had just taken his seat at table 
 one midday when one arrived. He made his 
 accustomed little bend of apology to Madame 
 Paulet, opened the missive, and fell an inert mass 
 beside his chair. He was raised and carried to his 
 bed, from which he never rose again. He was 
 dead within a week. The telegram consisted of the 
 four crude words, " Voire fils est morty M. Paulet 
 read it out to the company, and curses loud and 
 deep were showered upon the brutal blockhead 
 who had despatched it. The incident was the 
 occasion of an interesting little display of a certain 
 type of French character. C— — , a basso singer, 
 who shortly after appeared with great success at 
 Covent Garden, a genuine typical Provengal, who 
 seemed to have stepped out of the covers of one of 
 Ernest Daudet's novels, was so affected that he 
 sat undisguisedly weeping like a child. A fellow 
 meridional, a jovial, noisy humorist, who was an 
 avocat, burst into the room, full of a funny incident 
 which had happened that morning in one of the 
 
 Law Courts, and in another minute C , the 
 
 tears yet glistening in his big black beard like dew 
 upon a bramble bush, was shaking the roof and 
 making the glasses ring with peal on peal of 
 delighted laughter. 
 
 It was immediately after the sale of my novel, 
 "A Game of Bluff," that a series of events hap- 
 pened which, as much as anything that has ever 
 occurred to me, illustrated the arbitrary and incal- 
 culable character of my luck. Christie and I 
 
116 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 established ourselves for a week or two at a certain 
 popular resort on the coast of Normandy, in an 
 hotel conducted by a plump, personable, kindly 
 old French lady, Madame Bruix. Among our 
 fellow-guests was a handsome young English girl, 
 apparently about nineteen years of age. She in- 
 terested me by more than one circumstance. She 
 was quite alone, she never either received or wrote 
 a letter, and every morning immediately after break- 
 fast she disappeared for the entire day until the 
 dinner-hour. The landlady was a good deal of a 
 gossip, and one day, with no invitation at all on 
 my part, entered on a resume of what she knew 
 concerning her whom she called my " belle petite 
 compatriote," to whom I shall henceforth refer as 
 Miss Lucy March. Her history up to date had 
 been unfortunate. She was the daughter of a 
 once-flourishing professional man who had hope- 
 lessly ruined his career in a fashion not necessary 
 to rehearse here, and of a lady then in an asylum, 
 whose mental derangement had been precipitated, 
 if not wholly caused, by her husband's ill-treatment 
 of her, followed by his public disgrace. Miss 
 March had been born into the Anglican com- 
 munion, but had 'verted to Rome. Her father 
 had fled into hiding, nobody knew whither, and 
 she was absolutely alone in the world, with a fast- 
 melting capital of some few score pounds between 
 herself and complete destitution. A friend had 
 given her an introduction to the Mother-Superior 
 of a convent in the neighbourhood, and it was 
 there she passed the major part of each day, study- 
 ing conventual life with the object of discovering 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 117 
 
 whether she felt the vocation, and would be justified 
 in joining the Sisterhood. 
 
 Miss March and I became acquainted, and I 
 fell into the habit of conducting her to and from 
 the convent gate, and so, quite easily, to sharing 
 her evening walks on the sea-shore. I was a few 
 years her senior, and in the absence of any other 
 possible confidant it was natural enough that she 
 should sooner or later appeal for such sympathy 
 and advice as I could give. I heard anew the 
 details I had learned from Madame Bruix, and 
 Miss March further confided to me the confession 
 that every hour she passed in the convent revealed 
 to her more clearly her utter unfitness for its 
 discipline. She was almost at the end of her 
 slender resources, she was painfully conscious of 
 her unpreparedness to battle with the world, the 
 future was growing every moment more and more 
 terrible to contemplate — what could she do ? 
 
 She was, as I have said, a handsome girl, of a 
 rather striking and unusual type of dark beauty. 
 She had a conspicuous gracefulness of movement 
 and gesture, and a pleasing voice. I suggested the 
 stage as a possible avenue to independent bread 
 and cheese, and offered her an introduction to my 
 friend Henry Herman, who was just on the point 
 of leasing the Opera Comique for the production of 
 an extravaganza. Miss March closed gladly with 
 the proposal, and a day or two later returned to 
 London furnished with the promised introduction. 
 Herman, one of the kindest of men, engaged her 
 as a member of the chorus, and, although at that 
 moment by no means too well off, paid her double 
 
118 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the usual salary. She wrote me a letter of thanks 
 for my assistance, and Christie and myself shortly 
 after migrating to Nice, for awhile I lost sight of 
 her. Passing, a few months later, through the 
 Norman watering-place, I heard of her again. 
 Herman's extravaganza had failed to attract, but 
 Herman, with his usual good-hearted loyalty, had 
 found her another engagement elsewhere. Then 
 she had fallen ill — so ill that she had received the 
 viaticum, and had escaped death almost by a 
 miracle. Business took me to London, and being 
 there I called upon her. She had fallen into kind 
 hands, and had almost completely recovered from 
 her illness, but she was pathetically helpless and 
 solitary. I had just sold my novel, " A Game of 
 Bluff," my pocket was full of money and my heart 
 full of hope, and the idea occurred to me — why not 
 marry her ? I was no more in love with her than I 
 had — and have — been with a hundred other pretty 
 women, which, as things were destined to fall out, 
 was fortunate for me, but I returned to Nice a 
 fortnight later an engaged man, with the under- 
 standing that Lucy was to join me there directly 
 the purchase of her trousseau was completed. 
 Meanwhile the priest of the church she attended in 
 London undertook to procure for her from the then 
 Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster — the great 
 and noble Henry Edward Manning — the necessary 
 dispensation enabling her to marry one outside the 
 pale of the Catholic Church. 
 
 The peculiar strangeness of the adventure 
 beofan almost from the moment of her arrival at 
 Nice. I met her at the station, took her to a 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 119 
 
 neighbouring restaurant for luncheon, and, having 
 seen her luggage mounted on a four-wheeled cab, 
 gave the driver the address — that of the Convent 
 du Cceur de Marie, on Montboron, to whose 
 Superior Lucy bore an introduction from the 
 Mother of a similar establishment in London. 
 I remembered afterwards an undefinable air of 
 humorous surprise on the face of our charioteer as 
 he heard the direction, but at the moment thought 
 nothing of it. The cab mounted the hill, and 
 stopped after a journey of considerable length in 
 front of a heap of charred and smoking ruins. I 
 called to the driver to go on, to which he replied, 
 " Mais nous sommes arrives, m'sieu. Voici le 
 Convent du Coeur de Marie"! The convent had 
 been burned to the ground the night before, 
 and I now understood the cryptic amusement with 
 which the jarvey had received my instructions. 
 For the moment I was nonplussed. Then I asked 
 the practical humorist if there was any other 
 similar establishment in the neighbourhood. He 
 replied, with Voltairean irreverence, that the moun- 
 tain was pouilleuse with des boites de cette espece, 
 I bade him drive to the nearest. He did so. My 
 ring at the bell was answered by a black-garmented 
 old recluse to whom I presented my card, begging 
 her to transmit it to her Superior and to say that a 
 young English lady in distressful circumstances had 
 need of her counsel. After a brief absence the old 
 nun returned, and conducted us through a beauti- 
 fully kept garden, along a bleak stone hall, up a 
 flight of bare stone steps, and into a stone-blind 
 apartment, the door of which closed behind us with 
 
120 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 a most ghostly and ominous click. Lucy by this 
 time was in a sort of suppressed hysterical condi- 
 tion. Groping about in the black darkness I broke 
 my shin on the edge of a chair, in which I placed 
 her, administering such comfort as I could. The 
 house was obviously a very old one, dating, I 
 should fancy, from about the reign of Louis XIV. 
 Perhaps it had not always been a retreat for holy 
 women, but I could not help wondering how many 
 years might have passed since the chill darkness 
 of that stony cell had echoed with a lover's kiss. 
 Something of the same sentiment was obviously 
 in Lucy's mind also, for she gently repulsed me, 
 murmuring in a rather stricken voice, " Please ! 
 Please ! not here ! " I made out that the apart- 
 ment was cut into two by a grille of strong iron 
 bars. Having broken my other shin on a second 
 chair, I sat upon it as the door opened in the further 
 side of the room, admitting a faint grey ray of light. 
 I heard a flutter of skirts, and then a voice — the 
 most marvellously beautiful sound I have ever 
 heard issue from human lips. Its effect in the cir- 
 cumstances was indescribable — magical. It was as 
 though the angel Israfel, "who hath the sweetest 
 voice of all God's creatures," was speaking out of 
 the thick darkness. I told this invisible seraph the 
 condition of affairs, and the marvellous voice rang 
 back in womanly pity of Mademoiselle's unfortunate 
 plight. Emboldened by this, I ventured to ask if 
 Madame la Superieure could receive Mademoiselle 
 into her house, at least for the moment, until some 
 permanent shelter could be found for her. Madame 
 la Superieure was desolate, but the house, normally 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 121 
 
 full, was now inconveniently crowded by the presence 
 under its roof of certain of the luckless ladies 
 whose asylum had been burned the night before. 
 Would Madame then have the extreme kindness 
 to suggest anything to be done in the circumstances ? 
 Yes. Let me conduct Mademoiselle to the Hotel 
 des Trois Couronnes, Bouvelard Massena, and 
 say that she was sent thither by her recommenda- 
 tion. The house was of a perfect respectability, 
 much frequented by the clergy, and Mademoiselle 
 would receive every care and attention and be as 
 secure as under the wings of angels. And so, with 
 the darkness ringing as from a chime of fairy bells 
 with a sweet-toned benediction and a reminder to 
 Lucy that she must make of her husband " un bon 
 Catholique," we went out into the light of day. 
 
 I took Lucy to the hotel so recommended, and 
 she being tired-out by her long journey from London, 
 left her for the night. In the morning I called upon 
 her by appointment, and together we set out in 
 search of le Pere Bonaventura, a rubicund, obese 
 old gentleman who lived — mainly on chianti and 
 snuff — at the top of a monumentally tall house on 
 the fringe of the Old Town. Father Bonaventura 
 had been warned of our coming by his colleague 
 in London, the priest who had procured for us the 
 dispensation from the Cardinal- Archbishop. He 
 was a jolly old gentleman, with a moist eye, a 
 pendulous lip, and a voice like the roar of a good- 
 natured old lion. He settled himself in his capacious 
 armchair, stuck a huge pair of horn-rimmed pince- 
 nez on the extreme tip of a very prominent nose, 
 set a fat, snuff-stained white hand on either knee, 
 
122 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 and said, in a mellow, thunderous voice that made 
 the windows ring, " Aha ! Aha ! Voila deux belles 
 personnes qui vont se marier ! " I produced the 
 dispensation, which he read carefully and declared 
 to be " parfaitement en regie." He then explained 
 to me that I must procure and hand over ' to him 
 properly attested copies of my birth certificate and 
 my register of baptism, on receipt of which he 
 would at once proceed to put things in train for 
 our immediate marriage. Learning that Lucy was 
 living at an hotel, he asked her if she would not 
 prefer to carry out her original intention of going 
 to a convent, and on her answering decidedly in 
 the affirmative, undertook at once to order the 
 transference of her luggage to a convent-school 
 situated within an easy five minutes' walk of the 
 Villa Colbert, where I resided. " Mademoiselle," 
 he said, "would have the advantage of pious and 
 discreet society of her own sex, and complete liberty 
 to come and go between the hours of nine in the 
 morning and ten at night." He also prophesied 
 that I should soon become a worthy and devout 
 son of the Church, "because," he said, with that 
 beautiful mixture of kindliness and courtliness cha- 
 racteristic of the good priest in his dealings with 
 women, " it was not in human nature to resist 
 Truth, when spoken by such a voice as that of 
 Mademoiselle." 
 
 Father Bonaventura was as good as his word ; 
 and that night Lucy slept at the convent-school. 
 I hate the idea of the conventual life as heartily as 
 Thackeray himself, and, like him, think the moral 
 and mental mutilation which is of its very essence 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 123 
 
 as wicked and senseless as the physical cuttings and 
 crimpings inflicted on themselves by the monks and 
 fakirs of some Oriental forms of religious abomina- 
 tion. But I must needs confess that I have never 
 met a kindlier, nor, in their gentle way, a merrier 
 company than the ladies of that establishment. 
 Among their pupils were two or three hardly out 
 of babyhood, the children of neighbouring families, 
 and perhaps that companionship and the discharge 
 of the maternal duties it entailed kept their hearts 
 young and fresh. They swooped upon the " demoi- 
 selle anglaise " like a little flock of benevolent 
 vultures, and could not make enough of her nor 
 do enough for her to express their superabundant 
 sympathy and affection. Me they regarded as an 
 altogether wonderful kind of wild-fowl, a sort of 
 puzzling cross between a hero and a fiend. I was 
 going to marry "cette chere petite dame," and in 
 so far I was an altogether delightful and admirable 
 personage ; but I was a heretic, and that made them 
 shudder. I was probably the only specimen of 
 that kind of animal they had ever inspected near 
 at hand, and I am quite sure that they were rather 
 surprised, and perhaps a little disappointed, that I 
 had neither horns nor a tail, and smelt of nothing 
 more diabolic than cigarette smoke. 
 
 In redemption of my promise to Father Bona- 
 ventura I wrote to my eldest brother, who still 
 lived in my native place, asking him to procure 
 and forward to me the documents for which the 
 good old priest had asked — my certificates of birth 
 and baptism. He replied promptly, enclosing the 
 first-named document, but giving me in the place 
 
124 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 of the second a piece of information of which until 
 then I had been ignorant. I am, as I have already 
 said, the youngest of my father's large family. Late 
 in life, just before the moment of my birth, my 
 father had become imbued with what seems to 
 me the perfectly sensible idea that the baptism of 
 infants is a mistake, and that it should be left to 
 the judgment of the adult whether or not he 
 shall receive that sacrament. I was so completely 
 ignorant a pagan that I had not the faintest con- 
 ception of what this privation would mean in the 
 eyes of a Catholic. I went quite light-heartedly 
 to Father Bonaventura, handed to him my certifi- 
 cate of birth, and translated for his benefit the 
 passage of my brother's letter conveying the in- 
 formation I have just given to my readers. The 
 effect was electrical. I have heard a fair amount 
 of strong and picturesque language in my time, but 
 the dramatic soliloquy in which the good old Father 
 expressed his sense of the situation left anything 
 of that kind in my experience before or since long 
 miles behind. When he had exhausted his commi- 
 natory vocabulary and his breath, I begged for an 
 explanation. It was to the effect that not having 
 received the sacrament of baptism, which is not 
 merely a sacrament in itself, but the indispensable 
 key to all the gifts and graces of Holy Church, I 
 did not in the eye of Holy Church exist at all. 
 The Pope himself could not marry me. Made- 
 moiselle might, were such a criminal outrage on 
 the part of so admirable a young lady even think- 
 able, go through any travesty of marriage she 
 chose in the presence of a civil authority, but 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 125 
 
 such a performance would no more constitute a 
 marriage in the sight ot any Catholic than if she 
 were to walk out of the convent to share the home 
 of the first man she n ^t in the street, and it would 
 cut her off from all communion with the Church. 
 
 This was a terrible condition of affairs. " What 
 was to be done ? " : asked. Father Bonaventura 
 explained that all ttiat could be done was to yield 
 myself to the instructions of a qualified tutor in the 
 mysteries of the Faith, to declare my adhesion to 
 that Faith, and to supplicate admission to the 
 Christian communil-/ by the one door of baptism. 
 
 I am far from -esiring to shock the suscepti- 
 bilities of any pious reader :'■. > whose hands these 
 pages may fall, but it is unavoidable that I here 
 make plain the position in which I found myself 
 placed by this pre^r ounceme'M . I am, both tempera- 
 mentally and o long and i) ature reflection, not 
 merely an unbeliever in any form of supernatural 
 religion, but a hr.ter of all such forms. Religious 
 susceptibility i • -i note lacking from the keyboard 
 of my temper; nent. I do not remember ever to 
 have experiepi d the faintest thrill of religious 
 emotion, and i /.^collect, at the age of six, or there- 
 abouts, horrif; nTLy my motler by a statement to the 
 effect that prayer was a sketr waste of time, because 
 there was nobody to liste "> to it. I was led to that 
 point-blank negation by early experience which 
 made an indelible impress ; a upon my memory. I 
 had been beaten for an offence of which I was 
 innocent. It was a Sunday, and at chapel that 
 morning the preacher had made use of the phrase, 
 " Curse God and die." 1 had construed it as meaning 
 
126 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 that to curse God was to die, that so horrible an 
 act was necessarily followed by instant annihilation. 
 I had gone into the garden, and there, in a passion 
 of indignant revolt, had clencl ed my hands, set my 
 milk-teeth viciously together, ■\- d uttered the words, 
 "Damn you, God Almigh y!" Nothing had 
 happened, and I was probable- the most surprised 
 person breathing on this pl.iiiet at that moment. 
 From that instant ^o; many years thereafter I was 
 a point-blank athei -: jut I had the common-sense 
 to keep my convi j jhs to myself. Then, as I 
 lived and read and i' ought, carie the unescapable 
 doubt. I recognised 'St people- y^astly my superiors 
 in natural intellige ■ ; and ac.quired knowledge 
 believed what I rejected. I took to studying the 
 religious apologists, ' "r I found no one among 
 them, from Paley to L\ewman, who did not drive 
 further into my brain the nail of unbelief which he 
 was doing his clumsy best to extract. A man with 
 four arms or four legs ,v . aid seei to me a scarcely 
 more amazing creatur rhan th intelligent and 
 cultured person one me. .. every do/ who professes 
 his belief in the dogmas : t any form of supernatural 
 religion. I do not que'^ i on the sincerity of such 
 people. I do not questic i either their intelligence 
 or their culture. But I have given up the attempt 
 to understand their intellectual attitude, just as, if 
 I read the words upon a printed page, I should 
 renounce the effort to understand what might be 
 meant by " a square circle," or " a triangular 
 rhomboid." 
 
 Actuated as I was — a -'^ am — by such senti- 
 ments, I found the situatio; i in which my father's 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 127 
 
 late-born common-sense had landed me anything but 
 a happy one. I had to explain it to Lucy, and our 
 interview was the most painful I have ever known. 
 Father Bonaventura, of course, spoke of it to the 
 Mother-Superior of the convent-school, and the 
 Sisters, by reason both of their sex and their pro- 
 fession, were deeply stirred, and spared no means in 
 their power to persuade me to the end they desired. 
 Lucy's position was, of course, vastly more painful 
 than my own. After saying farewell to all her friends 
 in London in the character of an immediately pro- 
 spective bride it was an awkward business for the 
 poor girl to return among them unmarried after all. 
 She was of a singularly reticent and undemonstrative 
 character, and to this day I do not know how much 
 or how little personal affection she felt for me, but 
 pride was a strong ingredient in her nature, and I 
 know that she suffered greatly. More than once 
 I found myself on the verge of electing to act out 
 my part in what to me would have been merely 
 and purely a revolting farce, to accept the course of 
 religious instruction of which the good Father had 
 spoken, to feign conversion and acquiescence, and 
 to accept the rite of baptism. With a conviction 
 on which I may not always have acted, but which is 
 nevertheless as sincere and deep as any I possess, 
 that straightforward honesty is the only possible 
 road out of any conceivable dilemma, I rejected the 
 temptation. Lucy owned that she thought me right 
 in doing so. She made one final attempt to con- 
 vert me. There was at that time a young priest 
 preaching at a church in Nice who enjoyed a 
 peculiar reputation both for personal sanctity and 
 
128 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 as a pulpit orator. I have no doubt that he 
 deserved both parts of his reputation — there could 
 be none that he merited the second. I had accom- 
 panied Lucy to his church on the first Sunday- 
 night she spent in Nice, and his discourse was one 
 of the most remarkable efforts of human speech I 
 have ever listened to. He was a gaunt, loose- 
 limbed, ill-made man, with a face which in repose 
 was singularly harsh and repellent, and a voice 
 much more remarkable for power than for sweet- 
 ness, but I do not think that anybody who listened 
 to him thought of those defects after the first 
 minute. He had a sort of daimonic energy, and 
 attacked his chosen theme as a barbarian athlete 
 fighting for life and liberty in the Roman amphi- 
 theatre might have flung himself upon the gladiator 
 set to slay him. Would I, Lucy asked, meet this 
 priest and talk with him ? With absolutely no 
 expectation of either profit or pleasure from the 
 encounter, I consented. The interview lasted an 
 hour or so, and during that time I do not think I 
 spoke a hundred words. If absolute certainty of 
 the truth of Catholic doctrine and fulgurant scorn of 
 the blind and impious wretches who dared to doubt 
 it could have shaken a mind which makes cold 
 reason the final test of all things, I should have left 
 his society a fervent believer. As things were I 
 remained untouched, except by admiration of his 
 sincerity and of the torrential eloquence with which 
 he expressed it. A moment before we parted he 
 went as suddenly quiet as he had previously grown 
 excited. Would I, he asked me, give Faith a 
 chance — ^just a chance — to assert itself in my heart ? 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 129 
 
 Would I promise him to wear this for a whole 
 year ? I could carry it round my neck, under my 
 dress, and none would know that I wore it. 
 " This " was a little oval tin medal, stamped with 
 the image of a saint, and with some brief Latin 
 inscription whose wording I have forgotten. I 
 readily gave him the promise, and he hung the 
 medal round my neck murmuring, " Ca se fera ! 
 Ca se fera ! " shook hands with me, and went away. 
 Lucy and I came to an arrangement which was 
 perhaps as good as any possible in the circum- 
 stances. We accorded each other a six months' 
 common truce, to be spent on my part in con- 
 sidering whether I could join the Church, and on 
 hers whether she could renounce it. She returned 
 to London. A little later I received a packet 
 containing my letters, her engagement ring, a few 
 trifles of jewelry I had given her, and nothing else. 
 It had taken Providence six-and-twenty years 
 to mature this little joke, but it came off quite 
 successfully at last. 
 
 I have outlived most of my enthusiasms by this 
 time. Perhaps they were never very robust, and 
 partook more or less of the general slackness of my 
 character. But if I have ever been really in 
 earnest about anything in my entire life, it was 
 in my views on the religious question. I have 
 certainly thought longer and more intensely on 
 that and on its innumerable cognate themes than 
 on any other of the serious problems which every 
 thinking man born into the world must needs settle 
 for himself. I have for many years past made it a 
 
 K 
 
130 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 fixed habit to hold a sort of intellectual stock-taking 
 from time to time, and to reconsider my position in 
 regard to those questions. And it is many years 
 since I have appreciably added to or deducted 
 from the nett total of the result. In the final 
 sentence of the last of the series of letters in which 
 James Anthony Froude summed up the history 
 and the results of the Oxford Counter- Reformation, 
 he says of the Roman Church — " if an institution 
 with such a history behind it is an exceptional 
 instrument to bear witness to God's existence, if it 
 be alone the voice through which He speaks to 
 man, and makes known His nature and His will ; 
 then the attempt to understand the world, and what 
 goes on in it, had better be abandoned in despair." 
 Those words are truer, perhaps, of the Roman 
 Church than of any other religious community that 
 has ever existed, but they apply — or so it seems to 
 me — with more or less force to every other body 
 which has ever based itself on the dogmas of super- 
 natural religion. The Catholic Church has a bigger 
 mass of wrong, cruelty, and oppression to answer 
 for than any other religious body, no doubt, but 
 there never has been any religious body which has 
 not tortured and oppressed up to the full limits 
 of any powers it was permitted to possess And 
 this is natural, logical, inevitable, just, and right. 
 For if I do really and veritably hold that I am 
 the repository of a truth necessary to the eternal 
 salvation of my brother man, I am a traitor and 
 a coward if I do not persecute to death and 
 beyond it any teacher of a rival faith. My position 
 in such a case towards a teacher of a rival faith 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 131 
 
 is the position an honest dweller on a dangerous 
 shore holds towards a professional wrecker who 
 purposely lights false fires to lure ships to destruc- 
 tion ; or towards some insane or ignorant person 
 whose signals, honestly meant, would have the 
 same disastrous results. I must stop such person, 
 be he criminal, lunatic, or ignoramus, from wrecking 
 innocent lives ; and if I can do it at no less cost 
 than his life, it is my bounden duty to kill him. 
 Tolerance about the colour of my neighbour's neck- 
 tie or the shape of his hat is all very well, but 
 tolerance of a belief which is going to plunge his 
 soul into immortal torment is a burning sin. No- 
 body who has once clearly glimpsed this truth will 
 wonder afterwards that the most pitiless persecutors 
 have often been among the finest specimens of 
 human kind ; that Aurelius and Torquemada, who 
 were men of every virtue, tortured and slaughtered 
 for conscience' sake, while a pair of hoggish sensua- 
 lists like Commodus and Heliogabalus did not 
 trouble to persecute at all. Our second Charles 
 and our second James were both poor creatures, 
 but if we must needs choose between two such 
 specimens of the infinitely little, James was the 
 better of the two, and proved his superiority by 
 the very persecutions which have made his name 
 a byword. 
 
 I have seen it stated that a Church of Science, 
 were it once established and dominant, might 
 persecute as bitterly as any of its predecessors. 
 I cannot see why. Since Science leaves out of 
 consideration altogether the postulate of Eternal 
 Life, it can never hold that belief or disbelief 
 
132 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 in any of its dogmas can benefit or injure any- 
 body to the extent sufficient to justify persecution. 
 A man who denies the sphericity of the earth 
 or the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of man 
 injures nobody, not even himself. A man who 
 sins against scientific fact, who holds, for instance, 
 that cyanide of potassium is a good food, or that 
 vitriol is a wholesome beverage, will not be likely 
 to make converts, and a truly scientific society 
 would be rather glad than otherwise when he 
 tested his beliefs on his own person. A shortage 
 of idiots would be the last of philosophic fears. 
 
 Thinking as I do, I have sometimes been made 
 rather angry by the conventional and almost 
 universal belief that it is a sort of duty to be 
 tender with other people's religious convictions, 
 that it is bad form to tell religious believers that 
 their beliefs are nonsensical. I was wrong in feel- 
 ing angry, and I will presently say why I think 
 I was wrong. But I do not find, either actually 
 or historically, that the religious believer holds 
 himself under any very binding obligation to be 
 tender with people whose ways of thinking are 
 different from his own. I have been told — politely 
 by a broad-clothed curate in a drawing-room, and 
 with furious impoliteness by a corduroy-clad orator 
 in Hyde Park — that I devote myself to eternal 
 torment by refusing to believe statements so natively 
 incredible that I have passed a good part of my 
 life in wondering how they ever came to be made 
 I do not find that the earliest confessors of the 
 Christian religion were conspicuously tender to 
 the professors of the established creed which they 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 183 
 
 sought to overthrow. It was a poor creed, no 
 doubt, a thing of posturings and lustrations and 
 charms and outward observances. But it must 
 have had a core of reaHty for the nobler sort of 
 man who practised it. There is to me a note of 
 nobility and a note, too, of infinite pathos in 
 Farrar's explanation of the day-and-night, moment- 
 to-moment struggle to keep pure within the Law. 
 "If but one person could only for one day keep 
 the whole Law and not offend in one point the 
 troubles of Israel would be ended, and the Messiah 
 at last would come." We may easily believe that 
 the hope, for ever deferred, of one day performing 
 that impossibility and of ensuring that glorious 
 redemption broke many a humble, pious human 
 heart. People at once so righteous and so self- 
 righteous as the Pharisees would have feelings as 
 keen as most other people's, to say the least of it, 
 and would relish ridicule and denunciation as little 
 as any latter-day Christian. 
 
