My mother was a great reader, and with ten minutes to spare before the
starch was ready would begin the ‘Decline and Fall’—and finish it, too,
that winter. Foreign words in the text annoyed her and made her bemoan
her want of a classical education—she had only attended a Dame’s school
during some easy months—but she never passed the foreign words by until
their meaning was explained to her, and when next she and they met it was
as acquaintances, which I think was clever of her. One of her delights
was to learn from me scraps of Horace, and then bring them into her
conversation with ‘colleged men.’ I have come upon her in lonely places,
such as the stair-head or the east room, muttering these quotations aloud
to herself, and I well remember how she would say to the visitors, ‘Ay,
ay, it’s very true, Doctor, but as you know, “Eheu fugaces, Postume,
Postume, labuntur anni,”’ or ‘Sal, Mr. So-and-so, my lassie is thriving
well, but would it no’ be more to the point to say, “O matra pulchra
filia pulchrior”?’ which astounded them very much if she managed to reach
the end without being flung, but usually she had a fit of laughing in the
middle, and so they found her out.
Biography and exploration were her favourite reading, for choice the
biography of men who had been good to their mothers, and she liked the
explorers to be alive so that she could shudder at the thought of their
venturing forth again; but though she expressed a hope that they would
have the sense to stay at home henceforth, she gleamed with admiration
when they disappointed her. In later days I had a friend who was an
African explorer, and she was in two minds about him; he was one of the
most engrossing of mortals to her, she admired him prodigiously, pictured
him at the head of his caravan, now attacked by savages, now by wild
beasts, and adored him for the uneasy hours he gave her, but she was also
afraid that he wanted to take me with him, and then she thought he should
be put down by law. Explorers’ mothers also interested her very much;
the books might tell her nothing about them, but she could create them
for herself and wring her hands in sympathy with them when they had got
no news of him for six months. Yet there were times when she grudged him
to them—as the day when he returned victorious. Then what was before her
eyes was not the son coming marching home again but an old woman peering
for him round the window curtain and trying not to look uplifted. The
newspaper reports would be about the son, but my mother’s comment was
‘She’s a proud woman this night.’
We read many books together when I was a boy, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ being the
first (and the second), and the ‘Arabian Nights’ should have been the
next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on
discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent
that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since. ‘The
Pilgrim’s Progress’ we had in the house (it was as common a possession as
a dresser-head), and so enamoured of it was I that I turned our garden
into sloughs of Despond, with pea-sticks to represent Christian on his
travels and a buffet-stool for his burden, but when I dragged my mother
out to see my handiwork she was scared, and I felt for days, with a
certain elation, that I had been a dark character. Besides reading every
book we could hire or borrow I also bought one now and again, and while
buying (it was the occupation of weeks) I read, standing at the counter,
most of the other books in the shop, which is perhaps the most exquisite
way of reading. And I took in a magazine called ‘Sunshine,’ the most
delicious periodical, I am sure, of any day. It cost a halfpenny or a
penny a month, and always, as I fondly remember, had a continued tale
about the dearest girl, who sold water-cress, which is a dainty not grown
and I suppose never seen in my native town. This romantic little
creature took such hold of my imagination that I cannot eat water-cress
even now without emotion. I lay in bed wondering what she would be up to
in the next number; I have lost trout because when they nibbled my mind
was wandering with her; my early life was embittered by her not arriving
regularly on the first of the month. I know not whether it was owing to
her loitering on the way one month to an extent flesh and blood could not
bear, or because we had exhausted the penny library, but on a day I
conceived a glorious idea, or it was put into my head by my mother, then
desirous of making progress with her new clouty hearthrug. The notion
was nothing short of this, why should I not write the tales myself? I
did write them—in the garret—but they by no means helped her to get on
with her work, for when I finished a chapter I bounded downstairs to read
it to her, and so short were the chapters, so ready was the pen, that I
was back with new manuscript before another clout had been added to the
rug. Authorship seemed, like her bannock-baking, to consist of running
between two points. They were all tales of adventure (happiest is he who
writes of adventure), no characters were allowed within if I knew their
like in the flesh, the scene lay in unknown parts, desert islands,
enchanted gardens, with knights (none of your nights) on black chargers,
and round the first corner a lady selling water-cress.
