THE first is (or was) a schoolmaster. When he was in his later teens, long before I met him, he had worked for an Oxford scholarship, and he had worked so hard that a few days before the examination he was found at a late hour babbling incoherently over his books, a nervous wreck. He never took the examination and never went to Oxford, but, when he recovered, passed into a little day-school. Nevertheless, Oxford had entered into his soul. To me, he was more like an Oxford man, or what an Oxford man ought to be, than any other person I have ever met. He had all the larger and more genial traits clearly marked, with just the least delicious hint of pleasant caricature, like a good actor presenting a character-study of a younger Don. There were little peculiar traits too, as of some mythical college, of a ghostly Balliol or an unsubstantial ‘House.’ It may have been the result of deliberate cultivation, or it may have been the gift of one of the younger gods, a compensation for that disastrous breakdown; I do not know, but it was harmless enough, and delicate fooling for a spectator.

I have not seen him for years, but I can call him well to mind even now; a little man with hair loosely parted in the centre and falling over his temples, and eyeglasses insecurely perched halfway down a long nose. In the small town in which he (and I too) lived at that time, there were in all five working-men’s clubs. He was a member of all five. Why, I do not know, except that beer was very much cheaper in these places than it was elsewhere. But even that does not explain why he was a member of them all. But so it was. Nightly into one or other of these working-men’s clubs, he carried his insecure eyeglasses and his Oxford manner, and was well received, with the respect due to ‘a character,’ rather than with the hardly suppressed laughter that followed him elsewhere. There he would take a friend, and over the beer (which was both cheap and excellent) he would talk at length, letting the ball of conversation roll easily down the long cadences of his speech. His favourite theme, I remember, was the utter worthlessness of the middle-classes, to which he belonged, and he was the first person of my acquaintance to speak of them as ‘the bourgeois.’ It is years since I last saw him, but I trust that some school still knows him, chalky and pedantic, day by day, and that at least five working-men’s clubs still see him, magnificent over his beer, night by night.

The second man was a spectacled smoky fellow, getting on in years, whom I knew but slightly. His trade was the writing of boys’ stories, not for expensive illustrated books but for penny dreadfuls. What else he had done to earn his bread, when he was only an aspirant, I do not know, but that was his trade when I knew him. Year after year, he chronicled the adventures of Dick This or Jack the Other at School or among Pirates or Red Indians; and his pay was one guinea for every thousand words, which was not bad, for he could turn out a good many thousand words in a week and could also fill up with Boom! Crash! Bang! a kind of writing that boys like. Although the scenes of his tales were laid in all parts of the world, there was no nonsense about him; he did not travel in search of local colour, but used a gazetteer and trusted to his powers of invention, which were well-tried and excellent. But his heart was not in the work and he took no pride in it. At regular intervals he would simply send off so many thousand words to the Boys’ Monster Tales Publishing Company Limited, and his stories came out under many different names, not one of which was his own. He had a wife but no family, few friends, and belonged to no club or society. The thing he lived for was a great work in metaphysics, at which he had been engaged for many years, and which was to be called ‘The Mind of the Universe.’ All his spare time and energy were given to thinking out the problems that he had set himself, and he would weary his few visitors with interminable talk in a philosophical jargon of his own making. Years before, he had read a little handbook on Spinoza, which had brought a new set of problems into his world, and which had so intrigued him that he had determined to devote the remainder of his life to metaphysics. But he had also made up his mind not to study the philosophers, because their theories might keep him from original thought: he meant to think everything out for himself. When he had erected his system, the world would recognise it for what it was, and forgive his preposterous stories of ‘Jack Marraway and the Terror of the Prairie’ and the rest. He was wrong. I am no metaphysician but I know that his stories were better than his grand original system of metaphysics. For, after years of labour, he had only succeeded in enunciating paradoxes that were stale jokes in Ionia, in dragging out cumbersome creaking theories that even the long extinct State University of Hochensteilschwarzburg would have rejected at a glance; and all written in that terrible jargon of his. Yet it was a manly thing to do, and though all his labour was worth little, it was not in vain, for it gave him secret incommunicable pleasure and he felt himself to be a man marked off from the common run of men; which he was. For the rest, he smoked prodigious quantities of ‘Meadowsweet Flake’—a vile tobacco, grossly doctored and scented.

The other man I never knew personally, but I received many accounts of him, and his reputation, the legend of him, has been very dear to me. He was a shopkeeper and sold, at a considerable profit, optical instruments, spectacles and whatnot. But what set him apart from other men was that he had had more bad verse through his hands than any other person in these islands. It was his one great hobby to collect bad verse and publish it in anthologies. He must have known more poetasters than any other man living or dead. On the death of a well-known politician, or immediately after any great public event, he would set to work and gather up all the offscourings of the ‘Poets’ Corners’ of obscure country papers. Thus, he it was, and no other, who edited The Best Poetical Tributes to the late Joseph Chamberlain, and many other anthologies. His system was, I fancy, to compel every contributor to become a subscriber and take several copies of the volume in hand, so that it was ensured a sale. The verse was always bad, the very worst conceivable, for no one who wrote good verse would have suffered him to live. Why he did it—and he produced innumerable volumes—is a mystery, for there could not have been much money in it, and the same energy and impudence would have given him a fortune in the quack medicine business. I have thought sometimes that he was a satirist of a particularly deep kind, but I have been assured by those who knew him that he was entirely serious and innocently proud of the good work he was doing. Nor did he allow his literary service to interfere with his trade. In the centre of his shop-window there was a coloured life-size bust of Shakespeare with a pair of eyeglasses on its nose. The bust hinted delicately to all passers-by that though our man was but a shopkeeper, he too had served the Muse and was the editor of the Hundred Best, etc.; the eyeglasses, through which one caught the mild glance of the poet, indicated the nature of the shop. It was admirable! And though the man himself is dead, the shop remains and with it the bust. I saw it only a short time ago, and was gladdened; indeed, there seems something lacking now when I see Shakespeare without his eyeglasses; but one cannot, of course, be dogmatic about such matters of taste.

All three men lived in one town, where I too lived for a season. And there were others, more wonderful still, whom I cannot describe in this place, nor perhaps in any other, for I write to be believed.