At one moment the stage flashed through my mind, but the stage had serious disadvantages my friends at the top of the tree told me. Supers can generally get work, stars can’t. Of course, I hoped to be a star, we all do, and then those kind friends told me of the weary months, perhaps years, without work of those who have reached the top and for whom there are no suitable parts—years of long-drawn-out waiting, ironically called “resting.”

A very amusing account of some theatricals we had the following year, for which Weedon Grossmith and I painted the scenery, appeared in a little book by L. F. Austin, the predecessor of Chesterton on the Illustrated London News—Beerbohm Tree supervised the performance, and his young wife took part.

Should I take up painting seriously? My love of colour and form, the fact that I had exhibited a little without lessons, seemed to point to the possibility of my doing more if I studied.

Then again, a hat shop was no impossible means of livelihood, with my huge connection of friends.

Or, should I give up everything, give up the battle, and just live quietly in a small cottage somewhere and look after chickens?

Weeks rolled on in Finland, the notes for the book were made; parts of it were written in steamers or on railway trains, bundles of material had been collected for subsequent articles, and, most important of all, my mind was made up. I was going to write.

By the time we had knocked about Finland for three or four months I was worn out, from worry, work, anxiety as to the future, and want of sleep. Many people in England do not realise that the midnight sun shines in Finland no less than in northern Norway, and the perpetual sense of light is wearying, inexpressibly so sometimes, to the brain.

However, the notes were taken. I was steeped in the customs, habits, thoughts, and scenery of Finland, but, more important than all the rest, I had entered Finland in deepest sorrow, my mind had now been made up, flame-like—imagination had decided I would write—my spirit emerged in the house of life.

Artistic life is, after all, self-development, and self-development and outward expression lay before me in my newly sought profession. Cruel doubts crept in; but the flame of desire was burning, and again and again I said to myself, “I will write.” Through Finland in Carts appeared in 1897, the third edition came out three years later, and others followed at intervals (now in Nelson’s 1/- library).

On the borders of Lapland my resolution to become a scribe had been made and my luck had turned. It was there I received the wire containing an offer to take my house off my hands; and so began my first “let.” Four years later, when strenuous effort had made it possible, I went back to live in that same old home. It was a very old-fashioned thing to do, because everybody lives in everybody else’s house nowadays. The snobbish rich luxuriate in the castles of the aristocratic poor, and the aristocratic poor curl themselves up in the abandoned cottages of the self-made. But I reached my first goal when I stepped across the threshold of my old home again. The accompanying illustration, taken just after my husband’s death, is from a photograph for which a paper asked on the appearance of Finland. The reason for its not showing the conventional widow’s weeds—no crêpe and no veil—is that I never wore these social brands, and my severe, unrelieved black—a terrible breach of custom in the opinion of Jay’s forewoman—was impossible, for reasons connected with the camera. Hence a dilemma! Suddenly remembering my grandmother’s lace scarf and my sister’s new bridesmaid’s hat, I donned both and went off to be “taken.” Hence this photograph.

When I returned to England, late in September, and York Terrace was in other hands, I took a tiny country cottage in Buckinghamshire, and retired there alone with my little boys of six and seven years of age to write my book.

This had barely been started, and the notes were still scattered over the table and piled on the sofa, and the chapters had not yet been formulated, when another dreadful telegram was put into my hands: My father had fallen dead of apoplexy in his study. The second breadwinner in the family had gone out.

This made the third death in my circle of loved ones within four months: my husband, my father, my more or less adopted father, Sir John Erichsen—“dear Uncle John”—and my mother was very ill.

Life seemed full of sorrow.

These were the sad circumstances under which Finland was written.

Curious. Whilst so often my feelings during those days of journeying were of exhaustion from insomnia, heat, mosquitoes, jolting vehicles, and impossible beds, the papers were full of compliment on my “spirited sprightliness,” on “the liveliness of observation and the humour displayed by the narrator” whose pages were “full of entertainment and instruction.” It must often be so in the lives of those who are servants of the public. A smile and grin from actress or mountebank: the sigh and tear when the curtain drops.

A leading article in the Liverpool Post, a column and a half in length, kindly said:

And now journalism in turn began and that seriously.

I found a list of editors and papers, scanned it carefully, and to the most likely addressed manuscripts. On every possible and impossible subject—very often the latter, be it known—I scribbled. Often the manuscripts were returned, but equally often they were accepted, and gradually this came to mean regular engagement. Thus, for years, I turned out four, five, and six articles every week, many of them signed. The front page of the Pall Mall Gazette and the front page of the Queen were a constant source of employment, to say nothing of other work on nearly every important paper at some time or the other. I have written serious stuff for the magazines, topical stuff for the dailies, and rubbish for the frivolous papers.

