London Days Part 18

It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but it seems like yesterday. And yet, though it was more than a quarter of a century ago, the Great Dock Strike had seemed so long before that it was almost forgotten. In the dock strike, that is to say, in 1889, I had made John Burns' acquaintance. He says I "discovered" him, discovered the real John Burns under the red-hot agitator who was expected to lead a hundred thousand men to incendiarism and the sack of London.

I do not remember the year which brought this Meredith day to our spinning world. But it must have been in the early nineties, and Burns on the London County Council, and perhaps for a session or so a member of Parliament. The date, however, does n't matter. If it were not 1892 it may have been 1893 or '94. Let's get on.

Neither Burns nor I had ever met George Meredith. Burns and he had had some correspondence which resulted in the post card and our expedition to Box Hill that blossomy, fragrant morning when the England of dreams lay all about us, and the stream that ran by Burford Bridge "babbled o'

green fields" and played with flowers.

We arrived at the little station in Surrey about noon. Whatever it may be now, it was then a little station. We strode off to Box Hill, and turned a corner, and there, trapping the sunshine, was Flint Cottage, George Meredith's home, at the bottom of {224} a sloping garden running over with roses. Roses, roses everywhere, and higher in the sloping garden, overlooking a valley that the G.o.ds had made for poets to dream in, was a little chalet where Meredith wrote, and slept, and had the muses to wait on him. To the chalet a gardener directed us when we asked for his master. We climbed the path. The chalet door stood partly open. Burns knocked on a rose trellis. "Come in!" cried a voice. In we went. There was George Meredith, in a Morris chair, with a rug over his knees, and sheets and sheets and sheets of ma.n.u.script over the rug. If he were to rise, the whole mountain of paper would tumble helter-skelter to the floor.

"No! don't move," said my companion. "I'm John Burns." Then he introduced me.

"I knew you, John Burns, I knew you. Your photographs are like you.

The voice is what I imagined it would be. Sit, gentlemen, sit. There, by the window. No better view in England, I really think. I comfort myself with it. It is good enough for parliament-men and our scribbling kind," said Meredith, smiling roguishly at me. The grasp of his hand was firm and generous. His voice had rich, deep tones. But he looked a fragile being.

"Like the schoolboy, I can say, 'This is n't writin', it's readin','"

and he pointed to the ma.n.u.script.

"Chapman and Hall-ing," I ventured to say.

"That's right," said Meredith, "you see the slave bearing his burden."

If John Burns' photographs were faithful, so were Meredith's, or so was the one with which I had been {225} familiar. His beard and hair were grey, almost white then. He looked older than he was. He was only sixty-five. Only sixty-five, and I thought him old! He lived to be eighty-one. I liked his voice. I had been told that it was high and shrill. It was nothing of the kind. It was mellow, clear, and his speech was scholar-like, with quaint shafts of wit. They used to tell of his "artificial talk." I heard none of it. He was as natural as his roses. But there might be p.r.i.c.kly thorns under the rose.

Meredith gathered his papers and put them aside. He leaned back in his big, comfortable chair, and said "now let's talk" as another man might say "let's have a drink." And we three sat, and talked and remade the world like a lot of youngsters. We knew better, each of us, knew that the dreams we were indulging would never be realised, that probably we would never call them up and look at them again--we would n't dare--they would be buried with us, no doubt. Some other youngsters might dream similar dreams by and by. No doubt they would. But to-day was to-day. And to-morrow I would be twice as old as Meredith, though half his years, and know in all my body half as much as his little finger knew. That very day he was the youngest of the three. He bubbled quietly, like champagne in a hollow-stemmed gla.s.s. The conversation capered. We might have been lads out of school, and we ragged the authorities. Meredith was the youngest and gayest of the three, Burns the most enthusiastic, and I came dragging on with not exactly timorous whoop-hurrahs! And it was {226} June, and high noon, with roses everywhere, and still more roses, and the humming of bees.

And the big world was far away--a million miles.

It was "a fine Radical day" no doubt, in more than the limited political sense. Burns was the only political Radical of the three.

He called me "a crusted Tory." I don't remember what he called George Meredith, who left us guessing, I think, as some of his printed pages were likely to do. Anyway, we did n't talk books. Life was better.

And there was a lot of life to talk about yet, at the end of an age.

Besides, our host was pressing us to stay to luncheon.

Down the garden path we strolled, still talking. Meredith said, as we seated ourselves at table: "I 'm here alone at present: you come like a rescuing expedition. This talk is a shower on parched land." After luncheon the talk went on, under trees, and tea-time had come before we knew it. After tea a walk over Box Hill.

You will have gathered by this time that the talking was not about Meredith or his books. He guided us from those high pastures where we would have liked to browse to the lower marshes where we might stumble as we pleased over politics, Home Rule and no rule, free trade and protection, dear food and cheap food, munic.i.p.al administration, the housing of the poor, socialism, and all those everlasting puzzles which England is discussing now as she discussed them thirty years ago. They were very dear to John Burns. They seemed interesting to Meredith. He enjoyed talking another man's {227} shop; at any rate, he enjoyed talking Burns' shop so much that the talk scarcely touched on books.

