London Days Part 19

"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him again on Tower Hill, speaking to a big crowd. His platform was a dray. When he stopped speaking and jumped down from the dray, I introduced myself to him, said I was mightily interested, and that I wanted to interview him.

"'All right,' said he; 'begin!'

"If he were not modest, I was. 'Not here,' said I, 'let's go where we can talk in quiet.' So I tucked him into a hansom and, followed by a yelling crowd which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club of mine in the West End, where we had a long talk. The immediate results were--oh, well, some articles in which I tried to show the world the real John Burns."

"That was the discovery?" asked Meredith.

"Burns calls it so. He was no more modest about being discovered then than he is now. He has a way of telling you straight what he thinks, or what he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you."

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"I 've noticed that. John Burns, are you under any delusions about popularity? I think you are not."

"I 'm not," said Burns. "When the crowds are cheering their loudest, I am asking myself how soon they will hang my carca.s.s on the outer walls."

"A cheering and useful inquiry," observed Meredith. "My impression is that you have a long course to cover. But leaders of the people are wisest when they remember that there _are_ outer walls for the hanging of carca.s.ses."

"The confessions of Radicals strengthen the soul," said I.

"These are not confessions; they are articles of faith," exclaimed Burns.

I intimated that my faith in a political sense was as a grain of mustard seed, human nature being what it was, and political stupidity unconquerable. Gladstone being mentioned by our host, I asked Burns to tell his Gladstone story, that is, what the G.O.M. said to him, and what he said to the G.O.M. at their first meeting.

"It was in the lobby of the House of Commons," Burns explained, "soon after my election. You know I was not what might be called a worshipper of that wonderful man. A bit too independent for his liking, perhaps."

"And the only thing he would dislike, perhaps," said Meredith, smiling.

"Well, you know. I was in the lobby, talking with a front-bench Liberal when the great man pa.s.sed. The member with whom I was talking {233} took me up to him and presented me. The G.O.M. bowed, and we shook hands. He said:

"'It gives me pleasure, Mr. Burns, to see you here, to welcome you to the House of Commons.'

"I replied, 'Believe me, sir, my pleasure is equal to your own!'

"A hit, a palpable hit!" cried Meredith. "I can see Gladstone drawing in his horns."

"He stiffened a bit, and we went our ways. That is all there is of the story," added Burns.

"The one about the docker and the matches is not bad," said I.

"Let me have it," begged Meredith.

"At one of my meetings near the dock gates, a fellow shouted: 'Burn the docks; break in and burn the docks!' He interrupted me two or three times with that cry. The crowd was sullen. It had n't got its sixpence yet. I must stop the roaring fellow, or his mates might get out of control. I borrowed a box of matches from the nearest man.

'Catch!' I cried to the noisy chap. He caught it as I flung it over the heads of the crowd. 'Now, then,' I called to him, 'if you are crazy, if you don't care what happens to all these men and their wives and children, and if you want to ruin this strike, go, fire the docks!'

But the man did n't move. I waited, but still he did n't move. Then I said: 'Your hand has n't the courage of your mouth. Take the matches from him, men, hand 'em back to me. Make way for him. He 's shown that he 's a braggin' coward. Out with him!' He skulked away, hooted by the crowd. I suppose that was the {234} origin of the yarn that I was inciting the mob to burn the docks."

"That's the way history is written, John Burns. Have you found your dockers suspicious regarding you?" Meredith put the question with a nave air.

"Of course. Men of their kind are always suspicious, until they know you. Why should n't they be? Whoever went among 'em before those days with any other purpose than to get the best of 'em?"

"They suspected your decent clothes," said I.

Burns laughed. "One morning I appeared in a new suit of blue serge like this, and a new straw hat, like that. 'Where'd you get 'em, Burns?' one man shouted. 'He 's makin' more 'n sixpence out o' us,'

yelled another. Then I had to explain, anyhow, I did explain, that Madame Tussaud's had given me a new suit, so that they could put my old one on a wax figure of me. Tussaud's wanted my old hat, but my wife would n't part with that. She wanted it as a trophy."

We sat at table all the evening talking, George Meredith, John Burns, and I. Of all the men one had ever heard talk, I can't remember one who had a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's. I can feel its fascination now across the interval of nearly thirty years. It was, I have said, a musical voice, but it was more than that. It was rich and deep and delicate. The enunciation was perfect with a perfection that was rare and individual; his voice was an instrument with many banks of keys. Charm was its characteristic, charm that no {235} one could describe, although many have tried to do so. And his eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, or grey-blue, but you could not say--as they twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little lakes, pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as some humorous or sympathetic thought moved behind them--you could not say how, or why they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, of searching you, looking through you. There was nothing that you could describe in so many words, but there was much that you could feel and like. Even when Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or deed that he did not like, and spoke with dramatic force, his gaze would not blaze or harden. He seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface for the element of comedy, searching with sympathy and humour for the thing that he could understand, and understand better than any one else in the world. You could always touch him with a sympathetic humour. He did not like wise owls, or rather the owlishness which the run of humans take for wisdom.

