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Title: Edgar Wallace. A Short Autobiography.
Original title (1926): People. A Short Autobiography.
Author: Wallace, Richard Horatio Edgar (1875-1932)
Date of first publication: 1926
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   [London]: Hodder and Stoughton, [1929]
Date first posted: 3 August 2015
Date last updated: 3 August 2015
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1265

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






  EDGAR WALLACE

  A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY


  BY

  EDGAR WALLACE



  _This is a popular edition of the book published
  in 1926 under the title of "People"_



  HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD




  DEDICATION

  TO A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE
  THE RIGHT HON. THE EARL OF DERBY, K.G.



  Made and Printed in Great Britain by Wyman & Sons Ltd.,
  London, Reading and Fakenham




_Introduction_

I am aware that this autobiography differs drastically in many respects
from the memoirs which appear from time to time in volumes written by
men and women who have been associated with the great and the famous,
even as it differs from those recollections which appear in the popular
press and have to deal with half-forgotten scandals and the
better-forgotten transactions of sometime millionaires.

Essentially it is the story of the poor, and of one atom that climbed
out of the thick mud which clogs the feet of the battling millions.  If
it encourages one ambitious child to strive to eminence, if it helps
make lighter the lot of one man or one woman and gives hope where there
is no hope, it will not have been written in vain.

Incidentally, this little autobiography is in itself a tribute to the
system under which we live.  There cannot be much wrong with a society
which made possible the rise either of J. H. Thomas or Edgar Wallace,
that gave "Jamie" Brown the status of a king in Scotland, and put
Robertson at the War Office as Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

We were the poor who were not satisfied with our poverty; the lowly who
grew to the stature of our faith and are growing still, I hope.

I have sought nothing so illusory as "success"--rather have I found new
footholds from which to gain a wider view, new capacities for gratitude
towards my fellow-man, and a new and heart-felt sense of humility as,
from my little point of vantage on the ever-upward path, I watch the
wondrous patience and courage of those who are struggling up behind me.




_Chapter I_

Generally speaking, there is no mystery about birth, even in the least
creditable circumstances.  The most mysterious thing that can happen to
any man is not to be born at all.  Less mystery why, swathed (one
presumes) in voluminous shawls, one should be carried from Ashburnham
Road to a little court hard by the Deptford Creek which separates the
Royal Town of Greenwich from the unsalubrious purlieus of Deptford.

I was adopted at the age of nine days.  Otherwise there might have been
for me a romantic upbringing in Greenwich Workhouse or one of those
institutions whither motherless and fatherless persons of nine days old
and having no visible means of support are brought to maturity.
Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having
for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the
proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me.

"She's adopted," said Mr. Freeman, an autocrat in his way.

Nor when he discovered that he had been mistaken as to my sex did he
vary his humane decision.

In name and in fact he was a Freeman--a liveryman of the Haberdashers'
Company; a Freeman of the City of London--he could trace his ancestry
back for five hundred years through family and city records.  And he
was a fish porter at Billingsgate Market.  A stocky, big-featured man,
with a powerful nose and a chin beard such as Abraham Lincoln wore.

I never saw him write anything but his name.  I never saw him read
anything but the New Testament--a big, calf-bound volume with leaves
that were yellow from age.  He used to "break out" about twice a year
and drink brandy.  Then was the Testament laid reverently aside, and he
would fight any man of any size and beat him.  Once he fought for two
hours, perilously, on the edge of a deep cutting.  He had the strength
of an ox; balanced on the flat leather hat he wore in business hours,
he could carry heavy cases of fish, and they were no more to him than
such chaplets as the patricians wore.

He never did a crooked thing in his life.  His wife was the gentlest
mother that ever lived.  She could not write, but she could read.
Mostly she read aloud the murders in the Sunday newspapers, and we
discussed historic criminals--Peace, Palmer (whose trial she
remembered) and such moderns as Mrs. Maybrick.  I loved them and they
loved me.  They are dead, and I am the poorer for it.

I remember dimly the sinking of the _Princess Alice_.  Greenwich had a
maritime flavour in those days.  It was a town of blue-jerseyed men,
and in every other house in our neighbourhood was the model of a
full-rigged ship.  And over most parlour mantelpieces hung a collection
of brightly coloured china rolling-pins, the exact significance of
which I have never understood, except that they had to do with foreign
travel.

My first vivid recollection in life is one of a sort of possessive
pride in prison vans.  The gloomy "Black Maria" that rumbled up the
Greenwich Road every afternoon.  I recollect giving the infants' class
at St. Peter's School a miss and toddling up Trafalgar Street to see
the gloomy tumbril pass in the rain, with a shiny warder sitting on a
little knifeboard behind and a top-hatted driver under the tarpaulin
apron in front.

I think Young Harry was in the van on his way to Wandsworth.  And Young
Harry was my adopted "brother."  All his life he hated policemen and he
had a passion for fighting them.  Later, Tom took up this hobby, and
they were both in Wandsworth together when, as a very small boy, I
walked all the way to Wandsworth Prison to see it with my own eyes.  I
had a very proud feeling about Wandsworth Prison--I felt that it
belonged to me; just as one feels towards the handsome residences which
are occupied by rich relations.

Neither Tom nor Harry did anything much worse than assault the
constabulary--but they did this so consistently that they were scarcely
ever at home.  Harry, lean of body and face, with a pair of deep-set
dark eyes; Tom, fair and handsome: they have passed over.  Drink killed
them in the lifetime of their father.

"Young Dick," Harry used to say to me in all solemnity (one of my names
is "Richard"), "if you don't eat up your pudden, how d'you expect to
hit coppers?"

George Freeman heard of the discreditable exploits of his sons with
scarcely a ruffle.

"Father, Harry's got three months."

He would look up from his large-print Testament.

"Do him good," was his invariable comment--he was a loud
conversationalist; in such moments as these he shouted.

Queer that he and his gentle wife should rear such children as they
had.  He lived a Christian life, was just to all men, fearless--he
could not lie.

At three o'clock every morning, winter and summer, he left his house
for Billingsgate Market.  When I was old enough I sometimes accompanied
him.  Our way led through the street along which runs the boundary wall
of Guy's Hospital.  At exactly the same spot every morning he stopped,
took off his hat (I must do the same) whilst he prayed shortly for all
who suffered in those long wards.  He was an inmate once and brought
away the legend of an infallible ointment which cured everything.  I
went through the early part of my boyhood smeared with it, for he
believed that the cure of such inevitable trials as measles, scarlet
fever, and indeed any disease, lay in the treatment of the symptoms.
There are many earnest and learned social reformers who enjoy the same
delusion.

Down Love Lane, off Eastcheap, was a dimly-lit coffee-shop, redolent of
fish.  Here a man, and even a boy, could feast royally for
three-pence--wonderful coffee in thick cone-shaped mugs, and new bread
and country butter.  How often, wedged between the white-smocked
porters, have I sat, my jaws working, my ears cocked for that flow of
language which is Billingsgate's pride.  And I heard nothing, for I was
a child and your labouring man is a gentleman.  I suspect that they
choked back many lurid illustrations and comments--I have seen warning
glances flash from man to man.  And when once a large red-faced porter
forgot himself: "There's a child present!" said half a dozen voices in
chorus.

How those men worked!  Their hobnailed boots rattling over the slippery
pavement of the market--along the planks that spanned between wharf and
the G.I.C. boats that lay alongside.  I have stood on the quay hour
after hour in the glory of a summer morning, in the chill of winter,
watching the boats.  Ice-rimed boats from Grimsby, tubby eel-boats from
Holland, big ship and little ship.  "Collectors" that had come rolling
from the Dogger Bank with their holds packed with silvery fish that was
officially "alive."

Mrs. Freeman hated the market that she had never seen.  She hated it
for the toll it had taken of her sons.  It was to her a Fagin's kitchen
of iniquity.

"Never work in the market, Dick," she warned me.

My career was mapped out.  I was to be properly educated--which meant
that I was not to leave school at the age of ten, as the others had
done.

Billingsgate has for me only one unhappy memory.  George Freeman had a
weakness for hats.  There used to be an old Jewish pedlar--one supposes
he died in Park Lane worth his million--who carried hundreds of
second-hand hats of all sizes except mine.  Old George favoured a Derby
hat with a high crown such as Mr. Churchill made unpopular.  It was
something between a top-hat and a billycock.  He used to pay as much as
threepence for them.  How often have I, with a sinking heart, watched
him approach with a look of triumph on his rugged, handsome face, and a
newly-acquired hat in his hand!  How often have I sat in the dimly-lit
coffee-shop in Love Lane whilst a committee of porters have folded
strips of newspaper to stuff inside the lining that my small head might
not be altogether extinguished!  Mrs. Freeman invariably thought there
was one layer of paper packing too many for my comfort, and took it out.

A new hat meant chapel.  With a plaid scarf round my neck and the
atrocious dark tower supported on my ears, I must accompany him to the
Wesleyan kirk, there to be bored for one hour and forty minutes by a
superman I could not hear, probing into mysteries which I could not
understand.

Church is a terrible experience for children--a cruel experience.  A
lecture on Chinese metaphysics or Arch-Masonry, or Einstein's Theory of
Relativity, is as intelligible.  How bewilderingly painted, enamelled,
covered with mystic signs and obscured by smoky vapours, is the simple
Jesus to the average poor child who hears of Him through the medium of
the grown-up's pulpit!

I slept in the next room to "father" and "mother," and every night
brought the inevitable exchange:

"'Night, Dick."

"'Night, father."

"Said yer prayers?"

"Yes, father."

Pause.

"You'll go to hell if you don't."

"Yes, father."

A longer pause.

"I don't know that you will."

School and the promised education came at the age of six.  I learnt to
sign my name "Dick Freeman."  George gave me a penny and carried the
scrawl to the market for the admiration of his friends.

School.  A big yellow barracks of a place, built (or rumour lied) on an
old rubbish-pit into which the building was gradually sinking.  We used
to put chalk marks on the wall near the ground to check the subsidence.
And every morning when I turned the corner of Reddin's Road, Peckham,
and saw the Board School still standing where it did, I was filled with
a helpless sense of disappointment.  And the fires that were never lit,
and the evil blackboard where godlike teachers, whose caligraphy is
still my envy, wrote words of fearful length.  The drone of the
class-rooms, the humourless lessons, the agonies of mental arithmetic
and the seeming impossibilities of the written variety.  There were
golden days--poetry days.  We learnt the "Inchcape Rock," of that Sir
Ralph the Rover who sailed away

  "And scoured the seas for many a day.
  At last grown rich with plunder's store,
  He steered his course for Scotland's shore."

And Casabianca, and Brave Horatius, and so by degrees to the Master.  I
learnt whole scenes of "Macbeth" and "Julius Csar" and "Hamlet," and
could--and did--recite them with gusto on every and any excuse.

There was one very bright day indeed.  Mr. Newton, the class master,
initiated a practice which I hope is still a feature of elementary
education: he read to us--and chose the "Arabian Nights."  The colour
and beauty of the East stole through the foggy windows of Reddin's Road
School.  Here was a magic carpet indeed that transported forty none too
cleanly little boys into the palace of the Caliphs, through the spicy
bazaars of Bagdad, hand in hand with the king of kings.

Out of school, life ran normally.  Up before breakfast, and with a mat
bag ranging the Old Kent Road for the day's provisions.  (I did most of
the shopping.)  A pound of sixpenny "pieces" from Mills the butcher,
two-penn'orth of potatoes from the greengrocer's, a parsnip and a
penn'orth of carrots--I came to have a violent antipathy to Irish stew.
"Pieces" are those odds and ends of meat, the by-products of the
butchering business.  I was something of a connoisseur in pieces; could
tell at a glance the tainted "end," guessed unerringly the depth of fat
in a scraggy nob of mutton.  One could buy fourpenny pieces, but only
the very poor touched these.  They were almost low, and one lost caste
if detected buying them.

The clean, decent poor!  Their women are more wonderful than the
daughters of kings.  I've shopped with them; stood at their front doors
talking to them--they seldom asked you inside for fear you saw their
makeshifts.  Their lace curtains white as snow, the perennial geraniums
behind the polished glass of their front windows, their chicken-houses
and pigeon-lofts in the back yard above which on Tuesdays and
Wednesdays waved and fluttered the spotless banners of their decency.

You saw their women hanging out the washing: stout women dying of
cancer and smiling through it.  Gripping their clothes-pegs in their
teeth, propping up lines, arresting their labours to wipe wet foreheads
with wetter arms and exchange a jest with the woman next door.
Working, bearing and dying.  The insurance man calls once a week that
they may make provision for a decorous burying--their very ambitions
are headed towards the grave.




_Chapter II_

The value of popular education has so often been discussed by men who
are authorities on the subject that I hesitate to put on record my own
point of view.  But at any rate I can see the subject from another
angle.  If every boy who came from a Council school were being prepared
for a definite career, it would be a simple matter for the hard-working
teachers to train him towards perfection; but the truth is that eighty
per cent. of the boys who go through Council schools go forth into the
world to swell the ranks of unskilled labour.  Their seven or eight
years of dreary grind has taught them to read, to write an indifferent
hand, and to figure.  Within a year of leaving school even a public
school boy would find it difficult to qualify for a lower certificate.
How much harder is it for the poor boy who leaves a Council school, a
place more often than not of unpleasant memories, to utilise the
knowledge he has acquired during those seven or eight years!  The weary
hours he spends securing a working knowledge of the capes and bays of
England--knowledge that passes in a flash almost as soon as he has
taken a joyous farewell of his school!

I was a fairly intelligent boy, and I am trying to remember now just
what I _did_ learn.  At geography, roughly the shape of England;
nothing about the United States, nothing about the railway systems of
Europe.  I learnt that China had two great rivers, the Yangtse-kiang
and Hoangho, but which is which I can't remember.  I knew the shape of
Africa and that it was an easy map to draw.  I knew nothing about
France except that Paris was on the Seine.  I knew the shape of Italy
was like a top-booted leg, and that India was in the shape of a pear;
but except that there had been a mutiny in that country, it was _terra
incognita_ to me.

History: The ancient Britons smeared themselves with woad and paddled
round in basket-shaped boats.  William the Conqueror came to England in
1066.  Henry VIII had seven--or was it eight?--wives.  King Charles was
executed for some obscure reason, and at a vague period of English
history there was a War of the Roses.

Chemistry: If you put a piece of heated wire in oxygen--or was it
hydrogen?--it glowed very brightly.  If you blow through a straw into
lime water, the water becomes cloudy.

English Literature: Three plays of Shakespeare which especially
appealed to me, and knowledge of which was of the greatest service in
after life; an acquaintance with the "Arabian Nights," and one or two
poets.

Religion: No more than I learnt at Sunday school.

Drawing: Hours of hard work in an attempt to acquire proficiency in an
art for which I had no aptitude.

Arithmetic: As far as decimals.  In those days book-keeping was not
learnt at school.  You might say that all the knowledge I acquired from
my lessons in arithmetic was the ability to tot columns of figures with
great rapidity.

I think I would undertake to teach in a month more geography than I
learnt in six years.  Not, I hasten to add, because the teachers were
deficient, for we had in "Tubby" Gaines one of the finest head masters
that ever went to an elementary school, but because the system is as
wrong as it can well be, and hour after hour of time is wasted in
inculcating into a class of fifty, knowledge which is of no interest
whatever except to possibly two or three.

You have to remember to take into account the attitude not only of the
boys but of their parents towards school.  To the average poor father
and mother, school is a place which occupies a boy's time that
otherwise would be spent in making himself a nuisance at home.  When he
gets a little older, school becomes an interference with the liberty of
the subject; the boy is being detained when he ought to be earning his
living.

To the average boy, school is a horrible duty, and if there are ever
any who do not wake on Monday morning and groan at the prospect of
another week's grind, then they are hardly normal.  In any case, the
time given to popular education is ridiculously inadequate.
Twenty-seven and a half hours a week compares very unfavourably with
the time spent by a boy at a public school.  In my day, games were not
encouraged; there was little or no drill, and no break in the morning.
School was divided into standards, and the teacher took most of the
lessons, though occasionally there was an exchange.

The real trouble with the Council school is that there is no machinery
by which continuation classes can be made compulsory.  No boy should be
given a clearance certificate until, say, he has made himself
proficient in one of the modern languages.  As matters are at present,
a boy leaves school more or less illiterate, with no other
qualification than that required for a van or errand boy.  But mostly,
I think, the real deficiency in the system is that he is not taught to
speak.  Well acquainted as I am with the peculiar intonation of the
street boy, I am frequently at a loss to understand what he is talking
about.  This stricture not only applies to London, but to the
provinces.  The horrible articulation of the average Council-trained
youth is a terrible handicap to him in after life.  Indeed, the only
difference that exists between the Council boy and the public school
boy is his voice.  The nasal whine of the Cockney schoolboy is an
offence.  And there is really no reason in the world why he should be
allowed to go into the world under such a disadvantage.

Eleven years of life passed for me--confused years in which sixpenny
pieces and half-hundredweights of coal and Caius Cassius and wagonette
drives to Sidcup are inextricably mixed up.

George Freeman's breakings-out are more clearly remembered.  There was
a sort of routine which began with his return from the market in a more
jocular frame of mind, and a morning visit to the "Glengall Arms."  And
then a visit to the Post Office Savings Bank to withdraw fabulous sums,
and then the hire of a wagonette and horse which he drove to Sidcup,
where tea was to be had under the elms.  Then came a period of deep
depression and remorse; a certain harshness of temper, and finally the
interminable reading of the Old Testament, glasses perched on his thick
nose.

Those "on the drink" periods had their joys and sorrows for me.  Money
was plentiful--pennies to be had for the asking.  There were other
times when I sat on the doorstep of the hostel waiting for closing-time
and cursing all public-houses that kept me out of bed.  The bouts
lasted less than a week--he was both a frugal and a cautious man.  He
carried always in his waistcoat pocket a piece of steel umbrella rib
hooked at the end to retrieve his false teeth in case he ever swallowed
them.

At ten or thereabouts I became a sort of associate member of a gang of
burglars.  They stole type from a type-founder's.  I never took part in
the raids carried out under the direction of a desperado very little
older than myself, but I received a little of the loot and regretted
that it was not more useful.  And about now I met a man who asked me to
buy him cigarettes--a penn'orth at a time.  He gave me nice new florins
and I brought him back the change.  After I had changed five, I took
the sixth to the nearest policeman and said:

"If you please, sir, is this money snide?"

He broke it with his finger and thumb and said that it was snide.  So
my employer was pinched, and the magistrate said I was a smart little
boy.  I kept the _News of the World_ cutting for a long time--it was
the first time my name ever appeared in print.

Eleven years passed.  I made a suggestion to Mrs. Freeman, which she
rejected with indignation.

"Only raggity boys sell newspapers on the streets," she said.

And I wasn't a raggity boy.  Nevertheless----

I had explored the fascinating part of the City.  It begins at St.
Paul's and ends at Temple Bar.  I was a theatre-goer too--the Surrey
and the Elephant and Castle gallery was like home to me.  Have I not
shed tears over the sorrows of Mrs. Bennett, driven from home by cruel
parents and dying in the paper snow.  Theatre-going was something of an
adventure.  It involved saving--on less than sixpence the evening was a
failure.  The gallery cost four-pence at the Surrey (as against
threepence at the Elephant); an extra penny was required for a bottle
of ginger-beer and a penny for the tram ride home.

And at home trouble began.  A knock at the door ... a wait ... the
sound of feet in the passage.

"Is that you, Dick?"

The door was always locked and bolted against the burglar who never
came.  God knows what he could have stolen, for Mr. Freeman's savings
book was locked in the bottom drawer and he kept a policeman's
truncheon hanging to the rail of his bed.

"Yes, mother."

The sound of bolts being pulled and a running commentary on my
disgraceful behaviour.

"This time of night ... you ought to be ashamed of yourself ... you
young blackguard!"

There was always a gentle slap awaiting me as I darted through, but I
was a nimble dodger.

It was during the summer holidays of 1886 that I began my business
career.  Unknown to the Freemans, I "went to London" and was initiated
into the mysteries of "sale or return."  The paper I chose was the
_Echo_, a bilious-looking sheet that was remarkable for its high moral
tone and the accuracy of its tips.

On a summer afternoon I appeared outside Cook's office at Ludgate Hill
beneath the windows of the very club of which I was one day to be
chairman, with a bundle of _Echos_ under my arm.  It was an enthralling
experience.  I stood in the very centre of London.  Past me rumbled the
horse buses, the drays and wagons of the great metropolis.  I saw great
men, pointed out to me by a queer old gentleman in a frowsy overcoat
and top hat who haunted Ludgate Circus.  Sala--Mr. Lawson, who owned
the _Telegraph_, the father of the present Viscount Burnham--Toole, who
came occasionally to Fleet Street--Henry Irving driving in a hansom cab
with a beautiful lady called Ellen Terry (they were coming from St.
Paul's).  I was very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity of
seeing such people.

Winter came.  Attendance at my pitch involved "hopping the wag," a
mysterious colloquialism which meant playing truant from school.  And
in the winter trade was slack.  All the cold bitter winds of the world
circled madly in Ludgate Circus.  It was a shivering, nose-nipping
business.  I found a novel method of generating heat.  As I stamped my
feet I recited in a mutter the quarrel scene from _Julius Csar_.

CASSIUS: That you have wrong'd me doth appear in this:
    You have condemn'd and noted Lucius Pella
    For taking bribes here of the Sardians;
    Wherein my letters praying on his side
    Because I knew the man, were slighted of.

BRUTUS: You wronged yourself to write in such a case.


How I hated Cassius!  How I made him whine and cringe, and how wrathful
and indignant I, Brutus, was!  Before the end of the scene I was
glowing with righteous anger.

Only once was I too vehement.  A tall policeman suddenly overshadowed
me like a tower of blue.

"What's the matter with you, boy?"

"Nothing, sir," I stammered.

"Light-'eaded?"

"Yes, sir," I said, thinking that this was rather a cunning explanation.

"You better push orf home then," he said.

I pushed.

My earnings averaged (I guess) about three shillings a week, which I
spent in dissipation--ginger-beer, theatres and a succulent toffee
called "Devona."

There was Sunday school, of course, and Sunday school introduced me to
my first fiction.  It was a story called "Christie's Old Organ," over
which I have shed many tears.  The moral of the story was that one
ought to be kind to people less fortunate than oneself.  The complex
introduced into my mental system by "Christie's Old Organ" has cost me
thousands of pounds.  I have often wished that I had begun my course of
reading with "Jack Sheppard."

My periods of piety began usually in the month of April every year and
ended in July.  Between those two dates is held the annual Sunday
school excursion, and for sixpence (if you are a regular scholar) you
can get a day in the country with food thrown in.  And you are not a
regular scholar unless you have been on the books for a month.  In the
course of the years I worked almost every Sunday school in the
neighbourhood, accumulated a working knowledge of the more picturesque
miracles, and had seen the world from Epping Forest to Chislehurst,
from Richmond Park to Epping Forest.

The last treat of all was that given by Queen Victoria to the Board
school children.  I went to Hyde Park labelled, drank sweet lemonade,
cheered the wrong lady in the royal procession, and was awarded a
Jubilee mug shaped like a truncated cone.  I won three others coming
home in the train by tossing, but I had to surrender them to the
enraged parents who were waiting at Peckham Rye Station to welcome the
adventurers home.

The serious business of life began soon after.  Paper-selling was low;
worse, it was unremunerative.  For the first time I sallied forth under
my own name--I had to get a copy of my birth certificate to secure my
first job.

It was very interesting to be called by a name I'd never used in my
life; I felt a little more important, as though the Queen had bestowed
a title upon me.

There was a big printing firm in Newington Causeway that wanted a
"taker off."  The wages were five shillings a week from which, during
the first three weeks, five shillings was deducted as a guarantee that
the employee would not leave without giving due notice.

From eight o'clock in the morning until five-thirty at night, with an
hour for dinner, I stood by a lithographic machine and "took off" paper
bags as they were printed.  It was rather tiring, but I wore a felt
apron and in the course of the day my face grew black.  Sometimes when
we had gold work to do, my boots were covered with "gold" dust.  People
could see as I walked homeward that I was one of the world's workers.

I learnt a lot.  Why do machinists say "Sy up!" instead of "Stop the
machine"?  I have never solved that riddle.  And I learnt something of
usury.  There were men and boys on every floor who would lend you
fourpence if you returned sixpence on Saturdays.  The place was rotten
with this form of brigandage.  Often of my five shillings I took home
two--a goodly proportion of my income having gone in the shape of
interest.  It goes on still, I believe, and the trade unions could kill
it dead, if they moved in the matter.

My parting from this house was a violent one.  I stayed away for a day,
and a few hours after I had returned I was given the money due to me
and told to clear out.  I asked for the five shillings deposit and was
told it was forfeited; was shown the very paper I had signed which
admitted the right of seizure.

I went to the first policeman I met--I have always had a blind faith in
the police.  He was a fat man with cheeks that overhung his neck, but
he was Harry Curtis-Bennett to me.

"They've got no right to keep your money," he said loudly, "and you
can't sign away anything because you're a minor."

