Time and again, luck favoured me. One morning the announcement came in that the marriage between Lord Garmoyle and Miss May Fortescue had been broken off and that the lady was suing for breach of promise. Within ten minutes I had got her address and was off in a hansom to interview her. I found her a very pretty and very intelligent girl who blamed the whole fiasco upon Earl Cairns, one of the Conservative leaders, who was the father of Lord Garmoyle and naturally enough did not wish his only son to marry an undistinguished actress. I gathered from Miss Fortescue that Cairns was a North of Ireland man, a great lawyer, but very religious and prudish, one who still spoke of Sunday as the Sabbath and thought the stage the antechamber of hell. When Miss Fortescue saw that I meant to fight for her, she gave me letters both of Lord Cairns and Lord Garmoyle that were very interesting and confessed to me that though she "cared for" Lord Garmoyle, she had put the damages for the breach of promise at ten thousand pounds "because his father will have to pay."
I wrote a two-column article at once, telling the whole story under the title "Beauty and the Peer," exciting all the sympathy possible for Miss Fortescue and throwing all the odium on Earl Cairns. The article caused a tremendous sensation. That a Conservative paper should have printed such an attack upon a Conservative peer and leader was unheard of.
Kennard happened to be in Brighton, but he was told about the article within a couple of hours of its appearance and at once wired to me to stop publishing the story, which he characterized as "obscene!" I went to Lord Folkestone for support and found that he was merely amused. He didn't like Cairns, thought him narrow and bigoted, and encouraged me to go on, while promising to smooth down Kennard's ruffled plumage. Accordingly, I kept on and had a second article next day still more sarcastic. To cut a long story short, Lord Cairns couldn't stand the contemptuous exposure, so paid the ten thousand pounds of damages demanded, and everyone, including Miss Fortescue, gave me and the Evening News credit for the victory.
This journalistic triumph doubled the circulation of the paper, increased its advertisements considerably and so gave us all a foretaste of success. I cleaned out the sub-editors' room and put friends of my own in place of the hacks, notably an Australian Irishman named Dr. Rubie; turned out the old leader-writers too and gave their work to Cluer and other friends. The whole place was soon abuzz with life and vigour.
But I had some rebuffs. The office of the St. James Gazette was just opposite our office in Whitefriars Street, and when I went out at noon I used to see a dozen of their carts drawn up on one side of the street, while our fifteen or twenty carts were drawn up on the other side-all alike waiting to get the papers and hurry off to distribute them to the various shops all over London. I went into the matter and found that we were paying some six thousand pounds a year for our carts. At once I got an introduction to Greenwood, the editor of the St. James's, and offered to give his paper, which cost a penny, the benefit of our very much larger distribution at about half of that his carts cost him. To my astonishment he refused and stuck to his refusal, though it was plainly stupid.
Three years afterwards, when my first stories came out in the Fortnightly Review, Greenwood praised them to the skies, and very ingenuously admitted that he had had a prejudice against me because he had heard me called an "American business man" and now regretted his hostility. We became in fact very good friends, and long before he died I grew to esteem and love the man.
Lord Folkestone often got me to call for him at the Carlton Club and there one day he told me a couple of jokes about club life that seemed to me to be amusing. The Carlton Club, as everybody knows, is the official club of the Conservative party, and one day an influential member, recently joined, put up on the notice board a request that the nobleman who had stolen his umbrella would kindly return it immediately. After this notice had been up a week or so, an irascible nobleman went to the secretary and drew his attention to it.
"It is a libel on our order," he said, "and I insist that the name of the nobleman should be given or the notice should be taken down." Hereupon the secretary went and interviewed the member who had put up the notice. "I don't know his name," said the member.
"Why then do you think it is a nobleman?" asked the secretary.
"Well, this club, according to your own statement, is made up of noblemen and gentlemen. No gentleman would steal my umbrella, so it must be a nobleman."
And here is a story of the Athenaeum Club, which in its own way is almost as amusing. The Athenaeum possessed for many years a famous and polite porter, named, I think, Courtney, who could identify hats, umbrellas and walking sticks belonging to members, and was never known to make a mistake. One day a dignified Bishop on his way out was duly handed his things by the janitor.
"This umbrella does not belong to me, Courtney," said the right reverend prelate.
"Possible not, my Lord," replied Courtney, "but it is the one you brought into the club."
Such stories as these abound in London and give a special, distinctive flavour to life in England, and for that reason I shall reproduce some of the best, not forgetting those coined in New York.
CHAPTER XI
… O thou wondrous Mother-age Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife When I heard my days before me and the tumult of my life.
London in the early eighties; London after years of solitary study and grim relentless effort; London when you are twenty-eight and have already won a place in its life; London when your mantelpiece has ten times as many invitations as you can accept, and there are two or three pretty girls that attract you; London when everyone you meet is courteous-kind and people of importance are beginning to speak about you; London with the foretaste of success in your mouth while your eyes are open wide to its myriad novelties and wonders; London with its round of receptions and court life, its theatres and shows, its amusements for the body, mind and souclass="underline" enchanting hours at a burlesque, prolonged by a boxing-match at the Sporting Club; or an evening in Parliament, where world-famous men discuss important policies; or a quiet morning spent with a poet who will live in English literature with Keats and Shakespeare; or an afternoon with pictures of a master already consecrated by fame. London: who could give even an idea of its varied delights: London the centre of civilization, the queen city of the world without a peer in the multitude of its attractions, as superior to Paris as Paris is to New York.
If you have never been intoxicated you have never lived. I have felt myself made better and happier by exquisite wine, keyed up, so to speak, to a more vivid and higher spiritual life, talking better than I ever talked before, with an intensified passion that lit all the eyes about me and set souls aflame. But the rapture of such heightened life is only momentary. London made me drunk for years and in memory still the magic of those first years ennobles life for me; and the later pains and sufferings, wrongs and insults, disdains and disappointments, all vanish and are forgotten. I wonder if I can give an idea of what London was to me with the first draught of its intoxicating vintage on my hot lips and the perfumes of it in my greedy nostrils. It's impossible to describe such a variety of attractions, but I'll try, reminding my readers merely that it was my ambition to touch life on many sides.