 The real reasons why the scientific agnostic 
 should be tender with the old type of believer are 
 really perfectly simple. The statement that violent 
 language is bad form is true, little as the average 
 religious person acts upon it. And scientific truth, 
 unlike religion — to judge by history — in this as in 
 other respects, needs no violence to make its way. 
 The deductions of science get accepted just as the 
 multiplication table got accepted — because it is 
 pure waste of time to question them. Truths, for 
 the proclamation of which men have been burned, 
 are to-day more potent influences on the life of the 
 Pope himself than the dogmas of which he is the 
 
134 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 official guardian. Telephones were established in 
 the Vatican some years ago, and work as well there 
 as elsewhere. 
 
 I remember once telling Robert Buchanan how 
 completely the words he put into the mouth of his 
 Philip Vanderdecken expressed my personal religious 
 and philosophical evolution, and the goal at which 
 I ultimately arrived, and at which I fancy I may 
 venture to prophesy that I shall stay for the rest of 
 my life. 
 
 " All this season 
 
 During my residence among you, 
 I've sucked the poor, stale scraps of reason 
 
 Your last philosophers have flung you. 
 I've read through Comte, the Catechism, 
 (Half common-sense, half crank and schism), 
 
 And Harriet Martineau's synopsis ; 
 Puzzled through Littrd's monstr' informous 
 Encyclopsedia enormous, 
 
 Until my brain grew blank as Topsy's. 
 I've sucked the bloodless books of Mill, 
 
 As void of gall as any pigeon ; 
 I've swallowed Congreve's patent pill 
 
 To purge man's liver of Religion ; 
 I've tried my leisure to amuse 
 With Freddy Harrison's reviews ; 
 I've thumbed the essays of John Morley, 
 So positive they made me poorly : — 
 ***** 
 " The Zel>en /esu, Renan's Vie, 
 I also studied thoroughly ; 
 I vivisected cats with Lewes, 
 
 I tortured gentle dogs with Ferrier, 
 Found out just what grimalkin's mew is. 
 
 And how tails wag in pug and terrier ; 
 But came, however close I sought. 
 No nearer to the riddle of Thought. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 135 
 
 " Then finally, in sheer despair, 
 
 Burn'd deep with Scepticism's caustic. 
 Found Spencer staring at the air, 
 Crying, ' God knows if God is there ! " 
 And, in a trice, became agnostic ! " 
 
 It is to Spencer that I owe the intellectual calm 
 in which the last four-and-twenty years of my life 
 have been passed, a calm which I believe to be 
 henceforth unbreakable by any shadowy reincarna- 
 tion of the old doubts. 
 
 " The demonstration absolute 
 Mortal nor angel can confute " 
 
 of the division of the entire universe into two clean 
 halves, the Knowable and the Unknowable, which 
 occupies the opening pages of that truly colossal 
 book, " First Principles," has not, I am aware, 
 escaped philosophical onslaught, but I have never 
 heard or read any attack upon it which was any- 
 thing more or anything better than the merest 
 chopping of metaphysical chaff. All the argument 
 " about it and about " to which I had listened from 
 '* doctor and sage " for so many wasted years were 
 swept aside by the superb common-sense of that 
 wonderful utterance. The study of the infinitely 
 various phenomena by which we are surrounded is 
 a necessity of our nature, and results in incalculable 
 good to us and to our species. The belief that our 
 little minds can ever grasp the attributes of the 
 great underlying cause of those phenomena is a 
 folly — I had well-nigh written, a blasphemy. The 
 hope that, in long ages yet to come, our intelligence 
 may expand to the capacity requisite for such a 
 
136 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 comprehension may be dwelt upon by those who 
 care to toy with intellectual phantoms. To me, it 
 has no interest. 
 
 In some other matters I have parted company 
 with Spencer. As a sociologist he is no longer 
 what he once was to me, and I have turned from 
 the empty husks and the chill water of his fierce 
 individualism to the sustaining wine and fortifying 
 bread of Socialism. I have my doubts whether, 
 could Spencer have lived his long life over again, 
 he would have drawn from it the sociological lessons 
 his actual existence was spent in teaching. We 
 know from his own pen by what a terrible tedium 
 his final years were darkened, and I think it more 
 than likely that that tedium was deepened, if not 
 altogether caused, by his recognition that much of 
 the doctrine with which his name will be most 
 closely connected was based upon error. I owe 
 that suspicion to certain words he let fall to me on 
 the only occasion on which I enjoyed the honour of 
 personal intercourse with him. Walking up and 
 down the lawn of Buchanan's house in Maresfield 
 Gardens, I told him, in a momentary absence of 
 our host, what a load of personal obligation I felt 
 under to " First Principles," and added that I in- 
 tended to devote the reading hours of the next two 
 or three years to a thorough study of his entire 
 output. " What have you read of mine ? " he 
 asked. I told him — the volume I have already 
 mentioned, "The Study of Sociology," "The Man 
 versus the State," " Social Statics," " The Data of 
 Ethics," and the brochure, "Education." "Then," 
 said Spencer — and it was the only time I have ever 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 137 
 
 heard such a counsel from the lips of any writer 
 regarding his own work — " I should say that you 
 have read quite enough." He fell silent for a 
 moment, and then added, " I have passed my life in 
 beating the air. " It goes without saying that no 
 truly great man has ever been satisfied with his 
 own achievement. The contrast between the little 
 he has actually accomplished and the much he had 
 hoped, in the ardour of youth, to effect, must always 
 exert a saddening influence, and the greater the 
 man the greater that contrast will necessarily 
 appear. But some incommunicable note in Spencer s 
 voice told me that that reflection was not the 
 only, perhaps not even the principal, cause of his 
 melancholy. 
 
 I look back on the time spent on the Riviera 
 as by far the happiest of that period of my life. 
 Christie was at the summit of his reputation, our 
 joint circumstances were affluent, and the climate 
 and scenery of the neighbourhood are both so 
 beautiful that, granted merely physical health and 
 the absence of any real trouble, existence can hardly 
 be other than a joy. We rented the Villa Colbert, 
 situated nearly on the crown of Montboron, just 
 off the Old Villefranche Road. It was furnished 
 with the barest necessaries, to which we made no 
 addition, for all either of us needed was a table 
 whereat to work and a bed wherein to sleep. To 
 our right were the lower summits of the Alps ; at 
 our feet the red-tiled roofs of Nice ; beyond, across 
 the valley, the bald scalp of Cimiez ; to the left, the 
 wide sweep of the bay and the blue waters of the 
 
138 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Mediterranean ; and on exceptionally clear days 
 could be seen, like a low-lying cloud, the rocky 
 coast of Corsica. The garden of the villa was a 
 wilderness of roses, which seem, in my recollection 
 of the place, to have bloomed all the year round, 
 although I do not make that as a statement of 
 botanical fact. The precipice in which it termi- 
 nated on one side divided it from the next of the 
 innumerable terraces into which the declivity of the 
 mountain is cut to prevent its thin clothing of soil 
 being washed away by the autumn rains, and was 
 masked by a line of alternate aloes and orange- 
 trees, the last bearing fruit of a beautiful burnished 
 golden-green, and of a quite unsurpassably acrid 
 and bitter flavour — a bitter which bit to the bone 
 of the palate. There were, too, several eucalyptus 
 trees, whose pungent balsamic perfume seemed to 
 concentrate at compound interest in the scorching 
 heat, and to this day a chance whiff of that odour 
 brings back the aspect of the place with startling 
 clearness. 
 
 Of a morning I wrote at Christie's dictation, 
 the afternoon was occupied by my own work, and 
 after our early dinner we either descended into the 
 town for a game of billiards, or ran into Monte 
 Carlo for a night's play at the tables. Monte Carlo 
 is, I should fancy, one of the queerest and most 
 individual places on earth, with an atmosphere all 
 its own. The Metropolis of Play, the citadel and 
 donjon-keep of the great Goddess of Chance, it is 
 in itself a most eloquent, though most ineffectual 
 and unregarded, sermon against the practices on 
 which its prosperity is built. A barren, sterile 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 139 
 
 promontory on which unaided Nature could not 
 raise so much as a blade of grass, has been con- 
 verted into a paradise of beauty and luxury at the 
 cost of the countless fools who have flocked there 
 for the past fifty years ; a human torrent which 
 reaches flood-tide in the winter months, and never 
 ceases to trickle briskly even in the hottest of the 
 dog-days. There is no place in the whole world 
 where money is so exclusively the subject of men's 
 thoughts, and none in which it is less valued or 
 more lightly flung away. It is difficult even to a 
 cool temperament, and to an ardent one impossible, 
 to remember the true value of gold and silver in 
 those lofty, handsome apartments, musical with the 
 crystalline clinking of piles of napoleons and five- 
 franc pieces and the sibilant rustle of bank-paper, 
 and echoing all day long to the ceaseless croak of 
 the croupiers who dispense them with such a 
 curious mingling of impassivity and keen-eyed alert- 
 ness. A man who picked up a bag of gold or a 
 thousand-franc note in the street would think him- 
 self marvellously lucky, and would never dream of 
 reproaching Fortune with niggardliness towards 
 him ; but what is ten times that sum, picked up just 
 as easily at Monte Carlo, compared with the serried 
 piles of bullion protected by those weary, watchful 
 eyes? 
 
 Thackeray, generally a most close and accurate 
 observer, speaks in " The Newcomes " of the now 
 abolished gaming-saloons at Baden as of a theatre in 
 which the student of his kind might study every 
 phase of the quick-changing passions natural to 
 the gambler — delirious delight and grim despair. 
 
140 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 exhibited in distorted features and frenzied impreca- 
 tions. I can only suppose that our generation has 
 learned to cloak its emotions with more decency, 
 for in all the many hours I spent in the Salles de 
 Jeu of the great " hell," euphemistically known as 
 "le Cercle des Etrangers," I witnessed no such 
 spectacle, and rarely heard a word which might not 
 have been spoken in a Sunday school. Tragedies 
 occur at Monte Carlo — they are vastly more 
 numerous than its most constant habitues are 
 aware of, for one of the heaviest of the many heavy 
 expenditures made by the Administration figures 
 on their books as " frais de Publicite," which is 
 simply blackmail paid to the more important French 
 journals for silence regarding scandals and suicides 
 — but the public demeanour of the gamblers is 
 decent even to the point of dulness as a general 
 thing. Only at very long intervals do the passions 
 which seethe below the surface overtly proclaim 
 themselves without regard of time and place. I 
 arrived one evening to find one of the tables 
 covered by a black cloth, and on inquiry was 
 told that only an hour previously a man — name, 
 nationality, profession, and other details unknown 
 — had scattered his brains over it and his fellow 
 players with a pistol bullet. The other tables were 
 as calmly busy as ever ; and, although I watched 
 the local papers assidu6usly, I never saw a word 
 about the affair, nor did I ever hear it referred to 
 after the day on which it occurred. Monte Carlo 
 is essentially a city of strangers — no single item in 
 the crowd knows more than one or two scattered 
 individuals among the throngs that fill it, and each 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 141 
 
 is too intent on his own business or pleasure to take 
 much heed of his neighbour. This easy callousness, 
 common to all holiday resorts, blended with the 
 unique moral atmosphere of Monte Carlo, takes 
 strange and brutal forms sometimes. I had a slight 
 acquaintance with a gentleman, a Russian noble- 
 man, of whom another acquaintance told me a 
 characteristic little story. He was strolling in the 
 gardens one evening when, close at hand, he heard 
 the crack of a pistol. His companion, and innumer- 
 able other people, had rushed to the spot from which 
 
 the sound proceeded. Not so Baron . As the 
 
 report reached his ears he plucked his watch from 
 his pocket and noted the exact moment — nine 
 minutes to nine. He hurried to a table, and in 
 half a dozen turns of the wheel had broken the 
 bank by piling maximums on the number so 
 indicated and on the transversale in which it stands. 
 It is a true proverb — on ne prete qu'aux riches. 
 Just as such human monsters of iniquity as Nero 
 and Caesar Borgia and Alexander VI. were accused 
 by their contemporaries of crimes of which they 
 were no doubt perfectly capable, but which they did 
 not happen to commit, and of which impartial history 
 has absolved them, so Monte Carlo, that Sodom 
 among modern cities, bears the blame of much done 
 within her walls which is really no fault of hers. 
 Suicides at Monte Carlo there are many, but not all 
 who there untimely cut their mortal thread do so 
 merely because the capricious deity who presides 
 over the tables has been unkind to them. Men who 
 are desperate before they set foot in the place; 
 fraudulent trustees ; defaulting cashiers ; all sorts of 
 
142 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 rogues at odds with fortune, go there to play their 
 last desperate stake, to make one despairing effort 
 to retrieve their imperilled honour. No doubt, 
 a certain percentage succeed, and Monte Carlo, 
 which has ruined so many honester people, has 
 very likely saved from the rope or the razor many 
 a scoundrel by favouring his desperate ventures on 
 the black or the red. For people do win there — 
 indeed, were it not so, and did nobody ever come 
 away a gainer, who would ever play there at all ? 
 My own small adventures there shall presently be 
 told, but they may well wait while the feats of a 
 more august votary of Fortune are recounted. I 
 was present one night when the Marquis de Talley- 
 rand — a great-great-grandnephew of Napoleon's 
 astute and shameless Minister — entered the rooms, 
 and began a game so tremendous that scores of 
 smaller punters left their play for the superior 
 excitement of watching his. He played maximum 
 every turn of the wheel on every possible hazard ; 
 en plan, aux coins, a cheval, e7i transversale, column, 
 dozen, and the simple chances — un vraijeu d'enfer, 
 as I heard an awestruck voice whisper beside me. 
 Charmed perhaps by such magnificent audacity, and 
 conquered by the cool indifference with which he 
 took her favours, Our Lady of Circumstance seemed 
 to have given the fateful marble into the keeping of 
 Monsieur le Marquis that night. He won every 
 one of those awful coups, and broke the bank in less 
 than ten minutes, and went away amid a roar of 
 applause in which the very croupiers joined, with 
 the same air of rather bored amiability he had worn 
 throughout ; his pockets, and the corsage of the 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 143 
 
 lady who accompanied him, bulging with bank- 
 notes. I was greatly tickled by the conduct of one of 
 the witnesses of that colossal gamble, an old, purblind 
 Jew, with huge, flapping, elephantine ears jutting out 
 under a skull-cap of black velvet, who had remained 
 utterly unconscious of it. He sat just opposite to 
 where the Marquis stood, betting five francs a time 
 on the black. At every turn of the wheel a croupier 
 raked in that meagre little stake, while his confrere 
 handed to the Marquis a solid wad of bank-paper, 
 but when the little old Hebrew's last coin — or the 
 last he cared to risk — had gone, he turned to me 
 and said, almost with tears in his voice, " Ack! mon 
 Tieu, guelle jance hour la panque ! '* 
 
 I think it is Balzac who somewhere says that 
 while everybody is eager to extract profit from his 
 better qualities, it occurs to nobody that, in given 
 circumstances, his worst weakness might become 
 his strongest asset. I have already frankly con- 
 fessed my total imbecility in matters of finance and 
 calculation. It has been a serious drawback in the 
 general business of life, but it was the making of me 
 in my dealings at Monte Carlo. Just as great 
 mathematicians have spent years of wasted toil in 
 trying to square the circle, you will meet people of 
 very respectable calculative powers who believe it 
 possible to invent a "system" to make winning at 
 roulette a certainty. Among our acquaintances in 
 Nice was a gentleman who had once been very 
 wealthy, and who was stated to have lost seven 
 millions of francs by the exploitation of a series of 
 such systems of his own invention. Yet, when he 
 turned up one day at the Villa Colbert with the 
 
144 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 statement that he had at last discovered " le vrai, 
 le seul systeme philosophique," those incorrigible 
 and hopeless optimists, Christie and Herman, sallied 
 forth into Nice to buy a miniature roulette table 
 and a couple of thousand beans for counters, and, 
 under the instruction of M. de Paroli, devoted many 
 hours to testing his new martingale. It worked 
 beautifully — with the beans — and Herman had 
 almost made up his mind as to which of the palatial 
 villas on the Promenade des Anglais he would buy 
 with the pillage of the bank when three nights rigid 
 adherence to the system at Monte Carlo itself re- 
 duced him and Christie to temporary penury. Being 
 placidly convinced that the more perfect the system 
 the less I should be able to understand or practise 
 it, I resisted its contagion, and prospered. My 
 plan, which I found to act excellently, was simplicity 
 itself. I never risked more than a hundred francs 
 on any single day. If I lost the whole of my day's 
 capital, I accepted the loss and went away. If my 
 luck was good, I backed it so long as it held, and 
 stopped when it turned. By pursuing these tactics 
 throughout the eighteen months during which Nice 
 was my headquarters, I must have made a very fair 
 amount of money. All through my stay on the 
 Riviera I had a noble time, and denied myself 
 nothing, and when the next of my periodic rows 
 with Christie parted us again and I was thrown on 
 my own resources I had a collection of books and 
 a wardrobe which I found extremely useful in tiding 
 me over the following spell of poverty. There are, 
 as a matter of notorious fact, dozens of people every 
 season at Monte Carlo to whom the tables are a 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 145 
 
 source of steady revenue. They never risk more 
 than a stated small sum — one or two louis — a day, 
 and when fate is kind to them they may win ten or 
 fifty or a hundred or a thousand times that amount. 
 
 It was not long after the episode of my abortive 
 marriage scheme that I found one of my few regular 
 engagements in newspaper work on the staff of the 
 London edition of the New York Herald. Mr. 
 Gordon Bennett had been inspired to that adven- 
 ture in journalism by the brilliant success of the 
 Paris edition, but, if he had anticipated anything 
 like a similar triumph, the result of the experiment 
 must have been a grievous disappointment to him. 
 One of the many reasons for its failure was the 
 amazingly wrong-headed fashion in which it was 
 managed. During the eleven months of my con- 
 nection with it, the paper was edited by no fewer 
 than fourteen different people. I have been told 
 that the reason why I left it was that I was dis- 
 charged in consequence of an irreverent comment 
 on that circumstance. I went to sleep — so the 
 story ran — on two chairs in the sub-editors' room, 
 having previously given an office-boy a shilling on 
 condition that he woke me at a certain hour and 
 told me what quarter the wind was in and who was 
 editing the Herald. That I may have done so is 
 likely enough, though I have no memory of the 
 circumstance, but it was certainly not the cause of 
 my leaving the paper. I resigned voluntarily, in 
 the following circumstances : — 
 
 Sir — then Mr. — Henry Irving had revived at 
 the Lyceum Theatre, " in commemoration of the 
 
 L 
 
14G A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 centenary of the French Revolution," Watts Phillips' 
 melodrama The Dead Heart. I went to see it. 
 I thought — and think — that it was one of the silliest 
 and most futile lumps of rubbish it has ever been 
 my bad luck to see. Henry Irving was among the 
 half-dozen greatest European actors of the latter 
 half of the nineteenth century, but it is a regrettable 
 fact that he was also one of the worst judges of 
 drama that ever held in his hands the destinies of 
 an important theatre. So long as he stuck to 
 Shakespeare and Goethe he was all right, for the 
 simple and sufficing reason that he could not go 
 wroncr, but when he went on his own judgment he 
 infallibly made a mess of it. Another of his revivals 
 was George Colman's Iron Chest, an appallingly 
 bad adaptation of a dull and stupid novel written, 
 in some queer mental aberration, by Godwin, the 
 profound political thinker to whom the world owes 
 " Political Justice." Among Irving s original pro- 
 ductions was The Mad Doctor, one of the 
 woodenest and least convincing melodramas that 
 ever got itself produced, which Irving proclaimed 
 — before its production — to be as fine a piece of 
 work as Erckmann-Chatrian's Bells. The appal- 
 ling badness of The Dead Heart seemed some- 
 how to have communicated its contagion to the 
 generally admirable actors who appeared in it. 
 They included Irving himself, Sir Squire Bancroft, 
 Edward Righton, Miss Ellen Terry, and Miss Kate 
 Phillips, and I never saw any one of those excellent 
 comedians to less advantage. As I was eating my 
 supper after the performance in the Marble Hall — 
 whose place now knows it no more—the ablest of 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 147 
 
 the many editors of the Herald, and one of the 
 most kindly and friendly men I have ever met, 
 John Reid, came and sat beside me. I gave him 
 my impressions of my evening's experience, with 
 which — he had seen the show on the previous 
 night — he heartily concurred. " The worst of it 
 
 is," he continued, " " (naming the dramatic critic 
 
 of the Herald) "praised the blamed thing. How 
 can we take it back without looking foolish ? " 
 " Let me write an open letter to Irving," I suggested. 
 " You shall," said Reid ; " and I'll put it into next 
 Sunday's issue." So said, so done. I wrote the 
 letter before I went to bed that night, and handed 
 it in to Reid next day. 
 
 At that date, and for some time thereafter, the 
 late Joseph Hatton occupied some undefined position 
 on the Herald. What functions he fulfilled I never 
 knew, but he had some sort of power, and Reid — 
 an autocrat, as every good editor is, and needs 
 must be — rather resented this. Hatton, as all the 
 world knows, was an intimate personal friend of 
 Irving. He had edited the great actor's " Impres- 
 sions of America," and was one of his most sturdy 
 admirers and partisans. At the moment of com- 
 missioning me to write my Open Letter, Reid had 
 remarked, " Hatton will rile up at this, sure, but it's 
 going in, and if he doesn't like it he'll just have to 
 lump it." On the day preceding the appearance of 
 the letter a curious thing happened. Reid, returning 
 from lunch, met Hatton coming out of his — Reid's — 
 room. Reid had left a proof of my letter to Irving 
 on the spike-file standing on his desk. On looking 
 for it, he found it gone. Returning from dinner he 
 
148 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 found it on the spike again. Reid's conclusion 
 was that Hatton having read the letter — which he 
 had a perfect right to do — had gone across to the 
 Lyceum, scarce a hundred yards away from the 
 Herald office on the other side of the Strand, and 
 had shown it to Irving, disclaiming all responsibility 
 for its authorship, inspiration, or appearance. Who 
 its author was, he could not know, although he 
 might possibly guess, for it was signed by the 
 pseudonym " The Candid Friend," and nobody but 
 Reid, myself, and the compositor who had stuck 
 the type, was aware even of its existence. 
 
 The letter appeared, and made its little fleeting 
 half-hour of talk and conjecture, as such things will. 
 Reid professed himself delighted with it, and sug- 
 gested that I " might make myself a nuisance to a 
 whole heap of respectable Christian citizens " by 
 writing a similar letter every week to some selected 
 celebrity over the same signature. I consented, 
 and for some nine or ten weeks " The Candid 
 Friend" exhibited perhaps more candour than 
 friendship regarding the personalities and perform- 
 ances of as many prominent figures in the theatrical 
 and literary worlds. The identity at first concealed 
 behind the signature leaked out, as was inevitable, 
 and I received a certain number of letters, abusive 
 or laudatory, from various people, according as 
 they sympathised or otherwise with my judgments. 
 Reid had raised my salary, and for the only time 
 in my life I found myself in receipt of a steady ten 
 pounds a week. Once again the world looked 
 bright before me, in spite of the continued rejections 
 of " A Song of Sixpence." 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 149 
 
 My Nemesis was but sleeping, however, and 
 that with one eye open. Reid had held the editorial 
 chair for some fifteen or sixteen weeks — a lonsfer 
 time than any of his successors — but he was elderly, 
 a free-liver, and a martyr to some painful chest- 
 complaint with which the atmosphere of London 
 held no truce. He was suddenly and peremptorily 
 ordered to Algiers. A week after his departure, 
 which was loudly lamented by everybody on the 
 staff, I was again supping in the Marble Hall when 
 my colleague, Harry Dam, entered with a strange 
 
 gentleman, whom he presented as Mr. , the 
 
 new editor of the Herald, just arrived from New 
 
 York. In the course of conversation Mr. 
 
 asked me, " Say, Mr. Murray, do you happen to 
 know Bram Stoker's address ? " I replied that I 
 did not, but that he could easily get it by applying 
 
 at the Lyceum Theatre. Mr. volunteered the 
 
 statement that he was one of Mr. Stoker's closest 
 friends " on the other side." I cannot say precisely 
 that such an *' ice-talon'd prong as shot through the 
 brain and pericardium of Balaam " when he heard 
 his ass speak assailed me at that moment, but I did 
 murmur to myself the sporting query, ** With Joseph 
 Hatton still in his place of undefined power in the 
 Herald office and a gentleman who is a close friend 
 of Mr. Bram Stoker installed as editor — what price 
 * The Candid Friend ' } " The blow fell promptly, 
 
 as I had anticipated. The next day Mr. , in 
 
 the friendliest fashion in the world, gave me editori- 
 ally to understand that my letters must cease. I 
 replied that if they stopped I left the paper. " I 
 shall be sorry to lose your services," replied the 
 
150 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 editor, "but the letters must stop. London's had 
 enough of them, and we mustn't bore the public." 
 I pointed out that that was hardly Hkely to happen, 
 because the pubHc wasn't reading the Herald. 
 
 Mr. , with the delightful American bonhomie 
 
 which welcomes many jests at which the average 
 Englishman would probably be angry, accorded 
 a smile to my epigram, but was adamantine on 
 the main point. The continuance of " The Candid 
 Friend " was vetoed, so I left the paper. 
 