I thought my dingy countenance had misled him to the belief that I was
a heaver of coal.  He explained.

"You're under age," he said.

"I'm twelve last birthday," I said regretfully.

"Take a summons," he said, in his juridical way.

So I went to the police court and sandwiched myself in a queue between
a girl who wanted a weekly allowance from the father of her child, and
a miserable man who came to complain of his pugnacious wife.  In turn I
told the magistrate the sad story of the five shillings.

"Take a summons," he said.

It cost me a shilling.  I conducted my own case and won my first
lawsuit.

As I came out of court, I was approached by a policeman with a broken
nose.

"You used to be called Freeman," he accused.

Quakingly I admitted the truth of the charge.

He pointed to his nose.

"Your brother Harry done that," he said.

He seemed to bear no malice.  We had tea together in a coffee shop and
he paid.  I tried another printers--Riddle & Couchmans--and was quite
happy.  I was in the paper store and it was very interesting.  Have you
seen electric sparks come from between two sheets of paper after they
have been under a hydraulic press?  Did you know that you could cut
your finger to the bone on the sharp edge of paper?  There was a boy
there who painted pictures.  He was going to exhibit in the Royal
Academy one day.  I often wonder if he did, or whether he became an
artist.




_Chapter III_

I left Riddles more violently still.  It was in the period of strikes.
One day all the boys walked out--all except me.  When I came out to
dinner I was reproached, but went in again.  I don't know what it was
all about, but in the afternoon I held a meeting with myself and made a
dramatic exit from the building by way of the paper chute.  The boys
were enthusiastic but I was out of work.

I found another printers.  I was there a fortnight.  It was a soulless
kind of place.  They printed railway timetables.  There was no colour
or life in it.  I had to carry large parcels of railway printing to
very dull offices.  After this I went back to my old love--newspapers.
W. H. Smith provided me with a peaked cap, and on the wind-swept
railway platform at Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's I promoted the sale of
newspapers in a perfectly respectable manner.  When this palled I found
a new job just off the Old Bailey, where, if you went to work early
enough, you could see the black flag go up and hear the bell toll to
signify the death of picturesque sinners.

In a job and out of a job: I stayed a while with a bootseller marking
the virgin soles of balmorals with their selling prices.  It was one of
those multiple shops with branches in various poor districts.  On
Saturday nights you could earn an extra shilling by attaching yourself
to one of the branches.  In a clean, white apron I sold tins of
blacking to the ladies of Peckham and tins of dubbin to the
horny-handed male saunterers.  I drew attention to delightful slippers
for women, and hooked down dangling hobnailed boots for the inspection
of hardier citizens.  It was not very interesting, and I drifted into a
rubber factory in Camberwell.

I had got into the habit of standing back and taking a good look at
myself.

"Here you are," said I, "making macintosh cloth."

"Here I am," I agreed thankfully.  I had got on.  I was a "hand" in a
factory--I, who had started life as a furtive seller of newspapers, had
found my proper place in the industrial scheme.

At the rubber works was a bitter man who taught me something.  He was
bitter about everything--his home, his work, the beef sandwiches his
wife packed for him, my incompetence (I was his assistant), his
grinding employer.  I sat down one morning in the breakfast hour and
puzzled through, without assistance to the genesis of bitterness.  And
I reduced it to a first cause.  I was so full of my unaided discovery
that I fell upon him the moment he came in from the yard.

"You're sorry for yourself," I said, with the air of a savant revealing
a great discovery.

He was carrying a roll of damask and hit me over the head with it.
Thus I learnt two things: never to be sorry for yourself; never to tell
people unpalatable truths unless you are in a position to hit them back.

The art of cheap drunkenness was acquired at this factory.  Rubber was
dissolved in naphtha.  By leaning over the vat in which the process was
in operation and breathing the naphtha fumes, it was possible to get
pleasantly and even hilariously intoxicated.  You could also get dead.
I had many a pleasant jag until one day it made me very sick.

I wrote the first scene of a little play in rhymed couplets.  It was an
insulting play about my self-pitying chief.  Some time later he
complained that I was not as useful an assistant as I might be.  I went
out of rubber into leather, manufacturing boot heels by pasting scraps
of leather together in a mould.

On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons I had a very delicate, indeed
an artistic task.  One of the Freeman girls had married a
flower-seller.  He was an honest boilermaker when they married, but
from what I could gather, boilers went out of fashion soon after the
marriage and he had drifted into flowers.  I never see a boiler but it
suggests nosegays to me.  My task in the summer was to "wire" roses,
transfix their bases on two sides so that the leaves would neither
droop nor fall.  In the winter I dipped ivy leaves and hips and haws in
sugar and water.  They dried glossily.

Every Saturday morning he came back from Covent Garden with a tale of
woe.

"Fi'pence a bunch--for them!"  He'd shake the unoffending violets
savagely.  "I never knew flowers so dear!"

The other day I talked with an old lady who sells flowers in Piccadilly
Circus.  She drew forth from the depths of her basket a shaggy bunch of
lilies-of-the-valley.

"Two hog a bunch for them!  I never knew flowers to be so dear!"

There were odd jobs I took, some of which only lasted a fortnight.  I
was never out of work for more than two or three days.

One day I came home to Mrs. Freeman and told her that I had a job out
of London.  She was worried at this, because out of London was
synonymous with out of the world.  So I told her no more, but
accompanied the obliging young seaman (I sat next to him in the Surrey
gallery) to Grimsby.  I brought with me papers signed by my "parent or
guardian"--Mr. Freeman's signature was easy to forge--permitting me to
ship as a boy on the biggest steam trawler out of Grimsby.  I have
forgotten the name of it.  There is to-day in the Iceland fisheries a
Hull trawler called the _Edgar Wallace_.  Remembering my own unhappy
experience, I was reluctant even to have my own inanimate name attached
to such a craft.

I don't know how long I was at sea.  It seemed rather like twenty-eight
years.  It may have been a month.  It was the depth of winter.  A gale
blew us out and a gale blew us home, and in between whiles it blew an
intermittent blizzard.  The yards were frozen stiff.  The fish were
solid as they shovelled them into the hold.  I was cook and captain's
boy.  I boiled cocoa and soup and tea.  I made plum puddings and
roasted frozen mutton.  And I was ill all the time.  I was cuffed by
the crew for bringing a paper of pins on board--an unpardonable crime
on a fishing boat, for pins bring bad luck--and I was cuffed by the
captain and the mate for my deficiencies as a chef.

We came into Grimsby one seventh day of February and though I had bound
myself for a year I lit out for home with a shilling I had stolen from
the captain's cabin and a pair of sea boots that were two sizes too
big.  Thus equipped, I walked to London.  I did odd work on the way but
where I couldn't get work I stole bread from bakers' vans.  Literally
my diet was bread and water.  The journey took me the best part of
three weeks, and I reached home wearing the shoes of a trustful but
wealthy gentleman of St. Albans.  His servant had cleaned them and put
them on his window-sill.  There I found them when I came prowling round
in search of food.

For some reason, which I did not discover until years later, Mrs.
Freeman regarded this exploit as being a little discreditable.  I
afterwards learnt that it was the dread word "desertion" which
horrified her.  I had deserted a ship and apparently there were heavy
penalties, even imprisonment, for such nefarious goings on.

"You had better not tell any of the others," she warned me.

Mr. Freeman agreed.  Generally speaking he accepted her code as his own.

"You'd better go into milk," said George Freeman; so, after a family
consultation, I joined forces with Harry the Milkman.

Harry the Milkman was a sort of relation.  A burly, fresh-faced man
from Wiltshire with a tiny waxed moustache.  He had been in a little
trouble with his employers before saving a bit of money, he started
forth on his own.  I forget whether it was three or six months he got
for his embezzlements: I never discussed so trivial a matter.

There never was a more entrancing canvasser than Harry.  The lift of
his hat to a cook had changed the course of many a dairy account.  His
hair was parted in the middle and beautifully brushed.  He had a way
with housemaids which left them with dreams, and when he was not "on
the drunk" he was the most passionate abstainer.

Then would he sally forth to Deptford Broadway in a top hat and a
frock-coat befitting the importance of the occasion, and address the
crowd from a rostrum on the iniquities and evils of intemperance.
Harry the Milkman was known far and wide: even to-day Deptford recalls
his name and remembers his doings.

He had had one business of his own in the north of London and had
allowed that to go smash.  Partly drink, partly gallantry.  He was all
too popular with housemaids.  Incidentally, he was married.

We had at least one vice in common: we loved reading.  Preferably
stories written round the life of that historic character "Deadwood
Dick."  Often and often on chilly mornings we sat in front of the fire
together, each with our slim volume, devouring every line--enthralled
by hairbreadth escape, by haughty defiance, by daredevil rescue of
innocent maidenhood.

Sometimes Harry would read aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.


"By heavens!" cried Black Pedro.  "You shall rue the day you crossed my
path, Deadwood!"

Our hero flung his sombrero into the air with a merry laugh.

"Threatened men live long, Black Pedro," he cried.  "_Adios!_"

And, flinging himself upon Starlight, he put spurs to the mustang and
disappeared in a cloud of alkali dust."


And all this while, the milk cart was standing outside the door of the
shop, a cold horse pawing the macadam, and the maddened customers of
Brockley were howling for the breakfast milk that had not come.

In one of his periods of abstinence, he induced me to sign the pledge.
As I did not even know the taste of strong drink, I signed readily.  He
was a member of a lodge, the Rose of Kent, of the Sons of the Phoenix,
and in due course became its chief noble.  I also became a Son of the
Phoenix and was jobbed into the position of lodge secretary--a post
which brought me in 2d. per member per quarter.  As an officer of the
lodge I wore a large scarlet velvet sash, embellished with a tinsel eye
of God which should have appeared over my heart, but, owing to my lack
of inches, invariably glared on the world from the region of my
stomach.  I was ceremoniously addressed as "Worthy Secretary."  I wore
this sash in public processions--mainly funerals--walking under a large
silk banner depicting, if I remember aright, the road to ruin down
which The Drinker slowly totters.  The banner was borne by two
staggering men who, except at funerals, smoked, to show how little they
bothered about the burden.  The members were working men--good fellows
doing good work.  I have nothing but respect and affection for them.
The old lodge still stands--I saw its new banner go past the window of
my flat in a hospital parade, and I would have gone on to my balcony
and saluted it--only I was in my pyjamas.

For years I have kept a souvenir of those days--a daguerreotype showing
me with a basket of eggs on my arm, standing in a graceful attitude by
a milk barrow.  And when my children have grumbled about returning to
their expensive schools at the end of term, I have produced the picture.

"It is easier to go to school than to sell eggs," I said, "especially
the kind of eggs that I had to sell."

Harry and I quarrelled frequently over the cleaning of milk cans.  He
said I was a bad cleaner, and I told him loftily that my hands were
never intended for the cleaning of milk cans.  We parted.

There was a worthy brother of the lodge who was also a worthy
plasterer.  Also a worthy foreman to a roadmaking firm.  He offered me
a job.  The Victoria Dock Road was being torn-up and relaid with
granite pitchers.  I was appointed timekeeper and mason's labourer.  My
duties were various.  I kept some sort of accounts, I can't remember
what, and I carried huge pails of water from a distant standard to the
place where the concrete was mixed.  I also held the tape when the job
was measured up.  I relieved the night watchman whilst he had his tea.
I helped trim the red lamps that hung on the scaffold poles.

One day when I was helping to hang the lamps on the poles a man came up
to me and asked me how much I was earning.  I told him, with conscious
pride, that I robbed the firm to the extent of fifteen shillings a week.

"Pah!" he said.

He was a man with a beard and talked with an accent.  He wore a
deer-stalker cap and he had the manner of authority.

"You're doing a man's work," he said.  "Ask for more."

I was astonished.  I never dreamt that I was worth as much.  Here I
was--I who had been glad of five shillings a week, and now I was
earning fifteen shillings!

The seed of revolt did not take root, and when I joined the night
watchman I asked who the old bloke was.

"That's Keir Hardie--he's standing for this district."

I came on the job one morning to learn that he had been elected to
Parliament.

Soon after this I was sent to a Silvertown wharf to check the weights
of granite that were loaded from barges to carts.  Here I met a French
inventor who was experimenting with a new kind of brick.  He told me
there was no God, which was a great relief to me.  He believed in
reincarnation and had once been a cat.  He was a green-eyed,
pimply-faced man, terribly thin and full of admiration for Motley the
historian.  He brought me a copy of "The Rise and Fall of the Dutch
Republic," which, though I tried hard, I could not read.  It was
terribly dry after "Deadwood Dick."

The job finished.  My worthy brother of the Phoenix asked me to go to
Clacton with him.  Some miscreant was erecting row upon row of attached
villas, and my Phoenix man had tendered for the plastering.

It was in the depth of winter.  Timekeeper, I was--but usually when the
other work was done.  From dawn to sunset I lorried lime with a
long-handled hoe and filled hods and carried them up steep ladders.
The lime worked into my hands till I could not bear water on them.  I
testify to the health-giving qualities of Clacton air--I was hungry all
the time.  One day I decided to quit; I could have asked for my money,
but I decided it would be useless.  I was working for a working man,
and a working man, when he gets on in the world, is something of a
tyrant.

Instead, I walked to Colchester; pawned my overcoat for six shillings,
and came to London with one fixed determination, the result of a long
talk I had had with myself.

"Here you are!" I said.

"Where are you?" said I.  "You're earning fifteen shillings a week.
You have no education, no prospects.  Your handwriting is rotten;
you're not strong enough for a navvy and not clever enough for a clerk.
You're in a rut--how are you going to get out of it?"

On Boxing Day I spent my last shilling to see Fred Leslie in
"Cinderella."  On the following day, Mrs. Freeman protesting with
tears, I borrowed sixpence to pay my fare, and, going down to Woolwich,
enlisted myself a private of the Royal West Kent Regiment.

      *      *      *      *      *

Here, then, was the break, a definite and sharp turn of the road, the
first crag in the climb.  I had no more definite objective than the man
who finds himself at the bottom of a pit into which he has fallen--my
one desire was to get out.  Somebody had lent me a copy of Smiles's
"Self-Help": I think it was the most depressing book I had ever read.
All these poor boys who had achieved greatness in various arts and
professions had some natural bent.  They were mathematicians or
artists; the foundation of their fortunes was laid by their
inclinations.  There were a few patient souls who had worked their way
from office-boys to the control of great companies; but it always
seemed to me that they did no more than keep themselves in the middle
of a great, slow-moving river, and drift towards their elegant harbours.

I had no definite ambitions: I neither burnt the midnight oil in the
study of law, nor hoarded my farthings towards a fortune.  I never
desired enormous monies.  Rather, money was cash, to be spent and
enjoyed.

If I had a quake at all in the contemplation of my new career, it was
the inward shiver that a boy experiences when he enters the fatal train
that carries him to his first boarding-school.  The journey to
Maidstone was rather a desolate one--I occupied the same carriage as
two convicts being transferred to Maidstone Prison, and on the whole
they were more cheerful than I.  They had been there before and
canvassed the possibility of returning to their old jobs, discussing
the advantage of one "ward" over the other.

"Is old So-and-so still on the gate?"

The warder was friendly and informed them that old So-and-so _was_
still "on the gate."  But there was a new chief warder.  One of the
prisoners had "met him" in Exeter Jail.  He thought he was rather a
decent chap, but the warder gave no enthusiastic confirmation of this
view.

They asked after old friends.  Bill This was "on the Moor" and Harry
That was at Portland.  They agreed that Portland was worse than
Dartmoor but not so cold.

One of the men spoke of prisons in the manner of a virtuoso.  He might
have been a member of the leisured classes discussing continental
hotels.  At the journey's end I parted from them with some
regret--indeed, I should not have been sorry to have accompanied such
agreeable and experienced adventurers.  After all, they had only "got"
five years, and I was in the army for seven, with no remission for good
conduct.




_Chapter IV_

I have read and read and read until I am tired of reading about the
poor and their problems.  From time to time young Oxford gentlemen
descend to what is so picturesquely described as the abyss and grope
around in the mud for first causes.  They write learnedly about labour
and economics and supply and demand, and they produce in high lights
such examples and illustrations to support their theories as come to
their observation.

To-day they tell us that the sight of so much luxury in the West End,
the jewellers' shops, the shining limousines, the delicately nurtured
lap-dogs of society women, are creating a feeling of unrest among the
labouring poor.  I cannot remember when this "proof" of a coming
revolution was not adduced.  The truth is that, if working people are
decently housed and can earn sufficient to supply their families with
the comforts to which they are entitled, they care precious little
about those who are doing better than themselves.  Class hatred is an
invention.  The British poor are too sentimental to resent the romance
of success, too high-principled and too intelligent to find a grievance
in the prosperity of their neighbours.  They are decent people,
clean-spoken, clean-thinking.  They hold the sealed patterns of
national behaviour.

It is the habit to think of the poor in terms of slumdom, but there is
a poor which lives in shabby streets and cleans its windows and whitens
its doorsteps.  A poor whose horror is charity, and whose haunting fear
is that it may be buried by the parish.  A proud, self-reliant poor
that scorns relief and guards the secret of its poverty most jealously.
And these are the vast majority.  The writers of theses never meet
these people, and, if they met them, would learn nothing, for they do
not talk about themselves, and regard with sour suspicion those who
come prying into their affairs.  Their men have a best suit for
Sundays, their children wear stiff little suits and dresses that have
been carefully folded and put away all the week.  You can see the
little boys sent out on Sunday mornings with nosegays pinned upon their
coats.  This is the poor that has parlours in which the family may sit
on Sundays only, does its washing on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and its
shopping on Saturday afternoons.

Remember this, that starvation and dirt are not the hall-mark of
poverty: they are the normal condition of thriftlessness.  I am
referring to the poor who average fifteen shillings per week per member
of a household; of women who have to consider every penny they spend
and to whom Bank Holidays are events of supreme importance, to be saved
up for, to be looked forward to, to be remembered.  This is the poor
that the Church has lost--because for years the Church has offered
nothing but a duty to men and women who needed a day's relief from
duty, because it brought a new gloom into lives which were drab enough,
God knows.

      *      *      *      *      *

The Christmas decorations still hung in the barrack-room--a melancholy
sight for the raw recruit.  There was only one other man in the long
bare room when I came in.  He sat on the edge of his bed and he was
polishing his buttons.  The bed was laced with snowy white belts and
straps, a tiny knapsack no bigger than a lady's handbag glistened
blackly at the foot of the bed.

"Don't touch them straps or I'll gallop your guts out," he said, in a
mild, almost friendly, way.

He was "for guard" next morning.  The sleeve of the red serge jacket
which hung on a peg above the cot was decorated with two good-conduct
stripes.  He was, he admitted with a sort of self-conscious
indifference, "an old sweat."  He'd "done his seven" and was "taking
on" for another five.  There was no place like India, the army wasn't
like it was--nor the beer either.  All "quarter blokes" made enormous
sums out of cheating the troops and bought rows of houses; the
sergeant-major wasn't a bad feller, but the colour bloke was a reg'lar
barstid.

Thus he put all the army ropes in my hands, the scandal and pride of
Maidstone Barracks.  I asked him where the library was: the corporal
who had met me at the station told me that I could get refreshment
there.

"Libr'y?"  The old sweat tried to believe that his ears had misinformed
him.  "Libr'y?  You mean the canteen, don't you?  Don't come into the
army an' be a teetotaller or you'll be dead 'n a month.  Specially in
India.  They're always the first to go.  Alive to-night an' dead
to-morrer!  All due to drinkin' lemonade and buns."

He offered to show me the canteen.  I was firm to see the library.  He
offered to show me that, and explained that I would not have found him
in the barrack-room at all if he had had any money.

"Coffee's better than nothin'--but don't ask me to have lemonade: it
rots the inside."

The library was chiefly distinguished by its innocence of anything that
looked like a book.  There were two large volumes on a shelf, but
investigation revealed these as draught or chess boards camouflaged as
literature.  It was a wooden building with two hanging oil lamps, a
folding bagatelle table, several tables and a sprinkling of chairs.  At
one end of the room was a counter, behind which was a smoky oil lamp, a
large steaming kettle, a few bottles of lemonade and a plate of
sober-looking confectionery.  Heat was supplied by a stove, but this I
did not immediately notice.  I saw a lot of men sitting round
something, but I thought they were playing a game.

"The canteen's livelier," pleaded my guide.  "Beer does make you sing.
Lemonade merely eats away the linin' of the stummick."

I explained that I neither touched, tasted nor handled the accursed
enemy that men put into their mouths to steal away their brains.  He
shook his head gloomily, blowing on his coffee the while.

"You'll _die_ in India," he said ominously.  "Every night we have a
funeral an' it's gen'rally a lemonade drinker.  Beer drinkers never die
natural.  But Bible-thumpers go orf like the snuff of a candle.  It's
the climate."

He drank the coffee and thanked me politely.  After which he borrowed
threepence to buy a tin of blanco, and disappeared, presumably in the
direction of the canteen.

He was the first of the many Nobby Clarks I met in the army.  Why all
Clarks should be "Nobby" I have never discovered.  Nor why all Taylors
should be "Buck."  It is an army mystery.

Maidstone Barracks consisted of two-story wooden hutments of great
antiquity; there was a modern block consisting of four large rooms, two
in each wing; hutments and brick block formed two sides of a square,
which was bounded on the remaining two sides with one-storied married
quarters.  Old trees fringed the square; behind the barrack block was a
large playing field that ran down to the footpath along the Medway.

I was housed in the brick barracks.  My bed consisted of three square
"biscuits" stuffed with some unresilient matter, three blankets and two
sheets of rough unbleached linen which were changed once a month.

The first parade was at 7.30 in the morning, the last parade at 2.30.
Generally speaking, the accommodation was inferior to the average
workhouse and very much below the standard maintained at Dartmoor
Prison.  I'm not complaining.  I was quite happy about it.  It was
quite as good as anything I had had.

For days I moved like a man in a dream.  I drew my kit, was measured
for my scarlet coat, possessed myself of a rifle and bayonet and the
Slade-Wallace equipment.  I moved hither and thither at the orders of
sundry gods with stripes on their arms, and learnt to distinguish bugle
calls, the first two of which every soldier learns are "Cookhouse" and
"Defaulters."  Corporals filled me with awe; sergeants thrilled me.
The first officer I saw was to me the most tremendous vision.  I
welcomed eagerly my first "saluting drill" and once I had mastered that
ritual of homage, I lay in wait for officers to practise on.  I
acquired my nickname very early on.  I was named "Nunc," after a famous
prize-fighter.

It was intensely interesting.  The men were most kind to the raw
recruit; but then, Tommy is the everlasting flower of chivalry.  There
are some people who think that there is a magic atmosphere in the army
which translates wasters and blackguards into good fellows--but of
course that is rubbish.

They were good fellows before they came in.  They belong to the
cheerfully suffering class.  Their mothers have stood at the wash-tub
with a horrid pain gripping at their vitals, and have smiled their way
through washing day.  Their fathers have turned out in the cold
mornings and have sweated and grumbled through the long day, and have
come home at nights for a sluice at the kitchen sink, a cup of tea and
a bloater and a cheery evening pipe.  The Tommy is the salt of the
earth because the working poor of the Anglo-Saxon race are the salt of
the earth.  The clean and decent working poor who erected their sons
and daughters as perpetual monuments to the memory of their sacrifice
and devotion.  Some day, when I am a rich man, I will put up a statue
of a woman at a wash-tub, and I will call her the Core of the Nation.

There were two subjects which you might not discuss in the
barrack-room: one was politics and the other was religion.  Not that we
privates took religion very seriously, but we had a great respect for
people who did--you will find exactly the same attitude to-day in any
third-class carriage on any race train.  You will find it on Epsom
Downs during Derby week in the blank, unrecognisable stare with which
the text-bearers are greeted.  They are there, but men and women of our
class are polite enough not to see them.

I only once met a soldier who knelt by his bed to say his prayers.
Nobody threw boots at him, as they do in tracts.  But then, religious
tracts are the most nave form of fiction.  We used to shut up until
his public supplications were through, and if we felt uncomfortable,
old man conscience had nothing to do with the matter--we were simply
feeling awkward, as I might feel awkward to-day if I heard a man rise
up in church and take exception to a preacher's argument.

Two things you might not do in a barrack-room--fix a bayonet or whistle
the "Dead March in Saul."  For each such offender the door of the
guard-room yawned.

Infantry work is not very interesting.  Picket duty was more so.  There
was a little pub near the barracks called "The Phoenix" (how that word
clung to me!) which was patronised by certain turbulent spirits.  One
night there was a rough house, and I and another were ordered in to
throw out a large militiaman in the quarrelsome stages of booze.  When
I saw the size of him I thought that diplomacy was desirable.  I told
him that the corporal of the picket wanted him to come out and fight.
There were twenty men outside waiting to claim him.

"Ho!" said the militia, and took a sighting shot at me.  I lost one
tooth, but I had the satisfaction of helping to frog-march him to the
guard-room.  Twice we had to drop him heavily--he was a sick man the
next morning, but bore no malice and was a good fellow really.

