How does love come first to a man? Romance writers all agree that love comes as a goddess in blinding light, or ravishment of music or charm of scenery, but always crowned, always victorious. Mine is a plain unvarnished tale; love befell me in those first months in London in a most commonplace way, and yet I'll swear with Shakespeare that my love … was as fair As any she belied with false compare.
I was earning some five or six pounds a week and living quietly in Bloomsbury near the British Museum. I had occasion to call on someone in a boarding-house in the same district who had sent an article to the Fortnightly. I was shown into a parlour on the ground floor by the untidy maid and told that the lady would be down soon.
While waiting, a girl was shown in and also asked to wait. She came towards me where I was standing by the window and took my breath. Every detail of her appearance in the strong light is printed in my memory, even the shade of blue of the cloak she was wearing. She was rather tall, some five feet five, and walked singularly well, reminding me of Basque and Spanish girls I had seen, who swam rather than walked-a consequence, I had found out, of taking short even steps from the hips. Her eyes met mine fairly and passed on: long hazel eyes of the best, broad forehead, rather round face, good lips, firm though small chin; a lovely girl, I decided, with a mane of chestnut hair brightened with strands of gold. She was well, though not noticeably dressed, the long blue cloak and her apparent self-possession giving her rather the air of a governess. I resolved to speak to her. "Waiting is weary work," I began with a smile.
"It depends where and with whom," she replied with a touch of coquetry, but without a trace of English accent.
"Are you English?" I blurted out impulsively.
"Half-American, half-English," she answered, smiling. Her smile lit up her face enchantingly; it was like coming from a shuttered room into sunshine.
"My case too," I cried, "only instead of English, you'd have to say half-Welsh."
"Strange," she replied, laughing outright, "in my case, to be exact, you'd have to say half-Irish."
"Let us both keep to our American halves," I said, "then there will be nothing strange in my presenting myself. I am Frank Harris and trying here in London to be a writer."
"And my name is Laura Clapton." A few more questions and in five minutes I found that she was living with her father and mother in Gower Street; her father was a stockbroker and I could call any afternoon. I had time to promise I'd come next day and tell besides how I was working on the Fortnightly Review and the Spectator, thanks chiefly to my knowledge of various countries and languages.
"I know some foreign languages, too," said Miss Laura.
I was simply delighted to find her accent as good in German, French, Italian and Spanish as it was in English, and her command of the languages extraordinary: "Two years spent with my mother in each country," was her explanation.
Next day I called and was introduced to a little, round-faced, roly-poly of a mother. Very ugly, I thought, with pug nose and small gray-blue eyes, but in spite of face and figure, the little fat woman had an air of dignity, or, it would be truer to say, of imperiousness tinged with temper. When I met Queen Victoria later I was irresistibly reminded of Mrs. Clapton.
When Mr. Clapton came in the same evening, I saw where the daughter had got her good looks. Clapton was a handsome Irishman of perhaps five feet eleven, showing his fifty years in stoutness and greying hair. All his features were excellent, the hazel eyes splendid, and the man's personality genial and attractive. I easily understood how coming to Memphis, Tennessee, at five and twenty, the senator's daughter he met fell promptly in love with him. But he had been unfaithful and the proud southern girl wouldn't forgive him, and had taught her only daughter too to take her side, though in public the family held together. The whole situation was clear that first evening and I took an immediate liking to the good-looking, happy-go-lucky father, who probably out of custom kept up appearances with his unattractive wife for old affection's sake, and the pride he took in his daughter's looks and cleverness. For the daughter was undoubtedly clever and her looks grew on me: moving about in the room, taking off her hat and seating herself, the rhythmic grace of her beautiful figure made itself felt. I think from the beginning the mother disliked me as much as the father liked me. I found that Miss Laura loved the stage, had trained herself, indeed, to be an actress, and was only kept from going on the stage by the mother's insensate vanity and pride of birth. Naturally, I got them theatre tickets and soon became intimate.
A month or so later the father wanted to spend Christmas at Brighton; nothing could have suited me better. I knew Brighton well, so early in the week we went down and stayed at the Albion Hotel. In the mornings we all used to go out walking, but the fat mother soon returned to the hotel with her husband, leaving Laura and myself to our own devices. Two incidents I remember of those first days: I had put some rhetoric into an article in the Spectator on Hendrik Conscience, the Belgian writer, and I read it to Laura one afternoon. "You read wonderfully," she said, "and that prose is lovely.
You're going to be a great writer!"
I shook my head. "A good speaker, perhaps," I said, for already I thought of going into the House of Commons.