 I acted foolishly in doing so, from every point 
 of view. It was foolish, in the first place, to throw 
 away a regular and sufficient salary merely for a 
 momentary pique, a thing no man is justified in 
 doing unless he is sure of another berth as good, 
 which was certainly not the case with me. The 
 Letters had given me a certain reputation, but it 
 was a reputation of the wrong sort, as a fault-finder 
 and a firebrand, and I did not find that there was 
 any marked rush on the part of editors to engage 
 me. I have always hated journalism, and in that 
 also I have been unwise, because — let any literary 
 aspirant into whose hands these pages may fall take 
 note of this — there is no such school in the world 
 for a youngster who desires to make the writing of 
 fiction his profession as is offered by the daily work 
 of journalism. It brings him into intimate touch 
 with all kinds of people and sends him into all kinds 
 of places which, in any other line of life, he would 
 probably never see. There is no social extreme 
 between — and including — an Archbishop and a hang- 
 man with which he may not find himself in contact 
 at some moment or other. In a newspaper office 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 151 
 
 a young man sucks in knowledge of the world as 
 Joey Ladle took in his alcoholic stimulant, by the 
 pores. And although, during his novitiate, journalism 
 may give him few or no opportunities of airing his 
 powers as a writer, the merely literary training it 
 affords is excellent of its sort. It teaches him to 
 think clearly, and to express his meaning perspicu- 
 ously. And it is the one profession I know of — 
 except the stage — which pays the neophyte while 
 teaching him his business. The articled lawyer's 
 clerk, the aspirant to the Bench or the Church, the 
 medical student, the art student, all have to undergo 
 a more or less costly apprenticeship. The young 
 journalist, even if he starts on the lowest rung on 
 the staff of a small provincial paper, is paid at least 
 something from the start. There is, too, this other 
 advantage, that a young man of talent, either literary 
 or merely journalistic — the two talents are getting 
 more and more widely differentiated with every 
 passing year — is certain of success if he will only 
 stick to his work. Journalism presents the curious 
 anomaly of an absolutely open profession, open to 
 all who care to enter it, which yet never seems 
 overcrowded, and in which talent, if its possessor 
 will simply exercise a little common-sense humility, 
 and be content awhile to do the daily work for the 
 daily wage, is certain to win its way. My personal 
 failure as a journalist has never made me blind to 
 the truth of what I am now writing. It was wholly 
 and entirely my own fault. I contemned the work 
 it offered me, thinking it trivial — which is a half- 
 truth, and unimportant — which is an entire false- 
 hood. It is, as I have said elsewhere, a serious 
 
152 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 mistake to think so, as if a man should admire the 
 completed palace and yet despise the individual 
 bricks of which it is built. 
 
 I have many pleasant reminiscences of my time 
 on the Herald. I have never met a merrier, brighter, 
 cleverer, and all-round more friendly and pleasant 
 crowd than " the boys " who contributed to its 
 columns. John Reid in especial was a perfectly 
 angelic editor. He was iron hard on negligence or 
 incompetence, and would hold no truce with them. 
 Like most Americans of talent he was saturnine and 
 sententious, and if he did not like a man he could 
 make himself supremely and memorably nasty. I 
 remember him sitting in his armchair, with the 
 perennial stump of a big cigar, which never seemed 
 to vary in length, in a corner of his mouth, with one 
 eye shut and the other expressing an absolute and 
 most galling contempt for his interlocutor, and 
 saying, at the conclusion of a flowing period which 
 the latter had obviously fancied to be most impres- 
 sive and convincing, " Sir, you make me tired. You 
 have more words and fewer ideas than any other 
 person I have yet struck in my airthly pilgrimage." 
 I remember also a phrase he applied to a certain 
 member of the Herald staff who came over from 
 the States with a huge reputation as a journalistic 
 " hustler." " To go to that man for notions," said 
 Reid, "is like dredging hell for oysters." But I 
 have never been better pleased in my life than with 
 the quiet, stolid nod with which he rewarded such 
 work of mine as he really liked, and the low-voiced 
 comment, " That's right, sonnie." 
 
 Every member of the staff of the Herald — which, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 153 
 
 be it remembered, was a seven-day paper — had one 
 day's holiday per week. My day of recreation 
 coincided with that of Ervin B. Hawkins, a bright 
 young gentleman who hailed from an extensive 
 region which he was in the habit of describing as 
 the "Wild and Woolly West." He had a con- 
 suming thirst for the stock attractions of London, 
 and as his cicerone I saw more of the metropolis 
 than I have ever seen before or since. We went 
 on one occasion to the Tower. After seeing the 
 regulation sights, with which — especially the axe 
 and block and the Crown jewels — he was much 
 delighted, he suggested that there must be many 
 other spectacles in a building so old and so in- 
 timately associated with the most romantic episodes 
 of English history, to which everybody might not 
 be admitted. We were lucky enough to get hold 
 of an intelligent Beefeater, who knew vastly more 
 of the history of the Tower than one gathers from 
 the stereotyped gabble of the ordinary guide. 
 Among other places to which he conducted us 
 was the vaulted semi-cellar in which prisoners, 
 political, ecclesiastical, and others, were tortured. 
 It is used now — or was then — as a record room. 
 The Beefeater pointed out to us the low beds of 
 solid masonry on which, in unimaginable torments, 
 many a score of nameless wretches had sobbed 
 and shrieked their lives away. He showed us 
 the four holes in the stone pavement in which the 
 rack had been clamped down, and in the farthest 
 recess of that horrible Gehenna, a dim circle of 
 concrete, rather lighter in tone than the time- 
 stained masonry which surrounded it. That circle, 
 
154 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the Beefeater told us, marked the site of an old 
 dry well in which some years earlier the hideously 
 broken and mutilated skeletons of some scores of 
 human beings had been found. I do not think 
 that the pure air and broad sunlight could have 
 been much sweeter to any creature who had passed 
 through the terrors of that dreadful place than they 
 seemed to me as I emerged from it. I was on the 
 verge of actual physical sickness. Hawkins and I 
 strolled along in pensive silence for awhile, when 
 he remarked, in a musing, rather envious kind of 
 tone, "We've got nothing like that in the States." 
 I tried to cheer him by pointing out that America 
 had possessed the institution of chattel slavery, that 
 it had produced the Trusts, the cities of Pittsburg 
 and Chicago, and Mr. Jay Gould, but he refused to 
 be comforted. " It was horrible. It makes a man's 
 blood turn the wrong way. But it gives the country 
 an atmosphere." I have often been a witness of 
 the indescribable sensations with which a man of 
 English blood and alien birth beholds the relics 
 of our island history. I remember on one occasion 
 crossing the North Sea from Ostend in company 
 with a typical Yankee, hard-headed, cool, unimagi- 
 native, sardonic. I can remember the sudden 
 pressure of his hand upon my shoulder, and the 
 choking croak with which he extended his arm 
 towards the horizon and said, " My God ! Is that 
 England?'^ And when I answered "Yes," he 
 settled his elbows upon the rail and stared at the 
 broadening strip of land as hungrily as Christian 
 devoured the distant hills of Beulah, with the silent 
 tears running down his face. I can remember 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 155 
 
 taking a little Australian lady for her first visit to 
 Westminster Abbey, and the wild wonder with 
 which, following the direction of my finger, she 
 read upon the slab beneath her feet, " Sacred to 
 the Memory of Charles Dickens," and recognised 
 that she was standing over the dust of the splendid 
 and delightful genius who had given us " David 
 Copperfield." But my friend Hawkins's patriotic 
 envy of the Tower torture-chamber did, as he might 
 himself have expressed it, " yank the bun " over 
 any other similar expression of enthusiasm. 
 
 Reid, knowing that I had more or less acquaint- 
 ance with a fair number of British celebrities, 
 developed a habit of sending me out to collect 
 opinions regarding any interesting ** mystery " of 
 the day. That lurid and ever-vanishing nightmare 
 of criminality, " Jack the Ripper," was then per- 
 vading the Whitechapel district, and I inspected 
 his last victim, lying on the slab of the mortuary. 
 Reid suggested that I should go forth and interview 
 any celebrities I could find regarding the identity 
 of the criminal. I called on Walter Besant, Robert 
 Buchanan, James Payn, and Henry Labouchere. 
 1 was — or flattered myself that I was — a bit of a 
 favourite with Mr. Labouchere, whom I had inter- 
 viewed on similarly curious themes on several other 
 occasions. He received me with the query, " Well, 
 young man, what's the imbecility this time }" " I 
 have come," I said, " to ask you if you have any 
 theory regarding the identity of 'Jack the Ripper'?" 
 " Well," he said, rolling the eternal cigarette in his 
 mouth — I never saw him without the cigarette, 
 except on one occasion, when I caught a glimpse 
 
156 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 of him in his place in the House of Commons — " I 
 don't know that I've formed any theory. But 
 I suppose you'd like one ? " I replied that I should 
 be greatly obliged if he could evolve one for the 
 occasion. " Then," said he, " I'll tell you what. 
 Say it's me. Lots of people will believe it, and I 
 promise you I won't contradict it." The New York 
 Herald issued a special placard next day, bearing 
 the inscription, " Identity of Jack the Ripper — 
 Astounding Confession ! " And for once, at least, 
 the public read the Herald. 
 
 One memorable consequence of my connection 
 with the Herald was a meeting with George Mere- 
 dith, with whom I passed a day at his house at Box 
 Hill in the following circumstances. It had struck 
 me that " The Candid Friend " letters, supplemented 
 with other critical matter, might make a saleable 
 volume, and I had forwarded the script to Messrs. 
 Chapman & Hall, for whom, at that time, Mr. 
 Meredith acted as reader. I received from him a 
 letter, the gist of which was that he thought the 
 project inadvisable, although he was kind enough 
 to describe my utterances as those of " a stout, 
 natural voice, contrasting notably with the cluck 
 and gabble of the Newspaper Press." Such an 
 intimation I regarded as final, and wrote him a 
 brief note to that effect, replied to in turn by an 
 invitation to spend a day with him. I selected a 
 beautiful Sunday morning in early spring. The 
 maid who admitted me to the o^arden at Box Hill 
 told me that Mr. Meredith was at work in the 
 chalet, but I was kindly received by his eldest son, 
 who shortly after died, and by Miss Meredith, who 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 157 
 
 were sunning themselves on the front steps of the 
 house. We were talking together when I heard a 
 slow step crunching the gravel behind me, and the 
 young lady said, " Here is my father." I rose, and 
 confronted a tall old man, whose extreme leanness 
 made him appear of more than his actual height. 
 He was loosely clad in grey tweeds and a soft felt 
 hat, and carried a crooked oaken walking-stick. I 
 had seen a profile portrait of him, published as a 
 frontispiece to one of his books, but certainly should 
 never unaided have recognised him as its original. 
 It had represented a face of more than feminine 
 delicacy, with an almost angelic softness of expres- 
 sion. That is not at all a description of Mr. 
 Meredith as he appeared in the year 1889. His 
 features, independently of his grey beard and 
 moustache, were strongly masculine, and expressed 
 physical and intellectual virility of the highest and 
 keenest sort. It was the face of an intellectual 
 gladiator rather than that of a poet, and had 
 nothing in it of the ascetic or the saint. He 
 welcomed me with a simple and most encouraging 
 cordiality — I had been rather afraid of meeting 
 him, for I considered, and still consider, him very 
 much the greatest man I have ever had the 
 privilege of encountering in intimate converse. He 
 had a curious and memorable voice, a voice which 
 gripped the ear somewhat as chianti grips the palate. 
 His manner might be described by that conveniently 
 nebulous phrase, " old-fashioned," with a breadth, 
 repose, rotundity, and stateliness seldom met with 
 nowadays. He spoke with a marked drawl, and 
 with the accent common to English gentlemen of 
 
158 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the period of the Piccadilly-weeper whisker and the 
 peg-top pantaloon — the accent of Sothern's Lord 
 Dundreary. Having shaken hands with me, he 
 dropped into a canvas camp-stool, his legs stretched 
 out in front of him and resting on the heels; his 
 hands clasped on the crook of his walking-stick ; 
 and I beheld the indubitable physical original of 
 Dr. Shrapnel. Like the immortal Doctor, he had 
 a huge tuft of obstinate grey hair bristling up over 
 his forehead, and he had the habit of constantly 
 endeavouring to smooth it back into its place 
 among the mass which he attributes to Nevil 
 Beauchamp's political Mentor. I was soon aware 
 that these were not the only particulars in which 
 he resembled Dr. Shrapnel. He had a way of 
 divagating suddenly from dialogue into monologue, 
 and of adding cryptic asides, often accompanied by 
 brief, grim chuckles, to an interlocutor invisible to 
 his companions. He would have been a trying 
 associate to an intellectually lazy man, for he talked 
 precisely as he writes, and kept his hearer's wits, as 
 he keeps his reader's, perpetually astrain to follow 
 the thread of his ideas. At that date he was but 
 comincr into the kingdom he had fairly won years 
 earlier ; the critics who had so long neglected him 
 had still a habit of accusing him of intentional 
 obscurity and excentricit^ voulue, but that day's talk 
 with him quite dispelled any such illusion from my 
 mind. An involved reticulation of thought and 
 quaintness of expression are in him no affectations, 
 but as purely natural as the sledge-hammer forth- 
 rightness of Macaulay or the perfect plainness of 
 Defoe. Year after year of public neglect and critical 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 159 
 
 inappreciation have had, no doubt, some influence 
 in indurating those peculiarities, as they probably- 
 had had in the cases of his similarly treated con- 
 temporaries, Carlyle and Browning. Artists who 
 find the best they can give contemned or disre- 
 garded by the great mass, are apt to work only for 
 the chosen few whom they attracted from the first, 
 and disdainfully to accentuate the oddities which 
 repel the crowd. 
 
 We took a long walk together through the 
 lanes of the vicinity and over the estate of a neigh- 
 bouring baronet, to which my host had been granted 
 access, and talked of a multitude of things. He 
 spoke of having been recently engaged on trans- 
 lating certain passages of Homer into English 
 verse, though which passages I have forgotten. 
 Apropos of some subject spoken of between us he 
 told me of the existence in manuscript of a novel 
 entitled ** The Journalist," which, for reasons he did 
 not confide to me, would not be published until 
 after his decease. He spoke in high terms of the 
 French literature of the day, with its fearless spirit 
 of inquiry and discussion, and its tonic, healthy 
 outspokenness, as contrasted with the prevailing 
 English pusillanimity. In wit, the French were 
 incomparable, and he claimed for them also a high 
 place as humorists. As a general literary vehicle 
 he preferred English to any other language. The 
 talk fell on Tennyson, and I found, to my surprise, 
 that he had never come across the then Laureate's 
 ringing lines, "The third of February, 1853." I 
 quoted a line or two, and he asked, " Do you know 
 the rest ? " On my replying " Yes," he said " Give 
 
160 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 me that, sir, give me that," and I recited the entire 
 poem, he standing with his feet wide apart, his 
 hands on the crook of his stick, his eyes regarding 
 the sky under contracted, beetling brows, and his 
 mouth slightly ajar. I felt rather nervous and 
 slightly ridiculous standing spouting there, but he 
 seemed quite unconscious of anything humorous 
 in the situation. '* That is great, great ! " he said 
 emphatically, when I had finished. He expressed 
 a high opinion of Tennyson as a verbal artist, and 
 cited several passages, among them that from " The 
 Daisy," descriptive of the distant Alps as viewed 
 from the summit of Milan Cathedral : — 
 
 " How faintly-flushed, how phantom-fair, 
 Was Monte Rosa, hanging there — 
 
 A thousand shadowy-pencill'd valleys 
 And snowy dells in a golden air." 
 
 I said that it was very beautiful. '' It is too beauti- 
 ful," he replied, though what he meant by that he 
 did not explain. 
 
 We returned to the house, to find other guests 
 awaiting him. Among them was the late Leslie 
 Stephen, who, I have heard it said, was the original 
 of Vernon Whitford, of " The Egoist." It might 
 well have been so, for " Phoebus Apollo turned 
 fasting-friar " is a phrase of photographic accuracy, 
 a living word-picture of Stephen as I saw him that 
 day. He stayed only for a brief while, to my 
 regret, for he was a man for whose scholarship, 
 intellect, and fearless honesty I had a strong 
 admiration, and I would fain have seen more of 
 him. Years after, a few months before his death, I 
 had a brief correspondence with him, but that day 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 161 
 
 at Box Hill was the only time we met. There 
 were several young people also, who appeared to be 
 familiars of the house. The host seemed to be as 
 young at heart as any one among them, and was 
 obviously a huge favourite. Somebody mentioned 
 the Elephant and Castle, and a young lady new to 
 London asked what that might be. Mr. Meredith 
 immediately dashed into the recital of a legend, 
 obviously the creation of the moment, concerning 
 an elephant, a castle, and an oriental prince, of 
 which I have quite forgotten the details, but which 
 struck me at the moment as a quite wonderful bit of 
 improvisation. At dinner also his powers in that 
 direction came out. One of the guests would drink 
 nothing but mineral water, and Mr. Meredith 
 warned him against that habit with an intense, and 
 even tragic, solemnity, illustrating its dangers by an 
 horrific story about a fellow-collegian at Dusseldorf 
 — " when I was studying medicine there " — who 
 had fallen a victim to an unbridled thirst for that 
 class of beverage. The unfortunate youth had died 
 suddenly and in inexpressible agony, leaving behind 
 him a solemn request that the autopsy should be 
 performed by his friend, George Meredith. "When 
 I made the first incision," said the narrator, suiting 
 the action to the word with a horrible pantomimic 
 gusto on the joint of mutton he was carving, " the 
 glitter of the stalactites in the poor fellow's gastric 
 cavity positively blinded me — I had to wear blue 
 glasses for months after." 
 
 Among the other celebrities with whom I fore- 
 gathered as an envoy of the Herald was the once 
 
 M 
 
162 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 notorious and now well-nigh forgotten political 
 adventurer, General Boulanger, with whom I had 
 a brief interview at the house in Portland Place 
 which he tenanted during his English exile. Ten 
 minutes is but a short space in which to read any 
 man's character, but what I saw of le brav' General 
 did not very greatly impress me. Unless I am 
 vastly mistaken in my estimate of him he was a 
 mass of vanity, and vanity of a curiously puerile 
 sort ; and I left him wondering how such a person 
 could ever, even for a moment, have imperilled the 
 peace of a great country, and possibly of all Europe. 
 He was a decidedly handsome man, with an air, 
 when in repose, of strength and dignity which quite 
 evaporated in the least excitement, and his laugh 
 was indescribably fatuous. I cannot believe that he 
 was ever anything more than the stalking-horse of 
 the little clique of "spoof" politicians of whom 
 Henri Rochefort was at once the leader and the 
 type ; fishermen in troubled waters, with no real 
 programme except to keep things generally lively, 
 and no real convictions save of their own amazing 
 cleverness and the infinite gullibility of the rest of 
 mankind. His suicide in Brussels was the final 
 clou of a rather silly melodrama, and by the time 
 that the famous " March " had been superseded on 
 the street-organs by some other blatant bit of 
 musical vulgarity he was practically forgotten. 
 
 But perhaps the most memorable of the many 
 personalities whose fleeting acquaintance I made at 
 this epoch was that of a certain magnate of the 
 University of Oxford. He was the only specimen 
 of his species I have ever encountered or even to 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 163 
 
 my knowledge beheld, and he ranks in my memory 
 as the most astounding human product in my ex- 
 perience. He was a don of one of the oldest and 
 wealthiest colleges, a man somewhere well on the 
 sunny side of sixty. He had obviously been an 
 athlete in his youth, and he was as hard and clean 
 from head to foot as a new steel nail. He had a 
 grand head, clear-cut as a cameo, and an eye like a 
 stag's. He wore the clerical uniform, which fitted 
 him as though he had been melted and poured into 
 it, and his choker and cuffs glowed with a silver 
 purity. He is probably a bishop by now, and if he 
 would vert, I feel certain that the Sacred College 
 would make him immortal as the second English 
 Pope. I spoke with this splendid phenomenon for 
 full five minutes, and the interview was, as Zola 
 says of the moment when Renee Saccard made her 
 obeisance before the Emperor, la note aigue dans la 
 tnilodie monotone de ma vie. I shall remember that 
 interview while I remember anything. I suppose 
 he was a scholar — very certainly he was a gentle- 
 man, for only a gentleman could have been so 
 extremely offensive with so little offence. I don't 
 suppose he would have questioned that I was a 
 vertebrate animal : he might even have admitted 
 that I was a man, and, if not quite a brother, yet in 
 some distant degree a sort of poor relation. Can 
 you fancy the proudest planter of Old Virginia 
 holding condescending communication with a manu- 
 mitted nigger ? Can you imagine the Imperial 
 Majesty of Germany giving affable audience to the 
 smallest drummer-boy in the Imperial Army ? It 
 was like that. Every hair of his head, every 
 
164 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 wrinkle of his clothing, every tone of his voice, said 
 audibly, " You are no doubt a very good sort of 
 person in your way and place, but you are not 
 Oxford, and I have no sort of use for you." So 
 long as memory holds her seat I shall remember 
 that splendid, that serene, that sumptuous Snob. 
 
 That don has come to typify Oxford in my 
 mind. He was physically beautiful, as Oxford is. 
 He was venerable, learned, splendid, as Oxford is. 
 He stood upon the accumulated legacy of centuries 
 of venerability, of learning, of splendour, as Oxford 
 does. But also, like Oxford, and like everything 
 else in this mixed world of ours, he had the defects 
 of his qualities. His venerability was the accident 
 of age, his learning was obsolete, his splendour 
 was based on a quite exaggerated and erroneous 
 estimate of his personal importance — all of which 
 is true of Oxford. He was a great man and a law- 
 giver among schoolboys, but I could but wonder 
 how he would have shown in adult society not of 
 his own set. I found him wandering in my fancy 
 through a hundred scenes with which he was 
 ludicrously incongruous. How would he shape, I 
 wondered, in a newspaper office at 12 p.m. with 
 " a column and a turn " to knock out in three- 
 quarters of an hour on some unexpected develop- 
 ment of the fiscal problem, or the outbreak of an 
 epidemic of smallpox in Bethnal Green ? What 
 would be the value of his opinion on the chances of 
 this year's Derby ; how would he show in Tatter- 
 sail's ring ? What would he have had to say for 
 himself in the smoking-room of the House of 
 Commons, or of an ordinary middle-class club, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 165 
 
 where doctors, lawyers, merchants, stock-brokers, 
 and scientists were discussing the questions of the 
 day ? Could he lay a row of bricks, plough a 
 furrow, handle a spade, work a lathe, or perform a 
 surgical operation ? Could he do anything, or 
 teach anybody else to do anything, except to quote 
 Greek, turn out mathematical formulae, or to be an 
 upright, honourable, wrong-headed, and generally 
 ornamental and useless encumbrance ? 
 
 As I have confessed, my failure in journalism 
 was principally, if not entirely, my own fault. All 
 the same, my journalistic luck has been by no 
 means of the best. I have already given one 
 sample. Here is another, dating some seven-and- 
 twenty years back. I was chronically hard up in 
 those days, and at this particular period I had 
 struck the very bed-rock of poverty. I was sleep- 
 ing on the Thames Embankment, and living on 
 God knows what — I don't remember, at this time 
 of day, how I held body and soul together. But 
 I remember one particular meal, and how it was 
 obtained. There was a certain baker's shop in 
 Tottenham Court Road, with a window of which 
 the lower sash was capable of being raised to 
 permit the obtrusion a little way into the street of 
 a sort of broad wooden tray, supported at its outer 
 extremity by iron uprights resting on the pavement. 
 On this, bread and cakes were exposed for sale. 
 One morning — I had eaten nothing for four days, 
 and had had nothing between my teeth during 
 the whole of that time but water from a street 
 fountain — I stood still to sniff up the scent of the 
 
166 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 new-baked loaves, hot from the oven. There was 
 nobody in the shop but the baker, whose back was 
 turned. A rapid glance right and left assured me 
 that nobody was near at hand. I walked quickly 
 past the shop, and with the dexterity of a practised 
 conjuror transferred a small loaf of brown bread to 
 my jacket pocket. In another half minute I had 
 doubled the corner of Rowland Street and was 
 tearing at my prize with the horrible avidity of a 
 famished dog, with tears of rage and shame and 
 pure animal ecstasy pouring down my cheeks. 
 " Ah, Dieu, quil est bon et triste de manger quand 
 on creve ! " 
 
 On the afternoon of that same day, wandering 
 along the Strand, I met an acquaintance, one 
 "Jimmy" Adair, a brother journalist, of consider- 
 ably greater age and experience than my own, who 
 had also had his troubles. Jimmy had been editor 
 of a paper in Demerara for some years, and being a 
 thrifty soul, had managed to amass a goodly sum 
 of money, some six or seven hundred pounds. 
 Leaving the place for England, he had invested 
 his savings in rum, and had embarked Caesar and 
 his fortunes — himself and his rum — on the same 
 ship. In mid-ocean the ship caught fire, and 
 Jimmy, from the retreat of an open boat, had seen 
 her burn to the water's edge, a grand pyrotechnic 
 exhibition, to the glories of which his rum — poor 
 boy ! — had nobly contributed. It had been a sore 
 experience, but he took it with a certain stolid gaiety, 
 and faced the world anew, penniless, but cheerful. 
 It is many a long year since I have seen him, but, if 
 he be still " on live," I hereby send my love to him. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 167 
 
 Jimmy had news for me. Had I heard of the 
 new weekly paper, the People, which was to start 
 next Saturday ? I had not. Well, the People 
 was a fact, or on the point of becoming so, and, 
 moreover, Jimmy was appointed sub-editor. The 
 editor was Sebastian Evans. He and I were both 
 Birmingham men, he knew my brother, Jimmy 
 would introduce me to him, why not try my luck 
 with him? I was only too glad to try my luck, and 
 Jimmy and I went together to the office — the 
 identical office which, when the People moved later 
 to another address, served as headquarters to the 
 London edition of the New York Herald. Sebastian 
 Evans received me kindly, and promised immediate 
 perusal of any contribution I might offer. I went 
 to Adair's room and there wrote at hot speed an 
 article entitled " The Hotel of the Beautiful Star," 
 descriptive of my last week s nocturnal experiences 
 on the Embankment. Taking my courage in both 
 hands, I knocked at the door of Evans's room. 
 He was obviously surprised to see me again so 
 soon, but on my presenting my manuscript, said 
 simply, "Sit down, please." He read the article, 
 tossed it into a pigeon-hole, and scribbled a line on 
 a sheet of paper. "If the cashier shouldn't be 
 there, I'll cash it myself," he said. The cashier 
 was there, as it happened, and handed me two 
 sovereigns and two shillings. Jimmy and I went 
 over to the Gaiety bar together — the old Gaiety 
 bar, another lost landmark — and I ate my first real 
 meal for a good fortnight. And that evening I 
 made a special pilgrimage to Tottenham Court Road, 
 and dropped a sixpence on to the baker's tray. 
 
168 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 For some little time thereafter — as long as he 
 held the editorship — Evans accepted an article 
 every week from me, and I was in clover. Then 
 he left the paper, and a new man came, bringing 
 his tail with him, as new editors have a knack of 
 doing. A king arose who knew not Joseph, and 
 once again hard times resumed their broken 
 sway. 
 
