Nor did I ever meet Miss M. G. Tuttiett, who, since she wrote her great Silence of Dean Maitland, has been known to all the world as “Maxwell Gray,” until I became her neighbour at Richmond. These lost years have deprived me of a great pleasure, because, apart from my admiration for her novels, I share two of her hobbies—her enthusiasm for her garden and her enthusiasm for Italy.
I used to esteem it an honour and a privilege when dear old Mrs. Alexander—Mrs. Hector was her real name—used to toil up the stairs to our parties. Her books were delightful, and she was one of the earliest of my literary friends, for I met her at Louise Chandler Moulton’s before I went to America.
Still more, on account of her infirmity, did I appreciate it when Mrs. Lynn Linton came. My intimacy with her arose from two facts. When my novel, A Japanese Marriage, came out, she wrote to me in the warmest terms about it. She not only was enthusiastic about it as a novel, but thought it an unanswerable piece of advocacy for the relief of the Deceased Wife’s Sister (now happily accomplished). After that I was a frequent visitor at her flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and later we met as fellow-guests at Malfitano, the beautiful villa of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. S. Whitaker at Palermo. She looked the grande dame, and she was a great woman as well as a great writer, admired in both capacities by all the great writers of her day, which was a long one—long enough to include Walter Savage Landor. Her championing of A Japanese Marriage came as a very complete surprise to me, because she was noted for severity as a moralist, and the marriage of the hero and the heroine by the American Consul, after the clergy had refused to marry them, in the eye of the Law was no marriage at all, since neither of them was an American subject—it was a mere manifesto that they meant to live together as man and wife. That letter of hers was the beginning of one of my most delightful friendships.
I don’t remember when I first met Mrs. Croker or Mrs. Perrin or Flora Annie Steel, though they have all been valued friends for many years. As they are all Anglo-Indians, I suppose that I must have met one of them through some member of my family in the Indian Army or Indian Civil Service, and the others through her. My family have been much connected with India. To mention only two of them, my cousin, General John Sladen, was a brother-in-law of Lord Roberts, and actually kept house with him in India for a year, and his brother, Sir Edward Sladen, was the British resident who played so great a part in Burmah, and whose statue has the place of honour in the Burmese capital.
Of one thing I am certain, that the marriage of Mrs. Croker’s beautiful daughter—the belle of Dublin—to one of the Palermo Whitakers, was not the introduction, for Mrs. Croker has never been to Palermo, and I remember her asking me all about the Whitakers’ famous gardens in Sicily. Captain Whitaker did not live there; he was with his regiment.
It is natural to mention Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Perrin and Mrs. Croker together, for they long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme.
In the days when we first knew her, and she was living in Ireland, it used to be like a ray of sunshine when pretty Mrs. Croker, with her blue eyes and her bright colour and her delightful Irish tongue, paid one of her rare visits to London. As I write these words, I am about to pay a visit to her in her Folkestone home. She is exactly the type you would expect from her irresistible books.
When I asked Mrs. Croker what first gave her the idea of writing, she said—
“My very first attempt at writing was in the hot weather at Secunderabad. When my husband was away tiger-shooting, and I was more or less a prisoner all day owing to the heat, I began a story, solely for my own amusement. It grew day by day, and absorbed all my time and interest. This was Proper Pride. With reluctance and trepidation I read it to a friend, and then to all the other ladies in the regiment—under seal of secrecy. Emboldened by this success, I wrote Pretty Miss Neville, and when I returned home with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, I had two manuscripts among my luggage. These went the usual round, but at the end of a year I received a small offer for Proper Pride. It came out in August 1892, without my name, and was immediately successful—principally owing to long and appreciative notices in The Times and Saturday Review, both on the same day. Three editions went off in a month, and I must confess that no one was as much surprised by this success as I was. Subsequently I sold the copyright of Pretty Miss Neville for one hundred pounds, and though now a lady of thirty, she still sells, in cheap editions. I attribute my good fortune to the fact that my novels struck a new note—India and army society—and that I received very powerful help from unknown reviewers. I like writing, otherwise I could not work. I believe I inherit the taste from my father’s family, who were said to be ‘born with a pen in their hands’!” Mrs. Croker tells me that it was I who first introduced her to London literary society. I consider this one of the most charming successes of my literary career.
Mrs. Perrin, on the other hand, since she came back from India, has played a continuously prominent part in London literary life. She has been a leading figure at literary clubs and receptions, and has been a pillar of “the Women Journalists.” As story-teller and psychologist combined, she has no superior. Those of her wide public who know her in private life know a brilliant and charming woman of the world, with a proved capacity for managing literary affairs.