I didn't believe that I had genius, but I felt sure I could make myself an excellent speaker, and naturally I confided my ambitions to her. She had risen, and as I rose and thrust the paper into my pocket, I repeated passionately the last words of the article. Her eyes were on a level with mine and I suppose the passion in my voice moved her, for her eyes gave themselves to me: the next moment my arms were around her and my lips on hers.
She kissed me naturally, without shyness or reserve. I could not help thinking at once, "She has often given her lips; she's too good-looking to have been left unpursued." The thought gave me boldness. "How beautiful you are," I said putting my arm round her waist.
She smiled but drew back a little. "You flatterer!"
"No, no," I pursued; "not a taint of flattery; I'm so much in earnest that I'm absolutely truthful. Your figure is most beautiful: I love and admire small breasts, just as I admire and love large hips," and I put my hands again on her figure.
"I love your word," she responded, "that you are 'so much in earnest that you are quite truthful,' deep love and truth always go together, don't they?"
"Always," I replied. Her quick ears heard someone coming and she turned away, but the touches had thrilled me, and I could not forbear clasping her waist from behind. She wound herself out of my arms with infinite litheness and with pouting lips and frowning brows reproved my daring, but the finger on her mouth was a warning and her eyes were smiling: she was not really angry at all. The next minute her mother came in.
The situation of the father and mother filled me with pity for the girl; I felt in my bones that the father in especial must have called on her sometimes to help pay the weekly bills. She had been trained in worldly wisdom, yet had kept her spiritual enthusiasms. Her difficulties, which I surmised, endeared her to me.
On Christmas Eve we happened to be alone again in the sitting-room. After the first kiss I naturally kissed her whenever I had the chance, and under my kissing and caressing her lips grew hot. But she drew back almost at once.
"How strangely you kiss," she said, her eyes thoughtful.
I loved her for her frankness and read it rightly, I think: she was still virgin, but on the point of yielding. I resolved to be worthy of her.
"Laura, dear," I said, "I want to speak to you soul to soul. I love you and want you: give me six months or at most a year more and I shall have won a position in London and money. I've done a good deal in four months; I'll win completely in a year. Give me the year, will you, and I'll ask you to marry me!"
"I love you," she replied, "and trust you. I'll wait, you can be sure," and we kissed again as a sort of consecration-indeed as lovers kiss, whose spirits flow together at meeting of the lips.
The rest of those Christmas holidays can be told rapidly. I felt that Laura did not put much confidence in my assurances of splendid and rapid success. She had heard similar hopes expressed far too often by her father and had found them evaporate. I first heard the American word from her for such forecasts of hope, "hot air." How was she to know the difference between the gambler and the workman, whose self-confidence was rooted in many and widely different experiences?
I resolved to get back to London as soon as possible, and up to the last day, with the optimism of first love, I hoped to meet Laura there almost every day.
On the second of January I paid the hotel bill and was astonished by it; it took nearly all my nest-egg: Clapton had drunk champagne in his bedroom.
But what did it matter? I had had the time of my life and a smile from Laura's lips; a glance of approval from her eyes meant more to me than a fortune.
Just before lunch the father asked me to go out with him for a stroll. As soon as we were alone, he began by thanking me for the holiday. "I'd never have let you foot the bill," he began, "but I've had a long run of bad luck in this open stock exchange I founded in London. My partner, I find, has bolted in my absence and taken all the funds, but I only need just a small sum for expenses, a thousand '11 do-"
I would not let him conclude; I wanted to spare him the humiliation of asking.
I broke in at once, "I'd let you have it with a heart and a half if I had got it, but the truth is the holiday has brought me, too, to rock-bottom. I must go back and get to work, and I can't even get such a sum quickly. I say to you, as I've said to Laura, give me a year and I'll win."
His look was enough; the splendid long hazel eyes were as hard as buttons.
"Never mind," he said, "it doesn't matter." In ten minutes we were back in the hotel and I don't think I got ten words more from him that day. Evidently the father, too, thought me no prize.
When we reached London I drove them first to Gower Street, but their rooms were not ready for them. The father saw the landlady and came down to us in the hall and told us, with feigned indignation, that the hostess had not acted on his wire, but in a couple of hours their old rooms would be ready. "Mr.