 Sebastian Evans was a very remarkable man, 
 and would have been universally so regarded, had 
 he chosen to exercise any one of his innumerable 
 talents to the neglect of the rest. He was a doctor 
 both of medicine and law ; he was a brilliant 
 journalist, a first-class linguist, and a most able 
 barrister. His reason for taking to the bar was 
 characteristic. He had somehow become inspired 
 with a deadly hatred of a certain well-known 
 pleader, and determined, in his own phrase, to 
 *' have a smack at him." To that end, he qualified 
 as a barrister, and let it be known that, whatever 
 might be the merits of the cause, and for any fee or 
 none at all, he would be ready to fight any case in 
 which the object of his detestation held the opposing 
 brief. For a session or two he neglected all his 
 other multifarious pursuits for the one dear delight 
 of badgering his enemy, and, I am sure, got plenty 
 of amusement out of his freak. He painted suffi- 
 ciently well to be exhibited by the R.A., and he 
 wrote one or two volumes of really fine verse — 
 " Brother Fabian's Manuscript," and "In the 
 Studio." He gave me a copy of the latter volume, 
 which I have most unfortunately lost, but I remem- 
 ber a few lines which seem to me to show merit 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 169 
 
 high above that of most minor poetry. There was 
 a poem called " The King to Be," which opened — 
 
 " Weary with watching and worn with fight 
 The King to Be sat alone with the night, 
 For foes were many and friends were few, 
 And the friends were false, but the foes were true." 
 
 There was a phrase descriptive of the walls of the 
 Heavenly City as beheld afar off in a vision, *' like 
 wine smitten to stone," which struck me as very 
 fine. And there was a lilting bit of verse satirising 
 the slapdash school of impressionist painting, of 
 which I can remember only the following eight 
 lines : — 
 
 " True, the rudest of strokes shews you clearly 
 The painter who can from who can't, 
 But to-day 'tis the artist not merely 
 Who can, but who does, that we want. 
 
 " Not the trick of the trowel and plaster. 
 To shew that your handling is free. 
 But the trick of the genuine master — 
 The trick that no mortal can see." 
 
 Evans was, besides, a monument of learning, the 
 sort of man to whom one appealed as to an encyclo- 
 paedia, with a placid certainty of getting the infor- 
 mation one needed. I asked him once why he had 
 never taken a line and stuck to it. " Because I'm 
 a damned old fool, my boy," he answered. " But," 
 he added, "I'm the happiest old fool in Europe, and 
 my one regret is that I can't have my time over 
 again." The last I heard of him was that, at an 
 age when most men would have been nailed to 
 an armchair in the chimney-corner, he had taken 
 
170 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 to agriculture, and was learning to plough on his 
 own farm. 
 
 I have had a rather extensive acquaintance with 
 that curious development of modernity, the Amateur 
 Journalist. The amateur is a fearsome person, 
 whatever be the particular art or science in which 
 he may elect to exhibit his incompetence, but if 
 there is any pursuit in which his native cussedness 
 shows to more advantage than in any other, it is in 
 his conduct of a newspaper. By the very nature 
 of things, the amateur journalist is almost invariably 
 both the proprietor and editor of the sheet in which 
 he is interested. In point merely of literary intelli- 
 gence and culture I have known specimens of the 
 class superior to all but the very best of their pro- 
 fessional congeners, but those gifts are of quite 
 subsidiary importance in the editorial chair. 
 Worthily or profitably to fill that seat demands 
 qualities of mind and a general experience of life 
 which no amateur can hope to possess, for the 
 simple reason that if he possessed them he would 
 not want to be an amateur in any line, and least of 
 all in journalism. A dilettante commanding a fleet 
 in action or an army in the field would be hardly 
 a more hopeless futility than one of the same kidney 
 in a position of authority in a newspaper office. In 
 the first place, no paper run by an amateur can hope 
 to possess a competent staff, and this for a double 
 reason. The amateur editor does not want a com- 
 petent staff. That would mean being snubbed and 
 taught his business by his subordinates, and he 
 naturally prefers to suck the sweets of the editorial 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 171 
 
 position by dispensing patronage among other 
 amateurs. On the other hand, competent journalists 
 will not enlist under an amateur editor, who would 
 rile every nerve in their bodies all day long by his 
 complacent exhibition of ignorance of things the 
 very office-boy takes for granted. The one person 
 among such a crowd who may be generally relied 
 upon to know his business is the cashier, who may 
 or may not be an honest man to start with, but who, 
 if he remains honest after six months' experience 
 of the constant temptations to fraud put in his way 
 by his employer's childish ignorance of business, is 
 nothing less than a commercial hero. 
 
 To attempt to catalogue the points at which the 
 amateur differs from the professional editor would 
 be a tedious business. His most exasperating 
 peculiarity, in my experience of him, is his utter 
 lack of human sympathy with the people whose 
 living depends on him. That may seem a harsh 
 statement, but it can be justified by simply rehears- 
 ing the fashion in which I have been treated by the 
 three specimens of the breed I have had dealings 
 with. 
 
 In the first case I was acting as the sub-editor 
 of a weekly "society" journal, started and edited 
 by a young gentleman who had until recently held 
 a commission in a cavalry regiment. I used some 
 of the experiences gathered in his office as part of 
 those happening to George Murdoch as sub-editor 
 of Wisdom, in " A Song of Sixpence." On one 
 occasion he absented himself from the office for an 
 entire month without giving a hint of his where- 
 abouts, and without leaving anything more than the 
 
172 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 petty cash in the business-manager's desk to defray 
 the contributors' salaries and the printer's bill. I 
 managed, by infinite labour and diplomacy, to keep 
 the paper alive during his absence. When at last 
 he lounged back into the office I spoke with con- 
 siderable heat regarding his conduct. He listened 
 with a face of blank amazement. "What did it 
 matter ? " he asked. Here he was, ready to pay 
 everybody. I told him that what it mattered to 
 me was that everything I had in the world except 
 the clothes I stood in was in pawn, and that for the 
 past three days I had not had a square meal. Then 
 a light broke in upon him. " Do you mean to say," 
 he said, " that you live on what I pay you ? And 
 all the other Johnnies, too ? " I told him that, 
 incredible as it must seem, such was indeed the 
 case. The statement interested him for the moment, 
 but can hardly be said permanently to have enlarged 
 his ideas. A month or so later he casually inti- 
 mated to me that my services would not be required 
 after the end of the coming week. The reason 
 given was that at lunch that day he had met one 
 Jones — "an awfully nice chap, most disgustingly 
 hard up — old school-fellow of mine, don't you 
 know " — and had promised him my berth. I 
 pointed out that / was an awfully nice chap, that 
 I had fulfilled the duties of my position to the best 
 of my ability and, so far as I knew, to his complete 
 satisfaction, and that to fire me out at a week's 
 notice would make me as disgustingly hard up as 
 Jones actually was. "But I've promised Jones," 
 said my editor. " Don't you see, old chap, what 
 an awkward position you're placing me in .'* " I 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 173 
 
 intimated that the position was of his own making, 
 and further that I was legally entitled either to 
 three months' notice or to my full salary for that 
 period. He expressed himself, at great length and 
 with considerable force of language, as at once sur- 
 prised and wounded at my base commercialism, and 
 ended up by magnificently referring me to his 
 solicitor. I began an action, but had no funds to 
 carry it on, and so permitted it to lapse. This 
 person was not a brute. He was not even, intel- 
 lectually speaking, a fool. He was simply an 
 Amateur Editor. 
 
 My second experience of that kind of person 
 occurred several years later. This gentleman was 
 not the proprietor of the sheet whose destinies he 
 directed. It had been started and originally edited 
 by Mr. T. P. O'Connor, and was in his day known 
 to an extensive public as the Weekly Sun. By him 
 it was sold to a capitalist of vast wealth, who, no 
 doubt for his own good reasons, bestowed the 
 editorship upon a connection of his, who may be 
 here referred to by the title by which he was 
 known in the office, "the Doctor." Under his 
 auspices the paper fell rapidly into obscurity as the 
 Sunday Sun. Its first page was occupied by an 
 article entitled " The Book of the Week," and to 
 that page I was for three or four years a fairly 
 frequent contributor. I do not suppose that my 
 criticisms had any great influence on the public 
 mind, if for no other reason than that the circula- 
 tion of the journal was so small as to make it 
 rather wonderful that even the wealthiest of multi- 
 millionaires should have thought it worth while to 
 
174 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 keep it afloat. But they attracted the attention of 
 the editors of other papers, and I was on my way 
 to establish a good market for my critical wares 
 when Nemesis, wearing on this occasion the physical 
 semblance of the Doctor, asserted her influence. 
 The Doctor, besides editing the Sunday Sun, was 
 the managing director of Black and White. After 
 paying me many merely verbal compliments on the 
 excellence of my work, he proceeded to the practical 
 compliment of suggesting that I should enter into 
 a six-months' contract to contribute no critical work, 
 over my own name, to any but the two journals 
 under his control, and that for that term I should be 
 the only literary critic employed on either of those 
 journals. I accepted the contract, and promptly on 
 the day on which the six months expired I was 
 informed that my services were no longer needed 
 on Black and White, and that on the Sunday Stin 
 I reverted to my original position of an occasional 
 contributor. No pretence of an explanation of this 
 arbitrary proceeding was vouchsafed. My place 
 on the journals I had deserted in order to accept 
 the Doctor's contract had been of course filled up, 
 and the engagement I had looked upon as a really 
 brilliant chance was converted into my temporary 
 ruin. 
 
 My third experience in this sort happened 
 within the last two years. A weekly paper was 
 started by a lady — a very great lady indeed, of 
 quasi-royal rank. In this case I had no contract 
 or engagement, but acted merely from week to 
 week as literary and dramatic critic. Presently, 
 owing to complications I never understood, and 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 175 
 
 with which I had no personal concern, financial 
 difficulties arose. Loyalty to my employers has 
 always been a point of pride with me, and I stuck 
 to my work at no small inconvenience until my 
 account against the paper reached the — to me — 
 considerable sum of forty pounds. My loyalty in 
 this instance was recompensed by a cheque for the 
 amount due to me, accompanied by an intimation 
 that my services were no longer needed. A kindly 
 caprice of circumstance has of late set me beyond 
 the necessity of working merely for the daily crust. 
 But, should Fate again prove unkind, I shall need 
 the daily crust very bitterly indeed before I seek it 
 at the hands of the Amateur Journalist. 
 
 During, and for some time after, the period of 
 my engagement with the first of this eccentric trio, 
 I was living in Staple Inn, to me a place of many 
 memories. My rooms were at the top of Number 
 Four, next door to the Hall, and as that was the 
 building in which Samuel Johnson is said to have 
 lived while writing " Rasselas," I pleased myself 
 by the fancy that mine were the actual chambers 
 he had occupied. My sojourn there was signalised 
 by one curious experience. A group of my 
 acquaintances, who lived in the neighbourhood, 
 used to meet in the inner bar of a quiet little 
 public-house at the corner of Chancery Lane, 
 which occupied part of the site now covered by 
 one of Pownceby's wine-shops. Among them 
 was a young man named Swan, a quiet, studious 
 fellow, at that time engaged on the composition 
 of an Arab-English Dictionary. Returning one 
 
176 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 night from a week's stay in the country, I found 
 Swan at the accustomed haunt, dressed in deep 
 black, and plunged in a state of melancholy in 
 painful contrast with his usual placid cheerfulness. 
 Inquiry elicited that he had that day attended 
 the funeral of his oldest and closest friend, who 
 had been his school and college-chum, and for over 
 ten years his house-mate in London. " I can't 
 tell you," he said, "how I loathe going home to- 
 night, and the prospect of waking in the morning 
 to see poor old Tom's empty bed in the opposite 
 corner of the room. I can't do it — I won't." In 
 sympathy with his desolation I volunteered to go 
 with him that night, and occupy the vacant bed. 
 He was almost ludicrously grateful at the mere 
 offer of this small service. In the morning, after 
 breakfasting with him, I went to the Inn for a 
 shave and a clean shirt. On entering my bed- 
 room my heart fairly stood still for a moment. In 
 the roof was a huge jagged hole, and on the pillow 
 beneath it, exactly on the spot my head would have 
 occupied had I been sleeping there, lay an oblong 
 mass of stone, weighing at least thirty pounds — 
 the coping-stone of a chimney then in process 
 of repair. 
 
 On the inner sides of the index and middle 
 finger of the hand with which I am writing are two 
 small, scarcely perceptible, circular scars, recalling 
 to my mind certain events which may find record 
 here. Their connection with the first of these 
 events will not be immediately apparent to the 
 reader, but he will see the nexus presently. I 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 177 
 
 lived for a brief period in a certain set of flats, the 
 topography of which does not matter. My modest 
 wants were attended to by a girl of about seventeen, 
 a pretty, delicate little creature, with an air of gentle- 
 ness and of natural refinement not common among 
 women of her class, to whom I took a strong liking. 
 Without being absolutely mentally deficient, she 
 had a curious bluntness of perception, and a quite 
 wonderful ingenuity in the perpetration of small 
 blunders. I have known her to bring in my boots 
 of a morning, one beautifully polished, the other 
 encrusted with yesterday's mud. To send her on 
 the simplest errand was to court disaster ; and she 
 never b}^ any chance correctly reported a verbal 
 message. These little lapses were more than 
 atoned for by a positively pathetic eagerness to 
 be of use. I never met any other creature so 
 perfectly describable by the housewife's epithet, 
 ** willing," and it was no more possible to be angry 
 or severe with her than with a bird or a kitten. That 
 anything in the normal semblance of a man should 
 have wrought harm to so harmless a creature is one 
 of the most shocking facts I have encountered on 
 my way through life, but a fact it was. The natural 
 result of bowelless brutality on the one side and of 
 mere ignorant weakness on the other was that the 
 poor child bore a baby. It was born in an empty 
 set of rooms in the Mansions, and its dead body 
 was discovered in the fireplace there a few hours 
 later. There was no doubt of its maternity. In 
 the quite hopeless hope of being of some use 
 to the poor girl, I attended the coroner's inquest. 
 I had some slight acquaintance with the doctor 
 
 N 
 
178 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 who had performed the autopsy. He was a 
 red-haired, dour-faced Corkagian, with an accent 
 as broad as the Irish Channel. To my huge 
 relief, he swore positively that the infant had been 
 still-born. We left the Court together, and he 
 told me, in the calmest fashion in the world, that 
 he had perjured himself — the child had lived at least 
 an hour, and had died by suffocation. In answer 
 to a not unnatural remark of mine on the reckless- 
 ness of this confession to one of whom he knew so 
 little he replied, " 'Tis not you that would betray 
 me, I'm thinking. I saw your face while I was 
 givin' me evidence, and if ye'd come into a fortune 
 ye couldn't have looked happier. And if 'tis per- 
 jury to save that poor little fool from prison — or 
 maybe from the gallows — by Jasus, I ask nothing 
 betther than to perjure meself every day I have to 
 live." 
 
 Some ten or eleven years later than the date of 
 this little story I met this same Irish doctor, of 
 whom I had in the interim entirely lost sight. He 
 had gone down in the world from a combination of 
 causes, and was engaged as manager of one of 
 several chemists' shops run by a firm in the East 
 End. Since my twentieth year I have suffered at 
 odd and quite unaccountable intervals from the 
 malady — far more distressing than either actively 
 painful or really dangerous — of insomnia. It is a 
 peculiarity of my constitution that I am curiously 
 insensible to the influence of soporifics, and can 
 take with impunity doses of opium and its kindred 
 drugs which would kill most people. I was at 
 this moment attacked by the most obstinate fit of 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 179 
 
 sleeplessness I have ever experienced, and the day on 
 which I stumbled against my old acquaintance was 
 the ninth in succession during which I had not known 
 one minute of complete unconsciousness, although 
 I had been swallowing sulphonal and such-like 
 medical sweetmeats by the handful. I told him of 
 my condition, and begged him to give me some- 
 thing — anything — which would make me sleep. 
 He took me to his shop, and there filled for me a 
 phial of a salt of morphia — sixty grains weight, as a 
 provision in hand against subsequent similar attacks. 
 He gave me a scale of doses, of which I took a 
 pencilled note. I went home, went to bed, and 
 took a dose, which had absolutely no effect. I took 
 another, and a third, with a similar result. The last 
 post arrived, bringing a letter which informed me 
 that a business project which I had regarded, with 
 perfectly good reason, as a certainty, had fallen 
 through. My torn nerves and battered brain gave 
 way under this added stress. I do not think — though 
 I am by no means sure — that I had any deliberate 
 intention of suicide, but I certainly meant to sleep, 
 and whether I ever woke again or not was a quite 
 secondary consideration. I flung all that was left 
 of the drug — not much short of the original sixty 
 grains — into a tankard of beer, drained it, and re- 
 turned to bed. I have no memory of lighting a 
 cigarette, but when, after many hours of blank un- 
 consciousness, I awoke, I found the stump of one 
 crushed between my first and second fingers, each 
 of which had a hole in it exposing the charred sur- 
 face of the bone. Eight-and-forty hours of paralysis 
 — I can find no other word to express so complete 
 
180 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 a loss of muscular power — and of indescribable 
 nausea and headache were, in my case, the only- 
 results of a dose of poison sufficient to kill thirty 
 people of normal constitution. 
 
 It was while "A Song of Sixpence," was going 
 its rounds among the publishers that I had my only 
 first-hand experience of life in a London hospital. 
 I was suffering from a local growth which, though 
 not in the least dangerous nor at all painful, it was 
 judged necessary to excise, and my friend Oliver 
 MacKellar offered me the use of a private room 
 in St. Thomas's. That I declined in favour of a 
 bed in one of the common wards, which I rightly 
 anticipated would yield experiences valuable both 
 in themselves and as ** copy." The Sister to whose 
 care I was relegated afterwards confessed that she 
 had been strongly opposed to this arrangement, as 
 "gentleman" patients are not popular in hospital, 
 but she owned that her fears had been vain, and 
 that I had submitted as perfectly to the necessary 
 discipline as any other of the inhabitants of the 
 ward. It is an experience which I remember as 
 a whole with sincere pleasure. The one thing I 
 disliked in the entire business was the taking of 
 an anaesthetic, but on that MacKellar insisted, 
 and I of course gave way. When the time for 
 the operation arrived I was taken into the bath- 
 room of the ward, stretched prone upon a table, 
 and my mouth covered by an elastic mouthpiece 
 communicating with the vessel containing the ether. 
 I have never been more intensely awake in my 
 life than I was at that moment, and was backing 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 181 
 
 all my will- force and my cultivated power of 
 observation against the action of the drug. I can 
 remember my sensations up to the moment at 
 which I lost consciousness with perfect clearness. 
 I lay fronting a large, uncurtained window, looking 
 on the roofs of some houses topped by a brilliantly 
 clear sky. Quite suddenly, that part of the 
 prospect was smitten from my view as completely 
 as if a curtain had been drawn before it. I could 
 see nothing more distant than the ring of quiet, 
 attentive faces, MacKellar's among them, which 
 were regarding me. Then they vanished, and my 
 vision was bounded by the white, muscular, heavily- 
 veined hands of the anaesthetist, which held the 
 apparatus to my mouth. They vanished also, and 
 I was flying at incalculable speed through limitless 
 space of Egyptian blackness, pepper-castered with 
 spots and blotches and constellations of intense fire 
 which somehow gave no light. My mind was filled 
 with wonder at this paradox, wonder which gave 
 way to a bewildering exhilaration in the swiftness 
 at which I was being shot to some unknown goal — 
 something akin, I fancy, to the *' speed-madness " 
 to which the weak-nerved motorist is liable. Then, 
 the whole universe seemed to blaze into sudden, 
 all-enveloping flame — such a coruscation, I should 
 imagine, as lights the brain traversed and shattered 
 by a bullet ; and then, an insensibility than which 
 death itself can know none more complete. 
 
 Slowly, like a diver rising from some vast 
 depth of turbid water, I floated back to conscious- 
 ness. I was lying in bed, with a woman's face 
 bending over me, and yet at the same time I was 
 
182 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 in the old Independent chapel at home, and the 
 congregation was singing "Abide with Me" to 
 the strains of the organ. The voices I heard were 
 those of the nurses and my fellow-patients, for it 
 was now eight o'clock in the evening, and at that 
 hour it is customary in each ward to sing a hymn, 
 after which silence is proclaimed for the night, and 
 the guests of the good St. Thomas address them- 
 selves to sleep. 
 
 I awoke early next morning, and watched the 
 strengthening sun-rays chase the mist which hung 
 above the river, and listened to the chimes of Big 
 Ben until he proclaimed the hour of six. At the 
 first stroke the silence of the ward was broken by 
 a clamour of cheery voices. "Wot ho, Twenty, 
 how's the leg, old man ? " " Look ere, Seventeen, 
 if you snore agin like you snored last night I'm 
 blowed if I don't come and sit on your 'ed ! " 
 " Oh, stow it, ye bloomin' old grumbler. Always 
 asnipin' at somebody, you are. Puffick disgrice to 
 the ward, ain't he, Sister.'*" and so on. I have 
 an idea that the lover of his kind who would see 
 cockney human nature at its best should seek and 
 study it in the wards of one of the great hospitals. 
 A resolute cheerfulness, an obstinate determination 
 to make the best of the worst circumstances, a 
 cheery defiance of pain and of every other kind 
 of trouble, a lively sympathy for and interest in 
 each others' ailments, and a sincere gratitude 
 for the care and skill and tenderness so lavishly 
 bestowed on the sufferers, are the dominant notes 
 of such a place. 
 
 During my fourteen days' stay in St. Thomas's 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 183 
 
 I got on terms of intimacy with more than one of 
 my fellow-patients. One queer character was an 
 old peasant, a tough octogenarian who had passed 
 over sixty years in London without in the least 
 impairing the raciness of the dialect and accent he 
 had learned in his native village as a boy. He 
 suffered from some cancerous growth in the bone 
 of the lower jaw, and had already undergone eleven 
 operations, at each of which a bit of bone of the 
 thickness of a sixpence had been removed. He was 
 inordinately proud of this unique record, and deter- 
 mined to improve on it. ** The doctor," he told 
 me, "wants I to ha' my jar tuk out, an' have a 
 pewter jar put in i'stead, but I doant hold wi' anny 
 such blasphemious proceedin'. The Lard give I 
 my jar when He med I, and I'm agoin' t' eat my 
 vittles wi' un arl the days as I'm let to live." 
 Another patient, the darling of the Sister, the 
 nurses, and the entire ward, was a little boy of 
 about five years old, one of the most beautiful 
 creatures it has ever been my fortune to behold. 
 He had been born and bred in a slum scarce a 
 stone's throw from the hospital, and bore a common 
 English name ; but he could hardly have been of 
 unmixed English ancestry. His complexion was 
 a dark olive lit in the cheeks with a fine orange 
 glow ; his immense eyes, of a wonderful depth and 
 brilliance, were black as midnight; and he had a 
 mass of waving curls as fine and soft as the finest 
 silk — a beauty curiously touched, young as he was, 
 by that incommunicable air of knowingness and 
 furtive, shabby smartness natural to the child- 
 cockney — a Velasquez with a dash of Phil May. 
 
184 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 On the first day of my convalescence I went and 
 sat on his bed, and entered into conversation with 
 him. "What is the matter with you, my little 
 man ? " I asked. " My figh's broke," he answered. 
 " That's bad," I said. ** How did you manage to 
 do that ? " " Didn't do it. It was faver." " Father ! 
 Why, how did he do it ? " " Wiv a poker." " And 
 where is your father ? " *• In pizon." " And where's 
 your mother?" " Dono. Can you play cat's 
 cradle ? " I did not possess that accomplishment, 
 and he was good enough to teach me, and was 
 extremely impatient at my clumsiness and stupidity. 
 I spoke of him to the Sister, asking if, on his 
 recovery, he would be re-consigned to the mercies 
 of the brute who had lamed him, and was glad 
 to hear that another home, in which he would be 
 kindly treated and well taught, had been found for 
 him, with the full consent of his father, who, being 
 approached on the subject, had said that "they 
 
 might roast the little in hell for all that he 
 
 cared." During my time in the place more than 
 one child-patient recovered, and was sent howling 
 with grief out of the hospital, and back to the 
 sordid cellar or squalid garret they had known as 
 "home," accompanied by the sorrowing pity of 
 every soul in the place ; to exchange the paradise 
 of cleanliness, tenderness, loving care, good food, 
 sweatmeats, toys, all that children love, for the 
 inferno of the London slums. I have seen nothing 
 more heartbreaking than those farewells, nothing 
 more touching than the kisses and endearments 
 by which the nurses strove to soften for those 
 desolate little waifs the pang of parting. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 185 
 
 I learned in St. Thomas's a sad little history, 
 which was yet not without a sort of melancholy 
 charm. One of the patients was an old gentleman 
 — I use the word advisedly, for I have seldom met 
 a man of finer breeding — who was slowly con- 
 valescing after a severe operation. He was allowed 
 to rise for an hour or two every day, and during 
 that time made himself extremely useful in a quiet 
 fashion, doing little services for anybody in need 
 of them. He was visited by his wife, as obviously 
 a gentlewoman as he a gentleman, and I noticed 
 that they both showed much familiarity with and 
 a great affection for one of the nurses in the ward. 
 She was a grave, quiet-looking woman of early 
 middle-age, and, like so many other women of her 
 profession nowadays, patently a lady. She bore 
 a name uncommon in itself, and occupying an 
 honoured place in English history as that of a 
 great naval commander. The night before I left 
 the hospital the old gentleman and myself were 
 enjoying a pipe in each other's society on the 
 broad stone balcony at the end of the ward, over- 
 looking the river, and he told me the story of which 
 I have spoken. Nurse D. was the great-grand- 
 daughter of the heroic sailor whose name she bore. 
 The teller of the story had, thirty years earlier, 
 owned the estate contiguous to that of her father, 
 then, as he himself had been, a wealthy man. Both 
 families had been ruined, and he, an old and well- 
 nigh penniless man, had found his way into the 
 hospital in which his old friend's daughter, whom 
 he had known in her cradle, and had danced on 
 his knee a hundred times, was acting as a nurse. 
 
186 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 The publication of " A Song of Sixpence " 
 brought me some little consideration. It was well 
 noticed, and that circumstance, no doubt, helped me 
 to get rid of a certain number of short stories at 
 what were at that time, and for a writer so little 
 known, fairly good prices. The tremendous boom 
 in that sort of fiction, which came with the huge 
 popularity of Sir Conan Doyle and Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling, was then still, as a leader-writer of a 
 certain great London daily once beautifully said, 
 ** in the uncut leaves of the womb of fate," and 
 even the most popular authors did not make much 
 by it. I conceived the theme of another novel, 
 "A Man of Genius," and worked at it ardently, 
 until I received from the late Henry Herman, the 
 part-author of "The Silver King" and " Claudian," 
 an offer of more immediately remunerative labour. 
 
