Читать книгу Recollections - David Christie Murray - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Towards Journalism—Dr. Kenealy as Parliamentary Candidate—

The Wednesbury Advertiser—George Dawson—The First Private Execution—Misprints—The Black Country Sixty Years Ago—Aunt Rachael—Old Servants—Local Poets—Mining Dangers.

I suppose that I should have gravitated into journalism in any case; but it was poor old Dr. Kenealy, who was afterwards famous as the intrepid, if ill-tempered, counsel for the Tichborne Claimant, who gave me my first active impulse towards the business. The Borough of Wednesbury had just been created, and my own native parish was a part of it. The Liberals chose as their candidate one Brogden, who had been unseated for bribery at Yarmouth, a fact in his history which did much to enliven trade amongst the local fishmongers, the bloater becoming, as it were, the Tory ensign in all processions and in all public meetings at which the Liberal candidate addressed his future constituents. Two or three men, who afterwards became well known, nibbled at the constituency, and went away again. Among them were the late Samuel Waddy, Q.C., and Mr. Commissioner Kerr, who issued an electioneering address of astonishing prolixity, prefacing it with the statement that he had no time to be brief. But Brogden's only real opponent was poor old Kenealy. There was, of course, a Conservative candidate in the field; and, rightly or wrongly, it was said that Kenealy had been brought down in his interest to split the Liberal vote.

I found the doctor one night addressing a mere handful of people in a vast building which would have accommodated two or three hundred for every unit he had before him. That was the first occasion in my life on which I wore a dress suit; and amidst the unwashed, coally-flannelled handful, I daresay that my expanse of shirt front, and the flower in my buttonhole, made me conspicuous. I was a red-hot Liberal in those days, for no better reason, probably, than that my father held that form of creed, and I was quite persuaded that Kenealy was a paid impostor. So when, in that raucous voice of his, he said, “I love the working man,” I answered from below with a cry of “Bunkum, doctor, bunkum.” The doctor paused and looked at me, but said nothing at the moment By and by he flowed on: “When I go to the poll with ten thousand of the working men of this constituency behind me,” and I chimed in with a cry of “When, doctor, when?” This time the orator fixed my flint, as the Americans used to say. He surveyed me from top to toe, and he said quietly, and in a tone of deep commiseration: “I pity that drunken blackguard.” My first impulse was to spring upon the platform, and to throw the speaker from it; but it was so obvious that I could not clear myself of the imputation cast upon me in that way that I surrendered the idea in the very instant in which it occurred to me. I searched in my own mind for a retort, but I searched in vain; and I spent a good part of that night in the invention of scorching phrases. But the exercise afforded me no relief, and on the following day I sat down and wrote my first newspaper article. We had in our new-made borough, in those days, one ineffective, inoffensive little weekly journal called the Wednesbury Advertiser, and I posted my article to the editor, who, as much to my surprise as my delight, printed it in all the glory of leaded type. I believe I was under the impression that it would kill Kenealy; but, as all the world knows, the poor man survived for years, and died from wholly different causes. That was the determining incident in my career, and for months afterwards I wrote the Advertisers leaders without any sort of agreement, and without receipt or expectation of any kind of pay. It is not because I imagine my work to have been exceptionally brilliant that I am disposed to think that I must have seemed a sort of heaven-sent blessing to my editor (whom I do not remember, by the way, ever to have seen); but at least I did a good share of his work for nothing. I have addressed larger audiences since then; but I have certainly never been puffed up with such a sense of my own power and value as I had in writing those pompous, boyish essays, in which I trounced Disraeli, and instructed Gladstone and the chairman of the local Board of Guardians in the art of administration.

I have always held that there is no training for a novelist like that of a journalist. The man who intends to write books describing life can hardly begin better than by plunging into that boiling, bubbling, seething cauldron called journalism. The working journalist is found everywhere. Is there a man to be hanged?—the working journalist is present. Exhibitions, processions, coronations, wars, whatever may be going on, wherever the interest of life is richest and the pulse beats fastest, there you find the working journalist. There is no experience in the world which really qualifies a man to take a broad, a sane, an equable view of life in such a degree as journalism.

When first I joined the Press, I took a berth as junior reporter at 25s. per week. I went to George Dawson—one of the highest types of men I have ever known, but one who was a born idle man and loved to talk and talk, and so left no record of himself—I went to dear old Dawson and said, “You are starting a journal, and I want to be on it.” What is the bottom rung of the ladder? Well, my work was to report police court cases and inquests. I do not know of a lower rung. I had ambitions and ideas of my own, but I went for whatever came in my way, and I have not repented it until this day, although a good opening into business life awaited me if I chose to accept it in preference.