Harris will perhaps take care of you till then," he added. "I have to see-"
The vagueness of the arrangements confirmed my suspicions of Clapton's irresponsibility and increased my sympathy with the queenly girl. Of course, I was only too glad to be of service. I drove the ladies first to my rooms to get rid of my luggage. Though I had not wired, my rooms were all ready, swept and garnished; and the mother and daughter came in and had tea and afterwards I took them to Kettners, a good Bohemian restaurant, for dinner. I left them at eleven o'clock in their rooms and got a long kiss from Laura in the passage; I felt well repaid. As soon as I was alone and rehearsed the happenings of the day, as was my custom, I saw I had no time to lose. "If you want the girl," I said to myself, "you'll have to win a position quickly." Clearly I felt that now both the father and the mother would be linked against me.
They might, probably would, turn the cold shoulder and make it unpleasant for me even to call. Besides, I must not lose time and energy courting Laura; this was the determining thought: I must get to work at once and without encumbrance of any kind. That night I wrote to Laura fully, saying I would not see her for three months and telling her why: I would ask her to marry me within the year. She answered, saying she understood and would wait. My choice of her was so absolute that I took it for granted that she had chosen me with the same complete certitude. Yet I felt I must win as soon as possible and win big.
Next morning I went down to Chapman, the publisher. What would he give me for a book on my experiences in western America as a cowboy, etc.? He listened to me and told me he might give?. 100. "But it's only because I know you," he added. "Usually we expect the author to help us in bringing out his first book." In half an hour I learned a good deal of the practice of publishing and found reason to echo Byron's caustic reply to Murray, who sent him a Bible instead of a check. Byron returned the book with one alteration. He had written in the word: "Now Barrabas was a 'publisher'," instead of the Biblical "robber."
No hope of a fortune through a book. Five days in every week I spent now on this trail, now on that, but London business was better organized than business in the United States at that time and so again and again I found the hoped-for outlet was a blind alley. At length, after nearly a month of disappointments, I went down to the stock exchange and sought for a place as a clerk in a broker's office. I found that only one clerk in each office had the entree to the floor of the House, a privileged position again, to conquer which would cost at least a year's hard work. Besides, except the house of a German-Jew, not a single stockbroker seemed to want my services. But the Jew wanted many German letters written and I was more than willing to do them after hours; but the pay offered was only three pounds a week, and I stood hesitating. On my birthday, the fourteenth of February, I resolved to take Klein's offer and wrote to him that as soon as I had settled some business I'd be round, certainly within a week.
All this time I had been working steadily on the Spectator and growing there in influence. On each Saturday and Sunday I wrote two articles that always appeared; indeed, now I could control their position, for one day Hutton had taken me downstairs and introduced me to Meredith Townsend, his partner, saying that in the holidays, when he (Hutton) was away, he'd be glad if Townsend would use me in his (Hutton's) place.
"He knows half a dozen languages," said Hutton, "and he corrects proofs as carefully as a born reader." Townsend assured me of his interest, and while Hutton was away I got a good deal of editorial work to do on the Spectator and came to know Townsend intimately. In many respects he was the complement of Hutton. He had spent many years in the East and knew China fairly well. As Hutton was profoundly religious, so Townsend cared chiefly for success. Hutton believed with all his soul and mind that mankind was growing in goodness and grace to some divine fulfilment. Townsend was certain that "man in the loomp was bad," as Tennyson's Northern Farmer had it, and must come to a bad end. But the two men together fairly filled the English ideal at once sentimental and practical, and so the paper came to power and influence and wealth, notwithstanding the fact that save for a smattering of French, neither editor knew anything of modern Europe or America, nor of modern art and literature. I was really needed by them, and had I started with them a year or two sooner, or continued a year or two longer, I might have brought it to a partnership and the paper to a wider success. But when Hutton wanted to know if twenty-five pounds would satisfy me for the extra editorial work I had done, I smiled and assured him his good word was all I wanted and that I was fully paid with the six pounds a week I made from my articles. I knew how to win, if I didn't know when I would win. However, my chance came, as always, at the last moment.
One day I was in the Fortnightly office when Escott, coming up the stairs, met Chapman in the passage between their two rooms. After a word or two of greeting, Escott said loudly, "I think your protege will get the editorship of the Evening News. I gave him a warm letter to Coleridge Kennard, the banker, who, I understand, foots all the bills."
When he came into the room I had to report to him the results of a mission he had entrusted me with. The topic of the day was "The Housing of the Poor."