 Herman was a personality worth dwelling upon 
 for more than a mere moment. He was a genius 
 manqu^, a spoiled great man, a sort of crippled 
 giant. Perhaps his most serious drawback was 
 that he had no language to think in. He spoke 
 English, French, German, and Italian with pretty 
 equal fluency, and all with the same quaint Alsatian 
 accent, but he had no literary implement of which 
 he was complete master. In my experience, poly- 
 glots are always more or less puzzle-headed people, 
 and Herman's ideas, always grandiose and some- 
 times genuinely poetic, were apt to be somewhat 
 formless and inchoate. Cognate with these qualities 
 was a wild restlessness of temperament which kept 
 him from settling to any definite line of effort. 
 His mind was a sort of splendid rag-bag, full of 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 187 
 
 "purple patches," a mental dust-heap which would 
 well have repaid the labour of sifting and arranging. 
 He had had a vast and various experience of life. 
 He was by profession a doctor of medicine. He 
 had been a sailor before the mast, a ship's purser, a 
 steel engraver, a schoolmaster, a journalist, a hunter 
 and trapper, a gold-miner in California, and a silver- 
 miner in Colorado. He had fought for the South 
 in the American civil war, and had come unscathed 
 through nine pitched battles and four forlorn hopes. 
 He had lost an eye, it was generally believed in 
 action, but the fact was really otherwise. A frag- 
 ment of a Northern shell had inflicted a mere 
 scratch upon the lower eyelid, which, for lack of 
 proper attention, festered and gathered in a painful 
 fashion. When at last Herman was able to find 
 the regimental surgeon, the latter, who had been 
 sawing off arms and legs and performing kindred 
 operations for nearly forty-eight hours on end, was 
 so drunk with fatigue and sleeplessness, that, in an 
 attempt to lance the gathering, he thrust his instru- 
 ment into the pupil, and so utterly destroyed the 
 sight of the eye. After this accident Herman's 
 life became less adventurous, while still remaining 
 strangely haphazard and unsettled. For him to 
 succeed in any one of the innumerable professions 
 to which he turned his hand seemed enough to 
 disgust him with it, and to send him off in search 
 of some other means of making a livelihood. 
 
 He had been at one period a sworn chemical 
 expert of one of the Paris lav/-courts, and apropos 
 of that experience used to tell one of the best of 
 his inexhaustible store of good stories. He was 
 
188 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 called as witness regarding the quality of a certain 
 brand of wine. Having chemically tested the 
 liquor, he went into the box and swore positively 
 that it did not contain, among its many constituents, 
 one solitary drop of grape-juice. The wine-mer- 
 chant was, in consequence, heavily fined. On 
 leaving the Court, Herman found the merchant 
 waiting for him. He anticipated strife, or at least 
 objurgation, but the merchant was perfectly civil, 
 and invited him to a glass at a neighbouring cafe. 
 At the moment of parting, after a long and friendly 
 conversation, the merchant asked, with an admirably 
 casual air, " By the way, how was it that you were 
 able to swear so positively that there was no grape- 
 juice in that stuff of mine ? " " Because," replied 
 Herman, "if there had been, in combination with 
 the other elements you used, it would have caused 
 the formation of tartaric acid on the barrel." 
 " Thank you very much," replied the honest 
 merchant. " You II find some next time!' 
 
 Herman, myself, and John Cobbe — also, alas ! 
 among the departed — once found ourselves together 
 in the city of York. We took a walk one day, and 
 stopped for luncheon at an hotel in the neighbour- 
 hood of the racecourse. It was race week, but 
 owing to the singular inclemency of the weather the 
 meeting had been a comparative failure in the way 
 of attendance. The larder of the hotel was, in 
 consequence, greatly overstocked. The three of us 
 sat down to a table loaded with a mass of provisions 
 which would have satiated the appetites of a 
 regiment of Horse Guards — a Gargantuan mound 
 of beef, a huge ham, and a turkey, a giant of his 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 189 
 
 tribe, which would have turned the scale at thirty 
 pounds. We elected for the turkey. We were all 
 reasonably good trenchermen, and all fairly sharp- 
 set, but when we had done our best the great bird 
 looked as if a few mice had been nibbling at him. 
 At this moment a big, gaunt-looking mastiff strolled 
 in through the open French window leading to the 
 garden, and dumbly appealed to us for alms. 
 Herman, in one of the moments of comic madness 
 to which he was liable, gave the brute the entire 
 turkey. Probably fearing that the gift might be 
 withdrawn, he bolted with it down the garden path, 
 and leaped the fence into a neighbouring field. 
 " That's very funny, no doubt," remarked Cobbe, 
 who was a man of business, " but we shall have to 
 pay for that bird." " Then we'll haf zome vun vor 
 our money," replied Herman. He put the metal 
 cover over the empty porcelain dish, and rang the 
 bell. The waiter entered. " Take that away," 
 said Herman, "and bring some whisky." The 
 waiter, a portly, personable, rather muscular-looking 
 man, bent over the dish, stiffened his back, and 
 lifted — hard. The dish and the cover soared over 
 his head like leaves blown by the wind, the former 
 smashing to fragments against the wall behind him, 
 and the waiter sat suddenly on the floor with a thud 
 which shook the building. Herman and Cobbe, 
 who sat facing him, kept a perfect and unshaken 
 gravity of feature, as if nothing in the least out of 
 the common had happened. I was glad that my 
 face was turned in the opposite direction. The 
 waiter gathered himself up and went away like a 
 man somnambulising, and we saw him no more. 
 
190 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Another man, whose face was as white as a corpse's, 
 and who trembled visibly in vague terror of some- 
 thing sudden and painful happening to him, appeared 
 with the bill, in which the turkey and the breakage 
 figured largely. Herman paid it without a word, 
 and we all three lit our cigars and filed out. Pale 
 faces peered at us from doorways and corners and 
 over the balustrades of stairs, and the population of 
 the neighbourhood was congregated in the street 
 outside. A considerable deputation followed us 
 quite a long distance, loath to lose sight of the 
 three miraculous strangers who had devoured a 
 thirty-pound turkey, bones and beak and all, and I 
 have no doubt that we are the nucleus of a legend 
 in the place to this day. 
 
 Many of the experiences which had befallen this 
 modern Ulysses were worthy of permanent record, 
 and it is a great pity that death at the — for a man 
 of his superb physique and indomitable courage — 
 early age of sixty should have deprived the world 
 of the autobiography he had intended to write. 
 Let me rescue one or two events from the complete 
 oblivion which might otherwise fall upon them. On 
 one occasion he was living in a cosmopolitan camp 
 of pioneers, pitched under the shadow of a huge, 
 overhanging mountain-side in the State of Arizona. 
 There were a few animals among the community, 
 a couple of horses, a mule or two, a few mongrel 
 dogs, and one cat. On a certain morning the camp 
 woke up to find itself deserted by its four-footed 
 inhabitants, who were nowhere to be found. Her- 
 man convened his companions and addressed them 
 to the effect that this desertion was a grim warning 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 191 
 
 which might at any moment be horribly fulfilled, 
 and urged them to imitate the behaviour of the 
 quadrupeds and forsake the camp. They laughed 
 at him, and he went forth alone. He had tramped 
 barely five miles, when, with a crash which seemed 
 to shake the solid globe, the mountain-side fell 
 upon the camp and buried it a mile deep. 
 
 On another occasion he found himself one of 
 a similar crowd in some other wild district of the 
 then unsettled West. The camp consisted mostly 
 of the poorest and most ignorant class of Irishman, 
 with a sprinkling of Germans, Italians, Mexicans, 
 and Spaniards. One day it was joined by a 
 shambling vagabond in whom dim traces of what 
 he had once been were feebly discernible through 
 layer on layer of failure, drunkenness, and degrada- 
 tion. He claimed to be a graduate of the University 
 of Oxford, and there could be no doubt that he was, 
 or rather had been, a man of real culture and of 
 considerable natural talent. He discovered a bed 
 of asbestos in the neighbourhood, and out of the 
 fibre knitted for himself a pair of socks. Coming in 
 to camp one rainy day, he found a number of his 
 companions loafing round a fire. He took off the 
 socks and flung them on the mass of glowing logs, 
 and, when they were dry, put them on his feet 
 ao^ain. If his idea had been to astonish his 
 ignorant and brutal neighbours he certainly suc- 
 ceeded, but hardly to the degree to which they 
 succeeded in astonishing him. For within the 
 next ten minutes he was hanging by the neck to 
 a branch of a big tree, "accused — our learning's 
 fate — of wizardry." 
 
192 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Is the markedly optimistic temperament neces- 
 sarily allied to the superstitious type of mind ? I 
 am inclined to answer the question affirmatively, 
 for I have never known a very hopeful person who 
 was not more or less swayed by signs and omens. 
 Herman, whose hopefulness, to one of my some- 
 what sombre temper, seemed sometimes little short 
 of a happy kind of lunacy, was especially open to 
 such influences. He came down to Nice to colla- 
 borate with Christie on a novel. It was the seventh 
 day of the seventh month of the year when he 
 arrived. The carriage in which he had travelled 
 on the P. L. M. had been numbered 'j']']. The 
 open cab which conveyed him to our villa on Mont- 
 boron bore the number 707, and the number of his 
 various articles of luggage was seven. This rush 
 of coincidences inspired him with the belief that a 
 fortune was awaiting him at Monte Carlo, and he 
 scarcely gave himself time to swallow a biscuit and 
 a glass of wine before he flew thither, accompanied 
 by Christie, who — another optimist a oiUrance — 
 had caught the infection of his enthusiasm. They 
 returned by the early night train — le Train des 
 Decaves — without a five-franc piece between them. 
 They had played for over two hours, and number 
 seven had never once turned up. 
 
 By mining and speculation, and by other means, 
 Herman had made several quite respectable little 
 fortunes, but an incurable generosity — he would 
 have given the hat off his head to anybody who had 
 asked for it — and an ingrained contempt of money 
 kept him from retaining any of them. The Silver 
 King and Claudian were both great successes, and 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 193 
 
 are to-day yielding good revenues to those who 
 hold their rights, but to him they brought only brief 
 periods of prosperity. At the time at which I am 
 now arrived he was at one of his periods of financial 
 depression. A certain well-known dramatist had 
 recently died, leaving amongst his effects a mass of 
 inchoate dialogue and situation — written probably 
 many years earlier, before he had mastered the 
 practice of his craft — which bore the same relation 
 to a drama that a swamp bears to a canal, or a box 
 of beads to a necklace. It was bought for a few 
 pounds by a speculative manager, and submitted to 
 Herman. The latter was at that time suffering 
 from some sort of trouble with his one remain- 
 ing eye, and asked me to read the MS. to him. 
 I did so, and we discussed together its dramatic 
 possibilities. We determined that there were pos- 
 sibilities in it, and as a result the manager con- 
 tracted to pay Herman ^300 and myself ^50 
 for our labour in cutting, revising, reconstructing, 
 and generally knocking the piece into an actable 
 condition, and then staging it. It was to be 
 rehearsed for a fortnight, and played for a trial 
 week at a provincial town by a company already 
 on the road. 
 
 It was produced during a week of blistering 
 heat — the worst possible conditions for theatrical 
 success. Such audiences as came to see it were 
 exceedingly enthusiastic, but the houses were 
 dismally thin. Our manager had been doing badly 
 for some time past, the week's receipts could have 
 been barely sufficient to pay the company's salaries 
 and their fares to the next town, and when, on the 
 
 o 
 
194 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Friday night, the manager announced to us that he 
 must go up to London to raise the ^350 he had 
 promised us, neither Herman nor myself felt very 
 sanguine about seeing the money. The curtain 
 fell on Saturday's performance, scenery and dresses 
 were transported to the railway station, and we saw 
 the company off with cheerful faces, hoping against 
 hope. But when the last train from London had 
 come and gone, and the manager had not put in an 
 appearance, things began to look more than a little 
 haggard. We had a fortnight's unpaid hotel bill to 
 face, and the further question of how to return to 
 London took on disquieting proportions. We sat 
 together in Herman's bedroom, canvassing ways 
 and means, while the bell of a neighbouring church 
 tolled one, two, and three o'clock, when suddenly 
 a step sounded on the landing, and into the room 
 burst the glorious apparition of the manager, waving 
 above his head a handful of bank-paper. He had 
 missed his train from London by a bare minute, 
 and, knowing our necessity, had been almost as 
 perturbed as ourselves. Then, as good luck would 
 have it, a special train had been ordered by some 
 great personage to the identical town he desired to 
 reach, and he had secured a place in the guard's 
 van. I am happy to state that the piece turned out 
 a huge success, is still enjoying a vast provincial 
 vogue, and has set the manager on a pinnacle of 
 fortune worthy so good a fellow. 
 
 In spite of this and other interruptions the 
 composition of my new novel went steadily for- 
 ward, and was finished within five months of its 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 195 
 
 inception. It was nearing completion when what 
 I at first thought a most encouraging incident 
 occurred. I was introduced to a gentleman who 
 was on the point of starting a cosmopolitan monthly 
 review. He declared himself a fervid admirer of 
 such of my work as he had happened to see, and 
 learning that I was engaged upon a novel, desired 
 to read it so far as it had then progressed. I gave 
 the MS. into his hands, he professed himself 
 hugely delighted with it, and offered to run it 
 through the pages of his review at the rate of ten 
 thousand words per month, and at a payment of 
 £2 per thousand for the serial right. I acquiesced 
 gladly, and dreamed that I had at last found my 
 long-sought Mecaenas. Two numbers of the 
 review appeared, and then, unhappily, it died. I 
 received nothing for the twenty thousand words 
 of my novel which had appeared in its pages, 
 and had considerable difficulty in rescuing the 
 rest of the MS. from the printer, who had not 
 been paid either. The one scrap of satisfaction 
 I got out of the business came in the form of a 
 most generous letter of praise from Hall Caine, 
 who at that time I barely knew, but who, by 
 some weird chance, had happened on a copy of 
 one of the numbers of the review. He remains 
 to this day the only person I know of who ever 
 heard of its existence. 
 
 By this time the book was finished, and I 
 entered on the labour of finding a publisher for 
 it. The gods of literature were kinder to me on 
 this occasion than in the kindred case of " A 
 Song .of Sixpence," and it was rejected by only 
 
196 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 seven firms. It was ultimately published within 
 eighteen months of Its completion by a London 
 firm, and I may honestly describe it as a decided 
 success. The Press was enthusiastic, and I have 
 known few more delightful moments than when, 
 a week or so after the book's appearance, I 
 stumbled upon a review of a column and a quarter 
 in the Standard^ hailing me as a decided acquisition 
 to the ranks of contemporary novelists. The Times 
 was almost equally warm, the AthencBum^ the 
 Pall Mall Gazette^ and other leading journals, 
 spoke welcome words of encouragement, and in 
 the columns of the Westminster Gazette it was 
 made the peg on which to hang a series of 
 clever and trenchant articles on the then condi- 
 tion of English fiction. Surely, oh surely, my 
 chance had come at last ! Alas — 
 
 " Not seldom, dad in radiant hue, 
 Deceitfully comes forth the morn." 
 
 Shortly after their production of another novel 
 from my pen, written at hot speed to take full 
 advantage of my recent success, the personnel of 
 the firm underwent a change, with the result that 
 both books were nearly as completely lost to public 
 knowledge as if they had never been printed at 
 all. Once again, therefore, my Nemesis was left 
 triumphant. 
 
 Apart from one or two melodramatic pot-boilers, 
 the plots of which were conveyed from a set of 
 old French plays picked up for a few pence in 
 Holywell Street, and which, bad as they were, 
 brought me in more money than all my other work 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 197 
 
 in fiction, I made only one more essay at expressing 
 myself in that form. I wrote some five-and-twenty 
 thousand words of a novel of which the provisional 
 title was " A Splendid Fellow." Judging this per- 
 formance by what I can still remember of it, I am 
 inclined to think it was very much the best thing 
 I ever did. It was intended for an intimate analy- 
 tical study of a character not unlike that of the 
 principal character in my first novel, to whom 
 circumstances combined to offer the fullest possible 
 play to the utter selfishness and heartless ambition 
 which were the keynotes of his character. Under 
 the cloak of a fascinating exterior and of a facile 
 surface good-nature as genuine as it was shallow, 
 my hero was to have proceeded on a brilliant 
 and unchecked career of conquest, every step 
 in his path to a peerage and the certain prospect 
 of Westminster Abbey marked by some master- 
 piece of mean and caddish crime. I was in love 
 with my theme, and left the personages of the 
 story growing under my pen in strength and veri- 
 similitude with every passing day. Then, one 
 memorable evening, after a day spent in strenuous 
 and delightful labour on my magnum opus, I went 
 out for a walk. Returning, I chanced to raise my 
 eyes to the window of my room, from which, to my 
 horror, a snowstorm of paper was issuing. I tore 
 into the house and upstairs in tme to rescue the 
 last completed sheet of the manuscript of "A 
 Splendid Fellow." The rest was circulating over 
 the adjacent streets on the wings of the wind — the 
 only circulation it will ever know. I accepted the 
 incident as a sort of supernatural, final negatur to 
 
198 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 my ambition as a writer of fiction, and have never, 
 since that day, attempted another novel. 
 
 I may as well, while I am about it, make a clean 
 sweep of the narration of my misfortunes in the 
 merely literary line. In the year 1900, Robert 
 Buchanan — of whom I shall presently have a good 
 deal to say — was smitten with paralysis. His 
 recovery was pronounced to be quite hopeless, and 
 on the strength of my long and intimate connection 
 with him I was commissioned by a young publisher, 
 who had recently started in business, to write a 
 critical study of his life-work. Buchanan lingered 
 for nine months, and then died with almost startling 
 suddenness, and the book was on the market within 
 a week or two of his death. It went well, but, 
 owing to the publisher's retirement from business, 
 it has disappeared from the list of the living as 
 completely as the books I have already mentioned 
 had done aforetime. 
 
 A year or two later I made a bargain with 
 Messrs. Isbister to edit a library of books to be 
 called " The Pro and Con Series." Each volume 
 was to have consisted of two essays, written from 
 diametrically opposite points of view by well-known 
 experts on some debatable subject of actual interest, 
 such as the Nationalization of Railways and of 
 the Land, Capital Punishment, Conscription, the 
 Influences of the Turf, Municipal Trading, and the 
 like. I entered on the undertaking with a light 
 heart, recking little of the huge amount of corre- 
 spondence and the number of personal interviews 
 its performance would entail, almost all of which 
 work was doomed to be wasted. Messrs. Isbister 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 199 
 
 produced one volume of the projected series, that on 
 *' Old Age Pensions," and then went into liquida- 
 tion. That was five years ago, since when I have, 
 so to speak, confined my efforts to the hors d'oeuvres 
 of literature. The present volume is an attempt at a 
 dish on something like the old scale, and I am put- 
 ting in a good deal of time in trying to imagine what 
 new trick the literary Fates may have invented this 
 time for my discomfiture. Up to date, my account 
 with those capricious powers stands as follows : — 
 
 The complete MS. of a novel lost in trans- 
 mission through the post. 
 
 A novel rejected by thirty-six publishers and 
 ultimately sold for ^lo. 
 
 Two novels and a Critical Biography the 
 circulation of which ceased on the changes 
 in the firms of their respective publishers. 
 
 A projected series of Sociological Studies 
 vetoed by a similar accident. 
 
 Twenty-five thousand words of a novel blown 
 through the window. 
 
 A book which I cannot persuade any publisher 
 to produce. 
 
 The retirement of John Reid from the editor- 
 ship of the London edition of the New York Herald 
 and of Sebastian Evans from the editorship of the 
 People, the death of the Review in which the first 
 twenty thousand words of my story had appeared 
 and my adventures with the three Amateur Editors, 
 serve excellently as the trimmings to this feast 
 of failure. 
 
 A man talking of himself is as a babbling brook, 
 
200 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 and of his wrongs or his misfortunes, as a rushing 
 river. I have not nearly arrived at the end of my 
 tale of professional woe, but I should like to pause 
 here for a few words of personal explanation. I 
 should be sorry if any reader I am fortunate enough 
 to find should take this book as the outpouring of 
 the gall of an atrabilious grumbler. Writing this in 
 the imminent shadow of my fiftieth birthday, and 
 recognising — as I may well do — that my chances 
 of fame and fortune as a writer have vanished as 
 utterly as the snows of yester-year, I am not in the 
 least angry or bitter about it. To say that I have 
 never known moments of anger or of bitterness 
 would be to proclaim myself as something more 
 than human. But I have suffered, and suffer, so 
 little from the continued and inveterate failure of 
 my projects that I am inspired greatly to doubt if 
 the most brilliant success would really have brought 
 me any such overflowing pleasure as I once believed 
 it in its power to give. There may be — there 
 certainly are — natures otherwise, and, as I think, 
 less happily compact in this respect than mine, 
 natures to which success is a ravishing: and intoxi- 
 eating wine, and failure a draught of Marah whose 
 after-taste is only to be scoured from the loathing 
 palate by the tooth of the grave-worm. It is an 
 open question whether, in such a world as this, 
 where Fortune is rarely regularly kind even to her 
 most pampered favourites, 
 
 " Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full 
 Out of their choicest and their whitest wool — " 
 
 such a temperament can be altogether a blessing. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 201 
 
 Kicks are commoner than ha'pence to the luckiest 
 of us, and it is surely well for a man to be able to 
 accept either with a decent indifference. Tennyson 
 never saw my face, but he hit me in the bull's-eye 
 when he penned the lines he puts into the mouth of 
 old Earl Yniol, in " The Marriage of Geraint" — 
 
 " Nor know I whether I be very base 
 Or very manful, whether very wise 
 Or very foohsh ; only this I know, 
 That whatsoever evil happen to me, 
 I seem to suffer nothing, heart or limb, 
 But can endure it all most patiently." 
 
 Not by any means an heroic temperament, nor one 
 that makes a man potent either for good or evil, it 
 is one that early learns to smile at all the ills of life 
 that fall short of actual tragic dignity. And in other 
 respects my fortune has not been all unkind. My 
 parents gave me a physical machinery as admirable 
 
 " As I were made and set aside to show — 
 The body's habit wholly laudable." 
 
 There are few men of nine-and-forty who can say 
 that they have never known a day's serious sick- 
 ness, or suffered so much as a headache that they 
 have not richly earned. And even failure and its 
 consequent poverty are by no means entirely evils. 
 For one thing, they teach a man who, among the 
 thousands he jostles on the crowded highways of 
 the world, are his real friends. The poor man 
 knows that the hand offered to him is cordial, that 
 he is truly welcome at the board to which he is 
 invited, that the wine he drinks there is of an 
 honest vintage, and poured out for him with a 
 
202 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 ready hand and a kind heart. Si je ne stiis pas la 
 rose^ fai vkiL bieti pres d'elle — I know many of the 
 men whose names ring loudest in the public ear, 
 who have made the fame and the money I was once 
 so fain to make, and I do not know that they are 
 much happier than I, or that, at the final balancing 
 of things, I shall have much to envy them. 
 
 I have read much that has been written in 
 praise of poverty, but I have nowhere come across 
 a statement of certain considerations to which my 
 own experience has introduced me. I am not in 
 the least trying to be funny or clever at the expense 
 of common-sense when I say that it is one of my 
 deepest convictions that there is no man now living 
 who, not having enjoyed that advantage, would not 
 have been hugely improved by a spell — say, twelve 
 months — of financial distress as severe as is com- 
 patible with safety to life and could be supported 
 without permanent injury to health. And I hold 
 that statement to be truer the higher may be the 
 man's social position, the greater the power he 
 wields, the more unbounded the wealth he possesses. 
 There is no other experience so splendidly educa- 
 tional as for a man to stand in his native nakedness 
 and impotence, between the bare earth and the 
 bleak sky, and to recognise that whether he lives 
 or dies is, of all things in the world, the most 
 absolutely unimportant to the world at large. I 
 have sometimes thought that no man who has not 
 drunk to the dregs that bitter cup of wholesome 
 humiliation can be quite perfectly a man. I do not 
 know, and cannot conceive, of any really efficient 
 substitute for that terrible and fortifying lesson. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 203 
 
 To have come through a storm of fire on a battle- 
 field, to have passed days of hunger and despair 
 in a small boat on the wide waste of ocean, to have 
 forced, or to have failed to force, some great and 
 necessary piece of legislation singlehanded down 
 the throats of an insubordinate majority, to have 
 faced and dominated a mob yelling for one's life- 
 blood — such feats as these have been the furnace 
 to mould and temper hearts of noble heroism. But 
 in the bitter moments they can give, there is a con- 
 soling and strengthening dignity. There is nothing 
 dignified in being friendless, foodless, and impotent 
 in a great city ; and nothing in the least pride- 
 inspiring in escaping from such a dilemma — that puts 
 you merely on the level of the poorest scavenger 
 working in the street. You feel as helpless as an 
 unshelled crab on a rock ; very mean, very poor, 
 very cheap, as negligible as neglected ; and it is 
 very good for you, if you are really a man, and not 
 a mere bundle of appetites, lusts, vanity, and self- 
 importance, made up to look like one. It gives you 
 an amazing relish for the next plateful of victual 
 you strike, and — again, if you are a man, and not 
 the other thing — it gives you an intense pity for 
 those unfortunates who have not touched at the 
 Isle of Provant, and are still wandering on the 
 desolate waters from which you have escaped. In 
 a wisely-ordered State such an experience would be 
 insisted on as an indispensable part of the education 
 of all potentates of all kinds whatsoever ; all Kings 
 or Presidents of republics, all Princes of the Blood 
 Royal, all Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, 
 Barons, Baronets, heads of State departments. 
 
204 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 permanent officials, millionaires, editors, journalists, 
 authors, publicists, town and borough councillors, 
 employers of labour, and members of that vener- 
 able, if somewhat mouldy institution, the House of 
 Commons — of every person, without exception, 
 who claims the smallest authority in any kind of 
 public business, or attempts in any way to influence 
 public action. Socialism is coming with the inevi- 
 tability of death and the accelerating velocity of 
 a falling stone, but that one reform would bring 
 it with the rapidity of light. The human average 
 is on the right side, always and everywhere, and the 
 people who rule us are for the most part good men, 
 not more selfish or brutal than any similar number 
 of people drawn from other ranks. But they do 
 not know — they have not acquired that ultimate 
 wisdom which nothing but an empty belly can 
 impart ; and no man who has never been hungry — 
 unless he be a born saint, sage, and philanthropist 
 — can make an efficient legislator. 
 