The militia was a source of income to some of the lads of Deptford.  A
few of them belonged to five or six different "crushes."  No sooner was
their preliminary training over than they left with their bonus and
joined another "crush" in a false name.  One man told me that he was a
deserter from fourteen various militia battalions.

I had to go to hospital to have my tooth attended, and there I saw the
comfortable quarters of the Medical Staff Corps.  Nice beds, cosy
sitting-room and better pay.  Also a private held some sort of
position.  His uniform was quietly blue with red facings; he wore a
round cap and chin-strap of cavalry jauntiness.  I gave the matter
considerable thought.  Foot sloggers were to have broad red stripes up
their trousers.  The news thrilled us, but nothing came of it.

One morning I paraded before my company officer and asked permission to
transfer to the Medical Staff Corps.  The request was received a little
coldly, but the application was forwarded--in quadruplicate, I imagine.

My friend, the old soldier, was both indignant and sarcastic.

"What do you want to go an' mix poultices for?  And you a teetotaller!
You'll be dead in a month!"

None the less, on the morning of St. Patrick's Day, 1894, I paraded on
the M.S.C. Depot square at Aldershot, and was cordially welcomed by a
gaunt staff-sergeant.

"The Corps ain't bad enough but we've got to have a lot of Deptford
roughs transferred to us!  If you make a good nurse, I'll eat my forage
cap!"

I discovered afterwards that he had a grudge against the West Kents,
which was indeed mainly recruited from Deptford and Greenwich.

The work at the depot was heavy.  Classes in anatomy--of sorts--brought
me to a new acquaintance with human beings.  They were no longer men,
but bits of flesh with bones stuck inside them and certain organs which
had the trick of going wonky on the slightest excuse.  The discipline
was not so strict as in the West Kents, but the drill sergeants were
more vivid in the imagery they employed.  Their standard of education
was higher because it was broader.  All the sergeants and most of the
corporals added the art of dispensing to their other accomplishments.
They were versed in the "British Pharmacopoeia" and "Squire's
Companion."  From Acacia Gummi to Zingiber (which is ginger) they knew
the properties and compatibilities of all listed drugs.  Some of them
were dentists in so far as tooth-drawing was concerned; not a few had
got beyond the bones and organs stage of knowledge and dabbled in
nerves and muscles.

We class men grew terribly important as we progressed from knowledge to
knowledge.  We ceased to be entirely military--we became scientists.

There was a kit inspection on the square every Saturday morning.  One
man, pinched for time, found he had not packed his blacking brushes.
He thrust them into the breast of his jacket.  The colonel came round,
saw the bulging bosom of the soldier, and tapped it with his cane.

"What have you there, my man?" he asked, and quick came the answer.

"Heart, lungs an' thracic aorta, sir!"

I passed out of my class and was ordered for hospital duty--No. 2
Hospital, North Camp.  With a few other graduates I marched to my new
home.

The next morning I came into touch with a malady that one had heard
about and discussed in a shamefaced way.  I was put in charge of a ward
which contained twenty-four cases of syphilis!

I was sick at the thought of it.  In those days the disease was viewed
as leprosy was once regarded.  A sick man was regarded as a criminal.
He was told that his case was hopeless--but not by the doctors of the
Army Medical Corps.  We had a great old colonel who took summary
vengeance on a supercilious sister at the Cambridge Hospital who
referred to North Camp as "the dirty hospital."  We had no women nurses
at North Camp, and for this reason were the envy of the other
companies; and the work, though hard, was interesting.  When I had got
over my repugnance to handling the sheets and bed linen, and no longer
picked them up with my carbolized finger-tips, when I had taken a few
dead men to the mortuary and had learnt to dissect them for post-mortem
purposes without the little shed spinning round and round and feeling a
hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach, I enjoyed the work.  What
good chaps they were in No. 2 detachment!

I began to write little verses for their amusement.  One of them, Gus
Ward (he is a captain now and retired) was a famous elocutionist.  For
him I wrote a set of verses on the sinking of Admiral Tryon's
battleship.  They weren't good verses, but they were vigorous, and the
lines both scanned and rhymed.  We had great sing-songs in our little
canteen, and forbidden games--vingt-et-un, anglicised and militarised
as "pontoon," kept us up till one in the morning, with blankets over
the windows.

Once there was a mild riot and a daring youth with a grievance against
the sergeant-major, who lived in the opposite hut, took a large lump of
coal and dropped it through the sergeant-major's window under which he
slept.  I believe it fell upon his stomach and he was naturally
annoyed.  The doer of this deed was never discovered.  All except a few
wards were the old-fashioned Crimean hutments.  To North Camp came all
infectious cases, and in course of time I slept in wards or tents with
men suffering from every disease from itch to smallpox.  In such cases
the orderly was isolated as much as the patient, and none could
approach him.

I had not been at North Camp more than a year when there came an
incident which was greatly to affect my life.  At the time I was
detailed for range duty at Ash, and two things happened there.  A
soldier and his wife had a hutment near the ranges, and one rainy
evening, when the medical officer had gone, the woman fell into labour
with her first child.  Leaving me in charge of her--there was no woman
available--he went into North Camp to get a doctor.  I was terrified.
I tried to get the landlord of a little inn to send his barmaid to the
woman, but she refused.

The landlord, a widower, told me there was nothing to be worried about.
He produced for me a book on obstetrics filled with ghastly
illustrations.  This I carried back, and, a crisis arising, I delivered
the child, running from the bed to the open book on the table and from
the table to the bed.  The doctor, a civilian, came with the husband an
hour after the birth and was terribly shocked.  Three days later the
hair at the side of my head went grey.

Ash range duty gave me a lot of time to read and write.  "Deadwood
Dick" no longer fascinated me.  I began to dip into the "Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire," skipping the long words and the very immense
wads of stuff about the growth and development of the Christian
religion.  And I began to write little songs.  Just then Arthur Roberts
was at the height of his fame, and, greatly daring, I sent him a lyric
called "A Sort of a Kind of a--." I was stunned one morning to hear
from him and to learn that my first literary effort was successful.  I
never met Roberts till years later.  When I called at the Prince of
Wales' Theatre it was to meet Mr. Lowenthal, who gave me five pounds
and a lot of good advice.  I believe that Roberts sang the song for
years--on one occasion at a party where the late King Edward was a
guest.  "Biarritz" was the play for which the song was required.  The
day I was to go to town to hear it I was made a "prisoner at large" for
some military offence.  Nevertheless I went, and stayed absent for five
days.  On my return I was charged with:


"That being a prisoner at large, Private Wallace broke out of barracks
and remained absent until apprehended by the military police."


The latter part was a picturesque fiction and was expunged.

Old Colonel Cleary glared at me over his glasses.

"You'll go to prison with hard labour for ninety-six hours," he said.




_Chapter V_

At two o'clock that afternoon I was marched off to the military prison,
more curious than scared, in spite of dark hints of the fate that
awaited me.  Here was a new experience--imprisonment without the smear
of criminality.  As I passed through the grim postern I thought of poor
Harry, now dead, and I was glad that I was not going inside for hitting
a policeman.

"The Glass House," as the military prison was facetiously called, was
like every prison I have seen.  A wide hall surrounded by galleries,
the walls punctured at intervals with small black doors.  I was given a
bath and changed into convict attire, ornamented by the conventional
broad arrows, and marched up to a cell.  It was a bare apartment, with
a board bed and a ridiculously inadequate supply of blankets.  There
was a Bible and a set of rules to read, a window of frosted glass
(behind bars) to admit daylight and share of a dim light at night.  An
hour after I arrived a warder came and cut off my hair.  Nowadays such
things do not happen.  The soldier keeps his own uniform and his own
hair, but in those days the military prisoner had a worse time than any
convict.

There was no work to do on the first day.  I practised standing on my
head against the wall and acquired a certain proficiency.  After that,
I had no time for gymnastics.  I think I had skilly and potatoes for
tea--unsalted, unsugared oatmeal at which my proud stomach revolted.
In the morning breakfast was a repetition of tea.

A warder came and flung me in a piece of rope.  I was taught how to
turn the rope into oakum.  At eleven o'clock I was marched out of the
cell to a drill yard and initiated into the art of shot drill, the most
damnable and heart-breaking punishment that was ever invented.  You
stand in four lines, a heavy iron shot at your feet.  At the word of
command you lift the shot breast high, turn left, march four paces and
put it down.  Walking back, you find the shot that the man on your
right has deposited.  You lift this and follow the same routine, until
you have carried four shots to the left.  Then you carry them back
again to the right.

Two days of this broke me up physically--it was the army chaplain, one
of the best men in the world, the Rev. V. C. Hordern, who had me taken
off this punishment.  Thereafter I picked oakum.  A little breeze
between a warder and myself did not improve matters.  Not realising
that the oakum was weighed, I made away with quite a few strands by
pushing them through the holes of a ventilator.  However, the
punishment was not too irksome.

I was glad when my period of imprisonment was ended.  I had lived on
bread and water and potatoes, and came out with all my curiosity
completely satisfied.  I took a good look at "The Glass House" as I was
marched away, and decided that the Lord had never designed me for a
callous criminal.

Yet officers and pals were very nice about it all.  My own doctor met
me at the door of my ward next morning with a broad smile; the colonel
who sentenced me recommended me later as a second-class orderly, which
meant twopence a day extra.

Poor Mrs. Freeman got to learn and was terribly upset.  She feared that
I had "gone on the drink."  It was her only explanation for the
disasters which overtook her sons.

My song writing went on, but I found no buyer and inspiration
languished.

One morning, when I was in the mortuary dealing with a poor boy who had
died in the night, my room corporal came in.

"Wallace, you're marked for foreign service--you go to the Depot on
Saturday."

The fascinating problem was--whither?  Drafts were going to Singapore,
Malta, Egypt, Gibraltar, Hong-Kong, Bermuda, Jamaica, Nova Scotia,
Mauritius and South Africa.  I learnt that my destination was the Cape.
I went to London and said good-bye to the Freemans.  I never saw
"mother" again.  I have only one satisfaction, that I was able to make
that gentle life a little more easy before the end.  She forgot her own
children at the last and remembered me.  George Freeman survived her by
many years.

It was on the _Scot_, newly lengthened, that I went out of England in
August, 1896.  There was a party of the corps on board and the
accommodation was agreeable.  The _Scot_ was not the steadiest of
ships, but the weather was good and we made Cape Town without
discomfort.

The South African winter is nearing its end in August.  The nights are
chilly, but the hardier and earlier flowers are beginning to appear.
From the sea, standing at the foot of Table Mountain, the town is a
beautiful sight.  I have always loved Cape Town and the peninsula.
There is no spot on earth quite like it.  There was still some doubt as
to our destination.  I hoped to be sent to Natal--I found I was
destined for Simons Town.

"You lucky young devil!" said one of the Cape Town crowd.

Simons Town was in those days the greatest "loaf" known to orderlies
the wide world over.  It was the ideal station--a non-dieted hospital,
with four beds and a staff of four, a surgeon, a sergeant, an orderly
and a cook.  All bad cases that required nursing were transferred at
once to Wynberg.  The only cases I remember being detained were a
lunatic and an unfortunate sergeant who fractured his skull by a fall
from a bicycle.  And he died.

The officer was a charming gentleman named Greenway.  There was a
procession of sergeants, and in my time three cooks, the greatest of
whom was Private Pinder.  He is, I hope, a colonel by now.  Pinder was
the caterer, and a frugal man.  He never bought more milk for tea than
was sufficient for one.  We played euchre to decide who had the milk.
Generally he won.  His kitchen was spotlessly clean, he was something
of a martinet, and ran the establishment on such economical lines that
there was usually something due to us at the end of every month from
the grocer who supplied us.  Whether it was in the form of rebate or
just plain "squeeze" I forget.

There was a compact little surgery, and in the hours when I was alone I
experimented on myself with every drug.  I took opium, morphia, cocaine
(which made me laugh hysterically), chloroform, ether and Indian hemp.
The morphia nearly killed me, but I suffered nothing from the others.
And I had no desire to repeat the experiments.

The hospital was situated at the end of a long avenue of eucalyptus
trees, and at the mouth of a little kloof, where baboons barked all
night and a waterfall provided an endless murmur of sound.  At the end
of the avenue was the main road and Admiralty House, and beyond that
Simons Bay, as blue as the skies and dotted with white cruisers.  And
when the spring and summer came, the kloof was a treasure-house of arum
lily and gladioli, and Admiralty House was encircled by the blue fire
of plumbago.  There were gardens everywhere.  Gardens where narcissus
and freesia, heliotrope and roses, grew in their seasons.  Geraniums
ran wild in thick bushes, and there were traces with great pink
blossoms.

You might climb the kloof, or the zigzag path in the face of the hill,
and see False Bay stretch out to the Blue Mountains, or take a trip
across the plateau and look upon the very spot where the _Birkenhead_
went down.  A place of wonder and, unsuspected by me, of most lovable
people.  The Wesleyan chaplain was the Rev. William Shaw Caldecott, a
bearded giant of a man, an autocrat of autocrats, a brilliant scholar
and the author of several books on the Temples of Ezekiel and Solomon.
He was most kind to me.  Mrs. Caldecott was my literary fairy
godmother.  A very gentle lady of great character and beauty, she was
the daughter of Benjamin Hellier, then editing the _Agricultural
Journal_ for the Government, a white-bearded, Father-Christmas-looking
gentleman, who invariably wore a white top-hat.  I remember him as one
who never said an ill word--even about snakes.  A marvel of erudition,
this patriarch is the standard by which I judge good men.  Marion
Caldecott had written little verses and descriptions, but she had a
wide and selective knowledge of the authors.

To her guidance I owe the shaping of my life.  She opened out new
vistas, showed me new excellences, gave me my first glimpse of the
cultured gentlewoman of my dreams.  Her age then I do not know; her
hair was grey, turning white; she had piercing blue eyes and the most
beautiful hands I have ever seen.  I became permanently Wesleyan and
took a proprietorial interest in religion.  I even joined the choir.

There was plenty happening to relieve the monotony of life--if there
had been any monotony.  The Benin Expedition to the West Coast of
Africa under Admiral Rawson was short and sharp.  In the details of
that little war, most of which I learnt at second hand, was born the
germ of an idea which later was to fructify in my series of "Sanders"
stories.  I had the unique experience of receiving a letter of thanks
from the Admiralty for my care of the sick and wounded, which, I
presume, embellishes my documents at the War Office to this day.

New books came to me--Maurice Hewlett, Kipling--especially Kipling.  I
soaked myself in him.  One morning I read in the _Cape Times_ that he
was coming to South Africa for a holiday.  I sat down and wrote a
"Welcome" in the Kipling manner and sent it off to the _Cape Times_.  I
heard nothing more of the matter, but on the day Kipling landed the
"poem" was printed in a conspicuous place and I was summoned to Cape
Town to meet the editor--that mercurial genius, Edmund Garrett, alive
to his finger tips, though in the inexorable grip of a disease that was
wasting him.  I see him now with his keen boyish face and wavy hair--a
man whose eyes were dancing with life, who bubbled over with the joy of
it.  His courage was truly wonderful.

I was to meet Kipling.  The City Club was giving him a dinner--would I
come?  I said "Yes," but with misgivings, and consulted Mrs. Caldecott.
Should I know which were the right knives to use and the right forks?
How many wine glasses were there, and which wine went into which?  She
was rather hazy about the wine glasses, but put me right over such
problems as knives and forks.  I had had the same trouble when I dined
with her family, but there the courses were few.  This City Club dinner
began with _hors d'oeuvres_ and ended with ices.

Carrying in my mind's eye the distinguishing marks of fish knives, I
attended the club.  I was in uniform, of course.  When I came into the
reception-room Kipling was talking to the Mayor of Cape Town.  A
round-faced rather ferocious-looking man, with very powerful-looking
spectacles, he came half-way to meet me.  Lockwood Kipling, his father,
gave me as hearty a greeting.  I said nothing.  My mind was too
occupied by cutlery.  I could only bask in this new sun.  As to the
wines, I had made up my mind: I drank everything that was offered to
me.  Alas! for the noble principles enunciated by Harry the Milkman and
adopted _en bloc_ by a past secretary of the Rose of Kent Lodge, most
fiery of young Phoenixes--I went back to Simons Town that night rather
tight.

Some time later Kipling wrote to me from Newlands--he had not gone into
his house that was being built above Groot Schin by Rhodes.  It was a
charming letter in his most legible handwriting.  I was to put "more
spit and polish" into my work.  I was to practise journalism.

Kipling has the reputation of being something of a recluse.
Journalists say that he is difficult of approach, forgetting that
Kipling is at heart a journalist, knowing the weakness of his brethren.

Many years later, when I met Mark Twain, I understood better Kipling's
attitude.

"I don't mind your interviewing me," said the great Mark, "but for
God's sake don't put my words in quotation marks.  I couldn't talk as
an interviewer makes me talk."

Nevertheless, I and a dozen reporters clamoured for that interview, and
Mark led us forward--we were on the ship which brought him to England
at the time--to where there was working the noisiest donkey-engine that
it has been my misfortune to hear.  He drew the little circle of
reporters close up to the clattering pandemonium and spoke.  We heard
nothing!

My prospects, even with the boost to ambition which the Kipling talk
had given to me, were none too rosy.  One day I saw Kipling at his
bungalow and we had a long talk.

I was very much in awe of him, very gauche and awkward.  I blurted out
a foolish question.

"How does it feel to be a very great writer?"

He pulled at the pipe he was smoking and scowled at me from under his
black eyebrows.

"I probably think less about myself than you think about yourself," he
answered, a little crushingly.

I confess I did not feel that I was on the way to greatness.

Edmund Garrett said he would accept more verses--he did, a few.  But
journalism----!

He shook his head.  He was too fine a gentleman to point out my
deficiencies.  I was just a Cockney soldier, half illiterate, gauche
and awkward.  Between me and this product of Oxford was a gulf wider
than Table Bay.  I felt that he could not "see me in the part," as they
say in theatreland.  Journalism, he said, was a very exacting
profession--an ill-paid profession.  Should I learn shorthand? I asked
him.

"For God's sake, don't do that--you'll become an automaton!"

I had better go on writing verses.  His assistant editor, however, had
a newspaper mind.  I might supply items of interest about Simons Town
municipal meetings.  I jumped at this suggestion.  There was another
opening.  A wonderful fellow--the most irresponsible devil I've
met--started a local newspaper in Simons Town.  He collected the
advertisements; I began to saw off lengths of prose for the paper.  I
wrote short items of news and long items.  I wrote leading articles
denouncing President Kruger.  Incidentally, I sent a polite note to
Admiralty House asking for ship news.  Admirals who get friendly
letters from private soldiers may be forgiven if they display a little
hauteur.  A brief, curt note came back--a snappy note.

I stopped denouncing Kruger for one week and denounced Admiral Harris.
In forty-eight hours I was en route for Cape Town--a journalistic
victim of official tyranny.  I had discovered a limitation of
journalism.  My colonel talked to me very seriously, pointing out
certain paragraphs of Queen's Regulations.  I was given a ward to look
after--thirty medical cases.  The _dolce far niente_ of Simons Town
became a delightfully remembered dream.

A political consciousness was awakening in my mind.  Home politics I
understood, of course.  There were two parties in
England--Conservatives and Liberals.  If the Liberals came in you had
Home Rule, and if the Conservatives came in you didn't.  Had I not
cheered Mr. Darling, the eminent Conservative Member for Deptford?  And
did I not speak disparagingly of Mr. Sidney Webb, the Liberal County
Councillor, and Lord Edmund Fitz-Maurice, the Liberal candidate?  The
other day I reminded Lord Darling that I had been one of the most vocal
of his supporters.  He wasn't awfully impressed.

But in South Africa politics were vital because they were racial.  On
the one hand you had the psalm-singing, coffee-drinking Dutch; on the
other hand the true-born Englishman with his inalienable right to do as
he damn' pleased in any country at any time.  Could there be the
slightest doubt in what direction my sentiments leant?

I was under a cloud.  Major Hilliard, who had the C.M.G. for his care
of the late Prince Henry of Battenberg in his last moments, asked me
ironically whether I would go into Parliament or pass my examination
for corporal?  I elected for the latter as a matter of precaution.  The
meagre income from the Simons Town newspaper and the correspondence and
versifying that my leisure gave to me, was cut off.  I considered the
matter one night as I was taking my turn to sit by the bedside of a
dying sergeant, and decided upon a new plan.  In East London, which is
on the east coast of Cape Colony, was a bright little paper called the
_East London Dispatch_.  I wrote to the editor: told him I was the
famous Edgar Wallace who wrote such wonderful poetry in the _Cape
Times_, and offered to write him a weekly causerie in the style of
Sims's feature "Mustard and Cress."  I chose this because it seemed
easy.  I told him it would be light and frivolous and possibly witty.
I didn't call it a "causerie," because I hadn't met the word then and I
shouldn't have been able to spell it if I had.

To my joy he accepted the suggestion.  I was to start right away at
30s. an article, and he had no objection to my syndicating the feature.
I knew nothing about syndication, but I found out.  It meant sending
the same stuff to other papers.  After I had been writing for a month
or two I received an order from the _Midland News_ in Cradock and
_Grocott's Penny Mail_ in Grahamstown.  From these sources I received
3 12s. a week.  The article was written when I was on night duty in
the quietness of the waiting-room.  Many a bright paragraph,
scintillating with calf humour, was interrupted by the arrival of
casualties.  Once I turned out to resuscitate a half-drowned civilian
who had tried to commit suicide on the beach.




_Chapter VI_

Versifying is wonderful training for a writer--even doggerel
versifying.  I turned up an old army exercise book the other day full
of scraps of "poems" written in a sprawling boyish hand.  I wasn't
ashamed of the stuff I had written--it frightened me a little: suppose
I had realised how terribly deficient I was, how heartbreaking it would
have been!  I wondered how many other young men had thrown up the
sponge when a sense of their limitations came to them.  Happy was I in
my good conceit that this "poetry" of mine was in a fair way to being
very good indeed.

I wish I had preserved the scraps of paper on which my earliest
paragraphs in the Sims manner had been inscribed.  They were written
with labour and corrected painfully.  I would spend half an hour in the
search of the right word--even delved down to the very roots to secure
one which expressed the exact shade of meaning.  Mrs. Caldecott gave me
a Trench's book on "The Study of Words," which was immensely valuable.
Trench sometimes jumped at conclusions which were a little fantastic,
but I was happy to jump with him, and if there is some doubt that
"trivial" is derived from "three roads," and the gossip that is
peculiar to idlers who meet at their junction, Trench gave the
interpretation a warm and human significance.

Trench helped me very considerably, for he made me examine the tools of
my trade with closer attention than I should have done, and he taught
me that the English language is a very beautiful inheritance.  He
taught me that words are keys that will only fit their own locks.  It
was an easy lesson to learn--a hard one to practise.  My vocabulary was
a very small one.  I discovered this when I found that in a leading
article of the _Cape Times_, consisting of 700 words, there were twenty
words I did not understand and eleven sentences which conveyed nothing
to me.  For six months I rewrote the _Cape Times_ leaders, reducing
them to understandable terms--it was a very useful exercise.  At the
same time I practised condensing them to forty words, no more and no
less, and that was the best exercise of all.  I did the same thing with
the more profound of the English reviews.  One article in the Quarterly
took me three weeks to understand, and involved the reading of some
thirty articles in an old encyclopdia which Mr. Caldecott had in his
study.  At the end of that time I could have written a _Quarterly_
article on economics, for, incidentally, I had unearthed a flaw in the
writer's argument and a gross error in the basis of his calculations.
I remember that another article in the _Atlantic Monthly_ brought me to
a study of the Chinese Dynasties!

_The Owl_, a Cape Town weekly, took a weekly verse, and then its more
vigorous rival, the _South African Review_, gave me a standing order
for thirty-six inches of political poetry.  I discovered
"Hiawatha"--the easiest poem in the world to parody.  My verses and
articles were all about Kruger, "Oom Paul," and the burghers and the
downtrodden Uitlanders and Byworners and similar exciting subjects.  My
political fervour grew.  Sir William Butler, Commander-in-chief, sent
word privately that it was not seemly that a soldier should interest
himself in politics.

I was in trouble just then from another cause.  Having to paint the
chest of a bronchial case with liniment of iodine, I had executed a
china pattern plate on his chest.  The best drawing I have ever made.
And the Principal Medical Officer, making an unexpected call, had seen
but had not admired my artistry.  Also there was the incident of the
corporal's bed.  He was a very objectionable corporal, and he used to
come in late and rather tight.  One evening we pulled down his sheets
and poured inside two tins of Lyle's Golden Syrup.  All that I did was
to open the tins and rearrange the bedclothes, but there was
considerable trouble at 1 a.m., and worse to follow at orderly-room in
the morning.  Happily, by well-knit perjury, we cleared ourselves.

The colonel spoke to me on the political matter like a father.
Wouldn't it be better if I got out of the army?  I was earning too much
money and demoralising the detachment.  Rumours had reached him of wild
nights at Bill Scarsons--Bill kept a wine shop near the hospital.  I
applied for my discharge, borrowing 20 from Mrs. Caldecott's son--a
great scientist and as generous as he was clever--and in course of time
the order for my discharge was received.

