Thereupon the directors engaged me for three years as managing director at a salary of a thousand pounds a year and expenses, with a proviso that if I made the paper pay in the time, I should have a fifth of the net profits and an engagement for ten years, or for life, as Kennard suggested.
At once I felt I had won. I could marry now or just go on with the work: why didn't I seek out Laura and marry her? Simply because I had seen her twice at different theatres with the same sturdy, handsome American. The last time, coming out behind her mother, he had taken hold of her bare arm and she had rewarded his lover-like gesture with that smiling gift of herself I knew so well and valued so highly. No, I was not jealous, I said to myself, but I was in no hurry to put my head in the noose. So I worked with all my might at the paper and went out in the evenings. Folkestone had taken me to Poole's, his tailor's, and I was fairly well turned out. I was not a society favorite but already excited some interest, due chiefly to Folkestone's chivalrous backing.
I don't remember exactly how I came to know Arthur Walter of The Times, but we soon became great friends and I spent half my summers at his country house near Finchampstead. Mrs. Walter, too, took me up and was very kind to me, and I came to regard the whole household with real affection. Already I could tell them stories of a London life they knew little or nothing about, the life of the coulisses.
Sir Charles Dilke I got to know intimately through the paper and I may as well tell the story here, for he made me know Chamberlain and the Radical party with fruitful consequences.
A Mr. Crawford, f a man of some position, suddenly filed a petition for divorce and named the Radical baronet, Sir Charles Dilke, as co-respondent.
To my astonishment, the mere accusation was like an earthquake: London talked of nothing else. Folkestone gave me the aristocratic view. "Dilke," he said, "was known as a loose fish. The scandal would ruin him with his constituents, but nobody in society would think any the worse of him." I saw the chance of a journalistic sensation, so I wrote to Dilke at once, saying that if I could do him any good, the Evening News would help him to put his case properly before the public. At once he replied, begging me to come to see him in his house in Sloane Street. He met me there next morning with outstretched hands. "Your belief in my innocence," he began, "has been the greatest encouragement to me."
"Good God!" I cried. "Innocent! Like everyone else I thought you guilty; it's the politician I came to help, not the innocent."
At once he smiled, "We can talk then without affectation," and we did. I soon discovered that he took the whole thing far more seriously than I did or than Lord Folkestone. "A verdict against me means rum to my career in Parliament," he declared.
"But the great Duke of Wellington," I objected, "wrote to Fanny who threatened to publish his letters: 'Dear Fanny, publish and be damned.'"
"An aristocratic society then," replied Dilke, "rather enjoyed a scandal; today the middle classes rule, and adultery to them is as bad as murder."
"Let's make fun of the whole thing," I proposed, "and so lighten the consequences."
"Very kind of you," replied Dilke. "It may help, but it won't save me."
In the next weeks I got to know Dilke well. He was one of the few men I met in London who knew French thoroughly and could speak it as a Frenchman with fluency and a perfect accent, but in spite of this advantage, he knew very little of French literature or art. He lived in politics, and though hardworking, he was not well read, even in English, and anything but brilliant.
From time to time I met at his house all sorts of people like Jusserand, now French ambassador at Washington, and Harold Frederic, the brilliant American journalist and writer, and Edward Grey, Dilke's understudy as a minister for foreign affairs; Rhoda Broughton, too, the novelist and a host of others. For Dilke was a rich man with many intellectual interests and a tinge as I have said, of French culture. He had inherited not only the Athenaeum journal from his father, but also miniatures of Keats that I esteemed more highly. This admiration of mine astonished him and he was good enough to offer me a beautiful specimen. "If you would let me give you something for it-" I hesitated.
"What would it be worth?" he asked.
"I'd give you a hundred pounds willingly," I replied.
"Is it worth as much as that?" he exclaimed.
"If I had it, I'd not take a thousand for it," I cried.
"Really!" he said, but no longer pressed it on me, for Dilke was anything but generous.
The great question for Dilke in the divorce case was, should he go into the witness box and deny the adultery or not. He never discussed it with me till the trial was on; then at noon one day he called at my office and put the matter before me. Naturally I told him that he must go into the box and deny it. Any gentleman would have to do that for a lady, even if the liaison had been so notorious that his denial would only cause a smile. Thereupon Dilke told me that he had talked the matter over with Joseph Chamberlain in a room in the Law Courts and that Chamberlain had insisted that he mustn't go into the box.
"Dilke," I cried, "it is surely worse than foolish to go to your rival for advice.
Chamberlain and Dilke are the two Radical leaders. Fancy Dilke accepting Chamberlain's counsel." Dilke hemmed and hawed and beat about the bush, but at last confessed.
"You see," he said, "my name was often coupled with the name of Mrs.
Crawford's mother when I was young in London, and people might be horrified at the idea that I would corrupt my own daughter."
"Good God!" I cried. "That does complicate the affair. But no English judge would allow any question, even in cross-examination, that would tend to discover such a pot of roses."
"It doesn't horrify you?" asked Dilke. "I thought Chamberlain would have a fit when I told him."
"I wouldn't have told him," I said. "But do you think she is your daughter? Is there any likeness, or attraction?"
"No nothing," he replied. "The Greeks, you know, thought nothing of incest.
Some indeed say that the highest type of Greek beauty was evolved through the father going with the daughter, the brother with the sister-"
"We can discuss that another time," I said, "and I would like to, because I have some strange facts on it. The consanguinity is supposed to produce greater beauty, but certainly less strength and less intellect; but now I can only beg you to go into the box. If you don't, Stead and the other Radical journalists will get after you and declare that your abstention is a proof of your guilt. It is probable, too, that the judge will express the same opinion and then the fat would be in the fire. The nonconformist conscience would get on its hind legs and howl."
Everyone remembers that in spite of my good advice, which I urged with all my power, Dilke funked the witness box, let the case go by default against him, and the judge said that his abstention must be taken as a confession:
"Every gentleman would repel such an accusation with horror." Yet this righteous judge had heard Mrs. Crawford in the witness box declare that Dilke insisted on bringing a Mrs. Rogerson to their bed when she was in it,
"And Mrs. Rogerson," she added, "was an old woman and Dilke's old flame!"
British prudery pretended not to know what this second string to Dilke's bow could possibly mean, but in the best class of society the matter was fully discussed.
While I was defending Dilke as well as I could, John Corlett of the Pink 'Un', the London paper distinguished for its free speech, came to me and said, "You know Dilke and all about this case of Crawford." I admitted that I knew a good deal about it. "Can't you do something funny on it for me? You know we can sail near the wind, but mustn't make the sails shiver."