Almost the first “big thing” I recall in my experience was the first private execution which took place in the English provinces. It was at Worcester, when a man named Edmund Hughes, plasterer's labourer, was hanged for the murder of his wife. I have often thought that if that man's story had only been rightly told, if there had only been a modern Shakespeare round about, there was the making of a new tragedy of Othello in it. His wife had run away with her paramour no fewer than three times, and each time he had followed her and fetched her back. But the last time she refused to come back and cruelly mocked him. He left her, saying that he would see her once again. He borrowed a razor from a friend, went to the place, and nearly severed her head from her body.

Well, I went to see that man hanged. I had never seen anyone die before, and such a thing as death by violence was altogether strange to me. I was told to apply to the sheriff for permission to be present at the execution. I devoutly hoped that permission would be refused, but it was not. I shall not forget the sensation that overcame me as I left the gaol on the night before the man was to be hanged. It was wintry weather and a storm was breaking. The sky seemed, in fact, to be racked with the storm clouds. But through them there was one open space with one bright star visible. That star seemed to carry a promise of something beyond, and I went away somewhat uplifted, though sick and sorry notwithstanding.

When I went to the prison next day I, for the first time, bottomed the depths of human stupidity. The wretched man was pinioned and led up to the scaffold. I pray God I may never see such a sight again. The man was just one shake of horror. The prison chaplain, who had primed himself rather too freely with brandy—it was his first experience of this duty—walked in front of the prisoner reciting the “Prayers for the Dead.” The poor condemned wretch, who was gabbling one sentence without ceasing, and who was so terribly afraid as to be cognisant of nothing save the fact that he was afraid, had nineteen creaking black steps, newly-tarred, to mount on reaching the scaffold. He turned to the warder and muttered “I can't get up,” but the latter slapped him on the back with the utmost bonhomie, and said, “You'll get up all right.” He did get up and they hanged him. On the evening of the same day I read the amazing proclamation in the evening papers that “the prisoner met his fate with fortitude.” Yet I never in my life saw anything so utterly abject as that man's terror. I have since then come to the belief that the average man has learned the measure of expression of emotion by what he sees in the theatre. In the theatre a man has to make his emotions visible and audible to a large number of people. But in real life deep emotion is silent—I have always found it so. This was my first lesson in this particular direction, and I came to the conclusion that the average observer has no faculty for reading the expression of human emotion at all. Only for the sake of that reflection have I ventured upon this really gruesome story.

Somewhere about this time there appeared in Birmingham the first illustrated provincial newspaper ever issued in England. It was called the Illustrated Midland News, and its editor-in-chief was Mr. Joseph Hatton. France and Germany were at death-grips with each other, and I wrote many sets of war verses for the new venture, and made something like the beginning of a name. It was at this time that I first experienced an agony which has since recurred so often that by dint of mere repetition it has worn itself away to nothing. I encountered my first misprint, a thing bad enough, in all conscience, to the mere prose-writer, but to the ardent youngster who really believes himself to be adding to the world's store of poetry, a thing wholly intolerable and beyond the reach of words. Brooding over the slaughtered thousands of Sedan, I wrote what, at the time, I conceived to be a poem.

I can recall now but a single verse of it, and that, I presume, is kept in mind only by the misprint which blistered every nerve of me for weeks. The verse ran thus:—

“O! pity, shame, and crime unspeakable!

Let fall the curtain, hide the ghastly show,

Yet may these horrors one stern lesson tell,

Ere the slain ranks to dull oblivion go.

These lives are counted, the Avenger waits,

His feet are heard already at the gates.”

And, as I am a living sinner, some criminal compositor stuck in an “n” for a “v,” and made the stern lesson appear to exist in the fact that “these lines” were counted. I used to wake up at night to think of things to say to that compositor if ever I should meet him, and to the printer's reader who passed his abominable blunder. The most indurated professional writer who takes any interest in his work likes it to appear before the public without this kind of disfigurement; but it is only the beginner who experiences the full fury of pain a misprint can inflict, and I think that even the beginner must be a poet to know all about it.

Talking of misprints carries my mind at least a year farther forward than I should just yet allow it to travel. Mr. Edmund Yates, who was at that time on a lecture tour in America, brought a story he was then writing for the Birmingham Morning News, under the title of “A Bad Lot,” to a rather sudden and unexpected conclusion, and I was suddenly commissioned, in the emergency, to follow him with a novel. I wrote a first instalment on the day on which the task was offered me; but I had no experience, and no notion of a plot, and before I was through with the business, I had so entangled my characters that my only way out of the imbroglio I had myself created was to send every man Jack and woman Jill of them, with the exception of the hero and the heroine, to the bottom of a coal mine, where I comfortably drowned them all. In the last chapter my hero asked the lady of his heart, “Are there no troubles now?” and the lady of his heart responded, “Not one, dear Frank, not one.” And then I wrote, very neatly, and in brackets, the words, “White Line,” a professional instruction to leave the space of one line blank between the foregoing and the following paragraphs. And the “comp.” who was entrusted with my copy, being obviously inspired of Satan, set out the heroine's response and the trade instruction in small type,' thus, as if it had been a line of verse: