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 life-blood; 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
short-cut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a
dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and what
not. 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
absent-minded, 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 kind-hearted
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 and privately. I am far
more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably
slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual
size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my
happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as
the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others,--even though that body
weighs me down to the earth like a stone--it is as if memory and
consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and
dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary
night-cry of Creation, "Let there be Light."
But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my
story.