Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles Dickens himself with a copy of David Copperfield, and had actually sat on the young novelist’s knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs. Monnerie’s enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.
I once ventured to ask him how to write.
His face grew very solemn. “Lord have mercy upon me,” he said, “to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of lifeblood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.” Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.
I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: “But, dear Mr. ⸻, would you have me die of anaemia?”
And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next “Black Pudding Day” tempted us, we would collaborate.
Having heard his views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: “So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?”
He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. “What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why—merely with brains,” he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the mot is traditional.
And last, how to “act”: for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that?
More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only shortcut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and whatnot. In consequence, I often amused Mrs. Monnerie’s friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, “How naive!”
How I detested the word. Naive—it was simply my ill-bred earnestness. Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What you could be serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard—that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it.
How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, to my proportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absentminded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining.
How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don’t know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism—well, I may be smug enough, but I don’t, and won’t, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent’s last golden oriole.
Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kindhearted Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself—not one of the quarrelsome “Fair Folks of the Woods”—but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes, “There’s nowt like eels for eeliness.”
I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet
