THIRTEEN YEARS
OF A BUSY WOMAN’S LIFE

Photo by Hoppé, 1911
WRITING

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXII

THIRD EDITION

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

v

THIRTEEN YEARS
OF A BUSY WOMAN’S LIFE

ONE day in the ’nineties I was quietly sitting in my library, when the door opened and a gentleman was announced. Standing solemnly before me, he said:

“I have come to thank you for my life.” I looked at him. Was the man sane? Was he suffering from hallucinations, or what on earth did he mean?

“Yes,” he repeated solemnly, “I have come to thank you for my life.”

“I am afraid I am at a loss to understand,” I replied, “perhaps you can explain.”

“Existence became utterly unendurable,” he continued, “worries heaped upon one another until the strain was unbearable, and then, to crown all, a terrible disease took possession of me. I knew I could not live. It might be a matter drawn out in all its hideousness for two or three years, but—the germ was there.”

“We shall none of us live for ever,” I replied cheerily. “Death is inevitable.”

“Oh yes,” he nodded, “death is inevitable; but we do not all have to face it in this way. So unendurable was the strain that I determined to end the matter in my own fashion, and a day or two ago I finally decided to take my life.”

The man talked in a perfectly rational manner, though at the same time in an extremely impressive tone.

“I did not come to the conclusion lightly,” he continued. “I weighed all the pros and cons; faced all the circumstances of the case, and I could not see that my life was of any4 value; in fact, in many ways my family would be better off without me. I had not much pluck left to face the inevitable racks of pain and disease, so after hours and days of mental torment I decided to end it all.

“Night came.

“Having determined to wait quietly until all the family were in bed, I sat in my study and read. I read and thought, and planned and argued, and the hours appeared to drag interminably. For some reason the servants seemed later than usual in retiring, and I watched the hands of the clock slowly move along. It was almost midnight. The lights had been put out in the passages. I could no longer hear the tread of people overhead; but for fear that it was still too early I returned to the book I was reading. Strangely enough, my eye fell on the word suicide. It seemed to rivet me with a weird and terrible fascination. I looked again, and that word appeared to be written in letters of blood. Was it a message, I wondered, to a man standing on the brink of the grave, on the verge of cutting the knot of life? What did that word suicide portend? I read on....

“Gradually I became interested. Here was a strange case. A man battling with blindness, a man whose circumstances seemed somewhat similar to my own; and as I read, I discovered that he had thought deeply on the same subject, he had disentangled the same problem. Yes, as I read and re-read the words they seemed to burn into my brain. I realised that this man decided that he was not justified in taking his own life, that even though blindness threatened he still had a mission to fulfil; and when I had learnt those words by heart, I banged down the book, rose from the table, clenched my fist, and determined to go on quietly and live my life to the bitter end. That page which altered the course of events was in the ‘Life’ you wrote of your father.1 Since that evening I have read the book from end to end. Clearly he was right. He had a mission to fulfil and fulfilled it. I have, I hope, now passed through the darkest hour of my life, but I could not rest until I came to tell you personally that if you had not written the book, which chance put into my hand that night, I should have been a dead man to-day.”

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Seizing both my hands, he uttered, “God bless you and thank you! God bless you! Good-bye.”

And he was gone.

This incident set me thinking.

My father’s life had helped many men who had never seen or met him. Well if I, a woman, could in some lesser manner help some lone, struggling women who, like myself, after being reared in wealth, suddenly found themselves forced to toil for those “little luxuries” which to a refined woman are verily the necessaries of life, I too might be of use.

The Society bride who went to Ascot on a drag; to Ranelagh, Hurlingham, or Sandown in her husband’s buggy, or drove her own Park phaeton and pair; the pampered, spoilt, well-dressed young wife, who only lived for a “good time,” at one fell swoop lost all.

A hard school—more kicks than halfpence—and yet now it is passed one is almost thankful for the experience, thankful for each link in the chain so often welded with fire and tears.

Two things made life possible—ambition for one’s children and the kindly hand of friendship—two most precious pearls in the diadem of life. These, and a mother’s devotion and encouragement.

That hard time of Egyptian slavery is over; my thirteen years’ task is ended. The widow’s cruse may run low, but need not be empty if she has health and courage to work; yes, work, work, and still keep on working.

Only let me deplore the unfortunate circumstances that allow the possibilities of widows and children left to battle with the world, without sufficient means for a home and education after being born in luxury.

I won’t attempt to write my memoirs, but just jot down a few odds and ends before they slip my memory.

Memory is an excellent institution, and often assertive until one begins to write. Then nasty little doubts have a way of creeping in, doubts about dates, spelling of names, the actual perpetrator of a certain cute act, or the inception of a particular thought. Each year fills memory’s slate more full, and the older markings become gradually obliterated as new pencillings take their place.6

Poor old slate, let me see if I cannot decipher a few stray remembrances before they are all rubbed out—and recall how I began to write.

Thirteen years.

What does the title mean? It does not refer to a prison sentence, to supposed ill-luck as a fateful sign which a modern club of thirteen members is said to have put to the test, nor to anything romantic. Like Nansen, I am not superstitious. He was the head of twelve men on his Polar expedition, and his was the most successful one ever carried through, for he never lost a man. They started a party of thirteen and they returned a party of thirteen—an antidote to the superstition originated by the treachery of Judas.

Thirteen years is a large lease of existence during which to hire one’s self out a bond-slave. But that is what I did—perforce. Necessity is a hard taskmaster; and necessity plied the lash.

A great deal of water runs in thirteen years; water that turns the mill-wheel to grind us mortals to finer—perchance more useful—issues. The various incidents in my busy life during those years of toil all doubtless had their effect on character and my outlook on the world. “Nobody simply sees; nobody simply meets, and doing, simply does this and that. Inevitably in seeing, meeting, and doing there is a certain shaping of the mind and spirit of the person principally concerned.” So Richard Whiteing wisely remarked, speaking of this—my hardest stage of life’s journey.

Certainly my outlook on the world has altered since the days of happy, careless childhood, of joyous youth as girl and bride. How I resented constraint at fifteen and appreciated it later. How the restlessness of my teens mellowed and sobered and ripened.

Although I did not experience it myself, I am sure that adversity is a fine up-bringing for youth. It makes children think, which youth nursed in luxury seldom does. Adversity only came to me in my twenties.

Youth is often spent courting time,

Middle age in chasing time,

Old age, alas, in killing time.

Reared in a soil of generous sufficiency, nourished by wisdom and kindness in the warm sunshine of love, instead7 of the human plant being blighted when the winds blew and the rains fell, it grew stronger and blossomed and bore the fruit of work.

“Oh, poor So-and-so was not brought up to work,” people often say despondingly when bad times overtake their friends; “theirs was such a happy home.” But surely the home should be happy. At least, let there be something of gladness to look back on, when one is struggling uphill under a heavy load. The influence of parents is incalculable in effect on children. The example of my father was powerful in helping me to take up my burden as he had done his.

If these pages, put together after thirteen years of constant work, seem too scrappy—disconnected even—let me ask the sympathy of those who know what it is to be interrupted again and again by illness in the midst of a task. Illness that has laid me on my sofa, in bed, even sent me to a “cure” in search of health, as often as six times in eighteen months; that makes the grasshopper a burden.

Without friendship and sympathy courage would have failed to go on struggling with what seemed a veritable burden, and yet when well, how little I thought of toil and stress when writing more important books. The offer of a friend to undertake a little of the drudgery of the task seemed to lift tons’ weight off my head. Still, though other hands may pull a sofa and shake pillows into place, the invalid’s direction is needful or her own room would not have her own individuality, and would lose the personal touch that gives the clue.

Ups and downs will come. Bolts will fall from the blue. The unexpected is what always happens.

Then, oh, why not be prudent, both young men and maidens? Don’t be foolish, shy, or negligent to make provision against a possible wintry time, by settlement, or insurance, and in every sound and legal way hedge round your home against those desolating intruders—Poverty or Illness.

I do not intend to enter into all my ancestral chain between these covers; and I do not mean to moralise. People don’t care a ha’penny for other people’s philosophy, although everybody must have some kind of working philosophy of his own after he has knocked about in the crowd and scrimmage of life. I’ve got mine, like other folk,8 and I’ve learnt there are only two things worth living for—love and friendship. The first is not passion, but the capacity to care for the welfare of others more than for one’s own. Passion burns itself out, love is ceaselessly unselfish.

And friendship? Why, friendship is the handmaiden of sympathy, the art of appreciation, the pleasant interchange of thought.

This is a jumble of facts and fancies, wherein memory and pen run riot.

UNLESS a book starts with some interest it finds no readers. The first page is often the key to the whole.

But how is one to be interesting about such commonplace events as being born and vaccinated, cutting one’s first tooth or having measles and whooping-cough? They are all so uneventful, and while important to the little “ego” are so dull to the public. Therefore I refuse to be either “born” or even cut a wisdom tooth within these pages anent a busy woman’s life, except to say that on the night of my birth my father and his friend, the famous surgeon John Erichsen (later Sir John), walked home from a meeting of the Royal Society together, and on reaching the old house in Harley Street a servant greeted them with the announcement that my mother was very ill.

Up the stairs my father hurried, while his colleague went off for the nurse. I was too small to be dressed, so my early days were spent rolled up in cotton wool—which fact did not deter my further development, as at fourteen years of age I stood five feet eight inches high. On my second day of existence I was introduced in my cradle to him who for nearly thirty years was as a second father to me—him whom I always called “dear Uncle John.”

What a horribly egotistical thing it is to write about one’s self!

Until now I have generally managed to keep I out of books by using that delightful editorial WE, but somehow this volume cannot be written as WE, and the hunting of the snark never afforded more trouble than the hunting out of I. There it is and there it remains. It refuses to be removed. It glares upon the pages, and spurns all attempts to be suppressed.

12

Let me humbly apologise, once and for all, for

“I.”

Some people are born smart, just as others are born good—some are born stupid—and some are born haunted by the first personal pronoun. People believe they are relating the honest truth when they speak ill of themselves, and yet it is so pleasant to relate appreciative little stories of “ego.”

Why mention my early youth in a book only meant to treat of working years?—it may be asked. Well, for this friends are to blame. Folk have constantly asked, “What first made you write? Was it an inherited gift?”

Did my second baptismal name predestine my career? On this subject my father wrote in a diary:

“The next favours I received from Fortune were domestic ones—a boy and a girl. The name of Ethel was given the little maid to please her mother, that of Brilliana to please me. Brilliana, I called her, out of respect for the only woman of the name of Harley who added by her writings to the celebrity of the race. The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, 1625-43, wife of Sir Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath, were reprinted by the Camden Society, with introductions and notes by Thomas Taylor Lewis, M.A., Vicar of Bridstow, Herefordshire.2

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“Of men authors we have had abundance: of women only one. No wonder, then, I wished our daughter to perpetuate her name.”

Thus it seems to have been my father’s wish to dedicate me to the memory of the well-known Dame Brilliana who shone in both social and literary circles in the seventeenth century. Did he, perhaps, remember that the old Romans, at the birth of a child, used to choose for it the name of some ancestor, whose career they wished to be its example, in the belief that the deceased would protect and influence the infant to follow in the same path?

This second name of mine is queer enough, and seems to have suggested penmanship, followed by a number of strange nicknames, chosen promiscuously by my friends, but all tending in two directions:

“Madame la Duchesse.”

“Liege Lady.”

“She who would be obeyed.”

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“Grande Dame.”

“Esmeralda.”

“Carmen.”

“Vixen.”

Do these denote character?—for they apparently run from the sublime to the ridiculous.

My parents seem to have been less careful about choosing me a nurse of a literary turn, however otherwise excellent the woman was, for the following quaint letter to my mother from my old attendant, who was for nearly forty years in the family, is not exactly a model of epistolary art:

Apart from the undoubted virtues of my illiterate old nurse, my education proceeded on the usual infantile lines. My father taught us children a great deal about natural history, which we loved, as most children do, and many odds and ends of heterogeneous information picked up from him in those early days proved a mine of “copy” in years to come.

A sage once said the child should choose its own parents. He might have gone farther and said that the child should choose its own school, because if school-fellows have often had as much influence as mine did on me, then school companions are a matter of importance. Youth is the time of selfishness and irresponsibility. How cruel we are through thoughtlessness! How we stab and wound by quick, unmeditated words! The journey onwards is a stony one, but we all have to pass along if we are to attain either worldly success or, greatest of all blessings, mastery of self. I often wonder why people are so horrid at home. We know it, we deprecate it, but we don’t seem to have the pluck or the courage to change it. We suffer the loneliness of soul we all endure at times, even more than we need, because of our own foolish pride and want of sympathy with our surroundings. We could be so much nicer and more considerate15 if we really tried. We mean to be delightful, of course; but we signally fail.

In those far-away kindergarten days in Harley Street there were a little boy and three grown-up gentlemen with whom I made friends. The little boy grew up and went to Mexico, where I met him after a lapse of twenty-five years, a merchant in a good position. He was able to do a great deal for me during my stay there, and proved as a brother in occasions of difficulty.

Sir Felix Semon became a great physician, and Dr. von Mühlberg a German Ambassador. The more elderly gentleman was studying at the British Museum, and only lodged at the house. Dr. von Rottenburg was also a German, and he used to pat my head every morning on the stairs and talk to me about my playthings, calling me “leetle mees.” When I grew up this famous philosopher, diplomat, and writer never forgot the little black-eyed girl going to school with her doll, and was one of my dearest and best friends in Germany.

On his return to Berlin he published, in 1878, a book called Begriff des Staates. It was a learned volume and created much sensation in Germany. One day he was sitting in the Foreign Office when he received an invitation to dine with the great Bismarck. He was amazed, but naturally accepted. At the dinner were only two other men, the Imperial Chancellor and his son Herbert. The former talked to von Rottenburg about his book in most flattering terms. On his return home that night his wife asked him how he had got on.

“Not particularly well,” he replied. “I was so awe-stricken by the wondrous capacity, the bulk of both body and mind of Bismarck, that I seemed paralysed of speech and said practically nothing.

“Why were you invited?” enquired his spouse.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” was his reply. “Anyway, I am afraid I made but a poor impression.”

A week later von Rottenburg was again sitting in his room when Count Wilhelm Bismarck was announced.

“My father wishes to see you to-morrow,” he said.

“Indeed, and may I ask what for?”

“That is his business, not mine. Be pleased to call at such an hour16.”

Perplexed as to the repetition of the invitation the young diplomat called as desired. Bismarck was sitting at his table writing. The man who held the destiny of Europe in his hands looked up and nodded.

“Sit down,” he said, and went on signing letters.

When he had finished blotting the last bold signature, turning to von Rottenburg, he said:

“Do you wonder why I sent for you?”

“To tell the truth, I do.”

“I wish to make you Chief of the Chancellery.”

Von Rottenburg was naturally amazed, but said nothing.

“Do you understand what I say?” repeated Bismarck. “I wish to make you Chief of the Chancellery.”

“Well—er—but——”

“There is no well or but about it.”

“But, you see, I am rather ambitious.”

“Are you? I am glad to hear it.”

“And such being the case, perhaps——”

“Man!” thundered Bismarck from his seat as he thumped the table; “Do you understand the importance of what I am offering you?”

“I quite realise the immense honour, but at the same time I am interested in my present work, and am doing so well at the Foreign Office that I should be sorry to relinquish——”

“Are you married?” interrupted the Chancellor.

“Yes, to an English lady.”

“I congratulate you. I believe English women are the best wives and companions in the world.”

Here let it be remarked that Bismarck was a great English scholar. He spoke the language fluently, he read Tom Jones from cover to cover four times, and was never without his Shakespeare in the original, whole pages from which he could quote.

“Go home,” said the Prince; “tell your wife what I have offered you and ask her advice. But mind, if you come to me you will have to be my slave. Where I go you must go, and it is only fair that you should ask her permission. Women should be more considered than they are. Go home, I tell you, and ask your wife.”

ORIGINAL LETTER FROM BISMARCK WITH A TRANSLATION BY HIS INTIMATE FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE DR. VON ROTTENBURG

Still bewildered, flattered but faltering, von Rottenburg went home. He told his wife of his extraordinary interview with the Chancellor, and she at once exclaimed:

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“Of course, you must accept.”

“Must I?”

“Why, of course you must. A chance comes once to every man; let him accept it gladly when it does come.”

Accordingly he accepted the post of Chief of the Chancellery, and began his ten years’ service directly under the Iron Chancellor.

This post is by appointment for three years, and, as a rule, men are not reappointed, but von Rottenburg was enjoying his fourth term when Bismarck went out of office. During all those ten years von Rottenburg rarely left the side of his Chief—the greatest man of his day.

Speaking of the storm and stress of those years, he once said:

“No one can realise the strain of that time. Bismarck was the most remarkable man in the world. His physical health was as wonderful as his mental capacity. He had so much to do, so much to bear, so much to arrange, that I naturally saved him in every way I could, therefore nearly everything of importance went through me. That alone was a great responsibility. I settled all I could, arranged what interviews I thought necessary, and played buffer between him and the great world outside. But I often felt he reposed too much confidence in me.”

Bismarck objected to German being written or printed in Latin characters, and never read a book not printed in German letters. Von Rottenburg told me Bismarck had the greatest mathematical head he ever knew and a colossal brain. A man of huge bulk, vast appetite, and unending thirst, he was once at a supper-party in Berlin where six hundred oysters were ordered for ten people. He ate the greater share.

“Thank Heaven!” once exclaimed von Rottenburg; “during all those ten years of constant attendance and companionship with Bismarck we hardly ever had a disagreeable word, and instead of taking power from me, year by year he placed more upon my shoulders.”

“Practically nothing went to the Chancellor that did not pass through my hands. I shiver to think of the times I was disturbed at night with messages of importance, telegrams, special messengers, or letters marked Private; all these things seemed to have a particularly unhappy18 knack of arriving during the hours one should have had repose. It was very seldom, however, that I went to Bismarck, as I never disturbed him at night unless on a matter of urgent business, feeling that his sleep was as important to him as his health was to the German nation.”

“No, I don’t think I am tidy,” von Rottenburg once exclaimed. “I had to be tidy for so many years that I fear I am a little lax nowadays, although I can always find the papers I want myself, and generally know where I have put everything. During those years with Bismarck I had to be so careful, so exact and methodical. One of his little hobbies was that when he was staying in an hotel, or anywhere away from home, he, or I, would carefully search the waste-paper baskets to see no scrap of paper that could in any way be made into political capital was left therein.

“Bismarck was most particular about this. He destroyed everything that might, he thought, make mischief, or would do harm of any kind.”

Did von Rottenburg destroy his wondrous diaries which I saw a few weeks before he died? Of them I may have more to say in the future.

Another of my very earliest recollections is of Madame Antoinette Sterling. She came from America to sing in England, and often stayed at the residence of my grandfather, James Muspratt, of Seaforth Hall, near Liverpool. In this house in earlier years James Sheridan Knowles wrote some of his plays, and in it also Baron Justus von Liebig—who invented his famous soup to save my mother’s life—Charlotte Cushman (the American tragedienne), Charles Dickens, and Samuel Lover had been frequent and ever-welcome guests.

At the time that Antoinette Sterling arrived in this country sundry cousins, who were all quite little children, sat, open-mouthed and entranced, before the fire in that beautifully panelled, well-filled library at Seaforth Hall, while she squatted on the floor amongst us and sang, “There was an old Nigger and his name was Uncle Ned,” or “Baby Bye, here’s a fly.” How we loved it! Again and again we wildly demanded another song, clapping our hands, and again and again that good, kind soul sang to her juvenile admirers—maybe her first English audience.

Seaforth Hall was built by my grandfather about 1830,19 at which time four miles of beach divided him from Liverpool. The docks of that city are eleven miles long to-day, and the Gladstone Dock is now in the field in which we children used to ride and play. It was named “Gladstone Dock” because that great statesman was born at a house near by. The next dock will probably be on the site of my grandfather’s dining-room, and may berth the largest ship in the world, that monster now being built by Lord Aberconway (John Brown and Co.).

During his early years my father went a great deal into Society, being presumably considered a clever, rising young physician who had seen a good deal of the world, and was an excellent linguist: so by the time he moved to the house now numbered “25, Harley Street,” in 1860—a step followed later by his marriage with Emma, daughter of the above-named James Muspratt—he was well established in the social world.

I often heard him speak of the delightful gatherings he attended and so much enjoyed in those early days before I had opened my eyes on this wonderful world, when women like Charlotte Cushman, Catherine Hayes, Helen Faucit, Mrs. Charles Kean, Mrs. Kemble, and Mrs. Sterling added grace and charm to the company: when the scientific giants were Faraday, Tyndall, Sir David Brewster, Graham, Sir Henry Holland, and William Fergusson: and in the literary world he was brought into contact with Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Samuel Lover, Theodore Hook, and Mark Lemon.

The people at whose houses he visited became his constant guests; so later his children grew up in a delightful atmosphere, in a home of culture, where art, science, and literature were amply represented.

Meetings like these, even in earliest childhood, with bright souls, persons of culture, intellect, polished manners, and brilliant gifts, all leave strong impressions on a plastic youthful mind, and the memory is undoubtedly an influence through life.

But the commanding figure in Harley Street in my early years was not to be found among the doctors: it was Mr. Gladstone, while Mrs. Gladstone’s individuality was hardly second to that of her husband.

When Mr. Gladstone first came to live there the mob20 broke his windows, and shouted and yelled outside his house because of his hostility to Disraeli’s policy in the Russo-Turkish War (1876-8). The Jingo fever was at its height. There was tremendous excitement, and ultimately the street had to be cleared by mounted police. To the surprise of everyone, in the full tide of the tumult, the Gladstones’ front door opened, and out walked the old couple, arm-in-arm, and passed right into the midst of the very people who had been hurling stones through their windows. With the grand manner of an old courtier the statesman took off his hat, made a profound bow to the populace, and before the mob had recovered from its astonishment, he had walked away down the street with his wife.

It was a plucky act, and one which so surprised the boisterous assembly that they utterly subsided, and soon dispersed quietly.

Mr. Gladstone’s habit every morning was to leave home about half-past nine or ten o’clock and walk down to his work. My sister Olga (wife of Dr. Francis Goodbody), then a very little girl, used to go out with her nurse about the same time to Regent’s Park for her airing in a “pram.” Some twenty or thirty houses divided my father’s from Mr. Gladstone’s, and therefore, as the elderly statesman and the little girl both left home about the same time, they often met.

“Well, how is dolly this morning?” he would say, and then he would chaff the child on not having washed dolly’s face, or tell her that the prized treasure wanted a new bonnet. In fact, he never passed her without stopping to pat her on the head, and make some little joke such as children love. She became very fond of her acquaintance and came home quite disappointed if she had not seen “my friend Mr. Gladstone,” as she always called him.

Years afterwards, when Mr. Gladstone had ceased all association with Harley Street, and was Prime Minister, I fell a victim to the desire to possess his autograph. Few people now realise how difficult a thing it was to secure, for the public imagined that the statesman showered post cards, then a somewhat new invention, on his correspondents by hundreds and thousands. I asked his friend Sir Thomas Bond what was best to do. His advice was shrewdness itself. Mr. Gladstone, he assured me, had great objections to giving his autograph. He could not himself ask him point-blank21 for his signature. “But if,” said he, “you will send one of your books as a presentation copy to him, with a little note on the title page, ‘To Mr. Gladstone, from the Author,’ I will take it across and ask him to write you an acknowledgment.”

I did so, and Mr. Gladstone wrote me a charming little letter in his own hand:

Not long before his death I had another letter from him, short, as all his communications were, but always long enough to include the gracefully drawn compliment which, one fears, has died out of the art of letter-writing as now practised:

The mention of Mr. Gladstone in connection with Harley Street brings to mind his famous physician, Sir Andrew Clarke, who was a great personal friend of my father.

At one time Sir Andrew Clarke had the largest practice in London, besides holding the proud position of President of the Royal College of Physicians. Thanks chiefly to a charming personality, he was one of the most successful and most beloved of all the London medical men, and to him is doubtless due the widespread discovery that a careful diet is a better means to health than promiscuous floods of medicine.

These were some of the friendships and associations that surrounded my childhood: such was the soil that nourished my infant roots in kindliness and encouraged my green idea-buds to put forth into leaf.

AS the boy is proverbially father to the man, so is the girl mother to the woman.

Looking back, over thirteen years of exacting professional work, beginning in 1896—the sad cause and necessity for which will be told later—my destiny seems to have been that of a writer.

True, on my first coming out the stage was my girlish ambition. Elsewhere3 I have told how, after the success and delirious delight of the private theatricals given at home for me instead of a ball—at my own request—there came a tempting offer to make my bow behind the footlights. Breathless with excitement I rushed downstairs to tell my father and receive his approval. He heard my story, looked very sad, and declared it should never be with his consent: “Of all professions for women he disliked most the stage, especially for one so young.”

My dream was shattered, but the longing to work remained: Je l’ai dans le sang. Looking back now, difficult though it is to see one’s own growth, there was doubtless the worker dimly trying to struggle out of the enveloping husk of protecting conventionalities: something within me wanting to find an outlet, a means of self-expression.

In girlhood one hates the conventionalities. For instance, how I chafed at the care demanded in handling old family treasures and wished the cut-glass decanters, the old Scotch silver salvers, the Italian embroidered cushions, and all the other details of a refined home, at the bottom of the sea. I used mentally to vow that when I had a home of my own I would never have anything that cost more than sixpence, and would wear it out and throw it away. I did not then realise that little by little the love of beautiful 26things, fine workmanship, rich colours, coupled with reverence for ancient family gods, was being fostered within me.

Environment is of enormous importance in a child’s life. Heredity and environment are three-fourths of character, the other fourth being left to chance and circumstances; and character counts for more in the end than any other asset in life. If we are born into a refined home, we learn to hate vulgar things, we are not interested in vulgar people, and, however poor we may become, that love of culture and good taste never leaves us.

In spite of the tales and explanations that my father gave us about beautiful things of art, or curios, it must be owned these wearied me. But when the day for work came, some of them formed the nucleus and inspiration of the half-dozen articles the grown woman turned out every week for the Press.

The influence of that Harley-Street home was very strong. I left it when young for a house of my own, but its atmosphere went with me.

After all, it is the woman who makes the home. A man may be clever, brilliant, hard-working, a good son, a good father, and a good master, but without a wife the result is a poor thing. It is the woman who keeps the home together. It is the woman who is the pivot of life. Most men are like great big children, and have to be mothered to the end of time.

To my mother I really owe any success I may have had. Encouragement goes a long way, just as human sympathy is the very backbone of life. It was she who encouraged, cheered, and often censured, for she was a severe critic. It was she who helped my father during those awful years of blindness, who wrote his scientific books from dictation, before the days of secretaries and shorthand. It was she who learnt to work the microscope to save his eyes. Later, it was she who corrected my spelling and read my proofs. Never an originator herself, she was always an initiator. She ran her home perfectly and—whether as daughter, wife, or mother—never failed. Her personality dominated, and her personality made the home. Only two homes in life have been mine, and, roughly speaking, half has been spent in each; and yet few people have had so many addresses.27 I might have been running away from creditors, so many strange places have given me shelter in different lands.

I was a lazy young beggar in those Harley-Street days. Books and lessons had no particular fascination for me, and the only things I cared about were riding daily in the Row with my father, hunting occasionally, dancing, and painting. My education, after preparatory schooling, was more earnestly taken in hand at Queen’s College, Harley Street, but I was a very bad pupil, never did anything with distinction, and the only lectures I really cared for were literature and history, and the only occupations that appealed to me were drawing and map-making; but I did actually win a prize for mathematics.

Lady Tree, who was my mentor, can vouch for my mediocrity, judging by a letter just found, written by her shortly after a serious accident.

Later on my school education was finished in Germany, where my mother had many old friends, among whom was the great chemist, Baron von Liebig, my godfather. How oddly, as years roll by, friends meet and part and meet again, like coloured silks in a plaited skein. One of my school-fellows in Germany, for instance, came from Finland, and, later on, it was the fact of meeting her again that brought about my visit to “Suomi,” described in Through Finland in Carts.

Another of my companions became engaged to one of Sweden’s most famous artists, Carl Gustav Hellqvist, though at that time he was not known so well as later. He only spoke Swedish and French, and Julie Thiersch spoke German and English. Therefore many little translations were done by myself at that delightful country home of Maler Thiersch, on the shores of the König See, in Bavaria. Many sweet little sentences had to be deciphered by me, although the language of the eyes is so powerful that the actual proposal was accomplished through music (of which they were both passionately fond) and rapturous glances, in which he, at any rate, excelled.

What a delightful, fair, rough-and-tumble, jolly boyish man Hellqvist then was. Later, gold medals were showered at his feet, and many distinctions came to him while he painted those wonderful historical pictures which are now in the Museum at Stockholm.

But, alas! a few years of happy married life ended in an early death.

Other German girl companions are now married to Dr. Adolf Harnack, the famous theologian, and Professor Hans von Delbruck, Under-Secretary of State for Germany.

Of amusement there was no lack at home, for from the age29 of seven, I rode every morning with my father in Hyde Park, and kept up the practice with my husband after my marriage. Then there was skating on ice or rinks, croquet or tennis. There was also amusement of another kind. A delightful old Scotch gentleman used to come and tune the piano on Harley Street. One day he told me he was going on to tune one for an entertainment for the blind in the East End.

“Why don’t you come and recite to them?” he asked.

I was fifteen or sixteen at the time and bursting with pride over having won a prize for repeating Gray’s Elegy. That is a long time ago, but from then till now I have gone two or three times a year as girl, wife, or widow, to entertain those poor afflicted people—the blind.

The Somers Town club, which began in a small way and now numbers over eight hundred members, is the work of one woman. Mrs. Starey has accomplished a great mission. Besides her clothing club, coal club, and employment bureau, she provides an entertainment every Thursday night for these sightless sufferers to whom she has devoted her life. And as there are fifty-two Thursdays in a year, and it takes five or six performers for each entertainment, one can glean some idea of the labour entailed; but beyond all this, no outsider can realize what her life and sympathy have done for these sufferers. As a girl my interest was aroused in these people by the old piano tuner, and years afterwards I went on to their work Committee—just one instance among many, showing how first impressions and environment influence one’s after-life.

At “our shop” for the Society for Promotion of the Welfare of the Blind, on Tottenham Court Road, they sell mats, brushes, chairs, re-make mattresses, and even undertake shorthand notes and typewriting with nimble fingers and blind eyes.

I danced hard, painted, and accomplished a good deal of needlework for my father’s hospitals, or my own person. One Bugaboo haunted me, however, and that was music. I sang a little and played a little, both very badly, but my parents insisted on me struggling on. When I first met Alec Tweedie, shortly after my coming out, I heard him say, “There is only one thing in the world that would induce me to marry, and that is a thoroughly musical girl.” He had a30 beautiful voice and sang a great deal—but he married me!

Perhaps those music lessons made me appreciative later, but they were an awful waste of time and money.

Again, painting was another likely channel for my energies, for at that time I used to show my pictures at the women’s exhibitions; yes, and sell them too. But writing must have been ordained for me by the stars.

A year or two before my actual coming out my parents took me to supper one Sunday night at the house of Nicholas Trübner (the publisher), in Upper Hamilton Terrace, his only child being about my own age. Charles Godfrey Leland, Bret Harte, Miss Braddon, and others were there.

On this particular occasion I sat next that famous writer of gipsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland. He was an old friend of my father, and often came to Harley Street, so I knew him well. He chaffed me about being so grown up, and told me tales of some gipsy wanderings he had just made, when suddenly he exclaimed:

“Let me see your hand.”

Leland was a firm believer in palmistry, which lore he had picked up from the gipsies. For a long time, as it seemed to me, he was silent.

“Most remarkable, the most remarkable hand I have ever seen in anyone so young. My dear, you must write, or paint, or sing, or do something with that hand.”

Up to that moment I had certainly never thought of doing anything but lessons or enjoying myself.

He took out his pocket-book and made some notes, then he insisted upon the others looking at what he called “the character, originality, and talent” depicted in my hand.

He was so long about it that I grew tired, and at last exclaimed:

“I shall charge you if you lecture them about me any more.”

“And I’ll pay,” he said; “I’ll send you a Breitmann Ballad all to yourself.”

And he did. Naturally proud of being so honored in verse, its heroine was nevertheless shy, and never, never showed her poetic trophy for fear of being thought conceited.

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HANS BREITMANN’S BALLAD TO THE AUTHOR WHEN A GIRL—SET TO MUSIC BY ADOLPH MANN

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Years afterwards—in 1908—Mrs. E. K. Pennell wrote the Life of her uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, and there, to my 31surprise, reproduced my hidden ballad, a copy of which she had found amongst the writer’s papers. Sydney Low, in his critique of the book in the Standard, said this poem “was one of the best Leland ever wrote.” Leland intended it to be his last Breitmann Ballad, but I believe he wrote another later.

Leland was an enormous man, with a long, shaggy beard. He came from Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1824, but lived the greater part of his life on this side of the water. He was full of good stories: knew Oliver Wendell Holmes, Talleyrand, J. R. Lowell, Emerson, and others of that ilk. Our sympathy lay, however, in his love of the gipsies (about whom he wrote so much that to his friends he was known as “The Rye”), also in his affection for and knowledge of Germany, so that when I came back from that country a first-class chatterbox in the Teuton tongue, and ready to shake school-days from my feet, he wrote me that I “looked like a gipsy and talked German like a backfish.”

Those were the days of his waning as a literary star in London life, a firmament in which he had shone for long. His Breitmann Ballads were an unexpected hit. They made the journalist famous. The author became known as “H. B.” on both sides of the water. History relates that cigars were called after them, they were the rage. Germany was indignant; France ecstatic.

Lying by me is a letter I received from “Hans Breitmann32.” It displays his unvarying kindness and helpfulness towards younger people, always wanting to be doing something to employ their energetic mind and body. I had evidently made some proposal to him, and he says:

Leland was a most talented man, if one may use the word, for talent itself is generally undefinable even through a magnifying glass.

AUTHOR’S HAND

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Later, Adolph Mann, the composer, wished to set Leland’s charming words to music, and the accompanying ballad in 1908 was the result.

Sir Charles Santley thought so highly of it, “that he much regretted that the public would not let him sing any new things or he would have rendered it himself,” but, as he sadly remarked, “I am never allowed to sing anything but the old songs,” and at seventy two, when he retired, he was still “singing the old songs.”

That is the worst part of being a celebrity. The moment a man makes a name in any particular line, whether singing a song, acting a particular style or part, painting a certain type of tree, scenes of snow or what not—along that line he has to go for evermore, for the public to consider anything else from that particular person an imposition. People do not naturally become groovy. It is the public that makes them so.

The next development of Leland’s palmist theory, which begun in my youth, took place some years later, when a man arrived one day asking permission to make an impression of my hand. If I remember correctly, it was for a series of magazine articles upon the resemblance between the hands of persons occupied in the same professions. He showed impressions of the hands of many well known folks, and it was strange to see how inventive minds, like Sir Hiram Maxim, that delightful man of leonine appearance, had blunted tips to their fingers. That artistic and musical people should have long and tapering fingers was not surprising, but he pointed out other characteristics. Smearing a sheet of white paper with smoke, he pressed the palm of my hand on it, ran round the fingers with a pencil, and the trick was done. Anything more hideous or like a murderer’s fist one has seldom seen, but the lines were there as distinctly as those of prisoners’ fingers when their impressions are taken for purposes of identification.

This discovery, that the lines of the human thumb do not change from cradle to grave—was one of the brilliant achievements of Sir Francis Galton (the founder of Eugenics). I remember the great kindly, soft-voiced scientist in my father’s house speaking enthusiastically of Darwin—who was his relative—and his work. He was as determined to improve the race as Darwin was to prove its origin.

Sir Francis Galton was one of the kindest old gentlemen.34 Benevolence, goodness, and sympathy were written large all over his face. It was his very sympathy with mankind that made him wish to better the lot of the degenerate, while preventing their marriage, and improve the condition of the unsound. He even went so far as to wish rich folk to gather about them fine, sturdy young couples, to protect them and look after their children for the good of the race. He saw that the human race is deteriorating, while different breeds of animals are improving under care.

The tiny seeds of the environment of youth are what blossom and ripen in later years. And here, again, my childish environment bore ultimate fruit. As a child I met Galton, and as a woman I went on to the Council of the Eugenic Society of England.

Yes, I had a good time, a really lovely girlhood, and when the days of worry came I could look back with pleasure to those happy years. The remembrance helped me—but I missed the old life.

It doesn’t matter being born poor, that is no crime, and we cannot miss what we never had; but the poverty which robs of the luxuries—that use has really made necessaries—of existence is a cruel, rasping kind of poverty, that irritates like a gall on a horse’s back until one learns the philosophy of life. Luxury is merely a little more self-indulgence than one is accustomed to. Prolonged luxury becomes habit. The well-born can do without cream, but they cannot do without clean linen.

Those girlhood days were bright and happy. I had no cares, just a rollicking time in a refined and cultured home, with lots of young men ready to amuse me, and after all these years I am proud to say girl friends of my school days, and even of the kindergarten, are still constant visitors at my home. As I write a beautiful white azalea stands before me, an offering from a woman, who sent it with a note, saying, “It was so kind of you to let me come and see you after nearly thirty years, and so charming to find you so little changed from my school-playmate, in spite of all you have done since we met. Accept this flower with gratitude and affection from a friend of your early youth.”

These are the pretty little things that make life pleasant.

ICELAND seems a strange place to go to, but it came about in this wise.

My brother was ill after completing his medical education, and wanted a holiday. Not having the slightest idea where to go, Iceland was suggested. To Cook’s I then went. The young man behind the counter shook his head. They had never been asked for a ticket to Iceland. Indeed, they did not know how to get there. They knew nothing about the place. That decided the matter, and to Iceland, in 1886, we young folk went.

Then it was that my father besought me to keep a diary. “There will be no possibility of sending letters home,” he said, “because there are only two or three posts a year, and there is no telegraphic communication. So by the time you come back, you will have forgotten many of the interesting details, all of which your mother and I would like to know. Consequently I beg you will keep a diary.”

Therefore I took with me some funny little black-backed shiny books at a penny each, and scrawled down notes and impressions, sometimes written from the back of a pony, sometimes in the darkness of a tent in which one could not stand up; sometimes sitting beside a boiling geyser while our meal bubbled in a little tin can on the edge of the pool, but always beneath the gorgeous skies, the endless days and little-known nights of the Arctic in summer.

To that little trip romance is attached.

Alec Tweedie, who had been proposing to me regularly since the day I came out, was, to my amazement and disgust, standing on the quay at Leith when we arrived there ready to start.

We were a little party of four, and as he knew I particularly wished him not to come, and that he would make38 an odd man in the party and also render the situation uncomfortable for me, I was perfectly furious.

I raged up and down that quay, I used every bad word I could think of. But still he was firm to his ground. He would take his gun, he would shoot. He would never say a word to cause me the least embarrassment from the day we started till we returned, he would never refer to the old sentimental charge of which I was heartily sick. In fact, he promised to be on his “best behaviour,” but come he would.

I nearly turned tail myself, even at the last moment, so furious was I at the situation. However, as his word of honour was given, I accepted the matter rather than upset the whole party at the eleventh hour or let the others guess the secret.

To his credit be it said, he entirely carried out his promise. He was always there when I wanted him, never when I did not. He was just as nice to my girl companion as to myself. He was good pals with the two men, in fact, I do not think any of the others realised the situation in the least.

It was his behaviour during that time that made me begin to change my mind. I saw the strain it was on him and admired him for carrying it through. I saw him pull himself up many times and march off to light a pipe for solace.

If love is service, Alec loved.

Riding astride over a lava bed near Hekla my pony fell, the girths gave way, and saddle and I turned round together. It was a nasty fall on my head and I was stunned. Alec appeared—from goodness knows where—to pick me up. I have ridden since I was seven, generally on a side-saddle, but in Iceland, Morocco, and Mexico astride, and only two falls have been my lot, this and another from a side-saddle in Tangier, when my horse, climbing a steep stony road, strained and broke the girths and I fell on the off-side.

It was not till we were coming into the Firth of Forth many weeks later, just before landing on the quay where I had stormed and raged, that Alec Tweedie said:

39

“There is Edinburgh Castle, have I kept my word?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Have you any fault to find with anything I have said or done during the trip?”

“No,” I murmured.

“Have I kept my promise in the letter and the law?”

Again I had to answer “Yes.”

“Then you are satisfied?”

“But you had no right to come,” I weakly said.

“That has nothing to do with it. Are you satisfied?”

“Yes,” I had to reply.

“Then,” he continued, “remember that my bond is waste paper when we land in a few minutes, and the proposals I have made before, I shall repeat on terra firma.”

Six weeks later we were engaged, and six weeks later still I married one of the handsomest men in London.

When I was first engaged it was a constant subject of interest to my friends that the man should have such an extraordinary name as Alec. In 1887 no one in England had apparently ever heard the name of Alec. He was the fifth generation bearing the name himself, but outside that family the abbreviation does not appear to have penetrated.

Times change, and twenty years later the name had become so well known that I had the honour and felicity of seeing it on a music-hall programme, and placarded for a music-hall artist.

In his diary my father states the following:

“My daughter Ethel has just married (1887) Alec Tweedie, son of an Indian Civil Servant and grandson of Dr. Alexander Tweedie, F.R.S., formerly of 47, Brook Street, whose portrait hangs in the Royal College of Physicians, London. Old Dr. Tweedie’s work on fever was very well known, and the London Fever Hospital was built under his auspices. Strangely enough, he examined me when I first came to London to take the membership of the Royal College of Physicians.

“But the connecting-link is even stronger, for Alec Tweedie is first cousin to Sir Alexander Christison, my old40 Edinburgh chum, who took his degree with Murchison and myself on the same day in Edinburgh. My son-in-law is therefore a nephew of dear old Sir Robert Christison, whose classes I attended as a student.

“On his mother’s side, Alec is the grandson of General Leslie, K.H., and great-grandson of Colonel Muttlebury, C.B.K.W., a very distinguished soldier, who was in command of the 69th at Quatre Bras.

“My son-in-law is also a nephew of General Jackson, who was in the famous charge of Balaclava, so that on his mother’s side he is as much connected with the army as he is on his father’s with medicine.”

Being a young person with a mind of her own, I rebelled against hideous sugar flowers on my wedding-cake. I loved wedding-cake, and my father, knowing this form of greed, laughingly said:

“You had better get a wedding-cake as big as yourself and then you will be happy.”

I did, that is to say it weighed nine stone four pounds, my own weight, which is barely a stone more when these pages go to press.

Well, thereupon, I repaired to Mr. Buszard, junior—whose father, attired in a large white apron and tall hat, I, as a baby, had known in his then little shop in Oxford Street.

“I want real flowers on my cake,” I announced.

“Impossible, we never do such a thing,” he replied.

“Then you must do it now, do it for me.”

Much palaver, and Mr. Buszard and I crossed the street together to a little flower shop, with the result that those three tiers of wedding-cake were decked with natural blooms and a tall vase of white flowers as a central ornament.

Everyone has natural flowers nowadays.

I travelled away with the top tier of my cake, and ate bits of it in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, during our three months’ honeymoon.

We took one of the houses at the top of Harley Street, overlooking Regent’s Park, where squirrels frolic and wood pigeons cry, and there, in York Terrace, where the muffin man rings his bell on Sundays and George IV lamp-posts hold our light, I still live.

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Apropos of this street, Sir Arthur Grant of Monymusk once told me a curious story.

His grandfather owned many houses in the neighbourhood in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and whenever one was empty he put an old caretaker in who had once been a personal servant. On one occasion one of the houses was to let. A lady and gentleman arrived in a carriage and asked to see over it. The caretaker showed them round and they seemed pleased with everything. They asked many questions and lingered some time, and when they left, to the surprise of the caretaker, they handed her a sovereign.

As most people gave her nothing, and others a shilling, she was rather taken aback with the sovereign, and explained how large a sum it was.

“It is all right,” said the gentleman, “put it in your pocket and may it bring you luck.”

Not long after her return to the staircase, which she had been cleaning before their arrival, she heard a child’s voice. It seemed to be crying. She listened for some time, and as she was quite alone in the house, she was unable to understand the cause. Finally, feeling sure it came from a certain room, she went and opened the door, just to satisfy herself it was an hallucination. What was her amazement to find a sturdy little boy of two standing before her. She nearly had a fit, the people had not mentioned a child, nor had she seen anything of it, and she remembered that the lady and gentleman had left no address. Feeling sure such kind people would come back, she took the small boy to the kitchen and gave him some milk. He was too small to tell her who he was or where he came from, though he sat and cried.

When her husband came home she told him the strange story.

“Oh, they will come and fetch him presently. Don’t you worry,” he said.

But day wore on to evening, and evening wore on to night, and no one came. The only thing she could do was to pacify him and put him to bed, and when she undressed him golden sovereigns fell out of a bag tied round his neck.

The mystery thickened. Days went on; no one claimed the child. The caretaker went to Sir Arthur’s grandfather and reported the matter, and everything was done to try to trace the owners of the little boy, but nothing was heard of them.

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The woman’s husband was a nice old man, and instead of wishing to turn the child out, he said:

“No, God ordained to give us no children of our own. This little boy has been left with us, and it is our duty to take care of him.” So accordingly the little boy was brought up as their own son.

He was sent to school, went out as a page-boy, and became a footman. He made an excellent servant, clean, punctual, tidy, and efficient—but, alas! he finally traced his pedigree to a family of very high degree; from that moment he was ruined. He thought himself too grand for his situation, became idle, took to drink, began blackmail, and generally went to the dogs.

The house we took was a few doors from this romance.

Built about 1810, the house was strong and good, but old-fashioned, so we had to put in a bath, have hot and cold water laid on upstairs; add gas, after finally deciding it would be too much bother to work our own electric dynamo in the cellar (the only possible source of electric light in London in 1887 was at the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street); reconstruct the drains from end to end; in fact, turn an ancient dwelling into a modern one. A vine, probably as old as the house, bears fruit on the drawing-room balcony every summer, and lilies of the valley and jasmine flourish beneath the window.

One year the vine bore one hundred and seventy bunches of little black grapes. In the hot summer of 1911 the number of bunches was less; but two weighed respectively one pound, and thirteen ounces.

Was it Chance? or did Dame Brilliana Harley hover as a guardian angel round the path of her namesake, gently whispering suggestions shedding her influence to draw me in her footsteps? Howe’er it was, after my marriage and departure abroad, naturally nothing more was thought of the shiny black cloth book of Iceland notes by its owner.

Meantime it happened that Miss Ellen Barlee, a fairly well-known authoress in those days—she wrote a Life of the Prince Imperial—was going blind, and my father lent them to her so that her secretary might read my jottings aloud in the evening with a view to amusing the old lady.

GRAPES GROWING ON A LONDON BALCONY

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One day she sent for me. “My dear, you must publish this,” she said as soon as I arrived.

At that time I had not long returned from my wedding tour. Needless to say, therefore, I laughed at the idea. Miss Barlee was determined, however, to carry her point.

“If you do not believe in my opinion,” she said, “may I send the manuscripts to my publisher, and if he approves of it, will you take the matter into serious consideration, as you are almost the first woman—girl, I should rather say—to have been across Iceland?”

Naturally I assented to her proposal, thinking the whole thing absurd. What was my surprise when, a little later, I received a letter from the publisher to say that he liked the notes, and if I would divide them into chapters he thought that they would make a nice little book. He also asked whether I could let him have any illustrations for it.

Feeling somewhat exalted, and yet very shy about the whole thing, I sent him a number of the sketches that I had made. Lo and behold, they were accepted for the illustrations, and the book appeared as A Girl’s Ride in Iceland.

How strange it seems to look back and remember the origin of the title A Girl’s Ride in Iceland. It was the title I had put on the cover of the little black book—but it seemed absurd and ridiculous to my mind as a cover on a real book. I thought of all sorts of grand, high-sounding delineations; but Miss Barlee would none of them. “I love your title,” she said. “You were a girl, and it seems such an original idea, you must stick to it.” I did, but the critics laughed at the idea of a girl doing anything—nevertheless it was quickly followed with A Girl in the Carpathians, and every sort and kind of “girl” has haunted the public ever since, from the stage to the library.

The book ran through four editions, finally appearing on the bookstalls at one shilling.

But, oh dear, how I struggled with those chapters! How I fought those “Mondays,” “Tuesdays,” and “Wednesdays” of the diary-form and wrestled to get the whole into consecutive line and possible chapters: but it gave me amusement during long hours spent on a sofa before my eldest child was born. I used to get into despair, the despair of the amateur who does not know what is wanted, and which is just as bad as the despair of the professional who44 really knows what is wanted and yet cannot pull it off. And so A Girl’s Ride in Iceland appeared just for the fun of the thing. It cost me nothing and amused me hugely at the moment; but I soon forgot all about it and set to work to enjoy myself again.

Among the friends who came to our bridal dinners—alas! years have rolled on and death has played havoc among them—was Professor John Stuart Blackie, my husband’s cousin. In Edinburgh that remarkable head of his, with the shaggy white locks, the incomparable black wide-awake and the Scotsman’s plaid thrown around his shoulders, was really one of the sights. In fact, no figure was better known north of the Tweed than Professor Blackie in his day. The north was his “ain countree,” but he was a delight to every social circle that he entered on those occasions when he came south.

Of course, he commanded the whole company. And why not? Who would be an octogenarian as full of activity and high spirits as he was, a Greek scholar, professor, and a wit, without the authority to bid others keep silence while one’s self talks? His little foibles and vanities were the man, and nobody who knew him would willingly have seen him part with a single one of them.

On such an evening, soon after my marriage, I was sitting between him and Mr. (now Sir) Anderson Critchett. The Professor declared in his emphatic way that no man who lacked a poetic soul ought to live, poetry being one of the most refining and ennobling gifts; he had always been a poet himself and hoped to continue so as long as he lived.

The old scholar became quite excited on the theme and said he would sing to us after dinner, which he did, half singing, half reciting “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.”

“I believe in singing, it does one good,” he professed, and so he sang.

Eccentric as he was, Blackie’s courtesy was delightful. What a pity we have not more of that sort of thing nowadays! We women do love pretty little attentions.

Blackie once wrote me a poem—it was in Greek:

Likeness to God.

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When he gave it to me, he dropped on his knees on the floor before a whole roomful of people, kissed my hand like a courtier of the Middle Ages in humble obeisance, and handed me the little poem.

About this time also dates my first essay in journalism. Chance so often steps in to foreshadow the important events of our lives. Everyone gets his chance; but many do not recognise it when it comes. If we only accept small beginnings they often lead to big endings. My chance notebook on Iceland and some sporting articles in the Queen were the beginning of an income a few years later.

I was going to Scotland to pay a round of shooting and golfing visits with my husband, who was fond of all kinds of sport. It occurred to me it would be an interesting thing to write some sporting articles, for I invariably followed the guns. I therefore went down to the office of the Queen and boldly sent my card in to the editor. Miss Lowe received me. I explained my idea to her, but as it would be an innovation for a lady’s paper to attempt to print anything in the nature of sport she did not know how it would be received, so she sent for a worthy captain, who was at that time the art editor of the paper, and asked for his opinion. “Absurd!” he exclaimed, without a moment’s hesitation; “perfectly absurd! A woman can’t write articles on sport.”

As really I did not care very much about doing the articles except for an amusement, I was turning to go away, when I noticed the editor holding the lapels of the old gentleman’s coat and trying to bawl into his ear.

“Women don’t know anything about sport and don’t want to,” he continued, still determined not to listen.

Those were the early days of women in journalism, and men—or rather most men—had a strong prejudice against us and a distinct disbelief in our abilities. After this ultimatum there was nothing left for me to do but to say good-bye and leave Miss Lowe’s room. I was going out a little crestfallen that my plan had so completely fallen through, when, as the captain opened the door for me, he suddenly noticed my gloves, and said:

“Why do you wear those white gauntlet gloves? They look like the Horse Guards.”

“They are my driving gloves,” I replied.

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“Driving gloves!” he exclaimed. “What do you mean? You didn’t drive here?”

“Certainly,” I answered, “the phaeton is at the door.”

“You drove down Holborn at this crowded hour of the day?”

“Yes,” I mildly replied.

He looked out of the window and saw the carriage and horses standing in the street below. By this time I was in the passage. He called me back, scanned me curiously, and, turning to Miss Lowe, said suddenly, and without any preliminary canter:

“Let her do the articles. A woman who can drive a pair along the crowded London streets in the season ought to be able to write a sporting article.”

Perhaps his conclusion was as illogical as his previous opinion of woman’s capability in the sporting line had been. Anyway, as it gave me the opportunity I wanted, I was not disposed to question, much less to quarrel, with it. So began the first series of sporting articles to appear in a woman’s paper. The little set was a success. This was my first essay in journalism, just done at the time for the fun of the thing. I think I made about fifteen pounds over it, and promptly distributed my earnings where most sadly required.

Any little earnings then were devoted to charity, and I always called them my “charity money.” It was the generousness of superfluity. Now, when I can’t help giving away a great deal more than I ought to afford, it is the “extravagance of generosity.”

Having tried my hand at journalism I was satisfied, just as I had tried my hand as a girl in my teens at exhibiting oil-paintings at the Lady Artists’ Exhibitions or china plaques elsewhere; or as later, when I exhibited photographs and won a Kodak prize of five pounds for horses galloping across the open prairie. It is nice to make an attempt at anything and everything, and sometimes such experience becomes of value. Truly, journalism did so to me when, six years after those first half-dozen sporting articles appeared for “the fun of the thing,” I had to look to my pen, or my brush.

BORKUM OF SPY FAME—NOW A GREAT NAVAL STATION
Water-colour sketch by the Author. Exhibited in London 1911

How strange, after such a span of time, to feel a little thrill of pleasure at the announcement of acceptance of 47something I had done! It shows that, after all, one is capable of new sensations along new lines, even when parallel ones.

Everyone was talking of Borkum in 1910. Two English officers had been arrested as spies there and imprisoned in a German fortress.

Mr. Percy Anderson, fresh from designing the dresses for Kismet, chanced to see a sketch I had made at Borkum a few years before.

“Why on earth don’t you send it to an exhibition?” he asked.

“I never show anything nowadays,” was my reply.

“Send this for a change, then—just get a frame and send it in.”

The frame was bought, and to the Lady Artists in Suffolk Street it went. A little thrill of joy passed through me when I opened an envelope with a bright red ticket:

Admit the artist to varnishing day.

A week later my little picture appeared in the Daily Graphic.

Borkum, once famous “as the only spot on earth without a Jew,” is now a great German naval base. In 1900 it was little more than a sandhill, with a few lodging-houses and bathing-machines, and ourselves the only English folk. Icebound in winter, it was the home of millions of wild fowl in summer. Every evening before going to bed the visitors and residents sang their anti-Jewish anthem. Though strong in fortification, Borkum is not great in size, being only six miles long and half a mile wide.

Public charity is no doubt an excellent thing. The world could not get on without it. But private charity seems to me of infinitely more value. If every one of us always had some particular case in hand for someone less blessed than ourselves, what a much happier place the world would be. Individual charity means so much. There is nothing easier than for a rich person to write a cheque and send it to some institution, where a large percentage is swallowed up in paying rates, rent, and taxes, clerks, and the rest of it, but it means a great deal for a person to give up their private time, to expend their own energy, in looking after some individual case. We all know people we can48 help, not singly, but in multitudes, if we choose to take the trouble, and for the greater part of my life I have found it a good thing to have one big job in hand at a time and to work at it till completed. Procuring public or private pensions for the genteel poor, getting cripples into homes, invalids into hospitals, or people recovering from illnesses into convalescent homes; starting young people in life; enquiring into emigration cases and helping them; finding young women places in bonnet shops, even securing employment in orchestras.

In fact, there is generally a niche for every case if one only takes the trouble to find it. The niche is not always procurable by the persons themselves, as they have not the world-wide knowledge and influence to secure it; but with a little capacity, a little work, and a little thought one is often able to help young people to start, to help to educate children, and do hundreds of little individual kindnesses which may keep the whole family together, or mean the future success of the individual.

Poverty is always relative. It means possessing less than we have been accustomed to. Having been both rich and poor, I am perhaps an impartial critic.

The domestic experiences of those married years were, later, as so much garnered grain to the writer. My luxurious, happy home was—without my knowledge—affording me training which afterwards proved invaluable in my writing. The responsibilities of motherhood gave me insight into the workings and imaginations of children’s minds. The household wisdom learnt as mistress of a fairly large establishment has been of infinite use in writing on practical subjects of domestic interest—especially those of interest to women.

Men must really cease to think women find fun in ordering cabbages.

As every book we read leaves some sort of an impression, so every scene or incident we live leaves its mark.

ON a terribly cold day in January, 1893, my father received a wire from Christiania, saying that my brother was dangerously ill there.

After he took his degree, Vaughan had worked with Pasteur in Paris for some time at the table next Professor Sophus Torop. They thus became friends, and when my brother wished to complete some original scientific work of his own, Professor Torop kindly offered him space in his huge laboratories at Christiania if he cared to use them. Thither he went. A cut on his hand ended in serious blood-poisoning, and a terrifying telegram suggesting amputation of the right arm was the first intimation we had of the illness.

It was afternoon. Someone must go to Norway. Norway in winter! Yes, Norway covered with snow and ice: its rivers, fjords, waterfalls, and lakes all frozen: its mountains cloaked with purest snow: its people swathed in fur.

My father was too tied by his profession to leave. My mother was not equal to so perilous a journey. My husband was away in Scotland on business, so I undertook the expedition. It was considered too wild an undertaking for me, a young woman, to do quite alone, so my people insisted that my sister, then a little girl, should accompany me.

Three hours later we started, not in the least knowing how we were ever going to get to Christiania, as the winter was particularly severe, and for months the great naval station at Kiel had been completely ice-bound. We had the most exciting time crossing from Kiel to Korsör in the first boat that had ventured through the ice for twelve weeks, and so bad did the passage finally become that we were forced to get out and walk.

Crossing an ice-floe was somewhat interesting and certainly50 exciting, and walking on one’s feet from Denmark to Sweden was a queer experience.

Sometimes we stumbled through slush across ice-hummocks between two and three feet thick. At other times we got into lumbersome ice-boats and were pulled by sailors with feet properly swathed for the purpose. Occasionally the boat would slide into an ice-crack, and, though the passengers remained dry, the wretched men dragging the craft suffered unexpected cold baths.

We passed encampments on the ice, with people living calmly there, from whom we learnt that various venturesome travellers, thinking they could cross the frozen belt without proper guides, had started off on foot. Then fog or mist overtook them and they lost their way, or, being fatigued, they sat down to rest and were frozen into their eternal sleep. Others slipped and lost their lives in the ice-cracks. Two or three such deaths were matters of weekly occurrence that severe winter.

We were met in Christiania at six o’clock in the morning by Dr. Nansen, who came to tell us that our brother’s hand had been saved, and though he was still seriously ill, they hoped all immediate danger was past.

We nursed him and finally took him away to the mountains, where there was snow ten feet deep, to recoup after his illness.

Our experiences were so delightful that we returned to Norway a couple of years later for the fun of the thing, and I took a number of photographs. The Lady Brilliana Harley must have been at my elbow, I think, as I only did the thing as a joke and to amuse myself at the time. I had found ski so exciting a sport, I wanted others to know about its joys. Strange to say, however, no newspaper would take my photographs of ski. “They had never heard of such a sport, they did not wish to hear of such a sport—one which would never be the slightest interest to English people,” and so on. Who would believe this, when, only fifteen years later, the windows of London sporting outfitters are filled with ski in the winter months, and great numbers of young men and women have tried Skilübling themselves? Do not our English people go out to Switzerland51 in thousands and tens of thousands every year for this very purpose? While, after all, Norway is preferable in winter.

When I took up my pen professionally, I pegged away, and I wrote and wrote and wrote. Other people began to be interested, so I contributed the first snow-shoe articles to the Encyclopædia of Sport, and newspapers and magazines galore.

At that time in Christiania, and later on when we returned for snow-shoeing, Society was very simple, but very interesting. Night after night at parties we met such men as Nansen, Ibsen, Björnson, Leys the poet, and Ilef Petersen the artist. There were no grand dinners, just simple little supper-parties, beer and milk being the chief beverages, with one hot dish and many delicious cold compounds. The daughter of the house, more or less, waited at table. Everything was simplicity itself, but brains and talent, wit and humour were omnipresent.

The greatest personality of all this group was undoubtedly Björnson. He was one of the finest men, both in appearance and brain, that I have ever met, and I have met many great men.

I made a few notes, remembered much more; and finally, when friends begged me to write a volume of these travels, I wrote A Winter Jaunt to Norway. It went into two or perhaps three editions, but that was only as a hors d’œuvre. It contained personal chapters upon such people as Nansen and the latter-day dramatists of Norway, Ibsen and Björnson. Ibsen had not then the cult that he immediately afterwards acquired, and it is curious now to read of the hostility which his writings provoked. Sir Edwin Saunders wrote to me:

Mr. W. C. Miller, the editor of the Educational Times, wrote:

One appreciates most the compliments of one’s own fellow-countrymen. But the foreigner is charming, so52 frank and free, so naïve. How could a young writer be otherwise than pleased to receive this letter from a Norwegian?

