After this I had a long succession of different situations. It is possible for a girl to learn the work of any branch of domestic service in a week, if she wishes to do it, with the exception of the work of a cook or a personal maid. But then, it is quite possible to take a situation as a cook, and to keep it, without knowing anything appreciable about the work. Thousands of women have done it, and are still doing it. I never went as personal maid—I dislike familiarity—but with that exception I played, so to speak, every instrument in the orchestra.

I acquired an excellent stock of testimonials, of which some were genuine. The others were due to the kindly heart and vivid imagination of my sister Casey, now Mrs. Morgenstein.

I rarely kept my places, and never kept my friends. The only thing I did keep was a diary. A diary is evidence. So if you see anything about anybody in these pages, you can believe it without hesitation. Do, please. You see, if you hesitate, you may never believe it.

I well remember the first and only time that I met Gladstone. I was staying with Lady Bilberry at the time at her house in Half Moon Street. She was a woman with real charm and wit, but somewhat irritable. Most of the people I’ve met were irritable or became so, and I can’t think why. I may add that I only stayed out my month as too much was expected. Besides, I’d been told there was a boy for the rough work and there never was.

But to return to Gladstone. I wrote down every precious word of my conversation with him at the time, and the eager and excited reader may now peruse it in full.

He gave me his name quite simply, without any attempt at rudeness or facetiousness. I should say that this was typical of the whole character of the man. With a beautiful and punctilious courtesy he removed his hat—not a very good hat—on entering the house. I formed the impression from the ease with which he did this that the practice must have been habitual with him.

The only thing that mars this cherished memory is that it was not the Gladstone you mean, nor any relative of his, but a gentleman of the same name who had called to see if he could interest her ladyship in a scheme for the recovery of some buried treasure. He did not stay long, and Lady Bilberry said I ought to have known better.

About this time I received by post a set of verses which bear quite a resemblance to the senile vivacity of the verses which the real Gladstone addressed to my illustrious example of autobiographical art. The verses I received were anonymous, and as a matter of fact the postmark on the envelope was Beaconsfield. Still, you never know, do you?

By the way, whenever we change houses a special pantechnicon has to be engaged to take all the complimentary verses that have from time to time been addressed to me. Must be a sort of something about me somehow, don’t you think?

I cannot pretend that I was on the same terms of intimate friendship with Mr. Lloyd George. I spoke to him only once.

It was when we were in Downing Street. There was quite a crowd of us there, and it had been an evening of exalted and roseate patriotism. I gazed up at the window of No. 10 and said, as loudly as I could:

“Lloyd George! Lloyd George!”

Most of the others in the crowd said the same thing with equal force. Then an uneducated policeman came up to me and asked me to pass along, please, adding that Mr. Lloyd George was not in London. So, simply replying “All right, face,” I passalongpleased.

However, in spite of all that bound me so closely to the great political world, I could not help feeling the claims of literature. I am sensitive to every claim. It is the claim of history, for example, that compels me to write my autobiography. I seem to see all around me a thousand human arts and activities crying for my help and interest. They seem to say “Marge, Marge, more Marge!” in the words that Goethe himself might have used. And whenever I hear the call I have to give myself.

I doubt if any girl ever gave herself away quite as much as I have done.

One day in November I met Chummie Popbright in the neighbourhood of Cambridge Circus. He was a man with very little joie de vivre, ventre À terre, or esprit de corps. He had fair hair and no manners, and was very, very fond of me. He held a position in the Post Office, and was, in fact, emptying a pillar-box when I met him. I record the conversation.

Chummie managed the thing to perfection. My sister Casey wrote me one of the best testimonials I have ever had, and by Christmas I was safely installed for a week. Chummie’s uncle treated me with the utmost consideration, and it is to him that I owe many of the thrilling details that I am now able to present to the panting public. Although there was a high leather screen in the drawing-room which was occasionally useful to me, my opportunities for direct observation were limited.

Lord Inmemorison had a magnificent semi-detached mansion (including a bath-room, h. and c.) in one of the wildest and loneliest parts of Wandsworth Common. The rugged beauty of the scenery around is reflected in many of his poems.

There were, as was to be expected, several departures from ordinary convention in the household. Dinner was at seven. The poet went to bed immediately after dinner, and punctually at ten reappeared in the drawing-room and began reading his poems aloud.

The family generally went to bed at ten sharp.

