Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them—certainly not "out of their power and love"—but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about "beauty," too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than—well, its "meaning." As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother's way.
But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never "done" anything, nor "been" anything, except—and that half-heartedly—myself. No wonder I was censorious.
If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually polite enough; but—like the Beauties—inclined to be absent and restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau. There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond.
Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles Dickens himself with a copy of David Copperfield, and had actually sat on the young novelist's knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs Monnerie's enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob.
I once ventured to ask him how to write.
His face grew very solemn. "Lord have mercy upon me," he said, "to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of life-blood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots." Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief.
I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: "But, dear Mr ——, would you have me die of anæmia?"
And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next "Black Pudding Day" tempted us, we would collaborate.
Having heard his views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: "So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?"
He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. "What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why—merely with brains," he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the mot is traditional.