The Making of a Novelist | Page 2

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 had no experience whatever; but when Dawson was announced as the editor of the forthcoming Birmingham Morning News I wrote to him, asking to be allowed to join the staff. I had already secured a