I was fifteen or sixteen at the time and bursting with pride over having won a prize for repeating Gray’s Elegy. That is a long time ago, but from then till now I have gone two or three times a year as girl, wife, or widow, to entertain those poor afflicted people—the blind.
The Somers Town club, which began in a small way and now numbers over eight hundred members, is the work of one woman. Mrs. Starey has accomplished a great mission. Besides her clothing club, coal club, and employment bureau, she provides an entertainment every Thursday night for these sightless sufferers to whom she has devoted her life. And as there are fifty-two Thursdays in a year, and it takes five or six performers for each entertainment, one can glean some idea of the labour entailed; but beyond all this, no outsider can realize what her life and sympathy have done for these sufferers. As a girl my interest was aroused in these people by the old piano tuner, and years afterwards I went on to their work Committee—just one instance among many, showing how first impressions and environment influence one’s after-life.
At “our shop” for the Society for Promotion of the Welfare of the Blind, on Tottenham Court Road, they sell mats, brushes, chairs, re-make mattresses, and even undertake shorthand notes and typewriting with nimble fingers and blind eyes.
I danced hard, painted, and accomplished a good deal of needlework for my father’s hospitals, or my own person. One Bugaboo haunted me, however, and that was music. I sang a little and played a little, both very badly, but my parents insisted on me struggling on. When I first met Alec Tweedie, shortly after my coming out, I heard him say, “There is only one thing in the world that would induce me to marry, and that is a thoroughly musical girl.” He had a beautiful voice and sang a great deal—but he married me!
Perhaps those music lessons made me appreciative later, but they were an awful waste of time and money.
Again, painting was another likely channel for my energies, for at that time I used to show my pictures at the women’s exhibitions; yes, and sell them too. But writing must have been ordained for me by the stars.
A year or two before my actual coming out my parents took me to supper one Sunday night at the house of Nicholas Trübner (the publisher), in Upper Hamilton Terrace, his only child being about my own age. Charles Godfrey Leland, Bret Harte, Miss Braddon, and others were there.
On this particular occasion I sat next that famous writer of gipsy lore, Charles Godfrey Leland. He was an old friend of my father, and often came to Harley Street, so I knew him well. He chaffed me about being so grown up, and told me tales of some gipsy wanderings he had just made, when suddenly he exclaimed:
“Let me see your hand.”
Leland was a firm believer in palmistry, which lore he had picked up from the gipsies. For a long time, as it seemed to me, he was silent.