Lord Salisbury had written an article in favour of the idea in The Nineteenth Century magazine, and Escott, egged on by Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical leader, had sent Archibald Forbes, the famous war correspondent, to Hatfield to report on what Lord Salisbury had done on his own estate for the rehousing of his poor. Forbes had sent in a most sensational report. He described houses in the village of Hatfield with vitriol in his pen instead of ink; one diningroom he pictured, I remember, where "feculent filth dripped on the table during meals." The whole paper was a savage attack on Salisbury and his selfish policy. It frightened Escott, and when I pointed out that the antithetical rhetoric really weakened Forbes's case, he asked me, "Would you go down to Hatfield and check Forbes's account," adding, "I have spoken to Mr. Chamberlain about you and your articles in the Spectator and he hopes you'll undertake the job."
Of course I went down to Hatfield at once with a proof of Forbes's article in my pocket. In the very first forenoon I found that the house where the "feculent filth dripped" didn't belong to Lord Salisbury at all, but to a leading Radical in the village. At the end of the day I was able to write that Forbes had only visited one house belonging to Lord Salisbury of the thirty he had described.
I then called on Lord Salisbury's agent and told him I had been sent to ascertain the truth: "Would he give it to me?" Would he?
He was a thorough-going admirer of Lord Salisbury, whom he described as probably the best landlord in England.
"Lord Salisbury's not rich, you know," he began, "but as soon as he came into the title and property he went over every one of the six hundred houses on the estate: he found four hundred needed rebuilding; we decided that he could only afford to rebuild thirty a year. The same evening he wrote me that he could not accept rent for any of the four hundred houses we had condemned, and when the houses were rebuilt he would only take three per cent of the cost as rental. I'll show you one or two of the houses that are still to be rebuilt," he added. "I shouldn't mind living in them."
I then showed him Archibald Forbes's paper, without disclosing the writer's name. "Lies," he cried indignantly, "all lies and vile libels. If only all noblemen acted to their tenants and dependents as Lord Salisbury does, there would not be a radical in England," and I half-agreed with him.
Now I reported the whole investigation to Escott and he said, "You must tell Chamberlain about it: he'll be dreadfully disappointed for he had picked Forbes. But I am enormously obliged to you; you must let me pay your expenses, at any rate. I'll get it from Joseph," he added, laughing. "Shall we say twenty pounds?"
"Say nothing," I replied, "but give me a letter recommending me for the editorship of the Evening News and we'll call it square."
"With a heart and a half." cried Escott. "I'll give you the best I can write and a tip besides. Get Hutton of the Spectator to write too about your editorial qualities and see Lord Folkestone about the place, for though Kennard pays, Lord Folkestone is really the master. Kennard wants a baronetcy and Lord Folkestone can get it for him for the asking." Of course I acted on Escott's advice at once. Hutton gave me an excellent letter, declaring that he had used me editorially and hardly knew how to praise me as I deserved. The same evening I sent off all the letters. Two days after I got a note from Lord Folkestone, saying that Mr. Kennard was out of town, but if I'd meet him at the office of the Evening News in Whitefriars Street in the morning, he'd show me round and we'd have a talk. Of course I accepted the invitation and left my letter within an hour at Lord Folkestone's house in Ennismore Gardens, then hastened off to Escott at once to find out all about Lord Folkestone.
I found that as soon as his father died, he would be Earl of Radnor with a rentroll of at least?. 150,000 a year. "The eldest son's called Lord Folkestone by courtesy, for they own nearly the whole town and this Lord Folkestone married Henry Chaplin's sister. She's a great musician, has a band of her own made up of young ladies and her only daughter. Radnor is an old man and so Folkestone must soon enter into his kingdom; he's something in the Queen's household," and so forth and so on.
I was soon to know him intimately.
Coincidence has hardly played any part in my life; indeed, one incident about this time is the first occasion in my life when I could use the word. I was returning from Escott's house in Kensington when I asked the cabby to take me by the Strand and Lyceum Theatre, for I was greatly interested then in Irving's productions. As luck would have it, while I was looking at the advertisement, the people were going into the theatre, and, as I turned, a young man jumped out of a four-wheeler and then helped out Laura Clapton and her mother. He was in dress clothes but unmistakably American, thirty years of age perhaps, about middle height, broad and very good-looking. He was evidently much interested in Laura, for he went on talking to her even while helping her mother to alight, and Laura answered him with manifest sympathy.
For a moment-just one wild impulse-I thought of confronting them; then a wave of pride surged over me. As she had not waited even three months, I would not interfere. I drew aside and saw them enter the theatre, rage in my heart.
How far had the acquaintance gone? Not very far, but- Was Laura, too, that queen among women, a mere spoil of opportunity? Then I would live for my work and nothing else, But the disappointment was as bitter as death!