Even as I write, the vision of Ibsen’s simple home, his plebeian wife, and the old man seated at his desk with his little dolls laid out before him, comes floating over the space of years.

A most unromantic figure, surely! though at the end of his life Ibsen formed an attachment for a young girl which was tenfold returned by her. He was, notwithstanding the rough exterior, an amorous old gentleman, fond of squeezing ladies’ hands and whispering pretty things into their ears, so I was not so surprised as some of his admirers on this side seem to have been.

He was hardly dead before a little book appeared in German, its title being Ibsen. With Unpublished Letters to a Friend, by Georg Brandes. The friend was the girl. There were twelve letters, including a set of album verses and the dedication of a photograph. The romance came about in this wise.

In the late summer of 1889 Ibsen and his family spent a holiday in the Tyrolese watering-place Gossensass, where they made the acquaintance of a young Viennese girl who was also staying there. She was eighteen years of age, the poet sixty-one; but that wide disparity did not prevent a warm friendship springing up between them, which apparently was cultivated more assiduously on her side than on his, and was eventually brought to a close, as far as overt manifestations were concerned at any rate, by his decision. On separating, the dramatist gave her a copy of his photograph, on the back of which was written:

53

By the following February Ibsen was already troubled in his mind over the development which the friendship was taking. He wrote:

In spite of Ibsen’s entreaties his young friend continued to send him letters, and a little present accompanied one of them at the close of 1890. He replied:

That was the end of the letter-writing. They never saw one another again after the meeting in the Tyrol, and from then the Viennese girl kept silence. Only once did she break it—on the poet’s seventieth birthday, in 1898, when she sent him a congratulatory telegram. Three days later she received from him a photograph, on the back of which was written:

54

So Love came tapping at the window of the old gentleman who had described Youth knocking at the door.

A Winter’s Jaunt to Norway the papers unanimously described as “lively” and “breezy,” and its proud parent began to feel as if she had discovered the home of the winds.

A few years later the solid meal followed—the notes were served up as soup, re-served as fish for the papers, and took more solid form as meat for the magazines. Memory was called upon in all kinds of ways and on all kinds of Scandinavian subjects as puddings for the Press, so these little trips for pleasure became invested capital and bore good interest. I became an authority on Northern lands, and for years was written to, or telegraphed to, or ’phoned to for copy on like subjects. I was asked to review somebody else’s Norway book; to join a Norwegian Club; to supply someone with a teacher of Norsk literature, and be interviewed for “galleries” of travellers or sportswomen. One gentleman, whom I unfortunately did not see, but of whose industry I remain an unceasing admirer, wrote an admirable four-column interview with me, entirely from his own imagination.

It always pays to master something well, and it is strange how one comes across things again and again through life. When I had been very ill in 1909, and was ordered to Woodhall Spa for a course of baths, the delightful Bath-chair man who conveyed me to the pump-room, suddenly exclaimed, “Excuse me, ma’am, but are you the Mrs. Alec Tweedie that writes?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I wondered if you were immediately I heard your name,” he said, “because I owe you a lot, ma’am.”

“Owe me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “seven or eight years ago there was a sale near here and a lot of books were sold. I bought a dozen old copies of Murray’s Magazine for a shilling, and a shilling meant a good deal to me in those days, but reading meant more. In them I read articles by you on Nansen,55 Björnson, and those Norwegian fellows, and I got so interested in Norwegian literature and the North Pole that I have read everything about them I have been able to lay my hands on ever since. The Squire has been awfully good in lending me his books on Arctic travel, and if it had not been for you I should never have begun to take an interest in such things.”

It was really quite touching. How little one knows when one takes up one’s pen what good or ill those inky scratches may do.

On the heels of A Winter’s Jaunt to Norway, written for pleasure, came Wilton, Q.C., or Life in a Highland Shooting-Box, written for gain, which The Times was kind enough to praise for its instruction as well as amusement, saying the author appeared to have a sound knowledge of all varieties of the chase. This was the outcome of those sporting articles in the Queen written when I used to follow the guns with my husband. It was followed by a booklet on Danish versus English Butter-making, reprinted from the Fortnightly Review. This subject interested me so greatly that it was most cheering to find the big “dailies” taking up with zest my lecture to our slack farmers at home. A leading article in the Daily Telegraph said, “Those of our readers who wish to learn how the thrifty, hardy, and industrious Danes have grown rich during the last quarter of a century we refer to Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s instructive exegesis.” And the Review of Reviews affirmed, “It is a discourse much needed in the present day by our agriculturists.” But I am running too far ahead. Life is often ruled by chance, and that Danish subject which brought so much kudos at the time was taken up by chance because of a stray remark at a big dinner in Copenhagen.

Apropos of the simplicity of life in Norway, it was rather amusing to note the despair and worry caused over the dress allowance of the maids-of-honour appointed to attend upon the young English Princess, who had, in 1906, but recently taken her seat upon the throne of Norway.

It was decided that a certain amount of Court etiquette must be kept up. Accordingly, a high official from the Court of St. James’s went over to Christiania to see what could be done. It is a rule that a maid-of-honour should be paid a sum sufficient to dress upon, a sum which in England56 amounts to £300 a year, although a maid-of-honour is no longer given a thousand pounds as a marriage portion; all she carries away is her badge, with permission to wear it as a brooch since it is no longer required as an Order.

Being anxious to make all arrangements as satisfactorily as possible the Englishman visited a well-known gentleman in the capital, who had several daughters and went much into Society. Touching the subject, he asked, “What would be a reasonable figure for a Norwegian girl to dress upon?” and explained his reason for wishing to know.

“Well,” said the likewise exalted Scandinavian official, “I have three daughters, and as they go out a good deal, and I am particular that they should always look nice, I am afraid I am a little extravagant in their allowance and give them each twenty-five pounds a year.”

“Twenty-five pounds a year!” exclaimed the Britisher, amazed.

“Well, you see,” continued the Norwegian, evidently fearing that his visitor was shocked at the magnitude of the amount, “an ordinary young lady here would dress on fifteen or seventeen pounds a year, and, of course, some people do think the allowance I give my daughters somewhat excessive.”

The Englishman, evidently more surprised, proceeded to explain that a dame-d’honneur would have to dress more expensively than an ordinary young lady; besides, there would be an occasional visit to London, or some other capital, when new clothes would be required.

So these two good, kind creatures put their heads together, and, hovering between the hundred pounds offered by the Britisher and the fifty suggested by the Norwegian, decided that seventy-five pounds a year would be ample.

Norway was amazed at the magnitude of the sum. For a young lady to have seventy-five pounds a year to put upon her back was astounding. But the young ladies soon discovered that they were expected to dress for dinner every night, a social custom unknown in their experience; and before the year had run out, they had learnt that their allowance was as little as they could clothe themselves upon as maids-in-waiting to the Queen of Norway.

It was pleasant, when I paid my last visit to Norway in57 1910, to hear how popular our English Princess and her Danish husband had made themselves.

Norway is poor, but delightful.

Life on lentils and beans can be quite pleasant; but perhaps the proletariat may deny us even these luxuries.

Demos may decree that all men and women not employed on manual labour are “waste products,” and to work or to die will be demanded of them, work being to Demos a purely physical action.

THOSE early days of married life were very gay. We entertained tremendously. We went out enormously. We lived in a perfect social whirl. I enjoyed the privilege of wearing pretty frocks at luncheons, dinners, and dances; of riding in the morning, and driving a Park phaeton and pair of cobs in the afternoon, followed by two brown collies, given me by Sir John Kinloch of Kinloch. One, “Ruby” by name, went everywhere with me, and, clinging to her coat as she perambulated round the dining-room, my babies learnt to walk. They were a pretty sight, those two small boys in Lord Fauntleroy suits, tumbling about on the hearth with the long-haired red collies.

How I loved going to Ascot and Goodwood, taking people down, or being taken down, always feeling I could help to make things “go” and amuse people. Then the dinners; we had eight or ten to dine every Sunday night, quite informally, but as we usually lunched out and were away all day, we used to do this in the evenings. All sorts of charming people came, and I never enjoyed myself more than in the capacity of a hostess. Alec sang well, and we collected good musicians about us; Madame Lemmens-Sherrington, Madame Antoinette Sterling, George Grossmith, Corney Grain, Eugene Oudin, all went to the piano in turn.

My husband was member of a dozen golf clubs, including St. Andrews, Wimbledon, and Sandwich; and we took houses for odd months on different links for the benefit of the children, who were looked after by two excellent nurses, while we ran down to see them for week-ends or slipped over to Paris for a few days.

We went to shooting parties in the autumn, to race-meetings in the spring, were members of Sandown and59 Hurst Park, were constantly at Ranelagh or Hurlingham, kept a couple of boats on the river (the river was the height of fashion in the ’nineties) and generally enjoyed ourselves.

As a rule, we always lunched at the old Harley-Street house on Sundays when we were in town, went to all the theatres, and, in fact, lived a thoroughly happy, gay, social life, with no thought for the morrow.

I still kept up my painting, did a quantity of embroidery from my own designs for bedspreads, sideboard cloths, babies’ bonnets, or lapels of dresses; once and again wrote a little, but the business of existence was more amusement, and fun and spending, rather than making money and saving.

Everything seemed gay and bright and I found life one continual joy.

Let Youth be happy and gay. It is the time to be irresponsible and light-hearted. Years bring soberness. Life makes us wonder if the game is worth the struggle. I suppose it comes to all of us at times to wish to run away and hide ourselves as Tolstoi did. The rebellion of youth against home restraint returns again in later years as the rebellion of age against life’s thraldom.

And then, when the sky was blue, the bolt fell. We had been married eight years.

Suddenly all was changed. My husband had joined a syndicate. The syndicate failed. He had lost—lost heavily. Lost his capital.

Immediately our household was reduced to modest limits. Our drawing-room was shut up, three servants dismissed, the horses sold. For the first time in my life I was without a carriage. But, as Alec was sure of earning money again shortly, we did not part with anything which this income would make possible to keep.

Then a wonderful thing happened. A very dear old friend came to me.

“Ethel,” he said, “I am more than sorry, my dear child, for all that has happened, but your husband will go back to business and all will be well; meantime put that in60 your bank to tide you over and keep things going as a weapon to fight fate.”

It was a cheque for two thousand pounds. Imagine my amazement, imagine my pride at having a friend willing to make such a sacrifice; but, of course, I did not take it. I could not take it, although I thanked him from the bottom of my heart and promised if the necessity really came I would go to him.

To give in one’s lifetime is true generosity, to bequeath after death is often merely convenience.

But my husband never smiled again. Overpowered by grief at the position in which he had placed his wife and children, he died six months later in his sleep; died simply of a broken heart.

He was followed on the same journey only a few weeks later by my father, who passed away quite as suddenly, with the ink still wet on the paper of an article he was writing for the Lancet. He never finished his article, neither had he altered an old will as he had intended.

Three shocks had thus each followed the other in quick succession without time to recover from one before the next came, and so in little more than half a brief year the once happy daughter, wife, and mother stood alone, stunned, reduced to comparative poverty, with children clinging to her skirts. The two breadwinners of the family had gone out almost together.

There was not time to think and mourn and let precious moments go by. Something must be done. There was I with about as much to live on as I used to spend on my dress.

Then my old dear friend came back to me.

“I admired your pride and your pluck six months ago,” he said, “when you had a husband beside you to fight for you. But now, my dear child, you are alone and you have the children to think of. I wish you to go to your bank and put that two thousand pounds to your credit; and, more than that, I wish to adopt you as my daughter61.”

It was all so bewildering, so strange. I had known him all my life. He was one of my father’s oldest friends. His wife had always been charming to me and she had left me bits of jewellery when she died; but again I had to refuse. He had relations. I could not claim that privilege. Still he persisted.

“You have always been like a daughter to me—to us—and now I want to claim the right to provide for you and your children.”

Still I refused. I promised again to go to him if ever I was in real need; but I took nothing.

When he died others inherited all he had.

There are only two crimes in Society: one to be poor, the other to be found out.

It seems to me that everything in life is relative. If one is born poor, one does not know what it is to be rich, and if one is rich, one does not understand the responsibilities of strawberry leaves, and strawberry leaves do not comprehend the difficulties of a throne.

If things change, if one goes up in the world, one naturally assimilates ideas and ways by merely taking on a little more of what one already has; but if one slides back in life, one has to give up what is part and parcel of one’s very existence. I was not born in a back street or a country cottage or a suburban villa—in either of these I might have lived in simple comfort on my small income—but that would not have been me.

Bills came in on every side. Bills haunted me. Bills were nothing in my old life when they were paid up every quarter; but even a few hundreds meant sleepless nights of haunting fear to me now.

I took up my pen feverishly. Nine years of married life were ended. All was changed. Still, during those first few months of shock, my father yet lived, and I knew I could rely on his help, so it was not until the late autumn of 1896 that I realised my position in all its cruelty.

Pause, readers, not to give me your sympathy, not to shed tears on what is past, but to think of the future;62 pause and think, and pave the paths for your daughters, wives, mothers, and sisters by settlements.

Yes, settlements. It is a cruel thing to let a girl leave a home without a safeguard in proportion to the income of her family. It is a crueller thing to bring boys and girls into the world with insufficient provision for their education and maintenance.

This little book of a woman’s work will have served a good end if one father, husband, son, or brother, sees what opportunities were lost by no adequate provision being made for its author, when this could so easily have been done. Settlements of some sort are as necessary as the marriage ring, a health certificate is as important as the marriage lines.

I feel strongly that every child born should have some kind of provision made for its education and maintenance and to give it a start in life. Both boys and girls should be treated exactly alike.

The unexpected change in my position showed me how kind the world can be; how good and generous the bulk of humanity is. There are certainly exceptions, and those generally where they should not be. But one does not think of them: one turns to the geniality and little acts of thoughtfulness that day by day come from friends in the truest sense of the word, and I can only wish that mine could realise to what extent they have greased the wheels of these working years. Little kindnesses are like flowers by the roadside or sun-gleams on a rainy day.

From a photograph by Lombardi & Co.
WHEN FIRST A WIDOW

At one moment the stage flashed through my mind, but the stage had serious disadvantages my friends at the top of the tree told me. Supers can generally get work, stars can’t. Of course, I hoped to be a star, we all do, and then those kind friends told me of the weary months, perhaps years, without work of those who have reached the top and for whom there are no suitable parts—years of long-drawn-out waiting, ironically called “resting.”

A very amusing account of some theatricals we had the following year, for which Weedon Grossmith and I painted the scenery, appeared in a little book by L. F. Austin, the predecessor of Chesterton on the Illustrated London News—Beerbohm70 Tree supervised the performance, and his young wife took part.

Should I take up painting seriously? My love of colour and form, the fact that I had exhibited a little without lessons, seemed to point to the possibility of my doing more if I studied.

Then again, a hat shop was no impossible means of livelihood, with my huge connection of friends.

Or, should I give up everything, give up the battle, and just live quietly in a small cottage somewhere and look after chickens?

Weeks rolled on in Finland, the notes for the book were made; parts of it were written in steamers or on railway trains, bundles of material had been collected for subsequent articles, and, most important of all, my mind was made up. I was going to write.

By the time we had knocked about Finland for three or four months I was worn out, from worry, work, anxiety as to the future, and want of sleep. Many people in England do not realise that the midnight sun shines in Finland no less than in northern Norway, and the perpetual sense of light is wearying, inexpressibly so sometimes, to the brain.

However, the notes were taken. I was steeped in the customs, habits, thoughts, and scenery of Finland, but, more important than all the rest, I had entered Finland in deepest sorrow, my mind had now been made up, flame-like—imagination had decided I would write—my spirit emerged in the house of life.

Artistic life is, after all, self-development, and self-development and outward expression lay before me in my newly sought profession. Cruel doubts crept in; but the flame of desire was burning, and again and again I said to myself, “I will write.” Through Finland in Carts appeared in 1897, the third edition came out three years later, and others followed at intervals (now in Nelson’s 1/- library).

On the borders of Lapland my resolution to become a scribe had been made and my luck had turned. It was there I received the wire containing an offer to take my house off my hands; and so began my first “let.” Four years later, when strenuous effort had made it possible, I went back to live in that same old home. It was a very old-fashioned thing to do, because everybody lives in everybody else71’s house nowadays. The snobbish rich luxuriate in the castles of the aristocratic poor, and the aristocratic poor curl themselves up in the abandoned cottages of the self-made. But I reached my first goal when I stepped across the threshold of my old home again. The accompanying illustration, taken just after my husband’s death, is from a photograph for which a paper asked on the appearance of Finland. The reason for its not showing the conventional widow’s weeds—no crêpe and no veil—is that I never wore these social brands, and my severe, unrelieved black—a terrible breach of custom in the opinion of Jay’s forewoman—was impossible, for reasons connected with the camera. Hence a dilemma! Suddenly remembering my grandmother’s lace scarf and my sister’s new bridesmaid’s hat, I donned both and went off to be “taken.” Hence this photograph.

When I returned to England, late in September, and York Terrace was in other hands, I took a tiny country cottage in Buckinghamshire, and retired there alone with my little boys of six and seven years of age to write my book.

This had barely been started, and the notes were still scattered over the table and piled on the sofa, and the chapters had not yet been formulated, when another dreadful telegram was put into my hands: My father had fallen dead of apoplexy in his study. The second breadwinner in the family had gone out.

This made the third death in my circle of loved ones within four months: my husband, my father, my more or less adopted father, Sir John Erichsen—“dear Uncle John”—and my mother was very ill.

Life seemed full of sorrow.

These were the sad circumstances under which Finland was written.

Curious. Whilst so often my feelings during those days of journeying were of exhaustion from insomnia, heat, mosquitoes, jolting vehicles, and impossible beds, the papers were full of compliment on my “spirited sprightliness,” on “the liveliness of observation and the humour displayed by the narrator” whose pages were “full of entertainment72 and instruction.” It must often be so in the lives of those who are servants of the public. A smile and grin from actress or mountebank: the sigh and tear when the curtain drops.

A leading article in the Liverpool Post, a column and a half in length, kindly said:

And now journalism in turn began and that seriously.

I found a list of editors and papers, scanned it carefully, and to the most likely addressed manuscripts. On every possible and impossible subject—very often the latter, be it known—I scribbled. Often the manuscripts were returned, but equally often they were accepted, and gradually this came to mean regular engagement. Thus, for years, I turned out four, five, and six articles every week, many of them signed. The front page of the Pall Mall Gazette and the front page of the Queen were a constant source of employment, to say nothing of other work on nearly every important paper at some time or the other. I have written serious stuff for the magazines, topical stuff for the dailies, and rubbish for the frivolous papers.

I never had an introduction in my life and have rarely74 been inside a newspaper office. My work was done from my own writing-table and entirely by correspondence; for, in my belief, if the material is worth taking it will find its own market, and no amount of pushing or introductions will be of the slightest avail.

Penmanship means hard brain-fagging work with little gain in proportion. A well-known writer once told me one of his big important books brought him exactly thirteen pounds.

I still remember with what joy I read a leader in the Daily Telegraph on a magazine article of mine. It then seemed so great and wonderful to be mentioned in a leader; next to which recollection comes my pride on seeing book reviews with my own name above them in the literary page of that literary paper, the Daily Chronicle. These little vanities were the recompense for the dreary hours of work, when one’s head ached and one’s eyes felt hot and swollen and one’s brain seemed on fire or asleep.

What years of anxiety some of those were, when the house would not let and the bills would come in! Tenant succeeded tenant, and between whiles I wandered.

Later, when I returned to the old home, I took a boarder. In polite society people talk of “paying guests.” I prefer the true term—“lodger.” She was an old lady with a title, nearly blind, and had her maid. They were with me for two years. I used to work all day, and read aloud, trim her caps, or chat to her in the evening. She very rarely had a meal outside the house, so there was a good deal to arrange for her in my otherwise busy life.

My old lady came into an unexpected fortune and left.

Little boys home from school had to be fed at meals, amused between tea and dinner during that precious “children’s hour,” and I often left my bed in the morning, to begin another strenuous day, more tired than I had entered it the previous night.

But mediocrity and determination succeeded where genius and inspiration might have failed.

One rule, and a very good rule, for success is never to let one’s self get out of hand. If anybody cannot rule himself, he cannot rule his life.

Age has nothing to do with success. Byron, Burns, and Shelley all wrote priceless gems in youthful years, and, on the other hand, Samuel Smiles never took up his pen until75 he was past forty, and was then read by millions all over the world and translated into a dozen languages.

Often in those days I longed for my old world. I was too proud to tell people I could not afford a cab, and a bus fare was often a consideration. My beautiful evening dresses were out of date. Opera-cloaks and tea-gowns were laid aside in tissue paper—quite inappropriate for a journalist living in a country cottage. I used to long for a night at a theatre, a whirling dance, a day on the river. But no, life was one round of work, work, work. Thoughtless friends, out of the kindness of their heart, invited me to stay with them. Wealth of gold often accompanies poverty of mind. They thought they were helping me—they had not brains to see I could not afford the ticket to Scotland, the clothes necessary for them and their guests, or the stupendous tips required in large households—a life of pleasure now seemed to me merely fierce misery. What time I could spare from my work I spent resting, often in bed. Worn out mentally, bodily repose seemed the only way of re-stoking the engine for a further pull uphill.

Invitation after invitation had to be refused because I could not afford the expense nor the time. A great barrier had arisen between me and my old world. How I regretted I had not done even more than I had done for people less dowered than myself in the past! And yet Alec and I had often sent a bank-note in an envelope to a sick or poor friend. Then, yes then, the reward came. The thoughtless rich, with all their kindly but useless offers of hospitality, left me alone, and the others—those who were really worth knowing—sought me out. Well I remember a first-class return ticket to Scotland being pinned, as if by chance, on the top of the letter which invited me to a shooting-box. Another time some friends asked me to go abroad with them as their guest, and treated me as their most honoured friend. Boxes came for the theatres, and the note accompanying them asked at what hour I would like the carriage to fetch me, or motors were lent me to shop or call. It was all to save me expense, I knew; but done so nicely, and showing so keenly the determination to give me a good time and save my slender purse. These were the acts of true gentlefolk—the vaunted offers of visits that meant hundreds of pounds’ worth of clothes and76 ten pounds’ worth of tickets and tips were mere pretence, merely salves to the soul of the sender of the invitation, that he or she was doing something kind, knowing all the time they were but dangling a fly from the world I had lost, to the woman not yet sure of her new world or of herself.

The creative mind is like a sensitive plant. It feels sorrow or joy more acutely than its neighbour or it could not take in or give out impressions.

Everyone with initiative in the Arts is receptive. They are like sensitive plates in a camera. They conceive and receive impressions. Genius suffers, or it cannot expand, and poverty to genius is often cruelly crushing. It paralyses output, or is a wild incentive to work at the cost of double brain force.

It would be so nice if all really clever people, people whose work benefits mankind, could be saved the gnawing pains of poverty.

Genius is often emotional, and there are just as many emotional men as emotional women. I have seen as many tears lurking in men’s eyes as in women’s in my day. God bless them for it—a person who cannot feel is not human.

I went to all sorts of queer old eating-houses, doss-houses, lunatic asylums, gaols, docks, slums, Jews’ markets, and Billingsgate, in my pursuit of “copy”; always seeking something new.

I began to wonder if money was the only thing that counted, and then—a thousand times no. I realised that money was the only thing that counted in the world of snobs—but did the world of snobs count at all?

The words of Montaigne came back to me: “We commend a horse for his strength and sureness of foot and not for his rich caparison; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why in like manner do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him.”

A millionaire was one day sitting having tea with me, when I exclaimed:

“I wonder what it feels like to be so rich77?”

He stared at me, as though puzzled that anyone should be in doubt. “Often very disagreeable,” he replied.

“Why?”

“Well, one never knows who are one’s friends, because of one’s money; or who would cut one to-morrow if it were lost!”

Then he told me an experience which must certainly have been mortifying.

“At a ball my wife and I gave recently I felt tired, and slipped down to the supper-room for a glass of champagne and a sandwich. I sat for a moment at a little table where two young men were sitting, and this is what I heard:

“‘Whose house is this?’

“‘Oh, one of those beastly rich African Jews, I’m told.’

“‘Do you know them?’

“‘Lord, no! I came with Lady M——.’

“‘And I came with Lady N——. Not a bad house, though. Champagne might have been better.’

“Sick at heart, I looked at them, turned on my heel, and went upstairs. A few minutes later they followed. I was standing talking to Lady M—— as the pair sauntered up.

“She caught one of them by the arm and said to him, ‘Oh, I must introduce you to Mr. X——, our host.’

“I pulled myself together. ‘Thanks, there is no need; we met in the supper-room a moment ago, and I had the pleasure of hearing his opinion of my champagne.’ And having said that, I put out my hand and hoped he was enjoying himself. You should have seen that young man’s face.

“Is it pleasant to be rich? No!”

He spoke so bitterly, one could not help feeling how often accumulated wealth is merely luck, when it comes from the yield of the earth or is the product of invention; but yet how often it comes through Stock-Exchange knowledge, which not infrequently is another name for organised robbery!

In an earlier chapter I have alluded to my school-days at Queen’s College, Harley Street. This was the first college opened for women, and when it had been in existence fifty years (started 1848), I—as an “old girl”—volunteered to edit a booklet giving a short account of its history; and78 also suggested that other “old girls,” as an encouragement to the younger generation, should contribute articles describing their own particular professions, all of which were more or less the outcome of the education they received in Harley Street.

If I gave an honest account of the editing of that volume people would laugh. Up to that time no careful register of “old girls” had been kept. These were the initial days of women learning to be business-like, I suppose, and if the girls’ names were known their addresses were not forthcoming, or else nobody had any idea whether or not the said “girls” were married.

Persistency and dogged determination is rewarded in most things, and in the end the first page of the little volume entitled:

“THE FIRST COLLEGE OPEN TO WOMEN,
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, LONDON,”

recorded the following contributions, among others (it appeared in 1898):

Dr. Jex Blake was too busy to write her own articles, so I jotted down the sort of thing I wanted and she filled in the facts and figures.

Another good lady’s I entirely re-wrote; it was so impossible in the form in which it was sent in.

Some of the other contributors accepted the task gleefully, wrote to the point, sent copy to date, returned their proofs the same day, and otherwise showed the difference between an amateur and the professional journalist.

Several of my contributors seemed unaccustomed to writing for the Press. One dear lady actually wrote to enquire how she would know when she had written fifteen hundred words. She explained that a friend had told her, that she had a friend, who had another friend, who thought that a column of a daily paper contained about three79 thousand words, etc. etc. I suggested her writing a page and counting it, and multiplying by the number of pages, but when the manuscript came back the first page had been counted, and at the top of the second page appeared, “Carried forward 162 words,” at the top of the third page, “Carried forward 314 words,” and so on, as if it were the butcher’s book. She had succeeded in life, but not as a scribe.

Another insisted on writing something quite different from the subject arranged and asked for.

I had to sit in Maud Tree’s dressing-room at the Haymarket Theatre during a performance of Julius Cæsar to get her article out of her at all. Not that she does not know how to write, for she is particularly clever with her pen, as in many other things; but she has a little trick of procrastination, so it was only by sitting beside her during the “waits” and taking her ideas down on pieces of paper that we managed the article. I know nothing of shorthand, unfortunately, so the notes were somewhat scratchy and interlarded with remarks to her dresser: “Give me my cloak,” “A little more rouge,” “Has the call-boy been?” and so on.

There are two classes of successful people: those who buy a reputation, and those who make one.

Each despises the other and nurses his own illusions. But, after all, life would be deadly were it not for its illusions.

NEW! Why, there is nothing new. The only luck is to pitch on something old enough to be forgotten.

The writing profession is a hard and often underpaid one, but one thing may be said, that writers are ever ready and willing to help each other.

We can most of us testify to this by kindnesses received.

Sir Walter Besant was the very embodiment of this spirit of helpfulness, not only to me personally, but also to the literary world at large, and it was he who conceived the idea of bringing this same friendliness into a common centre by establishing the Incorporated Society of Authors.

Having touched on the toil, sorrows, and worries of “work,” it is pleasant to pass on to the silver lining to the cloud.

I cannot remember when I first met Sir Walter Besant, although two or three meetings stand forth distinctly in the tangled web of recollection. One of the many kind things he did for me was soon after my election to the Society of Authors. A dinner was announced. I had never been to a public dinner in my life, but as a member of that august body I had a right to be present.

Naturally wishing to go, I wrote a little letter to Sir Walter, saying that I simply dared not go alone; did he know any lady who would join forces with me?

“I quite understand,” he replied; “you are young and new at the game, and may bring any guest you like. If you take my advice you will let it be a man, and not a woman, because, I think, you will have a better evening’s enjoyment.”

From that moment women writers were allowed a guest.

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Accordingly, with a man as my “chaperon,” I attended my first public dinner.

Afterwards, when I was in great anxiety as to ways and means of obtaining a pension for the late Mrs. J. H. Riddell, I went one day to see Besant at his office in Soho Square. He was surrounded—half buried, in fact—by manuscripts, for he was then correcting his books on London—the really joyful work of his literary life. Volumes strewed the floor, volumes were stacked upon the writing-table, volumes lay pell-mell on the chairs. In fact, there was nowhere to sit or stand; London on paper filled the room.

He quite sympathised with my difficult task, but said there was then no fund available to which one could apply; and I asked if it would not be possible to form, in connection with the Society of Authors, some sort of Pension Fund for writers who had made fame but not fortune.

“Well, I don’t know; it might be,” he said.

As I poured forth a string of enthusiastic suggestions the dear old gentleman listened calmly and quietly, gazing through his gold spectacles in wonderment at my volubility.

“Not a bad idea,” he remarked.

Several interviews were the result, and not long afterwards the Pension Fund of the Society of Authors was formed, under the able Chairmanship of Mr. Anthony Hope. On the Original Committees of which I served, and still serve.

Besant was a real practical help to young writers. Quaint, old-fashioned, and prim, he addressed even his best friends as “Madam.” The following letter is in connection with a further pension for Mrs. Riddell, which I was then endeavouring to procure from the Civil List, and did afterwards succeed in obtaining from Mr. Balfour:

No man did more for writers than Walter Besant. He raised their status, he demanded more pay for their products, he attempted to make a copyright with America; and the present-day position of authors, unsatisfactory though it is, is a thousand times better than it was before Sir Walter Besant took the matter up and maintained that literary wares were property, and as such should be treated legally. I merely quote this letter to show the kindness of heart of the man, and how even the busiest people find time to do a good deed. He wrote:

His death was a loss to the entire literary profession.

He lived at Hampstead in a charming old house not far from George du Maurier and Frank Holl; in fact, in the early days of my married life, there was quite a little colony of interesting people living in that neighbourhood, and we often drove up on Sundays for luncheon or to call on those delightful folk.

Are there any novelists to-day who make enormous sums? When Sir Walter Besant himself died he left only £6000.

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Looking back into the recesses of one’s memory two women writers, who died within a few weeks of each other (1906), come to mind; two women entirely distinct in their lives and in their deaths, in their writings, in their purpose. One rich, popular, and brilliant; the other poor, popular, and—less brilliant, perhaps, but so extraordinarily brave and persevering, that if it be true that genius is the capacity to take infinite pains, no one will deny the late Mrs. J. H. Riddell’s genius.

The first woman writer of these two was Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes).

And Mrs. Craigie was herself a dual personality. As a girl she was full of romance, sentiment, enthusiasm, and fire. Mrs. Craigie as a woman renounced romance—of which she had but a sad experience—and sought solace in religion. The dissection of love and the solace of religion became the keynotes of her writings.

“John Oliver Hobbes” was another person altogether. He was a cynic, clever, brilliant, at times as hard as his name implied. He was the mask, the curb by which the budding womanhood of Mrs. Craigie was extinguished and held in check. The death of this duplex personality was a real loss.

A paradox often ends conversation, the listener is so busy trying to unravel its meaning. But a paradox in a book often stimulates the reader, and Mrs. Craigie was a master of paradoxes.

No one could honestly wish her back. Her death was ideal. At the zenith of her power, in the prime of her life and looks, with the happiness of unfulfilled dreams still before her, she lay down quietly to rest and passed away. She was a handsome woman, with wit and charm; her parents were rich, she acquired position, and she commanded respect by her work. She did not live to grow old or grey, she just slipped the cable when all the world was rose-colour and the sun shone.

Mrs. Craigie’s face when in repose had a melancholy aspect, her tongue was often bitter. Like all Americans, she loved titles and craved for social success; for, clever and brilliant writer as “John Oliver Hobbes” was, Mrs. Craigie was undoubtedly a woman of the world.

To a certain extent her life was dwarfed. An unhappy marriage, in which she early divorced her husband, kept the84 woman in her nature from expanding; she imposed restraint upon all her actions, all her thoughts. She never—even in her writings—let herself go.

Mrs. Craigie was of medium height, with a slight figure, piercing eyes, and dark hair, which she wore very simply. She was an excellent raconteur, and a delightful neighbour at a dinner-table. She certainly showed to greater advantage in the company of men than of women, in which characteristic she was somewhat un-American.

Knowing this want of sympathy with her own sex, she rarely appeared at women’s functions.

Mrs. Craigie’s name appeared in many papers as attending dinners or committees, and making speeches; but in reality Mrs. Craigie herself came seldom, ill-health or retirement into a convent being a frequent excuse at the last moment for her non-appearance. She spoke well when she did speak, although it was not really a speech at all, but a carefully prepared little treatise which she read word for word to her audience. She delivered it well, the matter was always worth listening to, and she was pleasing to look upon.

“John Oliver Hobbes” was a weird pseudonym. The titles of her books were equally incongruous. Imagine such anomalies as Some Emotions and a Moral, The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham, The Herb Moon, or the latest—The Dream and the Business. Mrs. Craigie will be remembered as a novelist, not as she aspired to be—a dramatist.

None of her plays achieved any real success except The Ambassador, which had a considerable run at the St. James’s Theatre, ably helped by that excellent manager, Sir George Alexander. Smart epigrams, pretty setting, and French frocks won’t make a play. Her characters lacked blood and sinew; they meant well and generally began well, but they were not healthy, living beings. In a novel that lack of characterisation was not so obvious as on the stage, and her smart lines, her epigrams, and ironic thoughts, or rather the irony of “John Oliver Hobbes” (her double), covered the lack of plot and thinness of character more satisfactorily.

As years rolled on and the sentimental woman was lost in the thoughtful religionist, swayed by the Romish Church, the philosopher found satisfaction, and her later books became deeper in tone, stronger in handling, and likely85 to be more lasting on the shelves of time. She was a literary personality, with high aims where her art was concerned, and had she lived she might some day have rivalled George Meredith, whose style she so much admired. Much mystery surrounded her death; she was barely forty when she suddenly and swiftly passed, as it were, like a person going out of a house without a good-bye.

People pray against sudden death. Let me pray for it. What more lovely ending than to sleep away into the Unknown? It may be a selfish wish, because the shock is greater for those left behind, but, after all, to them the death of a dear one is always a shock, come quick, come slow, and why should the parting be harrowed by tardiness? Yes, let me pray for sudden death, and at an early age before one gets dependent on others.

And my body. Well, if I die of anything interesting—disease or accident—that will make my body of any value whatever to medicine or science, I bequeath it for dissection to University College, Gower Street (or to any other hospital that may be nearer me at my decease). It is only right we should help the living to the last, and interesting cases should always be investigated; at least, my love and admiration for science and medicine tell me so.

Then the scraps can be cremated, because they will have fulfilled their end. Putrefaction is disgusting and harmful to living things; so let my remains be consumed by fire to clean white ash, and let that (in one of those beautiful urns designed by Watts) rest inside Kingsbury Church, or in the vault outside, beside my husband and father.

None of this is morbid, it is only common sense. Death has no horrors for me. I am content to die, and have even paid for and arranged my own cremation to save my survivors time and expense.

But let us return to Mrs. J. H. Riddell, who was the second of these two well-known women writers. Of her one thinks and writes differently; and for myself it is difficult not to hold her in memory more as the woman than the writer, for she was an intimate friend of my earliest years. Even then she was approaching middle life, and, unlike “John Oliver Hobbes,” who passed away when so much of the best of life seemed before her, Mrs. Riddell had reached the eve of her seventy-fifth birthday before death at last—in86 September, 1906—released her from her prolonged struggle.

She was writing as early as 1858, when women writers were little known. At one time she was among the most popular novelists of the day; but she only declared her identity in 1865, after the enormous success of George Geith of Fen Court.

The death of her husband whom she adored, the failure of her publishers, and her own constant ill-health, brought her much trouble, but she bravely struggled on with her writing for nearly half a century, producing some thirty or forty novels, many of which ran into second and third editions and are now in sixpenny numbers. Her insight into character was her strong point, and her people gradually unfolded themselves with skill and thought as the stories proceeded. She reaped little reward, however, as her best work was done before there was any copyright with America, and, being poor, she sold her books out for an average of about one hundred pounds each.

Although born on the hill-side in Ireland, at Carrickfergus, the daughter of a squire, and a lover of fresh air, fowls, flowers, and country pursuits and produce, Mrs. Riddell settled in London. She hated it at first, and then became an enthusiast over its charms. By day and by night she wandered into its highways and peered into its alleys. She learnt the City off by heart, and penetrated the mysteries of business life so successfully that, woman though she was, she wrote The Senior Partner, City and Suburb, etc. At that time business was not thought a suitable subject for the novelist except in France, by men like Balzac, so to Mrs. Riddell is due the honour of introducing the City gentleman and making him known to the West End.

Many of the tragedies, the failures, and mysteries of business routine which she so often depicted in her books, she wrote from personal knowledge. Misfortunes fell upon her family and, as she was the one to try to put matters right, she naturally learnt many curious ins and outs of speculation and failure. Had she not always had her hand in her pocket for someone, she would not have been so miserably off financially when old age and sickness overtook her.

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She wrote her first novel when only fifteen; but this she candidly admitted never saw the light.

In my early writing days I remember asking Mrs. Riddell for an introduction.

“What?” she replied. “Introductions are no good; the best and only introduction to an editor is a good article.”

How right she was!

Mrs. Riddell once told me she collected the whole of a three-volume novel in her head—all novels were then in three volumes—and for weeks and months she worried out the story. When it was quite complete she wrote the last, or the most telling chapter of the book, first. For instance, Beryl’s death scene in George Geith was set down just as it appeared in print three years subsequently.

As I have said, it was my privilege to know Mrs. J. H. Riddell from my childhood. She was an old and valued friend of my father, and in the curious jumbling of early recollections I recall eating my first ice at her house at Hampstead, and being obliged to confess, with a cold lump of surprise on my tongue, “It isn’t as nice as I ’spected.” A remark she recalled with amusement years afterwards.

I do not suppose I was more than five years of age at that time, but I can remember perfectly well the kindly and charming face of the hostess, and her dark brown hair, which she wore in a loose curl hanging behind each ear.

Her Hampstead home existed in Mrs. Riddell’s palmy days; she went through much subsequent trouble, backing a bill for a friend, paying debts for her husband, keeping a paralysed brother whose health necessitated constant care, and who was for many years a heavy drag upon her purse, all of which brought incessant anxiety upon the authoress. My father and my husband helped her substantially many times—so when they both died so suddenly she was even more handicapped by Fortune. She nobly struggled on until the year 1900, when, as already mentioned, I made a personal application to Mr. Balfour, then Prime Minister, for a sum of money towards purchasing an annuity for her. Much correspondence ensued, and, thanks to the courtesy of Mr. Balfour, a cheque for three hundred pounds was finally handed to me from the Civil List. Through the help of Mr. J. M. Barrie, a further couple of hundred pounds was obtained from the Royal88 Literary Fund. This, with some kindly contributions from my own personal friends, among whom may be mentioned Sir W. S. Gilbert, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Justin Huntley McCarthy, E. W. Hornung, and Anthony Hope Hawkins, was, however, found to be too small a sum to buy an annuity of real value, and, accordingly, I made that bold suggestion to the Society of Authors. It was finally agreed that I should hand over three hundred pounds direct to them, in consideration of their granting her a pension for life, the Society retaining the three hundred at her death.

Mrs. Riddell thus became the first pensioner of the Society of Authors, of which she was one of the original members; and time after time she expressed to me her gratitude for that sixty pounds a year, her own private income being practically nil. The Society conferred a great benefit in bestowing this pension, and, at the same time, must feel proud to know it was given to one so worthy to claim it in the world of literature.

Her struggles to work were magnificent, and she actually published her last book after she was seventy years of age. Nearly fifty years of penmanship is indeed a record. During the last months of her life she suffered much pain from cancer, and was constantly in her bed, not being able to write at all, and to read but little. I constantly went to see her, and wondered at her patience and grieved at her poverty and suffering.

Then came her release; for such was the messenger of death to her tired spirit. And the few friends who saw her laid in the grave, felt it was so, and had the relief of knowing they had added to her comfort—and even the necessaries of life—in her last darkened years.

Since those days I have collected purses for a dozen or more folk. Men and women whose names are known in every land—but who have fallen on evil days—generally ill-health having been the cause. The Arts are shockingly paid, the mental strain is great. Exponents of great work live on their health capital, their brain-force, and sometimes the chain snaps and the wheels refuse to go round. Then a few hundred pounds, or a pension, or the kindly sympathy of friendship that backs up their faltering strength, comes like a new fuse, inspiring the recipient to take up the threads of work almost as well as before.

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Yes, I collected between seven and eight hundred pounds for Mrs. Riddell, which I doled out weekly till her death. I paid her servant’s wages, rent, the doctor, and all the necessities of years of illness. Just as my little store was coming to an end her life flickered out. There was enough left for a modest funeral and a stone slab above her grave. That was the first time I undertook a big job of the kind; but not long after I did the same for one of the most famous singers of the day.

Then again, the people who do things that will live have proverbially bad business heads. Just as judges die without wills, and Chancellors of the Exchequer leave their own affairs in a muddle, so artists, writers, painters, scientists, reap little reward themselves when weighed against the intense pleasure they give to others.

Each little monetary collection or pension has necessitated dozens, almost hundreds, of letters, all of which have come into extremely busy days. I only wish I could have done twice as much, for well I know what a few hundred pounds handed over to me by friends and sympathisers would have been in those early days of widowhood.

He who gives quickly gives twice. The generous people are those who have been poor and suffered. The rich so seldom think of anyone but themselves, although writing a cheque costs them no self-sacrifice.

Then comes another notable woman; a power in her day. One who, herself strong-minded and a pioneer without recognising it, bitterly denounced other women for so-called strong-mindedness; but, while inflicting the lash on imaginary victims, she poured balm on the wounds of real sufferers. Unhappily deserted in her married life, she yet extolled the virtues of mankind to the skies—a living paradox.

Woman has advanced very far since Mrs. Lynn Linton invented the phrase of “the shrieking sisterhood.”

That was in the distant ’eighties, when the modern young woman, who filled her with such holy horror, was, after all, but a poor, shrinking creature compared with the amazons of 1907, who marched to Hyde Park to demand votes for women. A desire for the development of her own individuality, freed from the control of parents and the enforced escort of brothers, a latch-key, a club, and a mode90 of short hair, waistcoats, men’s coats, and even hard shirts, besides a horse-shoe pin, were all that the “Girl of the Period” advanced; but, in contemptuous condemnation of her, Mrs. Lynn Linton dipped her pen in gall.

Dear me! what an archaic type she already seems, that original “new woman” whom one used to find at the Pioneer Club in its early days.

Perhaps it is as well that Mrs. Lynn Linton did not live to see suffragists concealed in pantechnicon vans for the purpose of raiding Parliament, or shouting down Cabinet Ministers, assaulting policemen, smashing windows, and going to prison in hundreds with as much self-glorification as if they were notorious criminals and heroines of a “Penny Dreadful.” The dictionary surely does not contain words so scathing as the old lady would have required for such flagrant revolters against her ideal of womanhood. That women suffragettes have an ideal she would not have understood. The curt indifference of men to their more peaceable demands has forced women to perpetrate these antics to draw attention to their creed. She was herself a woman who was greatly misunderstood. The conception formed by the public, who knew Mrs. Lynn Linton only by her writings, was entirely different from that of people who were privileged to know her personally. All her venom was in her pen, all her heart in her home and her friends.

I have reason to recall her name with gratitude, for she was one of the first to assist me by helpful advice and example along the slippery path of authorship. Indeed, her readiness to place her long experience at the service of young writers, who were often entirely unknown to her, even at the sacrifice of considerable time and convenience to herself, was one of the most delightful points in her character.

One day, late in the last century, I was chatting with her in her flat eight stories up in Queen Anne’s Mansions, the windows of which looked out high over the neighbouring chimney-pots and far away beyond the grey mist of smoky London to the Surrey hills. Lying on the table was a large bundle of manuscripts, upon which I naturally remarked, “What a lot of work you have there on hand; surely that means two or three new books91?”

“Not one page is my own,” she replied, peering at me through her gold-rimmed spectacles. “Bundles of manuscripts like these have haunted my later life. I receive large packets from men and women I have never seen and know nothing whatever about. One asks for my advice; another if I can find a publisher; a third enquires if the material is worth spinning out into a three-volume novel; a fourth lives abroad and places the MS. in my hands to do with it exactly as I think fit.

“How fearful! But what do you do with them all?”

“Once I returned one unread, for the writing was so bad I could not decipher it. But only once; the rest I have always conscientiously read through and corrected page by page, if I have thought there was anything to be made of them. But to many of my unknown correspondents, I have had to reply sadly that the work had not sufficient merit for publication, and, as gently as I could, suggest their leaving literature alone and trying something else.”

“You are very good to bother yourself with them.”

“No, not good exactly; but I feel very strongly the duty of the old to the young, and how the established must help the striving. I am so sorry for young people, and know how a little help or advice given at the right moment may prove the making of a career; kindly words of discouragement, given also at the right time, may save many a bitter tear of disappointment in the future.”

This was the “dragon” who, I do not doubt, existed in the minds of thousands of readers of Mrs. Lynn Linton’s magazine essays—essays which were full of fire; critical, analytical, clear-sighted and written unflinchingly. Who would dream after reading one of her splendidly forcible arguments, written in her trenchant style, that the real author was one of the most domesticated, home-loving women possible, full of kindness and sympathy, and keenly interested in the welfare of all around her? How little a book reveals the true author. How often the pen disguises the real person, as words disguise the inmost thoughts.

Indeed, one might go far to find another such lovable old lady.

It is often supposed by the outside world that jealousies and rivalries exist between authors, as is too often said to92 be the case in other professions. Nonsense! Here is one example to the contrary. And many another could easily be furnished.

At the very time that Mrs. Lynn Linton was earning her living by writing novels, Mrs. Alexander, in private life Mrs. Hector (another dear memory), was doing the same. Rivalry there was none between these two; more than that, they actually helped each other. And in the end, when Mrs. Lynn Linton died, she left her most cherished cabinet of china and many other souvenirs to her woman writer friend, who prized them above rubies.

The following is a characteristic letter from Mrs. Lynn Linton, anent an article I had written about her:

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I had sat between her and Beerbohm Tree at the first performance in England of “Hedda Gabler,” which I had seen Ibsen rehearse in Christiania shortly before in his slow pompous manner.

To understand humanity is a work of intelligence, and Mrs. Lynn Linton had that gift in a marked degree. She was a woman of strong individuality.

FROM other people’s work I must return to my own. As is Fleet Street compared with Hyde Park, so is journalism with the authorship of more lasting literature.

To would-be scribblers I would say journalism is a bagatelle in comparison with the production of a book. The main axiom for a book is Write what you know about. If you live with dukes, don’t write about the slums. If you live in the slums, don’t write of dukes.

Don’t write unless you have something to say. For the papers, matter is more important than style. Aim at telling something interesting in an interesting way. Keep it short and crisp and to the point. Never mind rejection. Introductions to editors are of no avail. They generally retard. Work of merit always finds its niche, so peg away till you get the right thing and fit it into the right corner.

A journalist requires no equipment but a quick perception of men and matters, a desire for information, and a belief that what interests her may interest someone else. A journalist is obliged to look ahead:

Someone is reported very ill—collect facts for an obituary notice.

A picture promises to become successful—have an account of the artist and his work ready for press.

An actor is producing a new play—try to learn something about the play, and any little incident of its production.

One used to write of things that had been; but since all this Yankee journalism has come in, one has to anticipate things that are to be. Weddings are described to-day before the marriage ceremony even takes place.

MRS. ALEC TWEEDIE’S WRITING TABLE

It is a bad sign of the times, but that is modern journalism. A journalist’s is a hard and anxious life and often ill-paid; 95but here, at least, men and women can earn equal wages, and have equal chances. Nearly all the papers except The Times now have women on their staff.

Just as an actor adopts various disguises, so it is amusing to remember how many pseudonyms have been the different masks which have helped me, as other journalists, to attract the attention of the public. The public loves variety. It would never, never pay to appear always as the same old stager.

Journalists must turn their hand to anything, at any time, and in any way. Sometimes I wrote as a man, sometimes as an old lady, comparing the past with the present. For instance, the “Elderly Scribe” became “A Girl at the Drawing-room,” under which heading a long article once appeared in a leading paper, describing my imaginary thrills as an American débutante at the first Court of King Edward VII.

I think it was in the Pall Mall Gazette:

Most useful proved my own experiences at such functions as Drawing-rooms, and my favourite adage as to journalism came into play, viz. Write of what you know.

But how, some timid minds may object, can a working-woman still afford to go to Court? Suffice it to say that one originally handsome gown of wealthier days served me, its wearer, several times to make my curtseys to Royalty.

I should not have attended so often in the ordinary way, but going so much abroad as I did, it was advisable. There one’s reception at Court is of use, for, after all, foreigners are unable to judge one’s social position from one’s appearance, some of the worst scamps seeming the most ideal on the surface, therefore a pass-word, such as having “been to101 Court”—which means so little in England—counts for something across the water. I always wore a train, that once belonged to my great-grandmother. It ought to know its way to Buckingham Palace by now. Strangely enough, that old chiné silk (it must be between one hundred and a hundred and fifty years old) has a stripe of soft grey between wider stripes of beautiful mellowed flowers. It is exactly the same kind of thing that is so fashionable to-day. History repeats itself even in silk, and those dull chiné ribbons and dull chiné silks are but reproductions of those worn by our great-grandmothers.

Royalty and really great folk—that is great-minded people in high places—do not carp at the clothes of those whose work in life is harder than showing off new and expensive dresses. Thank goodness, the days are long dead when writers were supposed to exist on the sufferance of publishers, to be always ragged, in debt, or to fawn on patrons and live in Grub Street.

Still, this is forestalling the account of my laborious, weary time before achieving anything, so it must be put down in faithful warning that “good times” have to be worked and waited for.

I often wonder now how I lived through those first years of hardship, paying off debts, working often ten hours a day with the constant goal of making an income and achieving success.

Poverty or ambition are the only stepping-stones to attainment. Perseverance did it, and bed. On and on I pegged. Wrote and re-wrote some things several times over, while others were not even corrected. Worked with throbbing eyes and weary brain—I’ve always been more or less a teetotaller, but it wasn’t that which helped me—it was bed. Never a good sleeper at any time, I crept off to bed as early as possible, and even if I did not sleep, I rested my back, closed my eyes, and lay in the dark. Most of my work was planned then, all my articles were thought out in that silent obscurity. My bed was my salvation.

Lots of people work best in the evening and the small hours of the morning. I was never any good then, and if “copy” had to be ready, say, by eleven at night, and I knew a “printer’s devil” would be standing in my hall at that hour to bear it away to the machines, I always got102 hot and cold, nervous and fussy; I never worked so well as directly after breakfast.

Work! Would anyone dare to say I have not worked? Why, in one fortnight (November, 1906) I see I had long signed articles in the Queen, Daily Chronicle, Observer, Daily Mail, and Tatler. Five important papers, besides unsigned articles in others.

“What does a signed article imply?” someone may wonder. It means double, treble, quadruple pay—as compared with an unsigned one. It means the writer’s name is of value, and sufficiently established to say what he thinks and means right out, instead of sending his poisoned darts unofficially in the disguise of anonymity. All articles and reviews ought to be signed, I think. One takes more care, gives more thought, attains a higher standard than for anonymous stuff. Leaders and critiques would be of real value if one knew who had written them.

Ease has come, facility of the pen. I believe I could write an article on almost any sort of subject with five minutes’ notice, and twenty minutes in which to dictate it. It is so easy to write on a theme which you never really touch on at all, but just glide along the outside edge. Things conceived like this cannot be of permanent value, but they are the product of an active brain and serve their purpose for the moment. That is journalism.

It may be interesting to beginners to read here how I wrote my first magazine article as a girl, in amateur days. This will illustrate how wise it is to make use of one’s opportunities; how from one small beginning a path may be opened in the wood of difficulty, at which, except in rare instances, all but genius has to hew.

I chanced to be in Paris in 1890, with my husband and mother who knew Pasteur, and thus I saw a good deal of the delightful, grey-bearded old gentleman whose work made such a stir at that time and revolutionised science. He was then about seventy. Short in stature, he was in no way a striking figure, but his clear eyes and thoughtful face arrested attention. I shall never forget the charm of his manner, and the courteous tolerance he displayed towards an unscientific young woman, who had no excuse for poking about the place save that she was the sister of one of his students and the daughter of a scientist. At that103 time Pasteur did very little personal work or research himself, but he most carefully superintended everything that was done under his roof.

So anxious was he for others to benefit by his experience that he had set apart fourteen tables in his large laboratory, at which were to be found working students of all nationalities and ages, from twenty-five to fifty—some of them men who had already won a name in science. No charge was made to them beyond the price of the materials they used, and every facility for scientific research was provided.

The hydrophobia cure was then the subject of commanding interest in the scientific world. It was a curious set of people who assembled in the large outer hall of the Institute every morning. On one occasion when I was there the patients numbered eighty-nine, amongst whom were a little English girl (the first to be sent over by the Lord Mayor’s Mansion-House Fund), a French soldier, a Belgian fisherman, a German, and many more of different nationalities.

On my return to England from that visit, with mental and scribbled notes, I sat down to write a little article on “Pasteur and his Institute,” which I sent addressed to the editor of Murray’s Magazine, feeling quite proud of myself but absolutely certain of its rejection. It was the first magazine article I had attempted. What was my surprise on receiving a letter in the course of a few days, signed “The Editor,” saying that he had been much interested in the article, but it was far too short for a magazine, and if I could double its length and write on one side of the paper only, he would have great pleasure in inserting it.

I actually jumped for joy. It seemed as if the whole literary world were opening at my feet. Of course, I copied it all out carefully on one side of the paper as ordered, and added a little bit here and a little bit there, counting the words one by one as they crept from tens into hundreds. The article duly appeared. It was wonderfully well reviewed, for it was the first thing of the kind on Pasteur that had been written in English, and therefore was quoted at some length in our Press.

A few years afterwards, when struggling to pay Charterhouse and Harrow bills, I was dining out one night when a gentleman was introduced to me. He said:

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“I know you very well, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, far better than you know me. I have printed several of your articles.”

“Indeed,” I exclaimed, surprised, “but I have never seen you before.”

“No, but you know the editor of Murray’s Magazine as a correspondent.”

“Of course I do,” I laughed, “and love him very much, for he printed my first magazine effort.”

“I am the man,” he replied; “I am W. L. Courtney, under which name I have since accepted several articles of yours for the Fortnightly Review.”

This was a pleasant means of introduction to one’s editor.

Lending or borrowing money ends friendship, and in the same way I feel shy of offering my wares to anyone I know. Mr. Courtney and I are excellent friends; but the work is arranged by an agent nowadays. Friendship and work have never gone together in my case. It is so much better to be incognito, and for them to remain unknown. Writing is a business, and can only be worked on a strictly business footing.

On one of the few occasions I ever entered an editor’s room—certainly in all those thirteen years of stress of work the occasions could be counted on my fingers—the experience was not pleasant.

Up dirty, dark stairs I stumbled, and after much waiting was shown into the gentleman’s office. I informed him I was going abroad, that I could take photographs, and suggested a somewhat new scheme of illustrated articles.

“What do you want for half a dozen?” he enquired.

“Five guineas a column,” was my reply.

“Five guineas a column. Tush! I’ll give you one guinea; and take six articles.”

I had only been a widow a short time, and was in deep, dull black, with the little uniform muslin collar and cuffs. He looked me up and down. Perhaps he thought I wanted the money badly, and repeated “A guinea a column, no more.”

“But I cannot take less than five. I am going abroad to get the information, and six guineas would not pay the ticket one way.”

“Ten guineas for the six, then105.”

“No,” I replied, sticking firmly to my guns; “I am sorry I cannot do them for that. Good morning.”

He barely raised his eyes from the paper. He did not even rise, nor open the door. I stepped out, choking with humiliation and tears, but with my head still high.

I wrote several books in the following years and many magazine articles, but for five long years my name never once appeared in that gentleman’s paper. Probably the only paper in the country into which some sort of notice of something of mine did not creep.

He paid me out; but I survived.

Another time, I was dining in Grosvenor Street. A charming young man took me in to dinner. He asked a number of questions, spoke much of my past work and future plans. Being surprised, I said:

“You seem to know a great deal about me.”

“I do.”

“Would you mind telling me why? Are you a detective from Scotland Yard?”

He laughed.

“No, I am only one of your editors. You constantly write for me in the St. James’s Gazette. My name is Hugh Chisholm.”

The same thing happened with regard to the Pall Mall Gazette and Sir Douglas Straight.

Editors seldom or never write; many of them do not even know how. There are, of course, one or two brilliant exceptions, as W. L. Courtney of the Fortnightly, Owen Seaman of Punch, L. J. Maxse of the National Review, Austin Harrison of the English Review. But there is hardly a single daily paper where the editor is a writer, except J. L. Garvin of the Pall Mall, and J. S. R. Phillips of the Yorkshire Post. Many editors were once “reporters,” and on an occasion of stress were put on to edit some subject. Having done it satisfactorily they came in useful in times of pressure, and finally became one of the many sub-editors necessary in a news office. From that apprenticeship they have gradually climbed to the post of editor. An editor is therefore not a literary man as a rule, but a business manager with a sound judgment of the public pulse and what the public wants. If he is wise he never goes into Society or knows people, because then his106 hand is free, and he can be independent. He decides the policy and the attitude of his paper, therefore he must read all the contemporary Press, and about eleven o’clock in the morning he is so buried in other people’s newspapers that he has to be dug out of the pulpy débris and printer’s ink.

It is a tremendous strain to be an editor, besides a terrible responsibility. Poor men, I pity them. It is bad enough to be a topical writer; to have a “printer’s devil” waiting on one’s door-mat for articles on which the ink is hardly dry; but to have to read and pass everything nightly at such a pace is enough to send the wretched editor demented. He is responsible for libellous matter, so out it must go. He must not offend his political party, so free-lance contributors must be “edited,” and, above all, he has only so many columns to fill and ten times the amount of stuff waiting to be inserted.

Then again, The Times, that great bulwark of the British Constitution, receives from fifty to a hundred letters a day for insertion, out of which only six or eight of the most public interest can be printed. The Times is a great asset of the country, and proud, indeed, should be John Walter, the fifth generation. He is Chairman of the journal founded and maintained by his family at such a high standard for so many years. He ought to write the true history of The Times, as he alone can.

But there are many and puzzling questions as to the journalism of the present day.

Why are modern writers so destructive in their ideas? Why are they so seldom constructive?

Why in politics is everything for pulling down, and nothing for building up?

Is this the craze of the age? The hypercritical, hypersensitive desire to destroy everybody and everything, and why, oh why, must we have veiled advertisements in nearly every column of our minor newspapers?

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CHAPTER IX

ON THE MAKING OF BOOKS

ONCE I thought the grandest thing in the world would be to write a book. It appeared the acme of desire. To see one’s name on a cover, oh, the joy of it! I trembled with fear and pride when that wondrous end was attained. I almost took that first book to bed with me. I wasn’t very old or very sedate, and so that little volume made me childish with glee.

Well, I thought to myself, “I’ll never give away a single copy. If anyone wants it they must get it from a library or spend three-and-sixpence on it themselves.” I kept to my resolve, because honestly afraid that if an utterly unknown young writer made presents of her little venture, kind folk (!) would say she could not sell the work, so distributed it amongst friends. A year or two afterwards, when A Girl’s Ride in Iceland had gone through two or three editions, and appeared on the bookstalls at a shilling, then—but not till then—did its author feel justified in sending presentation copies, with some words and her name inscribed on the fly-leaf. This was not churlish, but reasoned out. Cheap sales of goods mean deterioration; but cheap editions of books denote the popularity of the originals. On that first venture I received a ten per cent royalty.

And now after years of labour and experience, so many and great to me are the hardships, the struggles, the worries, the endless detail and annoyances of producing a book, that I always feel inclined to take off my hat figuratively, or drop a curtsey, to every fellow-author.