At twelve or thereabout I put the literary calling to bed for a time,
having gone to a school where cricket and football were more esteemed,
but during the year before I went to the university, it woke up and I
wrote great part of a three-volume novel. The publisher replied that the
sum for which he would print it was a hundred and—however, that was not
the important point (I had sixpence): where he stabbed us both was in
writing that he considered me a ‘clever lady.’ I replied stiffly that I
was a gentleman, and since then I have kept that manuscript concealed. I
looked through it lately, and, oh, but it is dull! I defy any one to
read it.
The malignancy of publishers, however, could not turn me back. From the
day on which I first tasted blood in the garret my mind was made up;
there could be no hum-dreadful-drum profession for me; literature was my
game. It was not highly thought of by those who wished me well. I
remember being asked by two maiden ladies, about the time I left the
university, what I was to be, and when I replied brazenly, ‘An author,’
they flung up their hands, and one exclaimed reproachfully, ‘And you an
M.A.!’ My mother’s views at first were not dissimilar; for long she took
mine jestingly as something I would grow out of, and afterwards they hurt
her so that I tried to give them up. To be a minister—that she thought
was among the fairest prospects, but she was a very ambitious woman, and
sometimes she would add, half scared at her appetite, that there were
ministers who had become professors, ‘but it was not canny to think of
such things.’
I had one person only on my side, an old tailor, one of the fullest men I
have known, and quite the best talker. He was a bachelor (he told me all
that is to be known about woman), a lean man, pallid of face, his legs
drawn up when he walked as if he was ever carrying something in his lap;
his walks were of the shortest, from the tea-pot on the hob to the board
on which he stitched, from the board to the hob, and so to bed. He might
have gone out had the idea struck him, but in the years I knew him, the
last of his brave life, I think he was only in the open twice, when he
‘flitted’—changed his room for another hard by. I did not see him make
these journeys, but I seem to see him now, and he is somewhat dizzy in
the odd atmosphere; in one hand he carries a box-iron, he raises the
other, wondering what this is on his head, it is a hat; a faint smell of
singed cloth goes by with him. This man had heard of my set of
photographs of the poets and asked for a sight of them, which led to our
first meeting. I remember how he spread them out on his board, and after
looking long at them, turned his gaze on me and said solemnly,
What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?
These lines of Cowley were new to me, but the sentiment was not new, and
I marvelled how the old tailor could see through me so well. So it was
strange to me to discover presently that he had not been thinking of me
at all, but of his own young days, when that couplet sang in his head,
and he, too, had thirsted to set off for Grub Street, but was afraid, and
while he hesitated old age came, and then Death, and found him grasping a
box-iron.
I hurried home with the mouthful, but neighbours had dropped in, and this
was for her ears only, so I drew her to the stair, and said imperiously,
What can I do to be for ever known,
And make the age to come my own?
It was an odd request for which to draw her from a tea-table, and she
must have been surprised, but I think she did not laugh, and in after
years she would repeat the lines fondly, with a flush on her soft face.
‘That is the kind you would like to be yourself!’ we would say in jest to
her, and she would reply almost passionately, ‘No, but I would be windy
of being his mother.’ It is possible that she could have been his mother
had that other son lived, he might have managed it from sheer love of
her, but for my part I can smile at one of those two figures on the stair
now, having long given up the dream of being for ever known, and seeing
myself more akin to my friend, the tailor, for as he was found at the end
on his board, so I hope shall I be found at my handloom, doing honestly
the work that suits me best. Who should know so well as I that it is but
a handloom compared to the great guns that reverberate through the age to
come? But she who stood with me on the stair that day was a very simple
woman, accustomed all her life to making the most of small things, and I
weaved sufficiently well to please her, which has been my only steadfast
ambition since I was a little boy.
