Mrs. Alec-Tweedie

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CHAPTER II
THE GIRL IS MOTHER TO THE WOMAN

AS the boy is proverbially father to the man, so is the girl mother to the woman.

Looking back, over thirteen years of exacting professional work, beginning in 1896—the sad cause and necessity for which will be told later—my destiny seems to have been that of a writer.

True, on my first coming out the stage was my girlish ambition. Elsewhere3 I have told how, after the success and delirious delight of the private theatricals given at home for me instead of a ball—at my own request—there came a tempting offer to make my bow behind the footlights. Breathless with excitement I rushed downstairs to tell my father and receive his approval. He heard my story, looked very sad, and declared it should never be with his consent: “Of all professions for women he disliked most the stage, especially for one so young.”

My dream was shattered, but the longing to work remained: Je l’ai dans le sang. Looking back now, difficult though it is to see one’s own growth, there was doubtless the worker dimly trying to struggle out of the enveloping husk of protecting conventionalities: something within me wanting to find an outlet, a means of self-expression.

In girlhood one hates the conventionalities. For instance, how I chafed at the care demanded in handling old family treasures and wished the cut-glass decanters, the old Scotch silver salvers, the Italian embroidered cushions, and all the other details of a refined home, at the bottom of the sea. I used mentally to vow that when I had a home of my own I would never have anything that cost more than sixpence, and would wear it out and throw it away. I did not then realise that little by little the love of beautiful things, fine workmanship, rich colours, coupled with reverence for ancient family gods, was being fostered within me.

Environment is of enormous importance in a child’s life. Heredity and environment are three-fourths of character, the other fourth being left to chance and circumstances; and character counts for more in the end than any other asset in life. If we are born into a refined home, we learn to hate vulgar things, we are not interested in vulgar people, and, however poor we may become, that love of culture and good taste never leaves us.

In spite of the tales and explanations that my father gave us about beautiful things of art, or curios, it must be owned these wearied me. But when the day for work came, some of them formed the nucleus and inspiration of the half-dozen articles the grown woman turned out every week for the Press.

The influence of that Harley-Street home was very strong. I left it when young for a house of my own, but its atmosphere went with me.

After all, it is the woman who makes the home. A man may be clever, brilliant, hard-working, a good son, a good father, and a good master, but without a wife the result is a poor thing. It is the woman who keeps the home together. It is the woman who is the pivot of life. Most men are like great big children, and have to be mothered to the end of time.

To my mother I really owe any success I may have had. Encouragement goes a long way, just as human sympathy is the very backbone of life. It was she who encouraged, cheered, and often censured, for she was a severe critic. It was she who helped my father during those awful years of blindness, who wrote his scientific books from dictation, before the days of secretaries and shorthand. It was she who learnt to work the microscope to save his eyes. Later, it was she who corrected my spelling and read my proofs. Never an originator herself, she was always an initiator. She ran her home perfectly and—whether as daughter, wife, or mother—never failed. Her personality dominated, and her personality made the home. Only two homes in life have been mine, and, roughly speaking, half has been spent in each; and yet few people have had so many addresses. I might have been running away from creditors, so many strange places have given me shelter in different lands.

I was a lazy young beggar in those Harley-Street days. Books and lessons had no particular fascination for me, and the only things I cared about were riding daily in the Row with my father, hunting occasionally, dancing, and painting. My education, after preparatory schooling, was more earnestly taken in hand at Queen’s College, Harley Street, but I was a very bad pupil, never did anything with distinction, and the only lectures I really cared for were literature and history, and the only occupations that appealed to me were drawing and map-making; but I did actually win a prize for mathematics.

Lady Tree, who was my mentor, can vouch for my mediocrity, judging by a letter just found, written by her shortly after a serious accident.

Later on my school education was finished in Germany, where my mother had many old friends, among whom was the great chemist, Baron von Liebig, my godfather. How oddly, as years roll by, friends meet and part and meet again, like coloured silks in a plaited skein. One of my school-fellows in Germany, for instance, came from Finland, and, later on, it was the fact of meeting her again that brought about my visit to “Suomi,” described in Through Finland in Carts.

Another of my companions became engaged to one of Sweden’s most famous artists, Carl Gustav Hellqvist, though at that time he was not known so well as later. He only spoke Swedish and French, and Julie Thiersch spoke German and English. Therefore many little translations were done by myself at that delightful country home of Maler Thiersch, on the shores of the KÖnig See, in Bavaria. Many sweet little sentences had to be deciphered by me, although the language of the eyes is so powerful that the actual proposal was accomplished through music (of which they were both passionately fond) and rapturous glances, in which he, at any rate, excelled.

What a delightful, fair, rough-and-tumble, jolly boyish man Hellqvist then was. Later, gold medals were showered at his feet, and many distinctions came to him while he painted those wonderful historical pictures which are now in the Museum at Stockholm.

But, alas! a few years of happy married life ended in an early death.

Other German girl companions are now married to Dr. Adolf Harnack, the famous theologian, and Professor Hans von Delbruck, Under-Secretary of State for Germany.

Of amusement there was no lack at home, for from the age of seven, I rode every morning with my father in Hyde Park, and kept up the practice with my husband after my marriage. Then there was skating on ice or rinks, croquet or tennis. There was also amusement of another kind. A delightful old Scotch gentleman used to come and tune the piano on Harley Street. One day he told me he was going on to tune one for an entertainment for the blind in the East End.

“Why don’t you come and recite to them?” he asked.

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.

“Most remarkable, the most remarkable hand I have ever seen in anyone so young. My dear, you must write, or paint, or sing, or do something with that hand.”

