The Making of a Novelist | Page 2

over, lifted and dropped by a
caprice beyond the power of resistance. It was at this mournful moment
that I found my first friend in London. The story of that event shall be
told hereafter. What I want to say now is that the sight of that

permanent show in Lipscombe's window made me younger for a
minute by a score of years, and opened my mind to such a rush of
recollections that I determined then and there to put my memories on
paper.
I am not such an egotist as to suppose my experiences to be altogether
unique; but I know them to be curious and in places surprising.
Adventures, as Mr. Disraeli said a good many years ago, are to the
adventurous, and in a smallish kind of way I have sought and found
enough to stock the lives of a thousand stay-at-homes. At the first blush
it would not appear to the outside observer that the literary life is likely
to be fruitful in adventure; but in the circle of my own acquaintance
there are a good many men who have found it so.
In the city of Prague the most astonishing encounters pass for
every-day incidents. In these days of universal enlightenment nobody
needs to be told that Prague is the capital of Bohemia. There is a note
that rings false in the very name of that happy country now. Its
traditions have been vulgarised by people who have never passed its
borders. All sorts of charlatans have soiled its history with ignoble use,
and the very centre and citadel of its capital has an air of being built of
gingerbread. In point of fact, though its inhabitants are sparser than
they once were, and its occasional guests of distinction fewer, the place
itself is as real as ever it was. I have lived in it for a quarter of a century,
and, without vanity, may claim to know it as well as any man alive.
Eight or ten years ago I was sitting in the Savage Club in the company
of four distinguished men of letters. One was the editor of a London
daily, and he was talking rather too humbly, as I thought, about his own
career.
'I do not suppose,' he said, 'that any man in my present position has
experienced in London the privations I knew when I first came here. I
went hungry for three days, twenty years back, and for three nights I
slept in the Park.'
One of the party turned to me. 'You cap that, Christie?'

I answered, 'Four nights on the Embankment. Four days hungry.'
My left-hand neighbour was a poet, and he chimed in laconically,
'Five.'
In effect, it proved that there was not one of us who had not slept in
that Hotel of the Beautiful Star which is always open to everybody. We
had all been frequent guests there, and now we were all prosperous, and
had found other and more comfortable lodgings. There is a gentler
brotherhood to be found among men who have put up in that great
caravanserai than can be looked for elsewhere. He jests at scars that
never felt a wound, and a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.
There are many people still alive who remember the name of George
Dawson. There used to be thousands who recognized it with veneration
and affection. He was my first chief, editor of the Birmingham Morning
News, and had been my idol for years. My red-letter nights were when
he came over to my native town of West Bromwich to lecture for the
Young Men's Christian Association there on Tennyson, 'Vanity Fair,'
Oliver Goldsmith, and kindred themes.
Every Sunday night it was my habit to tramp with a friend of mine,
dead long ago, into Birmingham to hear Dawson preach in the Church
of the Saviour. The trains ran awkwardly for us, and many scores of
times poor Ned and myself walked the five miles out and five miles
home in rain and snow and summer weather to listen to the helpful and
inspiriting words of the strongest and most helpful man I have ever
known.
I am not sure at this time of day what I should think of George Dawson
if he still survived; but nothing can now diminish the affection and
reverence with which I bless his memory. I had been writing prose and
verse for the local journals for a year or two. I was proud and pleased
beyond expression to be allowed to write the political leaders for the
Wednesday Advertiser. I got no pay, and I dare say the editor was as
pleased to find an enthusiast who did his work for nothing as I was to
be allowed to do it. In practical journalism I had