There was a riotous evening the night I left.  We had a concert and a
presentation--a gold-headed cane, which was a noble accompaniment to my
new suit.  It was queer to find myself free of the army, with a room of
my own, people to wait on me at breakfast, with no need for getting up
at any hour, and the right to go to bed just when I pleased.  The night
after my release I walked about Cape Town till three o'clock in the
morning for the satisfaction of using my own latchkey.  I then
discovered that there was no train to Wynberg until six.  The
experience did not seem worth while.

But there I was in my own room, with a window looking out upon the
mountains, and a large, smooth table and pen and ink and paper, a big
dictionary, Roget's "Thesaurus," and a volume of familiar quotations.
I had all the necessary equipment for a successful writer.

There was leisure to read.  I remember digesting a book by Flammarion
on astronomy and Xenophon's "Anabasis" and "The Dialogues of Socrates,"
and failing dismally to get beyond page thirteen of Motley's "Rise and
Fall of the Dutch Republic."

Another man left the corps just about then.  He was tired of the army,
he said, and had got a job on the sanitary board somewhere up country.

"There's going to be a war, and when you fellows are slogging across
the veld you can think of me sitting in civvies outside my hut, with a
pint of beer and a big cigar!"

The town to which he went to take up his appointment was--Mafeking!  I
saw him a few days after the town was relieved.  As I rode down the
main street I saw a scarecrow eating a banana and recognised him as The
Man Who Wanted a Quiet Time.

Out of the army, in a high white collar and a natty grey suit; no
blooming reveille, no "Show a leg, will yer?  Blimey, some of you
fellers'll sleep your brains away!"  No parades, no P.M.'s, no orderly
room at 10 o'clock.

Eventually I found lodgings in Wynberg and sat me down to enlarge my
connections.  I could report council meetings to my heart's content.


MR. COUNCILLOR SMART asked when Little Kloof Road was to have another
lamp-post.  The state of the road was a disgrace to the municipality.

MR. SMITH (Borough Engineer) said the matter was under consideration.

The MAYOR said he hoped there would be no acrimony on the subject
(hear, hear).  He lived in Little Kloof Road and had to suffer as much
as anybody else (hear, hear).


I was sending Mrs. Freeman a pound a week, which later I increased to
2 10s.  I have an idea she never spent a penny of it, but saved it up
against my return.  Suspecting this I wrote a lordly letter telling her
she must use it on herself, that soon I should be worth thousands.  She
shook her head when she heard this.

"I hope the boy isn't doing anything he oughtn't to do," she said.

I got into the Parliamentary gallery and did a longhand summary of the
proceedings.  To meet people was easy now, and I made the acquaintance
of Cecil Rhodes, a big-framed, reddish-faced man with a curiously
squeaky voice.  And Willie Schreiner, and the mysterious Jan Hoffman,
who, though out of Parliament, was the big power behind the Dutch.

Rhodes's power was on the decline.  He had aroused the bitterest enmity
amongst the Dutch by the part he had played in organising the Jameson
Raid.  He never joined in a debate but the atmosphere became electric.
John X. Merriman, that lank politician, was his _bte noire_, and
sometimes the exchanges across the floor of the House brought Dr.
Berry, the Speaker, to his feet with a stern expostulation.

I saw Rhodes once at Groot Schom.  Possibly Kipling had spoken of me to
him, for he was very kindly, took me round his terraced garden, but
refused to talk any kind of politics.  He did, however, express the
opinion that Joseph Chamberlain was the biggest statesman that England
possessed, and asked me if I knew Alfred Harmsworth.

Rhodes had a favourite expression.  He would ramble on till he reached
some baffling expression of opinion.

"That is a thought," he would say impressively.  He was always
propounding "thoughts"--subject-matter for consideration.  His voice
alternated between a squeak and a rumble; he himself thought quicker
than he could speak, and sometimes he would leave you with the wreckage
of a sentence to disentangle as best you could, whilst he went off at a
tangent to talk about something altogether different, again to leave it
in the middle of an uncompleted sentence.

At the opening of the South African Exhibition in Grahamstown I went up
to represent a news agency.  There never was a quieter town than
Grahamstown.  It lies in the fold of the hills, a sweltering hot city,
full of churches.  When Sir William Butler (Acting High Commissioner)
arrived in state to open the exhibition, one man cheered and was
silenced by a stern policeman.

"We don't want any of that sort of noise here," he said.

Alfred Milner was High Commissioner, but he was home on leave.  Butler,
a lover of peace, saw all things working for war, and in his speech
uttered a warning:

"South Africa wants peace," he said--a statement which brought about
his recall.

I heard the speech, and by some queer instinct recognised its
significance.  It was almost a gesture of challenge thrown at Milner.
My account was the first to reach Cape Town and England.  It was my
first "beat."

One of the hardest habits for an ex-soldier to drop is the habit of
saluting.  For years after I left the army I could not meet an officer
without my hand mechanically moving upward.  I held all officers in
awe, and when Sir William saw me later in the day and beckoned me, my
knees trembled.

"You're the writing soldier, aren't you, Mr. Wallace?  Well, what do
you think of my speech?"

"I think, sir, there will be an awful fuss at home about it."

"I think so too," he nodded.

He was rather sad.  William Butler was a big man--you will remember his
wife's picture, "The Roll Call"--a large-hearted man who felt things
very deeply.  You can imagine no greater contrast in characters than
his and Milner's.  Milner had the soulless brilliancy of a lawyer; the
conscious superiority of an aristocrat.  He worried about petty things
and was incautiously dogmatic about big things.  I think he came to
South Africa with a fixed idea--that there was no solution to the
problem which the Dutch states offered but the solution which could be
forced by arms.  He was honest in this faith--I could not imagine
Alfred Milner being guilty of one act of trickery or deception.

My own position just about now was rather comfortable.  The output of
weekly political verse had increased to a yard and a half!  I was a
gentleman of leisure, with two suits and a suit of dress clothes.  The
latter, bought ready to wear, was a little tight, but was rather
beautiful to look upon.  "Leisure" is, of course, a relative term.  I
had learnt the habit of early rising and early working, and always I
worked at top speed.  I read and read and read, "masking" the passages
I could not quite understand and returning to them later to puzzle them
out.  My chief exercise was a book on Logic--Deductive and Inductive.
I read this page by page.  I have had it for years.  I have it now.  I
still don't understand it.

In this period I published my first book--a collection of verses.  It
was called "The Mission that Failed," and took its title from the first
"poem" which dealt with the Jameson Raid.  It had paper covers and was
printed locally and sold for a shilling.  I have no copy of it and
would gladly give a tenner for one.

Life in Cape Town in these days was delightful.  I lived on the edge of
Constantia, a district Kipling has made famous.  It was a place of
glorious ranges, of vineyards and pines.  I marvel that I do not live
there now.

My verses had reached England.  The _Daily Chronicle_ published some of
the best, the _Spectator_ published one or two.  They were, of course,
Kiplingesque---just as Robert Service's were.  Every young writer
imitates somebody, consciously or unconsciously.  I was a frank
imitator of Kipling.

The South African War came inevitably--one saw the black cloud rising,
and there was warning enough before the storm broke.




_Chapter VII_

Curiously enough, in my travels around the Eastern Province, I had made
a layman's reconnaissance of one disastrous battle-ground--Stormberg,
though I never dreamt that Gatacre or any other general would attempt a
frontal attack against such a position.  Cape Town was electrified by
the war.  Transports were arriving daily.  Train after train laden with
artillery passed up the line to a region that had suddenly become a
mysterious and terrifying Unknown.

I published a number of war poems in pamphlet form, with the assistance
of a gentleman who had a consumptive cure he wished to advertise.  He
took the back page for advertising purposes and paid half the cost of
the printing.

One night when I got back to Wynberg I found a telegram waiting for me.
It was from H. A. Gwynne, chief correspondent and manager of Reuters in
Capetown.  Gwynne is now editor of the _Morning Post_--a great athlete
and a great gentleman.  Again I was to come into contact with the
officer type.  In my opinion, he was the finest correspondent the South
African War produced, for not only was he a shrewd and knowledgeable
news-gatherer, but he had a sense of proportion that put him in a
different class from the others.  He had not, of course, the vivid pen
of G. W. Steevens, but then Steevens was rather an impressionist than a
news man.

"Would you like to go to the front?" he asked me.

The offer came at a moment when I had decided to re-enlist.  It was so
horrible sitting in Cape Town writing about things I had not seen.  My
heart was with the detachment, which was somewhere on the Orange River,
and I jumped at the offer.  A correspondent's pass was secured, and
with a hundred pounds in my pocket I left Cape Town one hot night _en
route_ for De Aar.

A hundred pounds!  It was all the money in the world.  No Rothschild
was richer than I, and in order to make the money go as far as possible
and to maintain this enormous capital, I lived economically, grudging
the 20 I had to pay for a horse.

I left Cape Town at night, feeling rather solemn, if the truth be told.
I was going into the blue, to an unknown and ominous beyond, where
there was fighting and death and the confusion of war.  I sat through
that moonlit night as the train crawled up through the Hex River
Mountains, wondering whether this was an opening, or whether I was
slipping into a dead end.  The train thudded on through the next day
across the white-hot Karoo, a place of silence and desolation, and we
reached De Aar that night.  We could not go any farther apparently; the
line had been blown up between De Aar and Newport, or possibly a rail
had buckled or a culvert had collapsed.  Whatever it was, it held us at
that arid junction till daylight.  The Guards were detraining as I
left, huge and stolid men, resting here for a day or two before they
joined Methuen on the Orange River.

I went along to Naawport, a ghastly hole of a place, which had its
railway officer, armoured train, and a sprinkling of disgruntled and
suspicious Dutch farmers.

French was holding a line somewhere north of the latter place, and I
went up in an armoured train and heard the first boom of the guns.
There was little news at Colesberg--but I saw there a very charming
Chief Staff Officer.  He was a major of cavalry and a very courteous
man--a Major Douglas Haig.

"I'm afraid there is very little news for you here," he said.  "Would
you like to see the General?"

The General received me in the friendliest way.  French was a little
man, a cheery soul, though worried the morning I saw him.  It was a
curious experience to have met the two men who in turn commanded the
Army in France, within five minutes of one another.  French, a
whisky-and-soda in his hand, a little talkative; Haig, debonair, very
silent and thoughtful; and somewhere in the distance the intermittent
"klik-klok" of rifles.  Methuen had got to the Orange River and was
planning a move towards Kimberley.  I arrived at Orange River Station
the day he left.

My old detachment of R.A.M.C. men was at Orange River when I arrived, a
sunburnt, whiskery lot of men, half of whom had grown beards and were
unrecognisable.  I had had an invitation to dine that night with a
swell I had met on the train--I think it was the Earl de la Warr, who
was corresponding for some newspaper or other--and I sent a message
over telling him that I had been unavoidably detained, and squatted
down with the gang around the blackened camp kettle to an over-rich
dinner of boiled rabbit, chicken and bully beef.  It was a gorgeous
evening, somewhat spoilt by a raging thunderstorm which came up the
Orange River.

My position was that of second correspondent.  My chief--I forget who
he was for the moment--was on the other side of the river with the main
body of the army, at that moment preparing to advance towards
Kimberley.  I was happy to learn, however, that the military
authorities knew nothing about my subordinate position, and I was
allowed to cross the river as and when I wished, not with the idea of
doing the other man's job, but because I had that insatiable curiosity
which is the chief ingredient in the make-up of the perfect
correspondent.

Gwynne himself came up before the advance began.  He was very satisfied
with the work I had done, but told me it was necessary that I should
stay at Orange River, not only to collect any news that was going, but
to act as reserve for himself.  Orange River was not my idea of a
perfect front, and I continued my visits to the army, using a bicycle
to get about the country, and keeping well out of sight of my chief.

I can't remember how many times I lost myself in that God-forsaken
stretch of no-man's-land.  I spent two nights sleeping in the
wilderness.  The second time I was taken prisoner by a small commando
of Cape rebels which was trekking eastward to join Kronje.  When I say
"taken prisoner" I am indulging in heroics.  I was questioned by the
leader of the party and allowed to go on my way.  It is a curious fact
that, although this little party crossed the one line of rails which
formed the slender line of communication with Methuen's force, they not
only made no attempt to blow it up or destroy it in some other way, but
actually stopped to remove an obstruction which had accidentally washed
down upon the rails!

From a hill I watched the Battle of Belmont, and later saw E. F.
Knight, the _Morning Post_ correspondent, with his arm shattered by a
rifle bullet.

It was at Orange River that I had my first tussle with the military
censor.

But the queer incident that occurred was after the Battle of Modder
River.  I had written out a story I got from a wounded officer, in the
course of which I had mentioned that a certain officer had been killed.
I misspelt his name (it was the difference between Ferguson and
Fergeson--these are not the real names).  The General sent for me, a
nice little man with a quiet, gentle manner, and read me a little
lecture.

"Be awfully careful about names," he said.

He was General Wauchope, and when, a week or so later, I learnt that he
had been killed leading the Highland Brigade into action, I dared not
send on the news, though I had it before the correspondents at Modder
River, for fear I had confused his name with another.

Between whiles I did a little unofficial hospital work.  The wounded
were coming down from Modder River and were being accommodated in the
field hospital at Orange River Junction.  The R.A.M.C. staff was a
small one and I was able to help a little, for I was a first-class
orderly and surgical work was my speciality.  I hasten to add that I
did very little, for the hospital staff was reinforced from De Aar
almost immediately; but I managed to get around to the tents where some
of the badly wounded men were lying, and take down the letters they
dictated to their people.  The courage of the dying Tommy is beyond
belief: I never saw a tear, never heard one regret from these men who
were taking farewell of life and all that life held.  They fill me with
wonder and awe, even to-day, when I remember those death-beds.  They
were not supermen, they were just true to type, and every Briton should
go down on his knees and thank God for his breeding.

Soon after Magersfontein I was sent up to Orange River and found myself
herded with the elephants of the newspaper world.  Julian Ralph was
there, Lionel James of _The Times_, Carl de la Mere, Percival Landon.
Later came Charles Hardy and Gwynne, Bennett Burleigh and Winston
Churchill.  George Steevens I had met on his way through to Natal.  A
quiet, watchful man who was rather difficult to know.  He gave you the
impression of great simplicity and an impatience of trivialities.  He
had played a bigger part in the world than he knew, or even his friend
Alfred Harmsworth had guessed, for he created the illusion of an
invincible Kitchener.

Winston I only saw.  I had an opportunity of meeting him, but was
rather shy about meeting celebrities.  A sturdy, red young man,
brimming over with life and confidence.  An adviser of generals even
then, if rumour spoke truly.  They might have done better if they had
followed his advice, for I am one of the people who believe that he has
a large quantity of the military genius of the first Duke of
Marlborough, his ancestor.  All his life he has comported himself in
the field with an absolute disregard for his safety--whether you like
his politics or not, you have to acknowledge his personal bravery; he
is a man without fear.

Bennett Burleigh I never liked.  I have the memory of gratuitous snubs
which were unpardonable.  He was a bluff, noisy man, very capable at
his job and very kind at heart, I believe.  Melton Prior, whom I met
later, was, with Villiers, one of the old school.  He was something of
an old soldier too.

I met Lord Methuen--they called him "Paul," and he was the easiest man
in the world for an ex-Tommy to meet.  Throughout the war I thanked God
when my work brought me into contact with officers of the Brigade of
Guards.  They never made me conscious of my social limitations, and
that is the highest compliment I can pay to their breeding.

In addition to my cables to London, it was my duty to write short
articles, which were forwarded to Reuters' head office in London and
distributed to the newspapers.  Because of my shocking caligraphy and
my curious spelling, I took the precaution of sending my written notes
to a typist in Cape Town: a girl who was earning a little money in her
spare time after business hours.  When the first few of these were
printed and came out, I sent copies of the newspapers containing them
to almost everybody I could think of.  I was tremendously proud of my
achievement, and three copies of the _Daily News_ with the article "by
Reuters Special Correspondent" went to the typist.  I did not explain
to her that other newspapers throughout England were also printing the
articles, and my failure to explain this led to amazing results.  For
subsequent articles (there were not many), instead of going forward to
Reuter, were sent direct to the _Daily News_.  All but one notable
exception.

The first intimation I had of this was a cable which later came to me
in Rhodesia:

  _Splendid article.  Continue.  Robinson._


For all I knew, Robinson was Reuters' other name, and I continued!  I
did not identify Sir John Robinson till months later.  After the Battle
of Magersfontein I was sent to join Sir Frederick Carrington, who was
taking a force through Rhodesia to relieve Mafeking.  On a tiny ship,
crowded with Queensland bushmen, I made the painful journey to Beira, a
place I remember for its sand and its cocktails.  At Sixty Mile Peg,
where the narrow and the broad gauge lines met, I killed my first lion,
before going on to Marandellas to find that Sir Frederick Carrington,
who had come out to South Africa much against his will, for he was an
old man and rather lethargic, had built himself a house and was looking
for a likely fourth at bridge.

Troops were, however, going forward to join Plumer, who was attacking
to the north of Mafeking.  I travelled up to Salisbury, booked myself a
place on the overland coach--the type of conveyance with which my early
studies of Deadwood Dick had made me acquainted--and began the long and
painful trek to Buluwayo.  I reached Mafeking when, so to speak, the
powder of Plumer's attack still hung in the air.

Plumer in those days was a colonel of infantry, a stolid, quiet-spoken,
phlegmatic man, very sparing of speech, yet withal possessed of an
extraordinarily keen sense of humour.  He was by far the most popular
of the "little commanders."  Baden-Powell was preparing to go home; and
the curious fact is that, although I was two days in Mafeking, I never
saw him and have never spoken with him in my life!

I had to hurry back to Buluwayo and from Buluwayo by the same painful
process to Salisbury.  There was talk of a native rising.  Chief
Linchwe had given trouble along the northern frontiers of the
Transvaal; a farm or two had been burnt, and a few unfortunate women
had been murdered and worse.  Later I was to join an expedition and be
a participator rather than a spectator in the grim vengeance which
followed.

Apparently it was not intended that I should go east again, and I
returned to Buluwayo, travelling with Whigham, who was, I think, acting
for the _Morning Post_, and later became one of the most brilliant
editors in America.  For years he had charge of the _Metropolitan
Magazine_, a unique performance for an Englishman of Englishmen.

By this time Roberts had driven through to Pretoria, and, officially at
any rate, the war was over.  Personally, I was rather sick at heart:
Mrs. Freeman had died, and much of the zest of life had for the moment
gone out.  I was weary of the war and South Africa.  Going down to Cape
Town, I took the first ship to Europe.

It was only when I reached London that I realised the extraordinary
work my typist had been doing; for not only had she sent these articles
to the _Daily News_, which I had not seen until I reached London; but
she had branched forth and sent one of the "stories" to the _Daily
Mail_!  I met Douglas Sladen--I don't know how I got into such a
literary atmosphere, but it was Sladen who said that he had seen an
article of mine in the _Daily Mail_.  The next morning I went down to
the office to search the files.  When I had discovered the article, I
sent my name up to the editor, and there began my acquaintance with a
man who, more than any other, founded my journalistic fortune.

One has to deal very briefly and delicately with the incident, because
Thomas Marlowe is one of the few men I know who genuinely resents this
kind of publicity.  He was grey, even in those days, with remarkable
eyes and a deep, menacing voice that has filled generations of
reporters with terror.  I told him I was going back to the Cape, that
in my opinion the war would last at least for another year, and he
commissioned me to write a few articles for the paper.  I had only sent
a few from Cape Town when I had a cable appointing me correspondent and
giving me the freest of hands.  I left immediately for the front, had
the good luck to attach myself to a column that at that moment was on
the point of leaving Magersfontein in search of Hertzog, the present
Prime Minister of South Africa.

Although Hertzog's commando was bigger than our little force, he
consistently avoided battle.  We had with us a detachment of
Australians (Victorians, if my memory serves me), Kitchener's Fighting
Scouts, a battalion of the Coldstream Guards, and two guns of the Royal
Horse Artillery.

The day of days was that when I accompanied a party of the irregular
horse on an unofficial sniping expedition, and had the good fortune to
bring down a Boer commander, who, I have every reason to believe, was
Hertzog.  My shot killed the horse, and probably I should have killed
the rider, but a loud-mouthed officer demanded what in something we
were doing at the moment I was drawing on my prey.  I am pretty
certain, from what we subsequently learnt, that the gentleman I brought
down was Hertzog himself.




_Chapter VIII_

Who will ever forget those days of marching and counter-marching
through the driving rain in search of a shadowy enemy, his presence
notified occasionally by a desultory exchange of rifle shots; turning
out at dawn in the drizzle, with a streak of light between the tops of
the hills and the heavy rain-clouds.  The stink of wet wood trying to
burn; the undertone of blasphemy that chorused up from the men's lines;
and the ride into nowhere--a wet man on a wet horse, the rain streaking
down, drops dripping from the brim of your broad-brimmed sombrero; the
clatter and groan of the mules lugging their burdens over a road that
had ceased to be a road, probably never was a road.  The everlasting
foot-slogging Tommy, his rifle slung over his shoulder, muzzle down,
his hands deep in his pockets, a pipe between his teeth.

Alone in that column of misery is he cheerful.  His voice rises in an
unmusical howl as he murders the music of popular songs.  Dead mules
and dead horses at the side of the road; a swollen drift to cross; and
so into camp, weary and aching.  And what a camp!  Water-proof covers
fastened together to shelter the men; tiny tents, hardly as serviceable
for the officers; but in ten minutes after camp is reached Mr. Atkins
is as cheerful as ever he was.  Fires are burning, for each Tommy in a
company carries a dry stick of communal wood under his tunic.
Sometimes when we were crossing the path of a little column that had
trekked laterally before, we came upon evidence of tiny battles,
forgotten nowadays.

Once, when I was taking a short cut, I found all that remained of a
British soldier, and halted to bury him.  It is a commentary on our
civilisation that I had to borrow the prayer-book from my coloured
mule-driver before I could read the service over the pitiable dead.

Once I found a Boer girl walking across the veld completely nude.  She
was rather difficult to deal with, for she was mad.  She told the story
in Dutch that she had been maltreated and stripped by some English
soldiers, but the Dutch farmer to whom I took her told me that this
wandering nakedly was an old and disconcerting habit of hers.  I spent
the night at the farm, and in the morning the farmer informed me that
the girl had hanged herself in the night.  He told me this quite calmly
at breakfast, and invited me to break off my repast and go in and see
her.  She was still hanging when I went in and, amazingly enough, was
alive!  She was alive when I left the place.  The next time I saw the
farm it had been destroyed by fire--I think the man was a loyalist and
the Hertzog commando had passed.  Hertzog was rather a terrible fellow
to loyalists.

I always remember those long hikes after an invisible enemy for one
characteristic of the soldier which I would like you to carry in your
minds.  If one was sleeping in one's d'abri tent and heard a chorus of
song in the middle of the night one could be sure that it was raining,
and that the sodden men sleeping outside in the open were greeting the
dismal weather in their usual fashion.

The soldier grumbles because it is part of his British nature to
grumble.  He grouses and endures.  And when he comes out of the army he
still grouses, with very good reason, and people stare affrighted at
the phenomenon and imagine a new breed of man loosely labelled
"revolutionary" and "communist" has grown up in the night, never
realising that he is only Tommy without uniform, exercising his right
to complain against the corporals and sergeants (very seldom the
officers) who are making his life a little more irksome than he deems
necessary.

Let this fact sink into your mind--it is the non-commissioned officers
of life who hurt, and against whom resentment is felt.  The foremen and
the petty overseers; the small men with near horizons and no vision
beyond; the little go-betweens who have acquired the habit of
tyranny--these form the grit in the machinery of industry.  Sometimes
they are for the bosses and make life hell for the men under them.
Sometimes they stand for rebellion against the higher direction, but
invariably their objective is power.  They are ready to adopt the
shibboleths of either side so long as they gain authority thereby.  If
they learn the trick of oratory they become leaders on one side or the
other, not because they possess the intrinsic qualities of leadership,
but because they are pleasingly vocal.

Nor is this phenomenon peculiar to any class.  Oratory has passed for
statesmanship in every phase and period of our political history, and
many a man has risen to the governance of great departments of State
with no other qualification than his aptitude for epigram and sonorous
peroration.

What magnificent men the Coldstreamers were!  Henniker, burly and
genial; Marker, the perfect type of clever soldier (he was killed
outside Ypres); little Monk, then a junior subaltern, who died in
France; Crichton, John Campbell, now commanding the regiment and the
gallant fellow who won his V.C. by rallying the Guards with a hunting
horn; Claude Willoughby, Crook, Lawless, the Guards doctor, and Beach,
the R.A.M.C. doctor, Powell, the horse gunner--these men are among the
bright memories of the war.

