“‘Ah, she was a sweet woman, but she always had a very delicate, puny sort of a colour. Ah no, not strong.’ A sigh, made difficult, but very moving, by teacake, followed by hurried absorption of tea. ‘And the poor Archdeacon too. Ah, he was a very clever man.’ (My countenance probably expressed dissent.) ‘Well, he was very clever at religion. Oh, he was a wonderfully holy man! Now, that’s what I’d call him, holy. And he used to talk like that. Nothing but religion; he certainly was most clever at it.’
“Later on in the conversation, which lasted, most enjoyably, for half an hour, ‘Are you the Miss Somerville who writes the books with Miss Martin? Now! To think I should have been talking to you all this time! And is it you that do the story and Miss Martin the words?’ (etc., etc., for some time). ‘And which of you holds the pen?’ (To this branch of the examination much weight was attached, and it continued for some time.) ‘And do you put in everyone you meet? No? Only sometimes? And sometimes people who you never met? Well! I declare, that’s like direct inspiration!’
“She was a delightful woman. She went on to ask me,
“‘Do you travel much? I love it! I think Abroad’s very pritty. Do you like Abroad?’
“She also told me that she and ‘me daughter’ had just been to Dublin—‘to see the great tree y’know.’ By the aid of ‘direct inspiration’ I guessed that she meant Beerbohm of that ilk, but as she hadn’t mentioned the theatre, I think it was rather a fine effort.”
The question put by this lady, as to which of us held the pen, has ever been considered of the greatest moment, and, as a matter of fact, during our many years of collaboration, it was a point that never entered our minds to consider. To those who may be interested in an unimportant detail, I may say that our work was done conversationally. One or the other—not infrequently both, simultaneously—would state a proposition. This would be argued, combated perhaps, approved, or modified; it would then be written down by the (wholly fortuitous) holder of the pen, would be scratched out, scribbled in again; before it found itself finally transferred into decorous MS. would probably have suffered many things, but it would, at all events, have had the advantage of having been well aired.
I have an interesting letter, written by a very clever woman, herself a writer, to a cousin of ours. She found it impossible to believe in the jointness of the authorship, though she admitted her inability to discern the joints in the writing, and having given “An Irish Cousin” a handling far more generous than it deserves, says:
“But though I think the book a success, and cannot pick out the fastenings of the two hands, I yet think the next novel ought to be by one of them. I wonder by which! I say this because I thought the conception and carrying out of ‘Willy’ much the best part of the character drawing of the whole book. It had the real thing in it. If Willy, and the poor people’s talk, were by one hand, that hand is the better of the two, say I!”
I sent this letter to Martin, and had “the two hands” collaborated in her reply, it could not more sufficingly have expressed my feelings.
V. F. M. to E. Œ. S. (Sept., 1889.)