A devout lady, to whom some friend had presented one of my books, used to say when asked how she was getting on with it, 'Sal, it's dreary, weary, uphill work, but I've wrastled through with tougher jobs in my time, and, please God, I'll wrastle through with this one.' It was in this spirit, I fear, though she never told me so, that my mother wrestled for the next year or more with my leaders, and indeed I was always genuinely sorry for the people I saw reading them. In my spare hours I was trying journalism of another kind and sending it to London, but nearly eighteen months elapsed before there came to me, as unlooked for as a telegram, the thought that there was something quaint about my native place. A boy who found that a knife had been put into his pocket in the night could not have been more surprised. A few days afterwards I sent my mother a London evening paper with an article entitled 'An Auld Licht Community,' and they told me that when she saw the heading she laughed, because there was something droll to her in the sight of the words Auld Licht in print. For her, as for me, that newspaper was soon to have the face of a friend. To this day I never pass its placards in the street without shaking it by the hand, and she used to sew its pages together as lovingly as though they were a child's frock; but let the truth be told, when she read that first article she became alarmed, and fearing the talk of the town, hid the paper from all eyes. For some time afterwards, while I proudly pictured her showing this and similar articles to all who felt an interest in me, she was really concealing them fearfully in a bandbox on the garret stair. And she wanted to know by return of post whether I was paid for these articles as much as I was paid for real articles; when she heard that I was paid better, she laughed again and had them out of the bandbox for re-reading, and it cannot be denied that she thought the London editor a fine fellow but slightly soft.
When I sent off that first sketch I thought I had exhausted the subject, but our editor wrote that he would like something more of the same, so I sent him a marriage, and he took it, and then I tried him with a funeral, and he took it, and really it began to look as if we had him. Now my mother might have been discovered, in answer to certain excited letters, flinging the bundle of undarned socks from her lap, and 'going in for literature'; she was racking her brains, by request, for memories I might convert into articles, and they came to me in letters which she dictated to my sisters. How well I could hear her sayings between the lines: 'But the editor-man will never stand that, it's perfect blethers' - 'By this post it must go, I tell you; we must take the editor when he's hungry - we canna be blamed for it, can we? he prints them of his free will, so the wite is his' - 'But I'm near terrified. - If London folk reads them we're done for.' And I was sounded as to the advisability of sending him a present of a lippie of shortbread, which was to be her crafty way of getting round him.
By this time, though my mother and I were hundreds of miles apart, you may picture us waving our hands to each other across country, and shouting 'Hurrah!' You may also picture the editor in his office thinking he was behaving like a shrewd man of business, and unconscious that up in the north there was an elderly lady chuckling so much at him that she could scarcely scrape the potatoes.
I was now able to see my mother again, and the park seats no longer loomed so prominent in our map of London. Still, there they were, and it was with an effort that she summoned up courage to let me go. She feared changes, and who could tell that the editor would continue to be kind? Perhaps when he saw me -
She seemed to be very much afraid of his seeing me, and this, I would point out, was a reflection on my appearance or my manner.
No, what she meant was that I looked so young, and - and that would take him aback, for had I not written as an aged man?
'But he knows my age, mother.'
'I'm glad of that, but maybe he wouldna like you when he saw you.'
'Oh, it is my manner, then!'
'I dinna say that, but - '
Here my sister would break in: 'The short and the long of it is just this, she thinks nobody has such manners as herself. Can you deny it, you vain woman?' My mother would deny it vigorously.
'You stand there,' my sister would say with affected scorn, 'and tell me you don't think you could get the better of that man quicker than any of us?'
'Sal, I'm thinking I could manage him,' says my mother, with a chuckle.
'How would you set about it?'
Then my mother would begin to laugh. 'I would find out first if he had a family, and then I would say they were the finest family in London.'
'Yes, that is just what you would do, you cunning woman! But if he has no family?'
'I would say what great men editors are!'
'He would see through you.'
'Not he!'
'You don't understand that what imposes on common folk would never hoodwink an editor.'
'That's where you are wrong. Gentle or ******, stupid or clever, the men are all alike in the hands of a woman that flatters them.'
'Ah, I'm sure there are better ways of getting round an editor than that.'
'I daresay there are,' my mother would say with conviction, 'but if you try that plan you will never need to try another.'
'How artful you are, mother - you with your soft face! Do you not think shame?'
'Pooh!' says my mother brazenly.
'I can see the reason why you are so popular with men.'
'Ay, you can see it, but they never will.'
'Well, how would you dress yourself if you were going to that editor's office?'
'Of course I would wear my silk and my Sabbath bonnet.'
'It is you who are shortsighted now, mother. I tell you, you would manage him better if you just put on your old grey shawl and one of your bonny white mutches, and went in half smiling and half timid and said, "I am the mother of him that writes about the Auld Lichts, and I want you to promise that he will never have to sleep in the open air."'
But my mother would shake her head at this, and reply almost hotly, 'I tell you if I ever go into that man's office, I go in silk.'