I never had an introduction in my life and have rarely been inside a newspaper office. My work was done from my own writing-table and entirely by correspondence; for, in my belief, if the material is worth taking it will find its own market, and no amount of pushing or introductions will be of the slightest avail.

Penmanship means hard brain-fagging work with little gain in proportion. A well-known writer once told me one of his big important books brought him exactly thirteen pounds.

I still remember with what joy I read a leader in the Daily Telegraph on a magazine article of mine. It then seemed so great and wonderful to be mentioned in a leader; next to which recollection comes my pride on seeing book reviews with my own name above them in the literary page of that literary paper, the Daily Chronicle. These little vanities were the recompense for the dreary hours of work, when one’s head ached and one’s eyes felt hot and swollen and one’s brain seemed on fire or asleep.

What years of anxiety some of those were, when the house would not let and the bills would come in! Tenant succeeded tenant, and between whiles I wandered.

Later, when I returned to the old home, I took a boarder. In polite society people talk of “paying guests.” I prefer the true term—“lodger.” She was an old lady with a title, nearly blind, and had her maid. They were with me for two years. I used to work all day, and read aloud, trim her caps, or chat to her in the evening. She very rarely had a meal outside the house, so there was a good deal to arrange for her in my otherwise busy life.

My old lady came into an unexpected fortune and left.

Little boys home from school had to be fed at meals, amused between tea and dinner during that precious “children’s hour,” and I often left my bed in the morning, to begin another strenuous day, more tired than I had entered it the previous night.

But mediocrity and determination succeeded where genius and inspiration might have failed.

One rule, and a very good rule, for success is never to let one’s self get out of hand. If anybody cannot rule himself, he cannot rule his life.

Age has nothing to do with success. Byron, Burns, and Shelley all wrote priceless gems in youthful years, and, on the other hand, Samuel Smiles never took up his pen until he was past forty, and was then read by millions all over the world and translated into a dozen languages.

Often in those days I longed for my old world. I was too proud to tell people I could not afford a cab, and a bus fare was often a consideration. My beautiful evening dresses were out of date. Opera-cloaks and tea-gowns were laid aside in tissue paper—quite inappropriate for a journalist living in a country cottage. I used to long for a night at a theatre, a whirling dance, a day on the river. But no, life was one round of work, work, work. Thoughtless friends, out of the kindness of their heart, invited me to stay with them. Wealth of gold often accompanies poverty of mind. They thought they were helping me—they had not brains to see I could not afford the ticket to Scotland, the clothes necessary for them and their guests, or the stupendous tips required in large households—a life of pleasure now seemed to me merely fierce misery. What time I could spare from my work I spent resting, often in bed. Worn out mentally, bodily repose seemed the only way of re-stoking the engine for a further pull uphill.

Invitation after invitation had to be refused because I could not afford the expense nor the time. A great barrier had arisen between me and my old world. How I regretted I had not done even more than I had done for people less dowered than myself in the past! And yet Alec and I had often sent a bank-note in an envelope to a sick or poor friend. Then, yes then, the reward came. The thoughtless rich, with all their kindly but useless offers of hospitality, left me alone, and the others—those who were really worth knowing—sought me out. Well I remember a first-class return ticket to Scotland being pinned, as if by chance, on the top of the letter which invited me to a shooting-box. Another time some friends asked me to go abroad with them as their guest, and treated me as their most honoured friend. Boxes came for the theatres, and the note accompanying them asked at what hour I would like the carriage to fetch me, or motors were lent me to shop or call. It was all to save me expense, I knew; but done so nicely, and showing so keenly the determination to give me a good time and save my slender purse. These were the acts of true gentlefolk—the vaunted offers of visits that meant hundreds of pounds’ worth of clothes and ten pounds’ worth of tickets and tips were mere pretence, merely salves to the soul of the sender of the invitation, that he or she was doing something kind, knowing all the time they were but dangling a fly from the world I had lost, to the woman not yet sure of her new world or of herself.

The creative mind is like a sensitive plant. It feels sorrow or joy more acutely than its neighbour or it could not take in or give out impressions.

Everyone with initiative in the Arts is receptive. They are like sensitive plates in a camera. They conceive and receive impressions. Genius suffers, or it cannot expand, and poverty to genius is often cruelly crushing. It paralyses output, or is a wild incentive to work at the cost of double brain force.

It would be so nice if all really clever people, people whose work benefits mankind, could be saved the gnawing pains of poverty.

Genius is often emotional, and there are just as many emotional men as emotional women. I have seen as many tears lurking in men’s eyes as in women’s in my day. God bless them for it—a person who cannot feel is not human.

I went to all sorts of queer old eating-houses, doss-houses, lunatic asylums, gaols, docks, slums, Jews’ markets, and Billingsgate, in my pursuit of “copy”; always seeking something new.