Strange as it may seem, every volume of mine has caused me sleepless nights of ever-increasing anxiety. Hyde Park, for instance, was written twice over from cover to cover—a108 little matter of about a hundred thousand words, re-arranged and practically rewritten.

I have generally worked myself into a perfect fever of anxiety by the day of publication, and even when those kindly, delightful reviews have appeared, my misery has not abated. Treated more than generously by both critic and public, I have naught to complain of. I have made far more money by my pen than I ever deserved—three hundred pounds advance on a twenty-five per cent royalty, is “nae so bad,” as our Northern friends would say. Columns of excellent reviews have appeared in the best papers of many lands. Yet I know the anxiety of it all, the rejection of articles, the return of “copy” from magazines, the weary, weary waiting when weeks seem years, after one has worked at break-neck speed; and although literature—no, I must not call anything I have done by such a stupendous name—although writing is a feverish joy, it is generally ill-paid, and the greater the rubbish, the more money it brings in. It certainly has done so in everything I have written. Serious work receives the least remuneration.

Major Martin Hume and other kind critics have told me I have “written two books that will live.” All I can say is those books (the last two on the list) have cost me ten times the work for less reward and much less public acknowledgment than the others. Serious work may live, but it seldom pays. Rubbish may pay, but it never lives.

Here is the list of thirteen books—the children of my pen—and various editions and translations of these have been published. But the newspaper and magazine articles number thousands, they cannot be counted.

A Girl’s Ride in Iceland.
The Oberammergau Passion Play. (Out of print.)
A Winter Jaunt to Norway.
Wilton, Q.C., or Life in a Highland Shooting Box. (Out of print.)
Danish versus English Butter-making.
Through Finland in Carts.
The First College for Women. (Out of print.)
George Harley, or the Life of a London Physician.
Mexico as I saw It.
Behind the Footlights.
109 Sunny Sicily.
Porfirio Diaz, Seven Times President of Mexico.
Hyde Park, Its History and Romance.

So many people have asked me how a writer works or plans out a day, that a sketch of an ordinary writer’s ordinary day may be of interest.

For years I have been called with a cup of tea at seven o’clock. Between then and getting up, thoughts have chased one another in quick succession. As a composer composes without a piano, so a writer writes without a pen. It is the thinking that does it. The arranging of facts and settling the sequence of events. It is the length of a book that wears one out, the necessity of keeping up the interest and working up to some definite end.

Breakfast at half-past eight, and a glance at the papers. To the kitchen as the clock struck nine, and then, every order given for the day, the flowers arranged, and so on. Nine-thirty heralded the arrival of my secretary, and from then till luncheon I was a hard-working woman. After luncheon, I could afford to be a “laidy,” not before.

At one time I had three secretaries, one Spanish and two English, and kept them all busy. On other occasions, I perforce worked ten hours a day. But as a rule four to five hours’ steady grind accomplished all that was necessary. One can do an immense amount in that time if one sticks to it.

It is fairly easy to give advice on how to write for the papers: journalism can be taught as a school task to a great extent, but with books it is different. We all have to serve our apprenticeship for ourselves, to learn how to balance our subject, to work out our theme, and finally to make a readable volume. It seems to me book-making is more a gift than anything else. Artists learn to draw, but they never learn to paint. Colour is an inspiration. Drawing requires work. The same applies to a book. We can all learn the mechanical part; but I don’t honestly think that anyone can write a book that people will read, unless they have some special gift that way. Books must be individual.

All this perhaps sounds pedantic, but the dozens and dozens of young men and women, who have written to me asking for advice, show how many, from milk-maids to110 hotel-lift boys, are interested in the subject. People, who can neither write nor spell, have strange ideas that God has sent them special literary powers, and hope to sit on the top of the ladder of fame without putting a foot on the bottom rung. ’Tis a laborious ladder to climb in all the arts; but it has its rewards. Public praise counts for little, the real pleasure is the knowledge within ourselves that we have given of our best. It does not satisfy; but it pleases.

To produce a book or a picture is a stupendous effort. It claims all the power of thought and of concentration that is in us. It demands enthusiasm, determination, the conquest of idleness and self. We may not produce a great book or a great picture, but it is our supremest effort at that time, and when done, we feel like a squeezed lemon.

“Writers are so dull,” is a frequent remark. So they may well be—at times. So are artists, or musicians, or any creative workers. Their life’s blood is given to their work.

Another saddening result of giving one’s self wholly (as a worker should) to a task until success crowns one’s efforts is that it often arouses the envy of onlookers, and mostly of those who would not take the least trouble to compete.

Yes: it is fairly certain that the more one achieves in any walk of life, the more jealousy one encounters. A pretty woman is called hideous by some; a woman with charm—that indefinable attraction we all love—is dubbed a minx. Brilliant wit calls forth much condemnation. Success of work and brain is belittled by the envious. So while nothing succeeds like success, no one makes more enemies than the one who wins.

Every little victory brings a new enemy. When one hears the “catty” things people say, one can but wonder what catty things are said about one’s self. People say malicious things, suggest improprieties without foundation, assert motives that have never been born. In fact, Society is often cruel and hard. It eats and drinks too much, gets overwrought and tired, and says nasty things it does not mean.

The life of many an ordinary Society man or woman is despicable. They are the people who are “too busy” to do anything useful, whose lives are no good to anyone, and therefore boring to themselves.

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Better work and be busy with something tangible, than idle life away in social dissipation. Yet how good and kind and generous most people are, and how hard many of them work for the good of others!

The vicissitudes of writers are many. I once suffered the loss in the post of an entire chapter of a manuscript. That missing link never turned up, and as I stupidly had kept no copy, while the rough notes thereof were of the roughest order, it was considerably difficult to rewrite the passages; indeed, impossible to remember the exact details of what the missing fragment formerly contained. Oh, the exasperation of it!—it was a thankless, dreary task.

How on earth Carlyle ever wrote his French Revolution over again is a marvel which fills me with admiration, whenever anything brings back the memory of all that labour which the second edition of that silly little chapter of an ordinary book cost me.

Work, too, is often wasted. Full of enthusiasm, after a peep at the gorgeous Eastern life on my return from Morocco in the ’nineties, I started a novel, which was nearly completed when the agent discovered there was already a somewhat similar book on the market. The appended letters speak for themselves and show the generosity of a man like Grant Allen in replying to a young and almost unknown author:

“Dear Mr. Grant Allen,

“I am much distressed! I was in Morocco this spring, and took copious notes, which I have since been busily writing up into a story, now nearing completion.

“Telling the plot to my host the other night, he exclaimed, ‘That is very like Grant Allen’s Tents of Shem.’ He found the book, and I have just read it, and put it down feeling very sad.

“You make English characters play the drama in Algiers, I do the same in Tangier.

“You have a naturalist, F.R.S.; I have a Science Professor from Cambridge.

“A Moorish girl falls in love with an Englishman.

“A Moorish man falls in love with my heroine.

“Indeed, the similarity of idea is in many ways extraordinary. I don’t see what to do unless I rewrite the whole112 thing, the work of some months, and even then, your story is splendid and your name famous; mine is simple and my name more or less obscure.

“It is altogether very disquieting.

“Being an author yourself, I felt I must tell you of my woes.”

“My dear Madam,

“I really don’t think you need trouble yourself excessively. Pretty much the same thing has happened to most of us—myself included. Besides, the number of people who have read The Tents of Shem is not so very great; nor did the book make stir enough to be well remembered by reviewers. My advice to you would be, go on and publish, and you will probably find nobody else is struck by the undesigned coincidence. Nor does it seem to me, from what you say, to be particularly close. If you will kindly send me a copy of your book when it appears, I will try to prevent any suggestions by reviewing it myself (if editors will permit me) over my own signature. If I am not struck by the supposed resemblance, nobody else need be. One little hint: don’t say anything about it to the publisher to whom you offer the book; never anticipate possible objections; ten to one, if you don’t, nobody else will raise them.

“Yours very faithful,       
“Grant Allen.

“Writers’ cramp, not discourtesy, compels typewriting. My right hand is useless, and even this machine I work with my left only.”

Still, that book was never finished. I had lost heart.

The same thing happened again in regard to a play in 1907. Everyone seemed to be making vast sums by writing plays and naturally an energetic woman wished to have a shot, too. I sketched out a most elaborate plot, laid partly in England and partly in America, and was brimming over with enthusiasm about it. Then I went gaily to the first night of Sutro’s play, John Glayde’s Honour, at the St. James’s Theatre, and lo and behold, the whole of my story unfolded itself on the stage.

Sutro’s play ran for about a year. Mine was never completed.

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After one has passed the critical age of twenty—I say critical, as many a man and woman have made or marred their future by that time—the love of books, the real honest pleasure of reading, the insatiable craving for knowledge takes fast hold of us, and we begin to realise, as we study even one single subject, what a vast field lies open before us. Unfortunately, the enormous number of cheap newspapers that have appeared on every side within the last few years have done much to interfere with more profound reading; but it is quite unnecessary for this to be the case, for there ought to be time for both. Newspapers are excellent amusement, and sometimes afford much information in odd moments, such as on journeys by train, or long rides in omnibuses, and at other periods of the day’s existence. But there are the evenings, and unless people are professionally engaged during that time, there is no greater pleasure or amusement than in the perusal of some sound book. Literature is so cheap nowadays, that it is within the scope of everyone.

Besides, what a great field is Literature! A vast mass of education can be gleaned from the pleasantest reading. It is a poor book, indeed, from which we can obtain neither amusement nor instruction.

It is strange how even a humble writer like myself gets quoted; more often than not, without payment or acknowledgment. A certain well-known author wrote a book which was literally a réchauffé of one of mine; but beyond my name appearing in the preface as “one of the works consulted,” no further acknowledgment was made. Whole articles have appeared with new headlines. Pages and pages have been embodied in other people’s work without any acknowledgment whatever.

I remember two instances, however, where I was most graciously asked for the right of reproduction. I say “graciously” advisedly, because I should never have seen the publications, and never have known the articles were used.

One was a letter from the head teacher of the great Military College near Berlin, Lichtenfelde, who asked if an article on Mexico might be used in the new English Reading-book, then in preparation for the students.

The other was a request for permission to transcribe an114 article on the Silent Sisterhood at Biarritz into Braille for the blind. That again was a thing I should never have been likely to come across.

Speaking of translations reminds me of the lack of emancipation of Germany as recently as Christmas, 1906. Porfirio Diaz had just been translated. It was being well advertised and well reviewed, all the result, probably, of a long article that had appeared a few months before in the Preussische Jahrbücher, the leading political magazine of the Fatherland, which had suggested that the book was of such value they hoped to see a German translation.

Having many friends in Germany, I thought I would go over for a month, let my boys join me for Christmas at Bonn, where we would visit Dr. von Rottenburg (mentioned in an earlier chapter), and afterwards snow-shoe and skate in the Thüringian Mountains.

On my dressing-table when I arrived in Berlin was a copy of Diaz, with the publisher’s compliments. It was charmingly and most artistically got up, and what cost a guinea here was only twelve shillings there.

But I at once noticed the name attached was Alec Tweedie. There was no “Mrs.” nor “Frau.” I peeped inside. Again the man’s name, without the feminine prefix.

Next morning my esteemed publisher, who represented one of the most important houses in Germany, called to make my acquaintance.

I congratulated him on the get-up of the book, and the excellent translation. “But why,” I said, “did you put ‘Alec Tweedie’ on the volume without a prefix?”

He hummed and hawed.

“That is a man’s name,” I continued, “my husband’s name, and I am a woman.”

“That is true, Gnädige Frau, we preferred to put a man’s name on the cover. You see a big historical, biographical work like that with a woman’s name upon it would be seriously handicapped in Germany. Fifty years ago, aye, twenty years ago in England, you women were hiding your identity under the manly names of George Eliot, George Trafford, George anything. Well, we are still in that condition in Germany, not as regards novels, but as regards more serious work.”

True, O publisher, and yet with all this female emancipation,115 with all the Reform Kleider which stand for advancement in Germany, it really was amusing.

Five years later the girls of the Fatherland were reading risky books and taken to see risky plays, such was the rapidity with which the pendulum of ultra-propriety swung the other way.

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CHAPTER X

THE END OF A CENTURY

THE close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was the subject of much notice both in drawing-room talks and articles in the papers. The latter recapitulated all that the march of science and civilisation had effected. Private persons spoke gaily or piously anent “turning over a new leaf.”

For me? Well, it was much the same as with the rest of nature. My life went on through 1900 with only this difference, that it had grown—grown certainly in the past years of striving to put forth one’s self.

Personally the end of the old century marked a new departure, and was the starting-point of much interesting public work—work, by the way, that only a few short years before might not have seemed so enticing to the then young Society woman as it was now to the thoroughly interested worker.

In 1899 the International Council of Women, under that brilliant worker the Countess of Aberdeen, had met in London. It was a tremendous undertaking, and I served on several of the committees. The one, however, which took most of my time and thought was the Agricultural Section, for which I was the Convener, and finally took the chair. It seems a funny thing for a writer to have taken the chair at the proceedings of an Agricultural Section, but this was the outcome of the pamphlet on butter-making, and the endless articles I had then written about women taking up dairy-work in this country.

The Agricultural Section was a novelty, and, I am glad to say, proved a success. I never felt more nervous in my life, although supported on the platform by many able people, among them the Earl of Aberdeen. Viscount117 Templetown sat next to me, and primed me in what to say, rang bells when the allotted space of time had been filled by some speaker, and generally acted as call-boy and prompter combined. And Professor James Robertson, Agricultural Commissioner of Canada, travelled to this country purposely to speak for me. I felt terribly impressed by the solemnity of the entertainment, the whole section being a new departure.

I continually received little notes from the audience asking questions or offering to speak. One of them ran, “Please pass me down that beautiful hat.” Utterly amazed at such a thing, I read and re-read the sentence. I seemed to know the writing. I looked again, and found a little “Hy. F.”

“Good heavens!” I thought. “Harry Furniss is here making caricatures of the proceedings.”

Truly enough, the picture appeared in a paper the following week.

One thing leads to another. At the Paris Exhibition of 1900 a Woman’s Section was inaugurated, and a few people were invited by the Minister of Commerce of the French Republic from England to go over and speak on different subjects. Accordingly to Paris I went, and for twelve minutes inflicted upon those poor, dear French people a speech which I read in French, entitled “L’Agriculture et les femmes en Grande Bretagne.” Since those days cultured women have energetically taken up dairying, chicken-rearing, and egg-collecting, to say nothing of many branches of horticulture in which they have proved themselves eminently successful.

But while these international courtesies and gatherings were in process the tragedies of war were being enacted in South Africa, and deep anxiety and sorrow prevailed throughout the British Empire.

Only a few weeks after the relief of Kimberley and Ladysmith Queen Victoria came to London for a couple of days. She had a splendid reception as she drove through the chief streets, a marvellous demonstration of unorganised loyalty. After our sad reverses early in the Transvaal War England went wild at the favourable turn of events, and London continued its jubilation during Her Majesty’s stay.

The Queen visited the City—it was on March 8th, 1900—and,118 in accordance with the ancient custom, the Lord Mayor awaited Her Majesty’s arrival at the City boundaries. On this occasion the Embankment was the route taken by the Royal procession, and the Lord Mayor—Sir Alfred Newton—stood in the road by the Temple Gardens and presented the Queen with the City sword in its pearl scabbard, offering a welcome “on behalf of your ancient and most loyal City.” It was an impressive scene. The great City dignitary is privileged to wear an earl’s robe when receiving a crowned head, and he was surrounded by his Sheriffs, the City Marshal, the Sword-bearer, and the members of the Common Council.

After taking the sword—which was presented to the Corporation by Queen Elizabeth—in both hands, Queen Victoria returned it to the Lord Mayor “for safe keeping,” adding in her beautiful voice and faultless diction, “My Lord Mayor, I wish to thank you for all the City has done.” This, of course, alluded to the formation of the City Imperial Volunteer Corps, which had started some weeks before for South Africa.

The next day, March 9th, 1900, a luncheon party was given at the Mansion House by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress to the members of the Executive Committee of the International Associations of the Press. Among others I received an invitation.

When an alderman is elected Lord Mayor, he and his family take up their residence at the Mansion House for a year. There is a charming suite of apartments at the top of the house for their reception, and all they have to take with them is their private house-linen; everything else is found. The servants are supplied, but as the Lord Mayor pro tem. pays their wages, he can dismiss them at his pleasure. This rarely occurs, however, especially among the upper servants, who positively nurse the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress and steer them clear of shoals during their year of office.

Arrived at the state door of the Mansion House, where magnificent servants in blue velvet and gold trappings, white silk, and powdered heads, took our cloaks, the guests ascended the red-carpeted staircase to the chief corridor. Here, at the far end, between two splendid thrones, stood the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress. The former wore a119 black Court dress, with his chain of office, and a wonderful locket of diamonds and enamel. On my name being announced, he most graciously shook hands, and remarked, “I believe I am to have the pleasure of sitting next you.” Evidently a Lord Mayor is not devoid of tact, judging by this small incident.

The City Marshal, resplendent in scarlet uniform, the Mace-bearer in black robes with sable cap, many well-known City dignitaries, and various officials stood around; among others being Mr. Sheriff (afterwards Alderman Sir) William Treloar, who was later a most popular Lord Mayor himself.

Some hundred and fifty people had been received when luncheon was announced. The Lord Mayor offered his arm to Mademoiselle Humbert, the daughter of one of the French Deputies and editor of L’Éclair, and the late Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid, one of the originators of evening papers, was allotted to me. We formed into a procession and marched to the big banqueting hall. A long table was arrayed down the room. At the side centre sat the Lord Mayor, in a veritable throne of red velvet and gilding. It was a magnificent setting, for behind him, along a large part of the room, a sort of red-baize-covered sideboard was erected, which literally groaned under gold plate. Tankards, cups, swords, and bowls in number were here displayed, the collection of hundreds of years of City wealth.

We began with the renowned turtle soup, and I ventured to ask the Lord Mayor if that were part of the City religion, at which he laughed.

“Almost,” he said. “But I think to-day it has been given for luncheon, a somewhat unusual affair, in honour of our foreign friends.” He was both affable and charming. During the meal a perfect budget of papers was brought in for his signature. He did not even look at their contents—there were too many of them—but merely signed. Thereupon I remarked:

“You may be signing away your birthright.”

“Oh,” he replied, “the Mansion House is a network of officialism, and all these papers have gone through the proper office, been enquired into, and passed; I have, therefore, nothing to do with them but sign my name.” Gorgeous120 flunkeys placed the papers before him and gorgeous flunkeys bore them away.

The luncheon was not particularly good, except the turtle soup, though it was well served. All the plates and silver bore the City arms. Beautiful yellow tulips stood in golden vases down the table. Certainly the foreign visitors ought to have been impressed by the solid magnificence of a City banquet. The Lord Mayor made a happy, though evidently unprepared speech, and regretted that he was not master of each of the sixteen languages represented by the different nationalities sitting round the table, but he did give a few phrases in French and German, much to the delight of the foreigners.

“What is the most difficult part of being Lord Mayor?” I asked.

“The dinners,” was his surprising reply. “It is a case of dining out practically every night, and as the Lord Mayor goes everywhere in his official capacity, he is always expected to say something. How is it possible to say anything with any sense in it six times a week?”

He seemed delighted with the Queen’s visit and showed the sword which had been used for the ceremony. The next day the announcement appeared in the papers that Her Majesty, in recognition of her City reception, had been pleased to confer a baronetcy upon him, and knighthood upon the Sheriffs.

I had a long talk after the luncheon with Sir William Agnew, who said, “I have now collected all my pictures for the Paris Exhibition, and flatter myself they are the finest collection of representative English art that has ever been brought together, considering the number—Gainsborough, Raeburn, Romney, Constable, Turner, Watts, Burne-Jones are among them, and several are insured for from £10,000 to £15,000 apiece. But I have never before found such difficulty in obtaining the loan of pictures. In several cases I received an answer in the affirmative until I mentioned Paris. ‘Oh no, my dear fellow! I am not going to let my picture go there,’ has been the reply.

“There is no doubt about it,” he continued, “that the attitude of the French Press lately towards the Queen, and their comments on the Transvaal War, have caused a very bitter feeling in this country, and in several instances121 I have had to make it a personal favour to myself to get the pictures at all. Indeed, the fear has been so great that the exhibition might be burnt down, or the canvases cut and destroyed, that I almost gave up all idea of a representative English collection in despair; and, although I have insured the pictures for a large sum from their owner’s door till their ultimate return, I shall not be happy in my mind until the exhibition is over and they are back again. The present mistrust of the French people is extraordinary, and the sort of feeling current that we may go to war with France has made it very difficult.”

A few years later the influence of King Edward did much to create a better understanding with France.

The Lord Mayor’s documents coming in for signature reminded me of a millionaire, who has much to do with the issue of shares and can sign his name fourteen or fifteen hundred times in an hour.

“I often do that,” he said; “in fact, two or three times in a year. But the greatest number of times I ever signed my name in a week was once in Paris when we were bringing out a new company; then I signed my name thirty-three thousand times in one week.”

“How on earth do you manage it?” I exclaimed. “Does a secretary pass the papers before you and blot them as you sign?”

“I have no secretary and no one blots them,” he replied. “A book, containing from one to three hundred documents, is put before me, and I lift each one with my left hand while I sign with my right. I don’t stop to blot them, they blot themselves—or smudge,” he laughed; “and as each book is completed I throw it on the floor and take up another from the table beside me. Every hour or so one of the clerks comes in, and wheels the signed books away on a trolley and places another bundle on the table. I sometimes sign my name for three hours straight off, which means four thousand to four thousand five hundred signatures without rising from my seat.”

“I am going to assist at a bazaar,” I exclaimed, “and I really think it would be a splendid idea to put you in a little room dressed up in gorgeous Eastern attire, charge sixpence for admission, and write in large letters on the outside: “‘The man who can sign his name fifteen hundred122 times in an hour!’ We should make quite a lot of money.”

He laughed. Writer’s cramp never troubled him.

When the day came that I really was overpowered with work, that my table was strewn with commissions, that I had secretaries hard at it, sorting, arranging, looking out photographs or figures; as I dictated between whiles and they typed, a horrible pain, like hot sand, came in my eyes. At first intermittently, then more frequently, till at last a hideous dread of blindness—like my father’s—seized hold of me. Off to Sir Anderson Critchett I went. “Overwork, overstrain; you must give up your work for a time.” “I can’t,” I replied. “Then you must be responsible for the consequences.” Lotions, blisters behind the ears, brought improvement, but still that hot, burning sand was there.

To Sir John Tweedy I then repaired. “Inflammation of the eyes from overwork; you must rest the eyes. Never work at night, and always wear a black shade when possible.”

So I gained nothing fresh from him. Both gave me exactly the same advice and warned me of danger.

I wore that hideous shade for a year, tore it off the moment a stranger appeared—never went out at night. The glaring lights of the theatre had become positive torture; but, in spite of all, I managed somehow to keep up my work and write another book.

Gradually, by resting my eyes whenever possible, never reading unless obliged, and sitting much in the dark, my eyes became better and remain better.

And thus the last days of the great Century of Progress sped into the realm of past ages. But when the newcomer crossed the threshold of Time, with all the new century’s opportunities and hopes, I was far away under the Southern Cross amid the brilliant colouring and luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.

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THE WRITER—IN DIVIDED RIDING SKIRT, SOUTHERN MEXICO, 1900-1

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CHAPTER XI

MEXICO AS I SAW IT

ONE day in July, 1900, I was explaining to my small boys that I was going off through Canada and America to Mexico to write a new book, to make some more money for bread and butter and school bills.

One of them appeared distressed at the idea. At last, after a pause, he said:

“Why don’t you go and sit in that shop in Regent Street with your hair hanging down, like those three girls do?”

I looked surprised.

“It would not be so tiring as travelling all that long way and writing another big book,” he explained, “and you would make just as much money, I am sure.”

Lovely idea!

But I dared not accept his suggestion, kindly meant though it was.

A letter I wrote to a woman friend in 1900 has just come into my hands. It says:

“Your congratulations on my ‘success,’ as you are pleased to call it, are very sweet. Public success seems to me to mean so little. After a good dinner the playgoeer enjoys any foolery—and much the same with books. A good temper makes a satisfied reader, and an easy chair and shady lamp do the rest. I am not satisfied. Far from it. Sheaves of reviews—and all good ones, strange to relate—lie before me; but they mean nothing. I know inside my little me that I ought to have done better.

“Perhaps I should have been wise never to have commenced the struggle. To have retired from London to a suburb or a cottage and lived quietly on my small income. You will say I have a fit of the blues—and doubtless I have—or liver, or something equally stupid; but I’ve been124 pretty hard at it for four years now—three books have been conceived and born and a fourth nearly done, and I am still alive; but I’m tired. Shall I go to Mexico and write another while I am young enough to rough it and stand the racket, or shall I throw down the pen and cry vanquished? Work is a tough job to a woman never brought up to the idea of working, and perhaps I’m trying to carry more on my silly shoulders than those silly sloping shoulders can bear. The table is covered with orders of all sorts and kinds—work lies before me if only I had the pluck to do it. The more ’success’ I gather, as you call it, the more incapable I feel.

“Two strings are tugging at me, one says go on, the other says stop. The first may end in failure. The second begins in failure. Mexico—and quite alone—mind you, is a long way, and a big job. To-night I seem to funk it; but, then, to-night I seem to funk everything, and even your letter of love and sympathy, dear friend, has not quite dragged me back to my senses. I’m very lonely at times, and that’s the truth. After that remark you will think I’m going to marry again; but there you are wrong. You lost your hundred pounds bet that I would re-marry in a year—so don’t be foolish and risk any more on this silly, wayward, lonely, spoilt pen-woman.

“Yours, etc.”

N.B.—I went to Mexico shortly after—alone, quite alone, on a twenty-five-thousand-mile journey.

Why did I choose Mexico to visit and write about? Because with all the world before me that land seemed to offer a more historic past than almost any other country on God’s earth; and was there not a spice of danger and romance lurking amongst its hills and valleys?

I left London in July, and, after halting in Canada and the United States, landed in Mexico on November 1st, 1900, and returned to England in April, 1901. Between those dates I had travelled some twenty-five thousand miles, had spent thirty-nine nights in moving trains, and many more in private Pullman-cars in railway sidings. I had lived a life of luxury and ease and had roughed it to nigh unendurable straits. Besides which I was constantly sending home articles to the English Press.

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It was a several months’ journey from Liverpool to Quebec, through Canada to Niagara, then to New York, Chicago, Washington, and Philadelphia; and onward, onward to Mexico. Before leaving America, however, I turned aside when I found myself only fifty miles from Galveston, which, about ten weeks previously, had been visited by its historic and terrible storm. Heart-rending were the sights that met my eyes and the tales that were poured into my ears. Eight thousand people had perished in that terrible hurricane, their bodies were even then being cremated on the shore. Rows of small houses literally stood on their heads, while on the beach pianos, tramcars, saucepans, sewing-machines, baths, and perambulators lay in wild confusion.

Resuming my journey I soon passed the Mexican frontier, and there had my first experience in ranch life; there, too, a “norther,” or dust-storm, made me long for the comparative comfort of a London fog. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, were all choked with hard, sharp, cutting sandy dust. My raven locks were grey and no longer suitable for exhibition in the shop in Regent Street. Next came another long railway journey to Mexico City, with the President of the line in his private train, with various entertainments on the way, including a bull-fight and a cock-fight, and much interested amusement at the customs of the people. Mexico City was reached just in time for me to see the celebrations of the Feast Day of the Lady of Guadaloupe, the patron saint of Mexico. It was a wonderful sight, and the story reminded me of Lourdes, though it is of much earlier origin and the pilgrimage of far greater magnitude.

The welcome tendered to me in the capital was delightful.

The Christmas customs were, of course, of great interest; Madame Diaz, the wife of that great President, invited me to her posada. A most enjoyable and novel evening. One of my most valued treasures is the little bonbonnière she gave me on that occasion.

Many varied experiences followed; rides lasting two or three weeks through that marvellous country to see old Aztec ruins; life at tobacco, sugar, tea, or coffee haciendas; to say nothing of the national customs, traditions, and superstitions on every side. The President gave me a guard of forty rurales (soldiers), and, as the opportunity of penetrating126 remote parts was great, twenty-two gentlemen of all nationalities, from Cabinet Ministers to clerks, joined us. We were sixty-three all told, and, though I rode astride like a man, I was the only woman.

Perhaps the most thrilling and exciting moment on my various travels was that spent on a trolley-car in Southern Mexico. Along those distant tracks barely two or three trains pass in a day, and hundreds, aye, thousands, of miles of railway have to be kept in repair. It is usual for the engineers to run along the line in a little open wagon, known as a trolley-car, which is worked by hand by four or six men, and covers the ground at a good pace. It can stop at any moment, and be lifted bodily off the line should a train require to pass.

Naturally, one sees the scenery magnificently from a car of this kind, for there is nothing before one. I was sitting in front with an engineer on each side of me. We had just come through one of the most magnificent passes in the world of engineering, and had, indeed, at that moment crossed a bridge, a slender, fragile thing. Some two or three hundred feet below it the water gurgled in a rushing stream. Parrots shrieked overhead, terrapins floated on the water, and monkeys swung from tree to tree. There was a precipice on one side, a high, rocky hill on the other, and just room for this mountainous line to crawl round the rocks.

We were all telling stories and chatting cheerfully: the next thing I knew was that the man on my right seized me by the neck, as if he suddenly wished to strangle me, and somehow he and I fell together a tangled mass down the side of the precipice.

When I looked up—luckily caught in the shrubs—an enormous engine was towering over my head, the grid-like rails of the cow-catcher looking ominous and weird above me. The splintered platform of the trolley-car was rushing down the mountain-side, and our iron wheels were running off in different directions. It was a marvel we were not all killed.

It had happened in this wise.

As we turned a sharp corner an engine suddenly bore down on us—one of those great black, high American locomotives, neither varnished nor painted. The engineers, accustomed to the ominous sound, luckily heard it before127 it was quite upon us. Hence, I was violently dragged from what, in another second, would have been instantaneous death. The natives all jumped off in some wonderful manner, also being accustomed to the sound; but our trolley-car was smashed to smithereens.

It was a ghastly experience. By the time I regained my equilibrium, and saw the horrible accident to our frail little carriage and learnt the awful danger we had just come through, I realised that I had just experienced one of the most perilous moments of my life.

I should have sat there oblivious and literally courted death. We never know life’s real dangers till they are past, hence the courage of the battlefield or shipwreck. We only worry over what we but partially understand, hence the anxiety so often experienced before sitting in the dentist’s chair. Anticipation is so much sharper than realisation.

This was not my only narrow escape, for I was blessed with the proverbial three.

While visiting at the hacienda of the Governor of one of the Southern States we, one day after lunch, amused ourselves by shooting at bottles with the rifles of the rurales. After a time my hostess and I had wandered away for a stroll, and, as we returned, a ricochet bullet slid off a bottle and buried itself in my womanly “Adam’s apple.” A red streak ran down my collar, I opened my mouth and literally gasped, choking; everybody thought I was dead. But it proved nothing, and in a few minutes I could breathe and speak again and was washed clean.

My third escape was a terrible illness, contracted when riding in the tropics, and caused either by venomous bites or poisonous ivy. Never shall I forget the awful loneliness of those days and nights fighting with death in a Mexican hotel.

Of all the marvellous sights, the magnificent scenery, the many-coloured birds and flowers rivalling each other in gorgeousness, I need not write here. But, far beyond everything, the scene that left the deepest impression on my mind was in Southern Mexico. It was a visit to the Caves of Cacahuimilpa, one of the greatest wonders of the world, and the Governor of the State organised an expedition for me to see them. Numberless Indians from far and wide had joined my party, glad of the opportunity of going128 inside the wondrous caves which they hold in such superstitious dread. Candles were distributed to the company, which by now must have been swelled to something like a couple of hundred people. All was ready.

The descent was easy, for a roadway had been made; but it was really very impressive to see so many individuals solemnly marching two and two into impenetrable blackness to the strain of martial music. Each person carried a long lighted candle, but before we returned to our starting-point, six and a half hours later, these candles had nearly burnt out.

The caves were originally formed by a river, the waterline of which is distinctly visible, while in places the ground is marked with wave ripples like the sand of a beach. Then, again, many stones are round and polished, the result of constant rolling by water; and, still more wonderful, two rivers flow beneath them, probably through caves just as marvellous, which no man had then dared penetrate.

I believe we went through seven caverns, and our numerous lights barely made a flicker in the intense gloom—they were nothing in that vast space. Rockets were sent up. Rockets which were known to ascend two hundred and fifty feet, but which nowhere reached the roof; the height is probably somewhere between five and six hundred feet. Think of a stone roof at that altitude without any supports.

The size alone appalled, but the stalactites and stalagmites almost petrified one with amazement. Many of them have joined, making rude pillars a couple of hundred feet high and perhaps a hundred feet in diameter at the base. Others have formed grotesque shapes. A seal upon the ground is positively life-like: a couple of monster Indian idols: faces and forms innumerable; here an old woman bent nearly double, there a man with a basket on his head, thrones fit for kings, organs with every pipe visible, which, when tapped, send forth deep tones. It was all so great, so wonderful, so marvellous; I felt all the time as if I were in some strange cathedral, greater, grander, and more impressive than any I had ever entered. Its aspect of power and strength paralysed me, not with fear, but with admiration.

At times it was terribly stiff climbing and several of the129 party had nasty falls in the uncertain light; at others it was a case of sitting down and sliding, in order to get from one boulder to another; but it was worth it all to see such a sight, to realise the Power that made those caves, to bow before the Almighty Hand which had accomplished such work, even in millions of years. There hung those great stone roofs without support of any kind—what architect could have performed such a miracle? There stood those majestic pillars embedded in rocks above and below; there hung yards and yards of stalactites weighing tons, and yet no stay or girder kept them in place. It was a lesson, a chapter in religion, something solemn and soul-stirring, something never to be forgotten; one of the Creator’s great mysteries, where every few yards presented some fresh revelation.

My knees were trembling, every rag of clothing I wore was as wet as when first taken from the washerwoman’s tub, yet I struggled on, fascinated, bewildered, awed, by the sights which met me at every step. Think of it. Stumbling along for four and a half hours, even then not reaching the end, and, though we returned by the easiest and quickest way, it was two hours more before we found the exit.

In one of the caves the Governor proposed my health, and the party gave three cheers, which resounded again and again in that wonderful subterranean chamber, deep down in the bowels of the earth, with a mountain above and a couple of rivers below. The military band of Cacahuimilpa accompanied us, and the effect produced by their music was stupendous. No words can give any idea of the volume of sound, because the largest band in the world could not succeed in producing the same effect of resonance in the open air which ten performers caused in those vast silent chambers.

It is impossible to describe the immense grandeur of Cacahuimilpa.

Man is speechless in such majestic surroundings; but in this all-pervading silence surely the voice of God speaks.

Hot, tired, and overpowered we were plodding homewards, when a letter was handed to a member of the party by a mounted soldier, who, seeing our lights approaching the entrance, had dared to venture into the grottos to deliver his missive. We were all surprised at the man’s arrival,130 and more surprised to find he carried an envelope. It turned out to be a telegram which had followed our party from a village forty miles distant, and had been sent on by special horseman with instructions to overtake us at all speed. Was ever telegram delivered amid stranger surroundings, to a more cosmopolitan collection of humanity assembled in the bowels of the earth, far, far away from civilisation?

What news that telegram contained! It had travelled seven thousand miles across land and sea; it had arrived at a moment when we were all overawed by stupendous grandeur and thoroughly worn out with fatigue. At the first glance it seemed impossible to read. Men, accustomed to the vagaries of foreign telegraph clerks when dealing with the English language, found, however, no difficulty in deciphering its meaning.

Then the Governor spoke a word. Every Indian doffed his hat and bent his eyes, as Colonel Alarcon walked solemnly towards me, and in deep tone, with evident feeling, explained that the President of Mexico had sent on the news to tell the English señora—

“QUEEN VICTORIA IS DEAD.”

A historic telegram, truly, announcing a national calamity, and received amidst the wildest possible surroundings in the strangest possible way.

The Queen was dead. The English-speaking people had lost her who had been their figure-head for sixty-three years. The monarch, to whom the whole world paid homage as a woman and respect as a Queen, had died at Osborne on the previous day, while we, wandering over Aztec ruins at Xochicalco, had not even heard of her illness.

Impressed as we were by the mystic grandeur of the caves, amazed at the wonders of nature, this solemn news seemed to fit the serious thoughts of the day, thoughts which had grown in intensity with each succeeding hour. Cacahuimilpa appeared a fitting spot in which to hear of a great public loss. Time and place for once were in no wise “out of tune.”

It was dark and the way steep as we rode back to the village in silence.

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Like the proverbial bad penny, I rolled home again with my pocket full of notes on men, women, and things. I had collected my material, written bits in railway trains, on steamboats, and almost in the saddle, and as soon as I felt well enough, put together Mexico as I saw It.

The beginning of the manuscript was sent off to the publishers in the June following, just two months after landing at home, and the remainder was printed, chapter by chapter, as I managed to finish each: a most terrible and anxious manner of proceeding and one certainly not to be recommended. The first proof of Mexico as I saw It was returned on July 10th; the slips, or galleys, finished on August 10th; the whole was paged and passed for press on September 10th. It appeared in October at a guinea net, the illustrations mostly from my own camera. So I was just six months in Mexico, and just six more getting out the book; in my own souvenir copy there is written on the fly-leaf: “It is done, but it has nearly done for me.”

Reviews were more than kind, but then the subject was new, so people found it interesting. As Frederic Harrison wrote in the Positivist Review: “The marvellous restoration of Mexico, from being a hot-bed of anarchy and the victim of superstition to its present condition of one of the best governed and most enlightened of modern countries, has often attracted the attention of political observers. In Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s most interesting volume we find suggestive sketches of the institution of the Republic, and a personal character of the President, General Porfirio Diaz, the noble statesman who has achieved such triumphs.” How could one help being gratified that other influential organs of public opinion felt with me the “fascinations of the Southern haciendas and of the natives of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,” and held the information, that had been zealously collected, of practical and informing value?

On the hospitality of the President it is only necessary to say that, looking back to those records of 1900-1, I find this expression—warm from the heart—respecting General and Madame Diaz:

“Their kindness and courtesy, the extraordinary thoughtfulness and consideration with which I was treated, will ever remain in my mind. Without the personal aid of General Diaz I could not have written Mexico as I saw It,132 and perhaps this peep into the life of the people, over whom he rules so powerfully, may help to make that wonderful country a little better understood.”5

Five years later I returned to Mexico and wrote the Life of the President.

The first time I left the country I was limping with pain after a serious illness of blood-poisoning—the second time I left almost limping again, but that was from the weight of the precious documents I bore away.

No one knew but the President, his wife, and three of his Ministers, what important material I was taking with me, or that I was going to write the Life of General Diaz from his diaries and notes. It was published in England and America in February, 1906, and reprinted with additions two months later. One kindly critic said: “It is a romance, a history, a biography, one of the most thrilling stories of real life ever written.” Later it was translated into German and Spanish. I was so pressed with work at that time I had one Spanish and two English secretaries constantly employed—I often sat at my desk for nine or ten hours a day, and rarely went to any social entertainment except an occasional public dinner.

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CHAPTER XII

THE CONTENTS OF A WORKING-WOMAN’S LETTER-BOX

THE fact of having committed a book into printer’s ink lays one open to curious correspondence. I am sure there are autograph hunters who seek the appearance of each new writer, in order to mark her down, as eagerly as ever angler watched for a trout rising to his fly. Some ask directly and are unashamed; others wrap up their request by desiring some piece of information. Happily it has not yet become a recognised custom for a writer to be asked by people entirely unknown to her to give them her books, but I have experienced even such modest requests. One circumstance was perhaps a little unusual.

From far-away Mussoorie, in the North-West Provinces of India, came a letter one day. It was dated “January,” after the season at the hill station was over, by some exile compelled to stay on through the dreariness of a deserted health resort, to live through the monotonously dull days and watch the successive falls of snow on the mountains. My correspondent had been reading about myself and my books in a popular monthly which had reached her, and became emboldened to ask “if the writer would lend her a copy of A Girl’s Ride in Iceland, which she would carefully return.” As she covered the thin pages of her foreign note-paper her boldness grew, for next she “confessed” that she would like to possess the book; and she wound up with a suggestion that if my name “was written on the fly-leaf, signifying that the book was a gift to her by the author, it would add to its value.”

I believe in this instance I did weakly send the book, autographed fly-leaf and all. One feels sympathetic towards a lonely woman compatriot left stranded on an Indian hill-top, thinking perchance of a friendly Christmas-time134 at home, with one’s own people, shops and shows to amuse and cheer one.

“A bibliophilic favour” was on another occasion requested. This time my correspondent was nearer home:

I am afraid those magazine excerpts, though neatly “backed” for preservation, are still unadorned.

What, one wonders, will become of pickers-up of bibliophilic trifles in these days when everything committed to paper is typewritten? The relics of dead authors of the twentieth century, when those of the twenty-first come to collect them, will not be the manuscripts written in ink in a neat (or otherwise) handwriting, such as the British Museum purchases for hundreds of pounds and stores among its treasures to-day; but lacerated engrimed sheets of typescript which can make but small appeal to anyone’s emotions.

At other times various correspondents have asked of me:

If I would figure with my children in a series of articles entitled “Model Mothers,” which Mr. Harmsworth’s (Lord Northcliffe’s) enterprise was bringing out.

Would I get somebody concert engagements?

Did I approve of divorce?

Had I any theory in the bringing up of babies?

Would I permit my visiting-card to be reproduced in the illustration of an article on “The Etiquette of Card-leaving”?

Had I two or three good specimens of opals from Querétaro for a correspondent who had twice read my Mexican book?

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While another enterprising gleaner sought my help in gathering his sheaf as follows:

Another enquired if I thought widows should remarry.

Lastly, among begging letters that visit the working-woman’s desk like so many buzzing flies, one covering many pages may be taken as a specimen. A youth, a French polisher by trade, wrote that he had given up his situation: taken to writing: failed and become a tramp. After many hardships, having only one penny left, he bought a postage-stamp and hoped to find a Who’s Who in his inn. He was unsuccessful, but discovered a Literary Year-Book, which he opened by chance, and his eyes fell on my name; therefore he sent me a most lengthy appeal for help, adding a promise of repayment as he had a prospect of work.

Truly strange epistles drift into the working-woman’s letter-box, and each steals a little time from her busy day.

Once an unknown person, chancing to read an article of mine on Lourdes, sent me sixteen closely written pages in French, betraying a profound anxiety on the writer’s part to convert me to Roman Catholicism.

Then come letters of a different kind requesting loans. They may be from the Royal Geographical Society, or the Earl’s Court Exhibition, or a lace collection, or perhaps some clergyman in the East End, but the letters come and the letters have to be answered.

The writers generally require the loan of curios from Iceland, Finland, Norway, Mexico, Morocco, Sicily; or any country, in fact, with which one’s name is associated. Lists have to be made, the objects looked out, packed, sent, placed, fetched, unpacked. Sometimes things get damaged, or lost, and then no one seems responsible.

People write asking for patronage; the loan of one136’s name as a patroness to soup kitchens, charity concerts, balls, clubs, hospital bazaars, or collections by a friend for some charity. I was once asked by an unknown man to be godmother to his child. Soaps have asked for my patronage, and a motor-car was suggested as a free gift (it was the early days of motoring) if I would drive it through the streets of London.

Letters from women and men aspiring to literature—and verily half the world seems to think literary gifts are as common as pens and inkpots; letters from the natives of all the countries about which I have ever written, asking for help, or “for money to buy a ticket home because they are stranded in London and destitute”; or a fond father wishing to start his son in mining writes to ask my experience of mines in Mexico; while perhaps a mother thinks my experience would solve a question whether her daughter, who is a hospital nurse, would find a good opening in Canada; and, again, a girl starting a dairy enquires for hints on the Danish procedure.

Letters modestly ask me if through my medical connection I can get “a poor friend” seen by a doctor gratis; or if I can give someone an introduction for the stage, or hear somebody else sing or recite, and see what he or she had better do with their talent.

Oh dear! Oh dear! Letters never end, they are like the taxes in their persistency. Is there anything under the sun people will not bother a busy woman to obtain? The following letter was as much underlined as one of Queen Victoria’s epistles:

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One effusion addressed to me begins:

In the same strain the letter runs on for several pages. For a long time the signature was a puzzle, and then gradually rose before me the vision of a man with whom I used to dance twenty years before as a girl; he was then a rich bachelor in Park Lane. A few years after this he married, and I only saw his wife two or three times. Surely on such a slight acquaintance the letter could not come from her. But it did.

What is to become of the endless stream of charming but incapable women, whose husbands, fathers, or brothers leave them in this deplorable condition?

Among the newspaper articles for which my pen has travelled over reams of paper—articles responsible for much of my strange correspondence—were some on hand-loom weaving.

Far away in the wilds of Sutherlandshire, chance once drew my steps to visit a little croft where homespuns were woven by the family, while the hens laid their eggs in the corner, or cackled in the rafters. Years went by and better days came to that household.

Appreciation is always pleasant, and such kindly words as those in the following simple letter are good to read. The excellent English used by the writer is a testimony to education in the Highlands of Scotland.

If the weaver’s letter was pleasant, the following reversed the shield. I have not often received abusive letters; but here is an example at random:

Possibly my correspondent would claim that her judicial merits in the matter of refinement extended to language.

A total stranger sent me the following—among epistolary curiosities—dated from a well-known ladies’ club:

Being struck with this letter, I sent for the girl. She came; tall, dark, handsome, and a lady. It appeared that she was not happy at home, but had means of her own. She had been abroad with friends, who invariably stayed in large hotels, all alike and all uninteresting, whilst she wanted to see something of the real life of the foreign lands she visited.

“But what do you want to do with me?” I asked.

“Travel with you. I would go as your secretary, as your maid, as anything if you would only take me. I would pay all my own expenses and promise to be useful.”

“Maids sew on buttons and lace up boots,” I replied, laughing.

“I’ll do all that and more, if you will only take me. I have your books, and I know I should love you, and I do so want to travel, to really travel as you do.”

She was delightfully enthusiastic; but, alas! I could not take her; the responsibility of a headstrong girl was too great. It might have turned out an ideal arrangement, but, again, it might have been a hideous failure, and when travelling to write books one has no time to tackle needless worries.

To end this list of letter-samples that more often tease than gratify the recipient are constant demands for subscriptions; appeals for gifts of books to poor clubs; letters from comparative strangers asking if they may bring a particular friend or a foreigner to call, as they wish to have a talk with me, or see over my house. In fact, no one who does not peep into a busy woman’s letter-box can have any idea of the amount of correspondence on all conceivable subjects it contains.

No doubt other workers have likewise helped—or are helping—the young or shiftless beginners who have not yet found foothold on the lowest rung of the ladder, round which so great a crowd is struggling. But do all, one wonders,140 learn, as has been my experience, how quickly eaten bread is sometimes forgotten by the eater: how often so-called gratitude is only the hope of fresh favours to come?

Does it ever strike people that it hurts?

A girl of my acquaintance was once very, very poor. She wrote asking my advice; saw me, and finally started in a small way as a manicurist. No move was made without claiming my advice at all times and seasons. She called and sat for hours asking this and that. She brought agreements to be looked over, earnings to discuss, address-books for suggestions; Heaven knows what she did not bring. At my persuasion she saved shillings and put them into the Post Office Savings Bank. Then it became pounds, and I arranged with a bank to open a little account for her, and later asked my stockbroker to invest her first saved hundred pounds in something very safe.

That first hundred saved, in a year or two became a thousand, and quickly doubled itself. She deserved it all, for she worked hard and saved diligently, but—well! the protectress was wanted less and less, the protestations of affection and admiration slowly ceased, and when my help could no longer be of use they came to an end.

Gratitude. Where is it? The people one helps most generously often turn away the moment they are firmly established.

Take another case. I started a certain girl in journalism. (I’ve started so many.) She worried me day and night for help and advice. I corrected MSS., suggested subjects, rewrote whole articles, and all because of feeling really sorry for her plight. She is now a flourishing journalist. We often meet, but she rarely takes the trouble to call because she need no longer get anything out of me.

Yes! after correcting four whole books, and that means hours and hours of dreary work, only in one case, to my surprise and delight—for such a small return gives one real pleasure—did I find a pretty acknowledgment, in a preface, of my part of the work.

People will come again and again, and a hundred times again, no matter how inconvenient the hour; they will drop in at meal-time, and knowing how poor they are, one feels forced to ask them to stop. But these very folk,141 once on their feet, sometimes forget the friendly outstretched hand of help by which they climbed.

It hurts.

On the other hand, some people are almost too grateful. A boy who was alone in lodgings and spent his Sundays with us in Harley Street in the long ago, went to China, where he has done splendidly; and every year since I have had a home of my own—since 1887, in fact—he has sent me a chest of tea, “because he never could forget the kindness of the past.” And he sends a similar recognition to my mother for the same reason. Such tokens of remembrance keep alive the friendships of those bygone days.

A woman who was with me for some years as secretary and left through ill-health never forgets to send me a kindly note on my birthday, a little thoughtfulness I greatly appreciate. One loves to be remembered. A penny bunch of violets often gives a hundredfold its weight in pleasure.

Yes, remembrance is always pleasant. Dear old Sir John Erichsen left me £300 in his will to buy a memento. I was too poor for mementoes when it came, so I invested it, and the £12 a year became of real tangible help. Or again, an old cousin in Scotland whom I only saw twice, left me, when she died, my paternal grandmother’s engagement-ring, and her delightful old tea-service of soft buff and white china ornamented with the daintiest landscape medallions.

Thank God, I have never been pursued in life by little ills, but three or four times big collapses have overtaken me. Typhoid, rheumatic fever, and blood-poisoning are no slight matters: but they are almost worth the suffering and pain for the pleasure of receiving such kindnesses from friends, letters of sympathy, flowers, fruit, wine, jellies, all have been left at my door, and I blessed the kind donors then as I bless them in remembrance now. Doubtless the severity of the illnesses that overtook me was due to intense overwork coupled with anxiety—overstrain invariably spells breakdown.

A horrible distrust overcame me at one time.

I used to go to bed worn out and weary, at last sleep would come. Then I would wake up with a start, feeling some awful calamity had overtaken me, that I had written something libellous or said something scandalous, and the Court of Law was waiting to receive me. No one would intentionally write a libel any more than they would cut a friend. I would see paragraphs chasing paragraphs across the page, just as the typed letters had turned red under my gaze when my eyes gave out a few years before. I used to get horribly anxious over my proof. Things I had rattled off when well were laborious now, and the anxiety they entailed was wellnigh unendurable.

It was merely a matter of health—a tonic and a rest put matters right.

MRS. ALEC TWEEDIE
After a painting by Herbert Schmalz, 1894

IT has been rather amusing to sit to various artists; they have such different ways of working. When Herbert Schmalz did my portrait (1894) he was busy upon those enormous religious canvases of his which afterwards toured round England and Australia as a one-man show, and which are so well known in reproductions.

He was painting “John Oliver Hobbes” at the same time, and she and I went to the studio on alternate days. Although we were hardly alike, the names of Craigie and Tweedie had something of the same sound, and quite confused the little servant, who always announced me as Mrs. Craigie, and John Oliver Hobbes as Mrs. Tweedie. Those were pleasant sittings, and perhaps I went ten or twelve times for the picture. Herbert Schmalz is a careful, painstaking artist, who is prone to alter scheme or colour, and do the work all over again unless it pleases him. At that time Sir Frederick Leighton often came to the studio, which almost adjoined his own.

Leighton was one of the most courtly, charming men I ever knew. Short of stature, he still had a magnificent presence, and his grey head was grand. No President of the Royal Academy ever looked finer at the top of the stairs on soirée night than this splendid draughtsman. The Academy Soirée in his day was a grand function. His personality attracted all that was best. I never liked his painting, but always loved his drawing.

The portrait painted by Mr. Schmalz6 was one day standing in my hall a year or two later, when a new servant—new servants are luxuries I do not often indulge in—asked if the picture was going away.

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“Yes,” I replied, “it is going to an exhibition.”

“I thought pictures only went to exhibitions when they were newly painted,” she remarked.

“So they do, as a rule,” I answered, “but this one is going to the Exhibition of ‘Eminent Women’ at Earl’s Court.”

“Lor’!” (in her surprise she nearly dropped what she was holding). “You don’t mean to say you are going there?”

Mohammed could not have been a prophet in his own household.

After all, plain truths and trifling jokes are often the most enjoyable, just as small ills are the least endurable.

When I sat to Blake Wirgman in 1902 for my portrait shortly after my visit to the West, he insisted on my being dressed in a dirty old divided skirt, huge Mexican sombrero, high boots, and shirt. The canvas is nearly life-size, and as I was foolish enough to submit to a standing position, with one foot up on a stone, I used to get awfully tired. Balancing on one leg in stiff riding-boots is apt to bring on cramp, so at odd intervals I danced round the studio to relieve my aching toes, and begged him to paint the boots without me. After dressing one day I returned to the studio, having put the boots on their trees, and placed them carefully beside the rocky stone where I stood. “There,” I exclaimed, “there are the boots, now can you paint them without torturing me.” Never shall I forget his peal of laughter at the idea of painting a pair of boots with wooden insides! However, he found a girl who took “threes” in boots, and she saved me a few hours of torture. Blake Wirgman is a delightful man, and I thoroughly enjoyed those sittings—all but the cramp.

“All but” reminds me of a dear old Scotch minister who used to read out the prayers for the Royal family, and to our amusement pronounced “Albert Edward Prince of Wales,” “All-but Edward Prince of Wiles.” This happened in a Highland kirk in Sutherlandshire, where the collie dogs used to come into the church and get up and shake themselves at the benediction, knowing that it was time to go home. A tuning-fork and a precentor added simplicity to the service, while the shepherds from the hills wore black coats and top-hats and pennies were collected on a tray147 at the door, just as represented in the play Bunty pulls the Strings.

The famous picture of “Scotch Elders” was painted by my husband’s cousin John Lorimer, A.R.A.; a very fine picture it is too. The appreciation of pawky Scottish humour runs in our blood, on both sides of the family, so my praise of a kinsman’s work will be readily understood as needing no apology.

Being with other workers amused and interested me, and made me forget the everlasting grind of my usual working-day. Mr. Cyril Davenport, of the British Museum, and author of many books on jewels, miniatures, and heraldry, made a vitreous enamel of my head. This is not paint, but powdered glass, shaken on the silver and then fired in a furnace. Some of the effects produced by this process are lovely. It is an old art revived, and a tricky one, as no workman knows the exact shade the furnace will turn out, any more than they did in the days of the manufacture of the famous rose du Barry.

It is quite a mistaken idea to suppose that sitting for a portrait necessitates sitting still. Far from it. Artists like one to talk and be amused, otherwise the sitter gets bored and the picture reflects the boredom. Few painters can work with a third person in the room, although Sir William Orchardson always preferred to have his wife reading aloud to him, or talking to his sitter while he was at the easel.

It may seem strange that so many people have painted my head, but please do not think it was the outcome of vanity on my part. I did not ask them; they asked me. Dozens have asked me to sit, and the baker’s dozen to whom I have sat have started off full of enthusiasm, found me difficult, and ended by thinking me horrid. Yes, horrid, I know. They have not said so in so many words, they have been too polite for that, but they have owned I was “very difficult, especially about the mouth.” That is why I have thirteen different mouths in thirteen different pictures. A mouth is the most expressive and the most characteristic feature of a face, and therefore the most elusive for the artist’s brush. When I am not talking, my face is as dull as London on a Bank Holiday.

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Some painters make too much of a portrait and too little of a picture. Others, on the other hand, make too much of a picture and too little of a portrait. Really, the picture is of most consequence, because the good picture with its impression of the sitter remains, while the fleeting expression of the face and age of the sitter passes away.

Joy is only a flash, sorrow is an abiding pain. We women have lines of figure when young, but we must all expect lines of wrinkles when old.

Artists and writers are generally poor, but we are often happy. The greater the artist, the less he seems to be able to push his wares. It is the mediocre who ring the muffin-bell, or whose wives sell their cakes. A certain clever woman is said never to stop in a country house without returning home with an order for a new ship in her husband’s wallet. Well, why not? If a woman is smart enough to find purchasers for her husband’s pictures, his horses, or his ships, all honour to her. We all want agents, even literary agents—poor, dear, abused things—and if we can get our own flesh and blood to do the work without demanding a commission, so much the better, but we might give them a little acknowledgment sometimes.

The poor want to be rich, and the rich want seats in the House of Lords, while a Duchess wants to write books and be poor. The simple want to be great, while the great know the futility of fame. It is a world of struggle and discontent. The moment anybody can get seats for a first night, or tickets for a private view, nobody wants them.

That sounds rather Gilbertian.

The late Sir William S. Gilbert was a dear and valued friend of mine for many years. One of the most brilliant companions I ever knew when he chose, and one of the dullest when something had put him out. He talked as wittily as he wrote, and many of his letters are teeming with quaint idiosyncrasies. He was a perennial boy with delicious quirk.

So few people are as interesting as their work—they reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books. W. S. Gilbert was an exception—he was as amusing as his Bab Ballads, and as sarcastic as “H.M.S. Pinafore.” A sparkling librettist, he was likewise a brilliant talker.

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How he loved a joke, even against himself! How well he told a story, even if he invented it on the spot as “perfectly true.” His mind was so quick he grasped the stage setting of a dinner-party at once, and forthwith adapted his drama of the moment to exactly suit his audience.

After a lapse of nearly twenty years “Iolanthe” was revived at the Savoy. Not one line or one word of the original text had been altered. “Pinafore,” when it was revived for the second time, just twenty-one years after its first performance, ran for months. How few authors’ work will stand such a test of excellence, yet Gilbert penned a dozen light operas.

The genesis of “Iolanthe” is referable, like many of Gilbert’s libretti, to one of the Bab Ballads. The “primordial atomic globule” from which it traces its descent is a ballad called “The Fairy Curate.”

It is a well-known fact that almost every comedian wishes to be a tragedian, and vice versa—look at Irving and Beerbohm Tree—and Gilbert had a great and mighty sorrow all his life. He wanted to write serious dramas, long five-act plays full of situations and thought; but no, fate ordained otherwise, when having for a change started his little bark as a librettist he had to persevere in penning what he called “nonsense.”

The public were right; they knew there was no other W. S. Gilbert, they wanted to be amused. Some say the art of comedy-writing is dying out, and certainly no second Gilbert seems to be rising among the younger men, no humorist who can call tears or laughter at will, and can send his audience away happy every night. The world owes a debt of gratitude to this gifted scribe, for he never put an unclean line upon the stage and yet provoked peals of laughter while slyly giving his little digs at existing evils. His style has created a name of its own; to be Gilbertian is all that is smart, brilliant, caustic, and clean.

Mr. Gilbert proudly remarked when he was just sixty-five, that he had cheated the doctors, and signed a new lease of life on the twenty-one-year principle. During those sixty-five years he had turned his hand to many trades. After a career at the London University, where he took his B.A. degree, he read for the Royal Artillery; but on the150 Crimean War coming to an end and no more officers being wanted, he became a clerk in the Privy Council Office, and was subsequently called to the Bar. He was also a Militiaman, and at one time an occasional contributor to Punch, becoming thus an artist as well as a writer. His pictures are well known, for all the two or three hundred illustrations in the Bab Ballads are from his clever pen. I saw him make an excellent sketch in a few minutes at his home on Harrow Weald; but photography cast its web about him and he disappeared into some dark chamber for hours at a time, alone with his thoughts and his photographic pigments. The results were charming.

What a lovely home that is, standing in a hundred and ten acres right at the top of Harrow Weald, with a glorious view over London, Middlesex, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire. He farmed the land himself, and talked of crops and stock with a glib tongue, although the real enthusiast was his delightful wife, who loves her chickens and her roses.

Sullivan always wrote the music after Gilbert had written the words. Gilbert’s ear for time and rhythm was impeccable, but he freely admitted that he had a very imperfect sense of tune.

The Gilberts were tremendous travellers; for many years they wintered in Egypt, India, the West Indies, Burma, or some other far-away land, and it was on these wanderings that he conceived ideas for the “Mikado.” When in Egypt for the third time, they nearly lost their lives in the railway accident between Cairo and Halouan. Fortunately they were only bruised from the concussion, but several of the passengers were killed and many wounded. The expert photographer was of course on the spot, and while waiting for a relief train W. S. Gilbert was busy with his camera. Being physically incapacitated by a long illness from being of any service to the sufferers, he contented himself with sitting on a rock in the desert and taking snapshots at the scene of the calamity.

Apropos of an interview I was writing on himself for one of a set that appeared in the front page of the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote the following amusing reply to my chaff suggesting all sorts of dreadful things that I would put in if he did not help me.

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Amongst the many people who made a sketch of my head was the late Captain Robert Marshall, the author of “The Second in Command” and other delightful plays.

