(sic) in his life. I have done business with a great many men in London, and think Hooley as honest, perhaps even more honorable, than most of the men I have worked with.
When he came out of prison, I met him by chance in the Strand and of course held out my hand and greeted him as of old. 'You know,' he said, 'I have just come out of Brixton?'
'Yes,' I replied, 'but that doesn't alter my opinion of you. When will you dine with me?'
He was very much obliged to me, he said, but he was going back to Risley Park, which he had settled on his wife after his Dunlop success. He told me that I was one of the few people who hadn't altered to him. Away he went, and I have not seen him since, though I understand that his book describing his career has been a best seller.
One curious thing happened which tinged my liking for Hooley with a shade of doubt. Broadley declared that he was not fair to us, and I found out that that was the case. When I sent my claim in for the three thousand pounds unpaid over Schweppe's to the official receiver, I got a letter from him that made me gasp. He asked me to define the debt and how it had been incurred.
I told him that I had put up five thousand pounds in the Schweppe promotion on Hooley's undertaking to pay ten thousand cash or shares, as I might decide after the promotion. I had received seven thousand in cash and no more. The official receiver answered me, saying that he was very sorry to question my word, but could I get any proof that I had put up the five thousand pounds. I went at once to my bank-Coutts's-got the original check endorsed by Hooley and took it to the official receiver in person and asked him for an explanation; I thought his request extraordinary. The moment he saw the check his manner altered; he became cordial. 'You have no idea,' he said. 'I have got claims from a dozen journalists, but no one else except yourself helped Hooley with the cash. Here is Mr. So and So who is asking for twenty thousand, yet he never advanced a penny. Please forgive me if I thought that you were like the rest, claiming money without having risked any.'
The thought came to me afterwards that Hooley had misrepresented me, as Broadley said; but I imagine that it was only because he classed all journalists together in a lump. He was careless, but not malevolent.
For some reason or other the Daily Mail was always against me, and in this matter of Hooley's bankruptcy it more than hinted that I was trying to get money without having done anything for it. Curiously enough, the result of the investigation of the official receiver cleared me and established the fact that the Daily Mail correspondent was one of those who had claimed money without having given any quid pro quo. Harry Marks, too, of the Financial News, was astonished to hear that I had put up money with Hooley.
'I am claiming twenty thousand pounds from his estate,' he said, 'but I never gave him any money. He never asked me for it.'
Hooley's example taught me the value of company promoting, and I resolved sooner or later to market the twenty-odd thousand shares I still possessed in the Saturday Review.
CHAPTER VII
All these years, '97 and '98, in which I had sketched out my Shakespeare book and written half a dozen new stories, I had come more and more to feel that I must do my own work and that the drudgery of journalism was interfering with the real business of my life. The public spirit of the time, too, didn't please me. It was evident to me that Chamberlain was seeking to establish British authority, or as he would have said, British supremacy, in South Africa. At length came the news that Alfred Milner was appointed by Chamberlain as Governor General, and was to be sent out to the Cape with full authority.
Ever since Harold Frederic introduced me to Alfred Milner, when we were all in the thirties, I had thought of him as the most perfect example of a modern German in mind that I had ever seen. Both in defects and in qualities, he was characteristically German and not English. For the German trusts reason and knows thoroughly what he has learned, while the best Englishman has a subconscious belief that there are instincts higher than reason, and he has never learned anything deeply enough to feel that he knows it as a master. These immature spiritual antennae are what makes the Englishman the tragic creature he often is in practical life, and the lovable person he is at his best; and their absence gives the German his supremacy in the present and forecasts perhaps his comparative failure in the future.
Now Harold Frederic was a great friend of Milner, and he had told me a good deal about him and his imperialistic views. I became a little anxious and saw Beit on the matter, but he assured me there was nothing important afoot, and at the same time he wanted to know why I had not asked him to take any shares in the Saturday Review. I told him he could take five thousand whenever he pleased; and he took five thousand and gave me his check; others took shares too, especially when a dividend of five per cent was declared on the capital. I was on easy street as regards money, but still a little doubtful of the political situation, when Harold Frederic came and said he was giving a big dinner at the Savoy Hotel to Milner on his appointment to South Africa, and asked me to speak at the dinner. I said I should be glad to.
Harold Frederic in his speech talked of Milner and himself as only a man of genius could talk. He spoke first of Milner's generous recognition of other men; how he had pressed work upon him and praised his writing enthusiastically; he gave this as a sign of kindness of heart, whereas in Milner it was merely the efficiency of the bureaucrat. Then he spoke of Milner's career.
'From the first,' he said, 'at Oxford, even, the English had picked Milner out for a high position. He had had a German training and had won besides all sorts of scholastic honors at Oxford. We all knew when he arrived in London and became Stead's assistant on the Pall Mall Gazette that he was sure to come to honor, and all of us are glad now to congratulate him,' for he's a jolly good fellow, and so forth.
Milner said little or nothing, did not commit himself in any way, whereas I spoke with perfect frankness. I said that the Englishman who went out to South Africa with power and who brought the Boers and British to mutual trust and harmony would do great work; but such a heaven-sent diplomatist would have to show sympathy with the Boers from the very outset. The English, of course, would trust him; he should make it his first object to win the confidence of the Boers, who were naturally suspicious. The British Empire extended north of the Transvaal over the whole central plateau of Africa to Nairobi or to Khartoum, or, if you wished, to Cairo; surely from the Transvaal border to Khartoum was enough for British colonization in the next two hundred years.
'There,' I went on, 'was the most fruitful land in the world, and the best climate in the world; and I think a great colonizing effort should be made, for all the unemployed in Britain might be established on that magnificent plateau and thus extend and consolidate the greatest empire on earth. The first essential to success,' I insisted, 'was to win the Boers by treating them fairly. They were not anti-English; they were, in spite of the war of 1880 and in spite of the Jameson Raid, inclined to be pro-English; and as soon as Krueger died the English colonists in the Transvaal would be accorded full citizen rights. The Boers would do this so much the quicker if the land to the north of the Transvaal were settled up by Englishmen. Why shouldn't the next colonial Governor be the Moses of this new Exodus? On the other hand, if the new Governor quarreled with the Boers and excited that dislike which lay so near ignorance, he might have a war on his hands that would sow evil broadcast and would retard the development, not only of South Africa, but also of Great Britain.'
I did my very best in this sense. A good many people applauded me, but after the dinner, when Harold Frederic and I strolled together to the Liberal Club and I congratulated him on one of the best speeches I had ever heard, he said:
'My dear Harris, I never made a good speech before in my life, and you usually talk well, but tonight I thought you were at your worst; you showed such distrust of Milner. I assure you, he's a Radical and a good fellow.'
'I don't believe he's a Radical; he's a German and he'll fail ruinously in South Africa. He'll bring war. You've only to look at him; he frightens me.'
Lord Desborough came to me afterwards and said that he agreed with a good many of my ideas, but he wished that I could really meet Milner because Milner was a prince of good fellows and absolutely fair-minded. Finally he invited me to lunch with him at Willis' rooms; and I lunched there a week later with Milner and Lord Desborough.
It was at this time the fashionable rendezvous for lunch in London, and I noticed that three or four people,