I began to wonder if money was the only thing that counted, and then—a thousand times no. I realised that money was the only thing that counted in the world of snobs—but did the world of snobs count at all?

The words of Montaigne came back to me: “We commend a horse for his strength and sureness of foot and not for his rich caparison; a greyhound for his share of heels, not for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her jesses and bells. Why in like manner do we not value a man for what is properly his own? He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many thousand pounds a year, and all these are about him, but not in him.”

A millionaire was one day sitting having tea with me, when I exclaimed:

“I wonder what it feels like to be so rich?”

He stared at me, as though puzzled that anyone should be in doubt. “Often very disagreeable,” he replied.

“Why?”

“Well, one never knows who are one’s friends, because of one’s money; or who would cut one to-morrow if it were lost!”

Then he told me an experience which must certainly have been mortifying.

“At a ball my wife and I gave recently I felt tired, and slipped down to the supper-room for a glass of champagne and a sandwich. I sat for a moment at a little table where two young men were sitting, and this is what I heard:

“‘Whose house is this?’

“‘Oh, one of those beastly rich African Jews, I’m told.’

“‘Do you know them?’

“‘Lord, no! I came with Lady M——.’

“‘And I came with Lady N——. Not a bad house, though. Champagne might have been better.’

“Sick at heart, I looked at them, turned on my heel, and went upstairs. A few minutes later they followed. I was standing talking to Lady M—— as the pair sauntered up.

“She caught one of them by the arm and said to him, ‘Oh, I must introduce you to Mr. X——, our host.’

“I pulled myself together. ‘Thanks, there is no need; we met in the supper-room a moment ago, and I had the pleasure of hearing his opinion of my champagne.’ And having said that, I put out my hand and hoped he was enjoying himself. You should have seen that young man’s face.

“Is it pleasant to be rich? No!”

He spoke so bitterly, one could not help feeling how often accumulated wealth is merely luck, when it comes from the yield of the earth or is the product of invention; but yet how often it comes through Stock-Exchange knowledge, which not infrequently is another name for organised robbery!

In an earlier chapter I have alluded to my school-days at Queen’s College, Harley Street. This was the first college opened for women, and when it had been in existence fifty years (started 1848), I—as an “old girl”—volunteered to edit a booklet giving a short account of its history; and also suggested that other “old girls,” as an encouragement to the younger generation, should contribute articles describing their own particular professions, all of which were more or less the outcome of the education they received in Harley Street.

If I gave an honest account of the editing of that volume people would laugh. Up to that time no careful register of “old girls” had been kept. These were the initial days of women learning to be business-like, I suppose, and if the girls’ names were known their addresses were not forthcoming, or else nobody had any idea whether or not the said “girls” were married.

Persistency and dogged determination is rewarded in most things, and in the end the first page of the little volume entitled:

“THE FIRST COLLEGE OPEN TO WOMEN,
QUEEN’S COLLEGE, LONDON,”

recorded the following contributions, among others (it appeared in 1898):

Dr. Jex Blake was too busy to write her own articles, so I jotted down the sort of thing I wanted and she filled in the facts and figures.

Another good lady’s I entirely re-wrote; it was so impossible in the form in which it was sent in.

Some of the other contributors accepted the task gleefully, wrote to the point, sent copy to date, returned their proofs the same day, and otherwise showed the difference between an amateur and the professional journalist.

Several of my contributors seemed unaccustomed to writing for the Press. One dear lady actually wrote to enquire how she would know when she had written fifteen hundred words. She explained that a friend had told her, that she had a friend, who had another friend, who thought that a column of a daily paper contained about three thousand words, etc. etc. I suggested her writing a page and counting it, and multiplying by the number of pages, but when the manuscript came back the first page had been counted, and at the top of the second page appeared, “Carried forward 162 words,” at the top of the third page, “Carried forward 314 words,” and so on, as if it were the butcher’s book. She had succeeded in life, but not as a scribe.

Another insisted on writing something quite different from the subject arranged and asked for.

I had to sit in Maud Tree’s dressing-room at the Haymarket Theatre during a performance of Julius Cæsar to get her article out of her at all. Not that she does not know how to write, for she is particularly clever with her pen, as in many other things; but she has a little trick of procrastination, so it was only by sitting beside her during the “waits” and taking her ideas down on pieces of paper that we managed the article. I know nothing of shorthand, unfortunately, so the notes were somewhat scratchy and interlarded with remarks to her dresser: “Give me my cloak,” “A little more rouge,” “Has the call-boy been?” and so on.

There are two classes of successful people: those who buy a reputation, and those who make one.

Each despises the other and nurses his own illusions. But, after all, life would be deadly were it not for its illusions.