There are other memories, curious and _macabre_.  Scheepers, for
example.  Scheepers was a Cape rebel, tried by court martial and
sentenced to death.  That he would have died, I very much doubt.
Unfortunately, a misguided pro-Boer in the House of Commons staged a
full-dress debate.  Before the agitation was well on its way, a message
was transmitted to Pretoria from London.  That same night Henniker had
a telegram, characteristically brief: "Shoot Scheepers.  K."  They went
to his cell and woke up the rebel leader and told him his fate.  The
next morning he was shot by a firing party of the Guards; and there the
matter would have ended, but it came to the ears of authority that
certain sympathisers were seeking the exact place where Scheepers was
buried.  An attempt had been made to bribe two members of the firing
party to convey this information.  That night Scheepers was dug up from
his new grave, deposited in a Cape cart and moved to a fold of the wild
hills, there to be reburied.  There is, I believe, a monument over the
supposed grave of this not at all admirable leader of Cape marauders.
There is, however, no body beneath the marble.

Another night to be remembered was spent in a midland town.  A local
farmer had turned rebel and was captured in a fight, tried by court
martial and sentenced to be hanged.  The man whose dreadful duty it was
to perform the execution arrived with the ghastly apparatus, fitted it
up in the courtyard of the local prison, and spent the rest of the
afternoon absorbing strong drink.  He was, I believe, in terror of
assassination.  I woke up at midnight to the sound of a fearful scream,
and discovered that friend hangman occupied the adjoining room to me in
the hotel and that he was in the most violent stages of delirium
tremens.  With the aid of a local newspaper man we got him back to bed
and tied him down, and for four hours, with ice and cold sponges, we
worked on the raving, half-demented hangman.  It was a night one will
not readily forget.  He had very ugly memories and he told us all about
them.  My companion was physically sick.  Eventually we got him to
sleep, and he turned up, a little shaky, but quite normal, to perform
his nasty job.

This was described as a senseless execution, as also was the killing of
Scheepers, and the shooting of five men at De Aar for train-wrecking;
but it has to be remembered that we had an enormously long line of
communications; the country through which the railway passed was
peopled generally by sympathisers with the Boer cause.  Without these
examples, anarchy would have reigned; and if we erred at all it was on
the side of leniency.  In making examples the mildest of offenders
frequently suffer for the sins of their leaders.

Soon after this unpleasant affair I was to meet Kitchener for the first
time.  I had seen him often enough, and I knew all the rumours that
were in circulation about his being "in disgrace with Roberts."
Roberts was a sort of hero of mine, and undoubtedly he was a
magnificent soldier and a brilliant strategist.

It was while Kitchener's train was waiting at Elandslaagte that I was
introduced by a member of his staff.  My first sensation was one of
disappointment.  "K." was a very big, heavy-looking man, with a
forbidding, rather repulsive face.  He had a slight cast in one eye,
and his manner at that interview was a little harsh and overbearing.
The Tommy who described him as "Gawd's young brother Alf" was
understandable.  And yet Kitchener was in truth a very gentle, kindly
and simple soul.  He was shy and more conscious of his own limitations
than any but his best friends knew.  It may seem a fantastic
suggestion, but I shall always contend that G. W. Steevens ruined
Kitchener when he wrote his fanciful pen-picture of the man in that
brilliant series of articles afterwards published under the title "With
Kitchener to Khartoum."  Steevens showed him as a man of ice and
blood--one who dressed himself in Arab garb in order to learn the
secrets of the enemy--a man without bowels of compassion, remorseless,
ruthless, relentless.  I have the impression that Kitchener spent the
greater part of his life in trying to live up to that reputation, and
that all his ferocity, his seeming boorishness and his invariable
aloofness, were due to another man's estimate which he had all too
willingly accepted.

He had already put into execution his plan to end the war: the creation
of vast blockhouse lines, designed to keep the enemy within certain
restricted areas.  As a protection for the railway lines they were
excellent, but as a means of bringing the war to an end they were, in
my humble judgment, futile.  Nothing was easier than to break through
them in the night, as the Boers proved time and time again.

I first found myself in conflict with Lord Kitchener over the shooting
of the British wounded at Vlakfontein.  There had been a little fight,
in which our men had been driven back, and undoubtedly after the
engagement a number of Boers walked round the battlefield shooting the
wounded Tommies.  I had this information at first-hand and put it on
the wire.  It was, as I subsequently discovered, censored out of
existence.  Fortunately, I sent at the same time a long written
dispatch to the Daily Mail, describing the incident.  This was
published and created a great sensation.  Questions were asked in
Parliament, and since the Government had had no information from Lord
Kitchener, the story was characterised as an invention.  The
Under-Secretary of State for War was then Lord Stanley, the present
Lord Derby, a man for whom I have the highest regard and affection.
Stanley could do no more than say that the Government had no
information at all on the subject, to promise inquiry and to award
condign punishment to the correspondent who had so lacerated the
feelings of the soldiers' relatives.

Kitchener had apparently made no statement about this incident; indeed,
until he was cabled by the Government, he furnished no particulars of
the Boers' most discreditable exploit, and one which was condemned by
Louis Botha in very pregnant words.  But "K." was getting very weary of
the war, most anxious to bring about its end, still more anxious that
the feeling at home should not be further inflamed against his enemy.
He was prepared, as I know, to grant the Boers a measure of
self-government immediately on the signing of peace.  Some time later,
Milner told me, with some acerbity, that Lord Kitchener had made an
unjustifiable use of the press to further his own views.  At the
moment, the "unjustifiable use" that "K." was making of the press was
to deny news of actual happenings.  Under pressure from the Government
he admitted that my account was substantially accurate.

In the meantime he was very annoyed with me, and I received a direct
hint from the censor in Johannesburg that my presence in the gold city
was undesirable and that I had best go to Cape Town.  I went down,
accompanied by two bright young officer lads, and only discovered as
the train was drawing into Cape Town station that they were acting as
escort.  I spent three days in Cape Town and went back to Johannesburg,
and by this time the truth had come out.

I thought it best to see Kitchener, and went over to Pretoria for the
purpose, but he would have none of me.  I wanted to see him on another
matter.  As an excuse for the censorship he had made a statement that
the Boers got all their information from English newspapers, and that
when he went in to parley with Louis Botha he found the latest copies
of all the English journals in Botha's camp.  This created a mild
sensation when the news was cabled home.  It was Gwynne, I believe, who
tackled him with this statement of his, and was met by a cool denial
that he had ever said anything of the sort!  Later he said that the
only paper that the Boers got was the one I wrote for, and I never had
a chance to discuss the matter with him; and when eventually we met on
more or less friendly terms I thought it would be tactless to raise the
subject.

The war was drifting to its end; the Boers were sick and tired of being
away from their farms year after year, and peace negotiations had
begun.  I heard that the British and Dutch were to meet at Vereenigen,
on the banks of the Vaal River, and conveyed this news in a short
telegram.  The censor summoned me to his office and, greeting me with a
bland smile, handed the telegram back to me.

"Oh, no," he said cheerfully, "there's no news whatever to go through
about the peace negotiations."

"Why not?" I asked in astonishment, thinking that such glad tidings
would be the first Kitchener would wish published.

"It is 'K.'s' orders," he told me.

Returning to my hotel, I puzzled the matter out.  I had met a very good
fellow, the financier Freeman-Cohen, who had a branch office in London
conducted by his brother Csar.  Harry Freeman-Cohen was a little man
who had the face of a stage comedy Jew, but I never met a straighter,
cleaner or whiter man in my life.  I count his friendship as one of the
happiest I made in South Africa.  My first step was to send a wire,
with his help, to his brother, saying: "Any message that comes to you,
take to Carmelite House."  This passed the censor.

My next step was to code my message, which ran:

_Peace negotiations begun.  Boer representatives are in Pretoria.
Milner gone there to secure basis negotiations._


I tore this up and wrote instead:


_With reference to Paxfontein Mines, all parties necessary to contract
are now in Pretoria, whither Alfred gone get bottom price._


In this obscure way I was able to send from day to day the progress of
the peace negotiations.  These had hardly commenced before, to my
amazement, Kitchener wired asking me to come over to breakfast.  I went
expecting to get a kick in the pants for some (journalistic) villainy.
In point of fact, I thought that he had discovered my code.  I was
agreeably surprised to be greeted like an old friend.  I arrived too
late for breakfast, and our interview was in his little study, alone;
here he explained what he wanted to do.

"Your newspaper has a large influence in England, hasn't it?"

I said it had a tremendous influence, without knowing a great deal
about it.

"Well, I'll tell you what I wish you would do, Wallace," he said.
"Can't you persuade your people to take this line in regard to
concessions to the Boers?"

He then outlined a number of concessions, to some of which I dared
demur.

"I can't send this as a news message," I explained, and we agreed that
it would have to take the form of a leader.  So between us we sat down
and constructed a _Daily Mail_ leader (which, I believe, never went
into the newspaper) urging the necessity for dealing gently with the
Boer, promising him a measure of self-government within a few years, a
promise which anticipated Campbell-Bannerman's Act, granting a general
amnesty to Cape rebels, and a few other things which I knew must be
embodied in any terms of peace between the South African Republic and
the British Government.  The wire went off; two days later we wrote
another leader, but apparently the news that the first had not appeared
in the _Mail_ inhibited any further confidence, and I was not sent for
again.

And again I resumed my underground messages.  Kitchener had sent word
that if he caught me there would be trouble.  I didn't want telling.

"But I should like to point out to you that if I don't get news through
to England there will also be trouble," I explained to the censor.

To find one's way into the guarded peace camp was of course impossible.
One elderly correspondent tried it, but his disguise would not have
deceived an amateur detective, and he was unceremoniously booted forth
into the cold world.

Fortunately for me, there was a good pal of mine in the camp, a Tommy
with whom I had soldiered, and, meeting him, I arranged a code of
signals.  He was to have three handkerchiefs--one red, one white, one
blue.  The railway ran within sight of the camp, and every morning I
journeyed down to the Vaal River by train, took the next train back,
keeping my eye on the camp for the signal.  Red meant "nothing doing,"
blue "making progress," and the white handkerchief was to signify that
the peace treaty had actually been signed.  I don't know how many
journeys I made on that infernal railway, but never once was the red
handkerchief displayed.

Then one morning, when rumour was rife that the negotiations had fallen
through, I saw my friend standing on the end of the tent lines, and he
was displaying a white handkerchief conspicuously.  I did not wait to
get back to Pretoria.  Instead I sent a wire from Germiston:

_Contract signed._


I have said that Kitchener knew that I was sending messages in code.
Too late he discovered how.

In the course of these long negotiations I had made one or two trips up
and down the line--once as far as Cape Town--so that no suspicion
should rest upon me, and it was my misfortune that I sent a wire from
Beaufort West detailing some developments in the Peace Conference, my
language being so unguarded that a man standing by my side, and himself
waiting to send a wire, read it, guessed its importance and notified
Kitchener.  The name of my "betrayer" was General Smuts.

One of Lord Kitchener's staff subsequently stated that I had given him
my word that I would not break the censorship regulations; but the
truth is, I had made no such promise.  I had been warned of the dire
consequences to me should I continue sending uncensored messages; but a
correspondent's first duty, within the bounds of honour and decency, is
to his newspaper.  It is the ship for which he is prepared to make any
sacrifice, and week after week the _Daily Mail_ published particulars
of the negotiations, and I became more and more an object of suspicion.
Bennett Burleigh complained to head-quarters that I was getting news
through by some underground channel, but he, I think, was the only
correspondent who took that step.

When the _Daily Mail_, which had been accused of getting its news from
the Colonial Office by improper means, came out with the story of how
the messages had been sent through, I had my big strafe.  I was strafed
at second-hand by Kitchener, by the Chief of Staff, by the censor, by
everybody except my paper.  But already the war was finished for me,
and a new vista was opening up.




_Chapter IX_

On the day peace was officially proclaimed, and whilst the church bells
were ringing, the churches were filled with thankful citizens of the
Transvaal, Freeman-Cohen walked into my room at Heath's Hotel, a large
cigar between his white teeth and a twinkle in his eye.  He had been
riding all the morning and his horse was at the door of the hotel.

"I have bought the _Standard and Diggers' News_," he said.  This was
the most important paper in the Transvaal, and had in pre-war days been
subsidised by the Kruger Government.  "I want you to edit it," he went
on.  "I'll give you fifteen hundred a year and a share of the profits."

Now to appreciate the situation, you have to remember that I had never
been in a newspaper office in my life except to hand in my deathless
prose about municipal councils.  But I was of the age when all things
seem easy.  I accepted the appointment, staffed the paper, and produced
a new journal in the _Rand Daily Mail_, which is now one of the two
greatest newspapers in South Africa.

Those nine months of service on the _Rand Daily Mail_ were hectic
months for me.  I was learning all the time, mainly discovering my own
deficiencies.  Yet it was a bright paper, extravagantly run, but
popular from the first.  We had the competition of the _Transvaal
Leader_, a loyalist journal which had established itself under the
Krugerian regime, but this we eventually killed (not in my time, it is
true).  We had also an evening paper, the _Star_, against us, and it
was an uphill fight for six months, all the time I was editor.  We had
a few scoops, and a few that came unstuck.  We were instrumental in
saving the lives of a number of Tommies sentenced to death for a
barrack-room riot on St. Patrick's Day, and we asked for, and got, a
good kicking from Milner.

Lord Milner was a gentleman of a peculiar temperament.  He was an
unhuman man in many respects.  You could imagine him as the permanent
head of a great Government department, for Milner was the beau-ideal of
a Civil Servant.  He was consciously superior to common people.  I am
not saying this unpleasantly.  He did nice things and kind things and
humane things; the people who worked with him loved him.  He was as
honest as the day, but he was the world's worst "mixer."

It was his worst handicap that he worried about little matters such as
an ordinary man would have hardly noticed, and was so sensitive to
criticism that without knowing his past you could have betted that he
had been a journalist who wrote leading articles.

There was nothing personal in his little brush with the _Rand Daily
Mail_.

We had a correspondent at Loreno Marques who sent us a rumour that the
British Government were buying that town from Portugal as an entrept
to the Transvaal.  This, if it were true, was a sensational piece of
news, and the brief cable was handed over to an imaginative artist to
expand.  We came out with a splash column in heavily-leaded type,
announcing the forthcoming transfer of Loreno Marques to the British
Government.

The story was instantly and violently denied by Milner.

We were a young newspaper, and this was a smack in the eye that was
going to leave a mark unless we did something, and did something quick.
I was seized with a bright idea.  I had the whole column translated
into Portuguese and set up.  The next morning I printed Milner's
denial, and added:


    "Whilst of course we accept His Excellency's statement that the
    British Government contemplate no such purchase, we can only
    reprint our correspondent's message as we received it, and ask our
    readers to judge for themselves."


Here followed three-quarters of a column of fluent Portuguese, which I
am satisfied not one reader in twenty thousand could understand.

Soon after this little episode I had a row with Freeman-Cohen on a
purely personal matter and resigned my editorship.  He was in the right
and I was in the wrong, but I was just a little bit swollen-headed and
rather too satisfied with my own infallibility.  Before the resignation
came, however, Joseph Chamberlain arrived in Johannesburg, and I had an
opportunity of a talk with that remarkable man.  If Milner was a bad
mixer, Joe was the best mixer that ever sat on the front bench.  His
frankness was startling.

"Milner is much too touchy," he said, referring to an incident that had
happened two nights before.

Pretoria gave a banquet to Joe, and Milner of course attended.  In the
course of the speeches some bucolic arose and regretted that Lord
Milner did not come more often to Pretoria.  It needed only this little
gibe to set Milner aflame.  Instead of delivering the speech that he
had ready, he launched forth into a justification of his avoidance of
Pretoria.

"He's very sensitive.  I wish he wasn't," said Chamberlain.

I asked him something about the policy of the Government, whether it
would change in the event of a general election.

"If there is a general election," said Chamberlain with a smile, "the
Conservatives will return.  There is no doubt of that.  I am an
infallible judge of the constituencies--I have never made a mistake."

He could not at that period have intended making Tariff Reform an
issue, for at the general election which followed our conversation the
Tories were driven into the shades, and Campbell-Bannerman came in to
give the Boers all that Kitchener had promised--rightly, as I believe.

In those days Johannesburg was a fascinating place to live in.  It was
arousing slowly from the dusty sleep of war; the mines were beginning
to work again--and everybody had money!

I had now a position: I was editor of what promised to be--and the
promise was well kept--the most important newspaper in Johannesburg.
My salary was roughly 2,000 a year; I had the _entre_ to whatever
society there was--it was the most tremendous period of my life.

All the world was drifting into Johannesburg; men and women whose names
are household words came and went.  Baden-Powell was organising a South
African police force, the only thing about which I remember was that it
wore green ties and that from its uniform B.P. modelled the kit of the
Boy Scouts!  Great actors and actresses were appearing on the
Johannesburg stage, and well do I remember one dreadful Sunday when
Edward Terry, John Le Hay, Leonard Rayne and I carried the body of poor
Kate Vaughan through a sandstorm to her last resting place.

Johannesburg thought and talked of nothing but money, of stocks that
were rising or falling, of borings in new fields, of assays that
produced fabulous results.  I plunged into the market with the best of
them, made 12,000 in one week and lost 20,000 between eleven in the
morning and one o'clock in the afternoon.

There were other adventures.  One day a small-part lady in a musical
comedy, who had received an unkindly notice from my dramatic critic,
stalked into my office with a large whip and informed me she was going
to thrash me within an inch of my life!  It was a delicate situation,
but was saved by timely brutality.  I told her I had never been flogged
by a woman, and I didn't exactly know what I would do, but I rather
thought that I should give her a black eye to start with!  After that I
took her out to lunch.

One day there came into my office a man who had discovered a diamond
mine somewhere up in the bush veld.  He was floating it for a million
pounds and desired ten pages of the _Rand Daily Mail_ to advertise his
prospectus.  He offered to pay 500 a page--in share certificates.  I
pointed out to him very gently that we also had a printing machine
downstairs and could turn out share certificates quite as easily as any
other printer.

Yet another memory of those tumultuous days: there was a man whose name
I will not mention; he was a member of the aristocracy, a charming,
cultured, courteous gentleman.  During the war he was an officer in a
crack regiment, and I had been brought in touch with him.  After the
war was over he settled in Johannesburg to repair his fortunes.  I saw
him one day racing and he told me that he had a block of shares which
at that time were worth 2,000 each and would, he assured me, be worth
10,000.  They were in a gold mine on the East Rand, and already there
was doubt as to whether gold in payable quantities existed.  The shares
sank down and down, and one evening, as he sat in his drawing room,
with a smile on his lips he asked a girl who was a member of the party
and who was a beautiful pianist, to play him the "Dead March in Saul."
He listened until she had finished, and then with a smile walked
across, shook her hand and, going out into his own room--shot himself.

What a queer, mad, tragic place Johannesburg was in those days, with
its overnight millionaires, its tremendous hospitality, its bubbling
faith in quick and easy wealth!  I left some of my heart and some of my
faith in the golden city when I flicked its dust from my boots in the
mail train that carried me to Cape Town and went on board the
homeward-bound steamer with exactly 80, most of which I lost at poker.
I arrived in London with three shillings--much less than I had had in
my pocket when I sailed on the _Scot_ as a Tommy six years before.


There are two things which matter in life.  One is health: your own
health and the health of those you love; and the other is faith.  There
are few mornings in my life that I have not wakened to thank God I am
alive, and to dash instantly at the nearest newspaper and discover what
the world has been doing while I wasn't watching.  All these wonderful
events, from the King opening Parliament to Mrs. Jones being charged
with having been drunk and disorderly, have a message for me, which may
take years to interpret, but eventually is solidified into one golden
speck of usable knowledge.  Money doesn't really matter at all.  At the
worst, you can always do something discreditable and get money.

Three shillings is a very small sum to restart one's life, but at the
_Daily Mail_ office that Saturday I had the good luck to find Marlowe,
who was most kind, and he sent me on to John Cowley, the manager, who
was kind in another way, and I walked out to Tallis Street with a job
and 60.  And that evening occurred one of those peculiar incidents
which I shall never forget.

I had parted from Kitchener more in anger than in sorrow; my name was
mud in the official records, my medals had been withdrawn from me for
the crime of breaking through the censorship, and I think I had a
fairly unbiased view of K.'s peculiar temperament.  That night I went
to the Gaiety, not knowing that Kitchener was in the house.  In the
interval between two acts he strolled into the vestibule, where a lot
of fellow-me-lads were sitting around smoking.  Instantly they came to
their feet, and I wondered what all the commotion was about, not
realising that K. was a great hero and that these young men were doing
him homage.  Looking round, I saw the big fellow, and my first
inclination was to rise.  My second was to sit very still and pretend
there wasn't such a person in the world as K. of K.  He looked round
the room with those slumbering eyes of his, and presently they rested
on me; and then, to my amazement, he walked over, and of course I got
up and shook hands with him.  Had I stood with the others, he would
have treated me like dirt.

I have referred in a previous article to the sensitiveness of Milner.
I had been home a few weeks when I was asked to write an article about
him, and in the course of this three-quarters of a column I suggested
that he had outlived his period of usefulness, and that it would be an
excellent thing both for South Africa and for his own reputation if he
came home.  Apparently this article was cabled to the Cape, and once
more Milner fell for criticism.  He had to attend a party to give away
prizes, and instead of delivering the address which the occasion called
for, he launched forth, in his most bitter terminology, on this
unfortunate article of mine.  I cannot for the life of me understand
why such a man in such a position should care twopence what some little
three-shilling journalist wrote about him.  I am satisfied that my
suggestion was a good one, and soon after he did resign his position as
High Commissioner and return to England--probably that was already
arranged.  But why worry about little people?

I put the question to Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth, as he was)
and he crushed me.

"You are little, Wallace, but the _Daily Mail_ is big," he said gravely.

I did not think it was a moment to remind him that Milner had not
mentioned the paper but he had mentioned me.

I was now a reporter, and, curiously enough, I had never been a
reporter before!  It is true that a war correspondent is a sort of
specialised reporter.  It is equally true that in the days of my
apprenticeship I had jotted down the emotional exchanges peculiar to
the meetings of municipal councillors.  But here was I, dropped down in
Fleet Street, a tyro amongst experts, expected to deal authoritatively
and efficiently with every phase of trouble.  For news is trouble.
Nobody wants to read about pleasant things.  Major Armstrong might be
the centre of a social life, perform good deeds and contribute to the
happiness of his fellow creatures, but until he poisoned his wife, and
tried to poison a lawyer, he had no news value.

Happily, Marlowe gave me the star jobs; that is to say, the stories
that practically supplied their own story, and required only a certain
amount of embellishment in the matter of write up.  Of shorthand I knew
nothing, and as an interviewer, but for my extraordinary memory, I
should have been a hopeless failure, for I possessed the fatal faculty
of interesting conversation, and usually after half an hour with a
victim I had not given him an opportunity of expressing a single view,
whilst I, on the other hand, had expressed many!

I once went to interview a scientist--I think it was Ray Lankester--and
at the end of about an hour's animated talk he said, with a touch of
that sardonic humour which was a characteristic of his:

"Very interesting indeed--now shall _I_ talk?"

I think it must have been largely nervousness which made me so chatty.
After one of the general elections Sir William Grantham was severely
criticised for his conduct of certain election trials, and I was sent
up to Morpeth to discover whether he intended resigning.  The old judge
received me with the greatest courtesy, and having heard my views on
the South African war, the state of Europe, the new naval programme,
the genius of Alfred Harmsworth, and the immense superiority of the
newspaper I represented over all other newspapers, Sir William
remarked, a little wearily:

"I gather you've come up here to try to discover whether I intend
resigning--I don't."

It was on this occasion that I saw at the Newcastle Assizes a great,
red-faced brute, who stood in a studied attitude of nonchalance, his
elbow on the edge of the dock, his other hand resting lightly on his
hip, and listening with a certain amount of amusement to the most
horrible story of assault that has ever been told in a court of law.
The unfortunate girl fainted twice in the course of her narrative, and
it was a sickening tale to hear.  When the evidence had been sifted and
the jury returned a verdict of "Guilty," the man still preserved his
elegant indifference, and even when Grantham addressed him in the most
scathing terms, and told him he was sending him to penal servitude for
seven years, the prisoner still smiled.  And then there arose in the
body of the court a stout woman, her face wet with tears, who turned to
the dock and wailed:

"Oh, Bill!  Oh, Bill!"

It was the prisoner's wife, and the effect of this interruption was
electrical.  His face went purple, his neck was swollen with fury, and,
shaking his fist at his unfortunate wife, he hissed:

"What do you mean by coming up here--_and showing me up_!"

My experience of crime reporting taught me a great deal about humanity
that has been very useful to me, and, alas! I have seen that indignant
prisoner in many guises, for vanity is behind four-fifths of the
murders I have reported.

It was soon after my return to London that I began to take a real and
intelligent interest in the human race.  Indeed, about this time I had
in my mind the collation of a monumental work which was to be entitled
"Motives and Expressions."  The book has never been written, although
at one time I had collected an immense amount of data and had
translated the significance of over 500 human attitudes and
expressions.  I have spent whole days watching men, how they stood, how
they moved their hands and feet, so that, seeing them from a distance,
I could almost put into words what they were saying or feeling or
thinking.  Some day a much cleverer man than I will undertake this
task, for the language of expression and gesture is universal.  For
example, an English baby of two or three years employs exactly the same
gestures as a child of the same age in the most primitive part of
Africa; and a man who is telling another that he has been badly treated
and will not endure such injustice, moves his hands, his head, his
feet, and inclines his body at a similar angle, whether he is a member
of the London Stock Exchange or a N'gombi warrior.  Mantegazza wrote a
very unsatisfactory treatise on the subject; unsatisfactory because he
was more concerned with satirising the ancient authorities on the
subject than with contributing any original observations of his own.

