Gogin lives at 164 Euston Road, just opposite St. Pancras Church, and the bells play doleful hymn tunes opposite his window which worries him. My St. Dunstan’s bells near Clifford’s Inn play doleful hymn tunes which enter in at my window; I not only do not dislike them, but rather like them; they are so silly and the bells are out of tune. I never yet was annoyed by either bells or street music except when a loud piano organ strikes up outside the public-house opposite my bedroom window after I am in bed and when I am just going to sleep. However, Jones was at Gogin’s one summer evening and the bells struck up their dingy old burden as usual. The tonic bell on which the tune concluded was the most stuffy and out of tune. Gogin said it was like the smell of a bug.
I saw a man painting there the other day but passed his work without looking at it and sat down to sketch some hundred of yards off. In course of time he came strolling round to see what I was doing and I, not knowing but what he might paint much better than I, was apologetic and said I was not a painter by profession.
“Dear me,” said he. “Why that’s my line—I’m a writer.”
I laughed and said I hoped he made it pay better than I did. He said it paid very well and asked me where I lived and in what neighbourhood my connection lay. I said I had no connection but only wrote books.
“Oh! I see. You mean you are an author. I’m not an author; I didn’t mean that. I paint people’s names up over their shops, and that’s what we call being a writer. There isn’t a touch on my work as good as any touch on yours.”
I was gratified by so much modesty and, on my way back to dinner, called to see his work. I am afraid that he was not far wrong—it was awful.
_Omne ignotum pro magnifico_ holds with painters perhaps more than elsewhere; we never see a man sketching, or even carrying a paint-box, without rushing to the conclusion that he can paint very well. There is no cheaper way of getting a reputation than that of going about with easel, paint-box, etc., provided one can ensure one’s work not being seen. And the more traps one carries the cleverer people think one.
She and her husband, an old army sergeant who was all through the Indian Mutiny, are two very remarkable people; they keep a public-house where we often get our beer when out for our Sunday walk. She owns to sixty-seven, I should think she was a full seventy-five, and her husband, say, sixty-five. She is a tall, raw-boned Gothic woman with a strong family likeness to the crooked old crusader who lies in the church transept, and one would expect to find her body scrawled over with dates ranging from 400 years ago to the present time, just as the marble figure itself is. She has a great beard and moustaches and three projecting teeth in her lower jaw but no more in any part of her mouth. She moves slowly and is always a little in liquor besides being singularly dirty in her person. Her husband is like unto her.