I said I was a writer.
“Dear me,” said he. “Why that’s my line—I’m a writer.”
I laughed and said I hoped he made it pay better than I did. He said it paid very well and asked me where I lived and in what neighbourhood my connection lay. I said I had no connection but only wrote books.
“Oh! I see. You mean you are an author. I’m not an author; I didn’t mean that. I paint people’s names up over their shops, and that’s what we call being a writer. There isn’t a touch on my work as good as any touch on yours.”
I was gratified by so much modesty and, on my way back to dinner, called to see his work. I am afraid that he was not far wrong—it was awful.
Omne ignotum pro magnifico holds with painters perhaps more than elsewhere; we never see a man sketching, or even carrying a paint-box, without rushing to the conclusion that he can paint very well. There is no cheaper way of getting a reputation than that of going about with easel, paint-box, etc., provided one can ensure one’s work not being seen. And the more traps one carries the cleverer people think one.
Mrs. Hicks
She and her husband, an old army sergeant who was all through the Indian Mutiny, are two very remarkable people; they keep a public-house where we often get our beer when out for our Sunday walk. She owns to sixty-seven, I should think she was a full seventy-five, and her husband, say, sixty-five. She is a tall, raw-boned Gothic woman with a strong family likeness to the crooked old crusader who lies in the church transept, and one would expect to find her body scrawled over with dates ranging from 400 years ago to the present time, just as the marble figure itself is. She has a great beard and moustaches and three projecting teeth in her lower jaw but no more in any part of her mouth. She moves slowly and is always a little in liquor besides being singularly dirty in her person. Her husband is like unto her.
For all this they are hard-working industrious people, keep no servant, pay cash for everything, are clearly going up rather than down in the world and live well. She always shows us what she is going to have for dinner and it is excellent—“And I made the stuffing over night and the gravy first thing this morning.” Each time we go we find the house a little more done up. She dotes on Mr. Hicks—we never go there without her wedding day being referred to. She has earned her own living ever since she was ten years old, and lived twenty-nine and a half years in the house from which Mr. Hicks married her. “I am as happy,” she said, “as the day is long.” She dearly loves a joke and a little flirtation. I always say something perhaps a little impudently broad to her and she likes it extremely. Last time she sailed smilingly out of the room, doubtless to tell Mr. Hicks, and came back still smiling.
When we come we find her as though she had lien among the pots, but as soon as she has given us our beer, she goes upstairs and puts on a cap and a clean apron and washes her face—that is to say, she washes a round piece in the middle of her face, leaving a great glory of dirt showing all round it. It is plain the pair are respected by the manner in which all who come in treat them.