This came about a few days before the Coronation of Edward VII. We were having tea together, when he took out a pencil, and in a few minutes this soldier-playwright made a charming little sketch. What a strange thing it is that people who succeed in one particular thing are often so gifted in various other lines. And people who do not succeed at anything seem to have no versatility of any sort or kind, except to amplify the various forms of stupidity.

I first met Captain Marshall at Sir W. S. Gilbert’s. The younger man almost worshipped his host, and considered him a model playwright. On his side, Sir William had been very kind and encouraging. His manner was perfectly frank, and he never hesitated to say whether he thought a piece of work good or bad, as it struck him.

There are not many cases in which a man can earn an income in two different professions. Lord Roberts is a soldier and a writer; Mr. Forbes Robertson, Mr. Weedon Grossmith, and Mr. Bernard Partridge are both actors and artists; Mr. Lumsden Propert, the author of a great book on miniatures, was a doctor by profession; Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Edward Clodd have other occupations besides literature; Sir A. W. Pinero is no mean draughtsman; Miss Gertrude Kingston writes and illustrates as well as acts; and Mr. Harry Furniss is as clever with his pen as with his brush.

No one looking at Captain Marshall would have imagined that ill-health pursued him; such, however, was the case, and but for the fact that a delicate chest necessitated retiring from the army, he would probably never have become a dramatist by profession. “After one gets up in the service,” he amusingly said, “one receives a higher rate of pay, and has proportionately less to do. Thus it was I found time for scribbling, and it was actually while A.D.C. and living in a Government House, that I wrote ‘His Excellency the Governor.’ Three days after it came out I left the army153.” Many men on being told to relinquish the profession they loved because of ill-health would have calmly sat down and courted death. Not so Robert Marshall. He at once turned his attention elsewhere; chose an occupation he could take about with him when each winter drove him to warmer climes to live in fresh air, doing as he was medically bidden, thus cheating the undertaker for ten years. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to spend an evening at the Opera. One night I happened to sit in a box between him and Mr. Cyril Maude, and probably there were no more appreciative listeners in the house than these two men, both intensely interested in the representation of “Tannhäuser.” Poor Mr. Maude was suffering from a sore throat, and had been forbidden to act that evening for fear of losing the little voice that remained to him. As music is his delight, and an evening at the Opera an almost unknown pleasure, he enjoyed himself with the enthusiasm of a boy, feeling he was having a “real holiday.” Since then he has appeared as a singer himself, in a Christmas frolic.

Herbert Bedford, the painter who married that delightful composer Liza Lehmann, was another once desirous to do a miniature of me. Accordingly, one terribly foggy morning in January, 1909, he arrived with his little box and ivory. He started; but of all things for a miniature a good light is the most necessary and fate was not kind. The fog deepened and blackened, till we were thoroughly enveloped in one of “London’s particulars.” I really think it was one of the worst fogs I remember; and that is saying a good deal, for I have not only had much experience in London, but have seen denser specimens in Chicago, and almost as bad in Paris and Christiania.

He waited an hour, but working was hopeless, so he departed. Next time he came, the morning was beautifully bright, but ill-fate pursued us, and we had no sooner settled down to work than Cimmerian darkness came on again. A week later a third attempt was made, and incredible as it may appear, the blackest of all smoky, yellow, carboniferous fogs arrived that day also. Verily, it was a black month. Though the morning was always fine when we started, the darkness arrived as soon as we were well settled down to work, as if from very “cussedness.”

November is named the month of fogs, but as a Londoner154 I should say they rarely come before Christmas, generally in January; and three or four during the entire winter is now our usual number. They seldom last more than a few hours; but they are so awful when they do come, that that is quite long enough, and the sooner science robs us of their presence the better. They certainly are less frequent and less severe than when I was a child. Poor old London climate! how we abuse it, and yet we have much to be thankful for. We do not get prickly heat or mosquitoes, sunstroke or ticks, neither do we have frost-bite or leprosy. The Marquis de San Giuliano, late Italian Ambassador in London and now Minister of Foreign Affairs in Rome, always maintained that London possesses the best climate in the world, and wondered why people ever left England with all its comforts in the winter, for the South with its cheerless houses and treacherous winds.

Madame Liza Lehmann has one of the most interesting faces I ever saw: fragile, delicate, refined. Once a well-known singer, but always shivering with nervousness, she left the public platform when she married, about 1894, and began composing. No woman has had more success.

“Liza doesn’t work, she conceives,” her husband once said as he stippled in my head. “For instance, sitting over the fire after dinner, I give her a poem that I think would make a song; she reads it through, drops it idly on the floor, and takes up the nearest book. I know the subject has not pleased. Another time she reads some verses, pauses, puts them on her lap, looks into the flames, waits and then reads them again. I say nothing; one word would spoil her thoughts. Again and again she reads them. She gazes into the flames or plays with her bracelet. Then, as in a dream, she gets up and fetches paper and pencil. In feverish haste she writes. I have known her write a song like that in ten minutes. I have known her go months and do nothing. Words speak to her, thoughts come, she seems at times inspired—but she can do nothing otherwise.

“One day she was at a publisher’s and was running through The Daisy Chain.

“‘Too serious,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it won’t sell.’ (He was wrong; it did.) She was angry.

“‘Nonsense,’ she said, ‘the public can’t only want rubbish like this.’ And she rattled off something.

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“‘Excellent, excellent,’ he cried; ‘just what they do want.’ That became a popular song, and fifty thousand copies were sold in no time.”

“I feel almost ashamed of that song,” she said to me one day. “It is not music at all, but I am punished for my sins; it haunts me on hurdy-gurdies and from boarding-houses, when the windows are open in the summer.”

Her husband is also an enthusiastic composer in a heavier line. His orchestral pieces have been played in Berlin, Russia, and other centres, but he cannot set a ballad to music, and has none of her pretty touch. He is a charming miniaturist, and once painted an interesting series of Meredith’s heroines.

Next in my gallery of artists comes Mr. Percy Anderson, who is almost better known by his designs for stage costumes than as a portrait-painter, although he has done some delightful sketches of women and children. His wonderful knowledge of human attire through the world’s history is well known. He has every period at his fingers’ ends, although sometimes, as in the case of “Ulysses” for His Majesty’s Theatre, he spends days and weeks in the British Museum, hunting about to find suggestions and designs for the required costumes; in fact, he even went to Crete on one occasion to copy the mural decorations, in order to be certain he was correct in his work.

Mr. Anderson is really an artist, not only in colour and form, but also in grouping and harmony. The greatest compliment he ever received was when he was invited to design the dresses for the famous “Ring” at Munich. That for an Englishman was indeed high praise from Germany. In working for the stage he often does six or seven hundred costumes for a single historical play. Each has to harmonise with its own tableaux groups, be right in detail and singly, yet form part of a scheme for the effect of the whole.

The water-colour drawing of me was done in a couple of hours. (See page 161.)

One summer day in 1903, I sat to John Lavery for a little sketch of my head, which that brilliantly clever artist painted in thirty minutes. I chanced to have sat next to him at dinner shortly before, and he had then exclaimed:

“I would like to paint your head!”

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“You know how I hate sitting,” I replied.

“But could you not spare me half an hour one afternoon just for the gratification of making a sketch of you? Once I have gained that satisfaction I will give you the picture.”

This put a different complexion upon the matter, and accordingly one afternoon I went to his studio, near the South Kensington Museum, to be decapitated. That studio is probably the best proportioned in London. It was built by Sir Coutts Lindsay, and is almost square like a box. The high walls are covered with a sort of dull brown paper, and a few French chairs and bureaus are its only decoration. I sat down in one of these special chairs waiting for him to arrange his easel, when he exclaimed:

“That will do, just sit as you are, and if you don’t mind I should like to take off my coat, as when I paint at high pressure it is hot work.” To this I assented, and in a moment he was hard at it.

“Talk as much as you like,” he said. “Forget you are sitting; move your head or your arms as you wish, just simply think you are paying me a little call; never mind the rest.”

All this sounded delightful. Then in a few minutes the speaking-tube whistled, and a message was called up to know if Mr. Cunninghame Graham might come up.

“Do you object?” asked Mr. Lavery, “Because he knows you are sitting to me, and said he would like to come if he might.”

“Not in the least,” I replied; “I should like it.”

Cunninghame Graham in the capacity of chaperon was a novel experience.

So up he came, and took a seat immediately behind the artist so that my eyes should not wander from the right direction for the picture. Was there ever a greater contrast than those two men? Lavery, short and broad, with ruddy cheeks, dark hair, and little, round, twinkling black eyes full of life and verve, and the calm aristocratic, artistic Cunninghame Graham, who always looks exactly like a Velasquez picture, so perfect is he in drawing and colouring.

Mr. Lavery has a curious arrangement for his palette. There is a table at his right hand, upon which a palette slants as on a desk. It is about three feet by two in size, and can hold a large number of colours.

HALF-HOUR SKETCH OF AUTHOR BY JOHN LAVERY, R. A. EXHIBITED FAIR WOMEN EXHIBITION, LONDON, 1910

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“I require lots of paint and lots of room to splash about, and I like the table arrangement; it is, in fact, the only way I can work,” he remarked.

We chatted on about many subjects, and when the conversation turned on Velasquez, whose wonderful pictures I had visited in Madrid only a few months before, Cunninghame Graham waxed warm. Although descended from a stock old as any in Scotland, his mother (or his grandmother) was a Spaniard, and there is clearly some of the warm Southern blood in his veins. He speaks Spanish with a charming accent, and has the true Castilian lisp and pretty intonation.

In the ’nineties I was riding along the shore in Tangier with W. B. Harris, The Times correspondent, Sir Rubert Boyce, of the Liverpool University, and the late Mr. Russell Roberts, a well-known barrister, when we saw two men riding towards us. One of them was performing all sorts of wild antics upon his steed, standing on the saddle and waving his whip in the air. As he galloped towards us I thought he must be a cowboy let loose, but as he came nearer he looked like a picture of Charles V painted by Velasquez which had stepped out of its frame. The tawny hue of his clothes, the brown leather of his boots, the loose shirt, the large brown felt sombrero, and the pointed brown-grey beard seemed familiar, and as the man drew nearer I discovered it was Mr. Cunninghame Graham, with whom was Will Rothenstein.

The next night I heard this descendant of old Scotland’s shores expounding Socialism to a handful of Arabs in Spanish. Well, well, Mr. Graham has his foibles; but he is doubtless the most brilliant short story writer in our language; and as fine a rider as any I ever saw on the open prairie catching wild bulls for the ring.

Cunninghame Graham is a strange personality; he is an artistic being, and Mr. Lavery’s portrait of him is inimitable. It has been exhibited all over the world and is well known.

Suddenly Cunninghame Graham exclaimed, “Twenty-seven minutes are up.”

“All right!” replied the painter. “Let me know when the next three have gone.”

“Thirty minutes, my friend. Time is up158.”

Lavery looked round at me, smiling.

“Done. I shan’t touch it any more. You allowed me thirty minutes, but you must let me have a moment over-time to add your name to the canvas, and then you may take it home with you.”

And I did so.

In 1910, that canvas appeared at the Exhibition of Fair Women at the Grafton Gallery, and a month or two later to my surprise I found it reproduced in a large volume of works by Scottish artists published in Edinburgh, under the title, Modern Scottish Portrait Painters, by Percy Bate.

So much is John Lavery appreciated abroad that his most famous pictures hang in Pittsburg and Philadelphia in the United States; in the Pinakothek, Munich; the National Gallery of Brussels, the Luxembourg in Paris, the Modern Gallery of Venice, the National Gallery of Berlin, although a few have luckily been gleaned by the public galleries of Glasgow and Edinburgh.

It is a curious fact that Mr. Lavery sent six or seven years continuously to the Academy, and six or seven times his pictures were refused. In 1888 the Committee accepted his “Tennis Party”—to his amazement—and actually hung it on the line. It went to Paris, where it gained a gold medal, was then “invited” to Munich, where it was finally bought for the National Gallery. He continued to send to the Academy for a few years, generally without success, but those rejected pictures are now hanging in various National Galleries. Suddenly in 1910 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

Concerning John Lavery, he told two funny little stories about himself one night when he was dining with me. The Exhibition of Fair Women, in 1908, had been attracting all London.

“A picture of mine was lost there,” he remarked.

“Lost? How?”

“Well, I painted the portrait of a lady, and this picture went to the New Gallery. It was three-quarter length. When its space was allotted it was stood on the floor under the place where it was to hang, but when the moment of hanging came the picture was gone, and what is more, has never been heard of since.”

“Who would take it159?”

“That is more than I can say.”

“Why would they take it?”

“For the sake of the frame.”

“But was the frame anything very remarkable?”

“Oh, it was worth about ten pounds.”

I laughed: “So they stole your valuable painting worth some hundreds of pounds for the sake of a ten-pound frame. What have you done to get it back?”

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Nothing,” I repeated, amazed.

“No, my only chance of ever seeing that picture again is to do nothing. You see, it is this way. If a thief realised it was a valuable painting which had attracted attention and was being searched for, he would destroy it. Whereas, if he thinks it is of no value, he will sell it in some back slum, and in course of time the picture will turn up again. At least that is what we artists think. I have no replica, not even a photograph, but the lady has kindly promised to sit again. Mercifully, it was not an order, but my own picture; and in a year or two I shall exhibit the second portrait and let it be photographed for different papers, when, in all probability, someone will discover they have one just like it, and we may be able to trace the picture back to the original thief. The frame must have attracted his attention, for it was not quite ordinary. I had it made in Morocco.”

“Have you ever had any other queer episode with a picture?”

“Yes,” he replied. “There is a certain well-known lady whose husband has her painted every year by some artist. She is good-looking and this is his hobby. My turn came. I painted the picture. It was barely finished, and had to go to an exhibition while the paint was still wet. When I went on varnishing day I was surprised to see a curious green haze over the face just as when you stick your nose against a window-pane, and the skin appears green in hue. I did nothing at the time, but determined to make some little alteration when the exhibition closed. The portrait came home. I looked at it. Yes, there was still that strange green hue over it, so I began to take it out of the frame in order to touch it up.

“Imagine my horror when I found that the canvas had stuck to the glass! and the more I lifted it, lumps of160 paint from the lady’s cheeks stuck to it. I did everything I could think of to get the two apart, ending by leaving the glass and losing my temper.

“‘Oh,’ said an artist friend, ‘just break the glass, and you will find it will be easier to get the portrait away.’

“Accordingly, I broke the glass. Worse and worse! bits of the canvas broke too, and anything more deplorable than my poor lady with her torn canvas and bits of glass hanging to her nose cannot be imagined. The issue was critical.

“I dared not tell her, for her husband had liked the picture, so I determined to copy it. For three solid months I painted every day at that copy. I never can copy anything, and that was my last attempt. The more I worked the worse it grew. I really was in despair. They kept bothering me for the return of the picture. The lady was abroad and could not sit again. They had paid me for a thing that was destroyed, and I was at my wits’ end.

“One day the lady was announced. I felt in an agony. Then I thought, before confessing, I would have one desperate and final shot. I told her I wanted to make a slight alteration—would she sit? She amiably complied. I seized the copy; feverishly for a couple of hours I worked upon it, and then—all at once the long-lost likeness returned. I had got it.

“The picture was sent home; her people were delighted with it, and it was not till long afterwards that I told them the awful episode, by which I had at least painted half a dozen portraits of that lady.”

Live and learn. Education is one constant enquiry, and knowledge is but an assimilation of replies.

WATER-COLOUR SKETCH BY PERCY ANDERSON

FEW experiences are more interesting than sitting for a bust. There is something enthralling in seeing great lumps of clay flung about in a promiscuous manner, and then gently modelled with finger and thumb into nose, eyes, and ears.

I had the privilege of sitting, in 1910, to Herbert Hampton, verily a privilege, for not only is he a sculptor of note, but also a charming personality.

Strangely enough, the first time we met, Hampton, without knowing anything about previous performances, said he would like to model my head.

“Oh no,” came in answer, “never again. I have done with studios and sitting on what you call a ‘throne,’ but what I look on as a chair of torture.” And so we laughed the matter off, but, after a second meeting, he wrote such a perfectly charming letter on the subject that my resolve gave way, and, let it be acknowledged at once, I have never regretted the weakness.

Hampton has the finest sculptor’s studio in London.

Here are casts of Lord Kelvin, Sir Henry Irving, Sir Luke Fildes, Miss Geneviève Ward, General Booth, and dozens more, besides plaster models of the colossal statue of the late Lord Salisbury, now erected on the stairs at the Foreign Office, and that of the late King Edward, to say nothing of five of Queen Victoria.

We talked for about a quarter of an hour after my arrival, as he said, “just to renew my first impressions,” and then, asking me to sit in a revolving chair on that terrible dais, he went to work. In front, on a moving table, stood the armature, or inside skeleton-support for my future head. At the bottom was a block of wood, from which three narrow lead pipes, tied together at the top, were designed to make162 a support for my neck and face. It was a simple, amateurish-looking thing, but, as Mr. Hampton explained, “the lead pipe is pliable, so I can alter the pose of the head as I go on, as you will see.” I did see.

On the modelling stand were great lumps of dark grey mud, or shall we call them bricks?—for they were about that size. This was the modelling clay, known as la terre, because it is French. It is more tenacious for working than our English clay. That is to say, it is firmer, and is darker to look at. One great block was laid on top of the pipes and squeezed till it might have been a melon; that was the beginning of my head.

Half another brick went on in front, and this gradually assumed the shape of a fat banana, out of which a nose was shortly evolved, and a chin. Another block was quickly divided and dumped on each side. Out of this two ears and some neck were manipulated.

Who shall say that such a performance was not fascinating? It reminded me of the dear, dirty mud-pies of my youth, of the spade-and-bucket days, and it was quite delicious to hear the “squeege” of the clay as it was flung on the armature. This took but little longer to do than to tell, for in a few minutes there was a sort of head and the beginning of a neck, though it closely resembled a block in a barber’s shop. When sufficient clay was in place, Mr. Hampton—who was talking all the time, and kept declaring he did not want me to remain still, but that the more I talked and amused him the better he should like it—really set to work. Then one saw the capacity of the man.

In two hours he had modelled my head. Eyes, nose, ears, chin, cheeks, and hair were all there; what was more, he had got the likeness.

It was a marvellous piece of work, not only as an exhibition of modelling, for he is a master of his craft, but as a likeness. Also, it was extremely pleasant to watch him work, to see him create order out of chaos, and it seemed impossible that we could have been talking for two hours, or that he could have done so much in two days, when the time was ended.

As to the manner of work, a few boxwood modelling tools lay upon the stand. They were like flat wooden knives163 with pointed ends, but except to slice off a little extra neck or hair, or to draw a fine line round eye or nostril, he did the whole thing with his hands.

Covered with a wet cloth, a bust of this kind will remain for months in a moist condition, fit for working on, but if kept too long, say a year or two, the wood inside rots and the clay falls to pieces.

On my next visit it was decided I should sit for the neck, and as a good many solid pounds of clay go to form a modelled human neck and shoulders, this had been prepared, so I did not have the pleasure of seeing it lumped on in handfuls.

Taking off my high bodice, I tied up my sleeves like a little girl of olden days. He walked round me several times, looked at me from different points of view, and then exclaimed:

“I shall not turn your head quite so much.” Accordingly, he took my clay face between his hands and twisted the whole physiognomy round. This was where the pliable pipes proved of use. But I could not help a little exclamation of horror when I saw a crack had come across the neck of my second self.

“I have cracked!” I exclaimed.

“That does not matter, we will soon mend you again.” So, with my head divided from my shoulders till he found the angle he wanted, he gave a few more friendly pats, seized la terre, and in a moment my neck was swan-like in form.

There was a particular fascination in sitting for this bust. Two more hours completed the neck and shoulders, and we had finished work for that day. If it had never been touched again, it would not have mattered. It was rough and impressionist in style, but I was there. I could see my very image on the modelling stand.

On my third visit the sculptor decided to add my hands and arms.

“Hands being as expressive as a face,” he said.

This meant more building up. Accordingly, bundle after bundle of firewood was requisitioned, until nine whole faggots were piled up inside me. A pretty little waist, truly, to require nine bundles of firewood as a foundation. However, in they went, and on went the clay in great dabs,164 with a nice greasy squish-squish each time it received a pat from the sculptor’s hand.

Simplicity is his ideal, and it is interesting to hear Herbert Hampton discourse on this subject, as, indeed, on other matters connected with his craft.

The bust to the waist was completed in six sittings of about two hours each, and a week later my image was placed in the Rotunda of the Royal Academy, where it smiled on everyone passing the door. “The impersonation of animation was my first impression of you,” said Herbert Hampton, “and that is what I tried to get in the bust.” And he certainly did. In spite of the usual placidity of white clay, the lady looks as if she were speaking.

One can know too much.

I remember, for instance, Herbert Hampton saying one day to me:

“Only the rudiments of anatomy are wanted for sculpture. If one knows too much one is apt to emphasise every muscle, every vein, every sinew, and the result is an anatomical specimen. Simplicity is the greatest charm of art, suggestion its goal. Why! great and wonderful as Michael Angelo was, I almost feel he knew too much anatomy.”

Experiences such as this sitting are of the greatest help and value to a writer, and give an insight into sister arts that widen one’s mental horizon and ripen one’s judgment. All workers should leave their own groove and see and know craftsmen in kindred branches of endeavour. Outside interests and hobbies are the worker’s salvation and inspiration.

After a bust is modelled it has to be cast in plaster. As a rule, only one cast can be taken, but there are various ways of getting a second, or even a third reproduction. The original clay bust on which the sculptor worked is now so damaged that it is destroyed, the clay often being used again for a fresh subject, and the bundles of wood being utilised for lighting the fire.

A young Frenchman once begged me to let him cast a hand and foot for some work he was doing, explaining that, though amongst the artists’ models there were exquisite heads and forms, that class of woman seldom had good hands, and a good foot never. Bad boots doubtless accounted for the latter. He made a pudding of plaster165 of Paris on a tin tray, and into the cold, clammy stuff my well-vaselined extremity was plunged. In a few minutes the cold, wet mud felt hot, almost burning, and the foot was done; but, oh, the dirty mess and the nastiness of it all.

Although England possesses some of the finest marble carvers, much of the work, unfortunately, is sent to Italy to be hewn, and even finished, because labour is cheaper there. Herbert Hampton always employs Englishmen, and does the actual finishing of the marble himself. In that he is a thorough John Bull.

It is an extraordinary thing to see how a bust is “mechanically pointed” in a rough block. Three fixed points with needles attached to each can copy the most accurate measurements, which, of course, are purely mechanical, from the original cast. After it is roughly hewn the sculptor begins carving and modelling with chisel and hammer. Thus the process is done in three parts: modelled in clay, pointed in marble, and then carved to its finished state of perfection.

Figures that are cast in bronze are done differently. The bust or figure is prepared in exactly the same manner in plaster of Paris, an exact model of what is wanted, and this has to be sent to the art foundry to be cast. That is not the work of the sculptor himself, but of the bronze-workers, and as bronze fetches from seventy to ninety pounds per ton, and it takes two or three tons to make a large figure, it is easily seen that five hundred pounds is quite an ordinary bill for casting a single figure at a foundry.

The huge figure of the late Duke of Devonshire (now in Whitehall) and I occupied the studio at the same time.

The greatest sculptor England ever produced, to my mind, was the versatile Alfred Gilbert. He was also one of the strangest personalities. He was both a genius and wayward. A genius as a sculptor, and wayward as regards the world. Never, never, in all my experience, have I known a stranger personality. For years I saw a good deal of him. He often came and dined, preferably alone, for dress-clothes irritated him, and humanity in the aggregate bored him.

I do not believe Gilbert knew what time or method meant. He slid through life. Sometimes he slipped into the right niche, sometimes he glided into the wrong one—but he was166 a genius by temperament, a genius oft-times in execution. He turned up on the wrong day to dinner, or failed to come on the right one. In fact, he was the most delightful, irresponsible, brilliant, irresistible human creature I have ever come across. His life was full of trouble, yet all those who really knew him loved him, and their hearts went out to him and condoned his muddles as the escapades of a boy.

Gilbert created the Clarence Memorial at Windsor, and if he had never done anything else, that would have been enough to stamp him as a genius. He designed the wonderful iron gates at Eaton Hall, and his work in metals and precious stones was unsurpassed. He practically revived the work of Albrecht Dürer and Benvenuto Cellini in this country.

When he dined with me he talked, he listened, he wept, he laughed by turns; after dinner he walked about, or passed his hands over the piano and played awhile, or would strike weird chords of wailing. He was a bit of a musical genius as well as a master in his own line. How often music and its sister art are thus twinned! But then, if I mistake not, he was descended from musicians on both sides. Suddenly he would leave the piano, attracted by a door-knob, a button, or an idea, and would then plunge into a dissertation upon art or a lecture on philosophy. How Gilbert loved art! Every bend and curve meant something to him. His blue eyes would dilate with pleasure or his heavy jaw become set and rigid in anger or contempt. When his work really pleased him he could not bear to part with it; when it dissatisfied him he broke it up—very honest of him, but hardly remunerative. He was never made for this world. He was a dreamer, a poet, an idealist; perhaps this very incongruity of temperament was the source of the beautiful ideals he conceived and sometimes brought to birth.

Down in that studio in the Fulham Road I spent many pleasant hours watching him work. He would often forget I was there. Then, rousing himself to my presence, he would offer me a cup of tea at odd intervals of half an hour, entirely oblivious of the fact that it was nearing dinner-time. A certain actor does this sort of thing as a pose—an impudent pose—but Gilbert did it because he could not help himself. He wanted to be hospitable, and hours became moments as he worked and dreamed. There167 were days and weeks and months when he never did anything, when hunger stared him in the face. But rather than part with a work of his creation, or an unfinished dream, he preferred to starve and, if needs be, die. London was no place for him. He was too utterly an artist for a great, teeming, bustling city, and away in Bruges—dead to the world, dead to his friends—the wreck of that great and charming personality is dreaming his life away amongst his unfinished gods, without the strength of will or purpose to complete his inspirations.

The complexity of Gilbert was beyond comprehension. His very genius was his curse. Truly a gifted, wayward child—lovable, but annoying; exasperating, but delightful.

Bertram MacKennall, an Australian by birth, was poor and unknown as a student in Paris, when he met Alfred Gilbert. He adored Gilbert and worshipped his work. One day the latter said to MacKennall:

“Go to London, man, and start there.”

“But I cannot afford it.”

“Never mind, go and try, and you will become my rival. It will do us both good, spur us both on to better things, perhaps.”

To London he came. He succeeded, and finally stepped into Alfred Gilbert’s place at the Academy. What irony of fate!

One day I chanced to go to MacKennall’s studio when he was working on a wax of the head of King George V for the coinage. On a school-slate, standing up on a small easel, was a little grey wax head in relief, measuring three or four inches across. Smaller he would not work because of his eyes; from that plaque a machine would reduce the silhouette exactly to the size required for the coin.

“Oh, the bother of this work,” he exclaimed. “Stamping one side of the coin often bumps out the other side in the wrong place, and all sorts of little annoyances like that constantly occur.”

His love of Gilbert was very touching—and his admiration of Phil May was only equalled by his surprise at his becoming a Roman Catholic a week before his death.

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER was a foremost figure in the artistic world, and he always struck me as the most curiously satanic gentleman I ever saw. He cultivated an upward turn of his dark eyebrows, he waved his long, thin hands in a fantastic way, he shook his locks or passed his fingers through them in a manner all his own, and appeared not only a poseur in art, but a poseur in literature, and a poseur among men. This probably added to his interest, for he certainly had a remarkable personality, and a better half-hour could not be spent than in his company.

He was as cruel to his friends as to his enemies, as scathing in his remarks, and yet at times almost maudlin in his sentimentalism. It was quite delightful to hear him discuss his own work. His egotism was—well, it was his own. His sweeping assertions were a revelation.

On my return from America in 1900 he told me that, “although an American himself, he should never visit that country again, as there was not an artistic soul to be found there.” And yet the purchasers of a host of his pictures and etchings were Americans, as were many of his best friends.

One hesitates to tell any Whistler stories, there has been such an extraordinary output. Many are doubtless apocryphal. I recall one or two that I have heard from his own lips, or from the persons (often the victims) chiefly concerned in them.

George Boughton, the painter, had a house on Campden Hill, designed by Mr. Norman Shaw, R.A., and five or six steps lead to the hall, as that eminent architect so often arranges. Whistler had been dining with Boughton one evening, and, as he was leaving, he did not notice the steps169 and fell down head first. The host was distracted and ran to pick him up.

Whistler sat up on the bottom step.

“What a d——d total abstainer you must have had for an architect, Boughton!” was all he said.

The famous “Peacock Room” at Prince’s Gate was a wonderful scheme of decoration, peacocks’ eyes on a gold ground being its principal motif. About the year 1880 the late Mr. Leyland, a wealthy shipowner and patron of the arts, had taken this grand new mansion, and asked Whistler to decorate a room. Jimmy, poor and out at elbows, as usual, jumped at the idea, but no terms were fixed upon. The work began. It was a prodigious undertaking, and the extraordinary and erratic little man spent two years and a half over his grateful task.

Being at Prince’s Gate all day, and having the run of Leyland’s house, Whistler had a hospitable way of inviting his friends to come and see the room, and then he would ask them to stop to luncheon. This sort of thing, which began occasionally, ended in being an almost daily occurrence, and Jimmy used to hold a little levée every morning, when subsequently three, four, and five people remained to luncheon. This became too much for Mr. Leyland, and his plan for putting an end to the campaign was a somewhat ingenious one.

Jimmy one day entertained four friends; the meal not being announced, he rang the bell for the butler.

“When is lunch?” he asked.

“I have no orders for lunch,” replied the man with a stately air.

“Oh no, of course,” replied Jimmy, not in the least disconcerted. “We’ll go along to such and such an hotel. Stupid of me to forget it!”

But it was enough, and though he pretended not to mind, and with that delightful impudence for which he was famous turned it off, he never forgave the incident, and determined to pay Leyland out. From that day he took his own lunch in a little paper parcel, and sat and devoured it when so inclined. On the next occasion Leyland came in to admire the peacock decorations about the usual luncheon hour.

“You will have some lunch, won’t you?” Whistler said.

Leyland looked surprised.

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“Oh, please don’t refuse. It is always excellent, I assure you.”

Leyland looked still more uncomfortable.

Up jumped Jimmy, fetched his bag, and proceeded to untie his parcels, saying:

“It’s all right, old chap, have no anxiety; it is my lunch, not yours, and you are heartily welcome to it.”

When the work was accomplished which had taken so long Leyland wished to pay the bill, and asked the artist what was his figure.

“I have worked a whole year and more,” Whistler said. “I consider my services are worth two thousand pounds a year, therefore the figure is two thousand five hundred pounds, from which you can deduct the few hundreds you have given me on account.”

Leyland was horrified.

“Preposterous!” he said, “perfectly preposterous!”

Jimmy looked at him and drew himself up to his full height, which was not great.

“I beg, Mr. Leyland, that you will accept as a gift the entire work of my life for the last year and a quarter. I can compromise nothing.”

Once again Whistler scored and Leyland paid. His thanks to his patron afterwards took the form of painting a life-size portrait of him as a devil with horns and hoofs.

The sale of the famous portrait of Carlyle gave Whistler one of those opportunities in which he delighted. It was first exhibited in Edinburgh, and the Edinburgh Corporation, wishing to possess this masterful work, telegraphed to know what would be his lowest figure, to which Jimmy replied by wire: “Terms a thousand guineas, to the tune of the bagpipes.”

This was pure cheek, for the picture stood at five hundred guineas in the catalogue, and instead of replying how much less he would take for it, as the canny city fathers desired, he had doubled the sum. Three or four years later he sold that selfsame picture to Glasgow for the sum of a thousand guineas.

When painting his delightful picture of Miss Alexander, Whistler took about seventy sittings—a fearful ordeal. She told Phené Spiers that she thought he often rubbed out a whole day’s work after she had gone.

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Near the close of his life Whistler withdrew from London for a period, living permanently in his rooms in the Rue du Bac, in Paris. I had not seen him for seven or eight years when I met him again in May, 1900, at a dinner-party at Mr. Heinemann’s in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. How altered Whistler was—he had changed from a somewhat sprightly middle-aged man to one nearer seventy.

His shaggy hair was grizzly grey, his round, beady, black eyes were as clear and brilliant as ever, overhung by thick black brows. A bright colour was upon his cheek, almost a hectic flush, if one may apply the term to a man of his age, and there was the same vivacity about him as of old. He was just as thin, and, needless to say, had not grown! He was the same witty little person, with the same sharp, sarcastic tongue. The artistic world had come to appreciate his work very differently from of old, and already he was encountering what a rival wit has pithily described as “the last insult—popularity.”

He had practically given up living in England, he said, with that strong American accent which he never lost: Paris he “found so much more inspiring.”

“There is not much wit in France now,” he remarked, “but there is positively none in Britain. There is not much good literature in France either, but there is less in England. People are all too busy trying to fill their pockets with gold to have time to store their brains with knowledge.”

The conversation turned upon his studio. Speaking of students, he said:

“Oh, I like women ever so much better than men. They are finer artists; they are more delicate, more subtle, more sensitive and artistic; indeed, it is the feminine side of a man that makes him an artist at all. Art is refined, or it is not Art. Man is not refined, except when he copies woman.”

“That is all very well,” I answered, “but unfortunately there have been so few great women artists.”

“Have there been many great men artists?” he enquired, with a little twinkle; “because I think not. In fact, there has been just as good work done by women as has ever been done by men in that line, and now that more of them are taking up Art, and are breaking the trammels by which they have been surrounded for generations, I shall be surprised if the world does not produce better women artists172 than men. It is in them; it is a born instinct. Love of refinement, beauty, poetry, sentiment, and colour belong to woman. Cruelty, perhaps valour, strength, and ruggedness, are on the man’s side.”

Encouragement goes a long way, just as human sympathy is the very backbone of life. Poor Jimmy Whistler got very little of either until his last few years. To the philosophy of youth everything matters, to the maturity of old age nothing matters.

He was brilliant and vain. But then, all men are vain. It is the prerogative of the male from the peacock upwards.

For some years Whistler had a little Neapolitan model, with very dark hair and beautiful black eyes. His wife took great interest in her. After his bereavement Jimmy felt he ought to continue to minister to the welfare of the girl, who by this time had grown into a magnificent specimen of a Neapolitan woman. She married when still very young, and, being tired of sitting as a model, she asked her patron one day to allow her to use his name if she started an atelier. “Might it be called the ‘Whistler Studio,’ and would he himself come and see after it and give instruction once a week?” Whistler approved of the plan and assented.

The woman therefore took a studio in Paris, where the painter was living, and at the end of the month, instead of having a dozen students as she expected, something like a hundred had entered their names, all eager to study under Whistler. On the strength of her success Madame abandoned her simple clothes and appeared gorgeous in black, rustling silk robes, in which she strutted about the studio and played the grande dame. Whistler, as has been said, promised to attend, and more or less he kept his word. The first day of his appearance the great little man marched into the room occupied by the female students, and, picking out one girl, sat down opposite her canvas, intending to correct her work.

“Give me your palette,” he said. “What is this? and this? and this?”

She told him the different colours.

“Hideous!” he replied, “and impossible! Where are so and so, and this and that?”

She had none of them. No one in the room was lucky173 enough to possess the colours he sought, so Whistler sent out for them and chatted pleasantly until the messenger’s return, having told the maiden in the meantime to clean her palette of all the vivid hues she had displayed upon it. The paints and the clean palette arrived together. Jimmy arranged them according to his taste.

“Now,” he said, “that palette is fit to paint with, and so ends your first lesson. Study it, and paint only with those colours until you see me again.”

Before the day was finished every girl had arranged her palette according to the plan, and the men in the other room likewise followed suit. When the artist paid his next visit to the studio, he found the palette he had himself prepared fixed upon the wall and immortalised with a wreath, while underneath was a label announcing, “This palette has been arranged according to the regulation of James Whistler, the artist.”

Whistler’s marriage was the strangest affair in the world, for he was probably about sixty at the time, and his bride, Mrs. Godwin, a widow, although a pretty woman, was by no means young. Yet the romance and enthusiasm they developed were delightful, and during the ten years or so of his married life Whistler became infinitely more human and contented in every way. They were very happy; indeed, his tender solicitude for his wife’s welfare on every occasion, and his anxiety and concern during her long illness, were a revelation to those who only thought of Whistler as a quarrelsome egoist wrapped entirely in himself. Hidden away, he had a kind heart, although he chose generally to conceal it. His wife’s loss was the tragedy of his existence, and he was never the same man afterwards.

Henry Labouchere wrote: “So my old friend Jemmy Whistler is dead. I first knew him in 1854 at Washington. He had not then developed into a painter, but was a young man who had recently left the West Point Military College, and was considering what next he should do. He was fond of balls, but he had not a dress-coat, so he attended them in a frock-coat, the skirts of which were turned back to simulate an evening-coat.

“I believe that I was responsible for his marriage to the widow of Mr. Godwin, the architect. She was a remarkably174 pretty woman and very agreeable, and both she and he were thorough Bohemians. I was dining with them and some others one evening at Earl’s Court. They were obviously greatly attracted to each other, and in a vague sort of way they thought of marrying. So I took the matter in hand to bring things to a practical point. ‘Jemmy,’ I said, ‘will you marry Mrs. Godwin?’ ‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Mrs. Godwin,’ I said, ‘will you marry Jemmy?’ ‘Certainly,’ she replied. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Oh, some day,’ said Whistler. ‘That won’t do,’ I said; ‘we must have a date.’ So they both agreed that I should choose the day, tell them what church to come to for the ceremony, provide a clergyman, and give the bride away. I fixed an early date, and got the then Chaplain of the House of Commons to perform the ceremony. It took place a few days later.

“After the ceremony was over we adjourned to Whistler’s studio, where he had prepared a banquet. The banquet was on the table, but there were no chairs. So we sat on packing-cases. The happy pair, when I left, had not quite decided whether they would go that evening to Paris or remain in the studio. How unpractical they were was shown when I happened to meet the bride the day before the marriage in the street. ‘Don’t forget to-morrow,’ I said. ‘No,’ she replied, ‘I am just going to buy my trousseau.’ ‘A little late for that, is it not?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘for I am only going to buy a new tooth-brush and a new sponge, as one ought to have new ones when one marries.’ However, there never was a more successful marriage. They adored each other, and lived most happily together; and when she died he was broken-hearted.”

WALTER CRANE’S MOST FAMOUS BOOK PLATE

One day I asked Walter Crane, who knew both Watts and Whistler more intimately than I did, whether he could tell me something of these two, so different from one another, and yet each of whom needs a prominent place—the one in the painter’s Valhalla; the other, well, let time decide in what niche and where Jimmy’s little statue shall command worship.

Crane replied:

One of my cherished possessions is the book-plate here shown which Walter Crane designed for me. He is probably the best Ex Libris draughtsman of the day, and he himself thinks this is the best book-plate he ever drew. At his request it was reproduced on wood, and while it has delighted its possessor, it will surely be admired by all for its intrinsic merit.

To explain the riddle of its symbolism.

On the right-hand side is the crest of the Harleys; on the left, the arms of the Tweedies. At the top the Medusa head and three legs represent Sicily. At different corners are implements, trappings, and odds and ends from various countries I have visited. The lamp of learning is burning brightly, the wreaths of fame, the book of knowledge are there, and a little ship is sailing away into the unknown; while below—and surely this is brilliant imagination—lies the world at my feet. This was sent to me with the following letter, written in the neatest and most brush-like of caligraphy:

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At a later date, on returning a book, the kind originator of my treasure added some notes in pencil about this particular kind of work; notes quaint and full of pith as the writer’s drawing.

Another note given below enclosed his own book-plate:

As to book-plates, seeing that books are a particularly treasured kind of personal property and cannot yet be considered as communal as umbrellas; and because borrowers of books like long leases, but are generally provided with short memories, the possibly harmless, but certainly most necessary, book-plate has a distinct raison d’être.

Furthermore, they afford an opportunity of embodying in a succinct, symbolic, and decorative form the concentrated essence of the character, performances, career, and descent of the book-owner or lover. Thus book-plates acquire a certain historic interest in course of time, and may from the first possess as well an artistic interest; but this, naturally, depends on their design and treatment.

Next appears a notable figure thrown upon my cinematograph stage by the rapid process of setting free successive memories.

Watts. For a lover of pictures, what recollections that name implies!

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How many and varied the styles, how many and varied the subjects, that in turn have found expression and thus sprung into life on the easel of this great painter.

It happened that on June 1st, 1886 (the anniversary of my birthday), a friend took me to the studio of Mr. Watts to see him at work, a note of which incident lies before me in a big, round, girlish hand.

To begin with, the charming house in Melbury Road, Kensington, with its large studio and spacious picture-gallery, seemed exactly the right home for a great artist.

At this time the master was working on what appeared, to my young mind, a ghastly subject—“Vindictive Revenge,” depicting a vulture of human form tearing to pieces a victim, whether man or woman escapes my memory. Horrible, and in no way satisfying to my reason. On another easel was a huge sulphur-coloured canvas showing a dying man sitting in his chair with a majestic woman’s figure standing by his side. Lying on a table near was a sketch (later exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery) of a most quaint and antiquated musical instrument that was used in the larger picture. This instrument resembled a wooden bowl, its aperture covered with a stretched skin, on which the shaggy hair was left, and the strings were passed over a few holes in this skin.

What it was called or whence its origin history does not relate. It had probably been picked up as a curio for its quaint appearance, but Mr. Watts disclaimed being a collector of such, telling me that his house would have been long overfilled had he given rein to this hobby, unique in the way it carries one on and on.

In the gallery in Melbury Road hung all manner of pictures and numerous portraits, amongst which I recognised those of Tennyson, the Prince of Wales, his former wife Ellen Terry, and Violet Lindsay—one of his favourite models—besides many more; but almost seventy were then being exhibited at Manchester, which somewhat denuded the walls.

In personal appearance Watts was a gracious, kindly old gentleman, with white hair and a closely trimmed beard. He wore a tight tweed suit and a scarlet ribbon loosely tied round his neck, besides a black velvet skull-cap, head-gear of so many “old masters178.”

Here it seems permissible to quote a message from that great artist, when he was ill, delivered by Alfred Gilbert at an Art Congress.

He urged “the importance of making the aims and principles of art generally understood. The stumbling-block to the English was the practical: all that did not present the idea of immediate advantage seemed to them impractical. Till the love of beauty was once more alive among us there could be little hope for art.... The art that existed only in pictures and statues was like a religion kept only for Sundays.”

Like all other first impressions, this visit to the studio stands out a clear and vivid sketch in my mind. Everyone must have enjoyed meeting Watts, but to those workers who use the pen there is always a kindred interest, an alliance of aim with the brothers of the brush, besides the inspiring pleasure derived from the presence and helpful words of a master of his art.

From 1886 to the year of grace 1910 is a leap indeed: all but a quarter of a century! Likewise, from the awe-inspiring canvases of Watts, the master, to the witty, delightful, crisp illustrations of that past-craftsman of Art, Harry Furniss, is a change of subject well-nigh as great. At the thought of him gravity forsakes one’s visage, gives way to a smiling mien and expectation of wholesome fun, of delicate enjoyment.

What a worker, oh, but what a worker! as the French would phrase it, is the well-known and popular Hy. F.

I think I can lay claim to being a fairly busy person, but I feel ashamed, stunned, when I think of the stupendous amount of work accomplished by Harry Furniss. Anyone who has seen those five hundred illustrations to the eighteen volumes of Dickens must have admired the delicate draughtsmanship, the characterisation, the comedy and tragedy, and, above all, the penmanship of the artist. Five hundred illustrations! Yes, nearly all full-page, most of them containing several figures, and yet—but read in his letter below.

No wonder he was up with the first streaks of dawn for months, no wonder he became ill. Harry Furniss achieved a Herculean piece of work, if ever artist did.

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Later in the autumn, accompanying a brief note snatched out of the over-busy worker’s day, is the expressive sentence, scribbled beside a pen-and-ink sketch of Father Time bearing the artist’s easel upon his back, as the patriarch squats and smokes, and H. F. breathlessly paints:

“Still working against Time.”

Doubtless he will go on doing so all his life, five hundred new illustrations for Thackeray later being but an episode, and yet he found time to illustrate many of his letters to friends: I have many I prize.

A KNOCK came at the prison door.

“Is Mrs. Alec Tweedie here?”

Yes, Mrs. Alec Tweedie was having her tea, and heard the question. Truly a nice situation! To be enquired for at a gaol.

But even that is capable of explanation. The man on the doorstep held a letter in his hand addressed to me by name, but only vaguely “Glasgow” otherwise. With the usual brilliancy of the postal authorities, they had found the rest of the address and pinned me to the prison, for I was staying with the Governor, who had married a friend of my kindergarten days.

The letter was an invitation to christen a “P. & O.” steamer on the Clyde at Greenock: to be godmother to an infant of twelve thousand six hundred tons, that, lying in her cradle, was four hundred and fifty feet long and fifty-four feet wide. When she sailed out to sea on January 6th of 1900, this mighty goddaughter of mine carried two thousand three hundred troops between her ample decks.

Needless to say, the sponsorial honour thus offered—the responsibility being light—was duly accepted.

It was a most glorious day when the Governor of the prison escorted me to Greenock. The P. & O. has become one of the most important factors in the commerce of the nation, under Sir Thomas Sutherland, so the christening was not only impressive to “those who go down to the sea in ships,” but to all onlookers. Those great yards on the Clyde employ several thousand men, all of whom, with their wives and children, were spectators of the ceremony, to say nothing of an invited public.

How enormous that ship looked, her great iron sides standing out from what shipwrights are pleased to call the181 “permanent ways”. She owned as yet no masts or funnels, or indeed any et ceteras, only there loomed her enormous iron carcase. One felt a fly on the wall standing beneath the shadow of her massive frame. She literally towered above us, a monster of steel and bolts and rivets. At the stern a wooden erection had been made, with a little staircase leading to a platform, and on this the builder of the vessel, Mr. Patrick Caird, and I stood alone.

It was a most exciting moment. The sun shone, there resounded a dull thud, thud, thud, for the men below were hammering her sides loose from the wood in which she had been embedded for about two years. Then came an almost breathless silence among the vast audience, when Mr. Caird turned to me and said:

“Be sure and break the bottle.”

I had never thought of doing anything else, knowing the importance to the superstitious sailor-man that the glass should be shattered to atoms, but his serious tones sent a shiver through me, and I recognised, as in a flash, the gravity of the moment.

There was, as usual, a bottle of champagne, decked with ribbons and flowers, hanging from the top of the vessel to a level with the place on which we stood.

“Remember,” he continued, in an undertone of adjuration, “that once the ship starts to move, she will run; so you must waste no time in throwing the wine.”

I did not really feel nervous until this, but on being suddenly told that the boat might be out of reach before one had time to execute the critical deed, and also being reminded of the importance of scattering the fluid, I felt a cold douche down my back.

We waited breathless—it seemed ages of suspense, and yet it was probably only a few minutes. Suddenly the vast bulk began to tremble, next gave herself little shakes like a dog, then she appeared to pause and shiver again. It was a breathless moment. Then the mighty carcase started. What a grand sight! There was something awe-inspiring as that vast thing slid slowly, majestically, and then more and more rapidly, down to the sea. I seized the flagon, and with might and main flung it against the side of the ship, determined that it should be broken more completely than bottle had ever been broken before.

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“With this I wish all luck and prosperity to the Assaye,” I cried, with a strange sensation of chokiness in my throat, while I flung the ribbon-decked flagon towards her. Truly a thrilling scene.

Whether the heat of the day or the strength of my fling was the cause, I know not, but the amount of froth that came out of that bottle of champagne was quite impossible to believe. I was drowned in it. The quart bottle seemed to contain gallons of froth. It effervesced over my hat, ran in rivers down my nose, and scattered white foam all over my shoulders. Mr. Caird, having recovered from his bath, produced a handkerchief, and kindly began to mop my dripping face and dry my watery eyes. It was a funny scene, rendered all the more funny, as it turned out, because some of the cinematograph people were behind us (those were the early days of cinematographs), and that night in the music-halls of Glasgow and Edinburgh the Launching of a P. & O. Steamer caused much amusement to the audience. Only my back view showed, I believe, but the black of my dress and the white champagne froth made an interesting production.

Having slid down the permanent ways, the ship’s pace became quicker and quicker, she really did run, and then she appeared to literally duck as if to make a bow when she entered the Clyde. For a moment, to my uninitiated eyes, it seemed as if she would turn a somersault. Not a bit of it. She righted herself, while the great chain anchors fixed to her sides were dragging mother-earth along with them, holding her sufficiently in check, or else she would have run up the opposite bank before the tugs had time to make her fast and tow her down-stream.

There was a rumour in the air that war was imminent in South Africa, and Mr. Caird murmured in my ear that it was possible they would receive a command to have her ready for transport as quickly as possible. And although, as I have said, she had nothing whatever inside her on October 7th, 1899, six weeks from that date the Assaye left Southampton fully equipped for the seat of war, and during the next two or three years she made so many voyages with troops, that she conveyed more soldiers to and from the Cape than any other boat afloat.

As a memento of the occasion, Mr. Caird gave me a183 charming brooch representing the three crescents of the Orient in diamonds. It was a pleasant, happy, and interesting experience.

Some years later it was my good fortune to go for the trial trip, as the guest of the Chairman of the Cunard Company, in the greatest ship and wonder of her day, the Lusitania (July, 1907), and lastly, to have been to the inaugural luncheon on one of the five new (1909) ships of the Orient Line, fitted with all the latest modern improvements, from electric plate-washers to electric potato-peelers and egg-boilers. This last was truly a little history in shipping. Where will wondrous labour-saving inventions end? It is these magnificent boats which do so much to cement the friendship and foster family ties between us and our Colonies, and when one sees that in an Orient steamer third-class passengers can travel twenty-six thousand miles for eighteen pounds, one opens one’s eyes at the comfort and marvels. These travellers have even a third-class music-room, and never more than six people in a cabin. Children can visit their parents, husbands their wives, in fact, the East and West become as one. Sir Frederick Green, the Chairman of the Orient Company, is not only a delightful man, but is extremely enterprising, and has achieved wonderful things. Even the amateur band, composed of stewards, has been abolished, and proper professional music is provided for the passengers. Those terrible days when one packed up sufficient underlinen for six weeks’ use have gone by, and everything can now be sent to the laundry on board on Monday morning, as regularly as it is done at home.

The christening of the proud P. & O. Assaye amused me the more at the time because of its sharp contrast with a humble Highland “baptisement,” at which it had also been my lot to assist a few years earlier. This last committal of a boat to the sea was the subject a year or two after of one of my sketches in words, and may be here given again, for who amongst us, on watching a fishing-smack going out from harbour, does not feel a stir of interest, and wish that “weel may the boatie row”?

At that time we—my husband was alive—had a little house in Sutherland, and became much interested in the simple fisher-folk near by.

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“Can you speak to Mrs. Murray, the fishwife, for a minute. Very particular, she says, ma’am,” said the parlourmaid one morning.

“All right,” and, leaving the steaming herrings on the breakfast-table, I went to the door to see Mrs. Murray.

“Good morning, Mrs. Murray. Did you want to see me?”

“’Deed, mem, yes, mem,” and the old body in short serge skirt, so full at the waist that her creel of fish literally rested on the pleats, beamed all over inside her nice, clean, white “mutch” cap.

“Maybe ye ken, mistress, we have got a new haddie boatie [haddock boat], and we want to have the baptisement whatever.”

“Well?”

“And maybe, mem, ye would be sae guid as to humble yersel’, mistress, and come down—the laddies want ye to come down and do the baptisement yersel’.”

“Me?”

“Yes, mem, if we might make sae bold in the asking,” and the old body looked quite shy at having asked, and actually the colour mounted to her weather-worn cheeks.

“But what do you want me to do?” I enquired, really interested in what a baptisement could be.

“Jist the baptisement, whatever.”

“Yes, but how do you do it?” I persisted.

“Law, mem, ye jist break the bottlie, whatever.”

“Oh; all right, I know all about that, and I’ll do it with the greatest possible pleasure; but which day?”

“If ye’ll jist please to name the dee yersel’.”

“High tide would be nicest, I think. It would not be so wet and sloppy, would it?”

“Weel, weel. I near forgot the laddies want ye to come pertikeler Tuesday at three or Wednesday at four, for the tide be high then; and they’ll bait some hooks, and ye can go out and catch the first haddie yersel’ for luck, mem.”

“All right, then, Tuesday, at three.”

So on Tuesday we hurried over luncheon and drove in the dogcart to the fishing village of Haddon, for the official ceremony, carefully armed with a bottle of red wine to sprinkle the sides of the boat, and a bottle of whisky for the family to drink the boat’s health; both being suggestions185 of the dear old fishwife herself—the one for the cold, the other for the boat, as she wisely remarked.

All our friends, the minister among them, refused to believe I—a stranger—had actually been asked to perform such a ceremony: the Haddon folk being usually so exclusive. They marry amongst themselves and do everything amongst themselves, no outsider ever being asked to partake in any of their functions.

Arrived at the quaint little village, driving with difficulty between the pigs, the babies, and the chickens, we sought the heather-thatched, whitewashed house of the Murrays.

“Good dee to ye, mem—good dee to ye au,” and out of the kitchen tumbled the mother, father, sons, and daughters, pigs, chickens, and grandchildren.

Carefully carrying a bottle in each arm, I marched to the beach, followed by the Murray family, our numbers being swelled by other villagers at every step.

There, on the sand, reposed the haddie boatie—a fine big boat, capable of taking a dozen or twenty men to sea. She was lying on rollers, ready to be put in the water—but, oh! what water. Great white horses lashed the shore; Neptune truly was riding fiery steeds. We were admiring the majestic crested waves breaking over the rocks when Mr. Murray said, “The hooks is baited, and ye shall catch the first haddie for luck yersel’, mem.”

Should I, or should I not, disgrace myself on that turbulent water, over which the seagulls screeched and whirled and flapped their wings?

By this time fifty or sixty of the villagers had arrived to help launch the boat, and my heart trembled when I remembered the one bottle of whisky brought for the Murray family to drink to the boat’s success. How far would it go amongst so many?

But my cogitations were interrupted by Willie Murray exclaiming, “Will ye please to gie the name?”

“Yes; what do you want it called?”

“Your own name, mem, if ye will please to humble yersel’ to gie it.”

“Mrs. Tweedie.”

“Na, na, na, mistress, whatever, jist yer surname.”

“Well, Tweedie is my surname.”

“Na, na, no’ that surname. Yer other surname, mistress186.”

“Do you mean Ethel?”

“Oi, oi, Essel—Essel.” (There is no “th” in Gaelic, and their tongues cannot frame it.) “Oi, oi, that be it, mem—Essel Tweedie, whatever,” and he took off his hat as though he hoped the wind would blow such an extraordinary name into his cranium.

By this time men and women had put their shoulders to the boat, and had got her down to the water’s edge. Just as she touched the sea I threw the bottle with all my might, nearly upsetting myself in the endeavour, for, if the bottle should not shatter to atoms, these superstitious fisher-folk would think that their new boat was cursed.

As she touched the water the red wine ran down her side, and I cried, “I name her Ethel Tweedie, and wish her all luck.”

“May the evil eye ne’er take upon her,” called Mrs. Murray, as the red wine mingled with the crested waves.

Into the water with a cheer both men and women went, right up to their waists, the waves breaking over their shoulders; but every time they got the Ethel Tweedie launched, a huge wave brought her back again.

“Come and drink her health before you put her into the sea,” I called. “Has anyone a glass?”

“Oi, oi,” replied Mrs. Murray; and unfastening the front of her blue cotton blouse, she brought forth a wine-glass, evidently brought down in anticipation. The chief members of the party drank the health of the boat and her namesake in Gaelic, and then one lad replied, when the glass was offered to him, “I’m no’ for the tasting the dee.”

Had he a cold, or why couldn’t he taste? So I offered the glass to his neighbour.

“I’m no’ for the tasting the dee,” he likewise replied; and we afterwards learnt they were teetotallers, and that was their way of expressing the fact.

“The hooks is baited, and ye shall catch the first haddie for luck yersel’, mem,” resounded in our ears; and the roar of the sea kept up a strange accompaniment, as a seagull shrieked in triumph at our discomfiture.

I dare not say no; I must risk disgracing myself, endure any agony of mind or body, but I must for the honour of Old England go and catch that first haddie.

How the wretched folk struggled to get that boat into the187 sea! I remonstrated at the women going into the water and working so hard on my account, feeling particularly sympathetic when I thought of the rough sea awaiting us outside, but all to no avail. I assured them I should not be disappointed if I could not catch the haddie to-day, I could easily come again; but no, they would struggle on, a few feet only at a time, always to be rebuffed again and again by the waves.

At last Mr. Murray took off his cap, scratched his head, talked Gaelic to everyone in turn, and, after his consultation, came over to me and said, “I’m right sad, mem, but the haddie boatie can no’ go in the water the dee; she’d jist go to pieces on the rocks, whatever.”

“Oh, I am so sorry, but don’t mind me,” I replied as graciously as I could, thankful for the deliverance.

“Na, na, but the haddie for luck! We au wanted ye to catch the haddie for luck yersel’, mem.”

“Oh, I’ll come another day and catch the haddie for luck,” and I inwardly thanked Heaven I had been saved the terrors of the deep.

“To-morrow I will come again and catch the haddie, and paint the name on the boat, if you like.”

“Oi, oi, paint the name yersel’, that’ll be fine; but ye’ll do it nice, now, won’t you? I want it weel done.”

Who could be offended at such a remark, made without the slightest idea of rudeness? A little such honest, straight-forward speaking is a treat, not an offence, in these days of gilded sayings and leaden thoughts.

I never caught that haddie, but I took my palette and painted the name in oils upon her sides, and happily the Ethel Tweedie has proved one of the luckiest boats in the herring fleet.

What a contrast those two launches were—the wealth of the one ship, the wealth of the onlookers, the wealth of the prospective passengers and cargo, the power and strength and value of it all.

On the other side—the simplicity of the humble little craft, the simplicity of the fisher-folk, the simplicity of the life of the fishing village.

Both were ships to go down to the sea, and yet how different.

THE “late” (or, as diplomacy ungraciously calls such, “ancient”) Chinese Minister to London, Lord Li Ching Fong, did much to cement a friendly feeling between the East and the West. He taught us to appreciate the charm of manner and breadth of thought of a cultured Chinese gentleman. No diplomat ever made himself more popular in London Society than this cheery, kindly little representative of the East. No matter where he went he always wore his hat indoors or out, with its red bob on the top and his pig-tail below, and dark silk coats in private, or embroidered robes at Court—but he walked about unattended and lived the life of an ordinary English gentleman. In the Legation he was one of the kindest and best hosts I have ever come across. He entertained a great deal and handled large, important dinners of twenty or thirty people with skilful ease. Lord Li never forgot a promise, however trivial, and was never late for an engagement.

One June day in 1909 the Chinese Minister was lunching with me, so I asked him to write his name on the cloth opposite the Japanese Ambassador. His neighbour on the other side was Lady Millais, the daughter-in-law of the famous artist. She was so delighted with the neat, small Chinese writing that she asked His Excellency if he would put her name on the back of her card in Chinese.

“Have you such a name as Mary or Maria,” I asked, “in Chinese?”

“No,” he replied, “but I can do its equivalent phonetically,” and very pretty it looked when done.

On her other side sat Joseph Farquharson, R.A., and turning to him, Lady Millais said:

“‘Mary had a little lamb,’ but where is the lamb189?”

Farquharson being famous for painting snow and sheep quickly saw the point, and taking her card, and a pencil from his pocket, exclaimed:

“Here it is!” and below the Chinese writing he drew a little lamb.

Mrs. Kendal, on his other side, leant over to hear what was going on, and laughingly said:

“I am jealous. Although not a ewe lamb, I think I deserve a sheep.” Whereupon Farquharson picked up her card, and with wonderful rapidity drew a sheep, and handing it back, said:

“I am very sorry, Mrs. Kendal, it is only a black sheep.”

It was all done so quickly it was quite a delightful incident.

Then I asked the Minister to write his name in Latin characters above the Chinese, and he did so; whereupon I proceeded to read the first word as “Lie.”

“No,” he said, “that is a bad word in English, but it is not my name. My father, Li Hung Chang, went to Paris, and as the Frenchmen pronounced his name “Lee” we have remained “Li” ever since. So I am now known by that title, and go about in Europe as Lord Li, although it sometimes causes my countrymen to smile when they hear it.”

Lord Li (Lee) told me the only foreigner he had ever known who spoke Chinese like a Chinaman was Sir Robert Hart; “And he speaks it as well as I do.”

Later I chaffed my Chinese friend about our English tea, and asked him if he considered it poison.

“Not poison,” he said, “but I do not like it.”

“Is yours made very differently?” I asked.

“Quite,” he replied.

“Will you show me some day?”

