“It is very good of you to have had me on Friday. I always feel I have no right to go out to dinner. I cannot give dinners back, and I am used only to the trader set connected with West Africa, so that going into good society is going into a different world, whose way of thinking and whose interests are so different that I do not know how to deal with them. If I were only just allowed to listen and look on it would be an immense treat to me.
“Ever yours truly,
“M. H. Kingsley .”
An amusing little incident happened at dinner in my house, when I sent her a message down the table, accompanied by a pencil, asking her to sign her name on the tablecloth under that of Paul du Chaillu. She was covered with confusion, and when my husband told her to write it big, as it was difficult otherwise to work it in, she said, with a blush:
“Please don’t look at me, for you will make me so nervous I shall not be able to write it at all.”
Maybe this nervousness was the result of a bad attack of influenza from which she was just then recovering. “Oh yes, I get influenza here,” she said, “though I never get fever in Africa, and I am only waiting for my brother to go off on some expedition to pack up my bundles and do likewise myself.”
She found herself among several friends that evening, the great Sir William Crookes was also one of the dinner guests, and she had read a paper at the British Association a few months before, when he had been President. Then she knew Mr. Bompas, the brother-in-law of Frank Buckland, and by a stroke of good luck I was able to introduce her to Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, who was afterwards appointed Director of the Natural History Museum at Kensington. They had not met before, and seemed to find in zoology many subjects of mutual interest.
Mary Kingsley had a keen humour. In her case the spirit of fun did not override the etiquette of good taste as it is so often inclined to do.
Just before dinner one February night in 1907, I was expecting friends; but when turning on the drawing-room lights a fuse went, and half of the lamps were extinguished.
It was an awkward moment. I telephoned to the electrician, who could only send a boy. Visitors arrived, and my agitation was becoming rather serious, for the fuse refused to be adjusted, when Sir William and Lady Ramsay were announced.