I think I was the first reporter to notice the fact that when a jury
comes into court to return a verdict of "Guilty" against a murderer,
they never look at the prisoner.  I once got a two minute "beat" in a
murder case by noticing this fact.  And I wonder how many doctors can
spot a man with a history of epilepsy by the peculiar shape of his
chin?  Personally, I have never seen an epileptic who had a normal
chin.  And why do men with high foreheads and deep-set eyes go bald at
an early age?

I discussed this book with Kennedy Jones and he was very interested,
until, producing a "sample" description of an abnormal face, he saw
such a striking likeness to a public man we both knew--he eventually
held a high public office--that he grew sceptical of my sincerity and I
was discouraged by his banter.  The man in question committed suicide
by taking an overdose of veronal.  He did this to escape a very serious
charge, and though the coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental
death, it was suicide beyond any question.




_Chapter X_

In those days there were three forces at Carmelite House.  The first of
these was Alfred.  I shall never forget the day I first met him.  The
setting was unique: it was his beautiful, boudoir-like office on the
first floor; a long, noble room, at which I gaped in awe.  The panelled
walls, the concealed lights, the Empire furniture, the statue of
Napoleon and the pastel portrait of Mrs. Alfred Harmsworth on an easel.
And against this background, a youthful, plumpish, smooth-faced man
with searching eyes and fair hair that was brushed over his forehead, a
glaring tie....  Vivid little fragments go to make up the picture.

He talked quickly, earnestly, convincingly.  You felt that to argue was
to invite the thunder-bolts of Jove.  He had a ready laugh and a charm
which is beyond description.  The Chief remains for me an almost sacred
personage.  I did not know him in the days of change, when disease had
gripped him and he was slipping to death.  Then I believe he was very
hard with his best friends, a tyrant who spared none.  But I knew the
normal man, the lovable "Mr. Alfred," generous to a fault.  Once he
saved me from ruin, and that is a service that I shall never forget.

The second of the triumvirate was "Mr. Harold," a taller, slimmer man,
of the officer type: shrewd, a little suspicious, a little sardonic, a
much steadier quantity than Alfred, he thought more slowly and saw much
farther.  He was not the Viscount Rothermere then, but was admitted to
be the financial genius of the House of Harmsworth.  Much of his work
lay on the business side.  One never saw him at the news conferences;
one seldom heard his suggestions put forward; but he was a power, and
he and George Sutton (now Sir George Sutton, Chairman of the
Amalgamated Press), were mainly responsible for the upbuilding of the
gigantic business which Northcliffe and his brother founded.

The third of the trio was "K.J."  Kennedy Jones was responsible for the
Harmsworths going into daily journalism.  He had persuaded them to buy
the _Evening News_, which he had turned from the wreckage of a fine
property into a handsomely paying proposition.  It was he who had laid
down the lines of the _Daily Mail_.  When I came back to London he was
at the height of his power: a difficult man to deal with, a Scotsman
without mercy for those who failed him, and the best-hated man at
Carmelite House in consequence.  Behind that hard mask of his was a
very likeable personality, but it took me quite a number of years to
sort out his pleasing qualities.

Alfred you knew at once, or thought you did.  You melted under the
geniality and kindness of him.  With Harold you were on your guard,
suspecting an understanding of your deficiencies.  With K. J. you were
in a constant sweat of apprehension.  And behind the three was George
Sutton, who, I imagined, examined every item of expense in the expense
sheet, and Marlowe, very sane, very straight, and very dependable.
There was no man more loyal to his staff, or more humane.

From the first day I saw Gwynne in his office in Adderley Street,
Capetown, until a long time after I joined the staff of the _Daily
Mail_, I was obsessed by one fear--the fear that somebody would "find
me out."  That on a fatal day an omnipotent being would confront me
and, pointing a scornful finger, would say:

"_He_ isn't a journalist!  He's a newspaper boy!  He is a slum
child--ignorant of the very elements of English grammar.  Ask him a few
questions and his sham is exposed."

Yet in my life only one man ever made me go cold with that fear of
exposure.

He was the writer of bright notes in an evening newspaper--I think it
was the _Echo_.  And he reviewed my little book of verse, "Writ in
Barracks."  And he so reviewed it that I felt that I was a hopeless
mediocrity.  I was stripped of my robes and exposed in all my skinny
nakedness.

It was a lesson to me.  I have been very careful, in criticising the
work of young people never to crush them as I was crushed.  Happily I
am rather resilient.  But I never forgot the scorn of this literary
gentleman.

What was it gave me confidence and killed the absurd
self-consciousness?  It was the comradeship of my brother
journalists--the old brotherhood that was so familiar to a soldier; the
readiness to cover up faults and forgive errors.  The working
journalist of "The Street" is the salt of the earth.

And in my early days on the _Daily Mail_ what an amazingly good staff
we had!  Charlie Hands, Lincoln Springfield, Sidney Dark, Mackenzie,
Filson Young, Frank Dilnot, W. H. Wilson, "L. G. M." (Mainland).  I was
counting up, the other day, that seven out of every nine reporters of
those days have since become London editors.

Alfred was fighting Chamberlain over the Stomach Tax.  After a little
time I was sent to Canada to discover opposition to preferential duties
on corn.  Happily, the accounts I sent were favourable to tariff
reform--"happily" because I had hardly reached Canada before Alfred
Harmsworth came to terms with Chamberlain and offered him the strongest
support.

I was quite an important person in Canada, partly, indeed mainly,
because in South Africa I had been able to show a little hospitality to
visiting Canadians.  They gave me a dinner or two, and I returned to
London with a little of my old arrogance restored.

I returned from New York on the _Majestic_ with as interesting a
collection of passengers as one could hope to meet.  Lord Denbigh and
the late Countess, Mr. Pease (afterwards Lord Gainsboro) and William
Jennings Bryan were each in his or her way educative.  Lady Denbigh was
a very sweet woman.  Her simplicity and goodness were allied to a very
large, shrewd knowledge of men and affairs.  Her brother, Hugh
Clifford, had just written an absorbing book on the Head-hunters of
Borneo.

Bryan's simplicity was of another kind.  It was the studied variety,
for he was a great actor as well as a great demagogue.  Sincerity is a
relative term.  He acted sincerity until it became his second nature.
Ever he had an instinct for unpopular but profitable causes; his views
on all non-parochial affairs were ludicrously wrong.  And yet there was
much that was likeable about him.  He stood as godfather to my boy (who
was named Bryan after him) and solemnly presented him with a volume of
Tolstoy's Essays, and me with a top-hat that William J. had found too
large for him.

The captain of the _Majestic_ was Smith, who afterwards sank in the
_Titanic_.

As I say, I came back to London rather pleased with myself, for I had
done fairly well in Canada.  Stalking into the _Daily Mail_ office on
the night of my return, I stood in a picturesque attitude by the side
of the news editor's desk.

"I'm back," I said simply.

He looked up over his glasses.  He was neither surprised nor
enthusiastic.  He did not rise and shake me warmly by the hand and give
me a welcome to the City.  Instead, he passed a slip across to me.

"There's an execution at ---- to-morrow morning.  Go down and cover it."

A novelist is allowed only within limits to stretch the long arm of
coincidence--in real life the most astonishingly unexpected things may
happen, and be accepted without question.

More than two years before, we had had a fight with De Wet in the Cape
Colony, and after it was all over I rode into the nearest town to send
off my dispatches.  As I neared the dorp, I became conscious that
somebody was shooting at me.  Little spurts of dust sprang up in the
road, and, looking round, I located on a kopje a soldier taking
deliberate aim at me.  Though I am not the best of riders, I kicked my
horse into a state of liveliness and went at a gallop towards the
assassin, and it must be said that he shot steadily until I was within
a dozen yards, when, guessing that I was British, he ceased fire and
stood up.  In a fury I asked him his name and his regiment, and then
demanded in the lurid language which I had acquired during my sojourn
in the Army, what he meant by shooting at me.

"I thought you were a Boer," he said.  "What do you want to wear a hat
like that for?"

"My friend," said I (I didn't say "my friend" but something much more
picturesque), "if you shoot people because you don't like their hats,
you'll end by being hanged!"

I threatened to report him to his colonel, but of course I didn't do
anything so unsporting, and he passed out of my mind and had been
forgotten, until that grim, grey morning when I stood outside the
condemned cell in an eastern county prison and watched the hangman lead
forth a weed of a man to his death.  And then, to my amazement.  I
recognised him as the soldier of the kopje!  Later, in the Governor's
room, when I signed the death certificate or whatever the document is
one signs, I saw his name, and all doubt was set at rest.

Of all the executions I have seen, that one remains with me for another
reason: the parson lost his place in the book half-way between the
condemned cell and the scaffold, and we had to stand for an eternity,
it seemed, whilst he found it again.

Ugh! those executions!  The crash of the trap as it fell.  The hangman
with his hand out steadying the rope; the dangling figure curved like a
bow that swung at its end.  A ghastly thing but most business-like, and
all over before you really begin to feel rattled.

My first English execution is memorable for another reason--it was the
cause of a most remarkable story-dream.

There is a literature of dreams, and one has read and heard much of
their significance.  But I wonder if my own experience can be
paralleled?  The dream occurred a few nights after this execution.  I
dreamt a dream, which was a story complete from start to finish, and
was, moreover, a most striking parable.

I have related it many times to my friends, and, generally speaking,
they have not believed me, the only persons who ever accepted (or
appeared to accept) my assurance that I had not made up this yarn being
Michael Arlen and Dulac, that wonder artist.  Yet in truth every detail
of the dream-story was as I relate it.

I dreamt I was walking on the parapet of heaven.  The parapet of heaven
was rather like the "parade" of a small seaside town.

There was a wall, a strip of pavement, and a road running parallel.
Leaning over the wall and looking down into a void in which, through
mists and dimly, one saw a pale green world turning, were a number of
old saints.  Their robes were rather grimy and ragged, and generally
they bore a happy but neglected appearance.  With their elbows on the
parapet they gazed abstractedly at the world below, and they were
smoking short clay pipes; from the rank aroma that came to my nostrils
I guessed they were smoking shag.

Presently I saw another and older saint come shuffling in his sandalled
feet across the roadway; under one arm he held an immense mortar and in
his hand he carried a large porcelain pestle.  The abstracted saints
scarcely noticed him till he sat down on the kerb, filled his pipe
carefully and lit it, and then, depositing the mortar between his feet,
took from his robes a large blue diamond that sparkled dazzlingly in
the sunlight.

This he put at the bottom of his mortar, and hammered at the diamond
until it was crushed into small pieces.  Hour after hour he ground away
until all that was left of the gem was a mass of white powder.  From
time to time the saints on the parapet turned their heads and watched
him.

When he had finished he laid down the pestle, and, picking up the
mortar, deposited it upon the flat top of the parapet.  Each of the old
saints took a handful of the powder and threw it into space, and,
leaning over, I saw the dust of it, like an iridescent cloud, sinking
out of sight.  And as I looked, the world came nearer, and I saw the
dust settling on the face of it.  And I saw human men searching, as
distinctly as though I were standing by their side.  Presently one
human found a speck, and his frenzied shouts brought hundreds and
thousands of other humans to him, and they put the speck of dust in a
large golden box and they built a church around it.

And in another part of the earth another speck was found, and those who
discovered it erected a university, masses of red buildings and spires
and temples, in honour of its discovery.  Where a third speck was found
by a searcher a hospital was erected, and a new science grew into
being.  And this thing went on day after day, year after year, it
seemed, for time had no dimension, and as I looked, centuries passed in
a flash.  But every time a speck was discovered and a church or a
synagogue was built about it, the old saints roared with laughter until
the tears rolled down their lined faces.

"What is the joke?" I asked one of the saintly men, and as he dried his
eyes he explained.

"You saw yon diamond old Harry was grinding?  Well, that is THE TRUTH.
You saw him grind it up into fine dust?"

"I saw that," I replied, "but what is the joke?"

"The joke!"

He was convulsed with laughter and could not speak for a long time, and
then he said:

"This is the joke--every man on earth who finds a speck thinks he has
the whole!"

I have never told the story in print before.  I put it now without
expecting that my assurance of its authenticity will be universally
accepted.  But that is the dream, almost line for line, word for word,
as it was dreamt.  It had a profound effect upon my philosophy, shifted
all my angles, and, as I believe, brought me nearer to an understanding
of the larger tolerance than most unlettered men have reached.

Some time after this I met young Billington, the executioner, and asked
him if his grisly job gave him dreams.  He told me it kept him awake
but did not produce anything phenomenal in the shape of nightmares.
His father, who was a more conscientious man, was undisturbed by his
horrible experiences.  One day a friend of his committed a murder, was
duly tried and sentenced to death.  Old Billington was taken ill just
about this time; he was in truth sick unto death; but the rumour
reached him that people were saying he was shamming, so that he should
not have the misery of hanging a friend.  It needed only this to
stimulate the sick man.  He rose from his bed, went to Strangways Jail,
hanged his sometime friend, and came home to die.

Ellis, the most taciturn of all the hangmen, was terribly worried over
some of his "jobs."  I was in a provincial jail the other day, talking
to the chief warder, and the subject of hangmen arose.  He had some
interesting views.

"Hangmen are not what they used to be," he said, shaking his head
sorrowfully.  "In the old days, when a hangman came into the jail, all
he wanted for breakfast was a glass of beer and a bit of bread and
cheese.  Nowadays they want caviare and peaches!"

He told me that the hangman who had officiated at the execution which
was immortalised in Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol" had
protested to the Home Office against the suggestion that he wore
"gardener's gloves" on that occasion--a rather amusing sidelight on
literary history.

One of the people to whom the story of the dream was told was Bryan.

"Very interesting," he said; but then he had not listened.  Bryan never
listened except in matters affecting his own private affairs.  He had
gone marvellously through life without learning from human experience.
The sum of his knowledge was added together from written theories.  He
had a passionate faith in other people's unpopular views and made them
his own.  He told me navely enough that he believed in the sour-milk
theory for prolonging life, until "everybody began to drink sour milk
and I just quit"!

Alfred Harmsworth asked me to bring him down to Sutton Court, and I
conducted the big American into Surrey.  K.J. was there and Max
Pemberton, and when in all gravity K.J. asked the silver-tongued orator
of Nevada to make a speech, Bryan instantly obliged!  I think it was on
the silver question that he grew so thunderously eloquent, and I shall
never forget that fantastic situation when Bryan in his innocence
"showed off" before the smallest audience he had ever addressed.

Bryan was especially friendly to me, and it was when I dined with him a
few days after the visit that in all solemnity he presented me with his
useless top-hat.  I kept it for years, and where it went eventually I
cannot trace.  I have just taken down from the shelf the little volume
of Tolstoy's letters and essays which he presented through me to my
son.  Alas, the leaves are mainly uncut!

"I shall one day be President of the United States," he told me, "and
on that day wars will cease."

As showing his extraordinary, almost incredible, innocence, I was one
day telling him, at his request, about the fighting strength of the
British Navy.  It was on the _Majestic_ and the subject arose from the
fact that we had just passed a British battleship.  On the back of a
menu card I drew a picture of a torpedo and described as best I could
how it worked.

"How large is it?" he asked, and when I told him he gasped.

"Do you ever think," he demanded, "of the poor fellow who has to sit
inside and work it?"

I told Lord Denbigh: he was amused, but thought I was lying.

Bryan had an idea of starting a newspaper in London on the lines of one
which he was running in Nebraska--a sort of right-all journal which
would ensure peace and happiness for all mankind; but Alfred smiled it
out of existence.




_Chapter XI_

Work was not all Bryan and Sutton Court, however.  Mine disasters,
royal processions, important funerals, religious troubles, riots in
France, murders, mysterious disappearances, a procession of trouble ...
the special correspondent's job is a wonderful school for the budding
novelist.

I became quite an expert on Spanish affairs; went to Madrid half a
dozen times and to Morocco as many.  In South Africa I had had a bad
fall from a horse, and to-day I would not mount the meekest charger for
a hundred pounds.  I overcame my nervousness in Morocco to ride out to
meet Raisuli the brigand, and as luck would have it, as I rode through
the Sok, the horse slipped and I fell between the weedy animal and an
old wall.  An aged Jew ran out of the bazaar and gave me help.
Incidentally he paid me a real left-handed compliment.

"You fell off because of the saddle," he explained soothingly.  "I will
send a saddle to your hotel from which you cannot fall."

Thinking it was something new in Moor inventions, I gave him an order
for this prince of saddles, and that afternoon there arrived at my
hotel--a pair of boots!

One trip to Morocco was remarkable.  You will remember that during the
Russo-Japanese War the Russian fleet, passing through the North Bank,
fired upon and destroyed some English trawlers.  This act of
nervousness on the part of Rodjetvenski created an immense sensation
and nearly led to a very bad international situation.

The Russian fleet was to coal at Vigo, and I was sent post-haste to
that port, there to gather, as best I could, particulars from the
Russian point of view.  The day I reached Vigo the fleet came in, and I
had to wait till night before one of my scouts brought me news that a
couple of Russian petty officers had come secretly ashore and were
carousing at a house of ill-repute.

To this house I repaired, and found, surrounded by ladies curiously
attired, two rather drunken sailors, one of whom spoke English.  From
him I had a good story of the panic that had seized the Russian ships,
and this I wired to London.  I did not wait for the fleet to sail, but
hurried back from Madrid to Algeciras and thence, by way of Gibraltar,
to Tangier, in time to see the fleet arrive and witness the reception
of the admiral in his gold-laced uniform.  I learnt only one thing of
importance, namely, that the two men who had informed me about the
events in the North Sea (the non-English-speaking Russian had prompted
the other) had been detected and had been hanged from the yard-arm
between Vigo and Tangier.

Algeciras and Gibraltar were like home towns to me, and when, after the
Agadir incident, the Powers called a conference of their
representatives to meet at that beautiful little port, I was sent down
to represent my paper.

It was the weirdest conference I have ever attended.  Here we had the
first hint of the coming of the war that was in 1914 to devastate
Europe.  At the moment neither France nor Germany could afford to go to
war--France had not yet re-armed her artillery; Germany, for quite
another reason, was unprepared for a long conflict; and the Algeciras
Conference was chiefly engaged in face-saving, and ostensibly occupied
in the task of defining spheres of influence in Morocco.

At the most tense stages of the meetings, when the French and Germans
seemed irreconcilable, the King of Italy made an effort to bring the
great protagonists together.  We knew that he had cabled to Visconti
Visconti, instructing him to find a middle way, and all day long there
was a coming and going of the harassed Italian minister, now visiting
the French, now the German, followed by a small army of correspondents
waiting for the result of this attempt at reconciliation.  I waited
too--near the telegraph office at the hotel.

It was eleven o'clock that night when the Italian secretary brought a
huge wad of telegraph forms into the office and passed them to the
clerk.  They were in code, of course, but I didn't need to read them: I
sent a wire to my newspaper saying that the attempt on the part of the
Italians to smooth matters over had been a failure.  I had no other
information than a glimpse of that thick pile of message forms, but I
argued this way: if the Italian minister had succeeded, he would have
first sent a short and jubilant wire to his master to announce his
success.  No short wire went to Italy.  The long message, I guessed,
was an explanation--and one only explains failures.

As it proved, I was right, but the statement made by poor Jules
Hedeman, of the _Matin_ (and very hotly made the following morning),
that I had obtained a copy of the dispatch and in some mysterious
manner decoded it, was of course all moonshine.  Poor Hedeman!  He died
a hero's death before Verdun.

I shall remember Madrid for the royal wedding.  I had been sent down to
cover this interesting event, and started well by inviting certain
important telegraph operators to dinner at the Caf Fornos.  It is
wise, of course, to make friends with ministers of state and
ambassadors, but the special correspondent whose reputation rests upon
getting news quickly and dispatching it even more quickly, doesn't know
his job unless he clears all the avenues to his editor.

To write the story from the inside of the church and get it off was a
tedious business.  A day before the wedding I went into the little
church where the ceremony was to be performed, made a brief word sketch
of its architecture, examined the service thoroughly, roughed out and
then wrote the account of the ceremony, leaving blank spaces in which
unforeseen details might be filled.

I sent the local correspondent into the church to watch, and waited for
him to come out, which he did before the royal party left, and together
we checked over the account which was already written.  As it happened,
there were only two or three details to fix in, and those I did sitting
in the roadway, to the wonder of thousands of curious spectators,
writing in the missing details with a pencil as he dictated them.

My pass allowed me to walk along the line of procession.  I made my way
back to the Puerta del Sol, handed in the cable, came back to the big,
sun-bathed "place" and waited the coming of the royal procession.

I was not exactly "dressed for the party."  My kit consisted of a white
shirt, a pair of grey flannel trousers, nondescript shoes and a broad
sombrero, for it was a poisonously hot day; but Spain is essentially a
democratic country, perhaps the most democratic in the world except our
own.  With my police pass tacked under my shirt, none said "nay" when I
fell in with the procession and followed it into the Calle Mayor.
Behind me somewhere (and his attention I was most anxious to avoid,
lest he inquired as to who was the scarecrow and complained of my
deshabille) rode the Prince of Wales, our present King.

Keeping behind the Coach of Respect, I footed it along the hot asphalt
roadway.  The crowd was frenzied in its joy.  Queen Ena, as we called
her--Victoria Eugenie, as she is named--looked beautiful.  The young
King Alfonso was one broad smile.  There never was a braver fellow than
Alfonso.  Nothing ever scared him.  His main recreation was driving a
motor-car at something between 70 and 90 miles an hour over the
uncertain country roads of Spain.

The Calle Mayor is a narrow thoroughfare, but at one point it widens,
and the royal coach was reaching the wider space where stands a church.
(I am not sure of this, but I have an impression of a church.)

Something made me look up.  The windows above both sides of the street
were crowded, and, as I raised my eyes, I saw a bunch of flowers
hurtling down from an upper window and caught a glimpse of a man's bare
head.  The moment I saw those flowers, my heart nearly stopped beating.
They were dropping at such a rate that there could be no question that
they concealed something heavy, something sinister....

The force of the explosion almost lifted me off my feet, and in a
second I was in the middle of a confused, screaming throng of people,
mad with fear.  I had a glimpse of dying horses, of blood lying on the
roadway, of a half-fainting queen being assisted from the carriage, her
white dress splashed with blood.  But more vivid still is the
impression of the king, as he stood up, an immovable smile on his long
face, his fingers waving encouragement to the crowd--the one calm man
in that horrible nightmare of screaming confusion.

I don't know how I managed to get back to the telegraph office, but,
quick as I was, officialdom had been quicker.  The lines were closed.
No news of any kind must go from Madrid concerning the outrage.

There was more pressing reason why none should come from me--I had no
money!  I had spent almost my last peseta on the cable describing the
wedding, and there began the queerest search that any correspondent has
ever made--a search in a strange city for money on a holiday when all
the banks were closed and Cook's was barricaded!

Lovell, who was Waring & Gillow's architect and my sheet anchor, was as
badly off as I, but I got a little from him; I borrowed some from the
Paris Hotel by leaving my watch with the hall porter, I touted the
British Lancer officers who had come to the King of Spain's wedding
whilst they were at lunch, but alas! they could help me very little,
and finally I fell on the neck of a philanthropic American of a
trustful disposition who parted with two hundred pesetas.

The only definite news was that a bomb had been thrown at the king.
Who had thrown it and why, it was impossible to discover.  The thing to
do was to send a succession of wires through to London, passing along
the most plausible of the rumours, giving London the responsibility of
sorting out and amending, from any information the office could get
from the Embassy, the obvious truths from the palpable guesses.  And
this I proceeded to do.

Though the telegraph office was closed, messages were accepted, but
those who sent them were warned that nothing about the bomb-throwing
would be allowed to pass.  Notices to this effect were posted.

I made my way round to the back of the premises, secured an entrance to
the instrument-room, and found my friends of the Caf Fornos.  They
shook their heads.  The Spanish Government, which was at least an
efficient instrument of censorship, had placed an embargo on all "bomb"
wires.  Even the Prince of Wales's message to the late King Edward had
been held up.  I was told that, when the wires were open, I could send
a few short ones at urgent rates--that is to say, at three times the
ordinary cost per word.  Then one of the clerks gave me a handful of
little red labels, one of which is stuck on each urgent message to give
it precedence over ordinary telegrams.

Sending a long wire at urgent rates was out of the question.  I had not
sufficient money.  This I explained to my Spanish friend; he shrugged
his shoulders and turned his back abruptly upon me.  At first I thought
this was an affront, but then----

I had a sheaf of telegrams in my hand.  Rapidly I stuck on every one
the magic red labels and placed them in the basket reserved for the
more important telegrams of ambassadors and ministers to their
governments.  My wires got through!  Later, when money came from
London, I called and liquidated my debt.  The first column in the
_Daily Mail_ the next morning contained a series of messages which had
been conveyed free of charge by the Spanish Government, though they
were not aware of the fact.