“With pleasure, but I must send you a Chinese cup, for I cannot make Chinese tea in your cups. In our cups the saucer is on the top, not at the bottom.”

Accordingly, this was arranged, and the following day the teacup duly arrived. It was about the size of a breakfast cup, with a ring of china instead of a saucer; the cup itself fitted into the hole, and was covered with a lid, which again fitted inside the bowl instead of outside.

Five o’clock was the hour named for our tea ceremony.190 I was sitting in the drawing-room with my ordinary English tea arrangements, and a special spirit lamp for His Excellency. At ten minutes past five he was announced, laughing merrily.

“What do you think I have done?” he said. “I have been so stupid. It was fine, so I walked from Portland Place, and thinking I knew your house well I did not look up at the number. I arrived and was shown upstairs by the parlourmaid, who seemed quite pleased to see me. At the door I gave my name as the ‘Chinese Minister,’ and was duly ushered into a drawing-room, which I at once saw was not like your room. A lady who was sitting there rose and said, ‘How do you do?’ I bowed and repeated the remark, at once feeling I had made a mistake.

“‘Do you speak English?’ she asked.

“‘Yes, madam,’ I replied, with my best bow, now quite certain of my mistake.

“‘Shall I tell the lady?’ I thought. ‘It will make me look a fool, and make her feel uncomfortable,’ and as she at once told me she had been in China, and expressed pleasure at seeing me, we chatted for a few minutes, and I waited for an opportunity which would allow me to get up and go gracefully. The opportunity soon came, and I said good-bye. She thanked me very much for calling, and I left.” Again the merry little man chuckled at his intrusion.

“Ah,” said I; “but it won’t end there. If you will call upon a strange lady, she will think she met you somewhere and return the call.”

“I did not really know her, so I need not repeat my visit,” he said quietly. “But I shall not forget I have done something stupid.”

I thought it so nice of him not to tell her of his mistake, and thus give a very diplomatic ending to an awkward situation. Then came the tea. Our tea-party.

He boiled the spirit lamp, and when I took off the lid, thinking it was ready, he shook his head.

“No, no,” he said, “the water must actually boil three minutes; that is the main point.” Into the cup, really the size of a breakfast-cup, he put a small half-teaspoonful of Chinese tea.

“What a small amount,” I remarked; “we put one fat teaspoonful for each person, and one for the pot191.”

“No wonder your tea is so bad, madam,” he laughed; “my arrangement is tea, yours is stew,” he continued with a wicked little twinkle.

On to these few scattered leaves Lord Li poured the boiling water, which he immediately covered with the lid. In a few moments he removed the latter, and taking the half-side of the lid instead of a spoon, stirred the surface of the tea. This he did about three times in a minute, by which time the water was slightly yellow and the leaves had all sunk to the bottom.

“Now it is ready,” he said; “remember, no sugar nor milk, ever!”

“But it is too hot to drink,” I said.

“Not too hot for a Chinaman, we drink it like that. But if it is too hot for you, we will pour it out,” and putting the versatile lid on the table so that it formed a saucer, he poured some tea into it.

“Do you drink it from the saucer like that?”

“Yes; those people who cannot take it so hot always do so. Otherwise, or when it is cooler, we drink it so,” and he put the lid back in the cup, but only half on in a slanting way, and made me sip the tea through the aperture at the side.

“What is the idea of that?” I said.

“To keep the tea hot and to hold back the leaves, because you see our cup is also our teapot.”

It really was both nice and refreshing.

“How many cups does your Excellency drink in a day?” I enquired.

“Always twenty, sometimes thirty.”

“Good heavens! How do you do it?”

“The better-class Chinaman gets up when it is light and goes to bed when it is dark. I cannot do that in London because you keep me out so late at night, but I am called at half-past seven, when I get a cup of tea; with my bath I have another cup of tea. With my breakfast at eight-thirty I have rice, vermicelli, fish, fruit, and more tea. Then I go down to my office, and during all the hours from nine to half-past twelve, when I am working with my secretaries, we all drink tea every half-hour or so, and some smoke pipes, but not opium. That is rare in China. Next comes lunch; but you must come and have a real Chinese luncheon192 and see how we eat it with chopsticks. Not an official party such as you have been to before at my house. Then it is the French cook, but my own cook, when I am alone, is a Chinaman.

“At four in the afternoon we have our third meal, and for the first time no tea, but cakes and light things. At half-past seven we dine, a dozen little dishes all at once. Then, if I were in China, I should go to bed, but as I am in London, I do as London does.”

“Last thing at night I still drink tea. The kettle is always boiling at the Legation, the cup is always ready, and my servant puts in the tea and pours on the water; then by the time it reaches me it is ready.”

The Chinese Minister is a very interesting man, and having finished our tea-party, during which he laughingly suggested that I should give him a certificate as a good cook, he told me many interesting things by way of exciting my interest and persuading me to write a book on China.

The children of the high-class families in China are betrothed very young, often when four or five years old, and never later than fifteen. The parents get a third person to negotiate, and if a union is considered desirable between the two families (they never marry out of their own social position in China), the parents meet and more or less settle the future line of education for their offspring, and sign letters officially agreeing to the betrothal. Nothing more happens. The wife, however, sometimes sees her future son or daughter-in-law.

When these children reach fifteen or twenty years of age their final marriage takes place. They never meet until the wedding-day, and the property settled on the girl by her father is her own by the law of China. After her marriage she belongs to her husband’s family, and goes to live in the house of her father-in-law.

If by the time a woman is thirty she has no son to continue the traditions of the family—and family counts for everything in China—the husband is legally allowed to take unto himself a mistress. She is not well born. He chooses her from the people, and she is officially accepted by the house, allowed to sit at the table, and if she bears sons, the first belongs to the legal wife, the second to herself, and if there is only one son, both wife and mistress share193 him, and, strange as it may seem, they generally get on quite well.

We had a long and interesting talk on the future of China.

“We are going to be the greatest country in the world in the middle of this century, but now there are troubled days ahead for us,” he said. “We are far more conservative than Japan. It has taken us longer to adopt Western civilisation, but when I went back from England some years ago, after serving many years in this country, I was one of a number of young men who tried, and in some cases succeeded, in making reforms. Those were early days, but boys like my son, now at Cambridge, are being educated in Europe in 1910; and they will go back with even stronger and more modern ideas. Indeed, I can see perfectly well that in the next twenty years there will be many reforms attempted in diplomatic and other circles in China, before we settle down. Every country must broaden and widen if it is to keep pace with the march of civilisation, and China must not be behind. We have a great past, and we must make a great future.”

Then he spoke with the utmost enthusiasm of the late Empress.

“She was old, she was not pretty, but she was wonderful. She had the greatest charm of manner of any woman I have ever known. She reigned for practically fifty years, and therefore her experience was unbounded. Above all, she was a diplomat. For instance, one day in 1907, she sent for me. I went. She talked pleasantly for some time on many subjects, and then she said, ‘We cannot always do what we like. We have to remember our country. We must always work for its good. You have been in England, and you like it. You are back in China, and perhaps you like it better because your home is here.’ I bowed. ‘But,’ she said, ‘London wants you. It is necessary to send a Minister to the Court of St. James’s, and, moreover, to send someone who understands the English people and is in sympathy with them, and who can be relied upon in every way. It is not a matter of pay. I know money does not tempt you. It is not a matter of position. You have that here, but your country needs your services. You can do much for China in England, and I am going to ask you to194 renounce your home life for several years and go to England.’

“It was charmingly put, and I felt touched at the many kind things she said, but still I hesitated. Then she looked straight at me.

“‘Li, your father left China for the good of China. We owe him a great debt for what he did in Paris. Will the son not follow the example of so excellent a father?’

“That did it. I left my home, and here I am, very happy, for England is to me a second home, and although I miss my wife and married daughters, I have my son with me, and many friends. Yes, she was a wonderful woman, our Empress. Her death was a great loss to China.”

Then I asked him why this boy of three was put upon the throne. “Because,” he said, “the late Emperor was a nephew of the Empress, and it is a rule with us that these dignities cannot descend from brother to brother, but must always come down one generation. When the Emperor died childless, it was therefore not his brother, but his brother’s son who succeeded him. As he is only three, his father has been made Regent, and is virtually the Emperor of China till the child is grown up. That little boy will be employed in learning to read and write four Chinese languages fluently till he is twelve or thirteen. After that his more general education will commence, but he has a difficult task before him, because he will take up the reins as Emperor at the very time when I think China will be having its greatest struggle.

“We must never forget the teachings of Confucius, but we must model our present Government according to the rules of modern civilisation.”

(Barely two years later the Manchus were overthrown.)

My own father had a great idea that everything in the world was good to eat if only we knew how to cook it.

Therefore, I was brought up to eat all sorts of queer things, a training that proved very useful in after-life when my travels took me from Iceland to Africa, from Lapland to Sicily, from Canada to Mexico. Sometimes I have lived on foie gras and champagne, at others been glad of black bread—sometimes I have been amongst thousands of cattle on a ranch without a drop of milk or a pat of butter within hundreds of miles; often I have been far from195 butcher’s meat, and drunk milk from the cocoanut, or eaten steak from the elk, turtle from the river, or bear from the woods.

Therefore, this paternal theory often held good and helped me over many an awkward moment. Which philosophy, however, was by no means called upon when the Chinese luncheon, to which I had been invited at my little tea-party, became soon after an accepted fact.

It was a hot July Sunday. The door of the Legation in Portland Place was thrown wide open, and up the green-carpeted stairs I walked. We were only a party of four, as Lord Li laughingly remarked that there were not many people in London who would care for Chinese food. He need not have been so modest about it, for the dishes were really excellent.

We were waited upon by a Chinese servant and an English butler. Needless to remark, the former was much the more picturesque. He was dressed in black, with high black velvet boots on his little feet, and though he looked about fourteen, the Minister assured me he was forty. He was barber, tailor, and butler.

“These men can do anything,” said His Excellency; “I could not keep a man in London to shave my head once a week, nor would he have enough to do to make my clothes. The important suits are sent direct from China. The others are made and mended by this man. I have four Chinese in the house, and they eat and live together, the English servants being quite apart. But they do not quarrel; in fact, I believe they are very good friends.”

My earliest recollections being of strange foods from many lands, it was not altogether a surprise to begin our repast with bird’s-nest soup, which was served in similar cups to that brought by Lord Li to my tea-party; the cup standing on a plate. At the bottom of the bowl was a small quantity of white, gelatinous compound, which looked almost like warm gelatine. Into this I was told to put a tablespoonful of strawberry jam, the whole strawberries of which I stirred up with the bird’s nest. Eaten with a spoon the two were very good.

The Minister explained the delicacy thus. “There is a small sea-bird in China which builds its nest on the sides of the rock with the little fish it gets from the water. These196 nests become quite hard in the heat of the sun, and it is these that are collected and used for this soup. It is a delicacy, quite expensive, and never eaten by ordinary people, but used more like your turtle soup on great occasions.”

Sharks’ fins made our next dish. These were also served in little cups and eaten with chopsticks. The two chopsticks were about a foot long and made of ivory, but it seems they are often made of bone, silver, gold, or wood, and children, until they are six or seven years of age, are rarely able to manipulate them. One is held between the thumb and first finger, the second between the first and second fingers, and so dexterous was Lord Li in their manipulation that he, later, took the small bones out of a fish and put them on one side more easily than one could have done with a knife and fork.

The shark fins, when boiled in Chinese fashion, were almost like the gelatinous part of calf’s head or the outside of a turbot. They were cooked with cabbage and some ham, so, in a way, the taste reminded me of German sauerkraut; but though also a delicacy, this was less delicate in flavour than the bird’s nest and somewhat satisfying.

Now came fish—mackerel, I think—likewise cooked in a Chinese way, for, be it understood, the Chinese cook was doing the entire luncheon. A thick brown sauce, with a curry flavour, and the tiniest of little onions here and there, were added to the dish, which the guest simply could not manipulate with chopsticks, so had recourse to an English knife and fork.

The next course was again served in covered cups, and was chicken, a favourite and ordinary dish in China. Apparently the bird was chopped fine, or had been passed through the mincing machine. Anyway, there were no bones, yet it was solid. My private opinion was that it must have been compressed under weights, because it adhered to its own skin and looked substantial, although the ingredients fell apart when attacked with the chopsticks. This tasted like boned capon, and with it was something white, appearing to be fish, which Lord Li said was dried oyster. It seems there is a particularly large oyster in China which has a sort of bag protrusion. This bit is cut away and sun-dried, when it makes the flavouring and decoration for the chicken.

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We had not finished yet. Duck was the next course. This came on a plate and had its bones entire. It was also covered with thick brown sauce and finely shredded vegetables. His Excellency told us there were many more vegetables in China than in England, and that some of them were prepared for export. These appeared to be shredded in the same way as vegetables are cut for Julienne soup. With it was also served a great dish of rice, and in ordinary Chinese households rice is served with every course.

“In the rich homes we eat much meat and little rice, and in the poor homes much rice and little meat,” said the Minister. This dish I did not care for at all, besides finding it next to impossible to detach the meat from the bones with the chopsticks.

Our next course was a very pretty one. On a plate sat a row of little dumplings, into which lobster, finely shredded with ham, had been daintily tucked.

I was struck by the fact that with the exception of the duck everything had been passed through the mincing machine or chopped. Beef, by the way, is so bad in China that it is rarely eaten.

Then followed the pudding, which was altogether a success, entitled “Water lily.” The sweet was also served on plates. Lord Li maintained that the foundation was rice; if so, it had been boiled so long that it was more like tapioca. Round it were stewed pears and peaches, and all over it little things that looked like white broad beans. These had a delicate and delicious flavour, and I guessed a dozen times what they could be, but in each case was wrong; and the Minister explained they were the seeds of the lotus flower.

No wonder His Excellency lives on Chinese food at home when it is so good and so well cooked. The native wine or spirit I did not like; it rather reminded me of vodka.

Our meal finished we repaired to the drawing-room, where was set out a silver tray of beautiful Chinese workmanship, with a silver teapot and silver cups lined with white china and with ordinary handles.

“You ladies must sit on the sofa,” said Lord Li, “for it is the fashion in China for the host himself to dispense the tea.”

Accordingly, he lifted the entire table and placed it before198 us, then poured out what appeared to be the palest green liquid.

“Surely that is not tea!” I exclaimed.

“Oh yes, it is green tea. Not green tea made for the English market, but real green tea, uncoloured, such as we drink in China without sugar or milk.” And, putting the spoon in the pot, he produced the leaves, very long and broad, each one separate from the other and absolutely devoid of stalks and dust.

“This I have sent over for me specially from my own estate,” he said, “and this is the tea of which I drink thirty or forty cups a day.”

It was refreshing, and reminded me of the orange leaves used so much in tropical Southern Mexico in the same way. With this ended our quaint Eastern meal.

HOW youth adores the stage! It ever has in all climes and ages, and probably ever will.

This was amusingly borne in on me just after my boy had gone to Cambridge. A particular play with a particularly fascinating actress in the principal part was announced for production there.

Of course, all Cambridge went.

A day or so later, when a lot of “men” were raving over the beauties of the fascinating actress, buying her photographs, wanting her autograph, and so on, one of them turned round to my son and said:

“Isn’t she lovely? I’m just dying to be introduced to her. By Jove, she is a ripping girl. What did you think of her, Tweedie?”

“I did not go,” he replied.

“Why not?”

“Well, you see, I know her pretty well; she went to school with my mother.”

A bomb might have fallen.

“Went to school with your mother?”

“Yes, and she has a girl nearly as old as I am.”

Bomb number two.

Charming and pretty as she is, a woman old enough to be their mother, she stirs the hearts of the undergrads, who, across the footlights, innocently think she is a girl of eighteen.

So much for the delusions of the stage.

Still, it is marvellous how some actresses seem blessed with perpetual youth.

There is no doubt about it that Miss Geneviève Ward is one of the most remarkable women of the age. One morning in March, 1908, came a knock at the door, and in she walked.

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“Out for my constitutional, my dear,” she exclaimed, “so I thought I would just look you up. I have walked six miles this morning, and after a little rest and chat with you I shall walk another mile home and enjoy my luncheon all the better for it.”

“You are a marvel!” I exclaimed. “Seven miles and over seventy. I saw your ‘Volumnia’ was a great success the other day when you played it with Benson.” For “Volumnia” is one of the grand old actress’s chief parts.

“Yes,” she said, “and the next day I started for Rome. I got a telegram to say one of three old cousins, with whom I was staying in Rome a few weeks previously, had died suddenly; so four hours after receiving the message I set out.”

“Were you very tired?” I asked.

“No, not at all. I knitted nearly all the way and talked to my fellow-passengers, and when I arrived, instead of resting, went at once to see to some business, for these two old sisters, one of whom is blind, were absolutely prostrate with grief, and had done nothing while awaiting my arrival. I stayed a fortnight with them, settled them up, and arrived back two days ago.”

Miss Ward has one of the most remarkable faces I have ever known. Her blue-grey eyes are electric. They seem to pierce one’s very soul. They flash fire or indignation, and yet they literally melt with love. And this great, majestic tragedienne is full of emotion and sentiment. Geneviève Ward is the Sarah Siddons of the day. Her “Lady Macbeth,” “Queen Eleanor,” “Queen Katherine,” and her other classic rôles, are unrivalled. Her elocution is matchless. Her French is as perfect as her English; anyone who ever heard her recite in French will never forget it, and her Italian, for purity of diction, is not far behind. On the stage her grand manner is superb. She is every inch a queen, and yet, strange as it may appear, she is only a small woman, five feet three at most; but so full of activity and courage that she impresses one with immense power, height, and strength.

I happened to tell her that I had again seen an account of her marriage in a paper.

“Some new invention,” she laughed. “And yet it is not necessary to invent, for the romance and tragedy of201 my life were acute enough.” And she then told me the following story:

“I was travelling with my mother and brother on the Riviera in 1855, when we met a Russian, Count de Guerbel. He was very tall, very handsome, very fascinating, very rich, and twenty-eight. I was seventeen.

“He fell in love with me, and it was settled I should be married at the Consulate at Nice, which I was; but the Russian law required that the marriage should be repeated in the Russian Church to make the ceremony binding, otherwise I was his legal wife, but he was not my legal husband.

“It was arranged, therefore, that I should go to Paris with my mother, the Count going on in advance to arrange everything, and we would be remarried there in the Greek Church. When we arrived in Paris it was Lent, when no marriage can take place in the Greek Church; and so time passed on.

“He must have been a thoroughly bad man, because he did his best at that time to persuade me to run away with him, always reminding me that I was his legal wife. The whole thing was merely a trick of this handsome, fascinating rascal. He promised me that, if I would go to him, he would take me to Russia at once, and there we should be remarried according to the rules of the Greek Church. Being positively frightened by his persistence, I told my mother. At the same time rumours of de Guerbel’s amours and debts reached her ears, and she wrote to a cousin of ours, then American Minister in Petersburg, for confirmation of these reports.

“My cousin replied, ‘Come at once.’ We went; I, of course, under my name of Countess de Guerbel, which I had naturally assumed from the day of our wedding at Nice, and we stayed at the Embassy in St. Petersburg. The Count’s brother was charming to me. He told us my husband was a villain, and I had better leave him alone. That was impossible, however—I was married to him, but he was not married to me, and such a state of affairs could not remain. It became an international matter, and was arranged by the American Government and the Tzar that we should be officially married at Warsaw. The Count refused to come. The Tzar therefore sent sealed orders for his appearance.202 Wearing a black dress, and feeling apprehensive and miserably sad, I went to the church, and at the altar rails, supported by my father and mother, and the Count’s brother, I met my husband.

“It was a horrible crisis, for I knew my father was armed with a loaded revolver, and, if de Guerbel refused to give me the last legal right which was morally already mine, its contents would put an end to the adventurer’s life. There we stood, husband and wife, knowing the service was a mere form; but the marriage was lawfully effected. He had completed his part of the bargain and we had learned his villainy.

“At the door of the church we parted, and I never saw him again. We called a cab and drove direct to the railway station, and thence travelled to Milan.”

Romance, comedy, tragedy! As I sat looking at that beautiful woman, still beautiful at seventy, it was easy to see how lovely she must have been at seventeen, and to picture that perfect figure in her black frock on her bridal morning—a pathetic sight indeed!

She was continuing her story:

“Determined to do something, I at once began studying singing for the stage on our arrival in Italy, and in a year or two made my appearance in Paris, London, and New York.

“I made a success in opera; but in Cuba I strained my voice by continually singing in three octaves, and one fine day discovered it had gone. Then I took to teaching singing in New York. But, unfortunately, I hated it; most of my pupils had neither voice nor talent; it was like beating my head against a stone wall.

“In my operatic days critics had always mentioned my capacity for acting. Then why not go on the stage? Thus it was at the age of thirty-five I appeared at Manchester, under my maiden name of Geneviève Ward, and in the end, having played Forget-me-not some thousand times, all over the world, I retired from the profession when I was about sixty. I have occasionally appeared since.”

This gifted tragedienne was going to Stratford to play in the Shakespeare week in 1908.

She came to have tea with me, and as she sat beside me looking the picture of strength and dignity, I asked if it took her long to get up her part.

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“Good heavens, no!” she replied. “I have never forgotten a Shakespearian character in my life. Every word means something. All I do is to read it through once or twice—perhaps three times—before the night.”

“I own,” she said, “that sitting here now I do not recall a word of Forget-me-not, and yet I played that several thousand times. But then, there is nothing to grip hold of in the modern drama; however, I could undertake to go on the stage letter-perfect even in that after a day’s work. I am sure, after reading it through, it would all come back to me. In Shakespeare I not only know my own part, but most of the other people’s, and I can both remember things I learnt in my youth and have played at intervals during my life, and memorise now more easily than my pupils. I did so last year when I got up those classical plays for Vedrenne and Barker.”

One cold February day Benson’s Company played Coriolanus at the “Coronet.”

As Miss Ward had sent me the following note, I was amongst the pleased spectators.

Her performance was simply amazing. Well rouged, with a cheerful smile and sprightly manner, this dear lady of over seventy looked young, handsome, animated, indeed beautiful, and buoyant in the first act. As the play proceeded her complexion paled, her eyes dimmed, the deep black robe and nun-like head-gear helped the tragedy of the scene, until in the mad scene she was cringing and yet magnificent; in the last act—thrilling.

Her clear enunciation, magnificent diction, and great repose are indeed a contrast to the modern young woman of the stage, who speaks so badly that one cannot hear what she says, and has often not learnt even the first rules of walking gracefully.

After the play I went behind the scenes, as arranged.204 Benson was there standing at Miss Ward’s door thanking her for her performance.

What a splendid athlete he is in appearance, and though I am not particularly fond of his performance, Coriolanus is by far his best. I congratulated him upon it, and his simplicity and almost shyness were amusing.

“But I am so much below my ideal of the part,” he said; “although it is strengthening and broadening, I cannot even now get it,” and then, turning to Miss Ward, added, “However, our ‘Volumnia’ is all she should be.”

There was Miss Ward, dressed ready to return home, smiling cheerfully and not in the least tired. As we were driving back to my house, she told me, in answer to a friendly enquiry, what her day had been.

“I went for a long walk this morning, had my lunch at a quarter to one, got to the theatre at two, began at two-thirty, and, as you know, did not end till five-thirty.”

“I hope you had some tea,” I said.

“Tea, my dear! Certainly not. I shall have a glass of hot milk at six, when I get in, and then my dinner as usual, a little later.”

Over seventy years of age, she thus had played a strong rôle for three hours, yet did not even need to be refreshed with a cup of tea. Geneviève Ward certainly is a great woman.

The three greatest English actresses I have ever seen are Ellen Terry, Geneviève Ward, and Mrs. Kendal. The latter two are among the most brilliant women and most charming conversationalists I know—outside their stage life I mean.

One February day in 1909, Mrs. Kendal walked up Portland Place to fetch me en route for luncheon with Geneviève Ward.

“Why have you suddenly left the stage like this?” I asked in banter.

In a serious voice she replied:

“Because we want no farewells. I went on the stage when I was four, and no one knew I was there. I go off the stage when I am fifty-five, and I do not see why people should be asked to contribute to my well-advertised disappearance as to a charity. I’ve worked hard for fifty years, and have retired to enjoy myself while I can.205 Actors have long-drawn-out ‘farewells’ lasting for two or three years. I don’t wish to do likewise. We’ve worked hard, and we’ve been thrifty and saved, and now we can retire from a kindly public—as their friends, I hope. I don’t want to write to the papers, or make speeches, or call myself their ‘humble servant.’ I’ve given them of my best, and they’ve paid me for it, as they pay for their hats and gloves. No gratuities, nothing more than I have rightly earned. Don’t you think I’m right?”

“Well, it is certainly more dignified, but we should have liked to give you a farewell cheer.” Then, reverting to others, I asked why Irving was so poor.

“Ah, because he was so generous. I remember an instance; when he heard the Duchess of Manchester (afterwards Duchess of Devonshire) had taken two stalls, he at once sent off to offer her a private box. She accepted, and then he ordered a two-guinea bouquet to be placed therein, and invited her to supper. Again she accepted. He at once asked a party to meet her; that cost him over twenty-six pounds. He told me so, and he returned the Duchess her guinea.

“Now do you call that business? Would a dressmaker give material gratis and entertain a customer to supper? We have never given free seats. Why should one? If the house does not fill, change the piece, but don’t pretend it’s a success by paper. Yes—I’m retiring; the public doesn’t want an actress to-day. It wants a pretty girl. If I was beginning now, instead of ending, I should be a failure. I was never really pretty. “Men and women who have never studied acting as an art are wanted now, young, pretty, well built. But as to acting!—the old school of acting is a thing of the past, my dear.”

From Stageland to Shakespeare-land is a natural transit. Besides, there is no space left in this book to describe afresh the many valued and gifted theatrical friends to whom I devoted an entire volume in 1904, for which a second edition was called two months after publication.

This book was Behind the Footlights, and it occurred to me to write in it that “Mrs. Kendal was the most loved and most hated woman on the stage.” These words might apply almost to Marie Corelli in literature.

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Who could help loving her who saw her as I did on October 6th, 1909, at the opening of Harvard House in Stratford-on-Avon?

It was a wonderful day.

A private train with bowls of flowers on every table, and smilax hanging in long tendrils from the roof (all this being the offering of the Railway Company), took us to Stratford at sixty-eight miles an hour. Our engine was also gaily decked with flags and flowers and had “HARVARD” painted across its front in big letters.

The sun shone brilliantly on that early autumn day, bestowing, as it were, his blessing on this scholarly alliance of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

A gracious little lady bade us welcome; short and “comely,” with fluffy brown hair above a round face. As a girl our hostess must have been a pretty little blonde English type—she owns the sweetest voice imaginable, a voice to love, to coo a child to sleep, the most gracious manners, and a delightful smile.

This was Marie Corelli, to whom the work of restoration of Harvard House had been entrusted; and her guests that day saw it just as John Harvard himself saw it as a child. In that house where this most modern of twentieth-century novelists awaited her guests, the sixteenth-century maiden Katherine Rogers, passed her early days, and in 1605 went thence as the bride of Robert Harvard the merchant, to his home in Southwark. Between that place and the small country town on the Avon their little son spent his childish years. And just as the river deepened and widened as it joined the infinity of the ocean, so John Harvard’s youthful intelligence deepened and widened in the great ocean of learning. Far, far away it bore fruit—not only in his own generation, but the waves of scholarly influence have rippled down through successive decades to the present day, when the College he founded in America—the first established in the New World—sends forth her men in thousands to all parts of the globe, and the name of Harvard is an honoured household word through the length and breadth of the world.

Although I had been twice to America and knew that the best of the culture and learning in the United States emanated from Boston and Harvard, I had not then realised207 that the famous University was three hundred years old—contemporaneous with our own Will Shakespeare—nor that its founder had been christened in our little old English Mecca.

Miss Marie Corelli had a bright word for everyone; flitted hither and thither like a bee, made speeches charmingly, and yet it must have been a day of great nervous strain for this little lady. A woman of taste and refinement, a woman of organisation—as the occasion revealed, with all its details of a luncheon for a hundred and fifty people, as well as an opening ceremony—and withal, what a strangely imaginative mind! Almost a seer, a mystic, a religious dreamer, a hard worker, a strange but lovable personality—such is Marie Corelli.

Many men and women who attain great ends are egotistical—and why not? What others admire they may surely be allowed to appreciate also.

It is the conceit of ignorance that is so detestable. The assurance of untutored youth that annoys.

The American Ambassador was, as ever, gentle, persuasive, eloquent, delightful. We had a long conversation on Harvard, whose virtues he extolled; but then Mr. Whitelaw Reid is at heart a literary man and would-be scholar, besides having enough brains to appreciate brains in others.

Mason Croft is Miss Marie Corelli’s home. Probably no writer of fiction—not plays, mind you, but pure fiction—ever made so much money, or has been so widely read, as Marie Corelli. The little girl without fortune—by pen, ink, and paper and her own imaginative mind—has won a lovely home. It is a fine old house, charmingly furnished, and possesses a large meadow (the “croft“) and an enticing winter garden. The châtelaine keeps four or five horses and is a Lady Bountiful. Yes, and all this is done by a woman with a tiny weapon of magic power.

So came the end of a delightful gathering—

But stop!

As Marie Corelli wrote the story of that day in a few pithy words, let me be allowed to repeat her message to the Evening News:

WOMAN nowadays. Poor dear! How she is abused, derided, called this, that, and the other—but she goes steadily on her own way, and she is forging ahead. This will be woman’s century.

Everything that is new, old age dubs “deterioration.” Because the modern girl is not early Victorian, does not wear low dresses and satin slippers by day, shriek at a mouse or faint, she is called “unwomanly.” Surely this is ridiculous. She is stronger mentally and physically, she is beginning to take her place in the world; and because in the transition stage she has forgotten how to make cordials—which she can buy so much cheaper at any Co-operative Stores—she is styled “undomesticated.” Every age has its own manners, and customs and ideals.

No, no, you dear old people, don’t think her unsexed. Woman’s sphere should be the home; but her horizon must be the world.

In one sense there is nothing new under the sun. In another everything changes, is renewed continually, and should be new. Therefore, to call re-arrangement deterioration is absurd. It is more often advancement. We can no more go back than we can do without the telephone, telegraph, or taxi-cab. We are all progressing, improving; the world is improving. Read Society books of a couple of centuries back, and note the change. Note the coarseness of Fielding or Smollett, and see the refinement of to-day.

It is a very good world that we live in, but youth must not be sacrificed to old age, any more than old age must be sacrificed to youth. Both must stand alone.

All this hue and cry about women’s work is very ridiculous. Since the world began women have worked. They have210 borne the greatest of all burdens—child-bearing; and they have cooked and washed and mended and made. They have ministered to the wants of man and home.

Worked? Why, of course they have worked, but they have not always been paid. Now is their day. They are strong enough to demand the recognition the world has been ungenerous enough to withhold.

Equality in all things for the sexes will make happier men and women, happier homes, and a more prosperous nation.

All women cannot be bread-winners any more than all men can be soldiers. Women are marching onward in every land, their advancement and the progress of civilisation are synonymous terms to-day.

The greater the women, the greater the country.

It is ridiculous to say that women workers oust men. This is hardly ever the case. In these days of endless change, when a machine is frequently introduced that does the work of four or five men, labour is constantly re-arranged. Then again, with increase of work, so there is incessant all-round shifting of the distribution of employment. Women do not take the place of men. They merely find their own footing in the general change. There is a niche for everyone ready to fill it.

Yes, women do work, and women must work, although a vast amount of misery might be, and ought to be, alleviated by their men-folk. The present disastrous state of things is largely due to men not providing for their wives or equipping their daughters to be wage-earners.

There are, of course, a few enthusiastic women who work for work’s sake, but they take the bread out of no man’s mouth. These are the writers of deep and profound books, who make as many shillings as they spend pounds in collecting their material—women who love research work in science; women who labour among the poor, organise clubs and homes, and devote their lives to charity and good deeds; but the cases are rare, almost nil, where women work for salary who do not need the money. Those who do certainly take the bread from the mouths of men and women alike; but the rich workers who accept pay are so few they do not count.

Many women with small incomes seek to increase those211 incomes in order to clothe their children, pay the butcher, or have more to spend on little luxuries, but these, again, are a small class. The large multitude of women who work are those who must do so, and they are the ones who require help, for theirs is an uphill fight against great odds. They have to contend with want of general education, want of special training, want of physical strength, want of positions open to women, when they enter the already overcrowded field of labour.

Women must work until men realise the responsibility of thrusting them unequipped into the sea of life to sink or swim on the tide of chance.

How bravely women do it too. Aching hearts and throbbing brows are forgotten in the fight for daily existence. Poor souls, how hard many of them toil, how lonely are their lives, and what a struggle it is for them to keep their heads above water. Many of them do so, however; and to them all honour is due.

Men and women should never be pitted as rivals in anything. Each sex has its own place to fill; but when the exigencies of fighting for existence occur, men should nobly help the courageous woman worker over the difficulties her men-folk have thoughtlessly placed before her.

I hate sex. Surely, in working, thinking, human beings—it does not matter whether one wears petticoats or trousers—there should be no sex as regards bread-earning. There are a million and a quarter too many women in England, and the gates of independence and occupation must not be shut in their faces. Personally, I should like boys and girls to be equal in everything. Forget sex, bring them up together, educate them together. Send them to public schools and Universities together, open all the trades and professions to women the same as to men. Let them stand shoulder to shoulder.

Many people thought that the heavens would descend if a woman became a doctor. They were wrong. Women are doing well in medicine and surgery, though they are still excluded from the Bar and the Church.

Yes, give girls just the same advantages as boys. Divide your incomes equally amongst all your children when you die, irrespective of sex. Give them equality in divorce. The world will be all the happier.

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Women will find their own level—just as men do; they will make or mar their own lives—just as men do. But let men cease shutting gates of employment in their faces.

A nation’s power depends on the physical strength and character of its women, and not on its army of men, or its statesmen.

How I envy men with professions. They come down to comfortable breakfasts, without the least idea of what will be laid before them. They enjoy it, have a look at the papers, perhaps a pipe, and then they get into boots and top-coat, go off to their chambers, offices, studios, or their consulting-rooms, as the case may be. They throw themselves into their work, knowing that no interruptions will occur during the whole course of the morning.

They enjoy their luncheon, which they have not had the worry of ordering beforehand, and so by the time four, or five, or six o’clock arrives they have done a good day’s work without annoyance from outside. They have earned so much money, and not far off they see a tangible reward. Lucky men!

How differently things go with a woman like myself, with a small income, a house, servants, children, all as important as the daily round of wage-earning. By the time one gets settled down to one’s desk at nine-thirty or ten o’clock one has gone through the drudgery of it all. The orders and wants of cook, housemaid, parlourmaid, and nurse have all been attended to. The cheques for washing bills and grocers’ books have to be written, orders sent for coals, the soda-water telephoned for, with all the endless round of wearying details which every housekeeper knows. In the midst of one’s morning work, curtains return from the cleaners, and have to be paid for at the door, or a man comes to mend the bell, and one has to leave one’s desk to show him exactly what is wrong. In fact, the interruptions are incessant even in the best regulated households, and one has to bring one’s distracted mind back from domestic details to write important letters or articles for the Press.

A working woman’s life would be endurable were it not for the interruptions.

Yes! I have lived the ordinary woman’s life and the professional woman’s life as well, and I always say to myself213 that the professional part is a mere bagatelle, because of the larger rewards, in comparison with the ceaseless worries and endless interruptions that fall at the feet of every housekeeper.

Men do not half enough appreciate the amount of work (becoming every year more difficult), the extraordinary number of little details, necessary to run even the simplest home.

When one covers one’s own furniture, embroiders one’s own cloths, and trims one’s own hats into the bargain, the daily round becomes complicated indeed.

I believe in clubs for women. It is so heavenly to get away from an ordinary dinner. It is really a holiday to have a chop or a fried sole, that one has not ordered hours beforehand. Besides, at the club one sometimes learns new dishes, and certainly new ideas from the newspapers and magazines, all of which one could not afford to take in at home independently.

For the unmarried woman the club is absolutely indispensable. It gives her a place where she can receive her friends, and let it be known that women are more hospitable than men. They are poorer, but are more generous in giving invitations to tea or a meal. Men’s clubs are full of old women, and women’s clubs full of young men, nowadays.

A club is also a boon to the married woman, for there are days when country relations arrive in town, when, for instance, the sweep has been ordered at home; then the country or foreign friends can be taken to the club, and need not know that their hostess’s small household cannot tackle a luncheon because of the advent of the sweep.

I believe clubs encourage women to read, and I am sure that expands their ideas and opens their minds. Women’s clubs are certainly an advantage, and though I have been an original member of several, I always float back to my first love, the Albemarle, where our marble halls, once the Palace of the Bishop of Ely, receive both men and women members.

I love my own sex. They are the guiding stars of the Universe, and the modern girl tends to make the world much more interesting than it used to be. Youth must spread its wings, and if it is sound youth it will be gently214 guided by experience. Let the bird fly, or it will fret at the bars of its cage, break its wings, and languish.

No one ever profited by the experience of another, any more than any person inherited the learning of an ancestor. Alas and alack, we must acquire both for ourselves.

To our mothers and grandmothers, with their sweet but secluded and often sequestered lives, it would have seemed a deed of daring for a woman to lecture the public. Would they have thought it—would our grandfathers rather have held it “ladylike”?

It is curious how one acquires a reputation without the least foundation. For instance, I am always being asked to lecture; sometimes it is at a People’s Palace, sometimes before a learned society, or on behalf of various charities, or to address the blind, or deliver educational discourses; and even the famous Major Pond of America once tried to persuade me to go on a lecturing tour in the States.

Tempting as his money offer was, I dared not face that vast public.

This reputation is a chimera, for I have only lectured a few times in my life; and these occasions have chiefly been at the People’s Palace at Vauxhall, where an audience of two or three thousand persons, paying from one penny to sixpence, eat oranges, smoke pipes, and otherwise enjoy themselves after their manner, while the lecturer is doing his (or her) best to amuse them. To keep these people out of the public-houses and well occupied for an evening seems worth even the pain and nervousness of standing alone on a stage, nearly as big as that of Drury Lane, with footlights before, and a huge white curtain for one’s slides behind.

The first time I ever spoke in public was at a large meeting (seven or eight hundred) held in the St. Martin’s Town Hall, when at an hour or two’s notice I took the place of the late Earl of Winchilsea, and, in reply to his bidding by telegram, discoursed for fifteen minutes on the position of women in Agriculture, a subject in which I was much interested at the time. I spoke from notes only, having a horror of a read paper, which is always exasperating or inaudible. Most speeches are too low and too long. The fifteen minutes appeared to be nothing, but the moments of waiting were torture until the first words had come forth. When one215’s knees shake, and one’s tongue seems to cleave to the roof of the mouth, when the audience dances like myriads of fireflies before one’s eyes, the misery is so awful that the result is not worth the effort.

Women are often excellent speakers, both in matter and style, and those who have an equal amount of practice are quite as good as the best men. Nevertheless, after-dinner speaking is, alas, far more often boring than entertaining, and one regrets a bell does not ring after five minutes, as a gentle hint to sit down. The poor speaker seldom knows when the right moment to end has arrived.

Everyone is shy about something. The rough-edged shyness of youth wears away, but we each remain tender somewhere. Shyness overpowers me when making a speech, or on hearing my name roared into a room full of people. The first makes me sick, in spite of having addressed an audience of three thousand people, which I find easier than thirty; the second makes me wish to run away.

“I’m shy,” is the excuse of youth to cover rudeness. Gauche, awkward, ill-mannered boys and girls call these delinquencies shyness. Being shy, however, is no extenuation of being discourteous. It is merely selfish self-conceit allowed to run rampant instead of being checked. How much easier it is to form a bad impression than to destroy one.

We are all imperfect, but the only chance of bettering ourselves is to realise the fact early and try self-reform.

I have been fighting faults all my life, and although I have overcome some of them—and I shan’t tell you what they are—a vast crop still remain to be mowed down by the scythe of Time.

The question of women and the suffrage is now so important that it is impossible for any thinking man or woman not to have an opinion on the subject. What a curious thing it is that Liberals who stand for Progress fear this onward movement. Is it because they think women in the main are conservative?

On the 6th of February, 1907, at the time when the Women Suffragists were being marched in scores to prison, and big processions were being organised, and endless fusses and excitements were in the air, Punch wrote an amusing article, sweeping away the House of Lords, and substituting for it a House of Ladies.

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My name happened to be among the half-dozen elected Peeresses, and a funny crew we were. Miss Christabel Pankhurst was chosen because she was then considered the only good-looking suffragette. Madame Zansig because of her thought-reading propensities. Clara Butt because she could reduce chaos to harmony, and so on.

Anyway, the article was commented on tremendously in the Press, and was the subject of much amusement among my friends. It brought me many quibs, telegrams, and telephones of congratulation on my elevation to the Peerage.

The following letter is from a notable woman, written about two years later:

Later I wrote a long article in the Fortnightly Review, entitled “Women and Work,” on the strength of which I received the following note from the pioneer of the movement:

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Every youthful person is a revolutionary at heart; anyway, I was, but as years have mounted up, even my radical tendencies have diminished. The real guides of a nation are the thinkers. Democracy must obey leadership, and leadership is the outcome of brains and learning. Here and there a great man rises from the millions; but the larger percentage of great men are to be found in the aristocracy and upper middle classes, not in the lower tenth, or even the lower middle class. I am becoming more conservative with years. It seems so much more easy to pull down than to build, and all this Socialistic cry is towards pulling down, upsetting, upheaving, without the slightest idea how to draw up a programme of reform or produce a single leader of worth.

It requires brains to appreciate brains. It requires talent to understand talent. It requires knowledge and experience to value the beautiful, and vast capacity to build, to organise, to make or to govern.

Many women nowadays have the full courage of their opinions. They say things and write things; lecture on them. But for myself—well, no!—not yet quite.

Something awful would happen to me if I wrote all the things I think. To suggest one finds it actually sinful to incubate miserable seedlings—the offspring of poverty, children conceived in drink, immorality, insanity, epilepsy, children doomed from birth—brings down denunciation. One hardly dare espouse such views, while it is considered more good, more noble, more moral to foster a population of degenerates than to prevent it. Our prisons are largely filled by drink or insanity, but we feed and keep the creatures and send them out to propagate their species, who in their turn fall upon the rates. Degenerates should never be allowed to marry.

We court adultery by our Separation Acts, tie unfortunate men and women to lunatics, instead of clearing the air by cheap divorce. We positively suggest infidelity by not making equal laws for men and women. We force women to work or starve, and then abuse them for entering men’s professions; but we hardly dare speak or write openly on these subjects, oh dear, no!

We see women neglecting their homes for bridge or men scattering their wits by wrongful indulgences, and yet218 Society does not revolt. Still we are waking up, and why? Simply because women are beginning to take an interest in the big questions of life; and once they take a thing up they generally manage to sift it to the bottom.

This is woman’s century. She is playing a bold game for the equality of the sexes, but she will win; and the world will be the purer and better for the part she plays.

Women don’t faint nowadays, and have vapours and migraine. They no longer make jams or weep. They are up and doing. They do things instead of talking of them. They are becoming the comrades of men. It is the women of the twentieth century who are going to revise Society.

Lord Emmott, the late Deputy Speaker, was one day pretending to me that all evil came through women.

“Look at the apple,” he cited.

“Oh, come now, that chestnut is too old,” I replied.

“Old but nevertheless evergreen,” he answered promptly.

If men are creating unrest and Socialism, women are spurring their sons to work and instilling into them morality. The immoral man will find every decent door shut in his face before another century dawns, just as the drunkard has been hounded from Society. Who would tolerate drunkenness at a dinner-party to-day? Men and women both shrink from it, and the same will be felt towards loose living. Women are free, no longer the slaves of men, and they are exercising their freedom in the purification of all things, ably helped by their comrades.

Women don’t grow old nowadays, they no longer put on caps when they marry, or leave the nursery to become matrons. They develop younger, marry later, are independent and self-respecting, and never grow old.

Old ladies and bonnets have gone out of fashion.

Dress—especially women’s dress—has in all ages and climes, so far back as we can trace by rifling tombs, and studying picture-writings and prehistoric carvings, formed subject of comment and satire, but also of invariable interest.

What of the dress of womanhood in this opening century? On one point all mankind cry out and many women join in the loud appeal. Here, so please you, is an exordium that—one woman unit—fain would publish.

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AMERICA is a vast country, likewise a vast subject to tackle. Everything there is vast, its mercantile projects, its successes, its catastrophes—but, above all, it possesses a vast wealth in the warm hearts of its kindly people. I have so many friends on the other side of the “herring pond,” that my memory lingers with pleasure and interest in the United States.

I wonder how many times since I returned from my last delightful visit in 1904 people have asked me what I thought of Roosevelt (Rosie-felt).

Those last weeks of the year had been spent in Mexico—my second visit to that remarkable and enchanting land—as the guest of President Diaz and his charming wife. Their great kindness, together with the interesting phase of life unfolded to me day by day, as I made notes for the Diaz Life, brought a desire to make the acquaintance of His Excellency’s neighbour-President of the United States—Mr. Roosevelt.

It was about as difficult to see Mr. Roosevelt as to see the King of England, perhaps even more so, for a good introduction would produce a presentation to our sovereign, whereas in America even a good introduction is looked upon with suspicion. President Roosevelt was surrounded by a perfect cordon of officials.

The White House is one of the best things in America. It is a low, rambling building, quite attractive in style, and like the homes of a great many noblemen in England. There is nothing of the palace about it; it does not seem big enough for the President of the United States, although standing on rising ground, amid beautiful surroundings. It is in a way more handsome externally—and decidedly more imposing—than Buckingham Palace, and a great225 deal cleaner. The decorations of the interior I thought appalling, but that may be my bad taste. They were so horribly new, and American.

The day on which I was received at the White House happened to be the eighteenth anniversary of the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt. They had been the recipients of congratulatory messages from all parts of the country, but the President was busy as ever. Except his annual recess, he knew no holiday.

I presented myself at the portico. Policemen were everywhere; at each corner was a blue coat.

“Pass on, if you please,” was the order of proceedings, until I arrived at a sort of conservatory door, where another policeman bade me enter. Horrors! a gaunt, square room with a small, empty writing-table in the middle, and chairs standing all round close against the four walls. It was enough to chill one’s enthusiasm. Worse than all! on nearly every chair sat a man who stared obtrusively at the entrance of a woman. Had I known the sort of ordeal to be passed through, in spite of my excellent introductions, I doubt if I should have ventured at all.

Not daring to run away, I sat on a chair like the rest, and felt that, instead of my best, my worst frock would have been the most appropriate for the occasion. One man was summoned to a particular door, and his neighbour to another, and then an old gentleman came forward to me and bowed.

“Mrs. Alec Tweedie, I believe? Would you please to step this way? The President will see you immediately.”

“A haven of refuge at last,” thought I, “anyway a carpet and a cushioned seat.” But even here three men were sitting and waiting in solemn silence, and all the staring had to be gone through again.

Ten minutes or a quarter of an hour of this awful tension passed, and then two more individuals were ushered in, and sat down, not one—of all the five staring beings—uttering a word. I was getting quite nervous, and wondering how best to slip away, when the door opened again.

Merely expecting a sixth sitter, I did not even take the trouble to look up. A vision stopped before me.

“Mrs. Tweedie, I am delighted to meet you,” it said.226 But somehow it was so short and round and smiling, that I did not grasp the fact that President Roosevelt himself was addressing me. A few pleasant words and he added, “If you will go in there, I will be with you in a moment.”

I went in. This was his own private room, large, plain, and neat, with an enormous, highly polished table reflecting a few roses in a vase. It was just a nice sort of office and nothing more. The only interesting personal thing appeared to be a business-like gun standing in a corner.

I sat and waited, but as the door was wide open I could see and hear the following:

“How do you do? Delighted to see you. Am very busy at the moment, but if there is anything I could do for you quickly, well——” Hesitancy, and a few murmured remarks.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t spare any time for that this morning. Good-bye!” So in five minutes the President got rid of all those five long-suffering, long-waiting mortals.

That was enough to make one run away without even waiting to say Good-bye. But feeling how foolish that kind of thing would be, I braced myself for the effort, and murmured:

“I’ve not come to ask you to make me a Bishop, or my uncle a Senator, or my nephew an Ambassador, so perhaps I’ve no business here at all. In fact, I’ve not come to ask for anything.”

The President laughed heartily, and, throwing himself back into a capacious arm-chair, soon proved himself to be a very human specimen of mankind.

There is no doubt about it, Roosevelt is an extraordinary man, and a strong one. There may be a little of the ungoverned schoolboy about him, but he is right at heart. His energy and enthusiasm prompted him to do things which, in his position, may not always have been discreet, but he accomplished a vast deal more for America than folk in his own country yet realise.

It was all the more interesting to see and talk to this amazing personality as I had just come direct from Mexico. No greater contrast was possible than that between the two then Presidents of those neighbouring countries.

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Diaz—calm, quiet, reserved, strong, determined, thoughtful, and far-seeing.

Roosevelt—impetuous, outspoken, fearless, hasty in action, and hurried in forming opinions.

Both remarkable men, very remarkable men, and utterly dissimilar in character as in physiognomy; each admiring the other in a perfectly delightful way. Roosevelt writes a hand like a schoolboy’s, and, with all his business rush and appetite for work, it somehow seemed to me that he would love quiet sentimental songs and pretty poems. No doubt there may be more clever men in America, more learned men, more suave and polished diplomatists, but this man is a judicious mixture that makes him great. In truth he is a gigantic personality. He is not in the least American except in his unrestrained enthusiasm and rough exterior. He gesticulates like a foreigner, his mind works quickly. Withal he was the right man in the right place, and the United States had every cause to be proud of him.

Once more I met, or rather saw and heard, America’s greatest living President. But how this chanced was at a sad time for our country.

As told elsewhere, I was doing a cure at Woodhall Spa at the time of King Edward VII.’s death. It happened that on my return to town I tumbled across my old friend the late Sir Joseph Dimsdale, in the railway dining-car, when the conversation turned on Mr. Roosevelt and his visit to England.

I regretted the circumstances that had saddened his reception; also that he should see nothing of our Court and alas! of the Monarch whom he had so much admired. And then we talked of the Freedom of the City, which was to be conferred on the ex-President in a few days’ time.

“Although my Cambridge boy was made a Freeman of the City of London the other day, I have never witnessed the ceremony,” I said.

“Would you like to see one of these public ones?” asked the ex-Lord Mayor.

“Immensely,” I replied.

“If it is possible to manage it, you shall have a seat,” he replied, and accordingly I was invited to see Mr. Roosevelt228 made free of the Ancient City of London, and enjoyed the privilege of hearing one of the most memorable speeches ever made within the Guildhall walls: certainly one of the most abused, admired, discussed.

Was Roosevelt playing to the gallery?

Was he angling for the Presidency of the United States? Or was he really trying to do England a good turn in correcting her stupidity in Egypt?

Anyway, it was a bold stroke, but done so skilfully that it did not seem so rude as it looked in cold print.

I had been much struck with Roosevelt’s personality when I spent that hour tête-à-tête with him in Washington—his rough-and-ready manner, his fearless, overflowing geniality—but I had never heard him speak in public.

The giving of the Freedom of the City of London is a great event, very old, very historic, very interesting, surrounded by ancient ritual.

As the Guildhall only holds about twelve hundred people, and that twelve hundred is mainly composed of Aldermen and aldermanic wives, sheriffs, ex-Lord Mayors, Masters of City Companies and burgesses, and a very business element, with a very business-like class of femininity, ordinary outsiders like myself are rare.

Owing to the death of Edward VII. everyone wore black. This made the Hall look its best, for the red robes, or dark blue and fur of the officials, contrasted well with the sombre hue of the audience.

Roosevelt was the personification of quiet dignity as he walked up the central aisle, subdued possibly by nervousness, and he was very still on the platform seated on the right of the Lord Mayor, with the Mace and other Insignia of Pomp on the table before him.

Sir Joseph Dimsdale’s speech as Chamberlain of the City was excellent. Well delivered by a far-reaching voice, with the manners of a gentleman, the learning of a scholar, and the tact of a diplomat. It was all that a speech of the kind ought to be.

Then rose Roosevelt the Democrat.

He bowed to everybody. To the right, to the left, behind and before, and while doing so, walked about the platform, as he did at intervals during the whole of his speech.

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Speech? It was no address, no oration. He is not an orator. He merely had a friendly chat with an audience he hoped was friendly disposed. Although no speaker, he is convincing. He continually stretched out his right arm and pointed his finger at some particular person and spoke directly to him, as he thundered forth:

“You won’t like it. You won’t like what I am going to say! but I am going to say it, and it is this!” Then glancing at the papers in his left hand, he read all the important parts. He had evidently prepared it with great care, and he said exactly so much and no more. He never gave more than three or four words without a pause; in a staccato way he hurled his ideas at his audience in the simplest language possible, but with a real American accent.

He was grave and weighty. He was very deliberate as he addressed different people by gesture, but he named no one, although Lord Cromer, Sir Edward Grey, and Mr. Balfour, were all at his elbow. One could not help feeling the earnestness of the man, and his claim to be an idealist when he spoke of the future of nations, and begged the public to throw aside the question, “Will it pay?” “Great nations must do great work,” he said, “such work as Panama, or Egypt, and not ask that eternal question, ‘Will it pay?’”

Personally, I think he did it extremely well, and feel also that, coming from a stranger, his words may probably have the desired effect, and make us strengthen our government in Egypt and India before we lose these two grand possessions.

While I was in Washington I again saw my old friend Secretary John Hay, who gave me his photograph taken in December, 1904, and consequently his last. He looked ill then, but was so keenly interested in Mexican affairs, and spoke so eulogistically of General Diaz, that on my return to England I ventured to ask him if he would write a few lines for the Biography of the Mexican President, on which I was by that time working.

He had already started for Europe when the letter arrived, but he wrote the following hurried lines, penned a week after his return to Washington from his last trip in search of health, when he must have been very busy:

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The letter was delivered in London the day following his death.

America has always sent us of her best in Ambassadors, but none was more popular or more respected than Colonel John Hay. The most shy and retiring of men, he abhorred ovations; public speaking was torture to him, yet he was the constant recipient of the first, and was excellent at the second. One of the most cultured of American Ambassadors, he was really a man of letters. He had not the acute legal knowledge of Mr. Choate, nor the diplomatic manner of Mr. Whitelaw Reid, but the world knew him and admired him as a man who was honest to the core.

No Secretary of State ever did more to bring his country to the front than John Hay. A number of most difficult foreign questions requiring prompt decision—Cuba and the Philippines, Japan and China—came to the forefront during his term of office; and the position, maintained in the world of diplomacy by the United States, was, at the time of his death, totally different from that existing when he first entered her service in the Senate at Washington.

Napoleon may have merely boasted when he declared that every French soldier carried a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack. The saying would be literally true if applied to those who march in the ranks of industry and politics in America. There is no office in the State which is not open to the man of brains and grit.

If asked for a type of the go-ahead American who is making his mark, I should be inclined to name John Barrett. I have run across him in several quarters of the globe.

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Keen and shrewd, with a Gargantuan appetite for work, Barrett, at the age of some forty years, had already been United States Minister to Siam, Argentina, Panama, and Colombia; he was Commissioner General to Foreign Nations of the St. Louis World’s Fair, and a year or two later held the important post of Director of the International Bureau of American Republics, towards the establishment of which in Washington, Carnegie gave a million sterling. One of his most marked characteristics is his readiness to act in sudden emergency.

An open-air gathering in a very small New England town was being held in support of Mr. Roosevelt. From the platform a man with a high forehead and intellectual features was making a speech; clearly and logically he dealt with the manner in which his country was fulfilling its obligations in the Philippines and Panama. The speaker showed remarkable personal familiarity with America’s Far Eastern possessions, and with Central American affairs. Many farmers were in the audience. Seeing this, the orator emphasised one of his points with a homely illustration from farm life, adding:

“I know what it is to work on a farm myself.”

That was too much for a stalwart young Democratic rustic, who, with others of the same party, had been attracted to the meeting by curiosity. He eyed the speaker’s faultless frock coat, immaculate shirt front and grey striped trousers, likewise the shining hat on the table behind him. Then he arose in his place and blustered out:

“What bluff are you giving us? You never worked on a farm! Bet yer never milked a cow in your life!”

“Not only have I milked cows,” replied the orator quietly, “but, what is more, I will put up a hundred dollars against the same amount to be put up by you and your party friends—the sum to go to local charity—that I can milk a cow faster than you can. Appoint a committee and produce the cows.”

The challenge was taken up. By the time the speech was brought to its close a committee was selected. It consisted of a Democrat, a Republican, and a woman. Two Jersey cows, procured from a neighbouring farm, were driven on to the platform. In full view of the electors each of the contestants seated himself on a milking stool232 and took a pail between his legs, the orator—“spell-binder” is the Americanism—still in his frock coat, with silk hat tilted on the back of his head.

“Are you ready?” came the words.

“Go!”

The milk rattled in the bottoms of the pails. It was still rattling in the young farmer’s pail when it already had begun to swash in the “spell-binder’s,” and the latter had his cow milked dry before his opponent was half through. The meeting wound up in a blaze of glory for the victor.

That was Mr. John Barrett, the diplomatic representative of his country in Panama, who was spending his leave in electioneering. He paid his way in part through college with money he earned as a day labourer on farms during the summer. First a schoolmaster, he drifted early into journalism, with its wider opportunities, and working on San Francisco newspapers, he divined what had remained hidden from people who had spent all their lives on the Pacific coast—the opportunity that was awaiting America across that vast body of water.

I first met Mr. Barrett when he was brought to call on me in London.

Later, on an October day in 1904, I was sitting in the “Waldorf” in New York, talking to Colonel John Wier, when a man passed. He paused and whisked round.

“Mrs. Alec Tweedie,” he exclaimed. “Why, where have you come from?”

“London; and you, Mr. Barrett?”

“Panama.”

We had both travelled far over the world since he had dined with me in London a couple of years before, and yet our paths crossed in that great meeting-place, the “Waldorf.” It was during his leave from duty which I have just mentioned, and he was very busy. Unfortunately I was leaving the same day for Chicago, but we met again in that city. His enthusiasm for Roosevelt was delightful; “the greatest man on earth,” according to him, “delightful to work under.” They had just been having an hour’s conversation on the telephone, though Washington lies nearly a thousand miles away.

“Won’t you come to Panama and write a book?” he said.233 “The Canal is to be the revolution of the world’s traffic, and one of the finest spokes in the American wheel.”

Poor old Lesseps; adored over Suez, damned over Panama, and then, thirty years later, to have his dearest scheme realised by America, through the aid of hygienic science. But more of my Lesseps friends in a later volume.

Early in 1908 came a charming letter from Mr. Barrett, then at Washington, part of which may be quoted here:

John Barrett is now the head of the Great Pan-American Union of American Republics in Washington.

Clara Morris, another personality of the West, was one of the greatest actresses America has produced, and her book was one of the most realistic presentations of stage life. On going to the States in 1900 I wanted to see her, but she had retired. However, when I returned on my second visit, she was back on the stage—the usual story of reverses.

It so chanced I was in Chicago that October, paying a visit to those delightful people the Francis Walkers. Behind the Footlights was selling well in an American edition, and on learning that I was in the city, the managers of the different theatres most kindly sent me boxes. Success cannot adequately be gauged by gold, it brings friends and opportunities beyond mere dross. One night we went to the Illinois Theatre (since destroyed by fire, with frightful loss of life), and occupied Mr. William Davis’s own box, to see The Two Orphans. There was an “all-star” cast.

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I had never seen that play since I was a little girl. It had been almost my first theatrical experience; and, as the first act proceeded, the story came back with more force than in any production seen for the second time nowadays, after even only a week or two’s interval. These childish impressions had sunk deep in the memory. In Chicago this inferior drama was well acted, and again I noticed how many English people were upon the boards. More than half the actors and actresses of America are English, or of British parentage.

Clara Morris played the nun. She received a perfect ovation, and needed to bow again and again before she was allowed to proceed with her small part. There was a quiet dignity about her, and when she told the lie to save the girl, she rose to a high level of dramatic power. After that Mr. Davis came and took me to her dressing-room.

We did not get into the wings through an iron door direct from the boxes, as in London, but had to go right to the back of the theatre, down some stairs, under the stalls (there never is a pit), below the stage, and upstairs again to the stage, where Clara Morris had a small dressing-room almost on the footlights, it was so far in front. This was the star dressing-room, but it was certainly smaller than those in our theatres, and one cannot imagine how three or four dresses and a dresser ever squeezed into it.