 It was not long after parting with Christie at 
 Nice that I made a journalistic liaison which 
 resulted, in a rather odd and out-of-the-way fashion, 
 in cementing the longest, firmest, and dearest 
 friendship of my life. I joined the staff of the 
 Hawk, a sixpenny weekly paper run and officered 
 by a small crowd of cheery journalistic Ishmaelites, 
 of whom one or two, including Augustus Moore 
 and James Glover — the latter now and for many 
 years past musical conductor at Drury Lane — 
 were old friends of mine. It was an impudent, 
 irreverent, utterly irrelevant and candidly libellous 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 205 
 
 little sheet, which, by sheer dint of those qualities 
 plus a good deal of slangy cleverness, rapidly 
 became a power among that curious social 
 continofent known as " The Smart Set." Like 
 the ideal Christian in relation to this passing 
 world, I was rather in the Hawk office than of 
 it, having neither the money nor the inclination 
 to mix much with the crowd for which the paper 
 catered. It had, or professed to have, a serious 
 side, and it gave me chances which more ** respect- 
 able" journals would never have afforded for the 
 plain expression of my convictions on many subjects. 
 I have always had a strong dash of V esprit frondeiir^ 
 and took full advantage of my liberty. The late 
 Harry Quilter had just started his brilliant but 
 short-lived Universal Review, and in one of his 
 earlier numbers appeared an article by Robert 
 Buchanan on " The Modern Young Man as 
 Critic," written with all that forthright candour 
 which used to mark its author's polemical utter- 
 ances. Moore and myself were more or less lids 
 with one or two of the people Buchanan most 
 pitilessly attacked, and Moore suggested that I 
 should reply to the article. The passage in which, 
 in my " Critical Appreciation of Robert Buchanan," 
 I recounted the incident may as well do duty here. 
 " My feelings towards Buchanan at that time 
 were of a somewhat mixed description, com- 
 pounded of admiration for the genius evidenced 
 in his best work and regret that he should so often 
 fall below the lofty level which, in his happier 
 moments, he attained and kept so easily ; and in 
 my criticism of 'The Modern Young Man as 
 
206 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Critic* the second of those sentiments certainly- 
 found stronger expression than the first. I had 
 at that time a tendency, which perhaps even now 
 I have not ahogether outworn, to let my pen run 
 away with me, and to express the passing mood 
 of the moment with unnecessary strength. What 
 I said was, as Buchanan himself subsequently 
 confessed, true enough, but it was truth savagely 
 spoken, and I have to own that the article was 
 permeated by a certain air of personal resentment 
 quite unjustified by the circumstances of the case. 
 My acquaintance with Buchanan was at that 
 moment of the slightest, but as the hazards of life 
 drew us closer and closer together I regretted my 
 virulence more and more, and when, some months 
 after the appearance of my ill-tempered article, 
 Buchanan, by a most thoughtful and quite un- 
 solicited act of friendship, showed how kindly he 
 had come to regard me, I felt that the hour for 
 full confession had arrived. I wrote to him, 
 avowing myself the author of the article and 
 apologising more for its manner than its matter. 
 His reply was like himself — frank, cordial, generous. 
 * Nobody knows better than I how, in these random 
 fights of the literary arena, a man loses his temper 
 and strikes harder than he need. I have many 
 such sins on my conscience. There is really very 
 little in your article that you need regret, and 
 indeed, knowing how you feel on these matters, 
 I do not see how you could well have written 
 otherwise. . . . To requite your candour, I was 
 fairly certain that you had written the article, and 
 quite certain, if my belief was true, that you would 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 207 
 
 sooner or later "own up" to it. Don't avoid me 
 like the plague because you have voluntarily gone 
 into the confessional, but come up to dinner next 
 Sunday and do penance.' The matter was never 
 again mentioned between us, and this apparently 
 untoward accident was the starting-point of an 
 absolutely unchequered friendship of more than 
 twelve years' duration. I mention it here only 
 because it was so richly characteristic of a side of 
 Buchanan's nature which the majority of people, 
 knowing him merely from his published utterances, 
 could hardly believe him to possess. A man of 
 passionately cherished ideals, most of which were 
 utterly opposed to the practice of his day ; a man 
 who, while he lived, must freely speak whenever 
 truth he saw, at whatever cost to the feelings or 
 interests of individuals ; he was incapable of the 
 least personal malice towards an opponent." 
 
 Buchanan's influence upon my character, my 
 outlook upon the world, my entire nature, was 
 profound, and will be life-long. It is my most con- 
 stant and enduring regret that I did not come into 
 intimate contact with him sixteen years earlier, at 
 the outset of my active career. This book is a 
 record of my own personal experiences, and not a 
 detailed study of the lives of other men — an 
 autobiography, not a literary cinematograph of 
 other personalities. But no man can truly recount 
 his own life without telling in part the lives of other 
 men, and Buchanan was so cardinal a factor in 
 mine, and was, moreover, in himself so interesting 
 a figure, that I shall make no apology for presenting 
 as clear an idea of the antecedent forces which had 
 
208 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 made him what he was when I met him as my poor 
 skill can compass. 
 
 Perpetually, and at all epochs of his life, it had 
 been Buchanan's fortune to be in revolt against his 
 immediate surroundings. Born into Robert Owen's 
 " New Social World," " nourished," as he himself 
 has told us, " on the husks of Socialism and the 
 chill waters of Infidelity," having hardly, until at 
 ten years of age he went to Scotland, heard the 
 name of God, the innate theological leaven which 
 was to make him all his life a seeker after some 
 divine sanctification of our moral existence worked 
 in him from his earliest years. In his " Latter Day 
 Leaves " he tells us : " All my experience, my birth, 
 my education, my entire surroundings, were against 
 the birth or growth of the sweet spirit of natural 
 piety ; all the human beings I had known or 
 listened to were confirmed sceptics or boisterous 
 unbelievers. Yet while my father was confidently 
 preaching God's non-existence, I was praying to 
 God in the language of the canonical books. I 
 cannot even remember a time when I did not kneel 
 by my bedside before going to sleep, and repeat 
 the Lord's Prayer. So far away was I from any 
 human sympathy in this foolish matter, that this 
 praying of mine was ever done secretly, with a 
 strong sense of shame and dread of discovery." 
 The elder Buchanan's friends, Lloyd Jones, Archi- 
 bald Campbell, William Turvey — names which are 
 not even names to the present generation, which 
 cares for as little as it knows of the debt it owes to 
 them and their intellectual kindred — were apostles 
 of free-thought, of which he was himself, in his day, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 209 
 
 an enthusiastic advocate. Not merely in pious 
 Glasgow, but throughout Great Britain generally, 
 men of such views were, at that time, social out- 
 casts, shunned and boycotted by all respectable 
 people. In her biography of Buchanan, Miss 
 Harriett Jay tells us : " The poet's father was an 
 object of special detestation, and he himself, as the 
 son of a notorious unbeliever, was very early 
 taught the lesson of social persecution. If he made 
 an acquaintance of his own age, that boy was 
 generally warned against him and taught to give 
 him the cold shoulder. * Don't play with yon 
 laddie,' the boys would say, 'his father's an 
 infidel.* Ridiculous as the record of this persecu- 
 tion may appear, it caused the lad at the time a 
 great deal of misery, and later on, when we spoke 
 together of those days of his youth, he assured me 
 that many a time he had prayed with all his 
 soul that his father would mend his ways, go to 
 Church, and accept the social sanctities like other 
 men." 
 
 This bitter apprenticeship had its results, read- 
 able alike in his life and in his work. The chilly 
 atmosphere of atheism revolted him, and he 
 escaped from it — entirely for a brief time, though I 
 doubt if after he took to the study of modern 
 thought, as expounded by Spencer, Huxley, 
 Haeckel, and Buchner, there was ever a moment in 
 which he felt complete certainty of God or of 
 eternal life. His brain and heart were at odds 
 upon the question, and remained to the last 
 unreconciled. That life-long struggle and the 
 vivid memory he retained to the last of his childish 
 
 p 
 
210 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 unhappiness, which might have soured or hardened 
 a poorer nature, were to him influences almost 
 purely beneficent. He learned in suffering what he 
 taught in song, and not only in song but in daily 
 word and deed : a large tolerance of all forms of 
 doubt and belief, an abiding sense of the sacredness 
 of that inner light which every thinking man must 
 kindle and tend within himself. His obstinate 
 clinging to a religious scheme of which he came 
 to see clearly the logical weakness was in no 
 small measure and to a great degree unconsciously 
 the result of his poetic temperament. Christianity 
 and many of its corollaries were aesthetically 
 beautiful to him. Miss Jay tells how he loved the 
 sound of church bells, and the reading of the 
 passage vividly recalls one summer Sunday morn- 
 ing in the country, when we lay sheltered from the 
 brilliant sunshine by the branches of a huge elm, 
 listening to the mingled music from the spires of 
 half a dozen adjacent villages. " What will life be 
 worth when that is heard no more ? " he asked. 
 His sense of abiding kinship with those he loved 
 was a deeper reason for his obstinate clinging to 
 the hope of immortality. It was so strong and 
 militant that at moments its angry revolt seemed 
 to conquer his intellect completely. As Tennyson 
 has it — 
 
 " Like a man in wrath, the soul 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt ' ! " 
 
 " I don't care a curse for your ' scientific evidence,' " 
 I have heard him say to a friend with whom he was 
 disputing. " It isn't thinkable that I should not 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 211 
 
 meet certain people again. I must meet them, and 
 I know that I shall.'' He would not admit at such 
 moments that his intense longing for the society of 
 his lost friends was no proof of the validity of his 
 hope, nor that future generations, nourished in the 
 Thanatist creed, would accept eternal separation 
 with none of the pangs he suffered. " They will 
 lose more than they will gain," was his reply to 
 such attempts at consolation. "It is only the 
 certainty of an immortality to be shared with the 
 souls we love that can give such a wretched busi- 
 ness as life the smallest value. If this existence is 
 all, it is not worth a burned-out match." 
 
 " Our friends and our enemies," says Thackeray, 
 with his own easy and delightful cynicism, "both 
 paint our portraits, and both portraits are like us." 
 That is true as a general statement, but like most 
 other general statements it has its exceptions, and 
 the most glaring exception I have ever known was 
 furnished by Robert Buchanan. The portraits of 
 him painted by his enemies were ludicrous carica- 
 tures, or rather, clumsy libels, for caricature is only 
 worthy of the name when it depends on the wilful 
 distortion of some really characteristic feature, and 
 is recognisable without having the name of its 
 alleged original displayed in large letters on the 
 frame. I have listened on many occasions to views 
 of Buchanan's character, and more — to personally 
 guaranteed excerpts from his biography — which, in 
 their ludicrous falseness to the very groundwork of 
 his being as I intimately knew it, remain among the 
 most marvellous utterances I have ever heard from 
 human lips. Such libels on his character and 
 
212 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 travesties of his actions were, in the cases I refer 
 to, invariably the utterances of people absolutely 
 unacquainted with him, but that such legends should 
 have been invented and should have gained the 
 smallest degree of currency was typical of much. 
 It was the result of the bitterness which charac- 
 terised the literary quarrels of the older generation, 
 as evidenced in the furiously indecent diatribes of 
 the earlier writers for the Quarterlies and " Black- 
 wood's." Buchanan's onslaught on the reputation 
 of certain pets of the critical Press — e.g. Messrs. 
 Swinburne and Rossetti — and on certain powerful 
 journalistic cliques, had begotten a passion of hatred 
 in the breasts of the smaller partisans of the people 
 he attacked, who found no aspersion too foul for the 
 disturber of the feast of mutual flattery. A legend 
 sprang up, a sort of" archetypal " figure was invented, 
 horrific as the horned and tailed devil of the 
 mediaeval Christian. We are more tolerant, per- 
 haps because less in earnest, nowadays, and look 
 back with wonder on the fashions of conducting 
 disputes which, even to our fathers, seemed natural 
 enough. 
 
 Mark Twain somewhere remarks that " the 
 principal difference between a cat and a lie is that 
 a cat has only nine lives." An exemplification of 
 this great truth may be found in the fashion in 
 which certain legendary misstatements regarding 
 Buchanan's once-famous article on " The Fleshly 
 School of Poetry," published in the Contemporary 
 Review, still pass from mouth to mouth. Mr. J. 
 Comyns Carr's recently-published volume, "Some 
 Eminent Victorians," and the article headed 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 213 
 
 " Anonymous " in the current edition of Chambers's 
 Encyclopaedia, both contain garbled statements 
 regarding that effusion. It is, or should be, per- 
 fectly well known that the signature of ** Thomas 
 Maitland " was appended to the article, not by 
 Buchanan, but by the editor of the Review. The 
 statement that in the body of that article Buchanan 
 had anonymously puffed his own compositions, could 
 be repeated only by deliberate malice or by igno- 
 rance of the article itself. That article contains an 
 imaginary cast of a performance of the tragedy 
 of Hamlet by a company of contemporary poets, 
 Tennyson figuring in the title-part, and Buchanan 
 as " Cornelius," a " super," who, in the first act, 
 speaks in a kind of brief duet with the scarcely 
 more important character, "Voltimand," one single 
 line addressed to the King — 
 
 " In that, and all things, will we show our duty." 
 
 That was the only reference, either to himself or 
 his work, made in the entire article. These facts 
 have been stated a score of times before, and will 
 probably need to be stated as often again. 
 
 Buchanan was constitutionally passionate and 
 occasionally wrong-headed. He cherished ideals 
 which were often impracticable, and other ideals 
 to whose fulfilment he himself frequently failed to 
 attain. He occasionally allowed his pen to run 
 away with him, and expressed the passing mood of 
 the moment with needless strength. In a word, he 
 was human, and had the defects of his qualities. 
 But the defects, like the qualities of which they 
 were the shadows, were essentially those of a strong, 
 
214 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 honest, fearless man, and he never shrank from 
 " owning up " when he felt that the heat of conflict 
 had made him intemperate and unjust. Perhaps 
 the most illuminating words I have ever read on this 
 aspect of his character are contained in the chapter 
 contributed to Miss Jay's " Biography " by Mr. 
 R. E. Francillon : " The right reading of Buchanan 
 was, I am convinced, that his very genius had 
 prevented him from outgrowing, or being able to 
 outgrow, the boyishness of the best sort of boy ; 
 while too many of us only too quickly forget what 
 any sort of boyhood means. And the grand note 
 of the best sort of boy is a sincere passion for justice, 
 or rather a consuming indignation against injustice 
 — the two things are not exactly the same. The 
 boy of whatever age can never comprehend the 
 coolness with which the grown-up man of the world 
 has learned to take injustice as part and parcel of 
 the natural order of things, even when himself the 
 sufferer. The grown-up man has learned the sound 
 policy of not sending indignation red-hot or white- 
 hot to the post or the press, but of waiting till it is 
 cool enough to insert in a barrel of gunpowder with- 
 out risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, if 
 he be among the great masters of language, hurls 
 it out hot and strong, in the full belief that no honest 
 feelings could be so weak as to be wounded by any 
 honest words. Of course he was wrong. Complete 
 honesty is perfectly compatible with even abnormal 
 thinness of skin, and with an even exceptionally 
 plentiful crop of corns. He would often have been 
 amazed and shocked could he, to whom hard hitting 
 was so easy, have estimated the effect of his blows. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 215 
 
 I do not believe Robert Buchanan to have been 
 capable of a malign or vindictive thought ; I know 
 that I never heard him utter an unkindly word. I 
 wish, above all else, that those who thought of him 
 as I had thought of him before knowing him could 
 have met him at home — Strasz-Engel, Haus-Teufel 
 (' Street Angel, House Devil,' say the Germans) — 
 not that they have any monopoly of the experience. 
 I have never heard the natural converse of the 
 saying, but it is impossible to think of Buchanan 
 without its suggestion." 
 
 Perhaps Buchanan did himself most harm, not 
 by exposing the faults of men of real value, but by 
 castigating the offences and ridiculing the preten- 
 sions of the smaller fry of literature and criticism. 
 As he wrote in The Outcast : — 
 
 "I've often, vexed by shrill annoys, 
 Birched Art's precocious little boys." 
 
 It would have been very much better to have left 
 such a task to other hands. Such small fry are 
 as dangerous as hornets if provoked, and may be as 
 useful as bees if fed and flattered, or even if left 
 alone. It is not the £'ros bonnets of the Press, the 
 stately three-deckers of literature and criticism, 
 which it is principally the astute man's business to 
 conciliate. It is the journalistic cock-boat which 
 swarms on the waters of the Press which does the 
 real execution. As many a beautiful and fertile 
 island owes its existence to the incessant efforts of 
 millions of scarce-perceptible insects, so many a 
 great reputation has been steadily and solidly built 
 by the animalculse of journalism. Years before a 
 
216 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 certain enormously popular novelist had attained 
 to his present pride of place I prophesied his 
 triumph, from the simple circumstance that when- 
 ever business took me to his place of residence I 
 found him surrounded by a crowd of journalistic 
 wirepullers, individually of small account, but with 
 strength enough in their mass to create any number 
 of literary reputations. Some day, no doubt, these 
 scribbling condottieri will find their general. A 
 man clever enough to form such a mob into a 
 disciplined and obedient regiment could become 
 a veritable artistic kingmaker, and might die worth 
 any amount of money. Balzac's immortal " Treize " 
 would not be "a circumstance" compared with such 
 a federation. Quite seriously, I see no impossibility 
 in the suggestion, and recommend it to the attention 
 of any reader who believes himself to possess a turn 
 for business organisation, Buchanan never could 
 be persuaded either to conciliate such people or to 
 let them alone. The truth is, he loved a fight, and 
 if there happened to be no single opponent in the 
 field worthy of his steel he was not above charging 
 and slashing among the horde of penny-a-liners. 
 He seemed to say, with old Ruy de Silva in 
 " Hernani " — 
 
 " Etes-vous noble ? Enfer ! 
 Noble ou non, pour croiser le fer avec le fer 
 Tout homme qui m'outrage est assez gentilhomme." 
 
 Which was magnificent, but not war as wise men 
 make it. 
 
 The period of my more intimate acquaintance 
 with Buchanan came about in a fashion characteristic 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 217 
 
 of the somewhat " casual " natures of both of us. 
 I had been for some time a frequent visitor at 
 his house and guest at his table when, originally 
 with the purpose of doing with him some piece of 
 work which somehow never got done, I became an 
 inmate under his roof. I went there for a day or 
 two, like Ned Strong to Clavering Park, in " Pen- 
 dennis," and stayed there nearly two years. When 
 from time to time I mooted the subject of my 
 departure Buchanan would not hear of it, and I am 
 glad to believe that his constant asseveration that I 
 was of great use to him was more or less really true, 
 though a third person might often have been excused 
 for wondering in what the use consisted. The only 
 joint work bearing our joint names we ever issued 
 were the novelised version of his Haymarket play, 
 The Charlatan^ and the comedy, A Society Butterfly^ 
 produced at the Opera Comique, and of which the 
 history shall presently be given. My real utility 
 was as an intellectual strop and chopping-block. 
 Buchanan was in certain respects, and apart from 
 his warm domestic affections, a lonely man. He 
 had never been, nor cared to be, popular with the 
 bulk of men of anything like his own intellectual 
 rank. I have seen but few people under his roof 
 whose names were known outside the circle of their 
 personal acquaintance. Herbert Spencer, of whom 
 I have already spoken, I saw there only once. 
 Hall Caine, then a young man just beginning to 
 rise above the literary horizon, came occasionally. 
 That old-time actor, the late John Coleman, who in 
 his ingrained staginess of voice and manner suggested 
 Mr. Crummies, and in his lightning alternations 
 
218 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 between the depths of despair and the summits of 
 irrational optimism recalled Mr. Micawber, was a 
 more frequent figure. During his term of collabo- 
 ration on Adelphi melodrama with Mr. George R. 
 Sims he naturally saw a good deal of that genial 
 jester, who could keep him in roars of laughter for 
 hours at a time. The good things Sims said at 
 Buchanan's supper-table were infinite in number, 
 and among the best was one at my expense. I had 
 been holding forth with most convincing eloquence 
 regarding the condition of English fiction, and pro- 
 claiming the absolute necessity, if the art was not to 
 sink wholly beneath contempt, of a fuller and more 
 fearless treatment of sexual problems, when Sims 
 shot my rhetoric dead by interjecting the heartless 
 remark — " Murray's Guide to the in-Continent." 
 
 For years Buchanan had never possessed a male 
 friend with whom he could be at his intellectual 
 ease, who was interested in the problems of life and 
 thought which most deeply interested him, and the 
 fact that on every conceivable issue our views were 
 diametrically opposed, and that we were both tough 
 and enduring disputants, made me, I fully believe, 
 a rather valuable companion to him. Scores of 
 times the morning light surprised us in the midst 
 of some interminable argument, and if, as was 
 certainly the case, I was greatly the gainer by our 
 interchange of thought, I gave back the best I had. 
 During those two years of intimacy I came to know 
 him more completely than I had ever known any 
 other human creature with the exception of my 
 brother Christie, and I am absolutely sincere in 
 saying that he was, quite beyond comparison, the 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 219 
 
 best man I have ever known — the bravest, the most 
 honest, the most cordial, the most kindly, the wisest 
 in counsel, the readiest in help. There was not in 
 his heart one hint of malice, nor in his blood one 
 black drop against any creature in the whole round 
 world. The only approach to a disagreement we 
 ever had together was when he remonstrated with 
 me apropos of an assault I had made on a writer 
 who had some little time previously assaulted 
 Buchanan himself on no provocation whatsoever 
 and with unmeasured virulence. " For God's sake," 
 
 he wrote, ** leave alone. People who know 
 
 of our friendship will think you are abusing him to 
 please me. And you are unjust — more unjust than 
 I was when I answered him. The man has done 
 good stuff, and you only stultify yourself when you 
 deny his merit." A life of incessant conflict can be 
 good for no man, but no man born to such a life 
 was ever less injured by it than Buchanan. I have 
 read somewhere a story of some hard-fisted old 
 Baresarker who, having knocked his enemy into a 
 turbulent river, jumped in and fished him out at the 
 imminent peril of his own life. That was the sort 
 of double feat of which Buchanan was eminently 
 capable. 
 
 It was a common sentiment regarding him, and 
 one which finds utterance in Miss Jay's "Biography," 
 that Buchanan's connection with the theatre was, 
 from the view-point of his higher moral and mental 
 interests, a mistake. I cannot think so. As is 
 often, though by no means invariably, the case with 
 men of his type, he added to his intellectual Ish- 
 maelism the sunnier temperament of the born 
 
220 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Bohemian. He loved life : his nature demanded 
 warm human contact, and he found both abundantly 
 in the theatre, which, "respectable" as it has 
 become of late years, is yet, and by its very consti- 
 tution must for ever remain, the one impregnable 
 citadel of social freedom. And he needed money. 
 Personally a Spartan, with absolutely no expensive 
 desires until, rather late in life, he tasted the 
 pleasures of the Turf, he wanted money wherewith 
 — literally — to live, to express the bubbling gene- 
 rosity of his temperament. He had spent the years 
 most men spend in the pursuit of pleasure " sitting," 
 as he himself expressed it, " empty-stomached on 
 Parnassus," and when at last he descended from 
 that dignified but rather comfortless altitude into 
 the city streets he found the life there, in spite of 
 its many horrors and squalors, good, sweet, fit on 
 the whole for a man to live among and enjoy. 
 That his stage work was coarse and poor contrasted 
 with his verse is true enough. But it should, in 
 plain justice, be recognised that here, as elsewhere, 
 the duality of his nature asserted itself, and that the 
 cheap sentiment of the Adelphi and the frivolity of 
 the Vaudeville never either contaminated his more 
 serious effort nor choked the springs of loftier 
 thought. Read consecutively, Buchanan's output 
 gives us the clearest mental image of a strenuous 
 mounting of the slippery crags of artistic achieve- 
 ment. The City of Dream, Mary the Mother, The 
 Devil's Case, The Outcast, were all written during 
 the period of his dramatic activity, and their artistic 
 value is high, and their inspiration sprang, crystal 
 pure, from the deepest wells of the poet's moral 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 221 
 
 being. He touched pitch — if the writing of popular 
 drama be to touch pitch, which I for one most 
 resolutely deny — and was not defiled. He mingled 
 with the sharpers of theatrical finance and with the 
 moral riff-raff of the Turf, and neither could leave a 
 fleck upon his honesty nor on his enduring con- 
 viction of the inherent Tightness of human nature. 
 He was indeed himself the Archetypal Poet of 
 whom he wrote : — 
 
 " Who, 'spite the bitter fight for bread, 
 
 'Spite Samson's mill-work blindly done, 
 'Spite piteous tears in secret shed, 
 Still kept his forehead to the sun." 
 
 Mr. Israel Zangwill shed a welcome ray of light 
 on Buchanan's personality when he wrote : " The 
 mistake people make about Buchanan is that they 
 think that there is only one of him. There are at 
 least a score of Buchanans, and most of them have 
 not even a nodding acquaintance with the others." 
 As a pendant to that brilliant bit of analysis let 
 me recount an incident from my recollections of 
 Buchanan's Turf career. It was at a time when he 
 was amassing material for a study of the life of 
 Christ. I found him standing in the middle of 
 Tattersall's ring, absorbed in the study of his Greek 
 Testament, perfectly oblivious of the life about him 
 until, at the warning clangour of the saddling-bell, he 
 restored the volume to his pocket, marking his place 
 with a tip-telegram, and plunged amid the roaring 
 "pencillers," as eager for the fray as any one 
 among them. It was at once one of the quaintest 
 oddities of my experience and a wonderful touch of 
 unconscious self-portraiture. 
 
222 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 We had been occupied one day in turning over 
 an old trunk full of disjecta membra, such as every 
 busy literary workman is sure to accumulate, and 
 had come across an incomplete first act of a comedy, 
 written some years previously. It bore no name, and 
 was in a quite inchoate condition. At Buchanan's 
 request I read it, and gave it as my opinion that 
 it was worth knocking into shape and completing. 
 We were rather languidly discussing its possibilities 
 when I chanced upon a paragraph in one of the 
 daily papers to the effect that Mr. George 
 Edwardes had offered Mrs. Langtry her own 
 terms to appear as a dancer at the Empire. This 
 gave me a notion of how the idea of the piece might 
 be put to immediate profit, and with Buchanan's 
 consent I at once took a cab to Pont Street and 
 interviewed the lady, with whom I had already a 
 slight but friendly acquaintance. Mrs. Langtry 
 laughed at the rumour — she was far too ambitious 
 of the legitimate laurels of the regular stage to 
 compromise her hopes by accepting such an offer — 
 indeed, I have an impression that the report was 
 altogether unfounded, and that the proposition had 
 never been made at all. I then suggested to her 
 that it might prove a strong attraction if she would 
 consent to appear in a piece of which the principal 
 clou should be a scene in which she danced — such a 
 scene, for instance, as might take place at a great 
 country-house at which the guests should get up a 
 mimic realisation of a London music-hall to take 
 the place of the ordinary ** private theatricals." 
 Mrs. Langtry grasped the idea at once, and Buchanan 
 and I set to work on the piece, for which we 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 223 
 
 hit upon the title, A Society Butterfly. Mrs. 
 Langtry Hked the piece so well that she would 
 gladly have financed it herself, and looking back 
 on what actually happened I am sorry that that 
 arrangement was not adopted. But Buchanan's 
 fortunes were desperate, and we determined to 
 float the venture by forming a syndicate, the piece 
 representing our contribution to the capital, and we 
 taking half the profit. The syndicate, when formed, 
 consisted of four members besides ourselves. One 
 of them was a lady who appeared in the cast, and 
 another a gentleman, at that time a conspicuous 
 figure in the City, and at this moment working out a 
 sentence of two years' hard labour. Whatever may 
 have been his failings in other directions, with us 
 he was perfectly square and above-board, which is 
 more than can be said for two other members of the 
 syndicate, who reduced every shilling they advanced 
 to less than half its value by unbusiness-like delay 
 and irritating interference. 
 