Not less than mine became her desire that I should have my way—but, ah,
the iron seats in that park of horrible repute, and that bare room at the
top of many flights of stairs! While I was away at college she drained
all available libraries for books about those who go to London to live by
the pen, and they all told the same shuddering tale. London, which she
never saw, was to her a monster that licked up country youths as they
stepped from the train; there were the garrets in which they sat abject,
and the park seats where they passed the night. Those park seats were
the monster’s glaring eyes to her, and as I go by them now she is nearer
to me than when I am in any other part of London. I daresay that when
night comes, this Hyde Park which is so gay by day, is haunted by the
ghosts of many mothers, who run, wild-eyed, from seat to seat, looking
for their sons.
But if we could dodge those dreary seats she longed to see me try my
luck, and I sought to exclude them from the picture by drawing maps of
London with Hyde Park left out. London was as strange to me as to her,
but long before I was shot upon it I knew it by maps, and drew them more
accurately than I could draw them now. Many a time she and I took our
jaunt together through the map, and were most gleeful, popping into
telegraph offices to wire my father and sister that we should not be home
till late, winking to my books in lordly shop-windows, lunching at
restaurants (and remembering not to call it dinner), saying, ‘How do?’ to
Mr. Alfred Tennyson when we passed him in Regent Street, calling at
publishers’ offices for cheque, when ‘Will you take care of it, or shall
I?’ I asked gaily, and she would be certain to reply, ‘I’m thinking we’d
better take it to the bank and get the money,’ for she always felt surer
of money than of cheques; so to the bank we went (‘Two tens, and the rest
in gold’), and thence straightway (by cab) to the place where you buy
sealskin coats for middling old ladies. But ere the laugh was done the
park would come through the map like a blot.
‘If you could only be sure of as much as would keep body and soul
together,’ my mother would say with a sigh.
‘With something over, mother, to send to you.’
‘You couldna expect that at the start.’
The wench I should have been courting now was journalism, that grisette
of literature who has a smile and a hand for all beginners, welcoming
them at the threshold, teaching them so much that is worth knowing,
introducing them to the other lady whom they have worshipped from afar,
showing them even how to woo her, and then bidding them a bright
God-speed—he were an ingrate who, having had her joyous companionship, no
longer flings her a kiss as they pass. But though she bears no ill-will
when she is jilted, you must serve faithfully while you are hers, and you
must seek her out and make much of her, and, until you can rely on her
good-nature (note this), not a word about the other lady. When at last
she took me in I grew so fond of her that I called her by the other’s
name, and even now I think at times that there was more fun in the little
sister, but I began by wooing her with contributions that were all
misfits. In an old book I find columns of notes about works projected at
this time, nearly all to consist of essays on deeply uninteresting
subjects; the lightest was to be a volume on the older satirists,
beginning with Skelton and Tom Nash—the half of that manuscript still
lies in a dusty chest—the only story was about Mary Queen of Scots, who
was also the subject of many unwritten papers. Queen Mary seems to have
been luring me to my undoing ever since I saw Holyrood, and I have a
horrid fear that I may write that novel yet. That anything could be
written about my native place never struck me. We had read somewhere
that a novelist is better equipped than most of his trade if he knows
himself and one woman, and my mother said, ‘You know yourself, for
everybody must know himself’ (there never was a woman who knew less about
herself than she), and she would add dolefully, ‘But I doubt I’m the only
woman you know well.’
‘Then I must make you my heroine,’ I said lightly.
‘A gey auld-farrant-like heroine!’ she said, and we both laughed at the
notion—so little did we read the future.
Thus it is obvious what were my qualifications when I was rashly engaged
as a leader-writer (it was my sister who saw the advertisement) on an
English provincial paper. At the moment I was as uplifted as the others,
for the chance had come at last, with what we all regarded as a
prodigious salary, but I was wanted in the beginning of the week, and it
suddenly struck me that the leaders were the one thing I had always
skipped. Leaders! How were they written? what were they about? My
mother was already sitting triumphant among my socks, and I durst not let
her see me quaking. I retired to ponder, and presently she came to me
with the daily paper. Which were the leaders? she wanted to know, so
evidently I could get no help from her. Had she any more newspapers? I
asked, and after rummaging, she produced a few with which her boxes had
been lined. Others, very dusty, came from beneath carpets, and lastly a
sooty bundle was dragged down the chimney. Surrounded by these I sat
down, and studied how to become a journalist.