She welcomed us at the door. “Mam, I am delighted to see you,” she said, with a true American “Mam.” Her hand trembled, for she had just left the stage after her big scene, and she was an elderly woman. I told her how keen had been my wish to see her, and how I had quoted her in my book. She knew that, and thanked me, saying many pretty things, and added:

“No, I never dared play in England, although I have been there, and loved it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because of my ac-cent. You see, I was born in the West, where from the age of thirteen I toiled at this profession. I starved and cried, worked and struggled, and when success did come and I moved up East the critics always rubbed in two things—my intonation and my accent. My voice was criticised up hill and down dale. ‘A great actress, but——’ Then came down the hail.235 Mam, if my accent grated in America, among all our awful accents here, what would it have done in Britain, with your soft, beautiful voices? So I refused to go again and again. Then also when success had come I felt, ‘This public likes me, my bed and bread depend upon them; if I go to England and fail they will turn their back upon me, and I shall starve again.’ And so, Mam, regretfully I refused.”

She spoke dramatically, fire shot from those large, wonderful grey eyes. I noticed she was not painted. Only the tiniest amount of make-up I have ever seen on any actress was upon her face, and then I remembered her words of warning upon the subject. In all those years she had not changed her mind.

Her husband, an elderly man with white hair, stood or sat while we talked in the tiny room, and as the last curtain came down I rose to leave.

“Will you give me your photograph, please?”

“My dear, I haven’t one. My ugliness has caused me so much pain in life that I have almost never let a camera be turned upon me. That was my second horror: ‘She is a great actress, but——’ And then down came the bricks upon my looks. God made me this way, but my critics have found it a personal sin.”

And she waxed warm on the subject. Her grey eyes were beautiful, however, they were so expressive; still her mouth was large, and her features heavy and bad. Her voice certainly had grated upon me when I first heard it. With those who found fault with her voice I had sympathy, but none with the beauty-seekers, for expression comes before everything, and Clara Morris’s expression was wonderful.

She wore her wedding ring upon her little finger, for whatever part she played through life she had never taken it off.

“You see how sentimental I have been,” she laughed.

In reply to a question, I replied that I had to be back in England for my boys’ holidays. Only once was I absent at holiday time, and on that occasion they were with my mother.

“Happy woman!” she exclaimed. “How I have always longed for children; though such happiness never came to me. But I have an old mother who still lives, thank God;236 and as long as a woman has a mother she can never grow old or feel lonely.”

Another remarkable figure in America, when I was over there in 1904, was Dowie the prophet, or as some on this side of the Atlantic more correctly termed him—the “Profit”; perhaps the biggest humbug that even his own vast country of adoption has produced.

Of course I went to see Dowie and Zion City; everybody did. The place lay within an hour’s railway journey of Chicago. Four years before it had been waste land. In the interval there had sprung up a railway station, an hotel called Elijah House, a whole town of residences, a huge tabernacle capable of holding seven thousand people, and a population of over ten thousand souls.

Knowing his gross life, the horrible language he used, knowing also that he was hounded out of England for his vituperation against King Edward—his King, for Dowie was born in Edinburgh and had lived only sixteen years in the States—I was surprised to find such a charming, kindly old gentleman. A man nearly seventy years of age, short and stout like Ibsen, with a large strong head and a grey beard; such was “Elijah,” as he pleased to call himself.

Dowie received me in a most magnificent, book-lined library; thousands of well-bound volumes—for which I have since heard he never paid—filled the shelves. Beside him on the table stood a machine that was clicking.

“What is that?” I asked, having visions of dynamite.

He solemnly handed me a telegram which read:

“Tom and Mary Bateson” (or some such names) “are seriously ill; pray for them.”

Looking me full in the face, he remarked:

“Tom and Mary Bateson were cured at 2.55.”

It was then 3.30.

“How?” I asked.

“Through my prayers,” he replied, “by faith.” And taking up a little piece of paper, he clicked on it through the machine.

“A duplicate of this,” he explained, “has been posted to the sick man’s friends so that they may have the record, but of course they felt the benefit of the prayer the moment I gave it237.”

He spoke so solemnly, so impressively, and with such apparent belief in his own infallibility, that he greatly impressed me. I kept the piece of paper as a memento of the occasion. It is short and business-like, and is here reproduced:

PRAYED

NOV 2 2-55 PM 1904

JOHN ALEX. DOWIE.

The man was a charlatan. One felt it in his eyes and in the grasp of his hand; and yet at the same time there was so much enthusiasm about him, it was easy to understand how people came under his sway.

Not one of those ten thousand persons, who then filled Zion City, drank alcohol, smoked tobacco, swore, gambled, or ate swine’s flesh.

The people, whether from fear or love I know not, certainly worshipped the prophet. Unlike the Christian Scientists, he believed in illness, and said it was punishment for sin and would be cured by prayer.

When I saw him he was revelling in every imaginable luxury, decked his wife in diamonds and fine gowns, ate off superb mahogany and handsome silver. Dowie was rich and prosperous, for every one of his followers was forced to give him a tenth of all he earned. Yet such were his extravagances that the largest shop in Chicago took possession of one of his summer residences, and let it, so that the rent might pay their bill.

Prophet or no prophet, Dowie had a keen eye to business. Everything stood in his own name: land, houses, furniture, and, as his son showed no spiritual desires, he educated him as a lawyer, with a view that he should continue in the town, in a business-like way presumably.

Dowie owned also factories of lace, sweets, biscuits, soap, harness, brooms, tailoring, even sewing machines and pianos. His disciples generally came to him with a knowledge of various trades, and he made use of that knowledge in a profitable way.

Dowie was a prodigious humbug, and died a beggar.

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After many happy weeks spent in the States I am not in the least surprised that Englishmen should marry American women. They show their good taste—I should do the same were I a man. Nor am I surprised that American women should prefer Englishmen—for the same remark applies. There is a delightful freedom, an air of comradeship coupled with pleasant manners and pretty looks in the American woman which are most attractive. Her hospitality is unbounded, her generosity thoughtful, and she is an all-round good sort.

The American woman is an excellent speaker. It is surprising to hear her oratory at one of her large club luncheons, such as the Sorosis in New York. I was honoured with an invitation as their special guest (1900), and for the first time in my life saw two hundred women sit down together for a meal. The club woman is young and handsome, well dressed and pleasing, and she stands up and addresses a couple of hundred women just as easily as she would begin a tête-à-tête across a luncheon table. She is not shy, or if she is she hides it cleverly.

Americans entertain royally; they almost overpower the stranger with hospitality. They are generous in a high degree, not only in big things, but in constantly thinking of “little gifts or kindnesses” to shower upon their guests. They become the warmest and truest of friends, in spite of their sensitiveness and hatred of criticism. Never were any people so sensitive about their country or themselves, or so ready to take offence at the slightest critical word. But we all have our weaknesses, and while we are too terribly thick-skinned and self-satisfied, Americans are perhaps too sensitive for their own happiness. They are not only warm friends amongst themselves both in sunshine and in shade, but they are equally staunch to their English visitors. They may in the main be a tiny bit jealous of England, but individually they seem to love British people, and welcome them so warmly one can only regret that more English do not travel in America where they would see her people at their best, for, alas! many of the Americans who come over here leave a wrong impression altogether of the charms of our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic.

The more the inhabitants of these two countries see239 of one another, the better they understand and appreciate each other’s feelings, the stronger are forged the links of the chain of brotherhood. And the stronger this chain is made, the better for the whole world.

America! It is impossible to mention here all the delightful people I met in America, from Mark Twain to Thompson Seton; from Kate Douglas Wiggin to Gertrude Atherton; from Agnes Lant to Julia Marlowe; from Jane Addams to Louise Chandler Moulton; from Dana Gibson to Roosevelt. Their names are legion, and in grateful remembrance they lie until I can visit their shores again, and shake them by the hand. I simply loved the American women.

The following delightful Christmas note from Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the great Shakespearian writer of America, and one of her foremost sons, is an instance of the kindly remembrance and loyal friendliness the American people keep green for their English friends, bridging not only the billowy Atlantic but the swift stream of Time.

CANADA is the land of possibilities.

On September 1st, 1900, I landed at Quebec, with introductions from the late Governor-General of Canada (the Earl of Aberdeen), to be warmly welcomed by the great historian of that country, Sir James Le Moine. He had written endless volumes on the Dominion, among the best known being The Legends of the St. Lawrence and Picturesque Quebec.

As to the writings of this Canadian “worthy,” to quote the word fitly describing him, the following extract from an article dealing with them will best explain to some who may not know what a work of filial love was his in chronicling the history of his native province.

“Nearly half a century ago James Macpherson Le Moine, advocate, and inspector of inland revenue for the district of Quebec, published a modest little volume of historical and legendary lore relating to the city and environs of Quebec, under the title of Maple Leaves. Little had been accomplished, prior to that time, in the way of collecting the scattered wealth of Lower Canadian legends and folklore, and English-speaking Canadians knew scarcely anything of the extremely valuable collections of manuscript sources of early Canadian history, scattered through the vaults of various public buildings in Quebec. To Le Moine, whose maternal grandfather was a Macpherson, though on his father’s side the young author was a French-Canadian, belongs much of the credit, through his English books, in interesting English-speaking Canadians in the history, the traditions, and the archæology of French Canada. It was at his initiative and under his presidency that the Quebec Literary and Historical Society, founded by the Earl of Dalhousie in 1824, undertook the publication of some of242 the most important existing manuscripts concerning the early history of the country.”

The morning after my arrival in Montreal, a week later, various people presented themselves before me—they had seen long notices in the two papers that morning, and came on errands of friendship, or through introductions. One was announced as “Dr. Drummond.”

I looked up; the name conveyed nothing to me; and as I was not ill, I wondered at the visit.

“If I can be of any service to you,” he said, “you have but to command me. I knew your father, his profession is my profession, your profession is mine too.”

“You write? Are you any connection of the Dr. Drummond who wrote the Habitant?” I asked.

“I am he.”

“Oh, then, you can indeed do something for me.”

“And that is?”

“Take me to see the Habitants in their own homes.”

Accordingly I spent several days among the farms and cottages of the old French-Canadians with this large-hearted man. I shall never forget his recitation of his own poems. They brought tears to my eyes and lumps to my throat, they were so simple and so real. And these poor folk loved him. It was a treat to see a man so respected and adored by the people whom he had been at such pains to make understood. Drummond was the Kipling—the Bret Harte of Canada. He was not much of a French scholar. His accent was horrible, but he comprehended. He had that human understanding and perception that count for more than mere words. He would sit and smoke in the corner with an old man, and draw him out to tell me stories while the wife made cakes for our tea.

Complimenting me on my French, he said:

“I can’t speak like you; often I can’t even say or ask what I want.”

“Perhaps if you knew more, you would not be able to make your poems so quaint,” I replied.

“I believe you are right. I jot down the English or French words just as I use them, as the Habitants use them, and perhaps if I knew more I should not do that.”

He was so human, so lovable, and at that time so poor. Half a dozen years afterwards Fortune smiled. His books243 were selling well; his cobalt mines had begun to pay. Then he heard disease (smallpox I think it was) had broken out at the far-away mines.

“I must go,” he said. “I cannot take the money these men are bringing me, without going to their help.”

He went; but almost before he had had time to make his medical knowledge of value to them, he was himself stricken and died.

Poor Drummond, a lovable character, and a genial comrade. The following verses are a good specimen of his style. They are taken from “The Habitant’s Jubilee Ode,” written at the time of the celebration of the sixtieth year of Queen Victoria’s rule. Why, the Habitant is asking himself, are the “children of Queen Victoriaw comin’ from far away? For tole Madame w’at dey t’ink of her, an’ wishin’ her bonne santé.” The answer is good French-Canadian and good sense:

If de moder come dead w’en you’re small garçon, leavin’ you dere alone,

Wit’ nobody watchin’ for fear you fall, and hurt youse’f on de stone,

An’ ’noder good woman she tak’ your han’ de sam’ your own moder do,

Is it right you don’t call her moder, is it right you don’t love her too?

Bâ non, an’ dat was de way we feel, w’en de old Regime’s no more,

An’ de new wan come, but don’t change moche, w’y it’s jus’ lak’ it be before,

Spikin’ Français lak’ we alway do, an’ de English dey mak’ no fuss,

An’ our law de sam’, wall, I don’t know me, ’twas better mebbe for us.

So de sam’ as two broder we settle down, leevin’ dere han’ in han’,

Knowin’ each oder, we lak’ each oder, de French an’ de Englishman,

For it’s curi’s t’ing on dis worl’, I’m sure you see it agen an’ agen,

Dat offen de mos’ worse ennemi, he’s comin’ de bes’, bes’ frien’.

Drummond spent part of his boyhood among the woods and rivers of Eastern Canada. His own record of these early days was graphic. He said: “I lived in a typical mixed-up village—Bord à Plouffe—composed of French and English-speaking raftsmen, or ‘voyageurs,’ as we call them—the class of men who went with Wolseley to the244 Red River, and later accompanied the same general up the Nile—men with rings in their ears, dare-devils, Indians, half-breeds, French-Canadians, Scotch and Irish-Canadians—a motley crew, but great ‘river men’ who ran the rapids, sang their quaint old songs—‘En Roulant,’ ‘Par Derrière chez ma Tante,’ and ‘Dans le prison de Nantes,’ songs forgotten in France, but preserved in French Canada. Running the rapids with these men, I learned to love them and their rough ways.”

At the poet’s funeral a poor countrywoman of Drummond—he was an Irishman by birth—was heard to say:

“Shure, he was the doctor that come into yer sickroom like an archangel.”

The amount of French still spoken in Canada is surprising to a stranger. One hardly expects to find French policemen on English soil, or the law courts conducted in the French tongue.

Some of the old French title-deeds in Canada are very amusing. A friend wanted to buy a small piece of property a few years ago, adjoining some he already possessed on the shores of the St. Lawrence. Apart from acquiring the land itself, there were “certain obligations which formed a charge upon the property,” and these were so wonderful they are worth repeating.

“EXTRACT FROM DEED OF CESSION BETWEEN CERTAIN PARTIES.

This extraordinary deed was only drawn in 1866. The old man is now dead, also one of the girls; the other is in a convent out West, and my friend managed to compromise246 with her for a small sum instead of letting her sit at his table, keep her in clothing, or provide her with potatoes.

In Ottawa I was the guest of the man who was probably doing more than anyone else for the agricultural development of Canada. The great strides with which in this Department she has surprised the world were primarily due to the enterprise of a Scotchman, Professor James Robertson, who held the post of Agricultural Commissioner from 1895 to 1904. He has written volumes on the subject, as well as being successful practically. It will be remembered that this able man had come to speak for me in London at the International Council of Women earlier in the year. After writing London, I ought to have put Eng., as no Canadian thinks of our London unless it has “Eng.” after it.

As a boy he left his father’s farm in the Lowlands of Scotland, where he had been working, and, full of enthusiasm and enterprise, sailed for Canada. He had much practical knowledge at his back, and many theoretical ideas in his mind, that he found difficult to work out in the narrow limits of a Scotch homestead. That lad’s name is probably one of the best known and most respected in Canada to-day, and yet it is not so many years since he landed, for he is still in the prime of life.

Professor James Robertson is a wonderful man; he retains his Scotch accent, has made practical use of his shrewd, hard-headed, far-sighted upbringing, and has about the most extraordinary capacity for work of almost any man I know. His energy is unbounded, and his physical powers of endurance marvellous.

Since I was in Canada in 1900, the increase of population and the output of the land is simply amazing. Roughly speaking, the population was then six millions; to-day it numbers over seven millions.

Growth! Growth! Growth! Wherever one turns there is growth in Canada; her cultured lands; her enormous crops; her untold mineral and forest wealth; her wonderful fisheries and water power; her gigantic railroads; her large cities—one knows not where they end. The Dominion Government with its experimental farms, and agricultural colleges, with its free grants of land which in 1910 equalled247 half of Scotland in area, affords, to Canadian and immigrant alike, facilities unparalleled in history. With such bountiful natural resources, such able statesmen at the helm, and such advantages from modern discoveries; when the rapidity of locomotion binds the ends of the earth together, and nations from divers continents hold daily converse with each other, rendering the world’s contemporary history an open book, the young country of the twentieth century has advantages never even dreamt of by the pioneers of past ages.

Surely Canada should be the nursery of Empire builders, and her sons the makers of history, and she will continue so, unless too much laudation turns her head, and she ceases to strive.

Professor Robertson took me to see Dr. Parkin, of Upper Canada College, Toronto, another of the best-known writers of the Dominion; his most widely read work being The Life of Edward Thring, the great reformer of boys’ schools, whose devoted admirer the Doctor is. Upper Canada College is like Eton, Harrow, or Charterhouse. It is a magnificent building, and everything seemed charmingly arranged.

Dr. Parkin is a delightful personality, a great scholar, a kindly teacher, and a staunch friend; he now lives in England, having been appointed—about two years after my visit—the organising representative of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust.

At his house I met Colonel George Denison, who had just written Soldiering in Canada, a book as well known on this side of the Atlantic as on the other. It was his grandfather, a Yorkshireman, who went out to Canada and founded “York,” now known as Toronto. The Colonel is an interesting companion and a good raconteur.

Sir William Macdonald may perhaps be said to have been the chief mover of education in Canada for many years. He was justly proud of McGill University in Montreal, and must have been gratified at the success of the manual training schools in different parts of Canada, which owed so much to his generosity. To him also Canada is indebted for the Macdonald Agricultural College at Ste. Anne de Bellevue, which he established and endowed at enormous cost.

248

No word on Canada, however brief, would be right without reference to Goldwin Smith.

Born in 1823, he died at a ripe age a few weeks after King Edward, to whom he had once been tutor in English history, and of whom the teacher said admiringly:

“He never once let me see he was bored, therefore I gathered he would successfully fulfil the arduous duties of royalty.”

After leaving England for the United States in 1864, Goldwin Smith saw something of the great Civil War. Later he came to Toronto, and there lived out his days in a charming old house called “The Grange.”

He told me emphatically in 1900 that “within ten years Canada would be annexed by the United States.” Goldwin Smith died just a decade later, and Canada seemed then more Imperial, more British, more loyal than ever. But a few months later came this wheat business in Washington, and up sprang the old cry of annexation.

There are a number of interesting writers in Canada. Most of them were born in England, and went there as children; there are others who were born there and have migrated back to England. Of the latter class Dr. Beattie Crozier is, at the present time, most before the public. He describes his early days in Canada vividly in My Inner Life, but Intellectual Development is one of the most readable philosophies ever written. He has a knack of putting the most abstruse subjects in the clearest possible light. Dr. Crozier lives in London, where he practises medicine. A few years ago a terrible affliction threatened to befall him. He went nearly blind. His eyes are now better, but to save them as much as possible, his wife writes everything for him to his dictation, looks up his data, translates French and German philosophies; in fact, is his helpmate in the true sense of the word. They are a devoted couple. One of those pretty ideal homes one loves to see, and which are often found in the busiest lives. The doctor resembles a smart officer in appearance; no one would ever take him for one of the profoundest thinkers of the day.

Sir Gilbert Parker is a Canadian; but he, like Dr. Crozier, now lives in London.

249

Lord Strathcona is another of the wonderful men of Canada. He is indeed their “Grand Old Man.”

One of the things that most struck Ibsen about the English-speaking race was their capacity for strenuous work at an advanced age. “Britishers often take up important positions in that span of life in which men of other nations are laying down their arms,” he once said to me.

It was at a dinner given to Sir Henniker Heaton, of Post Office fame, on his retirement from Parliament (1910) by the Men of Kent, that I was particularly struck by Lord Strathcona. I was sitting next the old gentleman with Sir George Reid, the High Commissioner for Australia, on my other side. It was really most remarkable to find a man of ninety years of age so clear and concise, and practical and sensible in every way. With the rather weak voice of an old man, he spoke well and to the point, referring to the blessings of penny postage, which Henniker Heaton had made possible to all the English-speaking world, comparing it with the days when he first went to Canada seventy years before, and each letter cost four shillings, and eight shillings for a double page, and no envelopes were used, as they increased the weight.

A fine well-chiselled head, Lord Strathcona has become a greater old man than he was a young man. His life has been remarkable for its steady Scotch perseverance and extraordinary luck, which, through the Hudson Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway, gave him affluence. It was not brilliancy or genius that brought him to the position he attained, but just that hard-headed Scotch capacity for plodding. Luck leads to nothing without pluck.

He talked quite cheerily of his next visit to Canada, the ocean holding no terrors for him, and he explained that his house in Montreal was always kept open and ready to step into. The same with his place at Glencoe, where he had only been able to spend four days in the year, much to his regret.

It was midnight before that old gentleman went home, to begin an early and hard day the next morning, for he is indefatigable at his work for Canada as High Commissioner, and is to be found every day and all day in his office in Victoria Street at the age of ninety-two.

“Yes,” he said, “Canada has a great future, though we250 must send out the right people. Ne’er-do-weels will do no good anywhere, and hard workers will always get on. Hard workers will get a hundred per cent greater reward in Canada than in Great Britain, while ne’er-do-weels will do worse, as there are no philanthropic institutions to bolster them up, or pamper them, as there are here.”

He is modest—almost shy and retiring. Very courtly in manner, in spite of his humble origin; but, then, he is one of Nature’s gentlemen.

Short in stature—the red hair almost white, but still peeping through the beard—his stoop and tottering, dragging gait denote age—also his slowness of speech; but his mind is all there—alive and active and full of thought and force.

Men may rise to great power in a new country if they only have the grit.

The life of another such in Canada, merely as known to the public by newspaper notices, reads like a romance.

His last night before leaving England in February, 1909, Mr. Fielding wished to see the popular play An Englishman’s Home. There was not a seat in the house; but by a little judicious management, with some difficulty I secured two tickets at the last moment. I dined with him at the “Savoy,” and then we went on to the theatre. Being short-sighted, I was holding up my glasses. The theatre was darkened during the act. Suddenly I found251 something warm and soft deposited in my lap. Dropping the glasses, I felt, and, lo! to my amazement, it was a head. A human, curly head. Naturally surprised, I wondered where it came from, and whether the man—for man it was—had had a fit, or was dying. I saw Mr. Fielding pushing him up from the other side. Then the head, murmuring apologies sotto voce, rose, but it was too dark, and the house too silent to find out what had really happened.

When the curtain came down and the lights went up, behold the poor owner of the head, who was sitting on the floor, covered with confusion.

“I am very sorry, madam,” he said. “It was most unfortunate, but my seat gave way.” In fact, the stall on which this good gentleman had been sitting had collapsed, sending his head into my lap, and his legs into the lap of the lady on the other side. A pretty predicament.

The rush on the play was so great that extra stalls had been added, until we had barely room for our knees. These had evidently not been properly coupled together: when at some exciting moment in the play, the gentleman had presumably laughed or coughed, and his downfall ensued.

There lay the blue plush seat on the ground, and under it, his top-hat squashed flat.

What a furore that play made, and yet there was little or nothing in it. But success came from the fact that it struck the right note, and struck it at the moment when the nation was ready for the awakening. How it was boomed! Men rushed to join the Territorials, and even I was one of the first women to send in my name for the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps. But, as they asked me to go to a riding-school to learn to ride—I, who had ridden all my life—I really could not go further in the matter.

Mr. Fielding is a most interesting personality and character.

“We are so apt to forget the good things of life,” he said that evening. “I wanted a motor-bus just now. There was none at the corner, and I had to walk. I felt annoyed. Then I pulled myself up, and thought—How many dozen times have I caught this bus just at the moment I wanted it! Did I ever feel or express gratitude?252 Yet when I miss it I growl—now is this fair?—and I shook myself and felt ashamed.”

“Very noble of you,” I said.

“Not at all. But I am always saying to myself I have no right to grumble, no right to be annoyed while I omit to be thankful and grateful for the manifold blessings around me.”

Speaking of nervousness being the cause of my refusal to go to Leeds that week to address five thousand people, Mr. Fielding laughed.

“How I sympathise with you! For twenty years I have been before the public, and yet have never made a speech without a little twinge.”

Of his chief, Laurier, he remarked: “It is an astonishing thing how much more English than French he has become. Forty years of constant communication with, and work amongst, British-speaking people has moulded him along British lines, and although the French manner and charm remain, British determination, doggedness, clear sight, and broad views are dominant. In fact, I far more often find him reading an English book than a French one, when I enter his library.”

Then briefly touching on his own doings:

“I’ve been in England two months, and sail to-morrow morning—came for two things, and accomplished both. First, the trade treaty with France begun eighteen months ago. Secondly, to raise six million sterling in London. I’ve also done that this week; and am now going home with the money, chiefly for our trans-continental railway.

“Treaty? Well, as a rule, only kings can make treaties, but in Canada we are given a good deal of power. This is the second time I have been made a Plenipotentiary in a way—a one-man affair when ready, signed by Sir Francis Bertie.”

“A treaty with France, and you don’t know French.”

“Ah, but I know my subject, Mam. Don’t scorn me for my want of French. In the province where I was born it was not wanted, and when it was needed I was too busy to learn; telephone bells or messengers were going all the time, so I had to give it up, but I’ll learn it yet, I hope.”

“Do you require French in the Canadian House?”

“No, we are mostly English members, and although253 some of the Frenchmen speak in French, and all things by law are read in both languages, the Frenchmen generally stop the reading and consent to take it as read. Laurier for twenty years has always spoken in English; perfect English. Lemieux speaks in English. In fact, to get the ear of the House one must speak in English.”

“Are the French-Canadians as loyal as the English-Canadians?”

“Yes, but in a different way. We are loyal because it is born in the blood; they are loyal from gratitude, and because they know England gave them freedom. They are more loyal than we should have been to France if that fight on the Plains of Abraham had been won by the French.”

Sir Wilfrid Laurier I do not know as I know Mr. Fielding or Mr. Lemieux, but Sir Wilfrid Laurier is a great personality. He struck me as a wonderful type when I first went up in a lift with him at the Windsor Hotel in Montreal, although I did not then know who he was. There is a rugged strength about his face that impresses. He is a scholar and a gentleman, speaks perfect English, and has great charm of manner.

He said in the Dominion House of Commons:

“I would say to Great Britain, ‘If you want us to help you, call us to your councils.’”

Another time, when talking of Lloyd George’s Budget, W. S. Fielding remarked:

“I have made thirteen Budgets, the only man who ever did such a thing, I should imagine; and I know from experience people always grumble. They grumble at everything and anything. To-day at Ascot (1910) a man was abusing Lloyd George’s Budget. ‘There are a few thousand people in the Royal Enclosure,’ I said, ‘and I should think every one of them disapproves. They are rich, and it hits them. There are tens of thousands of people over there on the race-course. They are poor, and they are glad. Was not Lloyd George right, therefore, to consider the millions?’”

Mr. Fielding possesses an enormous power for work. On one occasion, after a tête-à-tête dinner with me, he went home about eleven, and finding letters and documents awaiting him, sat up till five a.m. and finished them, also254 deciphering long Government telegrams in code. Next morning he began work at ten again.

Quiet, gentle, reserved, Fielding strikes one as a delightful, grey-headed old gentleman of honest, homely kindliness. He never says an unkind thing of anyone. Toleration is his dominant note, and yet with all that calm exterior he has proved himself the greatest treaty-maker of his age, as well as the most successful handler of budgets and manœuvrer of great Government loans; but he failed over Reciprocity.

This chapter would be incomplete without mention of the late Canadian “Ministre des postes,” M. Lemieux, of whom Fielding said: “He is one of the cleverest men in Canada.”

“Your King, my King, our King, is the most perfect gentleman I have ever met. Il est tout à fait gentilhomme,” so remarked the Hon. Rodolphe Lemieux, K.C., when Postmaster-General of Canada, to me in my little library, immediately on his return from Windsor, when King Edward was still our Sovereign.

Then one of the most prominent politicians in Canada, for he was not only P.M.G., but Minister of Labour for the Dominion, M. Lemieux is another man still in his prime. He was born about 1860. A French-Canadian by birth, he speaks English almost faultlessly, an accomplishment learnt by habit and ear during the last few years, and not from a lesson-book.

When I first met M. Lemieux in Canada about 1900, he hardly knew any English. Six or seven years later he could get up and address a large audience in our tongue with ease and fluency. Yet this art has been acquired during the most strenuous years of his life.

“I’m in London,” he replied to a question one day, “to try to settle the All Red Route cable between Britain and her Colony.”

Lemieux is an extraordinarily strong character. Of medium height, inclined to be stout, sallow of skin, clean-shaven, with slightly grey hair, standing up straight like a Frenchman’s; great charm of manner, not fulsome, but gracious, and at times commanding. He gets excited and marches about the room, waving his hands—nice hands, broad, but small for his sex—and pursing his mouth. A man of strength, and a gentle, kindly being. Very255 ambitious, and yet, as he says truly, “What is success, when once attained?”

One night I was to dine with him. Nothing would do but he must fetch me in a taxi. We went to the “Ritz,” where he had ordered an excellent little dinner, and where a lovely bunch of roses and lilies was beside my plate. When he went at five to order the dinner, he had ordered the flowers and a pin!

The day after his arrival at his London hotel his little jewel-case was stolen. He told me almost in tears. “Recollections, souvenirs, gone, my wife’s first present to me—a scarf-pin. Her great-grandmother’s earring. My ring as Professor of Law, gone. I feel I have lost real friends—friends of years and friends I valued. Their worth was little, their sentiment untold.”

A treaty between Canada and Japan allowed free emigration. At once ten thousand Japanese descended on Canada. Yellow peril was imminent. Lemieux was sent to Japan. After delicate manipulation he got the treaty altered, so that only four hundred Japanese should land in a year, a regulation that brought him much renown.

Then the Lemieux Act, which means amicable discussion between parties before arbitration, was brought in. One representative from each side and one representative of the Minister of Labour meet; everything is sifted to the bottom and published, with the result that few cases ever go to arbitration, but are generally settled by this intermediate body. It works so successfully that Roosevelt sent people from the United States to study its working, and the sooner Great Britain does something to settle her strikes along the same lines the better.

Yes, Canada impressed me, charmed me, and as I am proud to reckon, after ten years, two of the late Cabinet Ministers among my best friends, not forgetting one of the leading spirits in agriculture, I have followed the remarkable development of Canada with interest. She will expand even more in the next ten years. Canada is a land to reckon with. She can produce wealth, and as long as the Socialist does not enter to destroy that wealth, and distribute it, Canada will forge ahead. No one was more surprised than the Liberal Cabinet at their overthrow in 1911; they were more surprised even than Borden at his great victory.

AT a public dinner the photographer said, “The people at the bottom tables buy the photos, the people at the top table steal the pencils.”

Half the public dinners are attended by women nowadays, and yet women did not even dine at the tables of their lords and masters in the eighteenth century. They then took a back seat. Now in the twentieth century women with common interests bind themselves together into societies, recognising that “union is strength,” and they too follow the tradition of ages, and preserve the sacred English habit of organising dinners.

Is there any more thoroughly British custom, institution, or act of national feeling, than a dinner? Heroes, potentates, benefactors to mankind, are given a mighty Guildhall feast by the Chief Representative of our great capital—the mightiest in the world. Other nations hold banquets, but with them wreaths and ribbons are more to the fore than turtle soup and barons of beef.

One public dinner that afforded me personally special pleasure was given by the New Vagabond Club, on my return from my first visit to Mexico, when a great compliment was paid me. Following their custom, the Vagabonds had singled out two writers of recent books to be honoured. The one, Sir Gilbert Parker, as author of his great novel The Right of Way, as their guest, and myself in the chair, because Mexico as I saw It was kindly considered (to quote the cards of invitation) “one of the best travel-books of the year.” We numbered three hundred. Modesty forbids repetition of the speeches. Obituary notices and speeches are always laudatory.

At another New Vagabond Dinner held at the Hotel Cecil, I remember being much amused by a young officer257 of the Königin Augusta Garde in Berlin, who was my guest. We had barely taken our seats when a deep sonorous voice roared forth:

“Pray, silence for his Lordship the Bishop of ——.”

“What a splendid voice that gentleman has,” exclaimed my German friend.

“It is the toast-master,” I replied.

“Toast?” he said, “but that is something to eat,” and before further explanation was possible the Bishop began to say grace, and everyone stood up.

“Is this the King’s health?” asked the Baron, lifting his empty glass.

“No, it’s grace,” I answered.

“What is grace? It seems like a prayer.”

“So it is, for your good behaviour,” I said.

“Do you always have it?”

“Yes, when we go out to dinner.”

“And not at home?”

“Oh no, we are only good like that and enjoy all that official ceremony at public dinners.”

He was much tickled at the idea, and likewise relieved that the King’s health was not being toasted with empty glasses.

Another public feast—the Dinner of the Society of Authors, in 1907—gave me still more food for mirth, besides intellectual and other enjoyment.

My seat at the top table placed me between Mr. Bernard Shaw and Lord Dunsany. Exactly opposite was one of the fork tables that filled the room, and gave accommodation to about two hundred and fifty guests. In the corner facing us sat a nice little old lady. Somehow she reminded me of a cock-sparrow. She was petite and fragile, with a perky little way, and her iron-grey hair was cut short. She looked at my neighbour on my left, consulted her programme, on which she read the name of Bernard Shaw, smiled with apparent delight, preened herself, and then the following conversation began:

Old Lady (beaming across table): “I do love your writing.”

Grey-bearded Gentleman (bowing): “Thank you very much.”

Old Lady: “One sees the whole scene so vividly before one258.”

The grey-bearded gentleman bowed again.

Old Lady (bending a little nearer): “They live and move. The characters almost dance before one.”

Grey-bearded Gentleman (evidently rather pleased): “It’s good of you to say so. So few people read my sort of stuff as a rule.”

Old Lady: “They are works of inspiration! By the by, how does inspiration come to you?”

Grey-bearded Gentleman: “Well, it’s rather difficult to say. Anywhere, I think. An idea often flashes through my mind in a crowd, or even when someone is talking to me.”

Old Lady (flapping her wings with delight, and evidently hoping she was an inspiration): “Would you be so very kind as to sign my autograph book?”

“With pleasure,” was the reply. And thereupon she produced a tiny little almanac from her pocket and a stylographic pen, and with a beaming smile remarked:

“Under your name, please write Man and Superman!”

He turned to her with a puzzled look, and then this is what ensued:

“That is my favourite play.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t you love it the best?”

“Never read it in my life.”

“What! never read your own masterpiece!”

“No, madam. I am afraid you have made a mistake.”

“What! You do not mean to say that you are not Bernard Shaw?”

“No. I’m only Lewis Morris, the poet.”

Momentary collapse of the old lady, and amusement of my neighbour. By this time I was in fits. Shaw having telegraphed he would not come in till the meat course was over, Sir Lewis Morris had asked me if he might take his place.

Old Lady (collecting herself): “Never mind. You had better sign your autograph, all the same.”

And, not knowing whether to laugh or scowl, Sir Lewis Morris put on his glasses and wrote his name, then turning to me, said:

“Well, that was a funny adventure.”

Bernard Shaw himself arrived a little later, and sitting259 near us, waited for the moment when he was to get up and reply for the drama. Being a vegetarian, he had avoided the first part of the dinner.

A merry twinkle hung round his eye all the time he talked, and with true Irish brogue he duly pronounced all his wh’s as such, and mixed up will and shall! His red beard was almost grey, and his face has become older and more worn since success weighed him down, and wealth oppressed him so deeply.

I could not agree with Lewis Morris’s self-depreciatory remark that few people “read my sort of stuff,” for I learnt on very excellent authority that publishers have sold more than forty-five thousand copies of his Epic of Hades—not bad for poetic circulation—and that this and the Songs of Two Worlds shared between them sixty editions.

Poor Lewis Morris died a few months after this little comedy occurred.

To continue with G. B. S., here may be given the recollection of a luncheon at his home one day.

From dinners to a luncheon!—well, that is no great digression. Longer, certainly, than from luncheon to dinner, with five o’clock tea thrown in. To part from Bernard Shaw is too impossible.

“Mrs. Bernard Shaw” is the name upon the little oak gate across the stairway leading to the second-floor flat near the Strand.

Below are a club, offices, and other odds and ends, above and beyond the gate the great G. B. S. is to be found. “Bring your man to lunch here,” was the amusing reply I received to a note asking the Shaws to dine and meet “George Birmingham” (the Rev. James Hannay), the famous Irish novelist.

Accordingly, to lunch “my man” and I repaired. Everything about George Bernard Shaw is new. The large drawing-room overlooking the Thames is furnished in new art—a modern carpet, hard, straight-lined, white enamelled bookcases, a greeny yellow wall—a few old prints, ’tis true—and over the writing-table, his own bust by Rodin, so thin and aristocratic in conception, that it far more closely resembles our mutual friend Robert Cunninghame Graham. No curtains; open windows;260 sanitation; hygiene; vegetarianism; modernism on every side. Bernard Shaw has no reverence for age or custom, antiquity or habit—a modern man, his is a modern home, only rendered homelike by the touch of a charming woman. It is wonderful how loud-talking Socialism succumbs to calm, peaceful, respectable comfort. Since his marriage the Socialist has given up much of the practice of his theories, and is accepting the daily use of fine linen and silver, the pleasures of flowers and dainty things; he politely owns himself the happier for them; but then Mrs. Bernard Shaw is a refined and delightful woman.

George Bernard Shaw comes from Dublin, his wife from far-away Cork. She is well-connected, clever, and tactful, and the sheet-anchor of G. B. S.

Shaw was at his best. He ate nuts and grapes while we enjoyed the pleasures of the table. I told him I had first heard of him in Berlin, in 1892, long before he had been talked of here. I had seen Arms and the Man in the German capital—that, eight years later, I was haunted by Candida in America, and then came back to find him creeping into fame in England. That delighted him.

“Yes, I insist on rehearsing every line of my own plays whenever it is possible—if I can’t, well, they do as they like.”

I told him I had seen Ibsen’s slow, deliberate way of rehearsing, and W. S. Gilbert’s determined persuasion. What did he do?

“I like them to read their parts the first time. Then I can stop them, and give them my interpretations, and when they are learning them at home, my suggestions soak in. If they learn their words first, they also get interpretations of their own, which I may have to make them unlearn. I hate rehearsals; they bore me to death; sometimes I have forty winks from sheer ennui; but still I stick there, and, like the judge, wake up when wanted.”

“Do you get cross?”

“No. I don’t think so. I correct, explain why, and go ahead. I never let them repeat; much better to give the correction, and let them think it out at home; if one redoes the passage they merely become more and more dazed, I find261.”

“Speaking of Ibsen, do you think his influence was so great?” I asked.

“Undoubtedly. But the movement was in the air. I had written several of my plays which, when they appeared, the critics said showed Ibsen’s influence, and yet at that time I had never read a word of Ibsen. He emphasised and brought out what everyone was feeling; but he never got away from the old idea of a ‘grand ending,’ a climax—a final curtain.”

“Plays are funny things,” he continued. “A few years ago I received a letter from a young man in the country. He said his people were strict Methodists, he had never been in a theatre in his life, he had not even been allowed to read Shakespeare, but Three Plays by Shaw had fallen into his hands, and he had read them. He felt he must write a play. He had written one. Would I read it? I did. It was crude, curious, middle-aged, stinted, and yet the true dramatic element was there. He had evolved a village drama from his own soul. I wrote and told him to go on, and showed him his faults, but never heard any more of him.

“Once a leading actor-manager of mine took to drink. I heard it; peril seemed imminent. I wrote and told him I had met a journalist, named Moriarty, who had found him drunk in the street; explained that under the influence of alcohol he had divulged the most appalling things, which, if true, would make it necessary for me to find someone else to play the part. Terrible despair! Many letters at intervals. I continued to cite Moriarty, and all went well. One fine day a letter came, saying my manager had met the tale-bearer. He had happened to call at a lady’s house, and there Moriarty stood. The furious manager nearly rushed at his enemy’s throat to kill him; but being in a woman’s drawing-room, he deferred his revenge. Nevertheless, he would, by Jove, he would do it next time, if he heard any more tales. Vengeance, daggers!

“Then I quaked. I had to write and say my ‘Moriarty’ was a myth, so he had better leave the unoffending personage alone.” And G. B. S. twinkled merrily through those sleepy grey eyes as he told the tale.

Once I was inveigled into editing and arranging a souvenir book for University College Hospital, of which more anon.262 I asked Mr. Shaw to do something for the charity. This is his characteristic reply, written on a post card:

Yet another public dinner stands out prominently in my memory.

Quite a crowd attended the Women Journalists’ Dinner of November, 1907. Mrs. Humphry Ward was in the chair. Next to her was the Italian Ambassador, the Marquis263 di San Giuliano, and then myself. My neighbour was especially interesting as the descendant of an old Sicilian family, Lords of Catania since the time of the Crusades, and also because he himself had earned a considerable name in literature. Later he left London for the Embassy in Paris, and is now in Rome, as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Taking up my card, his Excellency exclaimed:

“Why, are you the lady who wrote that charming book on Sicily?”

I nodded.

“I am a Sicilian, and I thank you, madam,” he said. In fact, in the exuberance of his spirits, he shook and re-shook me by the hand.

We became great friends, and he often came in to have a talk about his native land.

A Sicilian, he sat in the Italian Parliament for many years, and was three years in the Ministry; then, in 1905, he was asked to come to London as Ambassador. He had never been in the diplomatic service, and had only visited Great Britain as a tourist; in fact, he feared the climate, on account of rheumatism, which at fifty-two had nearly crippled him. But pressure was brought to bear, so he came to St. James’s.

He declared England to be most hospitable, the people were so kind and opened their doors so readily; and he loved the climate. He was delighted he had come.

“In Sicily,” he said, “you are right in saying that we are still in the seventeenth century. We have much to learn. I believe in women having equal rights with men in everything. I think they ought to have the suffrage. Your women in England are far more advanced than in Italy, and I admire them for it. I have the greatest respect and love and admiration for women. My wife came from Tuscany. She was advanced for an Italian, and she first opened my eyes to the capabilities of women. I hope before I die to see them in a far better position than they already hold. They have helped us men through centuries and they deserve reward.”

What a delight the Marquis di San Giuliano will be to the suffragists among his own countrywomen if ever they264 attain to the advancement of our own Parliament Square agitators.

He lunched with me one day early in January, 1908, and afterwards drove me down to the Pfeiffer Hall of Queen’s College, Harley Street, where, with Sir Charles Holroyd as chairman, he had promised to deliver a lecture to the Dante Society. Its subject was the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, the whole of which the Ambassador read in Italian. Then he went on to comment upon the text in English, and explained the symbolical meaning of Ulysses’s voyage and wreck.

I was struck by a theory which the lecturer advanced: that the canto was possibly one of the factors that helped to produce the state of mind in Christopher Columbus which prepared him for his immortal discovery. In the inventory of the estate of a Spaniard who was a comrade of Columbus, one of the items named was a copy of Dante’s poem. It was probable that Columbus, an Italian, and much more educated than this officer, was in the habit of reading the book. It was known that a certain astronomer who was one of Columbus’s foremost inspirers, was a keen Dante student. Probably Columbus’s track, as far as the Canary Isles, varied but little from that of Ulysses. Certainly in Columbus’s speech to his wavering crew is found an echo of Ulysses’s exhortation.

On the drive to Queen’s College the Marquis wore a thick fur coat, and it was a mild day; I remarked upon it.

“I always transpire so, when I speak, that I am afraid of catching cold,” he replied.

What a trouble all these oddities of our language must be to foreigners. I remember a more amusing slip from the talented wife of a very public man, who speaks the English tongue with perfect grace and charm. I had asked if her husband wore his uniform when performing annually a great historic ceremony.

“Oh no, he wears his nightdress,” she replied, meaning his dress clothes.

Apropos of the Milton Centenary the Italian Ambassador was asked to speak at the Mansion House on “Milton in connection with Dante.” He motored down to my mother’s house in Buckinghamshire, where I was staying, and together we explored Milton’s cottage, where the poet wrote265 Paradise Regained and corrected Paradise Lost. We spent some time looking over manuscripts and photographs, in order that he should be saturated with the subject, and the next night he went to the Mansion House full of his theme.

“I got up,” said His Excellency, “referred to Milton, then to Dante, knowing that this was only my preliminary canter to personal reminiscences to come. What were those reminiscences? I gazed at that vast audience. I pondered. I knew there was something very important I had to say. I returned to the dissimilarity of the two men’s work. I wondered what my great point was, and finally with a graceful reference to poetry, I sat down.

“Then, and not till then, did I remember I had cracked the nut, and left out a description of Milton’s home, the kernel of my speech.”

This man is a brilliant speaker in Italian and French, and quite above the average in English and German. Which of us who has made a speech has not, on sitting down, remembered the prized sentence has been forgotten?

The Marquis gave some delightful dinners in Grosvenor Square. I met Princes, Dukes, authors, artists, actors, and even Labour Members of Parliament, at his table. He was interested in all sides of life, and all the time he was in England he continued to take lessons in our language.

I first met Mr. Cecil Rhodes in December, 1894, at a dinner-party which was notable for its Africans, Dr. Jameson and H. M. Stanley being there as well. A woman’s impression of a much-talked-of man may not count for much. He sat next me. I was fairly young and maybe attractive, I suppose, so he talked to me as if I were a baby or a doll. To be candid, I took a particular dislike to Rhodes from the moment I first saw him. A tall, some might say a handsome, man, his face was round and red, and not a bit clever so far as appearances went. He looked like an overfed well-to-do farmer, who enjoyed the good things of this life. He seemed self-opinionated, arrogant, petulant, and scheming—no doubt what the world calls “a strong man.” There seemed no human or soft side to his character at all. Self, self, ambition. And self again marked every word he uttered.

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Of course he was masterful. Even his very Will denoted that. It was hard, cool-headed, calculating, and less generous to his family than it might have been.

Still Rhodes did great things, and was it not he who said, “It is a good thing to have a period of adversity”? Mighty true—but strangely disagreeable.

Although outwardly so indifferent to everyone and everything, Cecil Rhodes was not above the vanities. He and a friend of mine had been boys together, and Rhodes became godfather to one of the latter’s children, a post which he considered held serious responsibilities. He wished to make his godson a valuable present. It was the proud parent’s idea to ask the great African to let the gift be his portrait.

“Of course I will,” said Cecil Rhodes; “arrange the artist and terms, and tell me when I am to sit, and I’ll go.”

So matters were settled. An artist was asked to undertake the commission, and one fine day my friend took Rhodes round to the studio for the first sitting.

The artist decided to paint him side face. Rhodes petulantly refused to be depicted anything but full face. Discussion waxed warm, and, naturally, my poor friend felt very uncomfortable. However, the artist, claiming the doctor’s privilege of giving orders and expecting to be obeyed, began his work on his own lines.

Cecil Rhodes gave only the first sitting and one other. Then, finding the picture was really being painted side face, like a child he became furious. He refused ever to sit again, and on his return from the studio wrote a cheque for the stipulated sum, and sent it to the artist, asking him to forward the picture to him as it was.

The brush-man guessed that his object was to destroy the canvas, so, instead of sending the picture, he returned the cheque. Thus the portrait—unfinished, indeed, hardly begun—remained hidden away in the studio; and now that the sitter is dead, it should possess some interest.

A man who knew Cecil Rhodes very well once told me:

“He was a muddler. I was one of his secretaries. When he went away we sorted his correspondence, ‘One,’ ‘Two,’ ‘Three.’ ‘One’ included the letters requiring first attention. ‘Two’ those not so important, and so on. When he came back from Bulawayo, we gave him the letters. Three months afterwards, he had never looked267 at one of them. ‘Leave them alone, they will answer themselves,’ he said; but that was a most dangerous doctrine, and sometimes nearly cost C. R. his position. He made endless enemies through this extraordinary, selfish, lazy indifference.”

As stated above, Stanley was at this dinner of which I have been writing, and I often met him later. He always appeared to me shy, reticent, almost to moroseness on occasions. He was a small man with white wavy hair, round face, and square jaw, dark of skin—probably more dark in effect than reality, in contrast to the hair. He was broadly made and inclined to be stout. His face was much lined, but a merry smile spread over his countenance at times.

At one of my earliest dinners with the Society of Authors I sat between him and Mr. Hall Caine. No greater contrast than that between these two men could be found, I am sure—the latter quick and sharp; Henry Stanley, on the other hand, stolid in temperament and a person not easily put out or disturbed.

“I walk for two hours every day of my life,” said Stanley. “Unless I get my six or seven miles’ stretch, I feel as if I would explode, or something dreadful happen to me. So every afternoon after lunch I sally forth, generally into Hyde Park, where, in the least-frequented parts, I stretch my legs and air my thoughts. I live again in Africa, in the solitude of those big trees, and I conjure up scenes of the dark forest and recall incidents the remembrance of which has lain dormant for years. Taking notes, going long walks, studying politics, compose the routine of my daily life.

“I am a Liberal-Unionist, and shocked that you should say you are a Radical—no lady should ever hold such sentiments.”

And he really appeared so terribly shocked I could not help telling him a little story of how on one occasion an old gentleman was introduced to take me down to dinner. Some remark on the staircase made me say, “I am a Radical.” “Ma’am!” he replied, almost dropping my arm, and bending right away from me. “Are you horrified? Do you think it dreadful to be a Radical?” I asked. “Yes, ma’am, I am indeed shocked that any lady—and let alone a young lady—should dare to hold such pernicious views!” Really, the old gentleman was dreadfully distressed,268 seemed to think me not even respectable, and, although I did my best to soothe him with the soup, to chat to him on other topics with the fish, it was not until dessert was reached that he was really happy or comfortable in his mind that his young neighbour was fit society to be next to him at a dinner-party.”

Stanley laughed.

I asked him if he had any desire to go back to Africa.

“None,” he replied. “I may go some day, but not through any burning desire; for, although I have been a great wanderer, I don’t mind much if I never wander again.”

During the evening he proposed the health of the late Mr. Moberly Bell, our chairman, whom he had known for twenty-eight years. Stanley had a tremendously strong voice, which filled the large hall, and seemed to vibrate through my head with its queer accent. He spoke extremely well, without the slightest nervousness or hesitation; his language was good and his delivery excellent.

It was not till I read his Life, when it first came out in 1909, that I realised what a struggle his had been. Reared in a workhouse, this maker of the Congo (which we muddled and allowed the Belgians to take for their own) was indeed a remarkable man. He attained position, wealth in a minor degree, a charming lady as a wife, and a title. His self-education and magnificent strength of purpose secured all this unaided, even by good fortune. His Life reads like an excellent novel. In these Socialistic days one receives with interest his remark, “Individuals require to be protected from the rapacity of Communities. Socialism is a return to primitive conditions.”

Yes. Stanley was a great man. Seven thousand miles across unknown Africa, amidst slave-traders, cannibals, and wild beasts, his expedition “tottered its way to the Atlantic, a scattered column of long and lean bodies; dysentery, ulcers, and scurvy fast absorbing the remnant of life left by famine.” So he crossed from East to West, and traversed hundreds of miles of the river Congo.

My other neighbour at that dinner—Hall Caine—had much in common with me, and we discussed Iceland, where, of course, we had both been; Norway, which he knew in summer and I in winter; and then Nansen.

The Manxman is an interesting companion, his nervous269 intensity throws warmth and enthusiasm into all his sayings and makes his subjects appear more interesting than they really are, perhaps. There is a magnetic influence in him. Physically delicate, a perfect bundle of nerves, there is an electric thrill in all he says, in spite of the sad, soft intonation of his voice.

He ponders again and again over his scenes, throws himself heart and soul into his characters, himself lives all the tragic episodes and terrible moments that the men and women undergo, with the result that by the time the book is completed he is absolutely played out, mind and body.

Certainly, to sum up, my dinner neighbours have often been, and often are, most interesting, and frequently delightful as well.

Nothing in the world is more bracing than contact with brilliant minds. Brilliancy begets brilliancy just as dullness makes thought barren.

MY dinner slips and their history would fill a volume, therefore they must be laid aside just now. Suffice it to say that as a bride I conceived the idea of asking celebrated men and women to sign my tablecloths. Now after twenty years there are over four hundred names upon these cloths, including the signatures of some of the most prominent men and women in London at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. All the men on Punch have drawn a little picture, twenty Academicians have done likewise. Specialists, such as Marconi, Sir Hiram Maxim, Sir Joseph Swan, Sir William Crookes, or Sir William Ramsay, have drawn designs showing their own inventions. Others have made sketches or caricatures of themselves. Among them are Sir A. Pinero, Harry Furniss, Solomon J. Solomons, William Orpen, John Lavery, E. T. Reid, Weedon Grossmith, Forbes Robertson, Thompson Seton, Max Beerbohm, W. K. Haselden. A possession truly, and a record of many valued friendships. It has its comic side too, for sometimes when I am out at dinner and my name is heard my partner turns to me and says:

“Are you the lady who has the famous tablecloth?”

I own I am, and try to forget the fact that I ever wrote a book.

And—yes, that is the point—they have all been signed at my own table and I have embroidered them myself.

How did a “worker” manage to continue to give little dinners, may be asked by other workers who find hospitality a difficult task rather than a pleasure. Well, with a little forethought and care it can be done.

During all those thirteen years I don’t suppose I bought a first-class ticket in Britain thirteen times. That was one271 of my many economies, enabling me to save a few pounds here and there, just as bus fares saved cab fares, and with these little savings I could enjoy the privilege of having friends to tea or dinner. We appreciate most what has caused us a little self-sacrifice, and I certainly appreciate my friends far more than any personal inconvenience, besides I had a home well filled with linen, glass, china, and silver.

It is snobbish to offer what we can’t afford, and honest to give what we can. Anyone can open a restaurant, and always have it filled with diners, but it requires a little personality to make and keep a home. When a woman is poor and friends rally round, she has the intense joy of knowing it is for herself they come and not for what she can lavish on her guests. The man or woman who only comes to one’s house to be fed is no friend, merely a sponger on foolish good-nature.

How hateful it is of people to be late. What a lot of temper and time is wasted. Surely unpunctuality is a crime. People with nothing to do seem to make a cult of being behind time, just as busy persons consider punctuality a god. The folk, who sail into a dinner-party twenty minutes after they were invited, ought to find their hosts at the first entrée. One of the most beautiful and charming women who ever came to London, the wife of a diplomat, took the town by storm; she was invited everywhere, but by the end of the season her reign had ceased, and why?

“Because,” explained a man well known for hospitality, “she has spoilt more dinners in London during the last three months than anyone I know. Personally, I shall never ask her inside my door again.”

The punctuality of kings is proverbial. So is their punctilious way of answering invitations, making calls, and keeping up la politesse of Society. ’Tis vulgar to be late, bourgeois not to answer invitations by return of post, and casual to omit to leave a card when there is not time for a visit.

Some people seem too busy to think and too indifferent to care. Marcus Aurelius maintained that life was not theory, but action. What a pity we don’t have a little more action in the realms of politeness and consideration.

We owe our host everything. He gives, we take. Let us anyway accept graciously, punctiliously, and considerately,272 not as if we were doing the favour; the boot is on the other foot.

Only eight or nine weeks before her death, Miss Mary Kingsley had dined with me on the eve of her departure from England, full of health and spirits, laughingly saying that she did not quite know why she was going out to South Africa, excepting that she felt she must. She wanted to nurse soldiers; she wished to see war; and, above all, she desired to collect specimens of fish from the Orange River.

Armed with some introductions, which I was able to give her, she departed, declaring with her merry laugh she would only be away a few months, and would probably return to collect some more specimen-jars and butterfly-nets before going on to West Africa to continue her studies there. She had only been a few weeks at the Cape when she was taken ill and died. She was a woman of strong character, great determination, a hard worker in every sense of the word, one who had struggled against opposition and some poverty, and the death of Mary Kingsley was a loss to her country.

The intrepid explorer was thirty before she had ever been away from our shores. She had up to that time nursed her invalid mother at Cambridge. But the spirit of adventure, the desire to travel, were burning within her; and as soon as the opportunity came she went off by herself to the wild, untrammelled regions of West Africa, and has left a record of her experiences in some interesting volumes.

Mary Kingsley made money as a lecturer, but the odd thing was that she was by no means good at the art. She possessed a deep and almost manly voice, but being far too nervous to trust to extemporaneous words, she always read what she had to say, and in her desire to read slowly and to be clear and distinct, she adopted an extraordinary sing-song, something like the prayers of a Methodist parson. This was all very well when she was telling a funny story, as it only heightened its effect, but when one had to listen for an hour and a half to this curious monotone, it became tiring. All who knew her, however, recognised her as a brilliant conversationalist. Sir William Crookes once truly said:

“Mary Kingsley on the platform, and Mary Kingsley in the drawing-room, are two entirely different personalities273.”

This woman who accomplished and dared so much, who braved the climate and the blacks of Africa alone, whose views on West African politics were strongly held and strongly expressed, was the very antithesis of what one would expect from a strong-minded female. She was small and thin, her light hair was parted in the middle, and she wore a hard black velvet band across the head in quite a style of her own, never seen nowadays on anyone except the little girl in the nursery. She had all the angular ways, and much of the determination, of the male, when put to the test, although to look at her one might think a puff of wind would blow her away.

Mary Kingsley was the niece of Charles Kingsley, and the daughter of Dr. Henry Kingsley. The woman, who would face a whole tribe of natives alone and unprotected, was in the society of her own people a shrinking, nervous little creature. Indeed, one marvelled and wondered however she kept the strength of will and the physical courage which she displayed on so many notable occasions during her adventurous travels. Once she wrote to me:

An amusing little incident happened at dinner in my house, when I sent her a message down the table, accompanied by a pencil, asking her to sign her name on the tablecloth under that of Paul du Chaillu. She was covered with confusion, and when my husband told her to write it big, as it was difficult otherwise to work it in, she said, with a blush:

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“Please don’t look at me, for you will make me so nervous I shall not be able to write it at all.”

Maybe this nervousness was the result of a bad attack of influenza from which she was just then recovering. “Oh yes, I get influenza here,” she said, “though I never get fever in Africa, and I am only waiting for my brother to go off on some expedition to pack up my bundles and do likewise myself.”

She found herself among several friends that evening, the great Sir William Crookes was also one of the dinner guests, and she had read a paper at the British Association a few months before, when he had been President. Then she knew Mr. Bompas, the brother-in-law of Frank Buckland, and by a stroke of good luck I was able to introduce her to Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, who was afterwards appointed Director of the Natural History Museum at Kensington. They had not met before, and seemed to find in zoology many subjects of mutual interest.

Mary Kingsley had a keen humour. In her case the spirit of fun did not override the etiquette of good taste as it is so often inclined to do.

Just before dinner one February night in 1907, I was expecting friends; but when turning on the drawing-room lights a fuse went, and half of the lamps were extinguished.

It was an awkward moment. I telephoned to the electrician, who could only send a boy. Visitors arrived, and my agitation was becoming rather serious, for the fuse refused to be adjusted, when Sir William and Lady Ramsay were announced.

I rushed at the former.

“Can you put in an electric fuse?” I asked.

“Certainly,” was the reply.

“For Heaven’s sake, go down to the kitchen,” I continued. “There is a hopeless boy there who evidently cannot manage it, and we are in comparative darkness.”

Down the steps the great chemist bounded, followed by the parlourmaid, and landed, much to the surprise of everybody, at the kitchen door. There seemed to be barely time for him to have reached the electric box, before the light sprang into being. Then he washed his hands and came to dinner, smiling.

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What a contrast to the fumbling of the British workman was the dexterity of the scientific man.

Two evenings later, Sir Joseph Swan, the inventor of the incandescent burner, was dining at my house and I told him the story.

“I have no doubt Ramsay had often done it before,” he said; “for when electric light first came in I never seemed to go to any house that I wasn’t asked to attend to the light. In fact, I quite looked upon it as part of the evening’s entertainment to put things in order before the proceedings began. But I think you have inherited your father’s gift as a raconteur, and that is paying you a high compliment, for he was one of the best I ever knew. Only the other day I was retailing some of his stories about Ruskin.” And then he reminded me of the following:

Ruskin and my father were great friends, and several times the latter stayed at Brantwood. On his first visit he had been touring in the English Lakes, and having a delightful invitation from Ruskin, he gladly accepted; but there was no mention of my mother, and consequently, rather than suggest that she should join him, it was arranged that she and my small sister—then about eight—should go to the neighbouring hotel.

That night Ruskin asked my father whether he liked tea or coffee before he got up.

“A cup of tea,” he replied.

“Why don’t you choose coffee?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I have lived so much abroad that I don’t fancy English coffee, it is generally so badly made.”

His host said nothing. The next morning my father was awakened and a strong smell of coffee permeated the room, and turning to the servant, he asked, “Is that my cup of tea?”

“No, sir, it is Mr. Ruskin’s coffee.”

“Mr. Ruskin’s coffee! What do you mean?”

“The master was up early, he roasted the coffee himself, he ground the coffee himself, and he made the coffee himself, and he hopes you will like it.”

So much for Ruskin....

During the course of the day it slipped out that my mother was at the hotel. Ruskin was furious.

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“How could you be so unfriendly?” he said.

“Well, you see my little girl is also with her,” my father replied, “and as we are on our way to Scotland they could not very well go back to London, and I really could not ask you to house so many.”

Ruskin did not answer, but rang the bell. When the servant arrived he proceeded:

“Get such-and-such a room ready, and see the sheets are properly aired, for a lady and little girl are coming to stop. Tell the coachman I want the carriage at such-and-such an hour.”