As soon as I had got rid of my wires, I hurried off to the house where
a colleague lived.  He was not exactly a colleague, but he was a most
important person who was writing for a most important newspaper,
affiliated at that time with the _Daily Mail_.  I found him in court
dress and slippers.  He was writing laboriously an account of the
wedding.  He looked upon my intrusion with no friendly eye.

"I suppose you know somebody's chucked a bomb at the King of Spain?"
said I, by way of excusing my presence.

He closed his eyes wearily and his white hand gesticulated towards the
door.

"My dear fellow," he said, with infinite patience, "I am in the middle
of the wedding.  Please don't bother me now."

His paper certainly contained a three-line reference to the
bomb-throwing, but it owed its origin to the indefatigable Reuter.

That night I called at the palace, with very little hope of getting in,
the more so since the Spanish press with one accord had decided that
the assassin was an Englishman.  A straw hat had been discovered in the
room from which the bomb was thrown, and in the crown was printed the
damning inscription "Made in England."  On this discovery was founded
the police theory that the miscreant was English!  When I say that it
was impossible to buy a straw hat in Madrid that did not bear a similar
label, you will be able to form a fairly just estimate of the
intelligence of the Spanish secret service at the time.

To my amazement, I was not only passed through the military cordon
which surrounded the palace, but gained admission.  I interviewed one
who was either a grandee or a court servant, and by him was afforded a
peep at the King and Queen of Spain on their wedding night.  They were
walking slowly along the picture gallery, and he was amusing her with
stories of his ancestors!

Alfonso is a sportsman--as white as any Christian in Europe.

It was discovered this same night that the man who threw the bomb was a
ne'er-do-well, named Morel, from Barcelona.  He was arrested the
following morning and shot dead the rural guard who took him, and was
in turn killed by another guard.  His body was conveyed to a little
village and carried into a bread-shop, the lower shelves cleared of
loaves waiting for sale, and here it was laid until the ambulance came
to bring him into Madrid.  He was an anarchist, but he had a physical
reason for his desperation.




_Chapter XII_

This is an appropriate moment to go back a year or two--to 1906, to be
exact.  I had realised that, whilst journalism was a splendid
profession and offered rich prizes to those who were fortunate enough
to get into the front rank, it led nowhere.  I had had a brief
experience of editing.  Alfred Harmsworth had placed me in charge of
the _Evening News_.  But it was a deadly sort of job, involving, as it
did, office work, and I am not so sure that I was a born Delane.
Anyway, I very joyously seized the first opportunity of getting out.
K.J. arranged to send me down into Macedonia, and to this end I was
instructed to get a working knowledge of French.  I did more than this:
I plunged into a study of Turkish Arabic, a study which was interrupted
by the urgent need of a special correspondent in Morocco.

What was in my mind, however, was to launch forth as a story-writer.  I
had written one or two short stories whilst I was in Cape Town, but
they were not of any account.  My best practice were my "Smithy"
articles in the _Daily Mail_, and the short history of the Russian
Tsars which ran serially in the same paper.  Collecting the "Smithys,"
I sought for a publisher, but nobody seemed anxious to put his imprint
upon my work, and in a moment of magnificent optimism I founded a
little publishing business, which was called "The Tallis Press."  It
occupied one room in Temple Chambers, and from here I issued "Smithy"
at 1s. and sold about 30,000 copies.

Emboldened by this success, I sat down to turn a short story I had
written, and which had been rejected by every magazine in London, into
a longer one.  The story was called "The Four Just Men," in which a
Minister was mysteriously killed and a prize was offered for the best
explanation of his death.  It was published at 3s. 6d.

I was determined, believing the story to be good, to make some sort of
reputation as a story-writer, even if it broke me to do so.  It broke
me all right.  I advertised in newspapers, on hoardings, on tubes and
'buses, the superlative merits of "The Four Just Men."  The result was
that, although I sold 38,000 copies, I lost 1,400!  There was, I
discovered, such a thing as over-advertising.

Lord Northcliffe came to my rescue and pulled me out of the mess I'd
got myself into.  In disgust, I sold the remaining book rights for 72
to George Newnes.  I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of
copies George Newnes have sold, but they have always been good people
to work for, and I hope they made big money out of my over-boomed
romance--which is really a very good story.  I read it again the other
day and was quite pleased with my handiwork.

At any rate I had established some sort of a name as a writer of
mystery stories, and every penny I lost was well lost.  The publishers
who had told me, with a smile and a shake of their heads: "No, thank
you, Mr. Wallace.  We don't know you as a story-writer.  We'll be glad
to take any volume dealing with your experience in Africa," were
confounded, but it took me a long time to get over the result of my
experiment in publishing.

It was whilst I was very broke, and judgments were out against me in
all directions, that a young man newly from Oxford was writing a series
of articles on "How the Poor Live."  He had done a little slumming, had
slept a night in a doss-house, and had had a morning at Covent Garden,
and it occurred to him that it would be an excellent idea if he spent
twenty-four hours as a broker's man.  His father was the proprietor of
a chain of provincial newspapers, and he himself, I believe, was fairly
wealthy.

By the oddest of chances he must choose my neighbourhood for his
broker-man exploit, and one morning I found a distress warrant levied
on my house and furniture for 93 (I hadn't ninety-three pence), and an
apologetic young man of very good address installed in my drawing-room.
When he found that I was in the same profession as himself, he wanted
to clear out.

"No, you'd better have the experience," I said, and reluctantly he
stayed.

I was quite alone in the place.  My people were away in South Africa; I
had no servants.  After we had cooked a chop for dinner, and he began
to find time hanging rather heavily on his hands, he suggested that we
should play piquet, at which, he said, he was rather more proficient
than the best man he had ever met.  It so happened that piquet was also
my game.  We started at nine o'clock playing piquet at threepence a
hundred, and finished at six o'clock in the morning.  I won sufficient
money from him to pay him out and take 60 to Kempton Park!

It was when the fortunes of the Tallis Press were at their lowest ebb
that I had a communication from a Durham schoolmaster, who had a
collection of short stories he wished to publish.  I met him and made
arrangements for their publication, and eventually they came out, but
only after a struggle.  On the day they should have been delivered I
had a printer's bill to pay, and though I am sure the kindly souls who
manufactured the book would have given me grace, I was obliged to pawn
everything I had to raise 50 to get the books in hand.  The young
author's name was Ian Hay!  Though financially it was not a successful
venture for him, the Tallis Press introduced to the world one of the
most popular authors of the day.

To revert to my "Four Just Men" publication.  I had lost all my money,
and in desperation had asked the Chief to help me out.  It was in
Madrid that I had the joyous news from him that the 1,000 would be
forthcoming.  He was rather pleased about the bomb story, but I don't
think he was very much influenced by that success.  He liked me, and I
was always a sort of favourite of his.

Following receipt of this letter, I had a wire instructing me to go to
Lisbon, and telling me that a letter was awaiting me there.  When I
reached Lisbon I found a highly confidential document from the news
editor, in which he told me that they had news an attempt was to be
made to assassinate King Carlos.  The Foreign Office knew all about it,
and incidentally so did the Lisbon Government.

I saw the king, through the good offices of a friend of an old
correspondent of mine in South Africa, a very stout, genial soul, who
pooh-poohed the idea of any immediate danger.  He knew, however, that
there was a plot against his life.  The Republican movement was an open
one, and some of the best people in Portugal were implicated.  I told
His Majesty that I would hang on for a week in case anything
interesting happened.  He seemed amused at the grim and, as it
happened, unconscious jest.

Apparently at home they were rather weary of waiting for this belated
assassination, for I had orders to proceed at once to Trondhjem, in the
north of Norway, to attend the crowning of King Haakon, a journey
involving a rush through Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Denmark and
Sweden, to the land of the midnight sun, or, if it was too far south
for the midnight sun, at least it was a land of daylight midnight.

The misguided British Government had sent a British cruiser to take
part in the coronation festivities, and part of the programme was a
firework display!  It came off, because sailors obey orders, but the
spectacle of fireworks bursting in a blue, sunlit sky was hardly
impressive.

The crowning was a homely affair, and there was present the Prince of
Wales (his present Majesty), who, like myself, was doing a lot of
travelling which he would much rather not have done, one suspects.

I had only seen King George twice in Madrid--he was one of the few
visiting royalties who did not disguise his indignation at the
slackness which made such an outrage possible.  I saw him just after
the bomb fell.  He and the Queen were most Britishly calm and
self-possessed in that moment of blind panic which followed the fall of
the bomb--and they were most unpleasantly near the scene of the outrage!

Soon after this I found myself in Narbonne.  There had been a strike of
wine-growers which had developed a little bloodily into riot and
disorder.  When I arrived in that ancient city there were cairns in the
middle of the street "to the memory of ----, murdered by the men of the
--th Regiment."

The visit is chiefly memorable because it brought me in touch with
Jaures, who was assassinated on the eve of the Great War.  The great
Socialist was practically in control of the town, and when I reached
Narbonne was issuing brassards and passes permitting pressmen to move
about at will.  He was an important little man, rather striking in
appearance and pompous in his manner.  Exactly why he should have been
issuing passes in a town practically under military government, I never
succeeded in finding out.  He was a very earnest, honest man, though
something of a firebrand.  In addition to whatever duties he was
performing, he acted as correspondent for a Parisian paper, and was
most humanly journalistic when he discovered that some of his choicest
periods had been cut by an unsympathetic sub-editor.

Another riot in France was that caused by the terrible colliery
disaster at Courriere.  There must have been something like a division
of infantry guarding the coal-pits; fights with the miners occurred
every day, and the cause of the trouble was the contention that the
French engineers had shut down the mines, which were burning, and had
left the miners to their fate, when they could with a little trouble
have saved them.  The correspondents were invited to go down one of the
still burning mines, an invitation which I did not feel inclined to
accept.  Indeed, there was only one correspondent who did go down, and
that was Albert de Courville, who was representing a London evening
newspaper.  He made the dangerous journey underground, traversing three
or four kilometres of the galleries, and from his description--there
were dead men at the very bottom of the shaft--I should say that the
miners' complaint was well justified.  Over a thousand men were left to
death, and for months afterwards the engineers went about under
military protection.

De Courville I knew from his early youth, when he was a reporter under
me on the _Evening News_.  He was, I think, the most courageous kid I
have ever known--nothing daunted him.  He went over to report the wreck
of the _Berlin_ on a stormy wintry night, leaving London in a dress
jacket and thin shoes, and did the best story of that disaster that was
received in London.  The effort nearly killed him.

The story-writing business languished.  There was not, as I had
anticipated, a passionate desire, either on the part of serial editors
or book publishers, to grab at my work.  Nobody pointed me out as a
coming author, though one of my only story-writing friends, W. Pett
Ridge, whose book "A Son of the State" had a very big influence on the
style of my early tales, never ceased to encourage me.  W. W. Jacobs
was the second of my "backers"--he was most encouraging.  In spite of
which, it was a toss up whether or not I should find another outlet for
my energies, when E. D. Morel began his storm attack upon the
Government of the Belgian Congo.  His book "Red Rubber" ran into
several editions, and Northcliffe decided that I must go out to the
Congo and see with my own eyes what was happening in the dark interior
of Africa.

The true history of that attack upon the Belgian Government, the text
of which was Belgium's inability to colonise the Congo Free State is a
secret which, in its entirety, died with E. D. Morel.  The basis of the
charge against the Congo Government was that its officials were guilty
of innumerable atrocities on the natives, and undoubtedly crimes of
mutilation and of a similar character had been committed by native
soldiers in the employ of the Congo Government.  There was missionary
support for these stories but, beyond question, there was bad blood
between the British missionaries and the Belgian officials, and we
regarded the missionary angle with a little scepticism.

They are splendid fellows, but twenty years ago they were a pretty
unequal lot.  I always remembered Mrs. Caldecott's dictum: "There are
lots of people you can pray with, but very few you can play with," and
though I very humbly acknowledge their earnestness and sincerity, there
were some one wouldn't care to have as partners in any intellectual
round game.

Very few of the missionaries spoke French, though most of them had
acquired the native tongue, and it complicated matters that the
majority of them were Protestants, whilst the religion of the Congo
Free State, if it had an official religion, was Roman Catholic.

I have nothing to say against missionaries: they treated me royally
whilst I was their guest.  But I saw no evidence of atrocities that
were not fourteen years old.  Germany coveted the Congo, and I am
perfectly satisfied in my mind that, in so far as Morel was concerned,
he was a propaganda agent working on behalf of the German Foreign
Office.  With him was Roger Casement, British Consul at Boma, a man who
in all sincerity hated England and the English, and was, moreover, a
decadent of decadents.

Nightingale had succeeded Casement when I arrived--a jolly and cheery
Englishman, handicapped by the "discoveries" of his predecessor, and
torn between anxiety to support him and the necessity for reporting
things as he found them.  Casement (who was hanged at Wandsworth during
the war for treason) was certainly in the Red Rubber swindle--swindle
in so far as it was an attempt to defame the Belgian Government in
order to bring about a conference of the Powers that would deprive
Belgium of its colony.

It says much for the prescience of Marlowe that he saw through the
agitation from the start, and was averse to my being sent to the Congo.

That trip, however, was for me one of fascinating interest.  I came
closer into contact with aboriginal tribes; I studied their lives, and
in a superficial way their language.  Brief as was my stay, I secured a
knowledge of the natives additional to the understanding I gained in
South Africa, which was invaluable.  Their folklore, customs, their
childlike systems of reasoning, and their biblical simplicity--I
absorbed the sights and sounds as blotting-paper absorbs water.  The
information I acquired made it possible for me to write, later,
considerably over a hundred stories in which natives were the principal
characters.  For this is a fact which must be remembered, that the
natives of the African hinterland, whether they are under British,
German or French rule, differ very little one from the other.

I had hardly put my foot in the country before I paid the penalty for
my temerity in appearing at sundown without mosquito-boots.  I awoke
the next morning with a swollen ankle, and fourteen days later to the
hour I went down with an attack of blackwater fever.  The missionaries
rushed me to Bongindanga, where there is rising ground; and in
connection with this visit I have a vivid recollection of a most
unlikely book--"Little Dorrit."  I have never read "Little Dorrit,"
even to this day.  I was half-way through the story, lying in a
convalescent chair under an awning, when forty-three forest natives who
came out in an iron-barked canoe to board the ship bumped our side, the
canoe capsized, and of the forty-three only two were saved.  I have the
most vivid recollection of watching these drowning people, never
dreaming that they could not swim, for the river folk are as much at
home in the water as the indigenous crocodile.  In fact I was rather
amused at their horrified faces, thinking that they were putting up a
little stunt for my amusement, since the cannibal has a great sense of
fun.  I know the page and the line where I left off reading.  I never
took up the book again.

Bongindanga and the forest around is reputedly the home of the okapi,
that shy beast which until a few years ago was regarded as mythical.
Armed with a Mannlicher rifle, I went out half a dozen times, but
though I found his spoor and once thought I saw the flicker of his
hide, I never had the luck to get a specimen.  That he is fairly common
about Bongindanga is proved by the fact that strips of his skin are
readily obtainable.  Until quite recently I had an old elephant knife,
the leather sling of which was indubitably okapi hide.  It was at this
little missionary station that I made acquaintance with the soldier ant.

Travelling up and down the coast as I did before I entered the Congo, I
met British officials and learnt from them the legends of old
administrators: of that official who had hanged three malefactors at
Grand Bassam with his own hands; of strange and sinister palavers held
in the bush; of witch doctors, jujus, fetishes; of Liberia with its
quaint Government and English-speaking negroes; of the strange slave
folk of Angola, still bought and sold for a bottle of synthetic
gin--indeed, I stored a quantity of knowledge and information which I
shall never exhaust.

I came back to England to the shock of discovering that before I left
for Africa I had libelled a naval officer, who brought a successful
action against the _Daily Mail_ and recovered 5,000 damages.  I was
entirely in the wrong.  I had sent off an account from Portsmouth of a
naval "mutiny" without being careful to verify the facts before I wrote
the story.  I think I am the only man that has ever been "fired" from
the _Daily Mail_.  All the other past members of the staff resigned.




_Chapter XIII_

I break my narrative here to deal with a matter on which I am regarded
as an authority--it is not a claim which I should advance on my own
behalf--namely, the criminal.

There are practically no books on the criminal which are in any way
helpful to those who have a scientific interest in crime.  Lombroso
only wrote one book that was worth a hoot, and, generally speaking, the
Italian school of anthropologists devoted their explorations in this
science to meaningless and deceptive measurements and tabulations.  It
may be interesting to know that the majority of murderers have
asymmetrical faces, but then so have quite a number of people who
aren't murderers.  It is a fact that one seldom sees normal features in
the dock of the Old Bailey, but an examination of the well of the court
where eminent counsel are sitting reveals the same abnormalities.

To understand the criminal you must know him and have or affect a
sympathy with him in his delinquencies.  You have to reach a stage of
confidence when he is not showing off or lying to impress you.  In fact
it is necessary that he should believe you to be criminally minded.
Criminals will talk very frankly in certain conditions.

Not many years ago a brutal murder was committed in a country town, and
it occurred to a sort of journalist who supplied sensations for a
certain newspaper that it would be a great idea if he could get a
confession as to how the murder was committed.  With the help of an
unscrupulous person who had access to the prisoner, he conveyed the
following offer.  He would pay for the man's defence, though the result
of the trial was a foregone conclusion, and in addition would supply
him with "outside" food whilst he was awaiting trial, if he would
smuggle out the story of the deed.

The murderer, a man of low mentality, agreed.  The story of the murder
was set out piecemeal, and in return counsel was briefed for the
defence.

On the day of the trial the horror-hunter had the biggest and most
sensational story ever published, and he only had to wait for the
verdict to release the confession.  But so eloquent was the counsel
that the man was acquitted!  To-day, in a provincial newspaper office,
there exists an unusable murder confession, whilst the scoundrel who
committed the murder is at large--I saw him near Marble Arch about two
years ago!

Parallel with the events which I have recorded ran rather an
interesting acquaintance with the criminal classes.  Only during my
Army life did I lose touch with these, but during the period of my
adolescence, until my enlistment, and from 1902 onwards, I have met,
and to some extent studied, the law-breaker, and have perhaps a better
acquaintance with him than any save the "higher command" at Scotland
Yard.

There are, roughly speaking, three types of criminals:

(1) Criminals through opportunity.

(2) Criminals through real or imaginary necessity.

(3) Criminals through deliberate intention.

The "good time" motive largely operates with the first two classes;
that is to say, people commit criminal acts with the idea of getting
money to enjoy themselves.  To the second category belong most murders,
and it may be noted that very few who come under the first or second
headings are criminals in the strictest sense of the word.

To the first belong the pilferers, the people who steal stamps, open
letters, and extract their contents, thieve whilst acting as caretakers
or in positions of trust.  In the second class are those who either
seize or make opportunity, with the idea of having a good time.

The first and second classes are peculiar in that the people so
classified never imagine that their offences will be detected.  They
are, as a rule, "safe" stealers; they never suppose or prepare for
detection.  They have complete faith that the cleverness with which the
offence is committed, the absence of all observation, the certainty
that suspicion will be distributed over a wide area, affords them the
minimum amount of danger.  That is one of the reasons why I count most
murderers in this category.  Men of the Crippen, Seddon, Armstrong
type--that is to say, men who are above the average in the matter of
education and worldly knowledge--meet inquiry with the greatest
self-confidence.  They are conscious of their intellectual superiority
to those whose business it is to bring them to justice or who will be
in charge of the investigations, should they ever be made.

Swindlers on the grand scale have the same mental attitude.  But, as I
say, these men are not criminals in the strict sense.  They have not
spent their lives in criminal practices.  Only about 10 per cent. of
convicted murderers have any previous convictions, and the majority of
the 90 per cent. are men and women who have lived fairly blameless
lives except for the offences with which they are charged.

My first acquaintance with the criminal began in Canning Town, in the
Star Music Hall.  Here I met two young men who, according to their own
account, made a fairly good living out of stealing tills from small
tradesmen's shops.  They asked me if I would join them: they wanted a
third member, for they had ambitious plans, which embraced a series of
West End robberies.  I was to be supplied with swell clobber, and was
to "smoodge" various lady cashiers.  This offer was made after my third
meeting with them.  The whole thing was discussed in quite a
businesslike way.  They bore me no malice when I rejected their offer.

I was curious enough to make a call at the establishment which had been
singled out for attack, to look upon the young lady who was to be
"smoodged" (in other words, to whom I was to pay flattering
attentions).  She was a girl of fifteen, and I understood why one of my
youthful age had been chosen.  Whilst I was still in Canning Town the
robbery was committed, and both men arrested.  Years afterwards I saw
one of them sentenced to death at the Old Bailey for murdering an old
woman.

Soon after this, and I think (I am not sure) as a result of this
acquaintance, I had the confidence of a leading ladder larcenist, whose
home was also in Canning Town.  He worked three-handed, and was the
best artisan at his game.  The ladder larcenist has lately been
glorified with the title of "cat-burglar," and there are quite a number
of innocent people who believe that this form of crime is something
that has grown out of the war.  The ladder man's _modus operandi_ is
simple.  He and two of his confederates watch a country house, and when
the family are at dinner he erects a convenient ladder to one of the
bedroom windows, shins up, collects all that he can find, after locking
the bedroom door to secure himself from observation, and beats a hasty
retreat.

None of the ladder larcenists I have met was a burglar in the strict
sense of the word.  It is a curious fact that burglars generally work
from the ground floor, and the ladder larcenist does his job on the
first story.

Most of the criminals by intention are specialists at their own job.
There may be isolated instances where ladder men are pickpockets, but
they have never come under my observation.  The gang that goes "on the
whizz" (pocket-picking) do little else until they become too old to run
or too clumsy to dip.  They work in gangs of two or three, and usually
one of these is a "minder," whose job is to maltreat the man or woman
who discovers her loss and to hinder pursuit.

Most pickpockets on detection assume what they fondly believe to be the
diction and style of a gentleman.  Their indignation is impressive.
They talk about their solicitors and hint darkly at actions for false
imprisonment.  Bill H., who is an all-round criminal and an exception
to the general rule, for he is both a pickpocket, burglar and a luggage
thief, once took the watch of an officer as he was riding by his side
along Whitehall.  Rising to make his exit, the loss was discovered; the
bus was stopped and a police-constable summoned.  Bill's hauteur and
wrath so impressed the policeman that he nearly let him go, but at last
he took him off to Cannon Row Police Station, which is near, and Bill
was searched.  Nothing was found on him, and for an excellent reason.
In a second when he was free from observation he slipped the watch
between his soft collar and his throat; but it was a noisily-ticking
watch, and Bill had to talk all the time for fear the "busy" heard this
guilty sound.  He was known, of course, at the station, and was put
into the cells as a suspected person; and although the watch was passed
out of the cell, he was eventually convicted.

William is a type of habitual criminal, not in the strictly legal
sense, though he has had more than one lagging.  The real criminal
cannot be reformed.  He may get too old for his job, or he may possibly
get a violent bout of religion, but during the period of his mental and
physical activity it is humanly impossible that he can be directed into
thinking straight.  Prison is merely a penalty of the game which he
accepts philosophically.  Nowadays, when imprisonment is lightened by
concert parties and wireless concerts, when he is allowed association
with his kind, and can even smoke in certain prisons, the time passes
much more quickly than it used; but the effect upon his moral character
is practically _nil_.

Prison only puts the fear of God into the non-criminal classes: to the
intentional criminal it is a home from home.  There are judges who are
divided in opinion as to whether long or short sentences have the more
reformative effect, but the length of the sentence matters very little.
The only thing that will halve and quarter the number of men who are in
and out of prison year after year is the alteration of prison regime;
until prison is a really horrible place, at which the discharged
prisoner turns and shakes his fist, you will have little or no
diminution of professional crime.  A month of the treatment I received
in the military prison at Aldershot would break the stoutest heart and
make a man think three times before he preferred his old practices to
honest labour.

When I was visiting Exeter Prison some five or six years ago I saw a
man, under forty, who had been over forty times an inmate of that
establishment.  There are tramps who make a regular practice every
winter of committing an offence which will send them to jail to tide
over the colder months.  They do this in preference to going into the
workhouse--a fact on which it is not necessary to comment.

The most skilful pickpocket was a man I met in Cape Town.  He was
practically in the employment of Cape Town's biggest receiver, a
jeweller and pawnbroker in quite a large way of business.  To
illustrate his skill, he brushed against me, and in a fraction of a
second's time unfastened my watch from a leather guard and at the same
time took my pocket-book from my hip pocket.  I have never seen his
equal.  Eventually he relieved a passenger from the incoming mail boat
of about 600, and, failing to notify his "find" to his employer, was
"shopped" by that gentleman on a trumped-up charge and was sent to the
Breakwater, where he died.

Another Cape Town criminal, whose speciality was acting as middleman
between uncut diamond stealers and an Antwerp fence, was probably the
richest criminal the world has known.  I was ignorant of his
questionable calling until he made a quick get-away on an Australian
ship.  He is still alive and, if one may judge by appearances, very
prosperous.