 One of our earliest necessities was, of course, 
 the finding of a suitable theatre. A certain com- 
 modious house in the West End had been vacant 
 for some months past, and we determined to apply 
 for it, and wrote with that object to a lady, cele- 
 brated some years earlier as a beautiful and accom- 
 plished actress, who was known to all London 
 as the sole proprietor of the building in question. 
 We received an answer from the lady's solicitors, 
 referring us to her husband. We called upon the 
 gentleman, and the consequent interview was one 
 of the quaintest bits of comedy I remember. He 
 was a long, lean, hard-bitten old Scotsman, with a 
 
224 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 truly wonderful resemblance to a deerhound — I 
 have seen dogs of that breed that might have sat 
 for his portrait — and he had an accent with which 
 phonetics would wrestle in vain. ** Ye want to tak 
 the theeter ? " he said. " Ay ! Weel, the rent is a 
 thoosand puns pair week, the tenant tae provide 
 gahs, eelectreeceetee, an' watter." Buchanan ex- 
 plained that we were not, for the moment, buying 
 theatres, and that all we wanted just then was to 
 hire one. "Ay," said the old gentleman. **Ah 
 ken pairfectly weel what ye want. Those are the 
 tairms " — and he repeated them. *' And who do 
 you suppose is going to pay such terms ? " asked 
 Buchanan. *' Nae leevin' cratur, ootside o' Bedlam. 
 Ye see," he continued, with a dry twitch of the lips 
 which appeared to be the nearest approach to a 
 smile of which he was capable, " Ah built yon hoose 
 as a bairthday present for my wife, an' med it ower 
 till her by a deed o' geeft in the strectest legal 
 forrm. But, not havin' takken final leave o' ma 
 beesiness senses, Ah pit in a clause to the effec' that 
 Ah was to hae the lettin' o't at ony rent Ah thocht 
 rizzonable at ony given moment. Sax months syne 
 her leddyship and I had a wheen pickle meesunder- 
 standin', an' she tuik hersel' afif to Pawris. The 
 theeter was lat, an' the rent was paid till her as 
 pair contrac'. Then the run o' the piece feenished, 
 the tenancy detairmined, and Ah'm askin' the tairms 
 Ah tauld ye. Ah'm thinkin' it likely my wife'll be 
 back in the coorse of a week or twa." We left the 
 old gentleman with a strong sense of his powers as a 
 domestic diplomatist, and ultimately took the Op6ra 
 Comique, for which we paid ^60 per week, nearly 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 225 
 
 half of which was made up to us by the rent of the 
 bars, sublet to a speculating firm of caterers. 
 
 The Opera Comique has disappeared from the 
 face of London, so nothing I can say about it now 
 can hurt anybody's pocket or anybody's feelings. 
 It was, during its existence, a house of mixed 
 fortunes. It had held great successes at odd times, 
 among which it will suffice to mention Trial by 
 yury, The Sorcerer^ Ariane, As in a Looking- 
 glass y and Joan of ArCy but it had also known 
 long periods of failure, and it was at such a time 
 that we succeeded in obtaining the lease at so low 
 a rental. Theatrical managers and speculators are 
 — with the possible exception of publishers — more 
 dominated by superstition than any other class of 
 people in the world, and I met plenty of folk who 
 took it for granted that in leasing the Op6ra 
 Comique we had reduced failure to an absolute 
 certainty. Fail we did, as the sequel will show, 
 but our failure was not in any sense the fault of the 
 theatre. It never is. Years earlier, I had heard 
 Augustus Harris sum up and terminate a discussion 
 on that subject one evening at the Greenroom 
 Club, in his usual trenchant style. " Unlucky 
 theatres be damned ! Get the right piece and put 
 the right people into it, and the public will tumble 
 over each other to get there, if you produced it up 
 in the ball of St. Paul's or down in the sewers." 
 Harris had a right to speak, for Drury Lane, which 
 under his management was a veritable gold mine, 
 had been a synonym for failure for years before 
 he took it. One of my few wealthy acquaint- 
 ances, who had backed more than one preceding 
 
 Q 
 
226 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 manag-ement, used to say that he never passed 
 down Catherine Street without feeling a pain in his 
 cheque-book. I am old enough to remember all 
 Belgravia and Mayfair crowding to the Phil- 
 harmonic, which occupied in Islington part of the 
 site now covered by the Grand Theatre, and was 
 known by the excellently-descriptive cognomen of 
 "The Dust Hole," when Ginevieve de Brabant, 
 one of the first specimens of Opera Bouffe seen in 
 England, was produced there. There is not a theatre 
 in London of twenty years' standing which has not 
 known similar fluctuations of fortune. People said 
 openly that Mr. — now Sir — John Hare must be mad 
 to spend hundreds of pounds in renovating the 
 Globe — another vanished theatrical landmark. Yet 
 the Globe had in its time held yo, Les Cloches 
 de Corneville, The Private Secretary, Charley s 
 Aunt, and a dozen other huge successes ; and Sir 
 John's production there of The Gay Lord Quex 
 was one of the biggest hits of recent years. 
 
 Augustus Harris was altogether too remarkable 
 a personality to be passed over with a casual 
 mention. My connection with him was never 
 really intimate, but we were friendly acquaintances, 
 and something more than that, for several years. 
 Such intimacy as we had together began a little 
 unpropitiously. The World, his first production at 
 Drury Lane, and one which has never been sur- 
 passed in the peculiar features of the class of melo- 
 drama with which he was associated, was in the 
 early nights of its hugely successful run when I 
 turned up at the theatre one evening accompanied 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 227 
 
 by a friend. I have learned since that it is not 
 considerate to ask for " paper " for a declared 
 success, but I was in the first flush of my short- 
 lived happiness and importance as a critic of a 
 London daily, and had a sort of unformulated 
 conviction — which some critics seem to retain their 
 whole lives long — that it should be the joy and 
 pride of any manager to give me anything in that 
 way I cared to ask for. Harris was standing 
 beside the box-office, and I made my appeal to 
 him personally for a couple of stalls. He set his 
 thumbs in the armholes of his dress waistcoat — a 
 favourite gesture — and replied, "My dear Henry 
 Murray, would you like to put your hand in my 
 pocket and take out a guinea ? " Somewhat nettled, 
 I replied to the effect that I had known the time, 
 and that not so long ago, when the feat would have 
 been impossible, and was turning away when he 
 drew me back with a laugh, and gave me the 
 vouchers with so charming a good temper that I 
 repented me of my ill-natured retort. We got on 
 together excellently afterwards, and he showed the 
 kindness with which he regarded me on more than 
 one occasion, and in his own peculiar fashion. I 
 was sitting one night in the rotunda at Drury Lane, 
 plunged in a brown study, when I became aware of 
 somebody regarding me. Looking up I recognised 
 Harris. ** What are you looking so rotten miserable 
 about ? " was his greeting. I replied that I had 
 not known that I did so look. " What's the 
 trouble ? " he continued ; and went on without 
 waiting for an answer, " There's only one trouble 
 in the world that matters — money. Would twenty 
 
228 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 pounds do you any good ? " " Do you know any- 
 body it wouldn't do good to ? " I asked in return, 
 perhaps a little crustily, for I thought of course that 
 he was merely chaffing me. " A civil question 
 deserves a civil answer," said Harris, and repeated 
 his query. I naturally replied, " Yes." " Then 
 come along and you shall have it," he said, and 
 in the calmest fashion led the way to his office, 
 where he made out and handed to me a cheque for 
 the amount mentioned. I never knew, and never 
 shall know, his motive, if it was not sheer kindness 
 of heart rather eccentrically exhibited. On another 
 occasion I called on him on some matter of business 
 at his house in St. John's Wood. At the end of 
 our interview, he said, ** This is my birthday. What 
 have you brought me ? " I replied that being 
 ignorant of the occasion I had nothing to offer but 
 the customary good wishes. ** That won't do," he 
 said. " This is my birthday, and gifts must pass ; 
 so, if you won't give me anything, I'll give you 
 something." He presented me with a box of a 
 hundred excellent cigars and a pretty little silver 
 cigarette-case, the latter of which was filched from 
 my pocket in the street less than a week after. 
 
 That he was not merely generous, but genuinely 
 tender-hearted, was proved to me by an odd little 
 incident. He was made one of the sheriffs for the 
 County of London, and on the day on which the 
 appointment was gazetted I met him at the theatre. 
 The piece then running was A Sailor and his Lass, 
 by Buchanan and Miss Harriett Jay, and its last 
 act contained a gruesome scene, in which the hero 
 — a part played by Harris himself — wrongfully 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 229 
 
 convicted of murder, performed his last toilet in the 
 condemned cell in Newgate, and was then strapped 
 by the executioner previous to passing on to the 
 gallows. The accuracy of some details of the scene 
 had been questioned by one or two of the papers, 
 so, after congratulating Harris on his elevation to 
 civic dignity, I jestingly added that the next time 
 he needed to reproduce such an effect he would 
 probably have actual personal experience to go 
 upon. " What do you mean ? " he asked in a 
 startled voice. I explained that the sheriffs took 
 it in rotation to superintend executions taking place 
 within the sphere of their duties, and that on the 
 doctrine of averages he would pretty certainly be 
 called upon to witness the extinction of at least one 
 criminal during his year of office. " / see a man 
 hanged!" he exclaimed. "Not for the Bank of 
 England ! I'd rather throw up the berth — I'd 
 rather be hanged myself ! " I have seldom seen 
 a man more relieved than he was at my explaining 
 that he could always employ a deputy, and that 
 there would not be the least difficulty in finding one. 
 Harris was a king of managers and producers, 
 and I do not believe that any man that ever lived 
 could have taught him his business. His recipe 
 for concocting the huge spectacles by which he 
 made his name and his fortune was beautifully 
 simple. " There are three things," he once said 
 to me, "that the great British public cares for — 
 love, the Turf, and battles. You can get a good 
 piece out of any one of 'em, but mix 'em, and you've 
 got the public by the short hairs." I am not much 
 of a theatre-goer in these latter days, and can say 
 
230 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 little of the autumn dramas recently produced at 
 Drury Lane from actual experience, but I have 
 never seen a detailed notice of one of them which 
 has not suggested Augustus Harris floating, a sort 
 of tutelary spectre, above the heads of the collabo- 
 rators whose names figure on the bill. 
 
 He was a man who did everything greatly, and 
 indulged in both work and pleasure on the gigantic 
 scale. I shall never forget the first time I saw him 
 eat. I had wandered into the stalls of the Adelphi 
 during a performance of The English Rose, He 
 was in a box, in which he signalled to me to join 
 him. We saw the performance out together, and 
 crossed the Strand to the Tivoli, then not a music 
 hall, but a restaurant. He ordered the biggest 
 fowl in the house to be grilled according to some 
 peculiar fashion he detailed to the cook, and a bottle 
 of whisky. I ate a fair portion of the fowl, and 
 accounted for two moderate doses of the spirit. 
 He quietly and unostentatiously disposed of the 
 remainder, and we went to the Greenroom Club, 
 where, in an absent-minded sort of way in the 
 intervals of conversation, he took a light dessert, 
 consisting of the major part of a small Stilton 
 cheese, a basket of pulled bread, and a glassful of 
 celery, washed down with more whisky. No 
 amount of alcohol seemed ever in the least to 
 disconcert him, and long spells of toil which would 
 have utterly exhausted others left him fresh and 
 fit. Perhaps, had he been more akin to other men 
 in the articles of nerve and driving-force, he might 
 have had a longer career — a fuller one would have 
 been hardly possible. He ran till he dropped, and 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 231 
 
 there is a sad, pathetic ring in the memory of the 
 last words he ever spoke : ** Let no one wake me 
 — I want a good long sleep." It is hard to imagine 
 that glowing spark from the great central incandes- 
 cence quenched in the cold darkness of death. If, 
 some day passing the familiar portals of the theatre 
 he ruled, I should find him standing there, his hat 
 at the old angle, his feet apart, his bright eye 
 beaming its old, cheery, friendly defiance of all 
 created things, ** I should not feel it to be strange." 
 
 To return to A Society Butterfly. Buchanan 
 was, in sporting parlance, "going for the gloves," 
 and was determined to give adverse fortune 
 no chances. Few pieces produced by a scratch 
 management have been better cast. Beside Mrs. 
 Langtry, our company comprised that admirable 
 actor, the late William Herbert ; Miss Rose Leclerq, 
 the Dugazon of her country and generation, quite 
 the best aristocratic old woman I have ever seen 
 on the English boards; Mr. Fred Kerr, who had 
 already won the place he has since retained in the 
 affections of the London public ; poor Edward 
 Rose, a quaint comedian, a graceful jester, and 
 a thoroughly good and lovable fellow, whose all- 
 too-early death was at once a loss to the stage and 
 to the drama ; and Mr. Allan Beaumont, then an 
 excellent "old man," and now a Professor of 
 Elocution at the Guildhall. All were happy in 
 their parts, and all worked with right good will, 
 although in that particular the palm must be 
 awarded to Mrs. Langtry, who had not only to 
 acquire the words and the business of the leading 
 
232 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 part, but also to study a '* Butterfly Dance " 
 specially arranged for her by Mr. Willie Ward. It 
 would be an exaggeration of flattery to say that 
 Mrs. Langtry, as we know her, is actually a great 
 actress, but since my experience with her on the 
 stage of the Op6ra Comique, I have had a con- 
 viction that she has missed the highest distinction 
 in her adopted profession only because she came to 
 its practice too late in life. Had she begun her 
 professional career ten, or even half a dozen years 
 earlier, at a period when her personality was less 
 fixed and more malleable, she might have made a 
 truly great artist. She possesses in a high degree 
 the sentiment of the boards, and she has a gift 
 Providence is not too fond of bestowing upon 
 women of unusual physical beauty — the gift of 
 brains. I cannot acquit the beautiful lady of her 
 share in our disaster, but that makes it only the 
 more imperative that I should give her the meed 
 she fairly earned, and no chorus girl on her pro- 
 motion could have been more willing, more patient, 
 more eager to give all possible satisfaction to the 
 management than was Mrs. Langtry. And in one 
 particular she acted with a rare generosity, for 
 which both Buchanan and myself were deeply 
 grateful. She insisted on taking from our shoulders 
 the financial burden of dressing her for her part, 
 and the series of Parisian " creations " in which 
 she appeared would certainly have strained our 
 modest resources. And here we made one mistake 
 — a mistake so foolish that it will remain inexplic- 
 able to me until I die how we could have made it — 
 we insisted on providing the " butterfly dress " in 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 233 
 
 which she was to perform her dance. That mistake 
 resulted in the ruin of our hopes. The butterfly 
 dress arrived a night or two before the evening we 
 had advertised for production, and at the first sight 
 of it Mrs. Langtry refused, point-blank and abso- 
 lutely, to appear in it. And here the syndicate 
 came in and clinched our ruin. A postponement 
 of a day or two would have given Mrs. Langtry 
 time to slip across to Paris, to select a dress suited 
 to her own taste, and so to appear in the dance, 
 which was, as I have said, the very hub of our 
 piece. But the syndicate raised a despairing wail 
 about the folly, the madness, of " disappointing the 
 public." Buchanan and I pointed out to them that 
 their fear was based on what is perhaps the hollowest 
 of all the innumerable silly superstitions which 
 beset — and besot — the managerial mind ; that the 
 public was profoundly indifferent whether or not 
 A Society Butterfly was ever played at all ; that 
 all that that section of the public which would be 
 present on the first night — whenever that might 
 be — would care about, was whether the piece then 
 presented interested or failed to interest them. 
 But our logic was vain. They held us to the letter 
 of our agreement — we had advertised to open on a 
 certain night, and open we must. Without the 
 dress, the dance was meaningless, and had to go 
 by the board ; so in hot haste we set to work to 
 devise a series of " living pictures," in the last of 
 which Mrs. Langtry was to appear as " Lady 
 Godiva " about to mount for her solitary progress 
 through Coventry. 
 
 The great night arrived, and the house was 
 
234 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 packed with an audience which may fairly be 
 described as distinofuished. The two first acts 
 went magnificently, and I have seldom seen an 
 audience on better terms with itself and its enter- 
 tainers. Mrs. Langtry's appearance in the third 
 act was the signal for a genuine ovation. She had 
 reserved the most beautiful of her dresses for that 
 scene, and the now historic jewels, afterwards so 
 cleverly stolen from the custody of her bankers, 
 were all displayed. She must have been pawnable 
 as she stood for at least five-and-twenty thousand 
 pounds. The act proceeded prosperously until it 
 arrived at the tableaux vivants, of which the first 
 two or three were mere ** bread - and - butter " 
 arrangements, intended only to usher in the great 
 effect of our leading lady's appearance as " Lady 
 Godiva." The tableaux were shown on a mimic 
 stage built over the real one, and composed mainly 
 of a huge sheet of thick plate-glass, beneath which 
 had been arranged four powerful limelights. These 
 were supplemented by four others in the flies, and 
 by yet four more in the wings, the intention being 
 to create the illusion of a figure poised in mid-air in 
 an atmosphere of blinding light. As, however, the 
 only lime which acted was a blue one, which fell on 
 the back of Mrs. Langtry's head and converted it 
 into the semblance of a bowl of snap-dragon, the 
 intention passed unrealised. In a theatrical ex- 
 perience of thirty years I have never seen so 
 sudden a change come over the spirit of an 
 audience. The house, which five minutes earlier 
 had been rippling with laughter and echoing with 
 applause, instantaneously became a pandemonium 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 235 
 
 compared with which the parrot-house at the Zoo, 
 or the House of Commons on an Irish field night 
 in the palmiest days of the Parnellite regime^ would 
 have seemed a haunt of dull tranquillity. 
 
 It was a nasty knock, and I have seldom 
 enjoyed myself less than during the hour I spent 
 next morning in skimming the notices in the daily 
 papers. Buchanan was acutely hated by a good 
 many pressmen, and what little sentiment existed 
 amongst them regarding myself was not entirely 
 friendly. The incidents which arose out of one of 
 the notices can now only be touched upon with 
 reserve, since the person who wrote it is dead. 
 He was a person of importance in his day — or 
 rather, to speak more justly, the journal for which 
 he wrote was important — and what he had to say 
 was so obviously spiteful and so flagrantly unjust 
 that Buchanan and I determined publicly to 
 resent it. This we did by appearing before the 
 curtain after the second act on the following night. 
 Buchanan read the notice to the audience, and 
 proceeded to a plain, unvarnished statement of his 
 opinion of the writer ; I following with a few brief 
 words of endorsement. The house, delighted, as 
 any chance assembly of people always will be, by 
 such a manifestation of the fighting spirit, cheered 
 uproariously. Buchanan was in fine comminatory 
 form that night, and I thought — and think — 
 that no honest man with a grain of pluck could 
 have sat quiet under so tremendous an insult so 
 publicly inflicted. But the journalist in question 
 did not happen to be conspicuous either for honesty 
 or for courage, and there was no fight. 
 
236 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 A bad first-night reception does not necessarily 
 spell death to a theatrical venture, and A Society 
 Butterfly played for seven weeks to houses each 
 one of which held rather more money than its 
 predecessor — the most encouraging symptom a 
 struggling entertainment can show. We had 
 touched paying business, and the receipts were 
 still mounting, when we made our second and 
 fatal mistake in our diplomatic relations with our 
 principal star. After the second night the butterfly 
 dance had been performed by a clever lady who 
 bore a marked physical resemblance to Mrs. 
 Langtry, a likeness so increased by a mere dash 
 of make-up that a good many people not intimately 
 acquainted with the latter lady's personal appear- 
 ance accepted her as Mrs. Langtry in person. But 
 the majority of the public was, of course, better 
 informed. While Mrs. Langtry refrained from per- 
 forming the dance the piece was practically mean- 
 ingless, and we did our best to persuade her to 
 perform that part of her contract, but in vain. The 
 piece, she declared, was " doing well enough as 
 it was." A little patience and diplomacy might 
 have accommodated everything, but here again the 
 syndicate was peremptory, and we had to offer 
 Mrs. Langtry the alternative — dance or go. She 
 went, and, with an understudy in her part the 
 receipts fell practically to nothing, and within 
 another week the " Butterfly " had fluttered its last. 
 
 The ruin of the piece was made inevitable by 
 what was perhaps the most galling accident I 
 remember in a not too fortunate career. Buchanan 
 and I went down to Lingfield one afternoon 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 237 
 
 specially to back a horse named Theseus, about 
 which we had received private information we 
 thought too valuable to be neglected. We moored 
 the brougham rather far down on the carriage 
 line, and stayed with it, so as to keep away from 
 the excitement of the ring, and avoid temptations 
 to fritter away our capital — £ioo — on bets on 
 earlier events, Theseus being booked for the fourth 
 race. We had reckoned on the horses parading 
 as usual before the stands, instead of which they 
 passed round by the other end of the oval to the 
 starting-place, and the first intimation we had of 
 their presence in the field was the roar which 
 announced their start for the race. 1 set out on 
 a desperate run for the ring, and reached the gate 
 in time to see the horse we should have backed 
 cantering home with a disdainful ease. He had 
 started at 20 to i, and we had missed ;^2000 — a 
 sum which would have enabled us to defy the 
 syndicate and follow our own course of action. I 
 have to confess that I raged exceedingly, but 
 Buchanan took the contretemps as he accepted 
 every other misfortune I ever saw him undergo, 
 with unruffled tranquillity. 
 
 My collaboration in A Society Butterfly was 
 not actually my first appearance as a dramatist. A 
 year or two previously I had gone on tour with 
 Christie in his New Zealand melodrama, Ned's 
 Chum, doubling two small parts in the second and 
 third acts, and he had produced a curtain raiser 
 from my pen, founded at the suggestion of Mr. 
 George R. Sims on a short story I had contributed 
 to the Dispatch. For some years I had made the 
 
238 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 writing of drama my ultimate objective, and to 
 that end had taken an infinity of pains to conquer 
 the technique of the stage. I must have seen at 
 least a couple of thousand plays during my time 
 as dramatic critic of various papers ; I had watched 
 the rehearsals of dozens, whenever I could persuade 
 a good-natured manager to permit me the privilege, 
 and I had read hundreds, principally of French 
 manufacture. And when I say **read," I do not 
 mean "skimmed." I read them, so to speak, with 
 a microscope, intent on absorbing the secret of 
 each writer's mastery of the boards. Alone and 
 in collaboration I am the author of seventeen 
 pieces, of which four have seen the light, and on 
 others of which I have received various sums of 
 money in consideration of a right to produce which 
 has never been exercised. The luck which pursued 
 me during my literary career was also my faithful 
 attendant in my dramatic ventures. I have now and 
 for some time past accepted it in the same acqui- 
 escent spirit, and do not think it likely that I 
 shall ever again attempt to storm the theatrical 
 citadel. The lure which attracts most literary men 
 to the stage is, of course, the money that may be 
 made there. It is certainly the Tom Tiddler's 
 Ground of the fortunate few who succeed in 
 pleasing the managers first and the public after- 
 wards. But money is, of all the really important 
 things of which life is made, to me the least 
 attractive and the least interesting, and the dis- 
 agreeables connected with the pursuit of stage- 
 success are, of all others, the least tolerable to a 
 man of my temper and habits. 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 239 
 
 The stage-door is the Frontier of No Man's 
 Land. It is the nearest possible occidental equi- 
 valent of that ** somewhere east o' Suez " for which 
 Mr. Kipling's hero so passionately longed, where 
 there ain't no Ten Commandments. If it have 
 any laws of its own, if its apparent chaos is really 
 resolvable to any sort of rule or order, my acquaint- 
 ance with it — for a pretty long period a fairly close 
 acquaintance — was insufficient to reveal them to me. 
 Outside the theatre, the actor nowadays is quite 
 like any other kind of man. He has, in greater 
 or lesser revenue, the virtues and vices, the 
 strengths and weaknesses, common to humankind. 
 His emotions, his tendencies, his views of things, 
 are ordinary, orderly, and calculable. But, when 
 once his foot has crossed that mystic threshold, 
 a change comes over him. His moral and mental 
 diapason alters its pitch, he looks on things from 
 a new and bewildering view-point. Beyond the 
 stage-door east ceases to be east, or west, west ; 
 the world in which the actor's inner being moves 
 becomes to the outsider as deceptive and unreal 
 as are the lath-and-canvas perspectives among 
 which he walks. He does astounding things. I 
 have known him at midday declare that a certain 
 drama was the masterpiece of its century, that 
 the one ambition of his life was to create its leading 
 character; we have settled together the terms on 
 which he would produce it and the principal items 
 of its cast ; and six hours later I have returned 
 home to find the script of that same drama, neatly 
 done up in a brown paper parcel, awaiting me on 
 my desk, without one word of explanation. I have 
 
240 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 been summoned in hot haste to a theatre by a 
 telegram from the manager, and on my presence 
 at the stage-door being announced, I have been 
 informed that the manager was too busy to see 
 me, but that, if I would state the object of my 
 visit, he would write to me. I have been told by 
 a manager that I did not possess, and by the 
 direct ordinance of the Almighty could never hope 
 to attain, the first faint glimmering idea of the 
 dramatic art, and I have within a week of that 
 utterance been employed by that self-same manager 
 to revise the work of a veteran dramatist of many 
 years' standing. Here be facts. And I am not 
 adducing these facts as proofs of my claim to 
 be regarded as the unluckiest of scribblers. They 
 could be parallelled out of the experience of scores 
 of other aspirants to stage honours ; they are quite 
 ordinary adventures, characteristic merely of the 
 queer atmosphere in which all things theatrical are 
 steeped. 
 