Then turning to my father he remarked:

“At that time, Dr. Harley, you can amuse yourself. I am going to fetch your wife.”

Ruskin loved children. He and my sister Olga became tremendous friends; they used to walk out together hand in hand for hours and hours, while he explained to her about beetles, flowers, and birds, and all things in Nature which appealed to him.

Sir Joseph Swan told me an incident in Carlyle’s life which will be new to worshippers of the Sage. “So many stories,” he said, “are told of Carlyle which show him as a terribly bearish person that I take pleasure in finding in this incident that there was another and kindlier side of his nature.” It related to a young friend some thirty years before, now a middle-aged and distinguished man:

The youth was a divinity student in a Birmingham College, preparing himself for the duties of a dissenting minister. He used to make occasional visits to London, and during one of these he haunted the neighbourhood of Chelsea in the hope of meeting Carlyle, then the subject of his hero-worship. Carlyle was “shadowed,” his goings out and his comings in were watched for days together, in the far-off hope that some moment would “turn up” which would bring them into contact.

“One day he followed Carlyle from his house, and across the Bridge into Battersea Park. Mr. Allingham was with him. Presently the two sat down together on one of the Park seats. No one was about, and the couple of old gentlemen were in no way occupied except with their own thoughts. My young friend nervously watched them as they sat, wondering how near he might venture. At277 last he mustered up courage enough to walk softly behind Mr. Allingham, and to say to him almost in a whisper:

“‘Mr. Allingham, do you think Mr. Carlyle would allow me to shake hands with him?’

“‘Mr. Carlyle,’ said Mr. Allingham, ‘here is a young man who wishes to speak to you.’

“Carlyle, roused from his reverie, stood up facing the young student almost savagely, and said very sharply:

“‘Who are you, and what do you want?’

“The brusqueness of the challenge drove the youth’s shyness away—he answered jestingly:

“‘I’m a Black Brunswicker from Birmingham.’

“Carlyle’s attitude completely changed. He laughed, and repeated:

“‘A Black Brunswicker from Birmingham!’ Then he added: ‘Tell us who you are, and all about you.’

“This led to my friend giving Carlyle his name and a good deal of his history. The Sage asked him many questions with evident interest and kindly intention, and they were about to part when Carlyle not only shook hands with his admirer, but gave him his blessing, putting a hand on his head and saying with solemn earnestness:

“‘May the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac go with the lad!’“

We were sitting one evening under the electric light, steadily burning in the Swan lamps. I asked Sir Joseph how he came to think of devising the lamp which has made his name familiar all over the world. So complicated a topic for the non-expert is the electric light that I am glad not to have to rely upon memory. Sir Joseph kindly undertook to put the matter in writing for me, and here is the narrative in his own words:

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At a charming dinner at Sir James Mackay’s,7 I sat between Prince d’Arenberg, an old friend (who is best known publicly as the Chairman of the Suez Canal) and Lord Morley; both elderly gentlemen, both scholars, leaders of men, both small, concise, and full of strength.

Not long afterwards, I heard Lord Morley lecture on English Language and Literature. He has a nervous manner, with thin, refined hands and fidgety ways. It was no doubt an ordeal to face such an enormous audience, but it was curious to see the nervousness of the accustomed speaker. He took out his watch, unthreaded the long chain from the buttonholes, and laid it on the table before him, drank three whole tumblers of water by way of a preliminary canter, stood up, received a perfect ovation, pulled at the lapels of his coat, and looked unhappy.

In clear black writing on half-sheets of note-paper, the lecture was apparently written. The light was good and the lecture desk high, and he was practically able to read without appearing to do so. Sometimes one could see he was interlarding his prepared material with impromptu lines, but the bulk of the material was delivered as it was prepared. And it was a brilliant achievement. A thin, small voice and yet so accustomed to use, that it could be heard all over the hall. As a rule he spoke quietly, but sometimes he became emphatic, and thumped his right hand on his left. Sometimes he folded his hands on his chest, at others he folded them behind his back. In fact, one would dub him a thoroughly good speaker from habit rather than circumstance. He has not got a sufficiently commanding presence, nor is his voice strong enough for effect, but being an absolute master of his subject and from the practice of fifty years of public life, he knows how to catch an audience and keep it interested.

Having referred to his nervousness, it is only fair to say it lasted but a minute. Before he turned the first page of his manuscript it had flown, and so accustomed was he to speak that he evidently prepared a speech of one hour’s duration, and exactly as the clock pointed to the hour he ceased. It was a scholarly production rendered in a masterly way.

In 1911 the late Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and other 280friends were dining with me in York Terrace, when Arthur Bourchier’s name turned up in conversation.

“How splendid he is as Henry VIII.,” remarked the veteran Academician, who had just celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, and who was still as hale, hearty, full of jokes as ever, and rattled off new stories with every fresh course.

Taking up his name card as he spoke, he drew a little square box, and in another instant, a few more lines had turned the box into the figure of Bourchier as Henry VIII.

“Have you seen Bourchier’s beard off the stage?” I asked.

“No, I do not think I have,” he replied, and then I told him of the silly little remark I had made at a public dinner and which someone must have overheard, as it appeared in endless newspapers the following week.

Here it is, headed:

“MR. BOURCHIER’S REJOINDER

Chaffing Mr. Bourchier about this a week or two later at a luncheon given by Mr. Somerset Maugham at the Carlton, I said:

“I really believe your beard is redder than ever.”

“Quite so,” he replied; “to-day is dye-day, Monday.”

“Oh, is it? I always thought it was wash-day?”

“With me it is dye-day, and every Monday morning I am steeped in henna,” he replied.

“Why did you start that beard?” I asked.

“Because, dear lady, when we began Henry VIII. it was winter, and I had not the pluck to face gumming on a beard for eight performances a week in the cold weather, tearing it off again, and shaving daily. I should have had no face left by now. It would have been raw meat. The only way was to grow a beard, and as the beard would come grey, the only way to master it was to dip it in the dye-pot.” And he laughed that merry chuckle which has become so familiar in his impersonation of bluff King Hal.

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Everyone liked Tadema with his genial personality. It is a curious thing that though of Dutch descent, he was really born in Wimpole Street, London. He lived more or less in Holland until he was sixteen, when he went to Belgium to study Art, but he never drew his pictures, except in his mind’s eye; he painted straight on the canvas. He was the first exponent of art and archæology in combination. When he returned to Holland they assured him that he was no longer Dutch, and if he wished to be considered so, he must be naturalised. “Ridiculous,” he said, “I shall do nothing of the kind, and if your rules are so absurd, I shall have nothing more to do with Holland.” “I was annoyed and I left, and England has been my home ever since,” he continued as he was relating this to me. “The funny part is, that when I wear my uniform to go to a Levée, I am always taken for an English admiral. You see I am short and fat, and have a beard, and the man in the street seems to associate that with the commander of the sea. Anyway, I have so often been taken for an admiral, that I sometimes forget I am a painter.”

If Tadema looked like an admiral instead of a painter, Somerset Maugham looks like a smart London young man rather than a medico who has taken to the drama.

What a strange career! A young doctor, in a small practice, he spent his spare time writing plays. For eight years Lady Frederick was refused a hearing. Then one day he heard that Ethel Irving wanted a comedy in a hurry—looked up his book, saw Mary Moore had had it for a year, dashed off in a hansom (there weren’t many taxis in 1905), made her unearth it, went on in the hansom, left it with Ethel Irving, and within twenty-four hours it was accepted. She was great in the part. Success followed. Mrs. Dot had been refused by managers for five years. Once accepted, it roped money in. Success number two.

In 1910 he laughingly told me he had just used up the last of his stock of plays, and would then (having made a fortune in the old ones) have to begin something new. He owned he had altered and written them all up a bit, but they were the same plays that all the managers had previously refused.

When an artist paints a portrait, he leaves out the disagreeable traits, when a photographer takes a photo he282 rubs out the wrinkles, and when an author writes a personal book he leaves out all the most personal touches.

The longer I live the more convinced I am that each tiny act has a wider reaching result. For instance, I wrote Iceland for fun. Ten years afterwards that girlish diary was selling on the bookstalls at a time when I badly wanted the money it brought in. Once I wrote a thing I hated. I wavered, but finally published it, and that wretched article has turned up again and again to annoy me and jeer at me.

We make a friend of good social standing, perhaps a little way above us intellectually and socially, that friendship leads to others of a similar kind. By chance we become acquainted with someone below our own sphere and usual standard. He is right enough in his way; but his friends fasten upon us. Without being positively rude various undesirable people are foisted upon us. We do a kind act. Years afterwards that kindness is unexpectedly returned with interest. We do a cruel deed and that deed haunts us along life’s path by its consequences. Everything counts in the game of life, and yet nothing counts but an easy conscience.

A thick veil, therefore, covers many most striking episodes and events. Diplomats have met at my house to discuss important world-wide questions. Politicians have talked over knotty points in my drawing-room hidden away from the eyes of the reporter. My little home has witnessed striking interviews, and the walls have heard wondrous tales of world-wide repute unfolded and discussed. I have often been of use in this way, and am proud of the strange confidences that have been placed in me, but such trust cannot be betrayed, and although I could tell many wondrous facts, my readers must not be disappointed that they should be withheld. Discretion is not a vice.

Silence is often golden.

Hence I may disappoint the many in these pages; but I hope to earn the gratitude of the few, by respecting their important confidences.

A TRUCE to work. Even adversity has its sweets. After tasks should come whatever pleases best, the toiler has earned a play-hour. A lover of pageant, I will now describe what to me is one of the interesting sights in London, namely a reception at the Foreign Office. The invitations are issued “by His Majesty and His Ministers,” for ten-thirty, but before ten o’clock a line of carriages is slowly wending its way to Whitehall, through Downing Street, into the courtyard of the Foreign Office.

It is the King’s Birthday, Parliament has risen, all the men of note in the country are dining at official dinners. They have all donned their best uniforms, Court dress, decorations, and ribbons, and presently are making their way up the gaily decorated staircase.

One must own to a feeling of disappointment on driving up, for the entrance door is meagre and indifferent, and the downstairs cloak-rooms are not imposing. Nevertheless, the dividing staircase once reached, all is changed. At its foot is the famous marble statue of the late Lord Salisbury by Herbert Hampton, the cast for which I had gazed on so often when my own bust was being modelled. The well is not so large as in Stafford House, nor so imposing as in Dorchester House, so the spectators do not stand all round, but on one side only; besides, the aspect is somewhat contracted. Still, half-way up the Foreign Minister, with several officials and a sprinkling of ladies, stands and receives. Those who have the entrée pass up the stairs on his left hand; those without it pass up on his right.

Masses of flowers festoon the marble balustrade; their scent is heavy in the air. What a strange crowd it is! Some of the most renowned men and women in Europe are present. Gorgeous ladies in magnificent gowns, with284 sparkling tiaras, are escorted by gentlemen ablaze with stars and orders. Then come a humble little Labour Member in a blue serge coat, and his wife in an ill-fitting blouse. At the top of the stairs the crowd disperses to the Great Hall, where the one and only picture represents William III. Beyond this is the room used in the last Administration for Cabinet meetings—for this particular reception took place in 1907—and where also Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, had just given his full-dress dinner. Here refreshments were served, and here also the band of the Grenadier Guards played during the evening.

Among the visitors were Ambassadors from foreign States, besides diplomats attached to the various Embassies, with their wives, Ministers and Ladies of the Legations, Consuls and Consuls-General of foreign countries, heads of Departments, and Chiefs of Government Offices; representatives of the Army, Navy, Church, Art, Literature, Drama, etc.

The decorations worn by the men certainly improve their appearance and add to the brilliancy of the scene, but stars own sharp, angular points, which have a way of scratching bare arms, as the writer knows to her cost.

About eleven o’clock the strains of “God Save the King” were heard, and shortly afterwards the Royal Procession was formed, and wended its way through all the galleries, until it reached the room where supper was arranged. Young men in official uniform preceded the procession, to clear the way. Then followed the Prime Minister, with the Princess of Wales (now Queen Mary), who has the gift of acquiring greater dignity of manner as years roll on.

The Prince of Wales (now King George V.) came next, and, with that extraordinary genial gift of recognition, apparently inherited from his father, he stopped as he passed through the suite of rooms to shake hands with the people he knew.

All the Ministers and their wives, the Duke of Norfolk, and a host of other officials followed in his wake. It is the custom for the gentlemen to bow low and the ladies to curtsey as the procession passes.

By this time there was barely breathing room, for all the official diners had arrived, and most of the three thousand285 invitations issued found a representative in that gay throng. Supper over, the Royal Procession returned through the State Galleries, and, descending the staircase, went home shortly after midnight.

Well, well! to think how many people declare they “would not thank you for such a pretty sight; would rather sit at home with their book, or smoke at their club; anything rather than see a fashionable gathering, and be jostled by diplomats and peers.”

“OPENING OF PARLIAMENT.
An Impression of the Peers.
(By a Woman Commoner.)”

Thus my little article was headed in the front page of The Pall Mall Gazette, 1902.

A tea-party at the House of Commons is another London experience that to me is always rather amusing. For this one drives to St. Stephen’s Porch, and, passing up a wide stairway flanked here and there by ponderous-looking policemen, is accosted at the top of the stairs by another magnificent guardian of the law, who demands one’s business.

“Tea with Dr. Farquharson,” was my humble reply on one occasion, whereupon the functionary bowed graciously, and waved me through the glass doors that led to the central hall.

There is always a hubbub in that particular lobby; at least, I have never been there when it has not been full of men discussing political affairs. (Or dare we call it gossiping?) Between four and five o’clock a small sprinkling of ladies, who have been invited to tea within the sacred precincts, are dotted here and there. Members are generally very good at meeting their guests, and on the alert, at the appointed place and time. It is well this is so, for it would be an awful trial for a lone woman to stand and wait there long.

Having collected his chickens, the evergreen Member for Aberdeen led us along the passage opposite our entrance to the Terrace. The way on the left leads to the House of Commons, that on the right to the House of Lords. It is all very imposing, as far as the end of the passage, but having289 reached that one stumbles down a stone-flagged stairway which would hardly do credit as the ordinary back-stairs of a private London house, and would certainly be a poor specimen of the back-stairs of a country mansion. Foreigners and Americans must be rather surprised at the cellar-like and tortuous means by which they are led to the famous river view; for back regions, consisting of kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and other like places, have to be passed by the dainty ladies who trip their way to the Terrace overlooking the Thames.

Having emerged from semi-darkness to the light, all is changed. From the Terrace there is a magnificent view of St. Thomas’s Hospital opposite, and the barges and river craft plying between.

Neat maids in black dresses and white caps and aprons serve the Commons. It is a charming place; still, although shaded from the sun, wind on the Terrace is not unknown, and the cloths on the little tables have to be carefully pegged down to keep them in their places. The entertainment, however pleasant, is not exactly what one would call smart. Plain white cups and brown earthenware teapots, hunks of cake on plates, or strawberries and cream, form the fare. There are none of those dainty little trays and mats, and pretty crockery, to which one is accustomed at ladies’ clubs or in Bond Street tea-rooms.

At one end of the Terrace, nearest the Bridge, is the Speaker’s House, and that part of the walk is reserved for Members alone. On a hot summer afternoon twenty, thirty, or forty men may be seen there settling important business, or enjoying tea and cigarettes. Then comes the portion set aside for Members with guests, and there the gaiety of the dresses—for every woman puts on her best to go to tea at the House of Commons—is delightful, but mingled with the smart company are some queer folk. Members are always being asked to entertain their constituents, and some of the political ladies from the provinces must be rather a trial to their representatives at Westminster.

We were a funny little party that afternoon. Miss Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell) sat at the end of the table, then came Sir Gilbert Parker, myself, Mr. and Mrs. (now Sir Henry and Lady) W. H. Lucy, Sir William Wedderburn, and Mrs. John Murray.

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Since the Radical majority in 1906 the Terrace has become a very different place. Smart ladies and pretty frocks, well-set-up and well-groomed men, are not predominant; for Labour Members wear labour clothes, and smoke pipes, while their families and friends look ill at ease below those glorious towers of Westminster.

A few days after that House of Commons tea with Dr. Farquharson I chanced to have tea at the House of Lords with Viscount Templetown. In this case, one drives up to the Peers’ Entrance, which is rather farther from Parliament Street, and alights beneath the fine portico, where officials in gorgeous uniform enquire one’s business, until the kindly peer, who is waiting in the hall, steps forward to claim his guest.

Passing, as on my visit to the House of Commons, through sundry cheerless passages and more horrible stone staircases, we stepped out upon the Terrace, this time at the end furthest from the Speaker’s House. The only difference in the arrangements is that at the Lords’ teas, waitresses are superseded by waiters wearing gorgeous blue ribbons and gold badges, so grand, indeed, that an American is said to have innocently asked if that was the Order of the Garter.

“Yes, my lud,” “No, my lud,” is the answer to every question. The tea is just the same, the fare is just as frugal, the cups and tray just as simple as for the House of Commons, but on every chair is painted “House of Lords.” What would not an American give to possess one of those chairs, iron-clamped and wooden-rimmed though they be?

The less said about the Ladies’ Gallery the better. I have never gone there without a feeling of disgust. One might as well be shut up in a bathing-machine, so foul is the air; or behind the screen of a cathedral, so little can one see; or in a separate room, so little can one hear. For many months in 1910 women were forbidden even this gruesome chamber as a punishment for militant disturbances. When the rule of banishment was rescinded only relations of members were admitted. Thus some curious relationships were invented. A story runs that someone asked a prominent Irishman if he would pass a lady in as his cousin.

“Certainly,” he replied—but when he saw her, she came from South Africa, and was black, and so he cooled off.

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“But the lady is official, and must get in.”

“All right, I’ll manage it,” replied the genial member, so off he went to a fellow-Nationalist.

“I say, there is an official’s wife from South Africa wants a seat. Will you pass her in as your cousin?”

“By all means,” replied his colleague.

Accordingly, the black lady took her seat complacently, and everyone wondered whose “cousin” she was.

Let me, “in half joke and whole earnest,” as the Irish say, give an instance of myself as an ordinary woman with certain ideas on politics, and show how one incident changed my mind on the Tariff. Let us call the little tale “The Story of a Fur Coat”—only a little story about my very own fur coat, a Conservative garment which nearly became Socialistic atoms.

In 1905 I was in Mexico. I had crossed the Atlantic in the warmth of summer, had travelled in tropical heat beneath banana trees in the South, and was to return to England in time for Christmas Day. I waited in Mexico City until the last minute, because I wanted to see General Diaz elected President for the seventh time. Then I remembered my big sledging coat was in London, and three thousand miles of the Atlantic had to be crossed in mid-winter, even after traversing as many more miles by land to reach New York.

I wired for the coat to meet me in New York.

Seven feet of snow lay piled along the sides of the streets of that city when I arrived, and chunks of ice floated down the Hudson, icicles hung from the sky-scrapers; everyone shivered out of doors, and baked, or rather stewed, inside the houses.

“Where is my fur coat?” I asked.

“It has not arrived,” was the answer.

Distressed and surprised, I went off the next day to the Steamship Office to demand the coat. From White Star to Cunard, from Cunard to White Star, backwards and forwards I trudged. At last a package securely sewn up and sealed was found. Was that it?

Really I could not say, as I had never seen the parcel before; but, as my name was on it, I presumed it was. Would the clerk kindly look inside and see if it was a blue cloth coat with a fur lining and sable collar?

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The clerk regretted, but he dared not open it, and suggested my filling in a sheet of paper.

“Certainly, I would fill in anything to get my coat.”

So I began. They have a way in America of asking the most irrelevant questions. Your age?—Parents?—Probable length of sojourn?—What illnesses have you had?—If you are a cripple?—What languages you speak?—and generally end up by enquiring of first-class passengers if they have ever been in prison.

I answered reams of such-like questions, as far as I can remember; swore to all sorts of queer things, and against “Value” put forty or fifty pounds, which was what the coat had originally cost.

The clerk took the paper, read it slowly through, appeared to juggle with figures, and then said calmly:

“The duty will be twenty-three pounds!” ($115.)

“The what?” I exclaimed.

“The duty——”

“What duty? It is a very old coat; it has been in Iceland, Lapland, Russia, and other countries with me, and it is not for sale. It is my own coat.”

“I quite understand all that,” he replied, “but you said its value was forty or fifty pounds, and we charge sixty per cent on the value.”

I nearly had a fit. I was sailing next day; I had no twenty-three pounds in cash to pay with, and I absolutely declined to disburse anything.

He simply refused to disgorge. Deadlock.

Fuming and fretting, I left the office. Every influential friend I had was appealed to in the next few hours, I maintaining stoutly that every paper in America should hear of the injustice to my “old clo’,” if I had to cross the Atlantic without it; and if I died from cold, my death would be laid at the door of the American custom-house officials.

Finally, the affair was arranged. At seven o’clock next morning a friend fetched me in that rare commodity—in New York—a cab, and we drove those weary miles to the docks. My luggage was on the vehicle, my ticket in my hand. It was not the same dock as I was sailing from at ten o’clock. More palaver, more signing of documents, more swearing to the identity of the coat, more showing of frayed edges, to prove the coveted garment was293 not new; and the precious thing was at last handed over. An official helped me into it. Another official mounted on the box of the cab and drove with me to the next dock; he actually conveyed me—and the coat—“in bond” to my ship. He saw me up the gangway, and then—but apparently not till then—did he believe I was not going to sell the coat, and cheat the United States of a sixty per cent duty.

Up to that time I had been somewhat large in my views, somewhat of a Free Trader; but after that I realised how impossible it was for England to stand out practically alone against all the other protected countries, and that if Free Trade was right, Free Trade must be universal or not at all. Why should we be the only people to be philanthropic?

When they wanted to take my fur coat from me I also realised I was not really a Socialist. I did not wish to share it with anyone; and when they wanted to charge me for my own wares, I felt the injustice of England allowing tens and tens of thousands of new foreign clothes to enter our ports unchallenged, while America and other countries charge half the value of the goods received.

From that moment I believed in Protection, and bade adieu to Free-Trade notions and Socialistic dreams.

We do the giving, while others do the taking, and the odds work against ourselves.

As we can’t make the world Free Traders, let us enjoy Protection, like the rest of the world. Conscription, more practical—and especially technical—education, and the revival of apprenticeships, would do more good to England than all the Socialistic tearing to pieces of manners and customs, strikes, disorganisation, and all the rest of it.

Cabinet Ministers, with their five thousand a year, and Members of Parliament, with their four hundred pounds, can afford to go on keeping the pot of discontent boiling—its very seething is what keeps them in office. Paid agitators are ruining the land.

“From gay to grave” this chapter is headed. Surely no misnomer, for to pass from teacups on the Terrace of Lords’ and Commons’ Houses, where women chat and smile, and show off their pretty frocks, to the atmosphere of solid learning diffused by the Encyclopædia Britannica, its huge staff, its editor, its hundreds of workers, this is a weighty and serious enough ending.

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The Encyclopædia Britannica celebrated its eleventh birthday—I mean edition—on the 13th December, 1910; and all the great papers (and the greater Dailies “include the lesser”) took notice of the really noteworthy banquet.

Four dinners had been already given by Mr. Hugh Chisholm, the editor, to his masculine contributors, but the feminine element being less numerous, it was thought inadvisable to distribute the women as scanty plums in four large dough puddings. Therefore the fifth and last of the series of Encyclopædia dinners given at the Savoy Hotel was dedicated to celebrating the share taken by women in the colossal work. We sat down two hundred and fifty, and no more representative attendance of light and learning was ever brought together. It was a triumph for both sexes. A splendid gathering of men came to do those women workers honour.

The Times said:

Twelve hundred contributors from all over the world. Among whom only twenty-seven were women. Is it surprising that I was proud to be numbered among those295 lucky few, and to have been one of the four asked to speak at that great gathering?

The Morning Post, after giving the names of the guests present, added that the wide range of feminine activity, shown in the lives and work of those ladies present, proved that into the last four decades women had compressed the work of four centuries. That the interests, work, and present place in the social scheme of women were entirely on a level with that of men, this being the strongest testimony of the enormous advance in civilisation made by all the English-speaking peoples in the past forty years.

Hurrah! All honour to women! Admiring my sex as I do, here let me make my boast of them, and give a little list of the leading women contributors that was kindly furnished me by Miss Janet Hogarth8 (head of the female staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica). If some are omitted, I am sorry; for we should make the most of our few chances of letting the blind, deaf outer world see and hear what women are doing and have lately done.

Education.—Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.

Scholarship.—Mrs. Wilde (Miss A. M. Clay), Mrs. Alison Phillips, Miss B. Philpotts.

Science.—Lady Huggins, Miss A. L. Smith, the late Miss Agnes Clarke, and the late Miss Mary Bateson.

Travel.—Lady Lugard, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Miss Gertrude Bell.

Sociology.—Miss A. Anderson.

Literature.—Mrs. Meynell, Miss Jessie Weston, Miss Margaret Bryant, Miss A. Zimmern.

Church History.—Miss A. Panes, Mrs. O’Neill.

Music.—Miss Schlesinger.

Medicine.—Mrs. Hennessy and the late Miss Fisher.

Philosophy.—Lady Welby.

Having myself, as usual, refused to speak, I was kindly reproached by Mr. Chisholm for declining, and told “to be sure to be amusing.”

But stop a moment! Punch was so delightful in his next issue, that it is to be hoped Toby will not yap at me for lifting the morsel wholesale.

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“THE END OF WOMAN

“[Miss Fluffy Frou-Frou’s reply to Miss Janet Hogarth, who, at a recent Encyclopædia-Contributors’ Dinner, said the best answer she had ever heard to the question, ‘What are women put into this world for?’ was, ‘To keep the men’s heads straight.’]

It seems that in the first edition of the Encyclopædia, published in 1798, the editor defined woman as “the female of man. See Homo.” Finally, Miss Hogarth, who began by telling what women had done for the Encyclopædia Britannica, ended by saying what it had given them, viz. the opportunity, hitherto unequalled, of showing what they could do to help learning, the chance to demonstrate their rightful place in the learned world.

Afterwards Mrs. Fawcett, in an excellent speech, said that the wife of a working-man (if she did her duty) was the hardest-worked creature on the face of the globe. Pointing to the successes achieved by women in various directions, she recalled the remark of a famous Cambridge coach who reproached his idle students, asking how they would like to be beaten by a woman. One replied, “I should much prefer it, sir, to being beaten by a man.”

To end up the notices of this memorable dinner, ever-delightful Punch helps one to leave off with a smile. This is a little scrap stolen—be quiet, Toby!—from a column of quips and cranks honouring our gathering:

DO you ever jot? If not, pray allow me to introduce you to one of the least expensive and most repaying domestic hobbies. I am myself a most inveterate jotter, both by pen and brush, for I have cases full of water-colour sketches, and bundles of maps, scraps, photos, and oddments. Plenty of entertainment for future years can be laid up in this way. Good stories; real plots too strange for fiction; bon-mots; impressions of scenery; plays; programmes; events; menus; anything that pleases one’s fancy is fish for the jotting net.

In some receptacle—whether drawer, despatch-box, or tin case—fling in your jottings, pencilled in haste while fresh. I have cupboards of notes on Mexico, Iceland, Finland, Lapland, Sicily, Russia, Italy, Morocco, America, Canada—pamphlets, prints, statistics, and other heterogeneous matter.

And to all would-be journalists and aspiring book-writers let me also add: jot down your happy thoughts, smaller inspirations, appreciated quotations, for all may be useful some day.

To begin with, here is a “true fact”—as silly persons will sometimes declare—concerning a banker.

By way of title to my little tale, I will call it:

“THE MILLIONAIRE’S FOUR POUNDS.”

He was lunching with me on his return from Egypt, this quiet, unassuming head of a great banking firm.

“What have you written this year?” I asked.

“Twenty-two stanzas on Egypt, a land of ancient tombs and modern worries. They appeared, and I actually got four pounds for them299.”

The four pounds delighted him. That he spent more than four thousand pounds in Egypt counted for naught, he had earned four pounds.

“Rather funny, I was motoring in Scotland lately, and I called on the Editor,” continued my guest. “He was charming. We talked on many subjects, and then I said, ‘You don’t pay your contributors very highly, do you?’

“‘Yes, oh yes, we do.’

“‘You only paid me four pounds for twenty-two stanzas the other day.’

“‘Ah, well, you see, that was poetry, and no one reads poetry!’”

He told me the joke with a merry little chuckle on his grave face, and his blue eyes twinkled.

This story is equalised by one Herbert Hampton told me. He was at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire, and wanted a couple of rooms for a week to rest and do a little sketching; so seeing “Apartments” up at a tiny cottage, he went in. It was a very simple place, clean and tidy, but quite a workman’s home.

The woman asked him two guineas a week. Considering the accommodation offered, he thought the price ridiculous.

“Come, come, I am not a millionaire,” he said.

She looked at him, paused, and replied:

“I thought you were a gentleman.”

Sometimes one has utterly unexpected annoyances. Here is an instance of such in my own experience. One day quite lately I was rung up on the telephone, and in the most rude and insulting terms was upbraided for having knocked off a woman’s hat in Regent Street. As I had not been in Regent Street that day, and never knocked off a woman’s hat in my life, I was naturally annoyed. The telephone rang again and again with the same impertinent remarks.

This was only the beginning of much trouble. Then came letters, blackmail, I suppose one might call them, and constant telephonic communications and general annoyance.

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In fact, it became so bad that, after nearly six months, I had to apply to a private detective. He took the matter in hand, and some time later—for though there were addresses, most of them proved to be bogus ones—he succeeded in unearthing the culprit, and the trouble ceased. That was one of the minor annoyances of life.

Now for one of the minor pleasures; just to balance the worries.

Some years ago I employed a gasfitter. The man interested me strangely. He spoke like a gentleman. He had the most beautifully refined hands, he was artistic in everything he did, and while attending to gas-fires, kept excusing himself for making appreciative remarks on good bits of furniture, or beautiful shades of colour.

One day he brought me a very old bit of china. It was a little cream jug, good in form, colour, and design. He hoped that I would accept it, as I seemed to appreciate pretty things. This was a little embarrassing, and became more so when his eyes filled with tears and he told me it had belonged to his mother.

“Yes, madam, to my mother. I was not born in the circumstances in which you see me,” and then he owned that he was the son of a peer.

Beyond that he would not reveal his identity, though he acknowledged that drink was the primary cause that brought him down to where he was.

Poor man. He was afterwards taken very ill, and I was able to do a little for him, but he died. And so was buried a strange romance, for the man was by birth a gentleman, in taste an artist, and in speech a poet; and yet circumstances and weakness of character had brought him to this low estate.

One instance of the strange stories concerning secret skeletons, locked up in our neighbours’ hearts, naturally leads to another.

I once met a man at dinner at a friend’s house. He offered to drive me home. He asked to call. After two or three chats he told me his story—one of those heart-rending stories we hear sometimes. He had married young and repented.

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There was no real ground for divorce; besides, he shunned the publicity of it in connection with an honoured name. Our country—alas!—won’t give people divorces for incompatibility. The usual result followed.

Well—he thought his wealth, his name, his achievements would live down, or, rather, drag up, the “woman of his choice.” Did they?

No. Of course not. He thought also that this time he had found an idol, a sympathiser, an inspiration. All went well for a time. Then the chains became irksome. She chafed at her position. She had everything but that marriage ring which spells respectability. She became discontented, irritable, the love grew less, the desire to be made “an honest woman” grew more and more. He dare not face the world a second time and own he had misjudged woman’s character. Therefore their dog-and-cat life continued—because they hadn’t the pluck to break it.

It was a tale of woe. Broken in health and in spirit, he owned he had defied the world and yet—with all the odds of position and wealth in his favour—had failed.

One day he suddenly wrote: “I can’t come and see you again, you belong to the world I have left, or that has left me. It only stirs up the misery of my present life. I thank you for your help, your sympathy, your much-prized friendship, but it is not fair on you to let you worry over me, and being with you is making me more discontented than ever. And so good-bye.”

As he stepped suddenly across my path, he stepped as suddenly back into the shadow. Poor man. His is the tale of many, but that does not make it any the less sad.

I lived in the world he had turned his back on—the world which finally shut him out, and that proud heart, that big brain and scholarly man literally laid down his arms, weary of heart, sick of soul, ambition sapped—life gone. He merely dragged out his existence from day to day. Chained to a loathsome sore. He did not complain. How could he? The chain was of his own making, the sore its inevitable result. Why, we ask, did he submit? Why? Because habit had become stronger than will.

Success is made or marred by individuality.

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Hostesses sometimes find themselves in very awkward positions.

A man once came up the stairs and shook hands with his hostess, who cheerfully said:

“And where is your wife?”

There was a great crowd at the time, and the man, somewhat briefly, replied:

“I have lost her.”

“I hope you will soon find her,” said the lady; “but it is rather difficult among so many people,” she added, with a merry laugh.

He looked crestfallen, and, as if not knowing exactly what to say, bent forward and murmured into the ear of his smiling hostess:

“My wife is dead.”

Collapse of the lady.

On Christmas cards.

Some folk affect to dislike or despise Christmas cards, but I find them most useful, often most welcome, always a kindly remembrance.

People in strange lands have been good to me. They have taken me about, invited me to their houses, have helped me in my work, and many introductions, obtained originally for practical purposes, have ended in real friendships.

It is impossible to keep up a correspondence with all one’s friends, however, and yet one likes them to know they are not forgotten.

Hence the idea of my Christmas cards originated. For many years now I have sent these cards of greeting to the furthermost corner of the earth, and thanks to the talent of my friends, or the practical use of my own camera, they have been somewhat original.

Here is a delightful card Harry Furniss designed for me among my earlier ones. I had just written Behind the Footlights, hence the lady with comedy and tragedy on her cap, pulling aside the curtain to reveal sketches of the different books. Needless to say, this clever idea was his own.

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Hustled History, one of that series of clever little booklets that have appeared annually for some time, was the talk of the town when it came out in the spring of 1908. My publisher rang me up the next morning to congratulate me on the advertisement of myself that it contained. Rather a curious way of putting it, I thought.

Everyone read it, everyone talked about it. It had dabs at everyone, but only three women were included—Mrs. Humphry Ward, Marie Corelli, and myself. This latter take-off on my style appeared under the title of:

In Romantic
Rouen
By
Mrs. Alec Tweedie

The same sort of quip had appeared about me a year or two before in Wisdom While You Wait, but I cannot lay my hands on it.

Colonel Selfe, R.A., who wrote so many of the acrostics for The World, one day sent me the following double acrostic on myself:

This is another, composed by the late Major Martin Hume, the historian:

Most of us have known or heard of such a lesser tragedy as the following, and thanked our stars it had not happened to one of our own kin.

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“What are you crying for?” asked the manageress of an hotel.

The girl she addressed was a fragile, pretty creature of nineteen or twenty, looking more as if a puff of wind would blow her away than as if she was capable of doing the dirty work of a kitchenmaid.

“Oh, nothing, thank you,” replied the tearful voice. “I hurt my finger, but it will be all right in a moment.”

The manageress eyed her critically. The polite reply, the refined speech and tone of voice, were all so unlike anything she was accustomed to in the kitchen department that they struck her as strange.

Then she noticed that, while the girl’s cotton sleeves were tucked up above her elbow, her arms were round, white, and plump, the hands small and pretty. Turning to the chef standing behind her, she remarked:

“Your kitchenmaid looks hardly up to her work, chef.”

“Oh, she is all right,” he replied. “She has not been in a situation just lately and she is a bit soft.”

The reply was satisfactory, and, being a busy woman, the manageress went on with her orders.

Next morning she was again strongly attracted by her new little kitchenmaid, who was busy in the scullery washing dishes. The girl was so ladylike in appearance, so delightful in manner, so charming in voice, her superior felt that there was something unusual, even wrong, about the matter; so she searched for the original letter from the chef to see under what conditions the underling had been engaged. It said that, as he preferred to work with his own kitchenmaid, he wished to bring her with him, more especially as she was now his wife.

Some days went on, and the little maid looked paler each morning, sadder and more depressed. At last a tap came at the manageress’s door, and the girl, in her cotton frock, white apron, neat hair and dainty cap, was standing on the threshold.

“May I come in, madam?” asked the plaintive voice.

“Yes, certainly; come along. Are you not well?”

“Oh yes, I am quite well, but I want to know if you will do me a favour. I have got a cheque for ten pounds from a lady whose service I used to be in, and I want to know if you will change it for me without letting my husband know307.”

The manageress looked up, surprised.

“Yes, I can change it; but how does this lady come to be sending you such a big cheque?” (As she took it in her hand she saw a well-known name upon it.)

The girl made some excuse and told a long and rambling story, but blushed to the roots of her hair when given the money.

Imploringly she said, “You will never tell him, will you?”

“No,” replied the kindly woman; “mind you keep the money safe. You may want it some day.”

Some hours went by. The manageress was pondering over the girl and her reticence, over the cheque and its mystery, when a servant rushed in asking her to come to the kitchen at once, as something dreadful had happened. She flew. There on the floor, with blood streaming from her head, lay the little kitchenmaid. Near her, sullen, stern, and menacing, stood the chef. At once the manageress ordered that the girl should be carried to her room and forbade the husband to enter. Then she sent for him to the office and asked for an explanation. But he gave none, except that his subordinate had cheeked him, so he hit her rather harder than he meant to do and stunned her. A blow against the oven door had caused the bleeding. Such was his story. Very different was that of the girl.

As she recovered consciousness, she moaned, “Save me!” and as her senses became more acute, she begged, “Don’t let him come near me.”

“Are you afraid of him?” asked her protectress.

“Yes, madam, mortally afraid; he will kill me. Do not let him come near me,” she implored in agony of mind.

“What happened?” persisted the manageress.

“Somehow he found out I had that cheque and wanted me to give it to him, but I would not and came to you. For it was all I had in the world, and I wanted it to get away and leave him.”

“To leave him? But you have only been married a month.”

“It seems like a hundred years of hell,” moaned the unhappy little bride. “He has been so cruel to me.” And then she told her story.

“I am not really a kitchenmaid. I am Lady Mary ——,308 but I liked cooking, and mother wanted me to learn, so I used to go into the kitchen in the morning and play about. The chef was charming to me, and—well, I think I must have been mad—I thought I had fallen in love with him, and I ran away and married him a month ago. From the first moment he has been bullying my family for money. He made me come away with him as his kitchenmaid until he got enough money out of my family to start a home of our own. But please do not let him come near me again. He will kill me! That cheque was from my aunt, for I had to tell her of my misery and disgrace. It was sent to enable me to get away and go to her home, where I should be safe.”

“Do not worry any more about that,” said her protectress determinedly. “You shall come to my room now, and I will telegraph to your aunt and put things right.”

She did so, and the girl was restored to her family. Strange as the story may sound, it is a true bill.

While on the subject of servants, the following is an interesting sidelight.

A mistress offered a servant girl a seat for a theatre. The girl beamed with delight. Suddenly her face shadowed, and she asked:

“Are there any countesses in it, ma’am?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because I don’t think mother would like me to go and see a play with a countess in it, ma’am.”

“And why not?”

“Oh, because they are all so dreadfully wicked.”

“Who says so?” asked the lady, amazed.

“The books, ma’am.”

“What books?”

“The penny books and Sunday papers.”

When looking back on my delightful American trips and to my real good time there, one little crumpled rose-leaf returns to memory, which, at the time, was a minor annoyance, but since has often caused me to smile at its absurdity.

Many and weird, truly, are the experiences and home truths one is vouchsafed while travelling.

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The last time I went to the States I intended to pay some visits, and as I was very overworked and tired I was persuaded to take a maid to look after me. That maid cost me a small fortune in money, as well as proving a constant anxiety, inasmuch as I had to look after her continually. A child of five years could not have been more trouble.

Almost before we left the landing-stage of the Mersey she told me she felt ill. The water at the time was perfectly calm; we were, in fact, still in the river, but the wretched woman went to bed before we crossed the bar and did not appear again until we reached New York; therefore I had the pleasure of paying her first-class fare and the extra steward’s tips for waiting on her—instead of her being a comfort to me.

Arrived on Yankee soil, I received a telegram from the President of Mexico suggesting my revisiting his country. I told the good lady I was going to Mexico.

“Law! M’m.”

“It is six days and nights in the train.”

“Law! M’m.”

By this time her eyes opened wider than ever. She still remembered the six days and nights on the steamer. Alas and alack! she was even more ill on the train than she had been on the boat. At Washington we had rooms on the seventh floor; but that woman refused to go up or down in the lift because it made her feel “so queer,” so she walked—and grumbled.

Oh, the joys of travelling with a servant!

When we started from New York I took off my rings and watchchain, and, as usual on such expeditions, packed them away.

The maid was sitting opposite to me in the train when she discovered they were missing. Suddenly she exclaimed:

“Oh, what have you done with your rings?” knowing they were the only articles of jewellery I always wore.

“I put them away,” I replied. “I never travel off the beaten track wearing jewellery of any kind.”

“Oh dear, what a pity! They make you look such a lady.”

(Collapse of poor Mrs. A. T. Did “ladyism” depend on diamond rings?)

GENEVIÈVE WARD’S stories are endless and amusing. To mention only two of these.

“A man arrived to have a tooth out.

“‘Will it hurt much, sir?’

“‘Rather.’

“‘Real hurt?’

“‘Rather.’

“‘Well, I don’t think,’ began the man in a dither....

“‘Sit down, sir, sit down right there, and bear it like a woman!’”

Story number two.

“Another man asked the dentist his charge.

“‘Fifty cents.’

“‘Fifty cents, eh?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘But with gas?’

“‘Guess that’s fifty cents more.’

“‘Wa’al, I won’t have gas then.’

“‘You’re a brave man!’

“‘’Tisn’t for me, it’s for my wife!’”

Now a couple of child stories. Surely, the workings of a child’s mind are too strange to be imagined.

My little nephew, aged four, was saying his prayers, kneeling on his bed and resting against his nurse. Suddenly he stopped.

Nurse: “Go on, dear.”

Small Boy: “I can’t.”

Nurse: “Go on, dear311.”

Small Boy: “I am switched off, Dod’s talking to someone else.”

Naturally, nurse’s breath was somewhat taken away, and she did not know what to answer, when suddenly reassurance came from the small boy. “It is all right. We are connected again now,” and he began again.

Here is another story about the same little man, though he was then rather younger, to be exact.

He was sent, one hot summer’s day, with his baby sister and two nurses, to Kensington Gardens as a treat. When he came back his mother asked him if he had enjoyed it.

“Oh yes,” he replied. “And what did you do?” she asked, but instead of replying in his usual bubbling fashion, he opened his eyes wide, and looking at her, exclaimed:

“Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“Do you know?”

“Well, what?”

“Do you know?” he again repeated, his eyes nearly dropping out of his head by this time, “we saw a lady smoking!”

Not being exactly sure what to reply to this remark, the fond mother went on with her work.

Seeing her unresponsive, the young gentleman trotted into the next room where his father was smoking.

“Dad, do you know?”

“Yes, I know, you went to tea in Kensington Gardens.”

“But DO YOU KNOW?” repeated the small boy, more earnestly than ever; and then standing before his father with his hands behind his back, he solemnly announced:

“We saw a lady smoking!”

The father, like the mother, was a little nonplussed, and merely exclaimed:

“Oh, really!” But the small boy stood firm to his ground, and with eyes still wider than before, exclaimed:

“Dad, do you think she was learning to be a gentleman312?”

Occasionally my eyes light upon some jotting worthy of almost pigeon-hole dignity—too prized for the society of mere scraps, yet too small for the space of a chapter. Here is one concerning a famous lawyer.

Fate has often thrown me into the company of lawyers—the most excellent of people when you don’t meet them in a professional, or fee-paying sense. The really busy advocate is in most cases a delightful man, for the very qualities which make him a social favourite go no little way to establish his success at the Bar.

I once asked Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., what was his recipe for producing a good barrister, and was a little surprised at the importance he attached to the study of oratory.

“Every law student at the beginning of his work should study the art of speaking, the most valuable and the most highly rewarded of all the arts which can be acquired by man.

“The counsel needs the power of fluent and correct expression and of the rhetorical arrangement of his argument of speech. He should have an easy, clear, and well-modulated elocution which compels attention, makes it pleasant to listen to him, and so predisposes in his favour the judgment of his hearers.”

“Ah, but has everyone this gift?” I said.

“Perhaps not, but all these things must be acquired. Each one of them requires a special study. Some men are, no doubt, more highly gifted by nature than others in strength of intellect, tenacity of memory, and the graces of oratory, but no one was ever so highly gifted as to be able to dispense with the labour by which the natural powers are trained and strengthened. The best books for the young law student are Whately’s Logic and Whately’s Rhetoric. They should be read and re-read until he knows them from cover to cover.”

“You are a very warm advocate of speech,” I interposed. “Do you think it a lost art, or an improving one?”

“The ancients were the best teachers. Aristotle’s Rhetoric (the best of all), Cicero’s De Oratore, Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, are the books of study; Blair and Campbell should be read, but are of no great merit, while313 of Whately I have already spoken. But the study of good models—and when I speak of study I do not mean simply reading a speech, but the examination and analysis of it, applying the rules of the art which these treatises contain: the attentive hearing of great speeches in Parliament or the courts, or of great sermons, is the only way by which the capacity for really good speaking can be acquired.

“Then every man who wishes to speak well should study elocution as an art. He should practise singing to give variety of tone to the voice. He should habitually see and study the best actors of his time, and so learn the ease and yet the moderation of gesture which helps so much even the best-constructed and most clearly delivered speech. If any one of these studies and exercises is neglected, the man who fails at the Bar must put some part of the blame upon himself.”

Sir Edward Clarke has fulfilled his own theories, even to witnessing the drama. He is a well-known first-nighter, and is often to be seen in the stalls of a theatre.

He sat in Parliament and listened to great speeches. He has himself built a church at Staines, wherein he has heard many sermons. And he has climbed to the very top of his profession.

It would be doing him an injustice to suggest that he places speech as the first and most essential quality in the lawyer’s training. The most brilliant speaker must have something to say. A capacity for logical and scientific reasoning and knowledge of the principles and rules of the law come before all.

“All success in every calling comes from hard work; there is no better secret,” he said decisively.

For years Sir Edward Clarke journeyed up to town from his charming home at Staines every morning, during the legal terms. His companion in the nine o’clock train was invariably the famous Orientalist and brilliant scholar, Dr. Ginsburg, who had made a home for himself and his unique collection of Bibles, and marvellous assortment of prints and etchings, at Virginia Water. Many and interesting were the conversations which these two celebrated men enjoyed during their little railway journey together. The one went off to the British Museum to work among the dead languages, and the completion of his life-work,314 the Massorah, and the other to the Law Courts, where, in wig and gown, he soon appeared from out his private room in the building, to the consolation of his own clients and the anxiety of his opponents.

Sir Edward Clarke declares the best speech he ever made in his life was addressed to one person—namely, the late Mr. Justice Kekewich. There was no jury, and the judge was alone on the bench. It was the case of Allcard and Skinner, a question of the plaintiff being allowed to recover from an Anglican sisterhood the money she gave while herself a member of it. Sir Edward managed to keep the money for the sisterhood, and Lord Russell of Killowen always declared it was his friend’s greatest stroke of oratory.

One of the events of the year at Leeds is the Lifeboat Celebration, when some thousands of pounds are collected. In these days when women are to the fore, the Committee decided to ask a woman to take the chair, and I was chosen for that position. They have the biggest of halls, which holds five thousand persons, with Members of Parliament, Lord Mayors, and other dignitaries on the platform.

The London editor of the Yorkshire Post came personally to ask me. I refused, funking the speech. Two days later, the Yorkshire Editor-in-chief arrived, flattered me to the skies, and begged me to go. But I persisted in excusing myself, and suggested his asking Sir Ernest Shackleton, promising that if they could not get him, I would do it.

Thank Heaven! Shackleton accepted, in spite of all his engagements, consequent on having just returned from the South Pole.

What an escape, but still it was a great compliment.

Here is a jotting that was pencilled down warm from the heart. As it stands, I give it, with its date, May 14th, 1909:

I do not know when I have been so pleased as at a little episode which happened yesterday.

It chanced a couple of years ago that I was able to help, encourage, and sympathise with a young man at a very315 trying time, and I laughingly told him I should not be satisfied till he had started again, and put by a thousand pounds. He scoffed at the idea of a thousand pounds as impossible, and wondered if he ever could begin life afresh.

Yesterday he walked in and said, “I have come to tell you that through your encouragement I have worked hard for the last two years, and have done what I thought then impossible. I have not only lived, but saved a thousand pounds, and in remembrance of this success, which is entirely due to you, I have brought you a little souvenir. It has taken me months to find anything quaint and old, such as I thought would really give you pleasure.”

Now, was not that perfectly delightful? He has, indeed, given me pleasure, and added to that his gift is quite charming. It is an old-fashioned pendant, set with beryls, that formerly prized pale blue stone.

Amongst the many disappointments one has in life, such success as this inspires one to fresh efforts.

Here is a tiny stray wanderer in the jotting heap. Such a little one, no one can object to it. Plainly it refers to some of my proof. Also that a review in “T. P.’s” familiar weekly had unkindly referred to me as an elderly sort of scribe, or something “previous” of the kind.

“P.S.—Just looked over proof. Feeling very sad at the prospect of settling down to contemplate middle age and anticipating senile decay, ordered hansom, gave man address.

“‘Yes, miss.’

“Hurrah! Nice man! Extra sixpence in prospect for the ‘miss’!

“Went to shop, ‘young gentleman’ behind the counter enquired:

“‘Your pleasure, miss?’

“Charming young man! Buy more than I really want.

“‘T. P.’ may be wrong; senile decay may be further off than he so ardently hopes!”

With this farewell to jottings.

316

And now I come to the publication of a big and serious book, Hyde Park, which made its appearance to the public in April, 1908, but took me eighteen months to write and rewrite, while as to the works consulted, seventy-three are duly acknowledged in the opening pages as sources of help, besides which there were, of course, others.

“What put it into your head to write about Hyde Park?” asked a friend the other day.

Well, partly because of my sons. When in search of data across an ocean and thousands of miles of land besides, my endeavour to return for the boys’ holidays entailed trying and often too rapid and arduous travelling. Hyde Park was nearer my own door, so “homeward bound fancy ran its barque ashore.”

Besides in anticipation the task seemed invitingly easy. From early childhood had I not ridden with my father every morning over the tan of the old Park, under its trees, or past its sunlit or steel-grey water? In later days, when friends whose hospitality had been warmly shown me overseas, arrived in London, it had become usual with me to drive them round “the ’Ide Park” until I felt a sort of London Baedeker.

Once, however, the work begun, it proved serious and engrossing, and meant study: study at the British Museum: study of many, many books: search for pictures of old London. Three or four times the amount of material actually used was assiduously gathered. Then began the task of sorting out what was needful. The real difficulty of writing a book is to know what to leave out.

Well, it was a great subject, and deserved the toil spent upon it. Reward came in the praise of the Press, and—this was specially sweet—at once. Within three days, thirteen kind, warm, even enthusiastic reviews! And yet how often the contrary has been the case, and will be with many works which the public slowly learn to value only after their writers have obscurely passed away, embittered, maybe, by the lack of appreciation.

Yes, I am grateful that my history of London’s great playground was called one of “deep research” by the Morning Post, of “bright, cheery entertainment” by the Pall Mall, a “thrilling and true romance which Londoners will have to read” by the Observer. The Westminster317 Gazette and the Sunday Sun agreed that the book made universal appeal to all lovers of London and lovers of England.

Perhaps not one among the many columns of flattering reviews, however, gave me so much pleasure as the following letter, from an old friend, well known to fame.

318

Love and friendship are the finest assets in the Bank of Life.

From generation to generation, Hyde Park has been the wide theatre upon which many tragedies and comedies of London have been enacted, the forum where many liberties have been demanded, the scene where national triumphs have been celebrated.

Yes, the book was a success; but every success in life brings a would-be friend, and a dozen enemies.

True friendship is not influenced by success or failure.

“THEY can’t come in here—I tell you they simply can’t.”

I was sitting eating my matutinal egg on a sleety January day in 1909, when I heard this altercation at the door.

“They can’t come in here,” repeated the cook, “they simply can’t.”

Thinking I had better go and see what it was all about, I ventured forth. On the doorstep stood two laughing postmen.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Parcels, mum, parcels; we have got a whole van full.”

“A van full!” I exclaimed, seeing a large red parcels-delivery van in the road.

“Yes, a special van for you, mum, containing one hundred and ninety-six parcels.”

I nearly collapsed.

“Where are they to go?” I exclaimed.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“They can’t come in here,” chirruped the cook, knowing the hall was already packed.

“You must leave them in the van,” I suggested helplessly, “until I have time to think what is to be done with them.”

“Can’t do that,” replied the smiling postman. “We have brought you a ’special delivery’ as it is, and I must go back for my ordinary rounds.”

“Well, they can’t come in here,” I repeated in the cook’s words, as the wind howled down the street and stray flakes of snow fell.

“Let us stand them in the street,” brilliantly suggested the postman.

320

This was an inspiration, and accordingly one hundred and ninety-six parcels were packed up against the side of a London house. They stood four or five feet high. Having told the cook to remain at the front door and see that nothing happened to them, I returned to my half-cold egg, but I had not even finished it before there were more altercations at the door.

The noise continuing, I again left the breakfast-table (8.45 a.m.) to see what it meant. Another van. This time a Carter Paterson.

“Have you any parcels?” I asked in trepidation.

“Yes, mum, seventy-eight; nearly a van-load of sacks and crates and other huge things.”

Into the street they also had to go, but before the men were finished unpacking other carts were arriving, and depositing sixteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six packages upon the pavement.

By ten o’clock the house and the neighbours’ houses were barricaded with parcels. Never, probably, was such a sight seen in a London street. Five vans’ loads disgorged at one time.

Messina was buried in ruins, I was buried in parcels. After eighteen days I was being disinterred from bundles and packages in London.

It all came about in this wise. The letter I sent to six important London papers, expecting, perhaps, that one of them might kindly print it, appeared in all of them. The evening Press reprinted it. It was copied into the large provincial papers the next day. That letter started a veritable snow-ball scheme. It was a Tuesday. I had a luncheon engagement.

On my return about four in the afternoon my parlourmaid met me with an agonised face, and exclaimed:

“We have had a time since you went out, m’m!”

“Why?” I asked, surprised.

“By twelve o’clock that front door-bell began to ring,” she said, “and it has never ceased. Ladies in motors, people in carriages, gentlemen in hansoms, babies in perambulators—and they have all left parcels.”

“Parcels!” I exclaimed in horror.

“Yes, m’m, parcels. The cloak-room is stacked from floor to ceiling.”

THE WRITER BURIED IN PARCELS FOR MESSINA
By Harry Furniss

321

This rather took my breath away, and I wondered how on earth I should ever get that number of things to Sicily.

No chance to return to the breakfast-table. There was no time to finish that egg as wildly I rushed to the telephone, begging one or two intimate friends to come and help at once, while a servant went off to neighbours to ask for immediate assistance.

Between signing papers for quickly-arriving packages and struggling to get helpers, a policeman appeared.

“Very sorry, mum, but, you know, you are obstructing the roadway,” he said.

“I cannot help it,” I replied. “I am literally overpowered, and as it is in the cause of charity, I suppose it does not matter.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he answered; “but you must leave some pathway, besides which you are blocking the road; you will be taken up as a public nuisance.”

This was really too much. Telephoning for assistance to a high official at Scotland Yard, who chanced to be a personal friend, he soon sent me a special constable. One was not enough. He had to send for another policeman. But as every little butcher boy told every other little butcher boy what was going on, and as every loafer told every other loafer to come and see, an inspector had also to be requisitioned. For four days we were guarded by three stalwart policemen, who kept an eye on us for a further length of time.

“Pass along, please. Pass along, please,” became a well-known cry in the Terrace. Verily it was a blockade—especially after the papers extolled the novelty of the scene. Then nurses and perambulators came to have a look at us; ladies in grand motors drove round to see the sight; Bath chairs added to the confusion; and, above all, the unemployed at one time threatened serious trouble.

But to go back in the history of events which led to the Siege of York Terrace.

It was Christmas, 1908.

We were only a party of twelve, but amongst my guests was His Excellency the Italian Ambassador, the Marquis di San Giuliano. We ate turkey and plum-pudding, cracked crackers, and made merry in the usual Christmas fashion.

322

The Ambassador and I talked much of Sicily, of its sunshine, its people and the happy months I had spent there, and then of his family who lived in or near Catania, not far from Messina.

Jovial, contented, and pleased we parted at midnight on that Friday. Before daylight on the Monday following two hundred thousand people had been killed, wounded, or rendered homeless in a few seconds in Messina. Terrible indeed was the disaster. The earth opened and practically swallowed Reggio on the opposite shore, while a huge wave overswept the Sicilian coast. Houses fell like packs of cards, and the beautiful city of Messina cracked to pieces like the smashing of glass.

For hours—yes, for many hours—the Italian Ambassador in London did not even know whether his entire family had been swept away or not. All his relations felt the shock, though happily none succumbed. His son, the late Marquis di Capizzi, wrote to me a couple of days after the catastrophe, and said:

“We are still suffering from the terrible impressions of the earthquake that completely destroyed Messina, killing nearly 200,000 persons. It lasted so long and so much that we were sure we should all be killed here (Catania) and yet we escaped.”

Then followed details of death, horror, and misery, of starvation and naked humanity running about in torrential rain. Thus flashed across my mind an idea which matured in the above-mentioned letter to the Press:

An innocent enough little letter! Yet how far-reaching in its results.

There stood the parcels, but what they were to go into was the next problem. Each girl friend as she arrived was bundled into a cab, and told to go to shops in the neighbourhood and collect all the packing-cases she could and bring them back. They were brought, but more and more were wanted. Each shop could only produce two or three, and those they gave cheerfully, but as the stacks of packages increased more rapidly than they decreased, it ended at last in our requisitioning huge furniture cases, the sort of thing that holds a cottage piano, a settee, or two or three arm-chairs.

The first fifteen hundred articles were counted. They filled ten crates. After that it was impossible to enumerate, or even to do more than cursorily sort the things, but on the estimate of the first ten cases, I appear to have sent away twenty-seven thousand garments in one hundred and ninety-eight packing-cases. Some of them were so heavy they took four men to lift.

The first twenty thousand left in three days to catch the earliest mail steamers to the stricken centres.

How terrific was the pace may be judged by one incident.

I telephoned on Wednesday morning to my friend Sir Thomas Sutherland, asking that the weekly P. and O. boat might take out twenty cases for delivery in Sicily. By lunch-time that number had swollen to forty, so I telephoned again, and begged he would find room for forty in the Simla.

324

Still the pile did not decrease. Still we sent for packing-cases to the large furniture emporiums. By tea-time the number was much augmented, and I wired desperately to Sir Thomas, begging him to come and see me on his way home. He did so. His motor could not get up the street, for the newspapers had begun to mention the circumstance, and a crowd of sightseers and idlers had come to look on.

“I never saw such a sight,” he exclaimed; “the place is like a railway emporium.”

“I have a confession to make,” I said. “I asked you at luncheon-time to take forty cases. Dare I tell you I now have altogether eighty-five packages standing on the pavement, waiting to go somewhere?”

“Eighty-five!” he exclaimed. “But the Simla is full already.”

“They can’t stop here,” I said, almost in tears, for really the thing was becoming too serious. “The cases won’t even come inside the door. I have nowhere to put them, and they can’t remain in the street in case it rains, even if the police do guard them all night.”

They went to the docks that night. Then I went to bed feeling that it was over.

But not a bit of it. The very same thing began again next day, and another friend—Sir Frederick Green, chairman of the Orient—had to be appealed to, to convey the next consignment to Naples, which he most generously did.

To give some idea of the enormous magnitude of this undertaking—twelve dozen-dozen yards of rope were used to tie the cases, and twice I sent out for four shillings and sixpence worth of nails for fastening the lids. Two whole quart bottles of ink were used for painting on the addresses; and three dust-carts—special dust-carts—were required at the end of the first day to take away the refuse of string, cardboard-boxes, and brown paper. Never can I thank my twenty-seven willing helpers sufficiently. There were seldom less than fifteen at a time unpacking, sorting, and repacking in the street in all that bitter cold. They forgot personal suffering and backaches, working right cheerily and generously all those anxious days.

Buried in parcels did I call it? Swamped in parcels,325 drowned in parcels! Probably about three thousand of them.

Twenty thousand garments were got off by Friday night, when I had already implored the public through the Press to stop sending any more. Twenty thousand garments in reply to my appeal for a few things to send in “a box”!

On Saturday I had the following letter inserted in the Press, thinking this would stop the flow:

But no, still they came.

326

A week later the Italian Ambassador’s kindly thanks appeared in the Press:

Did that end it? Not at all. For another week packages dribbled in from Ireland, from the North of Scotland, from Germany, and even from Switzerland.

