An idea came into my head and I gave it to Corlett. "Put in any comment about the case you like," I said, "and then sketch a little palette bed in the simplest of small bedrooms, because that is where Dilke assures me that he sleeps. Put two pillows on the bolster and leave the sketch for the first week with the caption, 'An Exact Reproduction of Sir Charles Dilke's Bedroom!'"
"That won't set the Thames on fire," said Corlett. "Still, the idea has a little piquancy."
"But think what you would be able to do next week," I said, "when you put in great letters that you made one mistake in the picture of Dilke's bedroom last week, that you are happy to be able to rectify it this week. Then reproduce the picture again exactly, putting, however, three pillows on the bolster instead of two."
"I will send you fifty quid for that," said Corlett. "That's the best thing I've heard for a h-1 of a while." And he kept his word. I always liked John Corlett. There was no nonsense about him, and he was a first-rate paymaster.
One quality Sir Charles Dilke had of greatness, a quality rare even in England and almost unknown among American politicians: he judged men with astounding impartiality. He knew the House of Commons better than anyone I ever met, with the solitary exception of Lord Hartington, and I was a fairly good judge of this accomplishment, for from the moment I became editor of the Evening News, I began to go to the House of Commons three or four times a week and listen to all the debates from the "Distinguished Strangers' Gallery."
There and in the lobbies I met all sorts and conditions of men from Captain O'Shea and Biggar to Mr. Parnell and Count Herbert Bismarck.
One incident about Dilke I must not forget to relate. As soon as the result of his trial was made known, Mrs. Mark Pattison, the widow of the famous rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, cabled to him from India, "I believe in your complete innocence and am returning to marry you at once."
This recalls a story that was hatched in Oxford, I believe, about Mark Pattison, the famous Grecian and his pretty young blonde wife, who had surrounded herself with a band of young Fellows and scholars, which seemed at variance with the pedantic tone of the elderly head. One day an old friend found Pattison walking in the college garden, lost in thought. "I hope I'm not interrupting," he said, after vainly trying to interest the Rector.
"No, no! my dear fellow," replied Pattison, "but I have ground for thought. My wife tells me that she thinks she's enceinte," and he pursed out his lips in selfsatisfaction.
"Good God." cried the friend, "whom do you suspect?"
When we read Mrs. Pattison's cable in the morning paper, Folkestone exclaimed, "Really, I begin to feel sorry for Dilke; his sins are finding him out," and Harold Frederic's word was much the same: "A bos bleu on a rake will be something novel even in London."
I never liked Lady Dilke. She was a woman of forty-odd when I first met her, an ordinary stout, short blonde with brown hair, blue eyes, commonplace features and complexion, who was always a pedant-indeed the only bluestocking I ever met in England. I may give one typical instance of her pedantry and so leave her to rest. When I had made some reputation as a Shakespeare scholar and had declined her invitations for years and years, she wrote to me once, telling me that the French diplomat, M. Jusserand, was a great Shakespearean authority whom I really ought to meet; and "who wishes to meet you," she added. "Won't you therefore dine with us on the- and meet him? Please come at seven and then you can have an hour together before dinner."
I wrote thanking her and turned up at seven sharp; I was eager to see if any Frenchman knew anything at first hand of Shakespeare. Lady Dilke introduced me at once to M. Jusserand in the little off-drawing-room on the first floor and said, "Now I'll leave you two sommites of learning to talk and straighten out all difficulties, for you both believe, I think, that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and not Bacon, though I remember once-," and the garrulous lady started off on a long story of how she had once met a Baconian at Lincoln College, "whom even my husband had to respect and this is how he approached the great question-"
Jusserand and I looked at each other and listened with courteous, patient inattention; the lady went on for the whole hour and the dinner-bell found us still listening, neither of us having got in a single word edgeways. To this day I know nothing of Jusserand's views.
From his marriage on, Dilke and I used to lunch together once a week, now in this restaurant, now in that, for many a year, and nine-tenths of what I learned about the House of Commons and English politicians came from him.
In fact, it was he who showed me the best side of English Puritanism, its appreciation of conduct and strict observance of all obligations. I always preferred the aristocrat view, at once more generous and looser; but the middle-class semi-religious outlook is perhaps more characteristically English, for it has propagated itself almost exclusively all over the United States and the British colonies.
Dilke taught me where Dickens got his Gradgrind, the master of facts, "the German paste in the Englishman," I called it. Dilke was well informed in politics and worked up all his speeches in the House with meticulous care.
But though he spoke monotonously and without a thrill of any kind, Gladstone, some time before the Crawford divorce case, had solemnly selected Dilke to follow him in the Liberal leadership. Laborious learning is esteemed in England beyond even genius, altogether beyond its value. This is what Goethe meant, I believe, when he spoke of the English as "pedants."
One evening at dinner Dilke corrected Harold Frederic in a little unimportant fact. For some reason or other, Frederic had asserted that only about half the inhabitants of Salt Lake City were Mormons. At once Dilke corrected him: "Ninety per cent, my dear Frederic, and eighty per cent communicants." Harold looked his disgust but said nothing. Afterwards, going home together, he expatiated on this tic of Dilke's and arranged with me to catch him. Harold was to get up the number of Copts in Lower Egypt; of course Dilke would pretend to have the figures at his fingers' ends and Frederic would bowl him out. For my part I was charged to find out the number of Boers in the Transvaal in comparison with men of other nationalities, and accordingly I got up the figures.
At our next dinner in Sloane Street I turned the talk on Cairo and said how surprised I was at the number of different nationalities there were in that strange land. "I met Copts by the score," I said; at once Dilke fell into the trap.
"Surely," he said, "the Copts in Cairo don't number more than a few hundreds."
"What do you think, Frederic?" I asked across the table, to get the proper audience.
"Copts in Cairo," repeated Frederic. "You can hardly be serious, Dilke; there are some eleven thousand of them."
Dilke was nonplussed. "Really, eleven thousand," he kept repeating; "Copts?
Really?" He was evidently shocked by the correction.
A few minutes later he committed himself to the statement that there were comparatively few Boers in Johannesburg and thus fell into my hands. I never saw a man so taken aback; accuracy was his fetish and to have it desert him twice in one evening was too much for his equanimity.
I mention these things just to set off a racial peculiarity of the Englishman which, I'm sorry to say, is showing itself almost as prominently in the American, though, I am glad to believe, without the intolerable presumption of the Englishman that knowledge and wisdom are synonymous.
In my first year in the Evening News I learned and practiced nearly every journalistic trick. When the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge was about to be decided, I found out that the experts usually knew which crew would win. Of course sometimes they are mistaken, but very rarely, and this year they all agreed it was a foregone conclusion for Oxford. Accordingly, on the great morning I had fifty thousand papers printed with "Oxford won" in big letters under the latest preliminary reports of the training, etc. As soon as the telephone message came through that Oxford had won, I let the boys out and this start enabled me to sell all the fifty thousand papers. I did the same thing with race after race on the turf and soon it began to be known that the Evening News had the earliest news of the races. I only mention these things to show that I was really working at high pressure day in, day out.