Up to that moment I had certainly never thought of doing anything but lessons or enjoying myself.

He took out his pocket-book and made some notes, then he insisted upon the others looking at what he called “the character, originality, and talent” depicted in my hand.

He was so long about it that I grew tired, and at last exclaimed:

“I shall charge you if you lecture them about me any more.”

“And I’ll pay,” he said; “I’ll send you a Breitmann Ballad all to yourself.”

And he did. Naturally proud of being so honored in verse, its heroine was nevertheless shy, and never, never showed her poetic trophy for fear of being thought conceited.

Years afterwards—in 1908—Mrs. E. K. Pennell wrote the Life of her uncle, Charles Godfrey Leland, and there, to my surprise, reproduced my hidden ballad, a copy of which she had found amongst the writer’s papers. Sydney Low, in his critique of the book in the Standard, said this poem “was one of the best Leland ever wrote.” Leland intended it to be his last Breitmann Ballad, but I believe he wrote another later.

Leland was an enormous man, with a long, shaggy beard. He came from Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1824, but lived the greater part of his life on this side of the water. He was full of good stories: knew Oliver Wendell Holmes, Talleyrand, J. R. Lowell, Emerson, and others of that ilk. Our sympathy lay, however, in his love of the gipsies (about whom he wrote so much that to his friends he was known as “The Rye”), also in his affection for and knowledge of Germany, so that when I came back from that country a first-class chatterbox in the Teuton tongue, and ready to shake school-days from my feet, he wrote me that I “looked like a gipsy and talked German like a backfish.”

Those were the days of his waning as a literary star in London life, a firmament in which he had shone for long. His Breitmann Ballads were an unexpected hit. They made the journalist famous. The author became known as “H. B.” on both sides of the water. History relates that cigars were called after them, they were the rage. Germany was indignant; France ecstatic.

Lying by me is a letter I received from “Hans Breitmann.” It displays his unvarying kindness and helpfulness towards younger people, always wanting to be doing something to employ their energetic mind and body. I had evidently made some proposal to him, and he says:

Leland was a most talented man, if one may use the word, for talent itself is generally undefinable even through a magnifying glass.

Later, Adolph Mann, the composer, wished to set Leland’s charming words to music, and the accompanying ballad in 1908 was the result.

Sir Charles Santley thought so highly of it, “that he much regretted that the public would not let him sing any new things or he would have rendered it himself,” but, as he sadly remarked, “I am never allowed to sing anything but the old songs,” and at seventy two, when he retired, he was still “singing the old songs.”

That is the worst part of being a celebrity. The moment a man makes a name in any particular line, whether singing a song, acting a particular style or part, painting a certain type of tree, scenes of snow or what not—along that line he has to go for evermore, for the public to consider anything else from that particular person an imposition. People do not naturally become groovy. It is the public that makes them so.

The next development of Leland’s palmist theory, which begun in my youth, took place some years later, when a man arrived one day asking permission to make an impression of my hand. If I remember correctly, it was for a series of magazine articles upon the resemblance between the hands of persons occupied in the same professions. He showed impressions of the hands of many well known folks, and it was strange to see how inventive minds, like Sir Hiram Maxim, that delightful man of leonine appearance, had blunted tips to their fingers. That artistic and musical people should have long and tapering fingers was not surprising, but he pointed out other characteristics. Smearing a sheet of white paper with smoke, he pressed the palm of my hand on it, ran round the fingers with a pencil, and the trick was done. Anything more hideous or like a murderer’s fist one has seldom seen, but the lines were there as distinctly as those of prisoners’ fingers when their impressions are taken for purposes of identification.

This discovery, that the lines of the human thumb do not change from cradle to grave—was one of the brilliant achievements of Sir Francis Galton (the founder of Eugenics). I remember the great kindly, soft-voiced scientist in my father’s house speaking enthusiastically of Darwin—who was his relative—and his work. He was as determined to improve the race as Darwin was to prove its origin.

Sir Francis Galton was one of the kindest old gentlemen. Benevolence, goodness, and sympathy were written large all over his face. It was his very sympathy with mankind that made him wish to better the lot of the degenerate, while preventing their marriage, and improve the condition of the unsound. He even went so far as to wish rich folk to gather about them fine, sturdy young couples, to protect them and look after their children for the good of the race. He saw that the human race is deteriorating, while different breeds of animals are improving under care.

The tiny seeds of the environment of youth are what blossom and ripen in later years. And here, again, my childish environment bore ultimate fruit. As a child I met Galton, and as a woman I went on to the Council of the Eugenic Society of England.

Yes, I had a good time, a really lovely girlhood, and when the days of worry came I could look back with pleasure to those happy years. The remembrance helped me—but I missed the old life.

It doesn’t matter being born poor, that is no crime, and we cannot miss what we never had; but the poverty which robs of the luxuries—that use has really made necessaries—of existence is a cruel, rasping kind of poverty, that irritates like a gall on a horse’s back until one learns the philosophy of life. Luxury is merely a little more self-indulgence than one is accustomed to. Prolonged luxury becomes habit. The well-born can do without cream, but they cannot do without clean linen.

Those girlhood days were bright and happy. I had no cares, just a rollicking time in a refined and cultured home, with lots of young men ready to amuse me, and after all these years I am proud to say girl friends of my school days, and even of the kindergarten, are still constant visitors at my home. As I write a beautiful white azalea stands before me, an offering from a woman, who sent it with a note, saying, “It was so kind of you to let me come and see you after nearly thirty years, and so charming to find you so little changed from my school-playmate, in spite of all you have done since we met. Accept this flower with gratitude and affection from a friend of your early youth.”

These are the pretty little things that make life pleasant.