The curious thing about these parcels was that more than half the clothes were absolutely new. People had gone to shops and bought five or ten pounds’ worth of goods in reply to my appeal “in kind.” A large number came from gentlemen’s clubs or chambers. These usually arrived anonymously, with a touching little bit of paper inside, “God bless you,” or “An unknown admirer of your books,” or “My interest in Sicily was first awakened by your book on that country.”

A pair of baby’s socks came from a poor woman who wrote she was sorry she could not send more, but still she wanted to send something. Another workman’s wife offered a week’s time, as she had formerly been a shirt-maker and could get through a lot in the time, and that right willingly “for them poor things327.”

A poor old governess wrote from a seaside town:

The address was rather touching:

“The Lady Authoress,
“Sending garments, etc.,
“To MESSINA,
“London.”

Another was poor; but had a pair of old ear-rings valued about £2, which she offered to send me for sale if I would apply the money in buying clothes. Some of the parcels contained several hundred things—often newly bought and beautiful—many were accompanied by complete lists of the contents.

Another letter came from a Home, and was signed by a row of Nurses on the Staff, each sending a contribution. A charming lady sent an odd shoe, and explained that the fellow shoe was in the parcel she had sent off the day before! A man sent a coat, and the next day followed the waistcoat which he had just found!

One more practical gentleman sent twenty-four pairs of328 beautiful new white blankets, done up in sacking; another thoughtful person sent six dozen new hair-brushes.

Numbers of people came to talk to me, shake hands with me, interview me, until I had to beg my friends to say I was engaged and invisible.

A lady brought a parcel and almost refused to leave it without seeing me personally and handing me her half-crown. As she was one of a number, the servant refused, whereupon she insisted on writing a letter, and sat down to slowly compile four sheets for my benefit, while the parlourmaid, who had been dragged from the packing, stood beside her. Luckily, she left the parcel and the two-and-sixpence.

Letters came from the grandest homes, from castles and courts, from vicarages and schools, and from some of the very poorest dwellings, carpenters’ wives and mill hands. They came from remote villages and towns I had never heard of, and many consignments arrived from abroad, the senders having written to large London emporiums and ordered blankets or shirts to be sent for the refugees.

Probably one-third came anonymously, a third more asked for acknowledgment, while others sent money to buy clothes, or for me to use at my discretion.

“Please prepay the carriage, dear friends.” Innocent enough words—but oh, the result of them almost swamped me—nearly nine hundred postal orders, mostly for sixpence, was the result. They came in letters, they came pinned to garments, they turned up anywhere and everywhere, and also stamps; just three, or six, or nine, or a dozen odd stamps, to help to pay carriage or buy clothes.

Roughly, I received about twelve hundred epistles, followed, after it was all over, by several hundred more begging letters from England and Italy. Many of these specified exactly what the writer would like to have: “A green dress, and my waist is 28 inches,” or “A pair of grey flannel trousers, and my height is 5ft. 10in.”

Among the strange addresses were:

“Alla Nobile Dama,
“Mrs. Alec Tweedie,
“Cultrice di belle Lettere,
“London.”

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Or again,

“To the Right Honourable Lady
“Alec Tweedie,
“London.”

They flattered and praised me, spoke “of my great merits and noble heart,” and then proceeded to ask me “to pay for the education of a young musician,” “adopt a baby,” “get the plays of a young dramatist performed in London,” “send money to a Viscount who was too proud to beg, so would I address it to his servant?” England and Italy honoured me with some hundred of these begging letters. Old clothes men offered to buy up what was left over. “Mrs. Harts” and “Mr. Abrahams” rang up to know if I wished to sell any of the surplus things. (What did they take me for?) Men and women pulled the front-door bell and asked for coats and skirts; in fact, my house was not my own for a month or more.

As one hundred and twenty-six pounds eighteen shillings and eleven pence came to me in money with the request that I would buy clothing (which I did from poor guilds), as the donors lived in the country, or do exactly as I liked with it, we tried to be businesslike, in spite of the rush, and made most elaborate tables showing cases despatched, dates, money received, expended, and so on.

Nothing was omitted. Every conceivable article of clothing for men, women, and children was there. Numberless blankets, sheets, needles, cottons, pins, tapes, new stockings with the proper-coloured mending pinned on, and boots and shoes galore. The things in themselves depicted the thought and care with which they had been selected, showing the sympathy of the people of Great Britain, from the poorest to the richest, with the unfortunate sufferers. Amongst other things were razors and pipes. There were even braces, slippers, fur coats, hairpins, sleeping-socks, and amongst it all came a parcel of most useful things, amongst which were hidden a dozen copies of the Christian World. Did the dear old body who sent them imagine that the Sicilian peasants could read an English tract?

One lady wrote she “is sending a case weighing four hundredweight, and as it contains seven hundred garments, she thinks it might go as it stands.” It did; God bless her.

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Really it was a study in parcels. Some were so beautifully done up that one marvelled at the dexterity of amateur hands which tied the string; others were disgracefully bundled together; and in one or two cases labels arrived saying they had been found without any parcels attached.

Many people had carefully sorted the things into bundles and written outside, “Complete outfit for a man,” “Complete outfit for a woman,” “For a peasant child,” or “For a well-born little girl.”

Several people in different parts of England offered to get up working-parties, and asked for suggestions for making suitable garments.

A Manchester manufacturer of flannel said he was willing to give all that was required, and his workpeople would give the time if I let them know what to make, but as his letter did not arrive until twenty-five thousand things had gone, I did not feel able to begin over again. Dressmakers and shops sent contributions. Several sent parcels in great haste. Poor dears, they imagined there would be one crate—my “one box on Friday” became a veritable joke. A lady sent a sack containing clothes, and kindly requested that I would let her have the sack back. I did return several portmanteaux, suit-cases, washing-baskets, and even hold-alls, but when it came to a sack——

The crowd which collected in the street was both pathetic and humorous. I remember two shabby little urchins of eight and ten looking with longing eyes at the warm clothing, and the younger one remarked: “I say, Bob, what a pity we wasn’t blowd up in that earthquake!”

A friend noticed a couple of unusual parcels being handed in at the door and quietly put into one of the cases. On rushing to investigate, she found that one contained my best drawing-room curtains returned from the cleaners, and the other a cake for afternoon tea.

Warned not to leave her wraps about, one of my helpers put her muff and stole on the staircase. An hour later she only rescued them in the nick of time from a crate where a kindly man was packing them up, thinking they “would be so comfortable for the poor people in Sicily.”

Many of these crates stood four feet from the ground. It was therefore impossible, even with the aid of friendly walking-sticks, to pack the bottom, consequently a kitchen331 chair was fetched, and by its aid various girls got inside and gradually packed the clothing and themselves upwards.

My rooms on the ground floor were full of parcels, letters, cheques, postal orders, keys waiting to be returned with portmanteaux, labels likewise to be affixed to returned empties, bills of lading, telegrams, cards, accounts for clothing, etc. Personally, I never sat down for one minute that somebody did not come to ask for a shilling, or sixpence, or half-crown, to pay for some package delivered unpaid at the door.

To complicate matters, reporters and photographers seemed to arrive from everywhere. They snapshotted us as we worked, they gleaned bits of information from any and every one, and one of them insisted on penetrating my private den, where he found me busily writing. A friend, hearing a crash and seeing a mysterious light, thought there was a sudden earthquake in York Terrace. She rushed to the hall to ask what had happened. “Oh, it is nothing, only Mrs. Tweedie being snapshotted.”

And oh—what a photograph it was! But it was reproduced in France, Germany, Italy, and Sicily.

Some weeks afterwards I received the following letter from the Italian Government through Sir Rennell Rodd, our Ambassador in Rome:

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Most of the packages were distributed by my personal friends to the real sufferers in Sicily fourteen days after the earthquake.

Yes, it was an experience. An extraordinary experience even in a life not unknown to strange sights and circumstances, but it was not what one would willingly undertake again. The strain of organising such a performance in a few hours’ time was terrific.

It cost me some weeks of my life, made a hole in my pocket, and did my walls and house much damage, but I gained a vast amount of experience, and hundreds of half-sheets of note-paper!

A DEAL of ink had run from my pen in thirteen years—thirteen books had been turned out, and thousands of odd articles, there was hardly a paper or magazine in the country to which I had not contributed something. Work had become much easier with practice, and a certain amount of success—far, far more than I ever deserved—had come my way.

During that busy time I wrote more words per week than I wrote in the whole previous nine years. I never believe in people making money they do not require, unless occasionally, and then they should pass their little gains on to some charitable cause. Still less do I believe in anyone writing anything to be printed just for the pleasure of seeing their name in print. That is taking bread out of someone’s mouth, and lowering the market standard. I never wrote a line in my life that was not paid for. Always before me lay two roads, the one grinding on to the bitter end as a writer and journalist, the second string being much the more important as it meant more pay for less risk; or the possibility that some day investments of my husband’s might turn out better and the necessity to work might cease. It did not cease—but after thirteen years I felt my feet sufficiently to bid adieu to journalistic work. A few hundreds here, and a few hundreds there carefully re-invested, three small legacies left because of the “splendid fight I had made,” or “in appreciation of her pluck and hard work,” lifted the cloud, and as the cloud rolled away I took my leave of the journalist’s yoke which had so often galled a sensitive back: the moment I could do without this source of income I left it alone, thankful, grateful for its kindly aid through years of adversity. I don’t suppose my editors missed me. They never knew me personally;334 incognito I entered their pages except as a name, incognito as a personality I left them.

I was ill—over-work, over-strain, over-anxiety for thirteen years bowled me over—I, who had never had “little ills,” seemed to be always having colds and coughs, sleepless nights, aching temples, tonsilitis, and other stupid little ailments; but in all reverence let me thank God that the necessity that plied the lash so unceasingly for thirteen busy years gradually relaxed.

I suppose there is no loneliness so complete as the creative brain-worker’s. He writes a book through weary months of thought and probably not one member of his own household even knows what it is about or looks at it when done. The painter is almost as bad, although a cursory glance may be given occasionally at his picture. The same with the inventor. The creator must be content to live in loneliness of soul and lack of sympathy. The knowledge that he is doing his best is his only reward. Even wealth is generally denied him.

Often in those busy years I wondered if I had been too fond of pleasure, too absorbed by amusement in those young married days, and if the necessity to work was my punishment. Every little act counts in life. Every good deed brings its reward, every silly action demands its toll.

The completion of my thirteenth year had ended my strenuous literary work. I then had more time for my friends, social purposes, calls of charity, committee work of all sorts and kinds, so although I remained as busy as ever, I was no longer a money-making machine.

It was then that I lost one of my oldest and dearest friends. I was ill myself at the time of his death (April, 1910), but from my bed I dictated, and corrected the proof on my sofa during the days of convalescence of an article for the Fortnightly Review, July, 1910.

“One of the men I should like to meet in England is William Quiller Orchardson.” So spoke the great Shakespearian writer of America, Dr. Horace Howard Furness, when I was staying with him on the Delaware River near Philadelphia (1905).

We were standing before a large engraving of the “Mariage de Convenance,” one of this famous scholar’s dearest possessions.

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“The idea,” continued Dr. Furness, “the thought, the sense of design; the space, the refinement, the art of the whole thing, are, to my mind, perfect. The man who did that must be a charming man, and next time I cross the Atlantic I shall hope to see him.”

They will never meet now, but I told Orchardson the story when I came home, and he looked quite shy with simple pleasure that any picture of his was so much appreciated.

Sir William Orchardson was one of Nature’s courtiers. He was refined in manner, delicate in thought, artistic in temperament.

England has lost one of her greatest painters. Orchardson is one of the names that will be known centuries hence. He was one of the few men to see his old work increase in value. He had a style of his own. “Thin,” some called it, doubtless because of his means of work, whereby the canvas remained exposed; but the talent was not thin. It was rich in tone, and the work was strong. Probably no living artist painted with less impasto, and yet produced such effect of solidity.

He had great partiality for yellows and browns, madders and reds, and, whenever he could introduce these tones, did so. He loved the warmth of mahogany, the shade of rich wine in a glass, the subdued tones of a scarlet robe, the russet brown of an old shooting-suit, and as his own hair had a warm hue, he generally wore a shade of clothes which toned in with it. As grey mingled with his locks, he took to grey tweeds, and a very harmonious picture he made with his slouch hat to match.

In these days, when it is the fashion to belittle modern artists, and magnify a hundred-fold the value of so-called “ancient masters,” it was delightful to come across one whose power was actually acknowledged under the hammer in his own lifetime. One of Orchardson’s pictures, “Hard Hit,” painted in 1879, fetched nearly £4000 at Christie’s thirty years later for America. He had the gratification of seeing many of his canvases double and treble in value, and yet he was always well paid for his work on the easel.

He saw his “Mariage de Convenance,” for which he originally received £1200, increase enormously in value, and his picture of “Napoleon on the Deck of the Bellerophon336,” painted in 1880, double in value before it went to the Tate Gallery.

But the more success he achieved, the more modest he seemed to become.

Simplicity was the keynote of the man. Simplicity of character, simplicity of life, simplicity of style. There is masterful simplicity in all his work. Look at the large, majestic rooms he depicted, with one or two figures round which the interest lies. His work invariably gives one a sense of space, elegance, and refinement. It is always reserved in colour and design, with great harmony and unity of effect, possibly helped by the use of a very limited range of colour. His drawing was strong in construction, highly sensitive in line, and had an entire absence of flashiness.

His portraits were, perhaps, his greatest achievement, and were extraordinary for their virility and power of characterisation; they were hailed with enthusiasm by the artists both here and on the Continent. He did not do a great number. Indeed, he was by no means a prolific painter—from three to five canvases were the most he accomplished in a single year.

He elaborated his still-life as much as the old Dutch painters, but the whole scheme of colour and design and his eighteenth-century costumes were simple.

As with his work, so with the man. He was moderate in all things. Gentle, refined, sensitive, thorough, and painstaking, always striving for better things. Never really satisfied with his work, never really satisfied with himself. A deeply religious man, he never mentioned religion, but somehow one felt he had profound convictions on this subject. His moral standards were high, his sense of justice was profound.

Two antagonistic qualities were ever fighting in the painter. The gentleness of the man, the determination of the character.

Orchardson had been a veritable hero for years. He had really been an invalid since the final years of the last century, sometimes desperately ill. Often he could only do an hour’s work a day, and during that time Lady Orchardson always read aloud to him. It soothed and amused him at the same time, and volumes of memoirs and travels were his delight. His wife was always beside him, and her337 encouragement and criticism were of great value to his work. They were a devoted couple.

Even neuritis did not stop his work. The triumph of mind over matter! There were days during those ten or twelve years when he looked as if a puff of wind would blow him away. Yet the work lost none of its brilliancy. Orchardson painted as well at seventy-five as he did forty years before. Of how many men can that be said?

Pluck is a wonderful quality. How few of the people, who admired Orchardson’s marvellous picture of Lord Peel, realised the agonies the artist endured during the time he was painting that and his following canvases. It was about 1897 that he first began to fail. Some put it down to heart trouble, others to an affection of the nerves, but whatever it was he was told that nothing could be done, nothing, at least, which could really cure the malady. With the most splendid fortitude and pluck Orchardson realised the situation. He was still a man of little over sixty. He was at the zenith of his glory, thousands of pounds were paid for his pictures, and orders were far more numerous than he could accomplish; he had a large family beside him, and for years he painted on with this agonising pain, making light of the matter.

How ill he looked one day when I called. He appeared so much thinner than even a month or two previously, and there seemed a depression about the merry laugh and twinkling eyes. He wore his left arm in a black silk sling, and the hands, always thin, seemed to show more blue veins, and look more delicate and nervous than usual. His hands were even more characteristic than his face. He was painting, and beside him his palette was fixed on a music stand.

“A very awkward arrangement,” he laughingly said; “but the best I can do, for I can no longer hold the palette at all.”

“But the stand is just the exact height, and looks all right,” I said.

“Ah, my dear friend,” he replied, “a subtle difference in colour is very slight, but when you are standing back from your canvas and decide that a particular shade is wanted on a particular point of a particular nose, if you have the palette on your hand you can mix it at once, while if you have to walk back six or eight feet to the palette to338 prepare the paint to complete this little alteration, you may just get sufficiently off the shade to entirely alter the idea. I weigh every tone. I am not an impressionist.”

Seeing Orchardson working under such circumstances struck me as one of the most sad and pitiful things I had ever known. Here was he, one of the greatest painters of the day, still in the prime of life, working against the most horrible odds, and yet sticking to it in a manner everyone must admire and few realise, for he always tried to make light of the situation. He painted his picture of Sir Peter Russell under these circumstances, also the portrait of Miss Fairfax Rhodes. Among his best-known portraits are those of Mrs. Pattison, Sir David Stewart, and Sir Walter Gilbey.

Orchardson’s famous picture of four royal generations (called “Windsor Castle, 1897”) was finished in April, 1900, for that year’s Academy. I went one afternoon a week before to have a look at it. The painter and his wife were having tea in the splendid dining-room at Portland Place, and he was thoroughly enjoying his buttered toast after a hard day.

“I like sitting at a table for my tea,” he said, “especially since my arm became troublesome, for even now I really cannot balance a cup. Congratulate me, however, for I have discarded my sling to-day after two years.”

The man who could not hold a cup could paint a picture.

The canvas was enormous—simple and striking. The quiet dignity of Queen Victoria on the left, and the happy little family group of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York (our present King), and baby Prince, was charming.

“A difficult subject,” sighed Orchardson. “It took me months to make up my mind how to tackle it at all. Two black frock-coats and a lady in black seemed impossible, till I insisted on having the child and his white frock to introduce the human interest. For days and days I wandered about Windsor to find a suitable room to paint the group in, and nothing took my fancy till I came to this long corridor. This is a corner just as it stands. The dark cabinet throws out the Queen’s head. The carpet gives warmth. The settee is good colour.”

“How very like that chair, on which the Prince has his339 hand, is to one of your old Empire chairs,” I exclaimed. The great painter laughed.

“It is mine. I lent it, you see. They have nothing quite so suitable as mine there, so I just painted in one of my own.”

It was only five days before the picture was to go to Burlington House. The Prince of Wales’s—alas, the only portrait he painted of Edward VII—was unfinished; one of the three busts was not even touched, besides many other minor details.

“Will you ever be ready?”

“Oh dear, yes! I once painted half my Academy picture in the last week. I take a long while thinking and planning, but only a short time actually painting. I shall be ready all right. At any time I rarely paint more than four hours a day, often only two; so you see I can accomplish a fair amount with an eight-hours day.”

In 1887 the Orchardsons moved from Victoria to Portland Place. The new house offered all the room required for his large family, but there was no studio. Nothing daunted, the artist designed a studio, and made one of the finest ateliers in London, where stables and loose-boxes once stood. He was not the first, for Turner, the great landscape painter, who lived in Queen Anne Street, close by, had his studio in the stables which later adjoined my father’s house in Harley Street. It was in that stable-studio Turner painted some of his finest pictures, and it was in a stable-studio almost a hundred years later that Orchardson painted his most famous canvases.

Rich tapestries hung upon the walls. Old chairs of the Directoire and Empire periods stood about on parquet floors, on which was reflected the red glow from a huge, blazing fire.

The upstairs rooms, with their pillars and conservatory, formed the background of such pictures as “Her Mother’s Voice,” “Reflections,” “Music, when Soft Voices Die, Vibrates in the Memory,” and “A Tender Chord,” and bits of the studio often served as backgrounds, just as his Adams satin-wood chairs, his clocks and candelabra, glass and old Sheffield plate, stood as models.

Orchardson was a man of wide interests. He was always liberal in his outlook. Anything new, no matter by whom,340 or what form it took, interested him, and he was particularly good to young men. For instance, the son of Professor Lorimer, of Edinburgh, sent a portrait of his father to the Academy. No one had then heard of young Lorimer, but the picture was accepted and hung on the line. Two or three years after, when the artist was in London, he was introduced to Orchardson, who at once exclaimed:

“‘J. H. Lorimer’! Ah, yes! I remember. I hung a picture of yours on the line at the Academy a few years ago, because it showed promise.” And thus began a delightful friendship. That was his way. Whenever he could do a young artist a good turn, he did so; whenever he could say a word of encouragement, he was always willing; endless were the visits he paid to the studios of youthful aspirants, and many the kindly words of advice and encouragement he left behind.

He thought it one of the crying shames of the day that more was not done for living painters and sculptors. He considered our public buildings and open spaces should be adorned by sculpture, that our public libraries and edifices should be decorated by paintings.

“There is just as good talent as ever there was,” he would say, “if these millionaires would only encourage it, and not pay vast sums for spurious old masters. You have only to call a thing old, and it will be bought, but call the same thing new, and no one will even look at it.”

Speaking to him once about a fellow-artist’s death, I said what a pity it was a man should live to over-paint himself, just as men lived to over-write themselves—paint until their eye has lost all idea of form and colour.

He did not agree to this. “Once a painter, always a painter,” he declared. “Our individual taste improves, our life becomes more educated, until we look upon work as bad which, years before, we thought good. In fact,” he maintained, “if the early pictures of an artist were put with his later work, you would probably find he had not deteriorated at all.” He gave as an illustration the works in the Manchester Exhibition—where one man had, perhaps, twenty pictures, painted in different years, hung side by side; and these, he maintained, one and all reached a certain standard, and did not deteriorate or improve very much with years.

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Once asked to paint a picture containing several portraits, he agreed, although the subjects were not handsome—ugly, in fact.

“What a trial that must be to you?”

“Oh dear, no! I far prefer an ugly face to a beautiful one. It is generally so much more interesting.”

“Then you choose their dresses and surroundings, presumably?”

“No; I do not. I like to paint them as they are, and in their own home. Dressing them up and giving them strange surroundings takes away their identity, and makes a picture, but not a portrait. Men paint with their brain, and if they haven’t got brains, no amount of teaching will make them artists. They must feel what they do with the mind. Colour is in the artist himself, but he must learn for years and years, not to paint, but to draw. Drawing can only be acquired, and is difficult at first. No man can hope to be an artist until drawing is no longer a difficulty. Then, but not till then, he may start to paint. Look how beautifully Frenchmen draw. Art is poorly paid and a disheartening affair. When I see and hear of the thousands of ‘artists’ barely earning a living to keep body and soul together, it makes me positively sick.”

One day a friend brought a beautiful bunch of roses to Portland Place. Mrs. Orchardson was so delighted with them, she took them into the studio to show her husband.

“Can’t you paint them?” she enquired.

“Well, they are lovely,” he replied. And after thinking a moment, he went and fetched a large canvas, on which he had drawn roughly his scheme for the now famous picture of “The Young Duke.” Many feet of white canvas and charcoal lines were there. The rest of the scheme and the colour was only in the artist’s head. He fetched a bowl, placed the roses in it, and there and then painted the flowers upon the great white canvas. So began the picture, round the bowl of roses.

Flowers and the country were always attractive to Orchardson, and in 1897 he bought a house near Farningham. Once settled, they were invited to a large county dinner-party to be introduced to their neighbours. Just before it was time to dress for dinner, it was discovered that Orchardson had not brought his dress-clothes from London. Should342 they send a message that they could not go? No; they decided that would be ridiculous. Had he a frock-coat? No; he had not even that in the country, and a blue serge suit was all that could be produced. Accordingly, the artist appeared at the formal county dinner arranged in his special honour more like an English yachtsman than a dinner-party guest; and, to add to their misery—it had taken so long to hunt for the clothes, and it took much longer to drive than they had anticipated—the guests had already sat down when they were ushered into the dining-room.

For many years before this, the Orchardsons lived off and on at Westgate. It was there he built the tennis-court—real tennis, not lawn tennis—that from first to last cost about £3000, and was finally pulled down and sold as old bricks and mortar. That game was his recreation and his amusement, and round him the painter collected tennis players from all over the world. He called it the “king of games,” just as he called fly-fishing the “king of sports.”

Another hobby was old furniture. One of his most prized treasures was an old piano. A Vienna Flügel of the seventeenth century, containing peals, drums, and bells. It was shaped like an ordinary grand, with rounded side-pieces of beautiful rich-coloured mahogany, and in tone resembled a spinet. This he gave a year or two before his death with a tall harp piano, to the South Kensington Museum. One day, walking down Oxford Street, he had seen the end of this Flügel piano sticking out of some straw outside an auctioneer’s. The wood and form struck him, and he pulled aside the straw to examine it more closely. He had the legs brought out to him, and found they were figures supporting worlds, on which the piano rested. Charmed and delighted at the whole design, he offered to bid for it—and as only two very old musicians, who remembered the piano in their youth, bid against him, it was knocked down to him. Afterwards he found the only other similar one in England was owned by the Queen, and stood at Windsor.

Funnily enough, he who had himself painted so many portraits, disliked nothing in the world so much as sitting himself.

“I am a fidget,” he said, “and it worries me to keep still. When Charlie [his son] asked me to sit to him in the autumn of ’98, I said, ‘My dear boy, I would rather do343 anything else in the world for you.’ However, his mother persuaded me that it would be to Charlie’s advantage, and therefore, like a weak man—for man is always weak in the hands of woman—I gave in. The boy painted it very cleverly, and people tell me it is a good portrait. Not that I know much about that, for no one knows what he really looks like.”

Orchardson was just twenty-nine when sitting in his little studio in Edinburgh he read long accounts of the great Exhibition of 1862. “By Jove, I’ll go and have a look at it,” he exclaimed. No sooner said than done. With a small hand-bag he came to London. The die was cast. He never returned to Edinburgh to live.

Those early days in this great city were days of work and struggle for John Pettie, Peter Graham, John MacWhirter, and William Quiller Orchardson, who all came together, and lived together in Pimlico, and then in Fitzroy Square. They all worked in black and white to keep the pot boiling, and right merry they were in those long-ago days. All attained success. Orchardson’s first stroke of luck came three years after his arrival in London, when he won a £100 prize for “The Challenge,” and for the next forty-five years he continued to work steadily, and climbed the ladder of fame rung by rung.

My last personal recollection of Sir William was when I was sitting to Herbert Hampton, the sculptor. One day we were talking about Orchardson, and Mr. Hampton was eulogistic in speaking of his work, and regretted Sir William had never been to his studio.

“I will ask him to come.” Below is his reply, written on March 12th, 1910, exactly a month before his death.

It was his habit to go out daily for fresh air, and, when able for it, for exercise, so I suggested fetching him in a taxi the next time I was to sit. To this he replied a few days later:

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The writing was very shaky, as it had been for some years. For years he could paint firmly and yet only write badly. This was probably due to his extraordinary power of concentration. Even ten days before his death he was struggling daily to the studio, too weak to stand before his canvas, callous to all outside matters, so determined to finish his pictures that he could concentrate his mind on his work and make great strides in a quarter of an hour. Then he would fall back exhausted. Here was a case of indomitable pluck, and such determination and concentration that he almost died with his brush in his hand.

Orchardson was a delightful raconteur, and although I knew him intimately for twenty years, I never heard him say an unkind word of anyone, and often admired his refinement of thought and delightful belief in everyone and in everything beautiful. He was by nature a serious, thoughtful man, although a certain air of gaiety overspread his speech, and a merry twinkle often sparkled in his eye. He told stories dramatically, quickly turning from grave to gay. Although casual in manner, unconventional in ideas, and remiss in answering letters, he never seemed to give offence to anyone. That same slack, casual way of acting on impulse that brought young Orchardson to London in 1862, remained through life. He never could make plans; seldom knew from week to week where he would be. He was, in fact, irresponsible by nature, but so sweet in character that the gods smiled on him and oblivion of time was excused, just as forgetfulness of appointments was exonerated. That was the man; but when work was foremost, all was changed.

Orchardson was a great painter and a kindly man. The345 world is the poorer for his death. Such men can ill be spared.

When my article appeared it was pleasant to hear from the wife of the painter:

Or again from his old friend Mr. John MacWhirter, R.A., who followed him so quickly to the grave:

These few kindly words were a great reward for a very little work. Poor MacWhirter himself died a few months later.

Some years ago the Society of Women Journalists did me the honour of appointing me one of its Vice-Presidents, an unmerited honour, for I was a bad journalist in the sense of ordinary journalism. I have never written about fashions or Society functions, and did little of the ordinary journalistic hack-work, such as reporting, though I wrote yards of “copy” of all sorts and kinds.

One day the idea came to me that it would be nice to invite my fellow-journalists to tea before finally ringing down the curtain on my journalistic life, and as a tea-party composed entirely of themselves would be rather too much of a family affair, I decided to ask some of my own friends as well. The card indicated on the next page was accordingly sent out.

There are three hundred members of the Society of Women Journalists, not all of course living in London, so we reckoned that one hundred might turn up during the afternoon. As it happened, the total number of people who crossed my doorstep between 3.45 and 7.15 (for they came before the appointed time and stayed after the allotted hour) was four hundred—one hundred and sixty-four of whom were men! 346

Luckily, some days beforehand I had sorted out the glass and china, been to the plate-chest, seen to the table-linen, ordered the hat-stands and urns, and made everything in readiness, for on Monday night before this memorable Wednesday I was taken ill.

Internal chills are like influenza, they sound so little and may mean so much. Tuesday found me worse, and when the doctor came late in the day, my suffering was so intense that he insisted upon an injection of morphia. I was too dull with pain, too stupefied from the drug to so much as even think about putting off that party. It seemed to me an absolutely impossible task. I had not tacked those tiresome letters “R.S.V.P.” on the cards of invitation, and therefore had not the slightest idea how many people would come, so as everything had been arranged, it seemed best to let things take their course, and chance my being up, clothed, and in my right mind.

347

The Fates decided otherwise. By Tuesday night I was worse. The nurse shook her head, still the doctor saw the impossibility of stopping the party, and wisely begged me not to trouble myself about it.

I knew my sister, Mrs. W. F. Goodbody, would be quite equal to the task of receiving in my absence. Besides, I sent messages to one or two intimate friends to come early and hand tea and coffee, and smile and talk; in fact, turn themselves into public entertainers for the afternoon. Everyone behaved splendidly. With so much brilliant talent to amuse them, they could hardly be dull. Even to my bed there rose the shouts of laughter and sounds of enthusiastic applause after the recitations and music.

The nurse stood over me like a dragon, refusing to let anyone cross the threshold of the sick-room; as a kindly angel she trotted backwards and forwards, telling me some of the names she heard announced. An Ambassador, and several Ministers, Royal Academicians, inventors, authors, Admirals, Generals, actors, and scientists, all came in turn.

I shall never really know who all my guests were at that party, for only in a haphazard way have I heard who came and who did not. But it proved that Hamlet without the Dane, or a wedding without the bride, might almost be possible when a party without a hostess can be a “great success.” Such is the comedy and tragedy of life. My guests were told I was suffering from a “little chill,” and, though kindly or politely regretful, they little guessed that their enjoyment was counterbalanced by my agony.

Many days passed before I was up again, and then I only crawled to Woodhall Spa. Crawled is a fairly correct expression, for the first time I was able to leave my room was to go to the train, and then a porter trundled me along the platform at King’s Cross in a Bath chair. So lying on my back all the journey, I arrived there a human wreck; but, thanks to Dr. Calthrop, and the efficacy of the waters, the patient found herself on her feet a few weeks later.

All praise to Woodhall Spa.

A day or two after my arrival even that quiet, sleepy little village was raised to the tiptoe of anxiety when a rumour came that King Edward VII. was dangerously ill. On that Friday night—May 6th, 1910—we tried to348 telephone to London for the latest bulletin, but no message could be got through; and it was not till the early hours of Saturday morning that the dreaded news which had already spanned the world in a flash, reached the restful retreat of Woodhall Spa, by means of the mail cart.

The King was dead.

A strong contrast was the little English village, where I learnt the sad tidings, to that wonderfully dramatic scene in the recesses of a Mexican cave, in which news of the death of Queen Victoria was announced to me.

All of us in the hotel were wearing coloured clothes, and all with one accord telegraphed home, or to the London shops or dressmakers, for black things to be sent; and rich ladies sallied forth and bought pots of paint to blacken their hats, or bits of ribbon of funereal hue.

And those wonderful days following the death of King Edward VII. showed forth not only spontaneous world-wide reverence for the Great Peacemaker, and homage to his dignity and prestige as a monarch; they bore witness to the sorrow of individuals numbered by multitudes and nations—the sob of a grief-stricken Empire that had lost and was mourning a valued friend.

DOES the hand lose its cunning? I had practically given up all forms of rapid journalism, when, on November 24th, 1910, I was suffering from a cold (which had, by the way, prevented my seeing my own tableaux got up for a charity at the Court Theatre). The telephone buzzed and fumed.

“Will you speak to the editor of the Daily Mail, please, ma’am, at once?” asked the parlourmaid. Down I went to the ’phone in my dressing-gown.

“There is a report that Diaz is assassinated.”

“Don’t believe it,” I replied.

“But the telegram is lying before me,” he continued.

“Sorry, but I don’t believe it. I know Diaz. I know his home, and I know the Mexican people.”

“Would I write fourteen hundred words at once?”

After some persuasion I promised to write something for the next day’s publication, although stoutly refusing to write an obituary. It so chanced my secretary was not at hand, so without looking up anything, I wrote those fourteen hundred words by hand in fifty minutes. The boy came up from the Daily Mail office to fetch it an hour after my conversation with the editor, and bore it off, to be telegraphed to Paris and Manchester.

Then I had some Cambridge friends to luncheon, followed by my “At Home” day. That night I dined at the “Criterion,” a Society of Authors’ Dinner, went on to a reception, given by the Chairman of the County Council, Mr. Whitaker Thompson, at the Hotel Cecil, and then to bed.

Of course the cold was worse, but inhaling creosote (of all sweet scents!) soon improved it again; and I slept peacefully until early tea began another strenuous day,350 and brought the following column of type to my bedside.

Here it is, just as it was scribbled:

Apropos of the book itself, the late Major Martin Hume wrote some months before, in a review on the work of some other author:

“Any book that truly and attractively sets forth the life-story of such a man as Diaz should be worth reading. Mrs. Alec Tweedie, a few years ago, produced in England an excellent biography and appreciation of the President, and the book now before us will certainly not displace it as the standard work in English on the subject.”

President Diaz himself selected it as his authentic biography.

The following letter from my publisher is, perhaps, therefore, of interest:

355

Diaz was hurled from power in his eighty-first year. It is one of the saddest episodes in the history of great rulers, and at the same time one of the most important in the history of a country. His remaining in office for an eighth term was a fatal mistake, and shrouded in gloom the close of a career of unexampled brilliancy, both in war and statesmanship.

Diaz left Mexico in May, 1911, and for fifteen months after that country did not know one moment’s peace.

His life was verily a moving spectacle of romance.

And so here end snatches of remembrance of thirteen busy years.

No—not quite—see next page.

JUST been elected to the Council of the Eugenic Society, and the only woman to sit on the Council of the Cremation Society of England.

And so ring down the curtain on the “Bakers’ Dozen,” and the booksellers’ and authors’ thirteen. So ends my tale—no “Spy’s” tail.

AU REVOIR!

HERE ENDS THE TALE. SKETCH IN “SPY,” 1912

• A
• Aberconway, Lord (John Brown & Co.), 19
• Aberdeen, Earl of, 116, 241
• — Countess of, 116
• Africa, 194
• Agnew, Sir William, 120
• Alarcon, Colonel, 130
• Albemarle, The, 213
• Alexander, Mrs. (see Hector), 92
• — Miss, 92
• Algiers, 111
• Allen, Grant, 111
• Allingham, Mr., 276
• America, 18, 100, 123, 125, 206, 292
• Anderson, Miss A. M., M.A., 294, 295
• — Mr. Percy, 47, 155
• Andrews, St., 58
• Angelo, Michael, 164
• Antrim, Countess of, 287
• Argentina, 231
• “Arms and the Man,” 260
• Arnold, Matthew, 19
• Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 176
• Ascot (Prologue, 5), 58, 253
• Assaye, P. & O. steamer, 183
• Atherton, Gertrude, 239
• Aurelius, Marcus, 271
• Austin, L. F., 69
• Australia, 145
• Avon, The, 206
• Ayrton, Mrs. Hertha, 294
• Aztec ruins, 125
• B
• Bab Ballads, 148
• Balaclava, 40
• Balfour, A. J. (Prime Minister), 87, 229
• — Lady Frances, 216
• Barlee, Miss Ellen, 42, 43
• Barrett, John, 230, 233
• Barry, J. M., 87
• Bate, Percy, 158
• Bateson, Mary, 236, 295
• — Tom, 236
• Battersea Park, 276
• Bavaria, 28
• Beale, Dorothea, 78
• Bedford, Mr. Herbert, 153
• Beecham, Sir Thomas, Mus. Doc., 297
• Beerbohm, Max, 270
• Behind the Footlights, 108, 205, 233
• Belgium, 281
• Bell, Mr. Moberly, 268
• — Miss G., 295
• Benson, 200, 203
• Berkshire, 150
• Berlin, 15, 113, 155, 257
• Bertie, Sir Francis, 252
• Besant, Sir Walter, 80
• Biarritz, 114
• Birmingham, George, 259, 277
• Bismarck, 15, 16, 17, 18
• Björnson, 51, 55
• “— Björnstjerne,” 134
• Blackett, Herbert, 354
• Blackie, Professor, 44
• Blake, Dr. Jex, 78
• Bompas, Mr., 274
• Bond, Sir Thomas, 20
• Bonne, 114
• Booth, General, 161
• Bordon, 255
• Borkum, 47
• Boston, U.S., 206
• Bothnia, Gulf of, 66
• Boughton, George, 168
• Bourchier, Arthur, 280
• Boyce, Sir Rubert, 157
• Braddon, Miss, 30, 289 (Mrs. Maxwell)
• Braille, 114
• Brampton, Bryan, 12
• Brandes, Georg, 52
• Breitmann, Hans, 31360
• Bret Harte, 30, 242
• Brewster, Sir David, 19
• Broken Hearts, 151
• Bruges, 167
• Bryant, Mrs. Sophie, D.SC., 294
• — Miss Margaret, 295
• Buccleuch, Duchess of, 287
• Buckingham Palace, 97, 101, 224
• Buckinghamshire, 150, 264
• Buckland, Frank, 32, 274
• Burmah, 150
• Burne-Jones, 120
• Burns, 74
• Buszard, 40
• Butt, Clara, 216
• Byron, 74
• C
• Cacahuimilpa, Caves of, 127-9
• Caird, Mr. Patrick, 181. See Cunard
• Cairo, 150
• Calthrop, Dr., 347
• Cambridge, 111, 193, 199, 272, 296
• Camden Society, 12
• Campden Hill, 168
• Canada, 117, 123, 194, 246, 255
• Carlton, The, 280
• Carlyle, 111.
• See Sartor Resartus, 170, 276
• Carnegie, 231
• Castle, Edinburgh, 39
• Catania, 263
• Cellini, Benvenuto, 166
• Chaillu, Paul du, 273
• Charles V, 157
• Charterhouse, 103, 247
• Chelsea, 276
• Chesterton (Illustrated London News), 69
• Chicago, 125, 153, 208, 232
• China, 190, 193, 230
• Chisholm, Hugh. See St. James’s Gazette, 105, 294, 295
• Choate, Mr., 230
• Christian Scientists, 237
• Christiania, 49, 153
• Christison, Sir Alexander, 39
• — Sir Robert, 40
• Chronicle, The Daily, 74, 102
• Clarence Memorial, The, 166
• Clarke, Sir Edward, K.C., 312
• — Sir Andrew, 21
• — Miss Agnes (the late), 295
• Clifford, Mrs. W. K., 294
• Clodd, Mr. Edward, 152
• Clyde, The, 180
• College, Queen’s, Harley Street, 27, 264
• — Bedford, 294
• — Girton, 294
• — Newnham, 294
• — Somerville, 294
• Colombia, 231
• Comedy and Tragedy, 151
• Congo River, 268
• Connaught, Duke of, 100
• — Duchess of, 100
• Constable, 120
• Copenhagen, 55
• Corelli, Marie, 205, 207, 304
• Coriolanus, 203
• Corney Grain, 58
• Coronet Theatre, 203
• Courtney, W. L., 104, 105.
• See Fortnightly
• Crane, Walter, 174
• Cremation Society of England, 356
• Critchett, Sir Anderson, 44, 122
• Cromer, Lord, 229
• Crookes, Sir William, 270, 272, 274
• Crozier, Dr. Beattie, 248
• Cuba, 230
• Cunard Company (see Caird), 183, 291
• Cushmann, Charlotte (American tragedienne), 18, 19
• D
• Daisy Chain, The, 154
• Dalhousie, Earl of, 241
• Daniel Druce, 151
• Danish versus English Butter-making, 108
• Dante Society, The, 264
• Darwin, Charles, 33
• Davenport, Mr. Cyril, of the B.M., 147
• Davies, Miss Emily, 294
• Davis, Mr. William, 233
• Delbruck, Professor Hans von, 28
• Demos, 57
• Denison, Colonel George, 247
• Denmark, 50
• Devonshire, Duke of, 165, 286
• — Duchess of (see Manchester), 205
• Diaz, Madame, 125, 131
• — (President), General Porfirio, 125, 131, 224, 233, 291, 350
• Diaz, Porfirio, Seven Times President of Mexico, 109, 114361
• Dickens, Charles, 18, 19, 178
• Dimsdale, Sir Joseph, 227
• Disraeli, 20
• Dot, Mrs., 281
• Drummond, Mr., 242
• Drury Lane Theatre, 214
• Dowie, John Alexander, the Prophet, 236
• Dublin, 260
• Dunsany, Lord, 257
• Dürer, Albrecht, 166
• E
• Earl’s Court Exhibition, 135, 174
• Edinburgh, 40, 44, 158, 170
• Egypt, 150
• Eliot, George, 19, 114
• Ely, Bishop of, 213
• Emerson, 31
• Emmott, Lord, 218
• Encyclopædia Britannica, 293, 297
• Engaged, 151
• England, 18
• English Review. See Harrison, 105
• Epic of Hades, 259.
• See Lewis Morris
• Erichsen, John (Uncle John), later Sir John, 11, 71, 141
• Eton, 247
• Eugenic Society, 356
• F
• Faraday, 19
• Farquharson, Dr., 288, 290
• — Joseph, R.A., 188
• Faucit, Helen, 19
• Fawcett, M. G., 216
• — Mrs., 294, 296
• Fenwick, Mrs. Bedford, 294
• Fergusson, William, 19
• Fielding, 209, 251
• — Hon. W. S., 250
• Fildes, Sir Luke, 161
• First Aid Yeomanry Corps, 251
• First College for Women, The, 108
• Finland, 21, 28, 65-7
• Fisher, Miss (the late), 295
• Foreign Office, The, 161, 283
• Forget-me-not (play), 203
• Fortnightly (see Courtney), 105
• France, 40, 121
• Frederick, Lady, 281
• Furness, Dr. Horace Howard, 239, 334
• Furniss, Harry, 117, 152, 178, 270, 302
• G
• Gainsborough, 120
• Gallery, Grafton, 158
• — Grosvenor, 42, 177
• — Modern (Venice), 158
• — National (Brussels), 158,
• and Berlin, 158
• — New, 158
• Galton, Sir Francis, 33, 34
• Garvin, J. L. (see Pall Mall), 105
• Germany, 28, 40, 114
• Gibson, Dana, 239
• Gilbert, Alfred, 165, 167, 178
• — Sir W. S., 88, 148-50, 152, 260
• Ginsburg, Dr., 313
• Girl’s Ride in Iceland, A, 108, 133
• Giuliano, Marquis de San, 154
• “Gladstone Dock,” 19
• — Mr., 19-21
• — Mrs., 19
• Glasgow, 158, 180
• Glencoe, 249
• Godwin, Mrs. (Mme. Whistler), 173
• Goodbody, Dr. Francis, 20
• — Mrs. W. F., 347
• Goodwood, 58
• Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 152
• — Lord, 297
• Gossenass, 52
• Graham, 19
• — Cunninghame, Mr., 156, 157, 259
• Grant, 67
• — Sir Arthur, of Monymusk, 41
• Gray (Elegy), 29
• Green, Sir Frederick (see Orient), 183
• Greenock, 180
• Grey, Sir Edward, 229, 284
• Grossmith, George, 58
• — Weedon, 69, 152, 270
• Grub Street, 101
• Guerbel, Count de, 201
• — Countess, 201
• Guildhall, 228
• H362
• Habitant, The, 242.
• See Drummond
• Haddon, 184
• Halifax, 250
• Halifax Chronicle, 250
• Halouan, 150
• Hampton, Herbert, 161, 162, 283, 299, 343
• Hangö, 66
• Hannay, Rev. James, 259
• Harley, George, or the Life of a London Physician, 108
• Harley, Sir Robert, Knight of the Bath, 12
• — Lady Brilliana, 12 (see note), 13, 42, 50
• — Street, 11, 15, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, 30, 40, 59, 264
• Harmsworth, Mr. See Lord Northcliffe, 134
• Harnack, Dr. Adolph, 28
• Harris, W. B., 157
• Harrison, Austin (see English Review), 105
• — Frederic, 131, 318
• Harrow, 103, 150, 247
• Hart, Sir Robert, 189
• Harvard House, 206
• — John, 206
• — Robert, 206
• Haselden, W. K., 270
• Hawkins, Anthony Hope, 88
• Hay, John, 229
• Hayes, Catherine, 19
• Heaton, Sir Henniker, 249
• Hekla, 38
• Hector, Mrs. (see Alexander), 92
• Hedda Gabler (play), 93
• Heinemann, Mr., 171
• Hellqvist, Carl Gustav (Swedish artist), 28
• Helsingfors, 66
• His Excellency the Governor, 152
• Hennessy, Mrs., 295
• H.M. Theatre, 155
• Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. Craigie), 83, 145
• Hogarth, Miss Janet (now Mrs. W. L. Courtney), 295
• Holl, Frank, 82
• Holland, Sir Henry, 19
• —, 281
• Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 31
• Holroyd, Sir Charles, 264
• Home (magazine), 68
• Hook, Theodore, 19
• Hooper, Dr., 297
• Hornung, E. W., 88
• Hospital, St. Thomas’s, 289
• House of Lords, 215
• Hudson Bay Company, 249
• Huggins, Lady, 295
• Humbert, Mlle., Editor of L’Éclair, 119
• Hume, Major Martin, 108, 305
• Hurlingham (Prologue, 5), 59
• Hurst Park, 59
• Hyde Park, 29, 107, 267
• Hyde Park, Its History and Romance, 109
• I
• Ibsen, 51, 93, 176, 236, 249, 260
• “Ibsen, Henrik,” 134
• Iceland, 37, 38, 43, 194
• Ida, Princess, 151
• Illinois Theatre, 233
• Inchcape, Lord (see Mackay), 279
• India, 133, 150
• Inferno, 264.
• See Dante Society
• Intellectual Development (see Crozier), 248
• Iolanthe, 149, 151
• Irving, Sir H., 149, 161
• — Ethel, 281
• Italy, 40, 202, 263
• J
• Jackson, General, 40
• Jameson, Dr., 265
• Japan, 230, 255
• John Glayde’s Honour (play), 112
• Judas (Prologue, 6)
• K
• Kekewich, Mr. Justice, 314
• Kelvin, Lord, 161
• Kemble, Mrs., 19
• Kendal, Mrs., 189, 204
• Killowen, Lord Russell of, 314
• Kiel, 49
• Kimberley (Relief of), 117
• King Edward VII, 98, 121, 161, 227, 248, 254
• — George V, 167, 284
• Kingston, Miss Gertrude, 152363
• Kinloch, Sir John, 58
• Kingsley, Charles, 273
• — Miss Mary, 272, 273
• — Dr. Henry, 273
• Kipling, 242
• Knowles, James Sheridan, 18
• “Koh-i-noor” (diamond), 99
• Königin Augusta Garde, The, 257
• Korsör, 49
• L
• Labouchere, 173
• Lady of Guadaloupe (Patron Saint of Mexico), 125
• Ladysmith (Relief of), 117
• Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 274
• Lapland, 70, 194
• Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 250, 252
• Lavery, John, 155, 156, 158, 270
• Legation, 195
• Lehmann, Liza, 153
• Leighton, Sir Frederick, P.R.A., 145
• Leith, 37
• Leland, Charles Godfrey, 30, 31, 32
• Lemieux, Hon. Rodolphe, K.C., 254
• Le Moine, Sir James, 241
• Lemmens-Sherrington, 58
• Lemon, Mark, 19
• Leslie, General K. H., 40
• Lesseps, 233
• Lewis, Thomas Taylor, M.A., 12 (see note)
• Leyland, Mr., 169
• Leys, 51
• Lichtenfelde, 113
• Li Ching Fong, Lord (Chinese Minister), 188
• Liebig, Baron Justus von, 18, 28
• Li Hung Chang, 189
• Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 156
• — Violet, 177
• Linton, Lynn, Mrs., 89
• Liverpool, 18, 19, 125
• Liverpool Post, 72
• Lloyd George, 253
• London, 150, 154, 202
• Londonderry, Marquis of, 286
• Lorimer, John, A.R.A., 147
• — J. H., 340
• Lourdes, 125, 135
• Lover, Samuel, 18, 19
• Low, Sydney, 31
• Lowe, Miss, 44
• Lowell, J. R., 31
• Lucy (now Sir Henry), 289
• Lugard, Lady, 295
• Lusitania, The, 183
• Luxembourg, The Paris, 158
• M
• Macbeth, Lady, 200
• Macdonald, Sir W., 247
• — College, The, 247
• Mackay, Sir James (see Lord Inchcape), 279
• Mackennall, Bertram, 167
• MacWhirter, John, 345
• Madrid, 157
• Mail, The Daily, 102
• Man and Superman, 258
• Manchester, 177-202
• — Duchess of (see Devonshire), 205
• Mann, Adolph, 33
• Mansion House, 118, 264
• Maple Leaves, 241
• Marconi, 270
• Marshall, Captain Robert, 152
• Master Builder, The, 176
• Maud, Mr. Cyril, 153
• Maugham, Mr. S., 280
• Maurier, George du, 82
• Maxim, Sir Hiram, 33, 270
• Maxse, L. J. (see National Review), 105
• Maxwell, Mrs. (see Braddon), 289
• May, Phil, 167
• McCarthy, J. H., 88
• Mendelssohn, 297
• Mexico, 15, 38, 123, 125, 194, 291
• Mexico as I Saw It, 108, 131, 256
• Meynell, Mrs. Wilfrid, 294
• Milan, 202
• Millais, Lady, 188
• Miller, Mr. W. C., 51
• Milton Centenary, The, 264 (Paradise Lost, 265)
• Model Mothers, 134
• Mohammed, 146
• Montaigne, 76
• Montreal, 242, 247, 249, 253
• Moore, Mary, 281
• Moriarty, 261
• Morley, Lord, 279
• Morocco, 38, 159
• Morris, Mr. Edward, 208
• — Clara, 233
• — Sir Lewis, 258
• Mountains, Thüringian, 114
• Mühlberg, Dr. von (German Ambassador), 15364
• Munich, 155, 158
• Murchison, 40
• Murray, Mrs., 184, 289
• — Willie, 185
• Murray’s Magazine, 103
• Museum, British, 15, 134, 155, 179
• — South Kensington, 156
• Muspratt, James, of Seaforth Hall, 18, 19
• — Emma (daughter), 19
• Mussoorie (N.W. India), 133
• Muttlebury, Colonel, C.B., K.W., 40
• My Inner Life, 248.
• See Crozier
• N
• Nansen (Prologue, 6), 50, 54
• Nansen at Home, 134
• Napoleon, 67
• National Review (see Maxse), 105
• National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 216
• Newton, Sir Alfred, Lord Mayor of London, 118
• New Vagabond Club, 256
• New York, 125, 202, 232, 291
• Niagara, 125
• Nice, Consulate at, 201
• Nordeau, Max, 223
• Norfolk, Duke of, 284
• Northcliffe, Lord (see Harmsworth), 134
• Norway, 49
• — Queen of, 56
• Nova Scotia, 250
• O
• Oberammergau Passion Play, The, 108
• Observer, The, 102
• O’Neil, Mrs., 295
• Orchardson, Sir William Q., 147, 334
• Orient Line, 183.
• See Green
• Orpen, William, 270
• Osborne, 130
• Ottawa, 246
• Oudin, Eugène, 58
• P
• Palace of Truth, The, 151
• Pall Mall Gazette (see Straight), 73, 95, 105, 150, 285
• Panama, 231, 233
• Panes, Miss, 295
• Pankhurst, Miss Christabel, 216
• Paradise Lost. See Milton, 265
• Paradise Regained    “      “
• Paris, 49, 58, 102, 153, 171, 202
• Parker, Sir Gilbert, 248, 256, 289
• Parkin, Dr., 247
• Partridge, Mr. Bernard, 152
• Pasteur, 49, 102
• “Peacock Room,” 169
• Pennell, Mrs. E. K., 30
• Pennsylvania, 31
• Petersburg, St., 66, 201
• Petersen, Ilef, 51
• Philadelphia, 125, 158
• Philippines, The, 230
• Phillips, Mrs. Alison, 295
• — J. S. R. (see Yorkshire Post), 105
• Philpotts, Miss B., 295
• Physicians, Royal College of, 21
• Pinafore, H.M.S. (play), 148
• Pinakothek, The (Munich), 158
• Pinero, Sir A. W., 152, 270
• Pittsburg, 158
• Plains of Abraham, 253
• Polar Expedition (Prologue, 6)
• Pond, Major, 214
• Portland, Duke of, 286
• Preussische Jahrbücher (Political magazine), 114
• Prince Imperial, 42
• Propert, Mr. Lumsden, 152
• Punch (see Owen Seaman), 105, 215, 295
• Pygmalion and Galatea, 151
• Pyhakoski, 67
• Q
• Quebec, 125, 241
• — Literary and Historical Society, 241
• Queen, The, 73, 102
• Queen Alexandra, 98, 99
• — Catherine, 200
• — Eleanor, 200
• — Elizabeth, 118
• — Mary (present Queen), 284
• — Victoria, 100, 117, 130, 161
• Querétaro, 134
• R365
• Raeburn, 120
• Railway, Canadian Pacific, 249
• Ramsay, Sir William, 270, 274
• — Lady, 274
• Ranelagh (Prologue, 5), 59
• Red River, 244
• Reid, E. T., 270
• — Sir George, 249
• — Sir Hugh Gilzean, 119
• — Whitelaw, Mr., 207, 230
• Rhodes Scholarship Trust, 247
• — Cecil, 265
• Riddell, Mrs. H. J. (novelist), 68, 81, 85, 88, 89
• Right of Way, The, 256.
• See Sir G. Parker.
• “Ring,” The, 155
• Riviera, The, 201
• Roberts, Lord, 152
• — Mr. Russell, 157
• Robertson, Mr. Forbes, 152, 270
• — Professor James, 117, 246
• Rodd, Sir Rennell, 331
• Rodin, 259
• Rogers, Catherine, 206
• Rome, 154, 263
• Roosevelt, Mr., 219, 224, 239
• Root, Elihu, 233
• Rothenstein, Will, 157
• Rottenburg, Dr. von, 15, 16, 17, 18, 114
• Royal Academy (London), 158
• Royal Artillery, 149
• Royal Geographical Society, 135
• Rue du Bac, Paris, 171
• Ruskin, 275
• Russia, 66, 155
• Russo-Turkish War, 20
• S
• Salisbury, Lord, 161, 283, 286
• Sandown (Prologue, 5), 58
• Sandwich, 58
• San Francisco, 232
• San Giuliano, Marquis di, 263, 326
• Santley, Sir Charles, 33
• Sartor Resartus. See Carlyle, 111
• Saunders, Sir Edwin, 51
• Savoy, The, 149
• Schlesinger, Miss, 295
• Schmalz, Herbert, 145
• Schopenhauer, 65
• Scotland, 45, 137, 157, 276
• Seaman, Owen (see Punch), 105
• Second in Command, 152
• See, König, 28
• Selfe, Colonel, R.A., 304
• Semon, Sir Felix, 15
• Seton, Thompson, 239, 270
• Shackleton, Sir Ernest, 314
• Shakespeare, 202, 261
• Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 257, 260
• — Mrs. Bernard, 259
• — Mr. Norman, 168
• Shelley, 4
• Siam, 231
• Sicily, 194, 263
• Siddons, Sarah, 200
• Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry, 295
• Silent Sisterhood, The, 114
• Smiles, Samuel, 74
• Smith, Goldwin, 248
• — Miss A. L., 295
• — Miss Maria Constance, I.S.O., 294
• Smollett, 209
• Society for the Blind, 29
• Soldiering in Canada (see Denison), 247
• Solomons, Solomon J., 270
• Somers Town Club, 29
• Songs of Two Worlds, 259
• Southampton, 182
• Southwark, 206
• Spiers, Phené, 170
• Staite, W. G., 277
• Stanley, H. M., 265
• Stanley, Lady Alice, 287
• Starey, Mrs., 29
• Stefansson, J., 52
• Sterling, Madame Antoinette, 18, 58
• — Mrs., 19
• St. James’s Gazette (see Chisholm), 105
• St. James’s, Court of, 193, 263
• — Theatre, 112
• St. Lawrence, 241
• St. Martin’s Town Hall, 214
• Stockholm, 28
• Strachey, Lady, 294
• — Miss, 216
• Straight, Sir Douglas, 105.
• See Pall Mall Gazette
• Stratford, 202, 206
• Strathcona, Lord, 249
• Suez, 233
• — Canal, 279
• Suffragists, Women, 215
• Sunny Sicily, 109
• Suomi, 65
• Sutherland, Sir Thomas, 180366
• Sutro, 112
• Swan, Sir Joseph, 270, 275, 278
• Sweden, 50
• Sweethearts, play by W. S. Gilbert, 68, 151
• Switzerland, 40
• T
• Tadema, Sir L. Alma-, 279, 281
• Talleyrand, 31
• Tangier, 38, 111, 157
• Tatler, The, 102
• Tehuantepec, Isthmus of, 131
• Telegraph, The, 74
• Temple Bar, 132
• Templetown, Viscount, 117, 290
• Tennyson, 177
• Tents of Shem, 112
• Territorials, The, 251
• Terry, Ellen, 177, 204
• Thackeray, 19, 179
• Thiersch, Julie, 28
• — Maler, 28
• Thompson, Mrs. W., 343
• Thring, Life of Edward, 247.
• See Dr. Parkin.
• Through Finland in Carts, 108
• Times, The, 106
• Tittoni, 331
• Tolstoi, 59
• Toronto, 247
• Torop, Sophus, 49
• Tower of London, 97
• Trafford, George, 114
• Tree, Sir Herbert, 27, 70, 93, 149
• — Lady, 27, 78, 79
• — Viola, 27
• Treloar, Sir William, 119
• Trübner, Nicholas (publisher), 30
• Turner, 120
• Twain, Mark, 239
• Tweedie, Alec, 29, 37
• Tweedie, Ethel (fishing boat), 186
• Tweedie, Mrs. Alec, 21, 54, 82, 92, 104, 114, 131, 138, 175, 180, 216, 232, 280, 294, 295, 304, 322, 325
• — Dr. Alexander, F.R.S., 39
• — Sir John, 122
• Twining, Louisa, 78
• Two Orphans, The, 233
• Tyndall, 19
• U367
• Ulysses, 155, 264
• United States, 124, 206, 224
• University, London, 149
• — College Hospital, 261
• V
• Vaughan, 49
• Vauxhall (People’s Palace), 214
• Vedrenne and Barker, 203
• Velasquez, 156, 157
• “Volumnia,” 200
• W
• Waldorf Theatre, The, 232
• Wales, Prince of (Albert Edward), 146, 177
• — — George (now George V), 284
• — Princess of (now Queen Mary), 284
• Walter, John (see The Times), 106
• War, Crimean, 150
• — Transvaal, 117
• Ward, Miss Geneviève, 161, 199, 202, 310
• — Mrs. Humphry, 88, 262, 304
• Warsaw, 201
• Washington, 125, 173, 229, 231
• Watts, R.A., 85, 120, 174
• Wedderburn, Sir William, 289
• Welby, Miss, 295
• Wellington, 67
• West Indies, 150
• Weston, Miss Jessie, 295
• Whistler, James McNeill, 168, 170, 173, 175
• — Mme., 172
• Whitehall, 165, 283
• White House, 224
• Whiteing, Richard (Prologue, 6)
• White Star Line, 291
• Wicked World, 151
• Wier, Colonel John, 232
• Wiggin, K. D., 239
• Wilde, Mrs. (Miss A. M. Clay), 295
• William III, 284
• Wilton, Q.C., 108
• Wimbledon, 58
• Winchilsea, Earl of, 214
• Winchester, Marquis of, 287
• Windsor, 166
• Winter Jaunt to Norway, A, 108
• Wirgman, Blake, 146
• Wolseley, General, 243
• Woodhall Spa, 54, 227
• X
• Xochicalco, 130
• Y
• Yorkshire Post (see Phillips), 105
• Z
• Zansig, Mme., 216
• Zimmern, Miss A., 295
• Zion City, 236

A CATALOGUE OF MEMOIRS, BIOGRAPHIES, ETC.

JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, VIGO STREET, LONDON, W.