“If you mean me, Mr. Wilkins,” I said, “I think you’ve made a mistake. I’m not in the habit of snapping people’s noses off, as you call it. And I think you must have a good many noses, for I’m sure you’ve got an opinion of your own about everything that is said, whether it concerns you or not.”
With that I took my work, and went into our little inner room to get away from him, for I wasn’t in the humour for an argument. And I wasn’t going to sit still and listen to that poor young lady’s lover being abused by an ignorant parish clerk, who had never lived in London and seen the world, as I had, with her perhaps dying upstairs.
I shut my door, but I could hear Wilkins keeping on the conversation, and talking loud, for me to hear, just for aggravation, and running down actors, just as if he knew anything at all about them. I don’t suppose he ever saw one in his life, except at a country fair, and, of course, that was not at all the sort of person that the young gentleman was.
Of course I knew what had made Mr. Wilkins so disagreeable of late. I had had to keep him in his place about my “Memoirs.” After he found out that I was going to use old Gaffer Gabbitas’s story in my book, he came to me one day, with a lot of scrawl in a penny copy-book, and said he’d begun to collect things for his own “Memoirs,” and would I look over them and help him to do them? I said, “Your ‘Memoirs’! What do you mean, Mr. Wilkins?”
He said, “I’ve been thinking that we might do ‘The Memoirs of a Parish Clerk’ together. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my time, and they’d be very nice reading. If you like to help me, we’ll go halves in the money.”
I said, “Let me look at what you’ve written.”
You never saw such stuff in your life. It is really ridiculous what an idea some people have of writing books. Mr. Wilkins had begun about his being born, and everybody saying what a fine baby he was, as if he could possibly have heard the remark; and then he had put in a lot of nonsense, which I suppose he thought very funny, about his father and mother quarrelling what name he was to have, and going through the Bible to find one, and his father wanting to call him Genesis, which made his mother go to the other extreme, and insist on Revelations.
That’s the sort of stuff you’d expect a parish clerk to write; but the impudence of the thing amused me. As if anybody would care two pins about the christening of Mr. Wilkins.
I looked at some of the other notes, and I saw quite enough. He’d put a lot about his being sent to the national school, and had made out that he was quite a scholar directly, and then there was something about his learning a trade, and his falling in love with the young woman at Jones’s farm; and if he hadn’t gone and written out some poetry that he sent the girl, which was nothing more than some valentine words as old as the hills.
When I gave him the book back I was obliged to tell him that that sort of stuff wasn’t writing—not writing for books—and that I didn’t think his “Memoirs” would be of much interest to anybody but himself.