It may be mentioned at this point that John Burns, even at that time, owned probably more books than Meredith, and knew the insides of them.

Whether or not he knew the insides of more books than did Meredith is another matter. Meredith, you know, was a publisher's reader.

I did manage, while we were at tea, to get in a word about "One of Our Conquerors" and its tribute to good wine, certain pa.s.sages which could have been written only by a connoisseur.

"Ah, I 'm that; yes, I 'm that! Burns would n't appreciate that, but you do." And I spoke of a certain description in the same book, a view from London Bridge, westward, in the late afternoon. And the man chasing his hat in a high wind. I said I had taken an American friend there recently, and he had had to chase his hat, and then, for solace, we had gone to the restaurant in the city, the one described by Meredith, and had had food, and cracked a bottle of the delicate wine which, with tender ritual, had been opened and served to the two men in the story.

"And," said I, "although you disguised the restaurant and the label, I will not disguise from you the fact that my friend is also a connoisseur of the bright and beautiful, the American celebrator of choice things and moments--Thomas Bailey Aldrich--and that he rose at a point in our simple feast and said, with reverence: 'I salute George Meredith.'"

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Meredith's eyes twinkled. He rose, lifted his straw hat, bowed, and said: "The Author of 'Marjorie Daw', I am your obliged and humble servant."

And so the honours were even between Aldrich and himself.

Burns put in his word here. "We must go for the five-thirty train.

Good-bye, Mr. Meredith, we have had the--"

"No, no, John Burns! It 's not to be heard of! Both of you are to stay for dinner! Mark you that, John Burns. Never, never shall I forgive you two if you leave a poor lone man of ink without dining at his table. The thing is forbidden, forbidden absolutely, John Burns."

Is it strange then that we stayed for dinner, having already taken luncheon, tea, and a stroll with the magician of Box Hill? Not only did we stay, but we stayed till nearly midnight, having just time to catch the last train for London.

And this is a very pleasant part of my recollections of the day:

Our host, when he had shown us to the dining room, excused himself for a moment, lighted a candle, and, opening a door in a corner of the room, descended to the cellar. In two or three minutes he reappeared, his delicate face lighted by the candle which he held in his left hand directly behind a dusty half-bottle of wine, through which the light shone softly in a ruby glow. One saw first the wine, then the light, then the face, as ascending the stairs they entered from below, mounting slowly with {229} exquisite care lest the wine be shaken.

Slowly, and with great care, Meredith wrapped a napkin around the bottle, and drew the cork, placing the bottle at my plate and saying, with the most gracious, old-world courtesy: "For one who knows and appreciates, from one who appreciates and knows."

There was "approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley!"

"John Burns is a teetotaller, they say," added Meredith. "Of such is not the kingdom of my heaven. Burns says you discovered him. What do you think of your discovery? Tell me how it came about."

"Burns does not embody my idea of a modest man," said I. "As for that, there seems to be some doubt, nowadays, whether modest men should be permitted to live. What does Gilbert say:

"'You must stir it, and stump it And blow your own trumpet, Or, bless me, you have n't a chance!'

"Well, I came upon Burns first, in '89, when he had London scared (of course London would n't confess that it was scared but it was) and he was 'stumping it' at the dock gates, and from cart-tails on Tower Hill, and was listened to by thousands and tens of thousands of hungry men, and their wives, and youngsters--"

"'Agitating the dregs of London', the newspapers put it," said Meredith.

"All for sixpence an hour," said Burns.

"You have the floor!" said Meredith to me.

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"I told you he is not accurately described as a modest man. This is _my_ story," I continued, "the story as I see it. London had heard of him--when was it?--in '86, or so, when he led a crowd of East Enders to Trafalgar Square where ma.s.s meetings were not permitted, and the crowd got out of hand and smashed plate-gla.s.s windows, and Burns got his head broken, or nearly so, and went to gaol."

"'Serve the brute right!' I remember the run of thoughtful British opinion," put in Meredith.

"I was not in England at the time, but I remember the verdict," I said.

"The trouble was," said Burns, "I hadn't been introduced to the authorities. There I touched a fundamental British prejudice. The affair secured me the introduction, and opened Trafalgar Square--"

"To the mob," said Meredith.

"To ma.s.s meetings," said Burns.

"I am playing British chorus," was Meredith's rejoinder.

"Second chapter," said I. "There came the year of the Great Dock Strike. The casual labourer swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a sane, not to say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an hour."

"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, were not sane, and, also, they had n't a sixpence, they said"--thus Meredith.

"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are on the point of adding," I went on. "We don't know how many thousands of men were thrown out {231} of work. n.o.body knows to this day, but here is what I am coming at; there were thousands of them, and there was great suffering in their families. Well, when I first saw Burns he was organising kitchens, and feeding women and children, and making ten speeches every twenty-four hours, and sleeping an hour or two when he could find time and a place to lie down. Some nights he did not sleep at all. The night before I met him he slept four hours in his clothes and boots.

In three days he made thirty-six speeches; in three weeks he averaged ten speeches a day, out of doors. He is hoa.r.s.e still, no wonder.