Another I.D.B. man (illicit diamond-buying) got away from the Cape with
a brief-bag full of uncut diamonds, came to London, and hadn't the
nerve to sell them.  Eventually he had the brilliant idea of going to
Amsterdam and learning the business of diamond-cutting.  It was seven
years after he came by his ill-gotten gains that he marketed the first
of the stones, and during that time he nearly starved, with 100,000
worth of sparklers in his trunk!

Illicit diamond-buying is not one of the romantic crimes of the past.
It still goes on, and, in spite of the drastic character of the Cape
laws, will go on whilst there are diamonds to be stolen.

There is little mystery about the genesis of the continuous criminal (I
employ that word rather than "habitual," which has a peculiar legal
significance).  He is being recruited all the time from Classes (1) and
(2), and it is perfectly true that, whilst burglary and the gigantic
crimes of the novelist are not planned in prison, the young and
accidental offender, finding himself in the company of experts, is
attracted to them.  He has gone into prison perhaps feeling heartily
ashamed of himself, and depressed by a sense of his abominable conduct,
dinned into him by the attitude of his relations and friends, and by
the shame and disgrace of his conviction.  Being human, he is anxious
to find excuses for his crime.  In prison he is introduced to a class
which does not regard his act as crime at all.  He will find a
sympathetic audience in the old offenders, and gradually his angle of
judgment takes an oblique slant.  He learns that the only crime he has
committed was to be found out.  He goes out of prison a ready-made
novice for a new and a dangerous game.

They will tell you, the prison reformers, that first offenders do not
mix with the old lags.  In theory that is a fact.  In practice, unless
you have the first offenders in a separate prison, nothing will prevent
contact.

I must confess that I have never met a clever criminal.  The vast
majority are illiterate and have a bad school record.  Not a few are on
the border-line of imbecility.  Nor have I yet met a criminal who was
not as vain as a peacock over some quality of his own.  Nor have I met
a criminal who was not an unconscionable liar.  The first moral sense
that atrophies in a continuous criminal is the sense of truth; and I
think, reversing this hypothesis, you can make no mistake in saying
that any non-criminal liar you know--that is to say, a man who has not
been in the hands of the police but lies for the joy of the lying--is
capable of breaking the law, and will break the law sooner or later.
The faculty of ready lying is, in my experience, the inevitable stigma
of an ineradicable "sense" of dishonesty.  I am not speaking of
children, who are natural romancers, but of persons who are passing
through their adolescence, and I am speaking of course of what we call
unnecessary lying.

There is a type of vanity in a criminal which prevents him from
committing small offences and urges him to commit greater.  Crippen
would not steal, but he would murder his wife and pretend she had gone
away from him, rather than risk the censure of the world by running
away from her.  Seddon murdered a woman because he feared the disgrace
which would come to his suburban home if it was proved that he had
swindled her out of her savings.  Mahon was the most amazing instance
of criminal vanity.  Thorne was another--these were both murders of
vanity.

The real criminal classes, by the way, have a horror of murder, and are
the stoutest upholders of capital punishment.  I have never spoken with
an old lag who did not believe in hanging, and if you were to take a
census of any great convict establishment you would find an
overwhelming majority in favour of capital punishment.  Except for
women, of whose mentality the criminal has a very low estimate.

Just before I went to Johannesburg a murder was committed in Standerton
by the Greek steward of the officers' club.  In revenge he shot a
Jewish storekeeper who had reported him for selling tobacco out of
bond.  I was in the club on the night of the murder.  The Greek, whose
name I think was Poropulos, walked out of the mess-room in the middle
of dinner, went down to the store, shot the storekeeper dead, and came
back to the dining-room, stopping only to change his boots--an act
which brought about his undoing, for a half-tipsy subaltern detected
the change, and on his evidence the man was arrested, tried in
Johannesburg before the special court and sentenced to death.

I had a chat with Poropulos whilst he was awaiting trial.  He claimed
to be--and I heard no evidence to the contrary--an honest man, except
for this little matter of selling tobacco out of bond; and his chief
indignation was directed towards a law which intended punishing him
because he had killed "the greatest thief in the Transvaal."  Poropulos
went to the scaffold smiling, and when asked to admit his guilt
promised to do so if they would give him a cigarette.  He stood on the
trap, the rope round his neck, smoking calmly until he came to the last
half-inch of the cigarette.  Then he spat out the end.

"Were you guilty, Poropulos?" the chaplain asked him.

He looked calmly from one to the other of the group about him, and
then, with a smile:

"You can all go to hell," he said, and with that they dropped him.

Such an end was paralleled by Landru's.  After they brought Landru from
prison to the foot of the guillotine, the counsel for the defence, who
was present, embraced and kissed him.

"I have done my best for you, Landru," he said.  "Will you not tell
me--did you kill these women?"

Landru smiled.

"_Cher matre_," he said calmly, "I am going a long journey and have
only that little bit of baggage.  Let me take it with me!"

The police force of England would never be able to cope with the
criminal but for his stupidity and his habit of specialising.  Add to
this the "nose," or the police informer, who is always ready and
willing to give away his best friend for a ten-shilling note, and the
chance of the law-breaker to escape detection is a very remote one.

Between the police and the continuous criminal there is a very
excellent feeling, which almost amounts to _camaraderie_.  The other
day a detective-inspector pulled up an old offender.

"There's been a burglary in so-and-so Street," he said.  "What do you
know about it, Jim?"

The man grew red with anger.

"Why, I'm living in that district myself!" he said indignantly.  "Would
I take a liberty on your manor?"

"Manor" is the quaint term used by police and thief alike to denote a
certain area; and it is a fact that the average known criminal will
never commit a crime in the district where he lives, that being
regarded as a personal affront to the detective-inspector of the
district.

I have seen a detective stroll into a West End bar, cast a quick eye
over the company, and, beckoning one to him, say reproachfully:

"Get off my manor, Joe," and Joe, being a wise man, obeyed instantly.

There is an idea in the minds of uninformed people that the police
hound down the criminal.  They do nothing of the kind.  A detective
will go out of his way to help a man if he is trying the straight game.
There is naturally a certain amount of give and take.  The police do
not arrest every man they believe to be guilty, and a man charged with
being a suspected person, and loitering for the purpose of committing a
felony, has generally had his first warning and has only himself to
thank for the trouble in which he finds himself.

It is equally true that the police will turn a conveniently blind eye
upon mild wrongdoing; but woe betide those who, encouraged by this
tolerance, enlarge their activities.

An old criminal whom I knew when I lived in Notting Hill, and who once,
with the greatest sang-froid, took me a round of fences' shops, told me
that the longest imprisonment he had was due to his own folly.

"I was making snide half-dollars in a small way, and planting them
round Camden Town," he told me.  "A fellow from the Yard come to me and
said: 'Bill, I'm warning you.'  Of course I said I didn't know what he
was talking about and gave him a lot of madam about his interfering
with me when I was trying to earn an honest living.  They pinched me a
month later and they brought every charge in the world against me.  The
busy that went into the box at the Old Bailey couldn't say anything bad
enough about me.  They'd have hung me if they could.  If I'd taken the
warning and been pinched for something else, they'd have said how I'd
tried to get work, and have got me off with eighteen moons.  Never take
liberties!"

I have no sympathy with criminals, not even a sneaking sympathy.  They
are a little less interesting than lunatics, a little less romantic
than sewermen.  Their lives are drab and ugly, fuggy and fusty, and the
majority "go crook" only because they are too lazy or too unintelligent
to earn an honest living.  Those who possess some degree of education
and intelligence are as a rule unspeakably vile in other respects.
Moreover, they are always broke!

I call to mind six of the intelligentsia of crime who are "operating"
in London at the time of writing:

1. Card-sharp; held a commission in the pre-war army.  A bigamist, but
now has a worse record.  Heavily in debt.  Only once in the hands of
the police.

2. An overseas citizen.  Two terms of penal servitude.  Card-sharper
and confidence man.  Bad moral record.  Is at the moment wanted for
passing a dud cheque.

3. Jewel and hotel thief.  Several convictions.  Bad moral record.  Has
been convicted of "living on the earnings, etc."  Living in obscurity
to avoid creditors.

4. Luggage thief.  Suspected bigamist; several convictions.  Broke.

5. Jewel thief, confidence man and card-sharp.  (This man had a
university education.)  Traffics in dope and lives on the earnings of
women.  Has a little money.

6. Confidence man and "jargoon" seller.  Very bad moral record.
Several convictions.  Bankrupt.


There is nothing Raffles-ish about these six, and they are typical of
the remainder.

A "jargoon" is a white sapphire, usually set in a plain gold ring.  The
"operator" scrapes acquaintance with a likely victim and shows him a
genuine diamond ring which he has bought (he says) for sixty pounds.

"Diamond rings are no good to me: will you buy it?"

The victim is a little shy of buying diamond rings from chance
acquaintances.

"Take it home--show it to any jeweller you like--if it isn't worth the
money, don't buy it," says the seller, and generally the mug takes the
ring and at the first opportunity shows it to a jeweller.

"That is genuine enough," says the jeweller.  "The gold is nine carat
but the stone is worth a hundred."

Next day an appointment is kept.

"I'll buy this ring," says the innocent.

"You can have it for seventy," says the seller.

"You said sixty."

The crook shakes his head.

"I said seventy--not a penny less."

With this he takes the ring from the buyer and skilfully palms it,
substituting the "jargoon."  There is a little haggling and the ring
changes hands--the operator retiring with 60, the mug carrying off a
jargoon worth about seventeen shillings.

But surely, you say, even a tyro could distinguish a white sapphire
from a diamond?

Not even a jeweller can at a glance, because the jargoon has been
"treated."  Packed in silver sand, it has been baked in a gas oven
which gives it the brilliancy of a diamond--a brilliancy which lasts
two days.  Jargoon rings cost twenty-five shillings each in
Clerkenwell, and there used to be a master criminal in Islington who
financed the sellers and took fifty per cent. of the profits.  Without
the "fence" the average middle-grade criminal could not live.

It will be news to most people that the fence usually buys the proceeds
of a robbery before it is committed.

"I'm going to do a fur shop," says a thief to the receiver.  "I wish
you'd come along and price it."

The receiver goes to the store which is to be burgled, buys some small
article, makes a quick survey of the stock and fixes a price.  He pays
not on the proceeds of the robbery--which he may not see before it is
planted--but on the list of stolen articles published in the police
organ _Hue and Cry_.

It is exactly the same with motor-cars.  A receiver will examine a car
and price it ten minutes before the thief drives it off.  The receiver
helps the police, for he is the most unconscionable "nose," providing
his own safety is not involved, but sooner or later he himself will be
"dragged."

"If the police know that a man is a receiver, why is he not arrested at
once?" you ask.

Police work is a delicate and complicated business.  There must be, as
I have already said, a whole lot of give and take in it, and invariably
the criminal is the giver.

I am perfectly satisfied in my mind that crime would be very
considerably decreased if a new form of punishment were instituted.
There should be disciplinary prisons, where the punishment was short
and sharp; where, within the limits of humanity, a prisoner's life
should be made so unbearable that he would never risk a repetition of
his experience.  It is absurd to take an embezzling milkman and deprive
his wife and family of the support he could give them for nine months,
when you could achieve the same result by a fortnight or three weeks'
discipline.  A prisoner should never be allowed to get used to jail.
In four cases out of five the dietary and the accommodation that a
prisoner receives are superior to anything he has previously
experienced.  He is allowed the pick of a library, concerts are
organised for his amusement, visitors appointed for his entertainment.
Running by the side of the disciplinary treatment there should be
inaugurated a system of suspended sentences.  It is absurd to send to
prison to associate with criminals, say, a postman with twenty years'
service who has been detected stealing some letters.  The man's ruin is
complete before sentence is passed.  A technical conviction is all that
is necessary to complete his downfall.  There is no sense in sending
him to prison and to contact with hardened criminals.

Jail has no terror for the professional thief: it is just an inevitable
inconvenience, like the measles of childhood, to be got through as
easily as possible before the man is discharged to qualify for a
further term.  You cannot stamp out smallpox by segregating healthy
people in a lazaretto.

Before I leave the subject I will refer to one class of thief who is
exceptional in many respects from his fellows: the highly specialised
gangs who cross and re-cross the ocean a dozen times a year and make
their living by fleecing passengers at cards are in a class by
themselves.  Generally speaking, they are a respectable lot of men,
with wives and families comfortably circumstanced.  Their casualties
are very few indeed.  For some reason the ocean-going lines seldom
prosecute, and do not even employ ship's detectives to check their
activities.  These men are thrifty souls who have reduced thieving to
an exact science.  Their expenses are heavy, but they are the only
thieves I know who systematically save money and eventually retire with
a competence.  I have known a large number of these, and once, but only
once, was "caught" for 80.  I accepted the swindle philosophically,
wrote a dozen stories based upon that painful episode, and made my
experience pay me a handsome dividend.

When they come to London they are generally to be found in the best
hotels, and seldom operate in the West End.  They are well aware that
Scotland Yard knows them and, given the opportunity, will be merciless,
and they take no risk, for first and foremost they are business men.

Generally speaking, the British criminal differs from the criminal of
every other nation.  Thieving is unaccompanied by violence.  The
professional gunman is unknown, and a burglar of my acquaintance who
found his partner carrying a revolver just as they were going on a job,
broke off his enterprise to give his reckless companion a good
thrashing.  If you see in the _Hue and Cry_ an announcement that a
wanted man is "dangerous: carries firearms," you can be pretty sure
that he is not home-bred.

Flogging blotted out the garrotter, and additional and heavy sentences
for the armed burglar have made him an almost extinct species.  There
is only one effective weapon in the hands of the law for dealing with
the criminal, and that is the weapon of terrorisation.

Burglars, by the way, are a very timid class.  Their nightmare is the
vision of a householder armed with a revolver.  There is not one
burglar in a hundred who does not go through life with this horror
hanging over him.




_Chapter XIV_

The first short story I had published in London was based upon a
newspaper experience--the wreck of the American boat train at
Salisbury, which I covered.  The story was published in the now defunct
_Pall Mall Magazine_; but it was the _Windsor_ which gave me my first
real start, and A. M. Hutchinson, who still edits the magazine, who
edged me on to the map of short-story writers.

I suppose it is because I have been so interested in human beings that
most of my stories have been woven around types.  Smithy, Sanders,
Bones, Mr. Reeder, Educated Evans, are all real people to me--and were
real people before they came to me!  The technique of short-story
writing is an art not easily acquired.  I must have written a hundred
stories before I mastered the balance of it.

Curiously enough, on my flying visit to London from South Africa, I had
decided that short-story writing was to be my long suit, and I had made
up my mind to consult the highest literary authority on the subject.
In my Wesleyan days I was an assiduous reader of the _British Weekly_,
and it was to Dr. Robertson Nicoll that I determined to go.  He was to
me a very tremendous person, and with a quaking heart I wrote to him--I
think he lived in Hampstead at the time--asking for an appointment.
The appointment was granted, and with considerable trepidation I went
up to keep it, arriving half an hour before the hour fixed.  I walked
up and down outside the house to pass the time, and eventually was
admitted.  I was ushered into the drawing-room and told by his
secretary that the doctor was still in bed and that he could not see me
for half an hour.  I was left alone to bring my scattered thoughts into
order.

Looking back, I cannot understand why I was so worried about this
interview, or why I attached so much importance to the opinion he would
offer.  Perhaps it was the fear that, having read some stories which I
had sent to him when I asked for the interview, he would tell me that
story-writing was not my game, that put me into such a sweat.  Five
minutes before the half-hour had expired I tiptoed from the room and
from the house.  I never saw Dr. Robertson Nicoll after that.

My stories, particularly my short stories, were selling better, and I
was earning a steady income.  A year passed before I joined Edward
Hulton, to edit one of his periodicals.  "Young Mr. Edward" was a dying
man then, and though it was sixteen years before he actually died,
something of the gloom of death lay on him all the time I knew him.

It was an amusing association, but it did not last long.  Charles
Watney, the capable foreign editor of the _Daily Mail_, had joined the
staff of the _Standard_ and invited me to the reporters' room.
Incidentally, I found myself again in association with H. A. Gwynne,
who was now editor of this solid journal.  E. V. Knox was another
member of the reportorial staff--so was Andrew Soutar.

I remember distinctly two episodes of my service on the _Standard_.
First, King Edward's funeral, the story of which I wrote in St.
George's Chapel; the second, when sent down to Ascot to "cover the
Royal Hunt Cup," with a free ticket and a golden sovereign for
expenses.  I came back with 1,100--so elated by my success as a
gambler that I forgot my duty as a journalist, and it was not till
nearly midnight when, drinking champagne and stout at the Press Club, I
was urgently reminded that I had a column to write.

Watney had already planned the launching of the ill-fated _Evening
Times_, and to the staff of this I was appointed--as racing editor!
Racing has always been a hobby of mine, and in whatever other respect
we may have failed on the _Evening Times_, I think I may claim without
immodesty that the racing feature was a success.

The paper was financed by two well-known Members of Parliament, one of
whom was Sir Samuel Scott.  John Cowley from the _Daily Mail_ was
manager, and eventually sank the greater portion of his own private
fortune in an heroic attempt to keep the paper going.  Mr.
Mallaby-Deeley was also associated with the _Evening Times_ for a
while, but he took very little active part in its management, nor did
he make himself responsible for its continuance.

The richer of the two men decided at a very awkward moment to withdraw
financial support, and since Sir Samuel could not be expected to bear
the burden of carrying the paper to success single-handed, it was
decided to hand over the paper to the staff.

What really killed the _Evening Times_ was the Crippen "confession."
We had established communication with one who had access to Crippen,
then under sentence of death for the murder of Belle Elmore.  I do not
doubt for one moment that the confession was actually made to this man.
We paid 500 for the privilege of printing Crippen's own story,
conveyed at third hand, and sold a million copies of the edition in
which it was printed.  We were hardly on the streets before the
Governor of Pentonville denied that Crippen had made any statement
whatever, and this was supported at the inquest.

That Crippen did admit his guilt and describe the circumstances of the
crime to our informant there is no doubt whatever.  We were in the
position that we could not explain the source of our information, and
for months we struggled on under the shadow of the discredit which came
to us.  With the reconstruction of the company all salaries were cut,
and most of us volunteered to work to save the _Evening Times_ for a
wage at which the average labourer would turn up his nose.  My salary
was 3 a week.

We struggled on month after month, Cowley finding the money.  No man in
his senses could face the inevitable ruin which would follow the
continuance of publication, and one sad day we closed down.  I do not
know how much John Cowley lost, but if ever I am asked to name the
bravest deed I ever saw, I shall endeavour to describe Cowley with a
cheque-book and a fountain pen striving to hold the fort.

The Sidney Street siege gave us a lift.  I came to work every morning
at half-past four, and on arriving at the office learnt of the exciting
events which were occurring in the East End.  I rushed through my
work--in my agitation picking five winners out of the six races that
were to be decided that day--and, taking a cab, dashed off to Sidney
Street.  It was rather like old times, though queerly unreal, listening
to the klik-klok of rifles in that dingy thoroughfare.  By good luck I
got into a house almost opposite that where the murderers were at bay,
and could, I think, have got one of them if I had had a rifle, for he
showed himself for a second at the window.

I left the siege to go to a racing meeting, and returned at night to
find the house where the dead murderers lay a smoking ruin.

I have only the faintest memory of how the following two years were
filled.  It was a period of struggle, but not of any great stress.  I
have an idea that I had rather a cheery time.  It was Kennedy Jones who
came to my rescue and gave me the assistant-editorship of _Town
Topics_, a little weekly that he had financed for Arthur Binstead, or,
as everybody knew him, "Pitcher."  "Pitcher" had been on the _Sporting
Times_, and when John Corlett sold the paper, "Pitcher" and his
colleagues, Colonel Newnham Davis, J. H. Booth and Horace Lennard,
decided to start, with K.J.'s assistance, a tolerable imitation of the
_Pink 'Un_.  Even K.J.'s newspaper genius could not make the paper go,
and I was called in as a director of editorial affairs, without, I
believe, greatly adding to the circulation.

"Pitcher" belonged to the old school of journalists, and was a splendid
wit and a man of great geniality.  The world's centre for him was
Romano's.  One day he was going down the stairs of the _Town Topics_
office and saw the office boy coming up, bearing on a plate a glass of
milk and a few biscuits.  "Pitcher" stared at the sight.

"Where is that going?" he asked.

"It's for Mr. Wallace," said the boy.

"Pitcher" gasped.

"Isn't he _weaned_?" he demanded.

"Pitcher," Newnham Davis, that gallant old gentleman who died in
harness, and Horace Lennard have passed: three good men who did
excellent work and were well loved in Fleet Street.

My salary was 10 a week when the European War broke on the world, and
all my cherished plans were knocked sideways.  K.J. cut our salaries in
half.  Other newspapers to which I was contributing either closed down
or restricted the size of their papers.  I say that the war "broke,"
but to me there was ample warning.  That fatal Sunday night when I read
in the late edition of the _News of the World_ the story of Serajevo
and the assassination of the heir-apparent to the Austro-Hungarian
throne, it was as clear as daylight that war was inevitable.  My
wanderings in Europe had given me some idea of what we might expect at
the first excuse for war.  The effect on me was disastrous.  Contracts
were suspended, a weekly newspaper for which I was working cut its
salaries in half, and I was well over the age limit for service.

It was at this moment that Charles Hyde (now a baronet), of the
_Birmingham Post_, decided to appoint me as military correspondent.
Kitchener's old ban still hung over me, but I was to write a daily
commentary on military events, provided that my article passed the
censor.  In the four years of war I wrote a million and a half words
for the _Birmingham Daily Post_, but although I have been credited with
having done much to keep the Midlands in good heart, I account my best
achievement in the war period to the unofficial propaganda I initiated
in the United States of America.

In the early stages of the war the possibilities of propaganda were
never discussed or considered, and indeed I did not call my efforts by
any such pretentious title.

I am a diligent reader of American newspapers, and I saw that the only
soldier who got any kind of appreciation in the American press was the
French soldier.  Poor Tommy was never mentioned.  And this, very
naturally, touched me on the raw--for the "poor blinking infantry" are
the wonder of the world.  I wrote some stories about Tommies and sent
them out to America, telling my agent that I didn't want paying for
them so long as they were published.

This was a foolish thing to do.  It stamped the stories as propaganda.

I tried again--changed the style of the stories and had two accepted
and paid for: "The Greater Battle" and "The Straightened Angle."
Others did not "get past," as they say.

I was certain in my mind that the only medium to show our people in a
fair light was the short story, and at last, thank Heaven, I discovered
a vehicle.  My idea was to convey to America a picture of English
soldiers and English effort which would create an atmosphere of
sympathy, if not for our cause, for the men who were fighting our
battles.  I never worked so hard in all my life to bring my stories to
perfection.

It was a series called "Tam of the Scouts" which was most effective.
This dealt with a little Scottish mechanic who rose to be an officer in
the Royal Flying Corps, and the story of his exploits ran without
interruption for two years in _Everybody's Magazine_.  "Tam Clubs" were
formed in many of the big cities, and I believe he even enjoyed the
distinction of having a horse named after him!

I confess that I did not even know that there was such a thing as a
Propaganda Department fostered by the British Government, and even if I
had known, it is doubtful whether I should have approached the bigwigs
of Whitehall, for what help could they possibly have given to me?  It
was sufficient satisfaction to me to know that my independent efforts
were going into 500,000 American homes every month.  When I was in New
York four years ago, an American editor told me that Tam was the
inspirer of the American Flying Corps spirit, and although I would not
endorse this extravagant estimate, I feel that I did something to put a
branch of the British fighting services "on the map" in the United
States.

There is no end to any story, but here I will make the end of mine; for
an autobiography should conclude at some decent interval from To-day.
I shall be broke again and rich again; but broke or rich, I shall, if
the Lord keeps me in good health, be grateful and happy for every new
experience, for every novel aspect which the slow-moving circle of life
presents to me.  I have made many big friends and provoked a few little
enmities, which will clear up some day.  And I am here!  Newspaper-boy,
cabin-boy, soldier, journalist, writer--what next?  Whatever it is,
I'll bet it is interesting.




      *      *      *      *      *



  NOVELS BY EDGAR WALLACE

  _Again Sanders
  The Flying Squad
  The Double
  Again the Three Just Men
  The Forger
  The Squeaker
  The Clue of the Twisted Candle
  The Feathered Serpent
  Terror Keep
  The Ringer
  The Traitor's Gate
  The Northing Tramp
  The Brigand
  The Joker
  The Square Emerald
  The Black Abbot
  Sanders
  The Door with Seven Locks
  Penelope of the "Polyantha"
  The Day of Uniting
  We Shall See
  The Yellow Snake
  The Four Just Men
  The Terrible People
  The Three Just Men
  The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder
  The Gaunt Stranger
  The Strange Countess
  The Valley of Ghosts
  Double Dan
  The Sinister Man
  The Green Archer
  The Clue of the New Pin
  The Crimson Circle
  The Angel of Terror
  The Law of the Four Just Men_

  HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD., LONDON






[End of Edgar Wallace, by Edgar Wallace]
