Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches. Helen Black

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СКАЧАТЬ the wrong way if I can help it, and I think I have some correct ideas respecting the true value of trifles. Yet I believe I have a backbone; at least I hope so, for mere softness and compliance will not bear the friction of life."

      HELEN MATHERS.

      (Mrs. Reeves.)

      Although it is but two o'clock in the afternoon, the streets are black as night. With the delightful variety of an English climate, the temperature has suddenly fallen, and a rapid thaw has set in, converting the heavy fall of snow, which but two days before threatened to cover the whole of London, into a slough of mud. It is a pleasant change to turn from these outer discomforts into the warm and well-lighted house which Mrs. Reeves has made so bright and comfortable.

      You have judiciously managed to arrive five minutes earlier than the hour appointed, in the hope of being able to make a few mental notes before Helen Mathers comes in, and your perspicacity is rewarded, for a bird's-eye glance around assures you that she possesses a refined and artistic taste, which is displayed in the general arrangement of the room. Lighted from above by a glass dome, another room is visible and again a glimpse of a third beyond. The quaint originality of their shape and build suggests the idea, of what indeed is the fact, that the house was built more than a century and a half ago.

      The first room is very long, and its soft Axminster carpet of amber colour shaded up to brown gives the key-note to the decorations, which from the heavily embossed gold leather paper on the walls to the orange-coloured Indian scarves that drape the exquisite white overmantels (now wreathed with long sprays of ivy, grasses, and red leaves), would delight the heart of a sun-worshipper as Helen Mathers declares herself to be.

      As she now comes in, she seems to bring an additional sense of the fitness of things. She carries a big basket of China tea-roses, which she has just received from a friend in the country, and the long white cachemire and silk tea-gown which she wears looks thoroughly appropriate, despite the inclement season. It is her favourite colour for house wear in summer or winter, and certainly nothing could be more becoming to her soft, creamy complexion, and the natural tints of the thick, bright copper-coloured hair, which, curling over her brow, is twisted loosely into a great knot, lying low on the back of her head.

      The conversation turning upon the peculiar structure of the rooms, Mrs. Reeves proposes to take you into the one innermost which is truly a curiosity. A very old cathedral glass partition opens on to a square and lofty room, used as an inner hall, with great velvet shields of china and brasses on its gold leather walls, and quaint old oak chairs, cabinets, and high old-fashioned clock. A portrait in sepia of Mrs. Reeves, done by Alfred Ward, hangs over a paneled door on the left. It was to this picture that Mr. Frederick Locker wrote the following lines: —

      "Not mine to praise your eyes and wit,

      Although your portrait here I view,

      So what I may not say to you

      I've said to it."

      Opposite is a very wide, high door that opens into the oak-panelled room, which may well have been a banqueting hall of the last century. It is lighted from above, and each pane of glass has in its centre, in vivid colours, the initials of the royal personage who, if the coats of arms abounding everywhere are to be trusted, may have occupied this room over a hundred years ago. By the way, the harp is absent from these armorial bearings.

      One entire side of the room is filled by a vast mirror, set in a magnificently carved oak frame, and supported on either side by colossal winged female figures, that are matched (and in the glass reflected) by the caryatides who appear to hold up the massive carvings above the door, which is itself covered entirely by superb carvings of beast and bird, and laughing boys playing at Bacchus with great clusters of grapes. Round this unique room runs an oak paneling of about five feet in height, surmounted by a ledge, now decorated with trails of ivy, and above the oak cupboards are panels representing a boar hunt, and worth, it is said, a fabulous sum. But the glory of the room is the mantelpiece, reaching to the roof. It was probably once an altar piece, as the centre panel represents the Crucifixion. Two busts – one of Queen Elizabeth, the other of the Earl of Leicester – frown down on you from a great height, and do not please you half as well as a bronze Venus of Milo below. The hearth itself (of an incredibly old pattern, with heavy iron fender, which suggests a prison) has on either side two odd-looking figures, that are supposed to represent Joan of Arc and her keeper. He carries a knotted whip in one hand, and seems to look ferociously on poor Joan in her half-manly, half-feminine garb.

      "I am very fond of these two," says Mrs. Reeves, looking affectionately at them, "and often dust their faces, but I am not at all fond of sitting in this room. I much prefer my sunny quarters upstairs, and these high carved oak chairs are uncomfortable to sit in, especially at dinner!"

      But pleasant as it is, there is other business on hand, and you cannot linger over these beautiful antiquities; the afternoon is wearing on, and Mrs. Reeves leads the way to the drawing-rooms, which are also oddly shaped, and open one out of the other, like those downstairs; but those rooms are very different to look upon, and are, in your hostess's opinion, "much more cheery." You can step from the long windows on to a flower-filled balcony that looks up and down Grosvenor Street. The hangings of the first room are of yellow satin, of the second room pink; the furniture is merely of basket work, but made beautiful and comfortable by many soft cushions; and a long glass set in a frame of white woodwork, its low shelf covered with rare old yellow china and flowers, reflects the gold and cream leather walls, and the overmantel crammed with a lovely litter of china, pictures, and odds and ends, in the centre of which is a horseshoe. "Picked up by my boy, Phil," says Mrs. Reeves, as you examine it, "and we always say it has brought us luck."

      But when you ask to see her writing-room – for there is not a sign of pen, ink, and paper to be seen on a modest white escritoire behind the door – she shakes her head and laughs.

      "I have no writing-room and no particular table," she says, "indeed I can't say in the least how my books get written. I jot down anything that I especially observe, or think of, on a bit of paper, and when I have a great many pieces I sort them out, and usually pin them together in some sort of a sequence. At home, where I had an immense room to write in over the library, the boys used to say no one must speak to me if my 'authoress lock' were standing up over my forehead, but if I ever display it nowadays, nobody," she adds, ruefully, "is deterred by it! Often, just as I have settled down to do a good morning's work, and have perhaps finished a page, someone comes in and puts letters or account books on it, or my boy Phil rushes up and lays his air gun or his banjo on the table, or my husband brings in some little commission or a heap of notes to be answered for him. I always tell them," laughing, "that everyone combines to put out of sight the story which is being written, and often it is not touched again for a week; but my composition, when really begun, is very rapid, and my ideas seem to run out of my pen. At my old home they used to say I wrote the things that they thought, which was a good, lazy way of getting out of it."

      This leads to the subject of her "old home," and Mrs. Reeves imparts some interesting details of her youthful days. She was born at Misterton, Somersetshire, in the house described in "Comin' thro' the Rye," and she has always most passionately loved it. Mrs. Reeves was one of twelve children, who spent the greater part of their time in outdoor sports and amusements, in which the girls were almost as proficient as the boys. Their father was a great martinet, and never permitted any encroachment on the regular lesson hours with their governess. "When I was only eight years old," says your hostess, "our grandmamma Buckingham (after whom I take my second Christian name) sent us a biography of famous persons, arranged alphabetically. I looked down the list to see if a Mathers were amongst them. It was not, and I took a pencil, and made a bracket, writing in my name, Helen Mathers, novelist; so the ruling idea must have been in me early."

      The colour of her hair was Helen Mathers's greatest trouble in her childhood. It was a rich red, and in the familiar home circle she was called "Carrots," to her great annoyance, until she was sixteen. СКАЧАТЬ