I heard him read once. There were visitors in the house who wished to hear the great man, and it was after midnight before a general retirement could take place. He had a rich, sonorous, over-proof, pre-war voice, considerable irritability, and a pretty girl sitting on his knee. The last item was, of course, an instance of poetical licence.

The girl had asked him to read from “Maud” and he had consented. He began with his voice turned down so low that in my position behind the screen I could only just catch the opening lines:

He opened the throttle a little wider when he came to the passage:

He read that last line “was serried in the band,” but immediately corrected himself. And the poignant haunting repetition of the last lines of the closing stanza were given out on the full organ:

It was a great—a wonderful experience for me, and I shall never forget it.

I have spoken of his irritability. It is not unnatural in a great poet. He must live with his exquisite sentient nerves screwed up to such a pitch that at any moment something may give.

For example, one evening he was sitting with a girl on his knee, and had just read to her these enchanting lines in which he speaks of hearing the cuckoo call.

The girl burst into tears and said she would not play any more. I think she was wrong. Whenever I hear any criticism of myself I always take it meekly and gently, whether it is right or wrong—it has never been right yet—and try to see if I cannot learn something from it. What the girl should have said was: “Now it’s your turn to go out, and we’ll think of something.”

Another occasion when Inmemorison was perhaps more pardonably annoyed was when a young undergraduate asked him to read out one of his poems.

“Which?” said Inmemorison.

I am told that the thirty seconds of absolute silence which followed this question seemed like an eternity, and that the agony on the young man’s face was Aeschylean. He did not know any precise answer to the question.

“Which?” repeated Inmemorison, like the booming of a great bell at a young man’s funeral.

The young man made a wild and misjudged effort, and got right off the target.

“Well,” he said, “one of my greatest favourites of course is ‘Kissingcup’s Race.’”

“Is it, indeed?” said the Poet. “If you turn to the left on leaving the house, the second on the right will take you straight to the station.”

The young man never forgave it. And that, so I have always been told, is how the first Browning Society came to be founded.

It was a meeting with this undergraduate—purely accidental on my part—in the romantic garden of the poet’s house that first turned my mind towards the university town of Oxbridge. I had no difficulty in finding employment as a waitress there in a restaurant where knowledge of the business was considered less essential than a turn for repartee and some gift for keeping the young of our great nobility in their proper place. It was not long before I had made the acquaintance of quite a number of undergraduates. Some of them had a marked tendency towards rapidity, but soon learned that the regulation of the pace would remain with me.

One Sunday morning I had consented to go for a walk with one of my young admirers—a nice boy, with more nerve than I have ever encountered in any human being except myself. It happened by chance that we encountered the Dean of his college. The Dean, with an unusual condescension—for which there may possibly have been a reason—stopped to speak to my companion, who without the least hesitation introduced the Dean to me as his sister.

That was my first meeting with Dr. Benger Horlick, the celebrated Dean of Belial.

No social occasion has ever yet found me at a loss. The more difficult and dramatic it is, the more thoroughly do I enjoy its delicate manipulation. I could not deny the relationship which had been asserted, without involving my young friend. The only alternative was to play up to it, and I played up. The perfect management of old men is best understood by young girls.

I told him that I was staying with mamma, and mentioned a suitable hotel, adding that I was so sorry I had to return to town that afternoon, as I had begun to love the scholastic peace of Oxbridge and valued so much the opportunity of meeting its greatest men. I was bright and poetical in streaks, and every shy—if I may use the expression—hit the coco-nut. Sometimes I glanced at Willie, my pseudo-brother. His face twitched a little, but he never actually gave way to his feelings. The Dean had ceased to pay much attention to him.

For about a quarter of an hour the Dean strolled along with us. At parting, he held my hand—for a minute longer than was strictly necessary—and said:

“You have interested me—er—profoundly. May I hope that when you get back to Grosvenor Square, you will sometimes spare a few moments from the fashionable circles in which you move, and write to me?”

I said that it would be a great honour to me to be permitted to do so.

“I hope,” he added, “that you will visit Oxbridge again, and that you will then renew an acquaintance which, though accidental in its origin, has none the less impressed me—er—very much.”

After his departure Willie became hilarious and I became very angry with him. He persisted that everything was all right. I had put up a fine performance and had only to continue it. The Dean would no doubt write to me at Grosvenor Square, and Willie assured me that he had his father’s butler on a string, and that the butler sorted the letters. I would receive the Dean’s epistles at any address I would give him, and would reply on the Grosvenor Square notepaper.