His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in his perceptions, his appreciations; physically he was frail, or was frail then! You would n't have supposed him ever to have been a great walker and a man of athletic tendencies. But he had been. Now he walked rather slowly, with a stick, and seemed glad to stop every few minutes. His face made me think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving. There was exquisite beauty in it, and the voice enhanced that. But even the most delicate lines {236} were firmly carved. If you handled him roughly you might bend him, but you could not break his spirit. At the time I speak of, he was beyond his years, far beyond them; physically, but in no other way, he seemed an old and fragile man. And yet neither voice nor eyes suggested anything of the kind. In spirits and outlook he retained the keenness of mighty youth. When he talked with us he was of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal; it was only when he walked with us about his garden, or over Box Hill, that the flesh betrayed, now and then, its limitations. If you had had his eyes, you might have looked through his body. A strong wind might have carried him away. But he lived sixteen years after that, and, for all his touch of melancholy, they were happy years.

Others could tell other tales of him and have done so; have said, for one thing, that he was quick and tempery. What they meant was that his highly sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but were on and off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the case with highly sensitive folk. Men do not study such sensitive creatures with the object of avoiding trouble; they blunder and thunder on and then are amazed, when they have struck a nerve centre, to find that it has its own method of reacting. And then George Meredith had been more than half his life a reader for publishers. And all his life he was writing poetry and novels! Now if there is any act less likely than another to insure peace of mind, it is the reading of other persons' ma.n.u.scripts. And to do that regularly, professionally, for several {237} decades, while you prefer to be a poet and love to be a novelist, is to give oneself to occupations which not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves of him that undertakes the triple task. Meredith must have had a rare power of concentration to preserve his own authorship from saturation in the flood of ma.n.u.scripts in which he swam for forty years. His experiences would have paralysed the creative capacity in most men.

I can suppose only that they who found his talk "artificial" must have touched some spring in him that Burns and I did not press. We found him entirely free from artificiality. No pair of strangers could have been more agreeably entertained. And yet we inflicted upon him a long day. They say he was "gey ill to live wi'." Perhaps he was; perhaps he was not. But why should n't he have been? Most writers are. And why should n't they be? They are of a sensitive sort, in greater degree, or less. Their business is mainly to observe, to consider, to speak with ink. These things require concentration of mind. And while the world is running in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are making suggestions which have no relation to the business in hand, or wondering why their wish cannot have precedence, or why their opinion is not the most important thing in the universe, the poet's work, or train of thought, has to get on, or the novelist's, or the reader of ma.n.u.scripts'. It may be true that no creative gentleman has a right to moods, but at least he has a right to tenses. No such plea is put forth for the rest of mankind. {238} Probably the fact is that the person criticising considers his own mood the more important of the two. Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their possessors to endure all the time as they can possibly be for any one else to encounter a part of the time. But who ever thinks of that?

We talked on through the evening, without leaving the dining room. I caught Burns looking apprehensively at the clock. "Yes," said I, "we can catch it if we go at once. It's the last train." There was a hurried leave-taking, and we were off. We left the kind old gentleman standing in the doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the path and shone full upon his face.

"Well?" said Burns, when we were seated in the train.

"A glorious day!" I answered.

"Never a better," said Burns.

Surely we never went through a better day together, and we went through many.

Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the outer lobby of the House of Commons just as John Burns was crossing it in the opposite direction. He saw me first and called out to me.

"Where have you come from now?" he asked, when we had shaken hands.

"And how long is it since we met?"

"America this time," said I. "I 've been there four years. But it must be seven years since I 've seen you."

"Gadabout!" said he. "Did you ever have another Meredith day?"

{239}

"No," said I, "nor anything like it. Let's go again."

"Let's," was his response.

But we did not go again, for, as it turned out, another ten days called me back to America. Burns, of course, was already in the Cabinet, but he wore a blue serge suit, just as of yore.

In 1913 when again I came to England, I did not see him. I had several months in the country but only ten days in town, when I fled with an attentive influenza which Freshwater drove away.

But in 1916, having come the day before from a liner at Liverpool, I was walking in Victoria Street just as Burns turned a corner.

"The oddest thing," said he. "I was just thinking of our day with Meredith. Let's talk. But don't talk politics. Which way are you going?"

"Any way," I said. And we strolled into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.