The society “Beauties,” now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me—well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either sex reminded me of petunias—the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure pure admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that’s a very different thing.
There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind—I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.
So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs. Ballard, used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called “clever” people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes—a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit.
Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men’s—and women’s—experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr. Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amusements at Mrs. Bowater’s to imagine myself in strange places—keeping company with a dishevelled comet in the cold wilds of space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on anyone I disliked at Mrs. Monnerie’s so as to enter in; no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr. Daniel Lambert.
On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs. Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey—and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore those eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet’s, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats—all three of them comparatively little men.
However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs. Monnerie’s, I never caught anyone making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs. Monnerie’s friends talking to one another—discussing plays and pictures and music and so on—anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.
Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them—certainly not “out of their power and love”—but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about “beauty,” too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than—well, its “meaning.” As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother’s way.
But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never “done” anything, nor “been” anything, except—and that half-heartedly—myself. No wonder I was censorious.
If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were