“I’ve got chunks of it in a writing-case at my rooms,” he said, “and I’ll send it round to you.”

I had to consent to this. However, the next day I skipped for London, somewhat to the disappointment of the restaurant that I adorned, and still more to the disappointment of Willie. But, as I wrote to him, he had brought it on himself. I could not take the risk of another accidental meeting with Dr. Benger Horlick.

Nor, as a matter of fact, did we ever meet again. But for three years we corresponded with some frequency; it was a thin-ice, high-wire business, but I pulled it through.

No doubt the task was made easier for me by the fact that the Dean was a singularly simple-minded man. Reverence for the aristocracy had become with him almost a religion. When he was brought—or believed himself to be brought—in contact with the aristocracy, his intellectual vision closed in a swoon of ecstasy. Snob? Oh, dear, no! Of course not. What can have made you think that? It was simply that the aristocracy appealed to him very much as romance did—he was outside it, but liked to get a near view.

The G.E. found that letters, however delightful, bored her when they were scattered through a biography. For that reason she gave one set of letters all together. I do not see myself why, if a thing bores you when you get a little of it at a time, it should bore you less when you get a lot of it. But, determined to follow my brilliant model with simple faith and humility, I now append extracts from the letters I received from Dr. Benger Horlick.

“I wish I could persuade you to be less precise in your language. If you say what your opinion is, you should take care to be beautiful but unintelligible. Commit yourself to nothing. Words were given us to conceal our thoughts, and with a little practice and self-discipline will conceal them even from ourselves. A candid friend once complained to me that in my translation from the Greek it was sometimes impossible for him to know which of two different lectiones I was translating. As a matter of fact, though I did not tell him this, I did not know either. Especially useful is this when one is confronted with a rude, challenging, direct question as to any point in religion or politics; I reply with a sonorous and, I hope, well-balanced sentence, from which the actual meaning has been carefully extracted, and so escape in the fog. It is indeed from one point of view a mercy that most people are too cowardly or too ashamed to say that they have failed to comprehend. Yet if they had my passion for truth it might be better. Truth is very precious to me—sometimes too precious to give away.

“It is good of you to say that the fourteen pages of good advice did not bore you. Can it have been that you did not read them? No Dean—and perhaps no don—who has been in that portentous position as long as I have can fail to become a perennial stream of advice. It is the Nemesis of those who have all their lives been treated with more respect than they have deserved. I am the only exception with which I am acquainted. Child, why do you not make more use of your noble gifts for dancing, amateur theatricals, and general conversation? And yet I’m not grumbling. Only I mean to say, don’t you know? Of course, they all do it—the people in the great world to which you, and occasionally I, belong. Still, there it is, isn’t it? And you write me such soothing full-cream letters with only an occasional snag in them. So bless you, my child. I do trust that the report which comes to me that you are going with the Prince of Wales, Mrs. H. Ward, and a Mr. Arthur Roberts to shoot kangaroos in Australia is at least exaggerated. These marsupials, though their appearance is sufficiently eccentric to suggest the conscientious objector, will—I am credibly informed—fight desperately in defence of their young. If I may venture to suggest, try rabbits.

“I am delighted to hear that you are not the author of the two articles attacking Society. The fact that they happen to be signed with the name of another well-known lady had made me think it possible that this might be the case. Society? It is a great mystery. I can hardly think of it without taking off my boots and prostrating myself orientally. To criticize it is a mistake; it is even, if I may for once use a harsh word, subversive. It is the only one we’ve got. Oh, hush! Only in whispers at the dead of night to the most trusted friend under the seal of secrecy can we think of criticizing it. But holding, as I do, perhaps the most important public position in the Continent of Europe, if not in the whole world—responsible, as I am, for what may be called the sustenance of the next generation—I do feel called upon to carry out any repairs and re-decoration of the social fabric that may be required. You with your universal influence which—until Einstein arrives—will be the only possible explanation of the vagaries in the orbit of Mercury, can do as much, or nearly as much. Do it. But never speak of it. Oh, hush! (Sorry—I forgot I’d mentioned that before.)

“In reply to your inquiry, I never read ‘Robert Elsmere,’ but understand from a private source that it saved many young men from reading ‘David Grieve.’ Your second inquiry as to the lady-love of my first youth is violent—very violent. Suppose you mind your own business.”