 That the manager — actor-manager or other — is 
 almost invariably densely ignorant of the value of 
 the goods in which he deals, might almost be 
 allowed to go without saying. That statement is 
 just as true of him as of every other sort of intel- 
 lectual middle-man, the publisher, literary or musical, 
 the picture-dealer, and the rest of the entire genus. 
 It seems to be an eternal and immutable law that, 
 directly a man begins to deal in the brains of other 
 men, Providence deprives him of his own. If you 
 asked the average intelligent man in the street 
 how Mr. Pinero, or Mr. Barrie, or Mr. Bernard 
 Shaw got upon the stage, he would tell you that it 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 241 
 
 is because they are men of distinguished capacity in 
 the practice of the dramatic art. But that is not 
 so. That Mr. Pinero has great natural gifts as a 
 dramatist, that he is a born constructor, that he has 
 a keen eye for traits of modern character, a great 
 stock of verbal wit, a marked faculty for inventing 
 telling situations, is true. That Mr. Barrie possesses 
 similar gifts, plus a most exquisitely poetic sense of 
 the infinite oddity, tenderness, and quaintness of 
 the life about him, is true. That Mr. Shaw possesses 
 an intellectual searchlight which goes like a Rontgen- 
 ray through layer under layer of conventional trap- 
 pings to the very bone of human nature, that he is 
 the most truly individual and personal writer in 
 England, and can express his wit and wisdom in 
 strings of epigram unmatchable outside the pages 
 of Voltaire, is true. These are the gifts which keep 
 these men on the stage, but they had nothing what- 
 ever to do with getting them there. They stumbled 
 on to the stage, precisely as Smith and Brown 
 and Noakes and Stokes and Styles and Thompson, 
 whose pieces are played to a crowd of clamorous 
 deadheads on their opening nights and to empty 
 benches for the rest of a fortnight's run, stumble on 
 to it ; but, being the men of talent they are, they keep 
 there, because the public recognise their talent and 
 want more and more of their work. If one of these 
 gentlemen were to write a piece more brilliant than 
 the best he has yet produced and to send it on its 
 rounds among the managers either anonymously or 
 under a feigned signature, it would have no better 
 chance of production than any other bundle of type- 
 written matter delivered at the stage-door by the 
 
 R 
 
242 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 postman. Have I any need to produce proof of this 
 allegation ? Certainly not to any reader acquainted 
 with theatrical history, but as I am writing for the 
 general public and not merely for experts, I will jot 
 down, almost at hazard, a few examples to illustrate 
 it. When Mr. J. P. Burnett produced Jo at the 
 Globe theatre thirty-five years ago, he offered on the 
 night of production, before the curtain rose, to sell 
 one-half of the entire rights of the piece for £^o cash, 
 and the experienced manager to whom he made the 
 proposal replied that he would not give him fifty 
 pence for them. Three hours later the latter offered 
 ^2000, and was laughed at for his pains. With 
 that admirable actress. Miss Jennie Lee, in the title 
 part, Jo ran to record business in pretty nearly 
 every country of the globe in which the English 
 language is understood, and its success took more 
 than five-and-twenty years to exhaust. I was present 
 when Joseph Derrick offered the rights of Confusion^ 
 stock, lock, and barrel, for £10 to another manager. 
 The offer was rejected. A week or two later, the 
 piece was produced at a matinee at the Vaudeville, 
 transferred at once to the evening bill, and ran for 
 close on a year. Everybody — that is, everybody 
 in the theatrical world — knows the pre-production 
 histories of Dorothy and of Charley's Aunt. Every- 
 body knows through what rejections, rebuffs, priva- 
 tions and hopes deferred Tom Robertson struggled 
 to his all-too-brief enjoyment of recognition and 
 success. Everybody knows how the plays of Mr. 
 Somerset Maugham, which are now coining money 
 in London, in the provinces, and in America and 
 Australia, were hawked from hand to hand. It is 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 243 
 
 my fixed belief that Messrs. Pinero, Barrie, Shaw, 
 Maugham, and the rest of the admirably accom- 
 plished band of our living dramatists, might have 
 died of hunger on the streets with their dramas in 
 their pockets, had they had no other means of gain- 
 ing their daily bread ; that they owe their success 
 wholly and solely to the intelligence of the public ; 
 and that the production of their initial successes 
 was as fortuitous as the spin of a coin or the roll of 
 the marble in the roulette- wheel. Fate has been 
 doubly kind to them — it first gave them their brains, 
 and then directed the fluke by which they were 
 enabled to exhibit them. 
 
 To come down to the bed-rock of fact, the actor 
 is not, in the vast majority of cases, at all a clever 
 man. Outside the particular faculties which fit him 
 for the practice of his art he is, pretty generally, 
 merely averagely intelligent, and in respect of general 
 culture he ranks lower than any other class of artist. 
 An actor who reads anything more intellectually 
 stimulating than the daily newspaper or the trashiest 
 kind of fiction, or who can sustain his part in general 
 conversation among intellectual people, is a rarity 
 in my experience. Here are one or two cases in 
 point, which I could supplement to almost any 
 extent. Some years ago a piece was produced at 
 a certain West- End theatre, of which the action was 
 supposed to take place in the reign of George I. 
 The manager, who played the juvenile lead, had, 
 accidentally — as it afterwards appeared — made up so 
 precisely like Joseph Addison that it seemed almost 
 as if the portrait of the great essayist had walked 
 out of its frame in Holland House to appear upon 
 
244 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 the stage. During an interval I went round to his 
 dressing-room, and in the course of our conversa- 
 tion referred to this circumstance. " Addison," said 
 my friend, "who was he?" "Addison of the 
 Spectator" I explained. " I didn't know the 
 Spectator was so old as that," said the manager. 
 He thought I was referring to the contemporary 
 critical weekly. I left the impression uncorrected, 
 and talked of other things. Then occurred another 
 quaint little incident. One of the young ladies in 
 the company was sending round a " birthday album " 
 — a volume containing a space for each day of the 
 year, in which the friends of the owner might write 
 their names and any " sentiment " or reflection that 
 occurred to them. It was brought to my friend the 
 manager open at the page containing the last con- 
 tribution, that of the low comedian of the company, 
 who, below his signature, had written, " An actor is a 
 person who paints his nose and says he is somebody 
 else." The manager, who was a great stickler for 
 the dignity of the profession, was exceedingly angry 
 at this. " Here, Murray," said he, " you're a literary 
 man. Tell me something I can say in answer." 
 *' Let's give him a dose of Schlegel," I suggested. 
 " Who the devil's he ? " asked the manager. I 
 explained that he wasn't anybody at present, having 
 had the fortune — good or bad — to retire from this 
 shifting scene some seventy years before, but that 
 he had been a German philosopher and critic with 
 a high appreciation of the functions of the drama. 
 "Well, what did he say.?" "He said, 'The 
 theatre is the meeting-place of all the arts and all 
 the philosophies.'" "That's devilish good!" said 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 245 
 
 the manager. " Thanks. I'll write that." He sat 
 at his table, and a minute after looked up and asked, 
 " How do you spell * philosophies ? '" A moment 
 later he got his call to the stage, and he had hardly 
 obeyed it when the peccant low comedian entered 
 the room. I showed him what the manager had 
 written. " That's yoti'^' said the low comedian. "I'll 
 
 swear that never heard of Schlegel in his life. 
 
 Give me a pen." And beneath the manager's 
 quotation he wrote, "Yes — but they meet in front 
 of the curtain^' after which, his work on the stage 
 being over for the night, he left the theatre. Per- 
 haps he was wise in doing so, for the manager 
 was a short-tempered person and a strong man of 
 his hands. A great actress — I use the adjective 
 advisedly, for I have seen few with a more delicate 
 or convincing gift for the presentation of human 
 emotion — once confided to me that she had never 
 either seen or read the last act of one of Shake- 
 speare's pieces, in the earlier scenes of which she 
 had, an hour previously, drawn from me tears of 
 sympathy, and had only the vaguest idea of how it 
 ended. When, years ago, I went on tour with Miss 
 Jennie Lee's Jo company. Miss Lee herself, her 
 husband — the adaptor of the piece — and a young 
 lady who played the part of " Esther Summerson " 
 were the only persons in the crowd who had read 
 the novel on which the play is based. 
 
 The conditions of the actor's life are so little calcu- 
 lated either to sharpen or to broaden his intelligence 
 that one can hardly imagine a generally intellectual 
 man enduring them for long together. To get by 
 heart a certain number of words, to speak those words 
 
246 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 in tones and accents prescribed by another person, 
 and to repeat them and certain mechanical gestures 
 — also learnt by rote — for a hundred, or five hundred, 
 or, it* may be, for five thousand nights in succession, 
 is a stultifying process. The individual actors who 
 have given proof of any distinguishing talent out- 
 side of the practice of the mere technique of the art 
 by which they live can be counted on the fingers of 
 one hand. With one or two notable exceptions 
 they fail hopelessly where they might be supposed 
 to find their best chance of success — in the writing 
 of drama. Now and then one hears of an actor 
 who writes, or paints, or models, or composes, and 
 does it as well as the run of amateurs ; but such 
 cases are extremely rare. When an actor excels in 
 any art outside his own it is generally as a per- 
 former on some musical instrument, an excellence 
 requiring a talent cognate to his talent as an actor 
 — as an exponent of the ideas and moods of other 
 people. And these cases, insignificant as they are, 
 are only the exceptions which prove the rule. 
 
 A man will, of course, be the better actor for 
 possessing brains, but brains are no actual essentials 
 of his outfit. Gifted with a handsome face, a trim 
 figure, and the accent of a gentleman, he can play 
 Romeo or Charles Surface to universal admiration, 
 if coached by a stage-manager conversant with the 
 business of the part. Endowed with a face like a 
 gargoyle and a voice like a fog-siren, he can make an 
 audience shudder over the brute malice of Caliban or 
 laugh itself hoarse over the stupidities of Launcelot 
 Gobbo, with only the faintest intellectual under- 
 standing of the character he pourtrays, or with none 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 247 
 
 at all. Physique is, indeed, nearly everything to 
 the actor. The intellect of Shakespeare and the 
 soul of Bayard, concealed in the fleshly envelope of 
 the late Mr. Toole, or the living Mr. Penley, would 
 fail to make them acceptable to an audience as 
 " Hamlet " or " Othello." Phelps was a far more in- 
 telligent man, and a far better actor, than Stephen 
 Kemble ; but Kemble drew money as " Falstaff," 
 because he had a big paunch and a naturally comic 
 personality, and Phelps played the part to a hand- 
 ful of deadheads, because nature had stinted him in 
 those respects. The rapid increase nowadays in 
 the number of theatres renders an increase in the 
 number of actors a necessity, and to-day scores of 
 young fellows go on the stage, as, were that course 
 not open to them, they would go into a City office 
 or behind a retail counter, with no vocation and no 
 enthusiasm, and with no education which would not 
 better fit them to sell butter or calico than to inter- 
 pret human thought and emotion. They are no more 
 " artistic " by nature than the average shopwalker 
 or the average clerk, and in general intelligence 
 they are decidedly below the run of mechanics. To 
 say that all actors answer to this description would 
 be obviously false, but to say that it correctly fits 
 ninety per cent, among them is rather an under- 
 statement than an exaggeration of the case. And, 
 just as every conscript of the Grande Armee carried 
 a shadowy Marshal's baton in his knapsack, so 
 every member of this intellectually ragged regiment 
 has it among his chances that he may one day 
 become the lessee of a London theatre. It is from 
 among their ranks that the lucky few who attain to 
 
248 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 that eminence are drawn. And he would be a bold 
 man who would declare that those happy individuals 
 are always superior in general intelligence, or even 
 in histrionic capacity, to the mass of their brother 
 actors. 
 
 The process by which the actor is converted into 
 the actor manager is simplicity itself. He serves 
 his apprenticeship in London or the provinces, or 
 both. As he gains in aplomb and technical skill he 
 is entrusted with more and more prominent parts. 
 At last Fate furnishes him with a part in which he 
 makes a decisive score. The critics write about 
 him, the illustrated papers publish his portrait, he 
 is interviewed, talked about. He probably dresses 
 well, and is socially presentable; he belongs, very 
 likely, to a well-to-do family, or has wealthy con- 
 nections ; or, at those wonderful social menageries, 
 the " smart " clubs, he has met and fraternised with 
 the class of man who finds most of the money spent 
 in theatrical speculation — gilded votaries of pleasure, 
 young, middle-aged, and old, stockbrokers, company- 
 promoters, and so on. He possesses, or " knows 
 of" a play which contains a splendid part, a part 
 which might have been written for him — a piece 
 with barrels of money in it. He talks about it to 
 his wealthy friends, and they catch enough of his 
 enthusiasm to subscribe the necessary one or two 
 thousand pounds for its production. It is produced, 
 and one of two things happens. It fails more or 
 less ignominiously, and the would-be manager falls 
 back, for a period at least, among the smaller 
 celebrities of the profession. Or it succeeds, makes 
 a lot of money, and establishes the young actor as the 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 249 
 
 permanent manager of a theatre, and, ex-officio, as a 
 judge of that form of literature which should be the 
 highest and greatest, and is frequently, partly as a 
 result of his influence, the most worthless and puerile. 
 The manager simple, who is not and never has 
 been an actor, is a more wonderful product still, 
 and only less worthy of study because, of late years, 
 he has grown to be so rare. He is purely and 
 simply a tradesman, and for the most part would 
 not for a moment pretend to be anything else or 
 anything more. He runs his theatre as his brother 
 tradesmen run their shops, with the difference — 
 rather an important difference when you come to 
 think of it — that he is absolutely incapable of 
 judging of the quality of the goods he sells. On 
 many points of his business he is an expert. He 
 knows what rent his landlord can fairly demand for 
 his theatre. He knows how many supers it will 
 take properly to "dress" his stage, the cost of 
 properties and accessories, the holding capacity of 
 his house, the amount of printing and advertisement 
 necessary to draw attention to the show. His 
 leading man would try in vain to bluff him out of 
 an extra ten pounds a week, clever indeed would 
 be the gallery check-taker who could long continue 
 to cheat him of a tithe of that amount. He may 
 be, in addition, an excellent stage-manager, with a 
 keen eye for grouping and effect. You may add as 
 many other qualifications as you can think of, but 
 they are all rendered nugatory by the one fact that, 
 like his friendly rival the actor-manager, he has 
 neither the artistic sympathy nor the critical judg- 
 ment to tell a good play from a bad one. 
 
250 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 Ignorance is the mother of superstition, and the 
 statement is just as true in the visible and tangible 
 world as in the shadowy domain of the unseen. 
 The manager cannot deny — he would pretty cer- 
 tainly do so if he could manage it with any decent 
 chance of being believed — that in theatrical specu- 
 lation failure is the rule and success the exception. 
 He must perforce find some explanation for so 
 patent a fact. The very simple — and perfectly 
 true — explanation, that he is, in the vast majority 
 of cases, a duffer and an ignoramus in the most 
 important department of his own business has pro- 
 bably never occurred to him. In my thirty years of 
 theatrical experience I have never once heard a 
 manager explain a failure — of his own production — 
 as due to a fault of his own judgment. Successive 
 generations of managers have invented, bequeathed, 
 and augmented a long list of feeble and futile 
 superstitions regarding the causes of theatrical 
 success and theatrical failure, superstitions which 
 have passed so long unchallenged that they have 
 hardened into the consistency of dogma. Here is 
 a single instance, the type of many. Some years 
 ago a certain manager of my acquaintance produced 
 an (alleged) comic opera at a West-End theatre. 
 It was beautifully dressed, faultlessly rehearsed, 
 there was a crowd of popular artists in the cast, 
 and the music was played by an admirable orchestra, 
 admirably conducted. But there its virtues ended. 
 Among many nights of boredom and disgust that 
 night stands out in my remembrance. The book 
 of the opera was a mountainous ineptitude. The 
 scansion and the rhymes of its lyrics would have 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 251 
 
 attracted contemptuous notice in a collection of 
 Catnach ballads. Its dialogue was pointless, vulgar 
 drivel. It had no plot. Hisses were heard in the 
 pit and catcalls in the gallery before the curtain 
 had been up ten minutes, and they grew in a steady 
 crescendo until the final fall of the curtain. A day 
 or two later I met the manager, and he confided to 
 me his theory of the damnation of the piece. It 
 was the result of admitting the paying public on a 
 first night. The opera was the best thing of its 
 sort he had ever known in his experience, a gem of 
 dramatic and musical art, and if he had only made 
 certain of a favourable first-night verdict by con- 
 fining admission to the personal friends of the 
 author, the composer, the artists, and the manage- 
 ment, it would have been a perfect gold-mine. 
 The man who said this amazing thing was neither 
 an escaped lunatic nor an inexperienced amateur. 
 He had had years of theatrical experience, and tens 
 of thousands of pounds had passed through his 
 hands. And if the work he produced, and the 
 excuse he urged for its failure, have remained all 
 these years in my memory, it is only because they 
 differed slightly in degree, and not at all in kind, 
 from dozens of other examples of managerial 
 imbecility. 
 
 Mr. Midshipman Easy, it will be remembered, 
 went to sea in the hope of finding on the ocean 
 that spirit of equality he had failed to find on land. 
 It was in no similar delusion, that I might discover 
 among theatrical managers an intellectuality indis- 
 coverable among the publishing fraternity, that I 
 left the concoction of novels for the manufacture of 
 
252 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 drama — I already knew enough of the theatre to 
 cherish no such dream. It was rather in the spirit 
 which might have actuated some unlucky gentleman 
 in the grip of the Inquisition, who, finding the 
 monotony of the Scavenger's Daughter or the 
 thumbscrew getting on his nerves, might have 
 elected to try the rack as a change. I should be 
 sorry to discourage budding genius, but I do not 
 recommend any young litterateur to try the theatre 
 as his first avenue to success. An unknown man 
 may get a play accepted by a responsible manage- 
 ment, but the chances are all against him. There 
 is no royal road to acceptance by managers, but 
 the best introduction to them nowadays is to have 
 one or two successful novels to your credit. None 
 of my books had ever really hit the public between 
 wind and water, and, as I have already said, the 
 luck which had dogged my literary ventures followed 
 me across the threshold of the theatres. And, as I 
 have already intimated, to hawk about a novel 
 among publishers, disagreeable as it is, is a summer 
 holiday compared to hawking plays about among 
 managers. Should I ever find myself condemned 
 to choose between doing that again and selling 
 matches in the street, I shall elect for the latter, as 
 vastly more dignified. 
 
 It occurred to me that I might perhaps find a 
 private patron for my dramatic wares, and I entered 
 on the search for him. But, like Falstaff — with 
 a difference — I was not only unfortunate myself, 
 but the cause of misfortune to others. The upas- 
 like effect I exercised on the fortunes of certain 
 publishers, as detailed earlier in these confessions, 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 253 
 
 extended almost invariably to such unfortunates 
 as showed any symptom of helping me to succeed 
 in my stage career. The first was H. C, a genial 
 young gentleman who ran some sort of business — 
 what, I never knew — which justified the renting 
 of a palatial set of rooms with a half-acre of 
 plate-glass frontage on the first floor of a house 
 in Regent Street. He acquired a two-years' right 
 of production in a comedy of mine, and promptly 
 went through the Bankruptcy Court. My period 
 of mourning for him was terminated by the appear- 
 ance on my horizon of a stock-broker who had 
 realised I don't know how much money by a 
 daring operation in some sort of South African 
 values. He rescued the comedy from H. C, and 
 was in the act of engaging a company and nego- 
 tiating with a certain suburban theatre for a trial 
 week when the Boer War broke out. The last 
 time I met him he was carrying a brown paper 
 parcel, which he told me contained his dress 
 clothes, and he appealed to me, as a person learned 
 in such matters, as to the best establishment at 
 which to hypothecate them. 
 
 Then J. W. " happened along," as the Americans 
 say. J. W. was a remarkable person in more ways 
 than one. To begin with, he was very much the 
 biggest and heaviest man I have ever seen outside 
 a booth, a Colossus who turned the scale at over 
 thirty stone. He became possessed of the acting 
 rights of a drama I had written in collaboration 
 with Christie and Mr. John L. Shine. Within a 
 few weeks of the completion of the bargain he was 
 smitten with paralysis, and for nearly two years 
 
254 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 ceased to count in the list of the living. The huge 
 man was reduced to the condition of a helpless 
 baby ; he was washed and fed like one, and was 
 oblivious of his nearest and dearest friends. A 
 constitution as remarkable as his physique brought 
 him through this terrible attack, and although he 
 was condemned to walk on crutches, and was shrunk 
 to a mere sketch and shadow of his former self, he 
 regained his intellectual powers. Those powers 
 were of no mean order, for after his recovery he 
 invented a most ingenious secret process for the 
 production of a substitute for a certain rare natural 
 substance of great and rapidly increasing value, and, 
 crippled as he was both physically and financially 
 by his illness, succeeded in disposing of his patent 
 in every civilised country in the world on such 
 terms that he told me he felt positively frightened 
 when he contemplated the extent of the fortune in 
 his grasp. We took a strong mutual liking for 
 each other. He asked to see some specimens of 
 my individual dramatic work, and as a result 
 promised me that he would, at the earliest possible 
 moment, take a theatre and " run " me as a play- 
 wright. One day as we were lunching together at 
 his office, he said, *' I am going to Buenos Ayres 
 next week, partly on business and partly for the 
 sake of the voyage. I shall be away about eight 
 weeks altogether. Make it an appointment to 
 come here on the seventeenth of August, and we 
 will settle things and get to work." I called on 
 the appointed date, and found his secretary in the 
 
 outer office. " Is Mr. W in ? " I asked. 
 
 "In!" echoed the secretary. "Yes — he's in his 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 255 
 
 coffin." He had fallen dead at his own table the 
 previous evening. 
 
 Perhaps the richest specimen of my peculiar 
 brand of luck in things theatrical was furnished by 
 a game of spoof played for my discomfiture by 
 Providence d propos of a melodrama produced 
 by the Messrs. Gatti at the Adelphi some twenty 
 years ago. I was at that time acting as dramatic 
 critic of a certain London weekly, and received 
 from my editor the voucher for a stall for the first 
 night of the piece in question. I forget what I did 
 on that especial evening, but there was metal of 
 some sort more attractive elsewhere, and I gave 
 the stall to a friend on condition that he wrote the 
 notice forme. Twelve years later, Richard Mansell 
 — another good fellow whose handsome face and 
 cheery voice I can never hope to see or hear 
 again — introduced Christie and myself to a theatrical 
 speculator who gave us a tentative commission to 
 write a play, whose action was to take place in the 
 Klondyke region, a country through which Christie 
 had travelled a year or two earlier, and where, as 
 all the world will remember, huge deposits of gold 
 had been discovered. We were to draw up a 
 complete synopsis of the piece, to write the first act, 
 and to submit them for approval. If they were 
 satisfactory we were to receive ^loo cash, and the 
 same sum on the completion of the drama, " in 
 advance of fees." Christie and I were both hard 
 up, and we went for our task con amove, and com- 
 pleted it within ten days of our receipt of the 
 commission. Christie read the act to Mansell and 
 his principal, and as he read I noticed a growing 
 
256 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 look of wonder on both faces, and a constant 
 exchange between them of glances expressive of 
 hopeless bepuzzlement. We had produced an 
 actual replica of the first act of the melodrama 
 I ought to have seen twelve years earlier. A 
 Canadian farmer-family, reduced to the verge of 
 ruin by a long battle with an ungrateful soil and 
 a series of bad seasons, who had determined to 
 throw up their farm and try their luck in newly 
 discovered gold-fields ; a half-breed Spanish woman 
 of vindictive temperament who had been cruelly 
 tricked by a sham marriage ; a murder, witnessed 
 by a low-comedy Cockney character ; and half a 
 dozen minor figures and situations had all been 
 faithfully reproduced from the older piece. The 
 coincidence extended even to the name of our 
 revengeful heroine, who in both dramas was 
 christened " Quita." Both our auditors received 
 our assurance of the purely accidental character of 
 the resemblance with implicit faith — indeed, to 
 doubt it would have been to stigmatise us, not as 
 plagiarists, but as lunatics. 
 
 Let me bring this somewhat monotonous record 
 to an end. Some five years ago I wrote a five-act 
 drama, freely adapted from a French original. 
 After hawking it about in the usual fashion among 
 the managers, I submitted it to a young fellow 
 with a taste for theatrical speculation, who offered 
 me ;^5o for the entire British rights. I was — as 
 my dramatic Macaenas was perfectly aware — so 
 poor at the moment that I would have sold my 
 teeth, which indeed were an almost superfluous 
 possession, and I accepted his proffer. He did 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 257 
 
 nothing with the piece, and a year ago, thinking 
 that I saw a chance of placing it elsewhere, I 
 applied to him for a copy to offer to a London 
 management. But the piece had vanished. My 
 original MS. and four type-written copies had 
 disappeared into space. 
 
 If I still cherished the faintest hope of success 
 upon the stage, this public proclamation of myself 
 as a dramatic Jonah would mark a depth of 
 business ineptitude to which even my father's son 
 might blush to sink. But I have said a last and 
 long farewell to any such hopes, and so my avowal 
 cannot hurt me. 
 
 Readers of " Monte Christo " will remember 
 the delightfully pious reason given by the Abbe 
 Faria for renouncing his attempt to escape from 
 the Chateau d'If. Finding that he has a hundred 
 yards of living rock to tunnel through, and no 
 instrument but a toothpick with which to perform 
 the operation, he concludes that his desire for 
 liberty is contrary to the Divine Will. In a simi- 
 larly devout frame of mind I finally relinquished 
 my dream of dramatic fame. 
 
 It had been my intention, on reaching the end 
 of this book, to round it off in proper orthodox 
 fashion, with a flourishing peroration expressing 
 my philosophy of life, and conveying a store of 
 moral counsel to my readers. But now that the 
 end is here, I do not feel in the least degree like 
 doing it. So far as moral counsel is concerned, 
 anybody who yearns for that may acquire a vast 
 deal more of it than he is ever likely to translate 
 
 s 
 
258 A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 
 
 into practice by investing a penny in the purchase 
 of a child's copybook. And as regards a philosophy 
 of life, I make, on self-examination, the amazing 
 discovery that I haven't any. Two years ago I 
 could have labelled myself quite easily as a point- 
 blank fatalist and pessimist. A fatalist I still am ; 
 I don't see how anybody who looks the facts of 
 existence squarely in the face can be anything else. 
 I came into the world by no motion of my own, 
 the mathematically accurate result of preceding 
 forces, and my original plasm has been shaped 
 and moulded, developed, distorted, fed or starved, 
 by an infinite plexus of circumstance with whose 
 ordering I have had extremely little to do. I am 
 also — academically — still a pessimist, inasmuch as 
 it is my sincere conviction, based on such observa- 
 tion of the cosmos as I have been able to make, 
 that the mass of pain exceeds the mass of pleasure ; 
 that neither the individual nor the race has any 
 ultimate objective ; and that the evolution of con- 
 sciousness was a colossal blunder of some vast force 
 outside the scope of human understanding. But 
 I have no inclination to enlarge on those views at 
 this moment. 
 
 The publication of this book will roughly coincide 
 with the second anniversary of my wedding-day — 
 the day on which I performed the only completely 
 sensible and the only truly fortunate act of an other- 
 wise quite curiously muddle-headed and, till then, 
 conspicuously unfortunate existence. And my pre- 
 sent, actual, workaday philosophy consists in enjoy- 
 ing the abundant harvest of happiness which has, 
 by some paradox well-nigh as bewildering as it is 
 
A STEPSON OF FORTUNE 259 
 
 delightful, sprung up in the little seed-plot in the 
 field of time which I had sown so liberally with 
 nothing but tares and brambles. With what I 
 think is a wise egotism I have come to recognise 
 that, out of joint as the world may be, I do not 
 suffer under the cursed spite of having been born 
 to put it right. A man who has arrived at fifty 
 years of age with such faculties, physical and 
 mental, as he ever possessed practically unimpaired, 
 and whose immediate surroundings are tranquilly 
 happy, may accept in all good faith and turn to 
 sweet uses the bitter couplet of Dryden — 
 
 " And from the dregs of life, hope to receive 
 What the first sprightly running could not give." 
 
 If I presented myself to you as the Stepson of 
 Fortune, and have continued so long to masquerade 
 under that name, it was only that I might more 
 completely enjoy your friendly surprise in taking 
 my final leave of you in my actual character of her 
 kind, if capricious Ladyship's prodigal, repentant, 
 and reinstated Son. 
 
 London : March 27, 1909. 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. 
 
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